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This is historically revisionist. Google was a money-making behemoth with its tentacles in many areas of innovation before it became the politicized entity we know it to be today.

Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area.

Github was the premier hosted SCM solution long before it literally pulled its meritocracy rug from under it [0] and has been living off first-mover advantage since, succeeding in spite of the activists it now employs, not because of.

I personally _would be_ very surprised to see an identity politics focused company beat either, not merely because of their [Google, Github] current status but because those in question haven't shown themselves to be capable of building much at all.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocr...

Google sheets had the gay pride flag Easter egg for almost a decade. Company has been political for awhile.

That's no more political than it is to celebrate Cinco de Mayo or Saint Patrick's Day with a custom logo or easter egg.

A lot has changed in the US in a decade. Case in point: a person could make the above claim with a straight face now. ;)

Obergefell v. Hodges was only four years ago. American conservatives are still trying to reverse gay marriage.

Not in SF.

Same SF where Mozilla's employees revolted against a CEO who donated to support Prop 8? None of that was political, then?

(And hiring mostly in SF isn't itself a political choice?)

rms is extremely political, and has made significant contributions In the operating system and application space. The entirety of the free software movement is a political movement, stemming from a philosophy that people should have freedom to change the software on devices they physically own. I assume you're not considering him one of "those in question?"

You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace.

We are talking of the company that was advocating do not evil. This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?

> You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace.

Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Google has done relatively little of note over the last 5 years given their size, and part of it is that they have an incompetence cancer and engineering teams cannot trust other teams (or even coworkers in larger teams).

Do you realize how harmful it is to an organization when you can’t tell if a coworker you are depending on is competent or if they were hired because of their genes?

> This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?

Which stand? Because they flip-flop all of the time.

It doesn't take more than a handful of interactions to determine if a coworker is competent. The reason they were hired is irrelevant; software engineering at Google is very fast-paced, and it tends to interpret incompetence as damage and route around it.

I'm an engineer at google and this bit about hiring someone because of their genes is false.

All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.

Right, there is a lot of talk about things but ultimately the strongest political side at Google are still the ones clamoring for meritocracy.

It's less "meritocracy vs. diversity" and more "meritocracy factors in diversity."

They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.

Which organization has collapsed that focused only on technical skills?

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true.

Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly.

Some tricks I saw used:

1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this.

2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway.

3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it.

In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves.

But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees.

By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook).

1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected.

2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen.

3. Sourcing an all-women group from a hiring event and sending them through the normal interview process is ... sending them through the normal interview process.

If you want to claim that Google is trying harder to hire qualified women than qualified men, sure, I don't think anyone disputed that. The dispute was whether Googlers ever think an unqualified person was hired to meet a diversity goal.

(And how often does Google fire someone for discovering that their interview process emitted a false positive? Given the incredible cost of making that mistake, most hiring processes are tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives, and Google's intensive process should be particularly good at that. Unless you're claiming HR is firing qualified men to meet a quota - i.e., textbook wrongful termination at scale - a bias for never getting around to firing women can't have a noticeable effect.)

> tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives

This is a lie perpetuated by googlers. That’s a false dichotomy. There is no evidence that their process reduces false positives. Pointing to a bunch of false negatives just means they have a process that produces a bunch of false negatives. For how smart googlers are purported to be, you would think they wouldn’t report such an obviously illogical statement.

Nope, allowing some candidates to retry more because of their genes or straight up skip a failed phone screen is lowering the bar for them. The entire hiring process from recruitment to offer is part of the hiring bar.

Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process.

You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities.

If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts.

> So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.

Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.

> This is historically revisionist. Google was a money-making behemoth with its tentacles in many areas of innovation before it became the politicized entity we know it to be today.

This is also historically revisionist. Google's been super political since forever, it just wasn't in the news for it.

Really?

Googler 2006-2014. I can't say I remember much politics during that time. The closest it got was Eric Schmidt having close relationships with Washington. That and the China thing but even there, Google was in China with a censored search engine up until they went and hacked the firm. I don't remember much discussion of the fact that we had a Chinese version of the search engine.

What are you thinking of?

I look at it like this. My friends who still work there complain about stupid idpol all the time now. I never heard complaints like that when I was there.

I read the "how Google works " book and I can't help but question myself if they built what they built despite of the culture.

The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture.

If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.

Google feels sometimes very much like startups with VC money just being inefficient and burning other people money, except of course, Google is burning it's own money that is generated from the non sexy / cool stuff (ads and enterprise email / storage )...

> If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.

Google in the early days didn't have infinite money nor market dominance and it obviously worked out. Doing what they did is what got them from A to B.

And Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are nothing like that and two of the three are more profitable. Correlation is not causation.

I didn't say it was. But the GP asked:

> If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ?

And the answer to that is clearly: yes. It would because it did.

Is there a variant of Godwin's law/meme that all conversations on HN about politics degenerate to hitting each other over neoliberal economics, the CoC and men's rights?

CoC?

Code of Conduct

Nah, there's a much simpler and more factually correct explanation. Google developed a natural monopoly using smart people. It then had very high hiring standards and higher salaries, and hired more very smart people in order to wrap its tentacles and create more competition crushing apps and features. It gave these smart people more freedom and money compared to what they were used to, and allowed them to freely innovate and task risks. This all happened before the political era we know today.

None of Google's success it had to do with identity politics. In many ways, you could argue Google was a-political for most of its life.

It seems likely that this is not a conflict between politics and non-politics, or even between left and right, but between labor and management. The people that built Google are shocked that management is not making the decisions they would make (especially about things a bit less functional than most corporate decisions, e.g. whom to do business with). I'm pretty sure that if all the programmers at Google decided Google should not do something as a company, they actually have the power to stop it. I am not sure they want to exercise this power in some coordinated fashion.

> And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.

They should be surprised as it hasn't ever happened before. That's not to say that it won't or shouldn't happen, it just would be surprising.

Didn't it happen with Google? Did they not build a more productive engineering department because they said "Bring your whole self to work, and bring your dog too" and not "We want your butt in a cubicle for 40 hours and this is just a job"?

I suspect if a company says "Bring your whole self to work, and we're actually serious about it, only bother applying if you think you'll gel with the folks already here," they'll still be able to hire as many people as they need and they'll deliver better products because of it.

How are they “more productive” than the other tech behemoths?

I would argue that they are less productive seeing that after all these years they haven’t diversified from advertising - where 90% of their profit comes from - as compared to Apple or Microsoft or even Amazon.

They're very productive, but much of that productivity gets spent reinventing the same products and services over and over.