Google CEO says company genuinely struggling with employee trust
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I have noticed in my life that there are people who operate on a principle that is sometimes called out as "It's not illegal if you don't get caught." Clearly that statement isn't literally true. The essence of the colloquialism is that rules are "arbitrary" and following them, when you don't have to fear the consequence of breaking them because you are unlikely to get caught violating them, is for "chumps." (sorry, another colloquialism).
What is lost on people is that people who don't follow rules erode trust. Especially when they could have easily followed a rule and didn't anyway. That trust erodes and is difficult if not impossible to recover. And not surprisingly those same people who are so happy to have "gotten away with it" have no idea that at some point in the future they are going to need that trust and it won't be there.
"Hiring an exec who supported Trump's travel ban" is purely a political issue. Temporarily halting travel from a list of countries designated by the Obama administration as 'dangerous' - specifically because there's a degree of lawlessness and/or the governments can't/won't cooperate with background checks etc. has very reasonable arguments supporting it. (FYI the nations were Libya/Yemen/Syria/Somalia/Sudan/Iraq - all of which have dysfunctional governments unable to provide reliable identity information - and Iran, which has other problems). Note that Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Indonesia, Saudi, Oman, Pakistan etc. etc. and the vast majority of states with many Muslim citizens were not affected.
Contextualising this within Trump's ugly rhetoric is another thing entirely and this part subject to interpretation.
If Googlers are going to be discontent about an issue like this then I'm afraid it's game over for their peace - because they are effectively internalising American political discord.
Google's direct participation in China etc. is another issue entirely, much more salient as it directly reflects 'what Google is doing' - but even this can be very complicated.
Google is essentially 'choosing' a very specific political ethos which is problematic in itself because most of us tend to confound our own version of morality with that of others in a very intolerant manner.
Yes it is. And that issue is that the person did something in a previous job which many employees found repugnant.
But the trust issue, is that the employees also don't trust that Google has the integrity to hire someone who did that, without understanding the whys of it. Or being sensitive to both their existing and new employee on the issue.
If I were in Google management, and I had the trust of the people I managed, I could explain to them the reasoning that went into the hire; The skills that came with the candidate, the business need, the qualities of the candidate. And the sensitivity around their previous job choices and how they made those choices (most people do what the boss tells them to do) and what was expected of them at a place like Google. And the people who trusted me would expect me to hold the new hire to those standards and to fire them if they didn't live up to them. I would be able to lean on that trust and say, "Hey, we need to give this guy a chance to prove he can do the right thing and we and he both understand he is held to a higher standard here."
Folks I managed wouldn't trust me if they had found out that I had allowed a sexual harasser to work for me after I knew that they had a problem. That is because they would lose trust in me saying that I would hold people to a certain standard.
That is the difference in a "only if you get caught" situational morality play. Someone with principles and integrity will take the necessary action, even if it is painful, even when they could "get away with it because nobody else knows."
It is a good litmus test. That test being to evaluate how you respond to people who do the right thing even when no one is looking, and to people who do the right thing only after the need to do it comes to light through some other path. In my experience, I trust people who do the right thing even if no one is watching way more than I trust the opportunists.
A different administration could have implemented a policy that limited travel from certain countries without backlash.
This one started by -- without warning -- revoking the right to re-enter the country for all legal visa holders from these countries on 1/27/2017, a week after the inauguration, INCLUDING GREEN CARDS.[1] That's a permanent residency visa. People were stranded away from their jobs, homes, families.
I was a green card holder not so long ago, and had family in the states on green cards. I felt real fear after the Muslim ban was announced on 1/27/2017.
The action seemed calculated to cause as much harm to ordinary people as it could.
Policy can be debated, but it's not the policy that is at issue here. It's the disregard bordering on malice. This was just one of many examples, from pardoning Joe Arpaio[2] and separating asylum-seeking families with no plan for re-uniting them,[3] to going looking for decades old citizenships to revoke[4].
I understand that we're too politically weak for anger to work, but I'm only human. It's galling to be told we're the intolerant ones in this situation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#Green-ca... [2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Joe_Arpaio#Backgroun... . Today, some Latinios in Texas feel compelled to carry around proof of citizenship: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/16/us/immigration-citizens-carry... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/us/family-separation-trum... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/magazine/naturalized-citi...
If you are right wing and have not been banned - it is just a matter of time. I know some people tried everything to stay inside the rules and they failed.
I don't know that this pattern is the fault of Dan and Scott directly - I think there is something deeper at work which goes beyond the political pattern recognition of the people who talk here.
I won't jump into the topic here but I am going to iterate - there exist three powerful factions in our political system - the left, the right and the liberals. I believe if we don't hang together we will hang separately.
