Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Rule #1: Never talk to the police without your lawyer being present
Rule #2: Don't create a paper trail that is going to make you look bad when it gets subpoenaed
I personally think that Google needs to be broken up into 10 different companies. And I would love to live in a world where companies face antitrust enforcement because of concrete actions. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a carelessly worded email is going to cause you more legal troubles than actual anti-competitive behavior.
Similarly, why the heck would Google want to have employees discuss controversial topics like politics and religion as well? Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.
You can think of it as tantamount to one's network, and the amount of influence within that network. Basically, "it's not what you know, it's who you know".
Source- lived in Shanghai for 5+ years.
when you bribe a teacher for a better grade, you aren't utilizing a relationship to induce a change in outcome, you are utilizing money, money that holds value independent of who is providing the bribe.
edit:i am making the assumption that parent read at least the wiki blurb of what the parent is replying to.
Unfortunately, most of the people who complain about this stuff don't actually care enough to vote against it, and they become part of the problem themselves.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
See Bloomberg, Hilary (outspent Trump 2:1). Many other examples of well-funded politicians failing.
Note that money also buys a lot of analysis, message testing, etc. to figure out which version of your word people like best.
> See Bloomberg, Hilary (outspent Trump 2:1). Many other examples of well-funded politicians failing.
Sure, having deeper pockets doesn't guarantee you'll win (particularly if you're a dark horse), but it is the way to bet.
It sounds like you're arguing that democracy is better if the politicians don't know what the people want?
Ironically enough I believe that the current democracy we live in is effectively quite close to the original democracy, as it manifested in the city-state of Athens and wider ancient Greece. Only 3% of the total population had a vote: namely those with family titles or enough wealth.[ß]
These days we'd call it plutocracy or oligarchy.
ß: It doesn't really matter what the general population does with their votes when less than 3% get to choose what options are on the ballot in the first place.
Ask yourself: who were responsible for putting him on the ballot in the first place? And why? Because from looking where I am (read: not in the US), the correct choice in 2016 elections would have been "neither". But that's not a choice available - choosing not to vote is entirely different from voting "none of the above".
I think money is still a problem in politics, but I think the model that money is the driving contributor is too simple.
As an aside, “neither” is an option in the U.S. but too many people have been convinced a third party vote is equivalent to throwing their vote away and thus it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy
> As an aside, “neither” is an option in the U.S. but too many people have been convinced a third party vote is equivalent to throwing their vote away
You missed my point. The option I'm talking about is not "neither". It's "none of the above". You need a way to actively express that you, as a voter, have considered the available named options and rejected all of them. Not by wasting a protest vote or abstaining to vote in the first place.
I don't believe I'm saying this, but I honestly think an Australian-style mandatory voting regime would do well in the US. At least that would force the states' hands and make voter suppression a hell of a lot harder to attempt. Combine that with ballots that always have "none of the above" option, and you might start to see something shift.
What would you think happens to legitimacy if "all options were bad" gets a larger share of votes than your supposedly winning candidate?
Thanks for clarifying on the "neither" issue. I would be an advocate of a "none of the above" vote option. In my mind, it does much as the same as if people voted third party. I wasn't equivocating a third party vote to a protest vote. At a certain point, when the percentage of third party votes reaches a certain tipping point those who feel like it's a wasted vote may be convinced it's a viable option. But I also think there are other (possibly more pragmatic) voting schemes like ranked voting that are being implemented at lower levels in the country.
I would be strongly against mandatory voting and I think it could make the system even worse. I think it's important to recognize that you also have the right not to vote just like you have the right not to own a firearm, have the right not to speak up even though you have the freedom of speech etc. A "right" is not equivalent to an "obligation". I think there's issues with uninformed votes as it is and this could be exacerbated by mandatory voting. Sometimes the appropriate choice is to refrain from voting rather than casting an uninformed vote.
Forcing people to vote is a seriously bad idea. They have no reason to vote responsibly, and likely will vote maliciously, carelessly, or randomly.
Having the right to vote includes the right to choose not to vote.
> It sounds like you're arguing that democracy is better if the politicians don't know what the people want?
I have no particular objection to politicians knowing what people want. But that wasn't how I think the money is being spent.
Rather, the use I was pointing out is centered on figuring out what people want to hear.
So, less "what positions would the voters prefer we take" and more "How can we package the policies our donors prefer such that voters choose us over the opposition". Spin, in other words.
We don't have to use our imagination. This sort of experiment is being run in multiple countries around the globe.
It has stated policy goals that are basically about creating an environment that's good for the firm's business and then gives a 50:50 split between the two major parties for federal campaigns.
I just can't get too excited about this being a bad thing.
"During the original oral argument, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart (representing the FEC) argued that under Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the government would have the power to ban books if those books contained even one sentence expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate and were published or distributed by a corporation or labor union. In response to this line of questioning, Stewart further argued that under Austin the government could ban the digital distribution of political books over the Amazon Kindle or prevent a union from hiring an author to write a political book."
Isn't that an insane conjecture? This exchange by itself probably lost the FEC the case.
>Imagine a world where there was no money in politics.
Such a world never existed, does not exist, and will never exist. Politics are a center of power. You can ban money all you want, but all you'll accomplish is create a 'black market'. I posit that you do not want to live in such a world.
The same is true of many areas of society. Medical doctors, company executives, the police, etc. all have power and there's good money involved. Still we have laws against fraud, insider trading, bribery, abuse of power, and so forth. While there are transgressions, by and large things seem to work, and when we find new kinds of transgressions, the reaction is not to throw our hands up and say "it'll always be like this!" but to fix the laws.
Which is to say: I don't get the defeatism about regulation here. Laws work. Making actions illegal and threatening a hefty prison term is an effective way of reducing their occurrence.
Now it may be hard to get such laws passed, but that's another story.
I'm not sure why anyone donates to it, though. Why not support your own causes?
All industries learn over time that it's an arms race and without spending the money they'll be in a vulnerable position.
The real fix is to elect those who would regulate or get rid of money in politics and punish those to take these lobby money. That's what people should focus on not how much the tech industry needs to spend on buying politicians like most other industries have done before.
Talking about politics provides no liability to Google.
That, or other language about "crushing" competition isn't going to play well when an antitrust investigation reveals it.
Yes it is. Just because you set up a false choice of "you're with me or against me" doesn't mean the rest of us have to play your game. Yes there is such a thing as leaving politics out of the workplace.
>Talking about politics provides no liability to Google.
I don't know about that. Nevertheless, it also creates a toxic environment, because there are a lot of contentious cultural and political issues that elicit emotional reactions and the vast majority of people will have a a wide variety of nuanced opinions on those, so all you're doing is introducing strife and toxicity with no benefit to the business.
Oh, that’s good to know.
So the workplaces are going to stop contributing to political parties and lobbyists, then? I can expect that any day now? That’s good to know, thanks!
Or did you perhaps mean that it’s only the workers that ought to be “neutral” and silent in their politics? Yes, that seems more likely to be what you meant.
So it is different, despite your snarky comment. A company lobbying doesn't affect your 40, 50 hr work week.
In the scenario you describe, how would you be aware of their racism if they didn't discuss it at work?
