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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Yeah a corporation isn't some cooperative integrated intelligence making decisions. Its hundreds of managers all working fairly independently. Hard for it to be anything but a vegetative growth, that locally optimizes for more growth.

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From: Arnon Geshuri (Google Senior Staffing Strategist)

... On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else. ...

From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources)

Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences.

From Eric Schmidt:

Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric

From Steve Jobs:

From Sergei Brin:

Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those.

Source: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s...

Edit: Fixed the Shona Brown email. She's on the board of Atlassian now so I guess avoid those people too.

Yeah at the highest management levels, managers (VPs?) are responsible to CEO direction.

But at middle manager levels (hundreds of people, not a handful, in very large companies) they're not directly responsible to the CEO. Nor are they directly responsible to the customer/market. They're in 'middle management limbo' where all they have to work with, is local incentives. Usually financial - optimize the budget for results.

Sadly, this usually ends with middle managers trying to maximize their budget and minimize their required output, to increase their chances of success. Which means, the most expensive product possible.

That's what I mean by 'locally optimize'.

That's a much more general point than the specific one at issue, which is the CEOs illegally conspiring to not hire staff from each other and terminating someone who refused to go along with the illegal conspiracy. This wasn't something the managers organically came up with.

That's so horrible. One note, the second quote ("Appropriate response...") was from Shona Brown (Google’s VP for Human Resources), not Eric Schmidt.

Wage fixing aside, doesn't it shock anyone to see them talking about people in this way? "the sourcer... will be terminated within the hour", "please make a public example of this termination"? You can almost hear them gloating about the crucifixion they're organising

it is well known that the upper management people have more psychopathic tendencies, for example https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

That email exchange is totally lacking any empathy (which is very typical of psychopathy [IANAD]) toward the ones affected, ie. the sourcer who is being fired and the employees whose livelihoods are being illegally depressed.

> Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group.

So already in 2007 a group of people at Google (all the hiring staff) knew about this policy. How much time did it take before someone complained?

I believe you misquoted the source. The "Appropriate response..." quote is attributed to Google’s VP for Human Resources, Shona Brown, not Eric Schmidt.

I can say with confidence that managers at Google are not even fairly independent. Lots of pressure (and toxicity) can float down from higher up in the org chart.

My first eng manager at Google was really mistreated by people higher up in the org and as a result didn't have much freedom to make things right for our team (or our project, which generally struggled a lot as a result). This is not extrapolation or speculation: He confirmed it to me.

If anything, I think engineers at Google probably have more independence and freedom than managers do, because they're really only accountable for their own work and personal results. Managers have to corral all those independent engineers into a group they can get away with taking responsibility for, and the upper levels of the chain don't always act in a way that acknowledges how hard management can be. The disconnect also means that "best for a manager's career" is not automatically going to be compatible with the career health of their reports.

The gap between "labor" and "management" in this scenario is also a great example of why unions for labor are important - it's very difficult to represent the needs of both labor and management collectively, so a good method is for them to each bargain collectively based on their own needs and interests.

Unclear where that's going? Sounds like, managers are responsible for measures (unspecified?) that are not in alignment with direct reports' interests. Sure, agreed. Managers are almost always responsible for some fiscal efficiency measure. Which is why they 'locally optimize'. Right?

My argument is that in many cases it's not local optimization at all. It's not optimal for anyone, their freedom is constrained by upper level management (the hierarchy / the corporation / the hivemind) which means neither the managers or their reports have freedom.

If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results.

Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough.

If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation):

* Give him a raise so he stays

* Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them

* Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap

* Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution

* Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above

In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.

Yeah some middle manager at the next layer up, had a local optimization to spend only the budget they'd allotted. So, the 'screw you' to the manager below.

This is a typical example of local optimization?

It's nonlocal specifically because it skipped the chain, and that happens in other places.

I think you're redefining 'local optimization' until it covers all behaviour. It's trivially true that everyone acts according to their incentives, extrinsic and intrinsic.

Or, I'm recognizing it when I see it. (And so are you - that description is pretty much spot-on a 'local optimization).

Do we believe upper management said "screw with your workers until they stop being effective"? That's trivially false.

Yep. Google management is unusual relative to management at many other companies; it's less direction and more cat-herding. Engineer empowerment is so high that managers don't have many of the tools in their toolbox for managing that they do at other companies.

Corporations are typically highly coordinated, hierarchical organizations with a chain of command that leads from the CEO to frontline employees. No, CEO's are not omniscient, but they have significant control over company culture and policy and should bear responsibility for patterns of corporate misbehavior. Corporations are absolutely capable of weighing benefits and risks to itself and outside stakeholders and making and acting on decisions.

And managers are motivated to locally optimize their part of the whole. CEO can blather on all they want about corporate morals. But if the managers are rewarded on how efficiently they deploy their resources (and they are), then any rational manager will do that. Locally optimize. Just look at what measure the manager's bonus depends upon, and you can substantially predict their behavior.

Giant companies are not just a CEO and some managers. There are typically half a dozen layers between the CEO and the footsoldier. And its the middle layer folks that create the true behavior of the beast.

This is incredibly untrue of Google, and every other organization I've ever worked in (excluding the tiny ones). I can't imagine how you could've come to this conclusion while ever having worked at a corporation (or indeed, any institution above a certain very low floor of employees).

Note that this isn't directly relevant to the case under discussion, which was coordinated at the CEO level

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