Google's Civil War
fortune.com
fortune.com
About as far as most people o work with go in terms of "civil war" is changing their profile picture to say "no to retaliation" which is so vapid and pathetic it's not even worth doing.
1. Outrage over previous sexual misconduct 2. Outrage over Google seeking amoral revenue streams 3. Declination of perks
The first one is just the chickens coming to roost. The second two I’ve always felt we’re due to a transition in CFOs.
Take Andy Rubin. One of Google's most valuable executives, he built up Android from nothing. He has a consensual relationship with a woman, but it starts to cool off and fade away. Around this time she accuses him of "pressuring" her into a sexual act, but the whole thing happened behind closed doors and there's no way to know what really happened.
Has he done anything wrong? Who knows? Google can't actually adjudicate this dispute, and Rubin claims innocence. In the ultra-feminist environment Google has accepted internally a woman can't ever be disbelieved so Rubin must be punished. But the situation is deeply unjust and everyone knows it. Rubin did great things for Google, and Google is now rewarding him by stabbing him in the back. So an arrangement is made: everyone stays quiet and the pain of the injustice and betrayal is soothed with a big payment.
Years later Googlers find out about this situation and instead of being outraged that a successful executive was fired on the basis of nothing more than heresay by someone he was in a relationship with, are outraged that he wasn't treated even more harshly. What message does this send to the future Rubins of the world? It says: don't team up with Google.
Since the intensity of most people's beliefs is low and the specific issues are not part of day to day work, it's not really a thing that comes up except when new news breaks and people talk about it at lunch for a day.
When you take a look at how many people, in an industry where it's trivial to get another job, quit over any of these issues, it's in the single digits.
It has affected by work literally not at all.
Some people care deeply about this stuff. I agree with a fair amount of it. But from my perspective calling it a civil war is frankly ludicrous.
It's true that TVCs are not employees, but this different in status does not amount to mistreatment.
The groups you mention are not mistreated at Google. In fact, the company bends over backward to recruit and accommodate them. I challenge you to name one policy that disadvantages women, people of color, or trans people. These persistent claims of mistreatment are in fact cynical attempts to achieve unearned status and special protection from normal rules that govern the company.
I 100% support anybody who has been a victim at work due to their identity and support programs to help these people.
But that isn't a civil war.
I feel like this is a small example of where my views of these employees disagrees with the author's. (I'm fine with employees having strong opinions on ethical issues, but this kindof puff quote doesn't lend them respect).
I dunno if the author thinks they're being impartial. Can't complain if they know (and the reader knows) where their preference lies.
> Meanwhile, there’s not a company in the sector that isn’t grappling at some level with the ways bro-gramming culture has made tech a toxic space for women and employees of color.
Anyone who uncritically invokes this frame is waging culture war, not describing it. This article is activist propaganda masquerading as neutral reporting.
The irony is that actually printing someone taking the appellation "entitled vocal majority" makes them look bad, not the company.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Google, but I'm pre-inclined to favor the employees doing more or less whatever they want, but holy hell, what a way for an activist minority to alienate itself from the base you need to form a union or cooperative.
The Bolsheviks, was a faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that split from the Menshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) at its Second Party Congress in 1903. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks
Rather surprised that people were getting away with that in the first place.
Edit: just realised that, like codes of conduct, the key difference is that now the rule also applies to the people at the top.
In theory I'm in favor of these sort of rules, but I hope they leave some wiggle room for common sense, preferably erroring on the side of tolerance.
The answer depends, of course, on the opinion the moral busybodies have of you, whether that's based on your job performance or your immutable characteristics. I've seen some pretty arbitrary outcomes from policies like this, it generally has the effect of making the IMs and intranet forums less useful, since people can't feel at ease no matter how well-intentioned they are.
It associates sex with violence and destruction.
A similar thing used to happen with "gay", which kids would use as an adjective for frustrating or annoying situations.
My preferences notwithstanding, it's still better to be clearer about what's happening. "Fucking up that variable" says very little about the cause of the problem, and its possible solution.
If you can't deal with criticism of your code, maybe working at a big tech firm isn't for you?
Does anyone know what exactly Microsoft is doing with the military? Is this like better image recognition for drone strikes / targeting humans or more like providing operating systems for military administration? Because those could both be technically construed as “building technology for warfare” with only the first choice being the actually bad type of work.
1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Instrumentation_and_Tele...
