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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems with leaks is that the natural management reaction to leaks is to decrease the free flow of information within the company.

When I joined Google in early 2013 it seemed like there was a lot more information and technical details shared at internal forums like TGIF than there was by the time I left in mid 2015. In fact, we used to joke that the internal go/stopleaks web page where people reported leaks was the new way to find out what was happening in the company, since TGIF had become basically a press release..

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Of course, this is classic authoritarian behaviour manipulation by the management. Stop people doing the just and correct thing by punishing everybody, so that the rank and file start to believe thatthe question of leaking should be seen in terms of their own working conditions. And they start to watch other people and turn against whistleblowing because it makes their own lives less interesting at work. This makes for more peer-to-peer surveillance in the interests of the authorities. The workers themselves start to align themselves hegemonically with the authorities, quite possibly against their and their society's interests.

My view on it it's Google has a vastly more open culture than any other place I've worked and some leaks contribute to making the culture more open but on the other hand there are people leaking pretty much everything and it's hard to have candid internal discussions when literally everything is being leaked. It's not like they all dislike leaks because management told them to, it actually has practical affect on internal discourse that are bad for the culture

By 2013 TGIF was a virtually information-free internal propaganda session compared to what it had been.

To my Noogler ears, the 2013 TGIFs were fascinating. But things seem to get more an more polished with less and less content as time went on. So I can only imagine what it was like in 2003.

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