I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.
Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff.
There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.
The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital.
I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.
This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.
Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.
I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.
It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)
I hesitate to say they "care" because I think that gives the wrong impression. Everybody wants to make a little more money, get a little more freedom in deciding their priorities, get a little more flexibility in their hours, etc. So if you say your only reason you're leaving is that you want more money, they're probably not going to give everyone a 10% raise next quarter. But if you have well thought out grievances that can be addressed without spending millions of dollars or completely changing the structure of the company, I think you'd be surprised how willing executives would be to try and make things better.
If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature.
Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so.
A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.
Then size is the problem.
I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary.
Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.
The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle.
Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too.
Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive.
Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.
Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed.
You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example.
And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM )
Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.
This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things.
If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody.
Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.
-stay and fight to fix
Vs.
-vote with your feet and compete
Each of these have positives and negatives :)
Politics; yes. Corporations; no. Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not.
If shareholders and the board are happy taking on government work then Google will take on government work. Ditto military projects, ditto Chinese projects, ditto anything really. The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. The only influence they do have is to cause profits to go higher than people planned on; because that makes management happy.
Insofar as unions do anything political it is usually inappropriate and better done through actual regulation so all companies obey in a coordinated fashion.
If the concern is corporate direction, the union has a seat at the table as well.
I have seen this fallacious notion expressed a thousand times over, in multiple disparate venues, and it exhausts me. I am even now questioning why I would bother to step into this conversation, and propose an alternative outlook. I do not expect you to enjoy my contesting statements. I do not expect you to thank me for them.
Truly, at this point I expect negative votes, and some off-hand comments about how I am ignorant (despite the sources I can cite), or brainwashed (despite my personal experiences affirming the perspective). One thing I know is that "well actually"ing individually misguided forum comments isn't a sustainable method of educating Tech Workers like yourself–and please, don't bother denying that appellation. This is a forum for tech workers. That's what Hacker means, as it's used here.
So, to the point: Politics are the mechanics of power.
It's that simple. There are explicit politics in government, e.g. wherein the Constitution delineates literal powers of particular offices, and then there are the implicit politics of families, nations, firms, interpersonal relationships, administrators, etc. There is no sense in denying that the decisions we make in the systems we inhabit influence the balances of power between actors within them. When you pass me the salt at the thanksgiving table, you grant me a power to arbitrate the passing of salt. When I show up to work, I submit myself to the powerful authority of the Jira system, and the managerial strategy it comprises. These are political acts.
> Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board.
This is true.
> The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not.
> is to be
This is weird. There is so much rhetorical work being done by this innocuous compound verb "is to be". In it, you imply a definitive truth. An inescapable logic. Something akin to a physics engine, if not a type of physics itself.
But I do not believe the Firm "is to be" as you say. It is as we will it. The Firm is a social construct. It's boundaries, methods, and behaviors are socially constructed. They're defined, as Searle observes, by collective intentions. Collective will. If we will it otherwise, the Firm will be otherwise. As XKCD's Randall Munroe puts it, "we're the adults now, and that means we get to decide what that means."
> The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made.
I don't put much stock in rights. There is power, and there is motive, but rights are pure poetry. Do the workers have the power to influence the firm? Do we have the motive?
We certainly have the motive. The Firm shapes the conditions of our lives. The lighting. The furniture. The distance to the bathroom. The hours of the day. These are the material conditions of our sensable environment. They determine the quality of our life. The relationships we invest in, the food we eat, the financial resources we've available to furnish our habitats. These are all influenced by the firm.
The air we breathe. The water we drink. The development of the landscape around us. These are impacted, immensely, undeniably, by decisions made in pursuit of the Firm's strategies. These developments affect us.
So long as we are sensitive to our environments, we will have motive to influence the firm. Do we have the right? An immaterial question. Does a dog have a right to dig? Does a waterfall have a right to carve? Nonsense terms.
Do we have, then, the power to implement our motives? To bring about our goals–unceasing, corporeal, visceral goals stemming from our animal needs, our bodies desires, to be fed, sheltered, exercised?
You say we have only one power: to please the master. I would say we have another: to displease.
It's nonsensical to say we have the power to "do well" without also conceding we have the power to "do ill".
We have the power. We have the motive. Why talk of rights?
(Quote from the post above yours, emphasis mine.)
I read the post you're replying to as saying they didn't understand why people don't just go work somewhere else, rather than burn out with futile attempts at trying to change the corporation from within. Whether they are right or not I can't really speculate in, just thought it interesting that we seem to have had different takeaways from the comment.
Moreover, the sheer size and power of Google means that changing its culture changes how it interacts with the world, which could have far-reaching consequences. Seems natural to want to see that impact improve.
They provide employment, food, transportation, leisure activities, social validation; in some cases housing. It's no wonder employees (especially young ones fresh from the bosom of Mother Academe) who have their entire sense of self wrapped up in being a Googler are hesitant to just walk away from that.
How much of that is simply due to vesting schedules?