This got me curious, so I tried searching for these leaked comments, while avoiding far-right news sites. This is what I found:
> Diversity advocates at Google – including the Mountain View tech giant's highest-ranking inclusion officer – are being targeted by a small group of colleagues in an internal culture war, according to a new report. [...] screenshots from Google internal discussion boards have been leaked and posted on far-right websites including Breitbart and the blog Vox Popoli, which espouses white supremacy. [1]
> 15 current Google employees accuse coworkers of inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees. Since August, screenshots from Google’s internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart and Vox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. [2]
> Their personal information and comments expressed in internal company forums have been leaked to the public and published on far-right websites, leading to mistreatment by online vigilantes. [..] "We need to see concrete and meaningful action," Fong-Jones said. [..] Chuck Johnson, who was kicked off Twitter in 2015 after tweeting about wanting to "take out" civil rights activist DeRay McKesson [3]
> Their tactics allegedly include “weaponiz[ing] human resources” by goading diverse members of Google’s team into making inflammatory statements, and reporting those statements as violations of the company’s rules around civility. [..] Pro-diversity employees say that their messages on internal Google forums have also been photographed and shared outside the company, leading to their publication on far-right platforms [4]
A lot of condemnation of the leaks, but I was shocked to find no trace of the leaked comments themselves - though the people whose comments were leaked are interviewed and given the chance to present their side. The contrast is greatest in [3], where the only comment quoted is the two-word "take out" of the presumably far-right Chuck Johnson.
So we have, broadly speaking, two sides making controversial comments. The comments of one side aren't published (except by far-right news sites), only their explanations given to the media. The other side does have their incriminating comments published (or parts of them), but doesn't get much of a chance to defend or explain themselves after that.
I'm just glad this one-sided reporting is on the side of truth and the good guys.
[1] https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2018/01/30/googles...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-war-over-diversity-ins...
[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/01/26/google-diversi...
[4] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/google-has-become-gr...
Anyway, let me help readers who may not be familiar with this motley crew. Here are some examples of the comments in question.
Liz Fong-Jones posted internally, "Frankly, I could care less about being 'unfair' to white men" and "I feel that if there's any harm to the interests of white men from that work, it is more than made up for by the benefits to everyone as a whole".
Colin McMillen, also named in the articles, said, "You are posting devils-advocate bullshit along the lines of 'oh no, some hypothetical white man who is just barely above the hiring bar might be intangibly harmed by some Googlers who decided to give marginally more training or education to non-Googler women'"
Kim Burchett said, "In the T5->T6 promo committee I served on, 2/4 committee members were women. Yay! 4/4 members were white. Boo! 12/15 candidates were men. Boo!"
The overriding theme of the leaked comments is that if you're white and a man, you deserve bad treatment and discrimination.
Where? I don't see any leaked comments from either side on those links.
> "Women, on average, have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)," the screed reads. [1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/google-employ...
It's a public tweet, in fact. Easy to find along with the rest of the author's opinions and explanations.
> An example of the reverse wasn't hard to find:
That quote is from James Damore's memo, and he has been interviewed by many media organizations, like The Guardian and Business Insider, so I don't see how you can claim he didn't have a chance to explain himself.
Things got even uglier when social justice sympathizers leaked a memo made on the message boards by James Damore, to left-wing news sites, resulting in his firing. "We must do more to foster an atmosphere of open debate." Damore says.
That’s because it causes the person to be targeted for harassment.
Hopefully they haven't been axing perspectives the way they've been axing projects!
Not sure what's behind Google's inaction here, they really shouldn't be worried about the trouble makers defecting to somewhere else that most likely won't tolerate their bullshit.
Silicon Valley has spent years setting itself up as an inheritor of the counterculture, a place where it's possible to "think different". Employees are given a share of the business (via a complicated tax shelter of options). Startups want "contributors", people who buy into the idea that they're engaged in a positive-sum contribution to the world rather than just bringing home a paycheck. They provide all sorts of office features to encourage people to "bring their whole self to work".
(I could go on, but I expect this thread to be buried)
Edit: exhibit A, hollywood social justice warrior proudly being a nuisance, disrupting law abiding citizens with a hammer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I ; the "1984" Macintosh commercial and its successor "Think Different" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs are as close to an official statement of SV founding ideology as you're going to get)
Google in particular, if they were looking for people capable of thinking outside the box, would not selecting very specifically from the box of people that are prepared to jump through the hoops of their ridiculous programming interviews. In fact, by this point in their history, they could just datamine the list of people who have repeatedly told their recruiters to take a running jump, and start sampling from there.