Well, I suppose if there were no minority employees in that workplace, it would be kind of hard to tell, but otherwise, it often isn't that hard. And if you are in the minority, you almost certainly can tell since, in a thousand tiny subtle ways, you're constantly being told you don't belong.
Anyone who thinks racism is only apparent when it is being spoken is plain wrong.
Aren't you worried you could be wrong if that's the standard, or someone could use that standard against you and be wrong?
We're banning that from the workplace now? Land of the free!
And, presumably, if the company is making political contributions to help it accomplish its goals, I'd imagine workers could discuss that and make suggestions inside work. But when you're just discussing your personal politics, you can do it elsewhere.
As presumed-CEO and leader, he needs to have the confidence of his organization, and also the ability to address controversial difficult topics. He failed on that.
He finally did the right thing by stepping down. He would have always carried the weight of the mismanagement of the response to the employee-criticism, and that is what killed him ultimately.
A CEO position isn't a reward, it's a service position, and I believe that no one is entitled to it. (Ditto many forms of leadership) So to complain about how unfair it was to him, perhaps we should think about how unfair it was to the employees of the organization who had to deal with situation instead.
As CEO your job is (a) leadership and (b) communications. He failed at both, badly. Perhaps he should have reached out to internal resources more (HR, PR, crisis PR, etc), but these are things I expect a CEO to figure out.
I'm not teaching a new hire coder what a computer is. Nor am I teaching a CEO about PR and communications!
Literally all he did was monetarily support a cause ($3,100) in private. He was not out there making statements or instituting changes to the company.
What does that have to do with "leadership and communications"?
I certainly don't align with his political position but respect people's right to hold one without fear or favour.
It has to be one of the most egregious acts of employee activism. And look where it got Mozilla now, the politically palatable replacement has driven it into the ground while it's only held afloat with money from Google.
Political donations are not private. They're a matter of public record (a point Eich himself has agreed with in interviews).
No, because workers are free to be non-neutral outside the workplace. Workplaces don't contribute to political parties, an environment isn't a donor. And that's the point: the workplace environment should be neutral.
Do you think the workplace environment of Uber is neutral on prop 22?
Work is highly political and I don't think anybody has ever pretended otherwise.
I mean, hell, political campaigns themselves are workplaces too. ;)
Google is picking a decent and fair path by allowing anything except anti-trust. Honestly, go to Google where you can be authentic and human about things.
With respect, I think James Damore (may have) found that he couldn't be authentic at Google.
Once it became clear that what he said could be interpreted as creating a hostile work environment, the company's hands were basically tied on having to let him go. The alternative would have been much worse for the bottom line. And the subsequent lawsuits and dismissals have made it basically clear that he had no legal leg to stand on.
I have no idea what the answer is, and wouldn’t want my employees engaged in such a discussion as it could potentially come back as a lawsuit.
In that same context, I wouldn’t want James Damore writing his memo. Equally, the reason he was writing his memo was possibly because there were other conversations happening around race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. If those conversations were encouraging the advancement of the disadvantaged members of one of those classes, you could argue that is a violation of Title VII.
Would the worker be happy if their boss tells them how to speak, what to speak, and what they can't speak about?
Honestly, Googlers work very hard. This isn't as big of an issue as people are making it out to be.
How do you want foster freedom and lessen control/restrictions? Seriously.
The idea that we should limit speech...is a very dangerous path to even think about. All thoughtful points are moot compared to how those policies can be abused and destroy an entire civilization. Nazi Germany wasn't too long ago. China restricted a doctor's speech about sounding the alarm on Covid19 (so it's more recent too).
If society (a collection of individuals) continue to think that it's "okay" to restrict someone's opinions (for any justification), they make society weaker. Truth wins out. Not authoritarianism.
But...back to my main point of responding to you. Googler (and other tech companies) aren't a DC think tank. They're building and shipping things. They work hard. And those that are highly skilled, want the autonomy in work. If you restrict that autonomy, you restrict your talent pool of workers. Maybe you think that's a good choice (Coinbase would agree) but...in the long-term, IMHO, freedom is more powerful than control.
I think that's a great philosophy for structuring a democratic republic form of government, but trying to apply that philosophy universally to all circumstances and all human interaction leaves it a giant untested hypothesis.
It would be nice if truth always won out. That would be cool. Insufficient data to say for sure that it does.
Consider this quote from a recent NY Times article[1]
"These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans: that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way. At the very least, we should understand that it isn’t the only way. Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html
Yes but with enough people whom build tools that amplify signal. Then the people will learn. I'm hopeful we'll shorten this delay as we age.
Indeed, people in this forum often seem to call attempts to discern signal from noise "censorship."
Edit: turns out I didn't have to wait long for a concrete example of that to come up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782944
If Googlers feel that strong about inequality, why not give away your fortune to social causes?
He made it quite plain that he thought he'd done nothing wrong. At that point, Google is either retaining one employee or facing a class action lawsuit risk. And he wasn't nearly 10x enough to justify retaining him. ;)
He also probably could have avoided being fired if he apologized and clarified that he did not realize that his musings on the subject could create a hostile work environment. He instead chose to double down that he'd done nothing wrong.
Workplaces like Google are inherently political because they manage vast amounts of data and their actions have implications on millions—even billions of people. Ignoring this is just complacency.
Why should you only do activism outside of work? If we actually want to change institutions for the better, it helps quite a bit if the people running the institutions are also trying to change thing too. If you don’t want to get involved for whatever reason, that’s fine but I think it’s unfair to say no one should
Disclaimer: I work for GOOG opinions are my own
Political changes aren't objectively "for the better". If that was true, they wouldn't be political decisions, but business decisions. The whole reason they're political is that we can't determine if they're good or bad scientifically so we resort to distributed opinion instead.
The people who are complicit to violence perpetrated by the company they work for are inherently making the same decision as those who are activists. Either way you end up with a programmerocracy, so why not try to reduce harm on others then? Maybe what you advocate for isn’t perfect, but if you can’t avoid politics in your workplace, why don’t you fight for what you believe in?
> Political changes aren't objectively "for the better". If that was true, they wouldn't be political decisions, but business decisions.
Very few things are objective. Some would argue that nothing is objective. This is not a reason not to act.
> we resort to distributed opinion instead
This is not true. I think it is safe to say that political decisions in our global society are overwhelming made by a very small group of highly elite individuals.
The search engine wouldn't have had a special rainbow stripe at the top for certain search terms if the company wasn't deeply political on the subject.
Equal pay regardless of gender is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow women and nonbinary folks from advocating at work for equal pay?
Equal opportunity for people of color is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow people of color from advocating at work for equal opportunity?
Accommodation for disability is a political question. Paid time off for pregnancy is a political question. What rights we grant to older employees is a political question. Whether LGBTQ folks can be fired for being out is a political question.
The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me. From my perspective, things at my workplace seem quite "neutral". But when I get to know people who are at all different, I find that the workplace is not at all neutral towards them.
If LGBTQ benefits are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to talk about same-sex marriage? Is it acceptable to advocate for pro-LGBTQ policies more broadly? If not, why not? It's all part of the same thing, no?
If H-1B visas are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to advocate that our company should support the removal of a politician who is anti-immigrant? Again, it's all part of the same thing, no?
