Google Staffers Share Stories of ‘Systemic’ Retaliation
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In addition, we're only seeing this from the perspective of those who feel they were retaliated against because of those protests, with absolutely no additional context or perspective of the managers/execs/peers (which I think we will never obtain for rather obvious reasons).
Personally, I have found Google to have a really open culture of communication. You're generally free to give your opinion. I'd be much more afraid of retaliation from peers due to something I said being considered offensive by some of them, than by an executive or my manager due to speaking out against the way the company does things (which happens all the time and by large amounts of employees). Of course that's just one experience and I may have been lucky with my own team.
disclaimer: I recently joined Google but I'm only aware of these incidents from media publications such as this and everything above is just my personal opinion on the incident.
Edit: Added that "more than a dozen" other stories were shared in the meeting according to the article, as I had originally missed that.
In my history of corporations, almost all bad behavior goes unreported because those in power are doing the bad thing. It seems like Google is not different in this respect.
For group discussions with no negative impact, there tends to be a 1-9-90 rule. 1% of the group is highly active, 9% are somewhat active, 90% are passive.
I believe it's safe to assume that similar ratios can be found in incidents like this - 1% or fewer will go public, 9% will go to their colleagues, and 90% will suffer in silence.
And remember, we're talking about cases of negative impact.
Ultimately, I don't think taking the argument down this path of conjecture over allegations (or lack thereof) will help clear our view of what is or is not the reality at the company. That's what company wide satisfaction surveys or platforms like Glassdoor are for. And in both accounts I don't see many signs that Google is doing poorly.
Edit: and the results of investigations prompted by these accusations might shed some light as well.
So more than two accounts of retaliation
If all they do is search, they have no competitors and are a defacto Monopoly. But as it stands, they can pretend they have many competitors by being in lots of different tiny businesses.
Alphabet helps the narrative as well. Oh, Google is a monopoly? Well that's just one of the many businesses we own. Never mind that we lose money on everything else and sell fewer smartphones in a year that apple sells in less than a week.
Google was found to be a monopoly in 'licensable mobile operating systems' recently by the eu
They already sunk a large military contract and are setting their sights on AI in general. If Google accedes to all the various pet issues of individuals working there then they won't have a business anymore.
This is the risk of appeasement. Google (and every company for that matter) should try a new stance: If you fundamentally disagree with the areas and methods that our leadership has chosen for our business, then find a new place to work. Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable.
I don't really see a reason to be upset at communication and get angry about "appeasement".
> Google (and every company for that matter) should try a new stance...
Perhaps it was pipe dream to actually believe the "don't be evil" pledge?
Whatever the case, the outrage of the dissents does seem cloyingly naive and I find it difficult to feel sorry for them. Maybe it's time for people to learn that "mega-corps" aren't exactly the best place for idealists after all.
It might be a good thing for google to shed some talent to the wind and see what comes of it. Who knows, it might lower housing cost and seed many more start-ups and small businesses with new people.
As for "don't be evil" that became useless a long time ago, it was just an invitation for everyone to describe their pet hate as "evil" even when that was clearly over the top. When I worked there I routinely saw trivial things like reskins of Gmail be described as evil (because we're ignoring feedback from users who didn't like it!). The word became debased to the point that it was worthless to even have such a slogan.
All the current issues are morally debatable at best, and simply not evil at worst. Even if you consider the US military hopelessly bloated, for example, is their view that the USA shouldn't have an army to defend itself at all? If not, why not, and how is it consistent with wanting Google to not be involved in such matters?
It really is morally indefensible that Google provide technology for military drone warfare (for example). If someone working at Google finds that ghoulish, it is their responsibility to speak up about it and leave (or be fired) if that's what it comes down to. Lucky for them, they probably have plenty of job prospects and don't "need" Google.
Similarly for the military, they're perfectly capable of funding and staffing their own research centers on novel ways to incinerate human beings. Does a surveillance capitalism platform really need to do that for them?
But that's a pretty small slice of Google's business.
> Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable.
So what does unacceptable mean?