(of course they subsequently changed the rules to make that less likely for non-tech staff, part of the gradual move away from "Don't Be Evil")
That's not how you foster counterculture. In fact, that's probably why Google went so long without any internal employee conflict.
It's not exactly a recipe for hiring people that are going to push back on corporate decisions.
Counter cultural types don't have a monopoly on innovation.
I can't say I agree with you. What you're suggesting is basically the Wall Street model where bad and unethical institutional behavior gets a suboptimal amount of pushback.
There's an EXTREME amount of power imbalance between employer and employee; if employees have to fear retaliation for voicing their concerns it has a chilling effect.
I'm okay with consequences, but voicing your concerns in public isn't grounds for consequences.
Employees are signing up for a world where they don't wear significant risk in exchange for subordinating their decision making to a company.
Companies are fundamentally an organised group of people working to a common goal. I can understand very well if individual employees want to assert their individuality. However, at any moment, they have only and exactly 3 choices:
1) Cooperate enthusiastically.
2) Cooperate with complaint
3) Quit
Nobody is going to get sacked for quietly and politely voicing a concern. However, once employees start organising to influence management on business decisions they really need to pony up the capital and become shareholders. Deciding what management does is the privilege of shareholders, not employees.
Isn't this precisely describing why unions were originally generated, so that employees can also leverage power equal to the shareholders, and therefore have a say in their own working conditions?
This article is talking about:
* Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change
* Microsoft, employees say they don’t want to build technology for warfare
* Salesforce, a group has lobbied management to end its work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency
* Google, [employees] want a say in and control over the products they build
Those are issues going way beyond what an employee can reasonably expect to influence. Being employed by a tech company is an achievement, but the end of the day tech workers aren't that special. They don't formally get to decide how the world works.
They absolutely can't take to social media to complain about these issues and expect to hold a job with the company they are complaining about. This type of activity isn't acceptable; they can't draw a wage and overrule strategic directions from people with capital at stake. The options are work or walk.
But I don't think they "should" do so if they're calling out legitimately poor behavior that has been unaddressed by any other avenue. That wording is quite strange to me. Would you say that Rosa Parks "should" have faced the consequences of stirring things up as she did? Accepting that it is possible is a necessary part of civil disobedience, but the imposition of those consequences by higher powers is not.
As an employee you are paid to execute the company's strategy.
If you disagree you can of course, and even should, voice your disagreement but that should be done in a professional in diplomatic way, in private.
If you cannot do that or cannot accept the company's strategy then yes, your alternative is to leave quietly.
The new "red guards" of the left may not like it, but that's what professionalism (not to mention a free society) is. Tough.
It must be said, again and again: corporations exist at the sufferance of the society that grants them their charter and only exist for the benefit of that society. A company that can't do that should have its charter revoked. And its labor force is part of that society.
I'm assuming you're talking about the US.
We are not subjects of our government, or of some other sovereign, whether that be society or anything else. Our society is founded on individual pursuit of happiness, not collectivism.
Put another way, corporations exist for whatever reason their creators decide. So long as they operate within the law and are able to sustain themselves, societal good is a side effect and a concern of the State, not the corporation itself.
We, as the actual owners of that government that grants this special exception, can--and should--expect better than the barest bare minimum out of such fictional persons if they want to keep their fictional personhood. This is a transaction: "we grant you the right to operate a fictional person and you don't act like shitheads in our society."
We don't do this, largely because of the weird little melty fears that led to you going off about collectivism when it doesn't apply here except insofar that labor participation can encourage, though does not guarantee, better behavior. But we can, and we should, keep this tool at the ready because corporate entities will be good citizens only so long as you keep the proverbial fist of an angry god ready to strike; sociopaths (and your standard corporation is a sociopath by definition) only, only, respect consequences and so those consequences must be severe and always at the ready.
A careful reader might note that I said nothing about such companies operating as unlimited-liability partnerships. Because yes, fair is fair, and people (who, unlike fictive entities, have rights and freedoms even if the results of those rights and freedoms suck) have the right to do as they please so long as they aren't harming other people. But they wouldn't take that option and we all know why.
I live in the US, and sit on the the board of a governmental organization, a nonprofit corporation and an LLC.