When I start thinking about it, a lot of these workplace issues are connected to broader issues...
Valuable employees leaving due to company misses on important social issues is itself a very powerful form of advocacy.
Wouldn't they be better off in a workplace where they could, you know, ask for the things that they think would make them better off?
But...by assumption, the majority disagrees with them? I don't get it.
I mean, just hypothetically, suppose some group was discriminated against at work. Women, Black folks, LGBTQ folks, folks with disabilities, whatever. This discrimination is "political", in that Serious Politicians disagree about whether it's right. I hope you don't think this is a stretch. You're saying that in a world where they couldn't advocate for themselves by talking about the issues they face, they'd be better off?
If this is about what's best for them, why not let them choose? Do we have to be the gatekeepers of what's good for them or not?
You appear to be moving the goalpost here. Or perhaps I was my fault for not being clear. My policy was referring specifically to discussing politics within the workplace.
As for your question, everyone is of course allowed to ask for more pay. This is not what I'd call politics, but simply salary negotiation. If you're suggesting something different. Then yes, you generally aren't going to help yourself within an organization by calling your boss a sexist who needs to promise to stop being a sexist. Or whatever it is you're specifically proposing.
Sorry, I think I was unclear. I meant, discussing inside the workplace issues that are relevant to their lives inside and outside work.
> As for your question, everyone is of course allowed to ask for more pay. This is not what I'd call politics, but simply salary negotiation.
OK. Let's take it a few steps further?
Are women allowed to say, "you know, women are paid less than men for most jobs in this country, let's advocate that this not be the case at our company?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, our company shouldn't be supporting X politician, because they're not in favor of equal pay for equal work?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, just as our company advocates for laws and regulations that we think are beneficial to our core technical business (software or whatever), we should also advocate for laws and regulations that are good for our people, like paid maternity leave."
And, just step back: Does it give you any pause that we're having a conversation about what what women are allowed to say?
I have been exposed to hysterical propaganda about the mythical pay gap but never seen in real life and speaking about it with my peer managers neither have they.
This emperor has no clothes.
We were talking about whether it's appropriate to discuss one's opinion on the pay gap -- among other things -- at work, despite its being political. Seems like you're saying it is appropriate? Like, if a woman who reported to you came to you asking for more money to reach parity with a male colleague, I guess you'd say, "I am a hiring manager etc etc and the emperor has no clothes, here's why you make less"? If you think that's OK, then we're in agreement on this point that this is an acceptable topic for work.
As someone who has managed people myself, I think it would be highly relevant to my business function to know where my fellow managers stand on this issue.
Casually surveying people's opinions on breaking the law and potentially leaving an incriminating paper trail that could harm the company seems similar the antitrust topic in the article.
I'd say discussions of any illegal activity on the company's behalf should be directed toward HR / legal.
What I'm against is creating a corporate culture that openly biases for or against certain political parties, religious or secular beliefs, or contentious policy or culture issues (like abortion). Keep those things out of the workplace, because those topics elicit emotional responses, and you want to maintain a neutral professional environment.
>The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me.
I'm glad you had a comfortable life. Don't throw your personal experience on the rest of us. You being 'youngish cishet white man" says nothing about the experience of others with those same immutable characteristics.
The rare exceptions usually result from collision with legal constraints on that policy, such as conversations that can get the company in legal trouble. Because whether or not Google as a company wants everything open for debate, US employment law makes it fairly clear that there are some things you're not allowed to say---for financial securities reasons, hostile workplace reasons, and lawsuit vulnerability reasons.
By that reasoning, why have any policies at all - after all 'mature adults' should know how to handle themselves.
The reality is that even (and especially) with mature adults, it's perfectly reasonable to set policies and rules on conduct. Making it clear to not engage in emotionally-charged 'debates' about contentious topics is perfectly inline with good corporate governance. Your coworker next desk over may have wildly different views on abortion, politics, religion, but none of that should matter in getting the job done you're paid for. Ideally you shouldn't even know, or care what their personal views are on societal issues.
Having political discussions about things such as whether the utility of trans people being able to communicate broadcast-wise to all people interested in trans issues versus the utility of school systems regulating what students that have been entrusted to their care can see unsupervised is part of the job, when you work in YouTube and are designing the system for flagging content as objectionable or non-monetizable.
On top of that, Google believes there's a point of philosophy that good ideas can come from anywhere, so they encourage engineers passionate about a topic to use proper channels to weigh in on sensitive subjects. User of proper channels is key, which is why there are trainings.
>so they encourage engineers passionate about a topic to use proper channels to weigh in on sensitive subjects
Sure they do. I'm sure they are perfectly OK with engineers being passionate about Trump, pro-life, religion... Yeah..
It's clear as day that pretty much everyone in this thread has a blind-spot because they just so happen to agree with the culture of a San Francisco company pushing progressive values. If you moved to rural Alabama and now you were inundated with conservative values and politics to the point where you were worried about your job if you did not consent, for example, signing your name on some conservative petition, I bet you would see the value of keeping the workplace neutral.
I've seen this first hand. There is a Director at my workplace that goes on pro-choice rants all the time. Her assistant confident to me that she's actually pro-life but feels like she has to agree publicly (and like her Facebook rants) because she needs her job. How is that good? What's the point of engaging in a pro-choice vs pro-life debate at work when you're trying to build a widget.
They aren't not okay with it. You will, of course, run the risk that your fellow engineers will think you're an idiot, especially if you fail to back up your position with evidence and consider other people's positions on the topic. But refraining from actively discouraging such conversation is part of the whole "bring your whole self to work" culture at Google.
I do believe they have cooled somewhat on the topic however, after they encountered both a wave of leaks of internal company correspondence and the Damore fiasco, which was bad press for them whether or not they were in the right to terminate him.
Political neutrality is a cultural attribute diametrically opposed to "change the world" narratives and "eat your meals at the office" work-life balances. A lot of company cultures are politically neutral. Google isn't.
That said, a company controlling what their employees say in public about matters of strategic commercial importance doesn't strike me as politically pointed. It's a business acting like a business.
Political neutrality doesn't exist. “Do not discuss politics” is a defense of the status quo.
Yes there is such a thing as 'political neutrality'. Every time you contract a plumber, you engage in 'political neutrality', because neither your nor the plumber interrogate yourselves on your political affiliations. You want your plumbing fixed for a fair price, and the plumber wants to get paid for a job well done and get back home in time for dinner.
Just because you set up a false choice of "you're either with me or against me", doesn't mean the rest of us will play your little game.
But if the plumber tells you that his boss is a capitalist pig, you can either report him to his boss, or not. Neither is neutral.
No. When you go to MacDonald's to get a Happy Meal, what politics do you engage in? When you contract a plumber, do you interrogate him on his political affiliation?
Don't twist language.
> When you go to MacDonald's to get a Happy Meal, what politics do you engage in?
You’re McDonalds experience is the direct result of political decisions, from the smoothness of your drive due to decisions on infrastructure maintenance, to the amount of traffic due to the political decisions decades earlier about city planning and public transit, to the cost of the meal due to trade agreements, labor laws, wage laws, corporate tax code, etc. to your risk of getting sick due to safety regulations, to the materials used in the happy meal box and toy due to environmental laws, recycled material subsidies (or lack of them), to child safety laws, to tort law and the likelihood and success rate of civil suits.
