Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold | Hacker News Reader

Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold

bloomberg.com

77 pointsjbegley70 comments

Is this really a new rule? I know Google sells itself as having a strong culture of openness, and it used to be even more open than today. But it's hard to believe it was ever acceptable to attack other employees by name or publicly demand that they should be fired.

Was this not precisely what was done to James Damore?

It did, but it doesn’t seem like it was acceptable then either. In fact they fired one person who went too far in criticizing Damore, and (anecdotally, unverifiably) are said to have punished a dozen others. (https://www.wired.com/story/ex-google-employee-claims-wrongf...)

Believe it. People were mercilessly mocked for making unpopular or disingenuous statements. When GCP hired an Oracle executive, he faced immense criticism purely on the basis of his reputation. And none of this was moderated in the past

This is the level of discourse you get from people who reverse binary trees all day.

People are downvoting this comment because they are missing the clever jab at the hiring process.

How can you be so sure?

It's a hangover from the days when Googlers were largely adults, and capable of being treated as such. After growing so huge, it's obviously not sustainable to keep hiring at this bar, so they're putting in stricter rules around employee behavior just like almost every other company does.

I remember fairly early on someone complaining about not having the right cereal in the lunchroom.

Ha, I never came across the entitlement-to-perks attitude, though I do believe that it existed even during my tenure. That being said, this is a wildly different problem from the one we're discussing.

Mocking an exec in the open that is a really cool culture. Well, it was while it lasted. At our BigCo we celebrate, venerate, suck up in every possible and impossible way to our beloved execs. Granted our revenue on per head basis is hardly tenth that of Google.

Of course it's always been understood as poor form to personally attack another employee, there was never any need for a rule saying so. In the same way, a "culture of openness" is always embraced with the implicit caveat that being "open" about criticism of decisions made by executives is also unacceptable and will be met with retaliation. That doesn't go both ways -- executives can be openly critical of you by name and on whatever terms they wish. Our generation didn't invent office politics, after all.

So this new rule is so broad as to be meaningless, it's sort of like making a new "no complaining" rule (which isn't as uncommon as you'd think). It demonstrates that the "chafe" was never about the rule. When we see workers purposefully making these criticisms anyway, as with this new hire or someone like James Damore, it means they've probably already understood that google won't act unless it represents a serious threat to their productivity. This is the company's first initial attempt to squash that sort of effort.

If an executive at Google posted memes and personally attacked a rank and file employee, they'd be met with the same pushback. The notion that this was only a problem because it was directed at an executive (or high level employee in general) is quite ridiculous. Personal attacks are not acceptable, full stop, regardless of who they're directed at.

Executives get away with more crass offenses all the time but even if they didn’t, you’re ignoring a key power imbalance that defines this struggle. What purpose would it serve for an executive to post in this message board? They have plenty of recourse already if a bad hiring decision has been made.

I think we’re also conflating “personal” attacks with criticisms that just happen to be about one person in particular. The meme in the article is criticizing google for exposing their relationships to key actors in child imprisonment policies in the US (connection was exposed by hiring one of them). By this standard there’s no criticism you could make of the company unless it didn’t apply to anyone, which doesn’t sound very meaningful. The same criticism could be levied (with the same picture/meme text) if they decide to hire Mike Pence next year, will that also be considered an unacceptable personal attack?

It ought to be, yes. People shouldn't bully their coworkers over political disagreements, even if they're large or important political disagreements.

Maybe a better exploratory question would be: what would have been an acceptable way to phrase that criticism, if you feel the substance was acceptable sans its obvious application to the most recent hiring decision?

Which criticism are we discussing here? The article describes a Matrix meme which Google allowed to stay up, and previous articles I've read suggest that Google regularly allows questions on hot-button issues when they don't call for specific personnel decisions.

> In the same way, a "culture of openness" is always embraced with the implicit caveat that being "open" about criticism of decisions made by executives is also unacceptable and will be met with retaliation.

Very much not the case at Google historically. The level of criticism against execs was vicious, to the point that a lot of it was IMO in bad faith.

At least when I was there, the line was drawn somewhere between SVPs and normal employees. People seemed pretty okay memeing on Vic Gundotra. But there were other characters at Google who were just ordinary employees, and people felt at least a little uncomfortable when you discussed them excessively. I think the meme templates for a specific person I have in mind were removed entirely.