Historically, coups like this happen to organizations all the time, to the point where conservatives consider it a fact of life.[1][2] It may be unacceptable now, but they'll just keep at it until their view becomes orthodoxy; it's more or less the point of liberalism. I'm also skeptical that the people in senior positions are that far from them ideologically; they simply have legal obligations to shareholders.
Another notion of acceptability is whether a coup sinks the company in the meantime. But it's a risk either way, unless the complaints are entirely without merit, and that seems unlikely.
Let's say Googlers who dispute this did quietly leave over these issues as you suggest. Google's incentives are structured perversely, the "user as product" business model is just ethically dysfunctional. Losing people who act as a check on bad behavior can thus compound these problems over time. If people then decide they've had enough (buoyed by a string of complaints from ex-Googlers) and go to Congress, that can also effectively sink the company.
[1]: https://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws... [2]: https://opc.org/OS/html/V5/1a.html
I've heard this isn't nearly as true as current conventional wisdom would lead one to believe. (to your point, those in power may feel they MUST do certain things even if they don't have to). If so, push back is one of the ways to correct any deviation and move towards a balance.
You seem to have an internal inconsistency in your argument -- assuming that it has the potential to destroy the company, if one fundamentally disagrees with the areas and methods that the leadership has chosen, by far the most effective means of preventing those actions would seem to be using it as a staging ground for a coup.
Are you the sort of person that tells people not to complain about the politics in your home country or to "move to China/North Korea if you don't like it here"? That would seem consistent with what you're saying.
If you fundamentally disagree with their values, find a new place to live? Hey, at least it's possible to move to a democratic country, but a democratic corporation? Not that many of them around.
And it sounds like Google is doing basically what you are saying.
Should people have zero insight into issues which could cost a company money or PR? Or should everyone expect to toe the line and simply follow the suits lockstep into hell?
Just a thought, but perhaps this is just another power play where employee wellness is used as vehicle. The best way forward in enabling unionization and get better benefits is to create more division between employer and employee. If you look more closely that is already happening. In the coming months there will be a lot of rehashing the stories (and even a dedicated movie) where Google employees are deprived of a bigger and better paycheck.
Not my intention - I was offering an alternative to the "If you don't like it you should just leave, because appeasement is death for a company"(paraphrase) I was replying to. (Though I do think people as a whole tend towards communal improvement, albeit with lots of short term self-focused protections)
> The best way forward [for union/benefits] ... is to create more division between employer and employee
OTOH, I wouldn't agree with this statement either. More division is something that CAN happen (and appears to HAVE happened here), but it's a bad idea for both employee and employer to SEEK that out.
On the gripping hand, people regularly find a way to perform below my lowest expectations, so I may be pollyannaing all of this.
That is just basic politics, strength in numbers. If you want align people with different ideological ideals/background or engage non participants, you use a common ground. What better way than to tell people they are being treated/payed unfairly. Not saying it is the best way or that they are intentionally doing this, but it works.
It seems to me they're trying to "encourage" these people to leave rather than fire them because that would look like retaliation. Google management isn't in bind, they're using the same playbook that has gotten them into trouble time and again.
If an employee had simply made a public statement critical of government contracts they could be fired for cause and it would be a non-issue (from a legal perspective, at least). But where Google runs into retaliation trouble isn't with what the employees have said but with how they're saying it: in a group.
Employees have an affirmative _right_ under the NLRA to join together and engage in "concerted activity" to advocate for their interests and to do so without interference or coercion from their employer.
It doesn't matter whether the employees are critical of sexual harassment or the food in the cafeteria, if two or more of them are making the statement jointly then the matter is far more complicated because the employees have additional rights.
For discussing working conditions like better pay, better benefits, etc. Not for getting on a soapbox and proclaiming that your employer is being morally bad. Yes, it absolutely does matter whether the employees are talking about sexual harassment vs. making moral criticisms of Google.
Criticizing management (for example, for soliciting and accepting government contracts) and advocating for change to company policy (for example, to no longer sell controversial technology to government entities) is well-established protected concerted activity.
Additionally, political speech (for example, "we don't support selling controversial technology to government entities") is also protected when there is a direct nexus between the political speech and the employees' interests "as employees." (The NLRB was feeling lazy the day they came up with that definition...)