> When you contract a plumber, do you interrogate him on his political affiliation?
No, but the cost and availability of plumbers is a result of politics. From laws and regulations on trades jobs, to labor laws and the likelihood of the plumber being in a union, to government investment into tradecrafts jobs training programs, to the laws governing required certifications (if any) and the associated cost of obtaining those, what the laws are governing landlord/tenant responsibilities if you rent or are a landlord, and on and on.
The way your life plays out day to day, and in totality, is fundamentally shaped at every level by “politics”, the laws written, and the way in which they are enforced (or not).
How about we commonly understood concepts to convey ideas? How does that sound to you?
Yeah, that’s not how it works. Just because you choose to not think about political decisions that shaped your plumber selections, McDonalds trip, or the city ordinance that bans or allows your breed of dog you are walking doesn’t mean they cease to exist. The world doesn’t disappear just because you close your eyes.
What you are really saying is those politics don’t matter to you, so in your mind they don’t exist. Well, they do exist to others. The labor laws and minimum wage laws enacted by a politician or vote are important to those burger flippers. The dismantling of union protections matter to that plumber and effect how much he is able to charge. Your lack of interest, or your lack of knowledge, of how politics shaped those situations does not separate those politics from the situations or make the politics not there. Nor does me speaking about those things bring about the politics, as I am merely highlighting something that was always there. I am not making it political, it always was. I am bringing it to your awareness.
Let’s look at a more extreme example to hopefully illustrate the point. Say you live in the American south during the 60s. You just want to go get a burger and fries. How could that be political? It’s just a succulent meal after all. Well you are not choosing to eat at a “whites only” restaurant. While you might not care, might not think anything about it, and might have not had a political thought in your head, that doesn’t magically separate the action from the underlying politics that shaped the way it happened and the fact that that action is political and is important to some other people. But if someone says you should be supporting Jim Crow laws by only shopping at whites only establishments, to you they are the ones making it political when in reality, it is already intrinsically political and they are merely highlighting the political aspect that always existed.
No it’s not. The lawyer works for the lawyer’s client, employers don’t work for their employees. Opposite.
There is another view, and another analogy.
A monopoly that closes ads accounts without any explanation (pointing to their 'terms of use' is not an explanation)
A monopoly that removes apps without any explanation
A monopoly that swallows competition, their patents to further suffocate market space
Is just evil.
Small businesses hurt, consumers manipulated and fair competition practices are poisoned.
So an analogy would be a private contractor for state prison system, is threatening their employees not to talk in public about their practices. While being investigated for corruption, unfair usage of federal and state empowerment, and unfair treatment of the prisoners.
I think this would be ok as far as legal practice, but hardly something one would applaud to, given the context.
I have worked for a company acquired by a Private Equity that was universally hated by managers and employees alike. They didn’t even want to hear problems internally in quiet. It still wasn’t appropriate to trash them or talk to the media while you were an employee.
If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.
> If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.
I'm curious, how did the PE situation you described work out? Did enough people leave to make change happen?
They appear to be mutually incompatible.
And at all companies, the standard line is, "never send in e-mail anything that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times, or might cause you to be deposed as a witness in a courtroom." And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.
All of this is not unique to Google, but applies to any company with half-way competent lawyers and a half-way competent HR department.
It's also a political stance that aligns with said company's political disposition and (more importantly) chosen market segmentation.
Finally, this company (desperately wants to believe that it) stands to increase its profitability if it strikes back against the forces that have lowered that profitability.
I would. If I spoke up about something dangerous to management, and they ignore the problem in a way that allowed someone to die because of it, I abso-fucking-lutely do not want to be their scapegoat. Leaving a paper trail is an important security measure here (and good ethics).
You don't see the fucking problem with this policy?
Ultimately, I guess the solution here is that this "training" ought to be considered as damning as the kind of speech that it tries to forbid.
This is like trying to get out of a drunk driving ticket by smoking weed and wearing a blindfold.
The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.
But on engineering matters, it does seem problematic to put legal before technical. Instead of people using the medium they would otherwise use to communicate something they are concerned about, they are supposed to stop, think about the company's image, and instead remember to bring it up in person tomorrow? Don't dare email a guy you know on the other production line to see if he's noticed the same pattern? This does seem like a nudge toward sweeping problems under the rug.
ETA by the way, the training does not discourage people from making statements of fact in discoverable docs, it discourages people from drawing conclusions of law. If you emailed Bob down on the production line to mention that you had 42 failed gFrobs on Tuesday, and asked Bob how many he had, that's not discouraged. If you were to instead mail Bob and said "Those Panamanian safety regulators are gonna be pissed, LOL!" that is discouraged.
In essence, that's all the training says regarding this topic.
And, both your setups imagine the main course being a verbal meeting tomorrow, no notes, only memories. Sometimes this is a great way to hash out problems. Sometimes it's not. Maybe the underling is scared that his words will be twisted by Cheryl on the way to big boss Bob, and would prefer to write it down to cover his ass... and if he can't, maybe he convinces himself it's not a big deal, and doesn't tell Cheryl at all.
There are two kinds of companies: Companies that advise their employees to watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued before. Most large companies are in the latter group.
In tech, it's much more obvious - unless you're working on hardware, the odds of your code directly posing a threat to life is rather low. The odds that some passionate employees may start a discussion on a large email group discussing ongoing legal action against your company that's been in the news, and that they will say something misinformed that will get quoted out of context, is incredibly high.
Never say anything in an email that you wouldn't want presented out of context in a courtroom. And unless you want all of your emails to be legally mandated to be retained for a few years, I'd avoid talking about anything relevant to ongoing or potential lawsuits over discoverable mediums.
Yes I see how this has come about. I'm trying to say that it's not a very healthy place for our society to have ended up.
And I'm explicitly not talking about discussing ongoing legal action, or speculating about politics. I'm talking about technical matters, and communication bandwidth between people close to the coalface who may notice some pattern, and people higher up from whom this might be hidden, if the incentives are wrong.
Sometimes talking to people in person is the best from all perspectives, sure. But illiterate societies never built jet airliners.
You do care, right?
So uh, don't talk about potential engineering problems that might kill you, and after the first response pushing back, you characterize the people highlighting these issues as a "bunch of nerds."
Honestly, no clue why people could possibly have a problem with corporate America, seems pretty healthy and non-toxic to me.
Your duties are to:
1. Society at large
2. Your users
3. Yourself
4. Your company
In that order.
> you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing.
Or the company could, y'know, keep its shit together and steer clear of stuff that people raise congressional hearings about, rather than just trying to sweep it under the rug.
I'm sorry but is this not exactly what is being said? To steer clear of instructing other employees to perform anti-competitive behavior? I think you may be misinterpreting the parent post.
Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.
But in this context, from the perspective of society as a whole trying to decide what the law should be, the personal opinion of Google employees does matter, regardless of what's presently legal.
This is ultimately an ethical question, not a legal one.
But I guess if you come in with the mindset of "might makes right" then you won't see the distinction.
> Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---
Surely the equivalent would be lawyers weighing in on the spec of what the "privacy coding" should do. Which is very much something that they ought to do?
> people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.