It is incredibly obvious from this perspective that the regulations the state chooses to apply greatly constrain what it is possible for your organization to do. And this goes beyond the day to day all the way up to the mission of the org.
The state definitely has a large influence on weather organizations exists, their form and the reasons for which and methods they operate.
> It must be said, again and again: corporations exist at the sufferance of the society that grants them their charter and only exist for the benefit of that society. A company that can't do that should have its charter revoked.
This sounds like BS to me. I see all the companies doing serious harm to humanity, environment, ecology are running just fine. Do you have examples of charter getting revoked?
It sounds like bullshit because some elements of the civic discourse have expended a lot of effort to make the idea inconceivable.
I am very surprised that a moderator would take side and use a rather rude and condescending tone in replying to a commenter that hasn't do anything beyond voicing a legitimate point.
Is that what HN is for?
Generic ideological arguments are simply off topic on HN. If you like, you can think of that as an arbitrary moderation decision. I think of it as following from the site principle of curiosity. Either way, please don't post any more of those.
Not that you're right about your sweeping statement either, but it doesn't even begin to apply here except insofar as labor participation in direction can--not will, but can--discourage that shitty behavior.
Both require employee representation on boards, as do many other not-socialist countries. Germany also has works councils.
The truth is that employees do not dictate the direction of the company in those countries. They have virtually no power and the system is used as a discussion platform on working conditions, pay, etc.
This is not quite the same as having employees decide what the company should produce and to whom it should sell it.
They both require one third of the board to be employee representatives. It might even be half for larger German companies. How does getting to vote on decisions and appointments equate to having virtually no power?
German work's councils, for all their imperfections and flaws, have often been looked at enviously by other Western countries - including US and UK. It is those which deal with conditions, pay and what have you.
That such organization tends to also have societal value--weird that thinking about societal value gets conflated with "socialism", I guess every man is an island--is a really nice side effect, though.
I personally agree it's kind of silly to expect your work to be a Utopia by your specific definition. On the other hand, if Google does learn to reconcile its business and competing employee cultures, they will have done something amazing that probably makes them a stronger institution.
I personally never interviewed at Google, but the damore scandal was a pretty big dissuasive for me to attempt to get one. It does not look like a safe space to me.
For another, Google is in fierce competition with the rest of the tech companies for talent.
These people are not attempting "labor organizing". They are putting on a few of the trappings of labor organizing, like drawing up lists of demands, but without doing any of the hard work that requires actually organizing a union.
In the United States, a company's employees decide whether to form a union by holding a referendum by secret ballot. Unions then elect their representatives through a similar process.
Google's activists are not attempting to form a traditional union. They know that they are deeply unpopular and would lose any fair secret ballot election in which they were on the ballot. The activists believe that by playing pretend-union, they can gain all the influence of a real union without the accountability and risk. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
For another the rest of the tech companies don't seem to enable let alone tolerate this shenanigans.
For years now, these people have been bullying the company into advancing hard-left political positions instead of serving the company's founding mission. They have created a climate of fear for anyone who disagrees with their extreme political positions, and they have almost certainly violated their employment contracts by leaking confidential information to the press. Their friends in HR protect them.
They appear to engage in activism full-time on the company's payroll according to documents they themselves have posted.
They talk constantly about "Google's values", which they twist into claims that the company has already decided to support their political positions. They demand that Google give up billions of dollars in business by abandoning product lines and refusing to serve huge portions of the population. For example, one of them demanded that one business disable a key component that drives a lot of revenue, calling the situation an "extremism emergency". To this person, the negative impact would have been irrelevant. These demands never stop. They call them "ethics".
Any functioning company would have fired these people a long time ago. Google leadership is full of cowards.
2. Google shouldn't accommodate the delusional and entitled.
3. Labor unions are antithetical to sound economic theory and practice, and no other company in the business supports them.
Imagine if you could murder troublesome people because that PR hit would be a one-time thing and better than this ongoing situation. There's a reason reputation is a thing.
Also 2 and 3 are just, like, your opinion, man.
I hope for your sake that you're a boss or capitalist and not a worker.
A real friend speaks out ...
Now Google's got reduced innovation and reduced autonomy for it's employees. They didn't scale the latter and subsequently, they're losing the former.
If the employees leave, Google's another IBM. Another corpse.
So people shouldn't have to take responsibility for their actions, just because they're paid for their troubles?
They also might have contracts with these people that require certain reasons for it.
Certainly it would be very bad press for google if they fired all of the people who are involved in this.