Recently the NLRB ruled that a company wrongfully fired employees in retaliation for missing work to attend a pro-immigration protest. IIRC the company hadn't even taken any actions against the employees (or in general) that could be considered "anti immigration" but their group attendance of the protest was protected concerted activity.[1] And the employees in that case missed their shifts at work (generally a fireable offense) and they weren't even criticizing management - they were criticizing the federal government.
[1] [PDF Download] https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d458270d0e8
(I can personally attest to Google being a demoralizing catastrophe of mismanagement, and many of the colleagues I most respected while I was there have left in frustration or in protest.)
Umm, Google's got just as much politics as Microsoft, arguably more
> Finally, Page laid down the law: "If you keep fighting, we'll be very happy to send you to the competition."
> During the speech, one of the executives who was in the room turned to a friend and whispered:
> "Did he just say, 'zero tolerance for fighting? I've been here for years. All we do is fight."
> As another longtime Google executive put it: "If the princes [are at] war, it's because the king tolerates it."
MK Snacks are better. Coffee Better.
Its less cost cutting and more about logistics. You can't buy Mom & Pop created chocolate for 60k Bay area employees spread across 100 offices. We'd be consuming > 100% their supply. Most of the changes are around streamlining our logistics in the bay area to single suppliers.
As for w-street's changes, its not all negative. E.g. When I First joined google I heard of a team spending 10mil on an experiment by buying custom hardware to test form factor...the same experiment could have been done with a 1000$ foam/clay/3d printed mockup. People like Ruth have tought many teams in google to be more frugal.
I'd also recommend checking out the playa Vista office in the spruce goose hanger.
I wish I could say that I don't know anyone who this has happened to. But that wouldn't be true. I know of at least one person who has experienced retaliation at Google. She left the company for a while, but ultimately came back.
This is the most brutal takedown of working at GOOG I've seen in yonks. A legit reason to choose to work somewhere else, all else being equal.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
(Slightly startled to learn that was published nearly a decade ago!)
Free stuff disappearing is an early signal, it often occurs before the hiring freezes and layoffs.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/how-to-land-a-job-at-microso...
I am not. Google had been the gold standard of at-work perks for 20 years. Even Facebook copied them.
I actually personally know someone who was retaliated at Google for raising a basic OSHA violation..
People are still complaining about not enough bathroom stalls? That issue has gone on for so long that I feel like the original person that decided that was an OSHA violation might be wrong. OSHA has had plenty of time to step in and assess penalties, their lack of action is suspicious.
You ever heard of the phrase vote with your wallet? The same applies here.
Don’t. Work. There.
Rank-and-file employees have strong legal protections against retaliation for unionization efforts. Employees in management roles do not.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for Google to attempt to transition union organizers out of a management role.
Of course, "management" is a term that is extremely vague inside Google; at least historically "Tech Leads" would not have been considered managers, so there could be an extremely low proportion of the company in a managerial role.
I wouldn't have thought managers would be welcome in a union in the first place? Doesn't a union represent workers against management?
Having said that unionizing activities are widely protected so ... talking about a union and such is allowed broadly so it would come down to what the actual established union rules would be.
My Branch in the UK at one point had a CTO of Motorola as a member.
So even if they don't know what you're saying on Signal, they know who used it at what times.
Plus Signal groups are unwieldy with many participants, plus it's just a PITA to type on your phone vs a keyboard.
Also, does GOOG MITM employee connections? Many large banks and hospitals make you install a root cert to use the wifi.
In short, there are many nudges pushing employees to use "insecure" organizing methods.
Also from a legal perspective, if you have a history of allowing internal debate, you open yourself up to liability if you silence that debate when it touches on the workplace.
(It's protected speech in the states to discuss working conditions, and it can be considered retaliation to not allow discussing conditions if other non work talk is allowed)
And a large part of organizing is bringing people into the fold, so you'd still need to be organizing at work somehow, even if all you're doing is asking for external communications methods to continue the conversation. There's a much higher drop rate that way though.
Legal protections are not very helpful in a context where the other party has unlimited legal resources and time is not on your side.