This whole discussion is a perfect example of why this silo mentality is fucking toxic. You don't need to be a chef to point out that the food is rancid.
No, and that's exactly the kind of categorical error that software engineers make and Google seeks to avoid. Merely speculating on the topic in writing can be used against Google in a court of law.
Google encourages the software engineers to point out the food is rancid. Via the proper channels, so they don't accidentally put something somewhere that leads to a New York Times headline that says "FAMOUS FOOD TASTER SAYS FOOD IS RANCID---SHOULD RESTAURANT BE SHUT DOWN?" The training is about how to have the desired effect without the undesired effect.
The training this story is about is how the company keeps its shit together. They remind employees that doing things correctly, safely, and within the law is a shared responsibility.
Not only did I have to certify that I received this kind of training every year at every large corporation that I've worked at (and yes, this includes Google), this was also covered in my MIT Sloan School class, "Legal issues for I/T Managers" that I took as continuing education when I worked in MIT Network Operations and served as Tech Lead for Kerberos V5 development.
I'm really surprised at the comments in Hacker News on this article. Doesn't everyone get this fundamental, basic legal training? IMHO every single practicing engineer should!
There's a big difference between "You should immediately tell your manager and legal" and "You should not tell anyone in the company other than that, state the facts plainly in clear terms, or leave a paper trail"
The former is your ethical obligation to keep people alive - but the latter is mandating employees to always participate in cover-ups, which is obviously unethical.
It's not my responsibility to help cover the company's ass if my they take a shortcut that gets people killed or help them avoid legal consequences for illegal or boundary-pushing behavior. My highest loyalty is not to their shareholders, and paying me a salary doesn't change that.
The company is covering their own ass and part of that is telling their employees that it's important not to leak stuff.
Beats going to court and then to prison because you made a convenient scapegoat.
Average employees aren't in a position to speak accurately about antitrust matters anyway. If they misspeak, it will certainly be used against the company regardless of the actual merit.
No it would NOT. It is absolutely noteworthy if they do such a nefarious, un-american thing.
Banning speaking on behalf of their employer. Sure. Go nuts.
Banning speaking as a private citizen because you have an opinion you wish to express in public as a private citizen representing the opinions of yourself?!?
FFS!
Are you actually serious about that???
You can't push back against that hard enough. Surely? Freedom, opposition to totalitarianism. The right to speak your mind. Even if Google doesn't like your opinion and your opinion is objective wrong, to hell with them. Freedom.
I don't like that any more than you do. Corporations have far too much power in the US, and way more control over the lives of ordinary citizens than they should. But, there's nothing against the rules here. And, that's the way big corporations like it.
Note that Google employees are still free to donate money or otherwise assist organizations calling for Google to be broken up. While Google may not like this, it's highly unlikely they'll ever find out about it.
A distinction without a difference, the intended effect is still the same: discouraging people from speaking out.
> I don't like that any more than you do. Corporations have far too much power in the US, and way more control over the lives of ordinary citizens than they should. But, there's nothing against the rules here.
Then surely the focus should be on changing the rules and pushing back what little we can, not making excuses about how it is technically not illegal.
What Google frowns upon, and will terminate an employee legally for, is speculation outside of that legally-protected space. So going to the SEC with evidence Google is acting bad? Legally protected. Circulating in an email "hey, is thing X that team Y is doing monopolistic?" No, and you'll get canned for having that discussion in an unprivileged environment without legal counsel present.
if you donated or is affiliated with _any_ political cause, and google fired you for that reason, then they've committed illegal discrimination against you.
However, this political affiliation/activism needs to be conducted outside working hours, lest it be associated with google's official public stance or incur liabilities. You actions as an employee could be misrepresented as the position of google, and they are well within their rights to restrict how you represent yourself during office hours, and they should also be allowed to prevent you from mis-representing yourself too (i.e., you cannot use your position as an employee to act as an agent of political activism or affiliation unless authorized by the owners of google).
I believe that's only the case in California and a handful of other states.
For instance: "Can an employer fire or discriminate against an employee based on political beliefs? You may be surprised to learn that, for many employees, the answer is yes." [0]
---
[0]: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Well, TBH, "banning employees from using certain everyday terms because they have specific legal usages and the company can be sued for $$$ if the words were taken out of context" is one of the most American things I can think of.
The whole thing has been taken out of context here. It’s basically just “here’s how you avoid saying anything that can be taken out of context and used against us”.
Hmmm...
After Google interviewed a candidate for an executive job
last year, that person sent a follow-up email to Sundar
Pichai ... the candidate asked about the antitrust implications
of a potential merger.
An antitrust question to Mr. Pichai was seen as inappropriate,
raising questions about the candidate’s judgment.
Hopefully the candidate chose a better place.
Poor executive judgement in an organization that has something to hide.
Regular citizens definitely do know lots about that and represent a voice we need to hear. We should not at all be silent and leave that solely to attorneys or Congress - that’s what gets us into the problem where the laws are selectively enforced in exchange for political favoritism and regulatory capture.
The real problem though is that most people don't have this deep understanding, and what's worse, don't realize that they are really clueless. This is especially true with software engineers, who think they can understand everything. (About the only more arrogrant people are physicists at certain national labs who are sure they can design cluster file systems, since after all, it all resolves down to F=ma, and they know physics. :-)
The problem is that law and regulations make the x86 instruction architecture look regular, orthogonal, and logical. And having software engineers trying to draw legal conclusions --- applying the facts to the rules as they current stand --- is about as scary having lawyers designing a storage stack. (There are of course exceptions; I know of some lawyers who started out in computer science, and then went to law school, and there are also some computer programmers who have learned enough about law to understand how little they actually know, but at least know when to call in the specialists.)
But sure, we should know lots about public policy issues, and dive down deep enough so that each of us can understand the tradeoffs --- and in general, there are always tradeoffs to pretty much any public policy preference. Trying to make assertions without paying any attention to nuance will get you something like a certain US politician currently up for re-election. (And to be fair, the reason why the law has so many exceptions and irregularities is due to trying to work around the downsides of the obvious simple rules.)
It's funny how the people who adamantly oppose any restrictions on "freedom" don't realize "freedom" cuts both ways - if you have the unlimited freedom to do what you want then other people also have the unlimited freedom to punish you if they don't like what you are doing.
And Google is free to fire them for doing so.
'Tis quite American sounding, to me.
It will be reported as "google employee says <>". It _will_ be taken as a statement that is believed by "google employees".
Don't be evil. Unless it affects our bottom line. Think Different. Unless you're a monopoly, then think the same as every other monopoly has. Move fast and break things. Their things, not our things.
Cut the shit "Make us money" is the corporate manifesto.
Tesla wants to make money just like Enron, but their strategies are quite different.
The first software startup I worked for absolutely did not have all of its software licenses arranged properly. Seats were passed around, and unlicensed cracked software was used to create public facing product.
Officially? None of this was recorded. Unofficially, the stance was quite clear: worrying about licensing is something companies that have more to lose than two sticks and a rock can afford to do.
Companies have people who will want profit before all else, and they will have people who truly want to value certain user values. The interaction between people is far too difficult to model as a consumer, so it's better to consider the business model, or, more weakly, how a decision affects social capital, thereby affecting this model. This helps create "trustless" scenarios, in which the "morals v profit" quandary is meaningless because both align to some degree.
