Sounds like you should be upset that management was keeping projects like Dragonfly or the ambitions of the DOD contract a secret internally then.
Op likes the culture because it's so open and transparent, but doesn't like that the transparency is shattered by having the nyt report on things internally?
Does op just want to be kept blinded by ignorance? I'm seriously confused by the point, and think I'm missing something really basic and fundamental.
One way of putting it might be that historically, employees had enough informayto generally keep the company in check. I'm not convinced that's the case anymore, and I can't blame the leadership when their attempts to be transparent result in live leaks to the nyt.
Do I have that correct?
I don't think that's quite it. Let me simplify and suggest that, broadly speaking, there were three classes of information: need to know, confidential, and public. Public is obvious, need to know is also fairly self explanatory, and confidential information would be that which is broadly available to those who wish to know within the company, but shouldn't be shared externally.
Leaks shift the confidential stuff toward need to know. So upcoming product launches are need to know, and I end up learning about new things when they're announced on a blog instead of internally ahead of time (this is for both controversial and uncontroversial things, like "here's what we're announcing next week")
But the more annoying and perhaps damaging part is that when controversy is raised, leadership can't respond to it with nuanced, confidential answers. Everything has to be in pr speak because it will get leaked, so the response is made with that in mind, or worse the response is directly to the press instead of to employees because a concern was raised via the press.
It's a bit of a viscious cycle. But to directly respond, it's both. It's seeing things I already knew that probably shouldn't be public, and learning things that I'd previously have learned from a meeting on the internet and knowing that as a result, I have less of the story than I would have before.
Honesty should be the rule, and any PR speak, by anyone, should be denounced.
I do see your point, I'm just disappointed that the company doesn't feel like it can tell you the truth because the truth hurts.
I have the context to peel back the abstraction. Someone external doesn't. That's not going to change. So PR answers have to exist. It's not that the truth hurts (there's lots of stuff that isn't bad but that is easy to misunderstand, or that people have missing context on: see the chrome login controversy which was from a team who I personally deeply trust to make good decisions for privacy and security, but who many people took to be an anti-privacy measure).
The context for a nuanced answer often relies on understanding organizational structure or history that often can't or shouldn't be public and even if it could be, most people won't care. You won't care. You say you will, but you're not going to spend the days or weeks to really understand all the context.
So no, the truth doesn't always hurt, pr speak is still sometimes necessary, but giving the pr answers to people who have the context to understand everything is really annoying to those people.
And yes this is me not so subtly saying that there's often context to decisions that you don't have. There are often perfectly valid reasons for not making that context public (Insofar as making things public will cause harm to end users). The classic example of this is making the exact algorithms for search quality evaluation public.
Never answering these questions makes Google look bad: conspiracies about favoring or disfavoring certain results develop. But the actual answer can be highly complex, and the only people who are going to care about more than a minute portion of the system ("why my site went down two spots") are those who want to find a avenues for abuse (dark seo).
(Probably worth stressing that these are my personal opinions and I have no real insider knowledge of search or anything I mention here).
So I think your disappointment is misplaced, ironically because you lack the context to understand some of these decisions.
This answer is incredibly condescending.
It has nothing to do with your intelligence and everything with information you have access to. Often understanding the real answer requires information you don't have and can't be given. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
But you aren't going to get that information, and it's not because it's bad, it's because it cant be given to anyone. So you can't have the full explanation either.
We fundamentally disagree on how companies should behave. That's all.
Here's three statements, tell me where you disagree:
There are certain things it would be unethical for a company to make public.
Companies often make decisions based on these things.
Justifying these decisions in public requires either acting unethically, or lying and providing PR bases answers about why a company is doing a thing.
Keep in mind that even saying that a decision was made or on what private information it was made can reveal information. Going back to the abuse example, nefarious actors will try to reverse engineer abuse models when you tell them what was involved in the decision to ban them.
Not everyone is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt any more. I'm sorry that bothers you, but that's reality. You can be mad about it, or you can attempt to understand and mitigate the issue. That's on you.