Now they are having their dirty laundry aired in the media (the same media that is aligned with the social activists they've been courting). This was the inevitable outcome of playing these games and they have absolutely reaped what they've sown. Hopefully this will be a lesson other companies can learn from and we'll start to see a return to "business" instead of "activism+business+social media outrage".
I'm all for tech workers organizing (or dare I say "unionizing"), but it seems like a no-brainer to use non-work email. There are plenty of other free options, including Gmail. If Google retaliated against an employee for something they sent from a personal Gmail account, they would be in a whole lot more trouble.
So "organizing" with their work email wasn't about "the organizers talking to each other", it was about getting people to join the Walkout.
Still, internal not-work-related mailing lists seem like a bad idea for all involved. For an example that cut the other way, see jwz's "Bad Attitude" list at Netscape, which got subpoenaed by Microsoft:
http://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitud...
If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that. US unions are often only concerned with the aspects of the job they can / have negotiated, or things that are already illegal (and you'd be surprised what comes out of the sausage factory when negotiations end). If the job allows for any judgment calls by the employer, they get to make them just the same as a non union job.
What is the answer then? You get the typical US union job where the job is hyper track driven as far as career path goes because the union feels that is the only way to control / have a say in those aspects. The employer doesn't have the flexibility to retaliate and hide it as a business decision.... but they also don't have the ability to promote someone over another for the same reasons (what is seen as retaliation by one person might be seen as a well earned promotion by someone else who got the job). Even then if your boss is a "jerk", often a union can't do anything.
The results are jobs where easy to identify things like seniority, some sort of certification system, and etc determine pay, progress and etc. That is a terrible trade off IMO.
There was a track very similar to the salary bands that you see in a F1000 company (<title>, senior <title>, staff <title>, <pricipal> title, etc), the only difference was that salary advancement within a band was time based, with only a small discretionary component. IIRC, you could get a 1% boost for exceptional performance identified by management, in addition to the schedule. Job titles were broadly defined.
Basically, unions that are oriented towards professionals vs. blue collar are less task and bullshit focused.
The union I was a member of provided generous training/tuition benefits, a platform for getting advice without potential retaliation, and dispute resolution. As a manager, it can be frustrating to deal with the dispute part, as the union is obliged to defend everyone.
The core issue here is that using employer resources to organize actions that could be perceived as against your employer is dumb for a variety of reasons.
If my coworker can spin up a new, valuable product, they should be able to multiply their comp as quickly as they can compound value. If my other coworker fell through the cracks and is a liability for the quality of the codebase and for regression of our talent pool, they should be able to be cut.
And the people here aren't actually going against their employer. They are the ones taking the long view in an increasingly myopic ecosystem that is more and more skewed towards the short game.
Google has a disproportionately skilled talent pool on the back of advertising a deal to employees where they are treated with respect, are allowed support for pursuing things that are good for the world, and aren't leaned on to accept evil. Smart, capable people tend to be thoughtful and have a vision for how they want the world to be, and tend to care about how what they're doing fits into the big picture.
If they reneg on that deal they will bleed top talent, which is problematic when your whole company is primarily constrained by the size and depth of its talent pool.
It's either idiocy or an inevitable game-theoretical degradation of institutions that will lead to its death, at least as a tech company by the thielian, pro-innovation, definition, if not of the company itself if it eventually lacks the talent to keep on top of new paradigms.
Either way, the company will end up as a shell of its former self or dead if Whittaker and company don't turn the boat, however unlikely that is to succeed.
That’s employee hostile. Effectively you’re creating a system where compensation is based on your ability to “engineer” placement on a hot team/product.
Ultimately it’s bad for a company as you’re signaling that political savvy is valued above skill, and less directly profitable teams become ghettos.
Maybe we could theorize of a magical system which deeply understands you and itself well enough to find an optimum mapping, but the reality is it doesn't exist, so you need to do that yourself.
In doing so you're making the system function better too, by voting with your feet and putting yourself where you'll give a shit and consequently get stuff done.