For example, take Apple and Google. Google profits heavily from adverts, so it is not only sensible but natural that Apple, as a strong rival in the OS field who have no business incentive to do so, should lean heavily into this, exploiting and actualising this gap in business-model-incentive. Likewise, Apple profits heavily from phone hardware: it is sensible and natural that Google, who somewhat rival Apple in this field, should desire somewhat to try and present their phones as being less overpriced.
This is far harder glean information from, of course, and PR can be as genuine as it can be deceiving. But it's a useful tool in a savvy consumer's arsenal, methinks, especially for large decisions or with companies whose practises and profits are well-known (as opposed to, say, a brand of toothpaste).
If Google's competitors didn't have a Justice Department that blatantly serves their own interests of investigating Google, then Google would have no incentive to keep their employees from discussing anti-trust law.
Government cronyism is why corporations can't simply let us have nice things.
This kind of training is not unique to Google, either. I got very similarly themed training at Eaton (a manufacturing conglomerate). In both cases, I was left with the impression that the employer had been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication in some lawsuit.
Here's the trick: In the event a lawsuit goes to discovery, who decides what's in scope to enter evidence?
Hint: it's not the corporation. Nor is it the employee who made the (in context, at the time) innocuous statement that used the wrong keywords in a way that can be taken out of context.
Indirectly, to protect the individual employee, because if a lawsuit going south harms the business prospects, the company might have to downsize, cut benefits, cut bonuses, &c.
I left this part out of my other post because I was a little fuzzier on the details of what they said, but this was the gist.
Edit: clarity
The snapshot feature is even sold as part of ~~G Suite~~ Google Workspace under the Vault product.
As `shadowgovt` pointed out: Its a judge and the lawyers who get to decide what does and doesn't get covered by the process.
So policies like "require annual, mandatory training for anti-harassment training", and "how to communicate with care", etc., are going to be remarkably similar across companies.
I mean, look at all the recent BLM support from large corporations. I mean, on one hand I'm glad to see them doing this. On the other, I know the only reason they are doing this is because it's pretty easy for them - it's largely already supported by their employees and the bulk of their customers see it positively. I can guarantee if it could negatively affect their long term prospects they wouldn't have done it.
For example, I remember quite clearly that in the late 80s and early 90s you'd hear nary a peep of support on LGBT issues from corporations, and even some of the more progressive companies had to do it with coded language (language gays understood but straight people were oblivious to). It was only when gay rights were already largely supported did corporations jump on the bandwagon.
Again, I'm not saying this is totally a bad thing, but I do think it is a cheap, easy thing. And if you know a company is never willing to do the hard thing, why put any weight into its opinions on these topics in the first place?
Social movements that succeed tend to take this into account, and frame things in ways that are not zero-sum. I lose nothing by letting gays marry; my heterosexual marriage is still just as legitimate. I lose nothing by allowing abortions - as a male, I'm not going to get one anyway. I lose nothing when YC seeks out qualified minority & female applicants; I have plenty of advantages of my own, I don't need that extra attention. I lose nothing when Black Lives Matter - my life still matters too, we just need to fix the institutional systems that let a black person get shot dead with no repercussions to the killer. (Personally, I think the left has made some very large tactical errors recently by ignoring this principle - fights over things like affirmative action, political correctness, and white privilege are all because the debate has been framed as "You must lose something in order for life to be fair", which isn't a great way to persuade people.)
As for BLM anyone can see the riots, looting, arson, and destruction that has affected places like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha. The riots have cost over two billion dollars in damages. Those are not damages to the government. Those are damages to ordinary people and business owners. Housing values go down, police protection is eroded, and some people were beaten or lost their lives.
Minority votes are being suppressed, they make less money than their white counterparts, they have less access to higher education, less access to nutritious food, and they’re disproportionately dying during a pandemic.
But sure, let’s ignore reality and talk about your narrow view on housing prices and police “protection”.
[citation needed]
If you don’t see the issues there, you’re part of the problem.
Kenosha is right next to the state border; he lived close to Kenosha on the other side of that border. What does it matter that he crossed state lines?
> kills two people and injures a third
All of whom were violently attacking him (one of them with a gun), as can be seen from numerous videos of the incident.
> ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazis
[citation still needed]
> you’re part of the problem
I'm proud to be part of the problem if the opposite of "problematic" is to accept provocative claims without evidence.
Are Asians not in the minority anymore?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/29/the-a...
To pick a specific example, you're completely correct when you call out that a lot of companies only started visibly supporting LGBT causes quite recently, when the social momentum was obviously moving that direction, and there was a direct profit incentive to pridewashing things. I know many members of the LGBT community who are against corporate involvement in pride events for precisely that reason, and I know many LGBT people who find it very disingenuous that companies might be profiting off rainbow marketing while not (or only recently) having non-discrimination policies, or offering equal coverage for health insurance to their LGBT employees.
On the other hand, I would contend that the pride washing and corporate push into LGBT rights is a large reason why they haven't backslid as quickly during the last 4 years as they might otherwise have done, and why there's still broad public support for marriage equality even in the face of a possible reversal of Obgerfell after the inevitable SCOTUS appointment. The activists did the work, but a few years of corporate pridewashing, seeing rainbows on every t-shirt, cereal box, soda can, and brand of tennis shoe normalized things for a group of people who wouldn't have ever listened to the activists who are pushing on things. There's real social value in signaling "Supporting LGBT rights is the cheap, easy thing that we're obviously going to do because everyone agrees it's the right thing". It won't change the mind of the active bigot, but there are a whole lot of people who will just go along with the majority opinion on social issues, and corporate signaling is perhaps the defacto way to signal the majority opinion on social issues.
They're not effecting any change in this way. The change has already been done. They're just riding on its coat tails.
Yes it's "trendy", but there is REAL value in LGBTQ+ representation in media, goods, and more.
I suppose this does devalue the activism, but I'm not really sure activism is the point. It's more about solidarity with the change, and cementing its place in "normal" society.
Some of those rants remind me of "spontaneous" pro party demonstrations of children wearing red neck scarves in North Korea.
Worth noting, of course, is most Google employees actually believe in the party line. Like, it's not an act... They are at will employees working for an employer they believe in. Google doesn't tend to retain long employees who stop believing in the mission or the execution of the mission (because having Google on your resume opens a door to them basically taking any other job).
But some of the worst Twitter cases are from people who got into Google early and ostensibly adopted the party line in the last 8 years.
These would perhaps get any other job, but whether they could keep it is another story.
You mean gender representation. There was one incident.
Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.
If you are even slightly historically aware, US labor history is one of the most violent and adversarial in world history. We've had plenty of strikes in this country where the company literally murdered employees. Google itself has been convicted of suppressing engineering wages.
I honestly am so baffled that all these liberal "woke" people suddenly come to the defense of a company (who along with small oligarchy of peers) now own 90 percent of the internet. They think its fine that the company suppress internal and external free speech, especially on the most important items to them.
I find the whole thing just utterly baffling.
If you get paid in company stock it's entirely in your interest to agree to let your company take measures to not get sued for billions of dollars, especially if those measures have ~0 actual negative impact on you. So why would employees push back against a banal rule regarding antitrust speculation?