For one political philosophy to have a monopoly is the last thing we need. It is as moronic as one sex winning the War of the Sexes.
Look at how economists are now reconsidering the position on global trade - positions that seem incontrovertible get walked back in time - do we want to slow down that mechanism?
Whether this is on purpose (a system used by the mods to keep the site left-wing) or not (just a consequence of the times we live in + a desire by the mods not to have flames all day) is another matter.
The political compass can be separated in economical and social issues. Economically, HN is right-wing, as you say. It's full of libertarians. But socially, it's strictly left-wing. Things that get you flagged? Men and women are not the same, we should not turn the world around to appease to non-heterosexuals, perhaps people of different races/ethnic backgrounds/religions are fundamentally different (for better or for worse), all humans aren't worth the same, countries should have the right to manage themselves in any way they want without having human rights shoved into them by the west... Stuff like that cannot be discussed here.
And as I said, I don't know if it's a conscious effort by the mods, or those topics only incite flames so they have to be shut down. What I do know is that just yesterday we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365411 on the front page (which is, quite literally, left-wing political propaganda) but something that criticised those points would be flagged in minutes.
That, and there are automated things which identify when a topic becomes flame
Older/active users are predominantly left-wing and use their flag power to flag right-wing points of view, because they deem them as trolling (charitable point of view) or because they want to silence them (uncharitable point of view). Then, mods come and ban those who amass many flags because someone who's got many flags is irredeemably a troll.
Obviously these examples are reductive by necessity, and both constructive and insubstantive/hateful posts can be reduced in these ways. Personally, the examples of such downvoted/flagged posts I've seen have almost always betrayed the latter quite unsubtly. (Your choice of wording is also kind of unfair - you've chosen reductions that are, again in my opinion, no-brainers to say "yes" to without context and assuming good faith).
Europeans - I am one so I know - if they are Anglos - are heavily influenced by the American information-sphere. It is normal for a European to listen to NPR or watch CNN and think they're hearing neutrality because there's context in American politics we're not aware of.
There is a conformity - I don't want to label it leftist - it leans there at the moment but it will go the other way in future.
It is not anybody in Silicon Valley's job to moderate the population's speech - that our governments did not produce a public space for the online world was a strategic error. I suppose we could just take the China route but no amount of machine learning is going to stop Americans telling the other side to fuck off - that is a feature and not a bug.
Please state facts.
An extreme right party in Belgium looks for better benefits for the poor than Democrats in the US ( cfr. Vlaams Belang in Belgium, i'm not approving them btw)
Their party programme was based on Denmark.
The most extreme is currently in Hungary and he is hard against immigration, but that's it.
Asked for an unban and it was ok within the minute.
HN just tries to reduce politics here, which is in their right.
1. Contracts with the Department of Defense
2. Participation in project PRISM
3. The Google Graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/)
4. Abandoning "Don't be evil"
> He said he tries “to understand when I feel there is something which caused breaking of trust and see what we can do to improve,” adding that “it’s definitely gotten harder to do this at the scale we are doing it.”
It's funny how concepts that any 15-year-old could grasp become "harder to understand" when someone offer you millions of dollars to not understand them.
On the other hand, Google had to back down [2]. I don't think this would work out for Google in the long term, that is, if they keep caving in to pressure from employees. Maybe trust erosion is inevitable if you're trying to pretend you're not just another profit-making corporation.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18240300/microsoft-ceo-de...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01...
In particular using "institutions we have elected to do X" instead of just "institutions that do X" steps around the question whether the institutions really do X. Which is, incidentally, the major concern of the opponents.
I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. All the statements made in https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html are true at the time they were written. The sentiment in the title of that post accurately reflects how everybody involved felt about it.
(I can't talk about whether they're still true because I've not been there in nearly two years, I wouldn't know)
But from the blog:
> We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.
Does not match up
In fact, the design of the NSA's interception nodes, rulesets and filtering systems resemble strongly many of Google's internal technologies (as evidenced by a leaked config file in the snowden documents)
The poster, today, is aware of how PRISM worked.
The blog author, then, was not aware that PRISM existed.
It's not as if that would be widely announced, even internally.
Google was not innocent in the matter (there is clear public evidence internal Google data got into the hands of the NSA), but it appears that data was stolen due to poor security of Google's systems rather than handed over voluntarily. Google underestimated the abilities of their adversary. I don't believe any other company back then would have been resistant to the same attack.
There is sufficient evidence in the leaked snowden docs and public blog posts to figure out what the bug was and how it has been fixed.
In either case, it's a tough problem to be sure.
I don't think you can mix a defense contractor and an advertising company that has a lot of public scrutiny, for the same reason tobacco companies and breakfast cereal companies tend to be separate entities (despite doing essentially the same thing: selling agricultural commodities to consumers).