If you want to accrue resources, align your competencies and values with the surrounding system so that you create value. If you're an employer and want people to be happy and create value, give people freedom to rearrange themselves to fix the problems you create by not knowing the actual people well enough to figure out where they align and will be happy and create value.
Ignore that reality at your peril, whether as an employer, an employee or a policy-maker.
IIRC, this is how basecamp structures their team.
Unions for trades/gigs, where the union is more guild-like, operate a bit differently.
It would be interesting to see something more of that in the US, and would allow for flexibility.
I do worry though that the situations that folks cite as a reason to unionize follow the path to the less flexible options.
> If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that...
US-style unions are really only just once instance of "unions." I can imagine another instance, where the union itself is both independent of the employer but also has a significant power in promotion decisions, that could deal with these situations better. That's getting toward a decision-making structure that formally represents multiple stakeholder grounds instead of just capital and its representatives.
I would really hate to deal with a second level of bureaucracy when it comes to promotions and such.... let alone employer's having to accept "this guy is a senior X now" and realize he is not as opposed someone else who wasn't given that chance. That still seems like a very track type of career path situation where the technology world is still fast changing and has huge amounts of variety.
I was imagining it more as peer-accreditation and peer-participation, as the other union members would be your peers. Basically more democracy rather than bureaucracy.
"Based significantly on" is not the same as "made by" or "made in collaboration with." The problem here is an employer using their discretion as a hidden means of retaliation, and they can still do that with all the feedback in the world as long as the discretion is still all theirs.
e.g. Let the immigrants in! (But don't build any housing because then they could afford it here) Global warming is real and we should do something! (Ok - let's mandate solar panels on all /newly/ built homes) etc.
People here are very much self interested.
Anyway, leadership at these places tend to support the status quo, and maybe pay lip-service to a few issues to protect the corporate image. They're arguably the real "centrists" which in the US means a socially-permissive capitalist.
Plus like this example:
>In the email, Stapleton said that she arranged a meeting with Google’s human resources division after flagging changes to her job. She was told to go on sick leave. When she replied that she wasn’t sick, Stapleton wrote, the HR director said: “We put people on it all the time.”
Just drop a line to your state DoL and they would be all over that instantly with nail filled baseball bats.
If I ran a company, and my employees were protesting decisions that I thought were in the best interest of shareholders, I would first listen to them. If after listening I still believed the course of action was correct I would have no other choice but to punish/fire them. It’s not the protestors’ job or responsibility to go around the company again and again instead of proper channels.
At some point, your morality and the morality of corporations and capitalism will always conflict. Is Google going into China a decision I like. No, it’s not. Would I maybe be upset if I was a developer on a censored search engine? Of course.
But is it the right thing to do for the shareholders? Yes! Of course. China is a huge market and represents massive potential for Google. They have a moral responsibility to maximize profits for their investors and that should always be the primary mandate for companies (unless they are a B corp, like Etsy).
This will naturally conflict with personal morality, as it should, but cognitive dissonance is always a given. The only question is whether you recognize and accept or deny it’s constant presence in everything.
Why? Why does profit have to be only motivator?
I understand it's a norm. I understand it's expected. Can you give me a reason beyond that?
It's not like Google is doing poorly and has to go to China to survive. Why contribute to the Chinese government's oppression of dissidents and minorities if you don't have to?
It doesn't have to be, it's what the investors want. The investors decide what gets to be optimized for, because they won't invest otherwise. It's not always profit, it might also be growth. And yes, there are cases where it's something else all together, but for the most part it's measurable and something that involves making your investors richer.
> Why contribute to the Chinese government's oppression of dissidents and minorities if you don't have to?
If you build the tech and the platform, you are in control, and you can stop at any point, you can nudge and you can pull. If you're not doing it, somebody else will and you won't have any influence to make it better/less bad.
That has a long tradition, even in non-profit companies like banking coops. People want to play the lottery, so you offer them a lottery. But by buying tickets to your lottery, they are putting 50% of the ticket price into their savings accounts. 50% aren't 100%, but they sure are better than 0%.
If perfect, good and neutral aren't available options, less bad looks good to me - even if it means that you will have to get your hands dirty and get your karma into trouble.