The reality is that Google, Facebook, and Apple make at least 2x what they spend on software engineers. Good software engineers are enormously valuable. They are making products used by billions of people.
Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house! This is the most lucrative sector of the economy (like Banking was before, and Chemicals was before that), and the best grads go there. Adjusted they are still making less than bankers did in the 80s.
We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down. That kind of thing would never happen in a fair economy. I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down, which may hurt Google stock, but would benefit the whole development community.
True, but Facebook was the one that busted the cartel by ignoring the anti-poaching agreement and hiring employees away anyway. Not the government! That seems to prove that the job market is at least competitive enough for cartels to be unsustainable in the long run.
> I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down
This is clearly contradicted by looking at the job market. The fact that the best paying companies are pseudo-monopolies like Apple and Google, or extremely well-funded startups/unicorns that aspire to pseudo-monopoly status by spending their way there with VC money, is evidence that tech monopolies are good, not bad for tech wages (at least if you're good enough to land a job at one of the monopolies).
If the companies were broken up they would make less money, and the reason why software engineers make so much money in the first place is that the pseudo-monopoly created by network effects allows for massive profits, at least some of which trickle down to the engineers. Software engineering is not in any sense harder than any other kind of engineering. The only reason why FAANG engineers make more money than electrical or civil engineers is their employers make way more money too.
The thing about monopolies is tech skills are portable across verticals. So if you have a monopoly on search, you can squeeze advertisers for money because there is no competition. But you can't squeeze your employees the same way, because they can jump ship to other non-search-engine tech companies and their skills will translate. So the monopoly power in the search space allows them to make a lot of money while the lack of monopoly power in the job market means they have to give some of those profits to their employees to stay competitive in hiring.
> Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house
You can definitely afford a home on a FAANG income (especially if your spouse also works). Let's say you make $300-$400k / year and your spouse makes another $100+k. You definitely have plenty of options within your budget.
Maybe you can't buy a large single family house in the middle of the city, but do you think the typical banker owned a McMansion with a yard in Manhattan? You can't bring your provincial suburban values with you if you want to live in a big city.
But, as far as the title is concerned, it seems common sense to prevent employees from talking about potentially very expensive legal issues, when every internal emails and chat logs can be potentially quote-mined by adversaries in future lawsuits.
(Disclaimer: worked at Google before.)
Now here’s something: if corporations like Google are worried about quote mining, what does this mean for your personal search history, and how you may face in a secret court for some “national security” charge in 2027?
This is a twist on the famous Upton Sinclair quote. Google has everything to gain by extending their "live at work" strategy to political conversations, until those political conversations affect them.
I don't know where the reporter gets the sense that they're "very particular." It's pretty common sense: "You are not a lawyer; don't speculate on points of law in discoverable media."
I said: "Can't we just get HR to put the contractors in their database too? We can have a different person type or something to make the staff-vs-contractor distinction clear"
I was told: "HR will never agree to that. The unions keep on asking for statistics on how many contractors are employed and how many hours they work. HR can truthfully answer 'we don't know'. If HR puts the contractors in their database, then they will know, and then they might have to tell the unions."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/02/business/antitrust-case-i...
We also have rules against talking to press. We can send them to a department that will handle that communication, but in general they won't get anything from us because it's easy to put a negative spin on anything we say.
> ...employees are told to assume that every document and email will end up in the hands of regulators, so they should refrain from using certain words or phrases. “We are not out to ‘crush,’ ‘kill,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘block,’ or do anything else that might be perceived as evil or unfair,” according to a slide used in the training, which The New York Times reviewed.
In my experience, these policies exist largely to avoid negative PR hits.
I'm pretty sure it is to avoid legal problems. Being deposed on what you might have said in a meeting 8 years ago is a lot different than being deposed about the complete chat history of what you said 8 years ago.
I've taken the trainings referred to in the article and I never once thought they were designed to dissuade discussions about antitrust issues. A more banal interpretation is that Google wants to create a culture that emphasizes creating good products not at the expense of competitors.
I've never felt inhibited about having conversations with employees about these issues. The fact is that most of the employees I've discussed these issues with don't think Google is violating antitrust regulations.
My personal opinion is that a certain segment believe that Google should just be broken up because their data collection practices whether or not there are any real antitrust violations and just see this as a tool to accomplish that end.
Part of this is taxes... if we just taxed them properly they wouldn't grow large and wouldn't need to be broken up.
Companies don’t pay taxes, people pay taxes. Companies may be the ones signing the checks to IRS, but they’re not the ones footing the bill.
The only difference is that for big companies it’s worth their while to have lots of accountants working the books, the same way it’s worth it to have lots of engineers fine-tuning the tech.
In other words: progressive taxation destroys wealth creation.
No, progressive taxation destroys wealth concentration.
I understand that when the pockets that wealth is concentrated in are your own, it might feel like destruction in a "who-moved-my-cheese" sense, but the fact is, no wealth is destroyed.
Arguably, at taxation extremes, wealth creation does suffer: too high and you remove some of the incentive to earn more (if there were a 100% tax rate above a certain bracket, for example), too low and government can't afford to enforce property rights and your incentives are to invest in protecting what you have (or can grab).
But in the very broad middle, the data shows that progressive taxation does not reduce the incentive to create wealth, and in fact the creation of wealth by most measures ends up being higher overall.
What is the difference to me, as an individual, what happens to the wealth once it's been taken from me?
Since I'm not spending it to further my own goals (e.g. by charitable donation to a cause whose values I share), does it matter whether that money has been spent on something someone else values, or literally burned?
Since I'm pretty sure that burning it would cause a deflationary spiral, yep.
The advantages over small companies aren't neccessarily a problem - in the same way that it isn't a problem that a fabric mill makes hand weaving uncompetitive and that a skilled weaver makes a rank amateur uncompetitive.
1) Googlers have some internal insight into how the privacy practices mechanically work; that insight engenders trust.
2) Googlers who don't find a level of trust very quickly get turned off to what the company's mission is and take their high-paying skillset elsewhere.
I mean, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Gathering the information is implied right there in the mission statement. People who aren't comfortable with the ramifications of gathering and using lots of information seek employment elsewhere.
Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies (In addition to a complete misunderstanding of the criteria on which your own job is evaluated on)?
I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.
I understand that this is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, because it exposes a rather obvious double standard.
The actual argument is that conservatives have lower Openness to Experience on average and they're thus less likely to be interested in working at a company like Google, that places such a high value on being open and stuff - this doesn't mean that Google is inherently ideological or biased against conservatives! It's an argument about people's individual interests and preferences, not skills or ability.
It's like the most risk averse move a developer could possibly make.
In general, political affiliation is not a protected class, and employers are, in fact, allowed to fire people for being too Republican. Or too Democratic, for that matter.
I for one, believe that you shouldn't spend your time at work having to defend yourself against these sorts of attacks, regardless of whether you are a liberal, a conservative, a Martian, or a reptilian. As a consequence of the above, I believe that you shouldn't spend your time at work making these sorts of attacks. But, as we can see in this thread, this, strangely enough, seems to be an unpopular outlier of an opinion.