Not just for Google, but broadly in tech, that doesn't quite work. If you jet, you lose un-vested equity. Oh, and you are also forced, in many cases, to spend a boatload of current cash to exercise vested options and get stuck with illiquid holdings for 5 or more years.
This all the more reason employees dont "just quit" and join another company. Say they quit and join Amazon -- now they are stuck on a 15/15/30/40 vesting plan and just kicked all their comp into a future year that may or may not arrive. Say they quit and join a typical startup, now they have a 1yr vest.
Google pays pretty well which makes it hard to leave, ave there is a lot of nice people to work with.
If you are in the money, you're losing a LOT of money when you leave, join a new company, and get struck new equity at a higher strike.
I'm not. Google encouraged it. Now they are forced to quash that culture because you can't run a multinational business that way. When profitability starts drying up in the ad business, you'll see a further shift.
Everyone's story is different but I joined in 2008 and it took me about a week to understand that the company did not want employees to get involved in a way that would affect day-to-day operations. As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon. As a different example, you could organise Irish-speaking evenings, and again - pat on the back. But try to push for an Irish language version of Google interface, and you can get in trouble if you make enough noise that decision makers hear about it. Both of these are actual examples I saw first hand.
The problem with not defining boundaries and instead relying on some fuzzy notion of understanding the subtext is that it leads to confusion. The James Damore fiasco demonstrates this. They guy actually thought he could write an opinion on a highly controversial and inflammatory topic without repercussions. Why did he think that? The vast majority of HR departments would explicitly discourage it and the company culture (especially at a multinational) would make it clear this isn't a topic for the corporate intranet. But he was confused enough that he thought this was ok because he probably though Google is different and is OK with employees debating political and social positions on company boards. That's what I mean by 'Google encouraged it'.
Isn't that what a successful socialisation process should equip you with?
"Successful socialization" is pretty nebulous. I think it's a phrase to imply that some people who are objectively functioning in society "don't count" as socialized.
Anybody can be successful in whatever respect until one day they aren't.
You can really, really not like any given person, but if you question whether Damore lacked/lacks basic socialization, then what do you make of Martin Shkreli, or Donald Trump? Are you ok until you get sentenced to prison? Or can you be a failure until you become POTUS? If you've failed at basic socialization yet held a six figure job at Google, what would you be if instead you were a supermarket cashier, but with the same beliefs and personality?
Awhile back people did ask for it and did secure said benefits, prior to the national legalization of gay marriage even.
So, in this case, organizing around and asking for those benefits did work.
That Hippy rebel spirit is/was very much an identifying characteristic of `Silicon Valley`. I'd even say that Google is the poster child of Silicon Valley v2.0, and the people that work there might even resent the inevitable conservative slide that makes Google in 2019 look more like IBM in 1989. I know I resent that.
I think it’s honestly ridiculous to suggest people are trying to get hired into Google to be political activists. We have no evidence of this and I’d need a lot to start believing it.
Effectively, a minority of these employees are using company time/resources to engage in personal activities. Often those employees are highly-vocal, cutthroat about shutting down others' differing views, and the voices of others who are just trying to get things done are not represented. I think the lack of an anonymous channel for others to push back is a big problem because there is no psychological safety afforded to the majority of employees.
Put another way, employee activism is an unscientific popularity contest where most people don't want to participate in the contest.
Never once have I heard anyone describe Google in such high regard while working there. We're encouraged to be autonomous, self aware, thinking people, believe it or not. There are many things I agree and disagree with that Google does and expressing that is perfectly fine.
They have two options:
1. Maintain high pay at another FAANG. Depending on perspective, at least one of those is no better than Google.
2. Take a significant pay cut to work somewhere else.
In the end we learn Google does evil for the sake of profits and many those who they inspired have become disenchanted.
If you want your call center to be more ecofriendly or your consulting firm to support Fight For $15, you may or may not get support but you probably won't see consequences. In tech itself, I've watched plenty of people push for green policies, or organize donations to support immigrants, or even recruit for the DSA with no issues at all. But they were recruiting for border reforms and political groups, not workplace unions and H-1B liberalization - and certainly not user privacy. When it comes to the Kickstarter union or Wayfair stopping sales to the CBP, the accommodation dries up fast.
That doesn't mean the activism is insincere, or even about not making waves: there's also a powerful selection effect invovled. If you're passionate about the environment, you probably don't take a job at Shell, or you quit in protest. But if you're passionate about LGBT issues, there's much more reason to be optimistic about workplace activism, and it's mcuh easier to reconcile keeping your job while you do it.
So what's up with Google? They used to do one thing in one way, then branched out rapidly, so they have lots of employees who bypassed the normal selection effects. And now they do everything, so every issue is simultaneously non-central to Alphabet as a whole and a direct challenge to some component of it. We haven't heard much about Google employees protesting search ranking algorithms or advocating for GDPR, because that's been selected against from the beginning. But AI, military work, internal transparency, and even corporate hierarchy are comparatively new issues for Google. The people who object aren't gone yet, and nobody can tell what's fundamental and what's safe to challenge.
Nurturing a work culture of employees who care and are passionate has always been a goal for many companies.