Ultimately, it's about the level of power that people wield. With great power comes great responsibility. Vic tied the compensation of every single employee to the success of Google+. So there is going to be some pushback, especially from one of the 75,000 people that have no control over how the social network does. There were also various circumstances that just made it feel right. One day there would be an email from Internal Comms about a day in the life of Vic Gundotra, mentioning how few hours of sleep he gets. It was then dug up that Vic did a car commercial where he talks about falling asleep at the wheel and how the lane assist feature saved his life. You have to find that kind of funny. Or maybe I'm just a terrible person and my cynicism ruined the guy's life. Either way, I was amused when people poked fun at senior leadership. It kept them honest. Every SVP thought they were Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, but really they're just coming to work a little sleepy every day controlling a machine much bigger than they can understand.

In the end, making fun of specific people was a tiny tiny part of the culture of openness at Google. I think it was worth taking the bad with the good, but it seems like that didn't scale too well. I feel like that's just part of the lifecycle of a corporation. The companies whose engineers invented computers and the Internet just aren't around in their original form anymore. Apple made it out. Microsoft is doing pretty OK. That's about it. I feel like Google is the next IBM; people will live out their careers there and keep it alive for the foreseeable future, but I am not sure that people aspire to get their first job at IBM anymore. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the culture that made Google Google has been determined to not maximize investment returns over the next quarter, and so it has to go. It worked for IBM, right?

The meme templates weren’t even the worst part. People stalked him online and leaked some of the posts to his next employer.

Yeah, it wasn't great. I think people learned from that episode and made a mental note to not do that again, though.

Ultimately, the person in question had a large volume of publicly-available writing, so I'm not sure it changed anything. But it does leave a bad taste in one's mouth because looking back, it was such a trivial thing that he was known for. In the years to come, shit got a lot more serious.

you mean ch..ch or whatever his name was?

Google is overrun by the leftist mob. Initially management heavily encouraged it because it was easy to score few morale and PR points, but now its got out of control and turned out on them and they don’t know what to do.

They should have let some bloodletting happen when hotheads threatened to leave during Damore and Project Maven times and entire company would be better off now, but they chickened out.

Regardless of the issues, a job at a company in the USA is at the discretion of the employer. I can’t understand actively taking part in anything that makes oneself as an employee marked as a pain in upper management’s ass and getting on the list “most likely to be riffed first in the next economic downturn.”

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

- George Orwell

Technology and governance (interesting that we use 'program' in both contexts) are excellent insofar as they enhance our liberty.

If they gadgetry advances the "be your own President" concept, it is useful.

David Wheeler famously said: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection."

But all of that indirection implies more bureaucratic policy, state (or State, depending on whether it's technology or governance) and an encroachment on individuality in the name of a single, narrow vision.

Topics such as corporate policy, voting, transportation, and medical gadgets get at the trade-offs involved in maximally automating and extinguishing the entropy from everyone at the expense of individual liberty.

PREDICTION: these over-managed efforts become Towers of Babel, as is human, and promptly collapse, as is human. The effect of technology may be to support a higher tower and shallower collapse, but the tension between the individual and the group is the only consistency.

I hope they wouldn't accept that applying extra-legal pressure on tax collectors is ok. Or pressuring people who craft talking points for raising taxes. The situation would get a lot uglier than a few grumpy voices at Google.

This is a silly position, and presumably the number of employees involved is very small. It isn't like he is going to be involved in border policy issues while working at Google.

Diversity of thought is important.

Making silly stands against people with opposing political views will eventually prove short-sighted. It's always best to assume good intent and treat people as you'd want to be treated.

"Diversity of political thought" is not important to a technology company. I love how the right tries to paint themselves as victims using this statement.

The main benefit of diversity is that it causes people to fight each other instead of fighting those in power. Upper management at Google has a real problem of the lowly workers organizing protests and pressuring management to change, forcing more diversity would fix this. Then they could finally become Microsoft where nobody raises an eyebrow when they help China spy on their citizens, take on military contracts or hire republican politicians.

By the way, you might not have noticed but the measures described in this article are intended to achieve just that, as it mostly silences the loud left within Google when they try to push back.

Right/left is the best divide-and-conquer wedge issue found so far, exploited by media corporatists to atomize people further from each other in the name of money, while the real division is between the have-way-too-muches and the have-little-or-nones.