Lefty shrinks churn out studies finding that conservatives are authoritarian, wet the bed, kick puppies, you name it, we've heard it all. So I doubt your premise since I've seen the reaction to this stuff being published, and it's usually more bemusement than anything else.
But nothing Damore wrote was personally insulting to women like calling them "authoritarian." His larger point was that women have, in aggregate, different interests than men.
Say, for the sake of argument, that there are some distinctly masculine priorities and distinctly feminine priorities. If so, our base assumption should be that they are equally morally valid.
And there's plenty of evidence, e.g. college graduation rates, that professional women are somewhat more capable than men at identifying their interests and acting on them.
That means that if men and women pursue occupations to different degrees, our default assumption should be that they're intelligent and capable and making decisions in their best interest, not that they're victims.
That could all be true and it's still possible that engineering is an unfriendly climate for women. The hard fact is there used to be a lot more women programming and it declined in the '80s.
But to whatever extent there's a real feminine preference, we ought to respect women expressing such a preference and not try to save them from it.
> And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?
If, as Damore was, the manifesto is entirely supportive of the effort, it's hard to see why it would be unacceptable. If the company has set out to do a thing, and someone wants to help them do it, you can't fire them for that.
> Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies
No, you can't fire them for it even if they do poor work. Especially when, like Google, you still have trouble hiring as many women in engineering as you want.
Damore's interpretation of the data may have been amateurish, but he's presenting some analysis that could be improved upon to figure out a better strategy to achieve those goals.
You're claiming a double standard, but if Google was serious about employing more women, they'd act on these ideas, even if the action was to dig into them and say "nope, this stuff is wrong." Not fire the guy.
The picture the firing of Damore paints is that Google was more interested in showing that they cared about hiring more women than actually succeeding in hiring more women.
> I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.
The right-wing media is as garbage as any other media.
Even if the press were good, you've a cacophony of opinions, so you can't make them all happy. You're better off sticking up for your employees.
In academia, you could publicly collect signatures under such manifesto, and people would be afraid not to sign.
In Google... dunno, someone has to try. Unless it already happened.
1) Use the right language concerning things like 'market dominance'.
2) Not wanting Googlers to have public opinions which are against the companies opinions
3) Suppressing voices over very material causes for concern i.e. whistle blowing.
The more nuanced issue is #1.
If Google legit doesn't believe they are a monopoly player, then they have to make sure that everyone acts and behaves in that manner, and uses the right language. If personnel go around talking about 'dominating the market' that could be effectively 'used against them' irrespective of the material nature of ostensible market domination.
A lot of this kind of stuff is vague, political, words have power etc. and things can be taken way out of context.
It's not wrong for Google to want staff to use the right words to describe market situations correctly.
Of course this means something different if in fact, objectively speaking they're trying to get people to actually misrepresent reality.
And unionizing. Don't forget unionizing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...
I'm sure there's a few more things you can't talk about at Google too. But the NY Times should at least do a better job of remembering their own stories.
All companies will learn this the hard way when during the discovery the other team of lawyers bring casual internal conversation between employees as evidence into the court.
What if they just banned English from all company documents and let people use a smattering of all other languages the employees know? With some documents in Chinese, some in Swahili, some in Spanish, and the most confidential documents in obscure tribal languages, it would be fun to watch the Justice department try to piece things together.
For employee productivity they could just hand out AR goggles that translate everything in sight automatically to a language the employee knows -- they're Google, after all.
Or simply invent a company-specific language that uses the same words as English but with some words switched up, e.g. Customer -> Clown, Stock market -> Circus, Earnings -> Feast, etc.
Using such hacks would likely be interpreted as evidence that the documents should be interpreted more maliciously than normal.
The legal system is not computer code. Instead it is interpreted by judges and people.
Judges who will simply rule against you/fine you/send you to jail if you act in obviously bad faith.
This approach combines all three of those things, it involves deceiving a judge or jury with language games, misrepresenting that these words or languages have hidden meanings, and wasting their time in deciphering what was really communicated.
This would be akin to everyone at Google typing in qwerty but using a keyboard setting that interprets the keypresses as dvorak, and also having an extension that substitutes characters viewed from fellow employees back to qwerty. How the message is stored or exchanged doesn't change the material fact that one employee intended to write "competitor" and another employee read "competitor" and in depositions both would admit to those facts.
Because if you actually have this to the point needed, you’re far better off selling those out to the world.
Chinese and Swahili would give them no trouble at all.
1: Real example from my friend who represented such a person in an immigration hearing.
At most places I’ve worked, “Clown” was already a well-established code-word among the engineers - it’s code for “Engineer” :P
Using terms like 'market dominance' may have legal implications, they surely will have populist implications as anti-trust issues are as much political as anything else.
So instructing staff to 'not speak about Google's market position' is very reasonable, because words have power and implications beyond what most employees probably believe when they're using them.
This is somewhat different from asking people to 'not have opinions' and a totally different league from trying to suppress whistle-blowers etc..
Google will never change unless forced to. I quit soon after.
Google's a big beast, and it's not as homogeneous as people from the outside looking in sometimes assume. Hell, I'm pretty sure nobody really knows everything that's going on in it.
I thought it was slightly ridiculous until I saw the suggested alternatives of "allowlist" and "denylist". These really are better terms: they're completely self-describing and match the verbs that you'd usually be using when referencing a denylist. Only downside is they don't have the same number of letters (and so don't line up if you put them one after another in code), but that can be worked around.
Try to show up for work in a MAGA hat, and see if you're still employed by lunch. Google employees are, at best, free to support the dogma approved by Google.
I'll hazard a guess: This site is full of former and current Google lackeys.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/google-content-moderation-in...
(Not to mention the whole James Damore thing.)
Generally speaking (and regardless of personal position on the topic) any company which has a dedicated "diversity" commissar isn't a place you can speak freely.
I'd love to see what would happen to a Google employee who tries to argue that sexual harassment laws and policies are stifling normal social interactions, empowering the vicious and overly sensitive to destroy anyone who upsets their particular sensibilities, and creating an overall climate of fear and conformity.
It's not the company that might hold them accountable; it's the government, if the government's looking for evidence that either individual employees break law regarding hostile work environment or there's a pattern that can be established that the company either encourages or turns a blind eye to creation of hostile work environment.
That sort of speculation is for a law salon or (anonymously) Reddit, not an internal mailing list.
On the other hand, employees criticizing the company for not sufficiently punishing sexual harassment is exactly the kind of evidence you're talking about.
Employees trying to build an Orwellian counter-story that punishing sexual harassment as the law requires creates a hostile work environment are treading on thin ice. Very easy to misinterpret that; I wouldn't commit it to discoverable media.
You are required to follow your legal obligations in America but you are not required to like them or to not complain about them.
In general, I'd consider it a thin ice category for discussion inside the company in written format.
Just look at Amy Cooper [1].
But it goes further than that. It's generally a good idea not to do anything that might lead to a heading like:
"Employee of X says [bad thing about X]"
When I worked at Google, I made it a point never to comment publicly on any issue or thread where I could possibly be quoted. That's just commonsense and (IMHO) completely reasonable for your employer. I'd suggest that if anyone chafes against such restrictions that they should probably seek other employment.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/woman-fired-by-franklin-temp...