The whole country is rather politicized (some of it actually violent). Google doesn't force employees to pretend that's not the case. Maybe a good idea, maybe bad.
Google's culture is uniquely subservient to politics. The organization's mission is very clearly secondary to the employee's personal activism.
"Politics-free" also means "the ethical choice is what the higher-ups define", which would be difficult for me to stomach for its own set of reasons.
I regularly see elaborate arguments that non-political speech is impossible therefore employees must be allowed to talk politics at work. They're very tiresome, because ordinary people can see they're just not true. Non political workplaces are possible and desirable. Employees should ban political discussion, starting with this tedious everything-is-politics stuff.
It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking?
Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround.
I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.
That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?
Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.)
> or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit?
No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
> Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral
Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?
Maybe early on in Google. But to influence thousands of highly opinionated people, all with their own opinions, without negative side effects, is really difficult. Did you mean early on in the employees' efforts, or early in Google?
> No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
Sorry for the confusion -- I mean "tamping" -- that any topdown attempt to force neutrality on employees when they are agitating for not-neutrality would have negative costs. (tampering is a different word, but it's an understandable mis-communication... darn English!)
> Or maybe all of this bias is accidental...
You could be 100% correct. I have no idea, it's a viable option. My point was to answer your original question of "what could they be thinking".
My objective was just to propose a few ideas about what they could be thinking. I 100% don't know, but I think what I said could fit the limited information we have.