Diversity of political thought" is not important to a technology company

Of course it is. If Google had it they wouldn’t be having so much trouble with regulators. Instead there are no internal checks and balances when Google’s particular brand of panopti-utopianism bumps up against the real world. A few more libertarians on staff and maybe they wouldn’t be caught up in so much privacy troubles. A few genuine socialists and maybe they wouldn’t be hounded by the tax authorities. And so on.

http://archive.is/XkqVl

Posting memes critical of the company you work for is banned? Bruh

Well for like 20 years they've allowed it and they've done pretty well. Actually it's a way people can privately (within the company) vent about confidential things and reach others who feel the same way. If they can't vent when some middle manager makes a bad call, or some exec agrees to aid some murderous government's surveillance, what will they do instead? Stage more walk outs? Leak to the press? Unionize?

Posting memes critical of the country you're part of is banned? Bruh

The employees "chafe" because they're prevented from personally attacking and name-calling coworkers? Pretty much every workplace has similar rules.

Framing the issue like that is incredibly unproductive. It's a more complicated topic than that.

Anyone can create a strawman like that and easily set it alight. What takes real insight is actually understanding the issue, why sides of it are unhappy, and how to address it reasonably.

Responding like that is incredibly unproductive. It's a more complicated topic than that.

Anyone can create a strawman like that and easily set it alight. What takes real insight is actually understanding the issue, why sides of it are unhappy, and how to address it reasonably.

Do you see how unactionable this comment is? When you're responding to an idea or post you don't agree with, try to explain why and offer an alternative idea. Yes, you're not obligated to do this in general, but IF you're going to post why not make it constructive and informative?

The difficulty is in rolling back previously unlimited freedom.

>”some employees say the new rules smack of censorship.”

Wait, wait, haven’t I heard that companies by definition can’t be accused of censorship because they “are not the government” when people protested Google’s censorship in YouTube and its search arm?

But, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, yeah it’s censorship! Good one.

People don’t claim companies can’t censor things. They claim that you can’t have your first amendment rights violated by a private organization. Censorship would be part of a first amendment violation, but the two are not equivalent

Nope. I've had plenty of progressives try to tell me that it's only censorship if the government does it.

> People don’t claim companies can’t censor things.

I did a quick search because I recalled seeing that in the past. It's certainly not the prevailing consensus, but people do make that claim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18676417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19929107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9967543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500298

I want to go meta here for a sec: Why does it seem like publications are tripping over each other to publish another article on complaints by Google employees? And why do I keep clicking on them? The complaints, by the way, are almost always about some decision made by people far above their pay grade. Are all Google employees expected to share in and guide all corporate decisions now? It's weird. I'm aware of zero companies that size, that do that.

You're seeing it more often because employees are talking to the press more often about internal politics. It's published because Google is famous and powerful enough that stuff that happens at Google is newsworthy by default.

Karan Bhatia, Google’s global policy chief, told employees in a staff meeting last week that Taylor wasn’t involved in the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. southern border. But on Oct. 28, BuzzFeed News published emails showing that Taylor had in fact shaped talking points for Nielsen on the administration’s detention of migrant children.

Shaping talking points is quite different than crafting policy. Did no one on the Google message boards recognize that?

I know the posted title is generally preferred when linking articles but in this case I think the title doesn't accurately describe the article. I clicked not really realizing what the article was about.

The gist is Google is imposing new internal rules to restrict harsh or personal criticism of other employees, in this case to prevent employees from criticizing an executive hire who was involved in the Trump Department of Homeland Security. I gather the controversy is related to DHS's involvement in child separation at the border. A secondary controversy involves internal employee criticism of presumed anti-unionization efforts because removed from company message boards.

Maybe go with: "Google Employees critical of moderation designed to restrict internal dissent"?

Your suggested title is more misleading than the current title. Not allowing employees to personally attack other employees isn't restricting internal dissent. Employees are free to voice their dissent all they want as long as they keep it professional. Posting memes and trolling another person is unprofessional and childish, and would likely get you written up or even fired at practically every company in existence. The fact this was ever deemed acceptable in the first place is actually the more shocking news.

So now the censorship they have on Youtube is basically taken internally. Maybe now they'll see from experience what the consequences are of censorship.

If your definition of censorship is not allowing employees to use company time and resources to make personal attacks against other employees, then every single company in existence engages in censorship. The fact this article is even news shows how ridiculous things have gotten.

My definition of censorship is suppression of any kind of speech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com