Google Team That Keeps Services Online Rocked by Mental Health Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Google Team That Keeps Services Online Rocked by Mental Health Crisis

bloomberg.com

45 pointsmegacorp21 comments

My probably unpopular take: it's not the entire team, just one guy in particular. This guy has multiple serious mental health issues, diagnosed, and is trying to get the company to unionize. He has admitted to sleeping through meetings. He has taken multiple mental health breaks in 2021. He seriously worries that he would become homeless if laid off... as a google engineer. Forgive me, but I simply don't think this person is credible. It seems more like he just hated his boss and decided to try to smear him with the race card. Other employees on the team said "that they and many of their colleagues had positive experiences on the team and with Aubert". I don't think this is a responsible thing to report on, and the headline is pure clickbait. It delegitimizes instances of real racism.

[I work at Google]

This seems to be directly contradicted by the article, which something like 3-4 other current and ex employees in the org who faced major issues, as well as some unattributed quotes. Further it notes that the team in question scores significantly lower on happiness/wellbeing than Google overall. Additionally, the "other employees" you quote were 3 sources provided by Google when asked for comment. Of course Google's will provide sources who don't have anything negative to say.

The person accused of the racism and bad working environment is still at the company and was even promoted. Google is run by smart and levelheaded people, some of the best and most talented in the world. I find it hard to believe that in our modern time, a racist manager would not get punished for racism and would even be promoted, especially at a company like Google. Far more likely is that some emotionally volatile employees had some sort of breakdown and publicly complained, and Bloomberg jumped at the opportunity to write a clickbait headline about how Google is being "rocked" by this.

>Google is run by smart and levelheaded people, some of the best and most talented in the world.

I apologize in advance for this not being related to the article, which I can't access. And also for my comment being theoretical rather than experience based as I haven't worked there.

Google gets so many people applying, I'm sure, that they think they can and do hire only the best of the best.

However, it's an illusion, because in fact, the population they can select from is very small compared to all the people in the world who could do a given job. It's a truism that the best people don't come on the market, right?

Conversely, there are many, many things that someone who is the best of the best can do besides Google, even if they are looking for a new job.

But Google, understandably, expects people to jump through all sorts of hoops, because how else do they winnow down the field that is far too large for their openings?

So the people they actually hire have to be very bright, but necessarily have a peculiar sort of tunnel vision, which when taken to its extreme, may manifest as a neurotic inability to imagine a life without working there and an unreasonable faith that all the smartest people are there.

Because if they have a healthy perspective, by definition, they would see a billion other opportunities and not be one of the people who tries the very hardest to get a job at Google.

And over time, this has to affect the overall culture and management too.

Tautological positions like this are interesting: "this couldn't happen, so the evidence that it might have is clearly fabricated".

I mean even Google HR admits the manager acted inappropriately more than once.

Like you seem to be going from "I find one person quoted in this article unreliable" to "all the allegations from a half dozen different sources are false", which seems odd.

> I mean even Google HR admits the manager acted inappropriately more than once.

Even without any fault and perfect behavior, a manager should expect that HR would make a statement like this. Not lightly, but often they feel they would have to and taking responsibility without a fault is still the job of management.

No idea if that is the case here or not. In my experience racism is extremely rare among engineers, even if you acknowledge that some of them certainly seem to have a personality.

I was thinking about this, and you're right. It's bad logic to use and would potentially have me overlook instances of real racism. That being said, I believe it was just the one guy who was playing the racism card. IIRC most of the allegations were about his abrasive management style more than anything.

I worked on that team, with him. He was always a strong engineer and a great co-worker. It's really sad to see someone like that treated so badly even if they (may) have stumbled a little bit.

Major issues? The article is very vague about what exactly this guy's problem was, but we can get a hint from the mention of Damore's memo and that the problems included:

"preventing staff from asking unfiltered questions at all-hands meetings, policing virtual spaces where workers convene, monitoring and enforcing content rules for email lists and taking down posts on internal boards"

"a culture where bosses felt empowered to put results ahead of comity"

“Since the Damore memo, Google has tried to tamp down on outrage and to get individuals less preoccupied to address societal issues,”

"Shaw said his new manager suggested he didn’t deserve his paycheck because he wrote an inconsistent amount of code."