Because it’s constrained to its niche. Let’s say split search/ads from the rest of Google. It’s still a money-printing machine but what can it spend that money on? It has to pay dividends to shareholders rather than propping up YouTube and GMail and Google Cloud and cross-pollinating data with them. Ditto if any of them become profitable. Shareholders win, regulators win, its good for everyone.
Us split-advocates aren’t just knee-jerks, we have thought about this.
It's about the fact that there is an entire market that has been closed because Google has a monopolistic power to bundle.
Seems like you could say every company is doing essentially the same thing, since they're providing goods and services to consumers.
Besides, Google is an AI-first company now. Stuff like Assistant, which is arguably their most promising user-facing service relies most on all these services being seamlessly connected. This split would cripple such a profuct.
No country’s constitution enshrines a right to profit from an unviable business.
In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates.
This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there.
The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.
The fact that the employees are speaking out and in many cases actually taking direct action that will effect their career prospects is the antithesis of
>They've got nothing to give them self confidence
People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals. The problem Google has is exactly the opposite- they market themselves as a morally good company and so they end up with a high number of people who view that as important working for them. When they fail to live up to those actual standards, the employees protest. I think trying to ascribe the protests to a lack of courage is a very strange conclusion.
"Google" in that context doesn't mean exclusively its management, but rather, the whole group of people. When Googlers stage walkouts and so on they don't care much about the specific situations at hand. If it wasn't one thing it'd be another thing. This is clear from scratching the surface of their complaints in any detail: it's all built on very brittle foundations.
What they want is the feeling of collective moral action, of clarity of purpose, of being a part of something bigger than building the next chat app, and they're able to get that at Google where it wouldn't be tolerated at most companies. It's exactly because this sort of activity does not affect their career prospects or might even enhance them that is why they do it: remember that their promotions aren't decided by management at Google but rather, by committees of the same sorts of people who are protesting.
People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals.
This is exactly what people with no self confidence in their own goodness would do.
If they were secure in their own morality, in their own sense of living a right life, they wouldn't be attempting to find it by engaging in constant cultural crusades inside their own place of work. It seems quite clear to me that many of their supposed moral positions aren't well thought through and exist primarily so they can protest. In other words, the protests aren't a means to an end (change of policy by Google's management), the protests are the end, in and of themselves, because it's via noisy displays of moral virtue that they find what they're truly looking for.
If you like I can go through some of the inconsistencies in the various positions their employees have taken.
Wow, are you projecting an image with that statement? Just realize that your attitude of blind judgement of others perpetuates this partisan divide. Not wanting to talk to someone based on a differing policy perspective is /exactly/ the problem. This breaks our republic. You should desire to try and understand their perspective and enlighten them to yours. Honestly sickening to read that.
The Googlers are the ones who'd do neither, so what do you think of them?
And I’m saying that by not engaging with people you disagree with based on politics in your personal life you are shirking your civic duty. It’s selfish, short sighted, and intellectually dishonest behavior. Seriously reconsider because it reveals a certain closed mindedness and breeds partisanship and tribalism in others; things I’m guessing you aren’t for based on parent comments.
I think a business is a business, it has its own charter to follow and it seems fair that it’s within the abilities of that charter to limit the speech of at-will employees to some extent.
I can’t believe Google is putting up with this behavior from employees, and makes me think their hiring process needs a rework and reaffirms the feeling I have that Google has a culture of immaturity. It just seems like a personal attention grab to me on the part of the Googlers. They should leave if they feel so strongly. People who really think the people they work for are evil defect, possibly after leaking information or making a mess, but usually posthaste. Google is letting them make a mess right now.
The moral questions that face google's rank and file are so poorly discussed in the tech sector or by society at large I'm not surprised that they only get rankled when the company does something that can be blogged about with a hot take. I guess it's good that things like "military contracts" and "former Trump staffer" can penetrate thick skulls, but they're many many years past nip-it-in-the-bud phase. They have no intention of establishing an overarching moral philosophy and have set themselves up to just rationalize questions away as come up.
Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed."
If I am not mistaken Google has recently made a change to its Chrome browser (77.0.3865.105) that removed the ability to disable javascript, cookies, etc. (via chrome://settings/content or clicking to the left of the address -- "site information" -- in the address bar) for all websites when in Guest mode. It can still be disabled for individual websites.
Assuming I am not mistaken, suprisingly, I have not read anything about this change. Is it possible there was no intent to stop users from turning off javascript and cookies and this was simply another example of a "flawed implementation".
These settings seems to stick, however the ability to globally turn off cookies and javascript remains broken. Also, it is so time consuming to change settings for each site, one has to wonder if this inconvenience is deliberate.