Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns employees: Don't get too political | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns employees: Don't get too political

businessinsider.com

17 pointsmike2222333325 comments

It seems to be okay for google to get political, lobbying politicians and writing them cheques in the premise of getting backhand favours.

.. Which is accepted practice for companies in general. But why?

Would they qualify for freedom of the press if they renamed themselves to The Google Times?

Because the Supreme Court decided that the legal fiction that corporations are people extends giving them free speech rights. Tellingly, money counts as speech in America.

Google is showing the hands of private government. How authoritarian will Americans let their employers become?

Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. This gives employers the ability to be as authoritarian as they want, more or less. Toe the line or be out of a job (and lose health insurance, possibly risk homelessness, etc.) is a powerful coercive mechanism. In many states, people can be fired for political activity outside of work.

Chomsky points this out in this [1] interview.

>Incidentally, there’s an interesting book that just came out finally, says some of the obvious things about this, by a woman named Elizabeth Anderson. She’s a philosopher and an economist. It’s called Private Government or some name like that, but her point is that, which is a major point, yes, there is a government, but governments can be repressive. But most of our lives are under private government, which she says are indistinguishable from communist dictatorships.

>Any business, for example. If you subject yourself to it, you become essentially a slave of the institution with no rights, give away your liberty, and so on.

>....And when the Industrial Revolution came along, everything changed. You could only survive by being subordinate to a major corporate structure, and wage labor became the norm.

[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...

Specifically, the concept of being so beholden to an employer as to be essentially forced to obey their (nearly) every whim is called “wage slavery”[0]. While it’s not nearly as bad as the days of the “company town,” [1], when workers could be paid in company scrip good only at company stores[2], while renting company living quarters, more people are wage slaves today than will admit it, and they get angry when you suggest they are!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

Aren’t some of these mega corps contemplating building their own employee cities? We could see people forced to re-learn just what a company town implies, and all out of a drive to centralize in SV and lower housing costs.

> Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster.

Yeah, but probably not all those Googlers that feel like they need to be both activists and work in Silicon Valley.

In the past, such a message wasn't needed because people tended to keep their views private and maintained a sense of decorum at work.

Most political expression these days is shallow and negative, and as a result is potentially divisive. I doubt many employers would have a problem with positive, constructive sentiment...but these days people just talk about who they want to punch.

Yeah, speaking out against total censorship [1] and AI drone programs [2] is "shallow and negative". Have you not been following the Google political & moral blunders lately?

Work shouldn't be private governments, work shouldn't be authoritarian. Workers do the work, they deserve a say -- not just the shareholders.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/google-employees-res...

Yes workers deserve a say, but a say about work-related things. Leave the politics, religion, controversy at home.

You don't get to throw those out and say you're not censoring people.

"I'm trying to run a business here," is not an excuse to quash completely acceptable communication between people at work. In fact, if your worker's are incredibly divided on a topic, it may be time to have a good think about it.

Not that you should have to. Citizens United was a farce in dire need of being undone.

Either way. I get where you are coming from, and agree to a point, but enforcing a schizophrenic divide between personal and work lives isn't a very good answer either, and just creates fear amongst people that keeps them from speaking out when something is genuinely wrong.

And the opposite is creating a shadow regime of political enforcers in the office.

Once you get the lord your political views over your coworkers, you'll inevitably starting injecting these views into wage reviews etc

I'm not talking about anything else, I'm talking about workers having a say over what they produce in a moral and ethical sense. Without the workers, you don't have a business.

>Leave the politics, religion, controversy at home.

This only strengthens the authoritarian Private Government argument.

You speak out by leaving.

If a Google employee changes the search algorithm without the knowledge of his manager, how would we ever know?

I don’t think that you can do that without attracting the attention of other programmers:

- You have to ask for a review.

- Even if you find a like-minded programmer, most key parts of the code are flagged by senior programmers who get alerted where there is a significant change.

- Assuming this goes through, any significant change in which websites get listed, clicked on, etc. will be flagged by an anomaly-detection tool.

Changing anything impactful requires to pass through a lot of internal radars, certainly far more sensitive, informed and exhaustive than anything external.

Do you think that this is enough to convince a hostile sceptic?

I don't work for Google, but in my shop, my code has to have 2 ship-its or I can't even get it into the build stage of the pipeline.

The commit log in the repo.

So this article is being blown out of proportion. Pichai's letter is just saying that Google employees should act in a professional manner, not that they shouldn't have political views or be involved in politics.

> "The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them accountable."

I'd always assume the server farm to handle my search request would be stateless. Whom in Google should Sundar hold accountable if that's not the case?

Finger wagging Google's super smart employees is unlikely to work out well.

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