This is all code for: they asked me to focus on my job instead of social justice activism.

Also, the way the article primarily cites people who have self-admitted mental health issues is rather telling. Why couldn't they find people who are without psychological issues to build their story around?

I actually used to work in Google SRE and know some of the people mentioned in this article. The idea that department is full of racist sociopaths is absurd and frankly slanderous. All this says far more about Bloomberg, the type of stories they want to write and the sort of people the company is struggling to rid itself of than anything else.

> The idea that department is full of racist sociopaths is absurd and frankly slanderous.

And isn't a claim made anywhere in the article. I'd ask that you consider why you're making things like this up. Is it to win an internet argument or because you're unwilling to actually engage with the things the article does say?

Did we read the same article?

“I no longer feel psychological safety on this team,” wrote Shaw, who is Black and had accused his leaders of racism.

Claim that the SRE leaders are racist.

“SRE at least in Zurich has an abusive and downright sociopathic management culture, which will drain you, burn you out and not give a damn,” he tweeted in May 2020.

Claim that the SRE leaders are sociopaths.

Right, so senior leadership is racist. That's like...4 people out of potentially a few hundred.

Culture can be set by a few powerful people. You don't need the org to be "full of" bad actors for those bad actors to harm some people. Engage with the article, not with a misrepresentation.

You're aware that "full of" isn't a literal expression of mathematical quantity, right? For these people to claim there's even one racist sociopath in such a relatively small department is an extraordinary claim, but they're asserting that it's commonplace amongst management. That claim is quite obviously incredibly unlikely unless they're using dumb redefinitions of words, like defining "racist" or "sociopathic" as "anyone who disagrees with my ideology".

I worked on this very team for years and with the people in the article except the manager who joined after I left. Even in my time there was no shortage of people burning out and in my impression if someone fell behind due to personal issues or whatever you were put in the doghouse and had to earn your way back. I’m ready to believe it didn’t improve much after I left

Some migraine medications have severe mental side effects. Doctors often want to wait 3 months or more before trying the next one. It can take many rounds to find a solution that works.

Trying to work when you deal with bizarre side effects like wanting to remove your left arm is unbelievably stressful. Or even the fact that most medications cause sleepiness.

Chronic Illnesses can get you a ton of negative labels.

You mean that being on call all the time and responsible for deciphering why someone else’s service broke and fixing it is a draining occupation? Who could have predicted that?

I feel like I’m personally in an awkward position. I’ve fought both for and against SRE-type teams at one point or another. While every company I have ever worked for has had some good developers, they’ve always had awful DevOps that never seemed to know or accomplish anything.

I honestly don’t think any of the DevOps mindset works long-term, just like “full stack” developers doesn’t.

As an outsider, I always imagined Google treated their DevOps people with the same disdain they reserve for their customers and contract employees.

Seems like a high-pressure / thankless role in most companies, but Google seems to overzealously prioritize uptime. I'm guessing it's not fun to be responsible for site reliability.

> As an outsider, I always imagined Google treated their DevOps people with the same disdain they reserve for their customers and contract employees.

This seems like an odd conclusion. SRE as a role was pioneered by Google (like they literally wrote the book on it https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/) and they treat it better than most other companies (on-call is compensated and waking hours only, among other things).

There are problems with Google's SRE culture, but "thankless" and "like contract employees" are not valid descriptors.

> just 49% of the 76 Borg team members who responded had a favorable view of what their work group was doing to help their well-being, 12 percentage points lower than employees companywide

> In November, “team temperature” surveys found dissatisfaction among Borg employees. Out of a top score of 10, Borg’s three sub-teams scored 5.07, 6.5 and 6.73—all short of the 7.5 rating Google considers satisfactory.

Otherwise it looks to be just two manager (one promoted to exec) and a manager they hired who are explicitly called out.

I don't think this counts as "rocked". There's no mass resignation or moving teams.

Keep in mind (and this is conjecture) that the specific kind of person who makes a great SRE will be more neurotic than the average person. There's a specific kind of meticulousness and paranoia that makes certain people way better at spotting and resolving problems even before they appear.

Could this character profile be tested for for purposes of recruitment?

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