10 ms·

What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

155 points by nbmh 9y ago

Cyphase 9y ago
This article is adapted from Duhigg's book, Smarter Faster Better.[0] I remember it being an interesting read. [0] http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster-better/ http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster-better/
philprx 9y ago
2016. Please title your post with year when posting older things.
jxi 9y ago
That’s a really long read. Can anyone summarize?
- JepZ 9y ago
  Hey downvoters, I find that a reasonable request. The comments here and in the old thread do not seem to recommend to read it, so if someone already read it, please be so kind to summarize it for the rest of us.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Well... read it? Is expecting an intelligent person on HN to read what is essentially a two-page article really too much?
- indubitable 9y ago
  Google wanted to optimize teams. Couldn't find any patterns that show why one team does better than another. Saw psychology report indicating that having people free to express themselves is important for team performance, as if this is a major revelation. Rest of the paper focuses on a single anecdote that is supposed to show this.
  - indubitable 9y ago
    As an aside, I am familiar with and critical of the psychology report [1] they reference in this article. The paper had a psychologist break people into groups and then perform tasks like plan a shopping trip. The psychologist's data indicated that the sum of the measured aptitudes of the teams did not correlate against their performance, so they then jumps from that to suggesting that therefore individual aptitude does not affect team performance. I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does. [1] - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scien...
    - bobby_the_whale 9y ago
      "It's not fair when you reason better than us!" -- Psychologists United Now (PUN)
  - ozim 9y ago
    Actually not, people free to express themselves was not major point. Major point was like from Dale Carnegie 'Don't criticise condemn or complain'. People do not like to be criticised and they work better if they feel no one is judging them.
- retrogradeorbit 9y ago
  Don't waste your time.
blatherard 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399
dinoleif 9y ago
Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article. The way this works is: 1/ Google crunches some data 2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT) 3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)
- dinoleif 9y ago
  I made a mistake. It turns out that there are actually 9 articles as part of that series, so I have to make a correction: There is not a single piece of useful data in any of those 9 articles.
  - sgift 9y ago
    And useful data is defined as ...? This is an NYT article, not a scientific paper. No idea what you expected here ..
- huzzar 9y ago
  Disregarding the article, there is plenty of open and available research for this have a look here http://cci.mit.edu/mciresearchpage.html http://cci.mit.edu/mciresearchpage.html
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Do you work at Google, or what are you basing these bold assertions on? FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I can assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.
  - jamra 9y ago
    Are you suggesting that working at google somehow impacts OP's ability to read the article and determine if the article cites data?
    - 9y ago
bobby_the_whale 9y ago
The New York Times also started to write clickbait head lines. That's exactly what the world needs: more clickbait. The article is just another glorification of data for nothing but attention and branding of the religion called Google. Gamification of the work place where it is tracked with how many people you have had lunch sounds like a dystopia straight from Black Mirror. It appears that Google's employee force seems to consist out of easily offended weak individuals with lots of social problems. Visit a tech talk with Google employees present, wait for one of them to ask a question and observe their behavior. Just like the pan-sexual squirrel oriented 0.001% of the world these weird people try to convince the rest of the world that what they are doing is normal in such publications. It's not normal; it's sick. We used to lock these people up such that the people upholding and paying for the fabric of society wouldn't be bothered by these mentally ill people. Tech companies found a way to extract value out of some of these mentally ill people and as such a cost reduction results for governments as well as a tax increase. The downside is for their co-workers which need to cope with literally, crazy people.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I've stopped believing in NYT's "integrity" since a few years ago. It's even worse for political news. As an example, just yesterday I heard about Donna Brazile's admissions that Hillary rigged the primary election by controlling even who the DNC got to hire and how she essentially laundered huge donations to her campaign through the DNC. Sounds like the story of the day, considering Donna Brazile was the former DNC chair, right? (even if only for a few months) But if I searched for "Donna Brazile New York Times" on Google, all I get to see is a story on how Hillary Clinton won an award and "shed tears" in the same day. NYT's political bias is palpable. That's why so many people believe Trump when he says mainstream media is "fake news". No, I'm not a Trump supporter at all, just pointing out that this sort of blatant bias in mainstream media makes it so much easier to believe even someone like Trump when he points it out, because it's ringing true to people.
  - naturalgradient 9y ago
    The NYT has run of the most effective ad campaigns in recent years, somehow placing itself as the last bastion of 'objective reporting', and the intellectual smugness that comes with it. From my observation, they are giving platform to just one side of the debate in many issues, e.g. title IX legislation, where they are portraying a move that is supported by a number of reputed law professors[0] as another Trump goverment vs the victims argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/weakening-college-sex-assault-policies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/weakening-college... Yes, it's an opinion article, but by choosing to give platform to just one side of the opinion, they are making a political choice. [0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-title-ix/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-title...
Radim 9y ago
TL;DR: "…the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues." "When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well." The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?). I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.
- gaius 9y ago
  which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...
  - microcolonel 9y ago
soufron 9y ago
Well they learned the perfect team should be composed of the best breed of white males, between 25 and 45, and that they should be sufficient, arrogant, and leaning to the far-right when possible - but using progressive rhetorics. Lol.
- soufron 9y ago
  Oh, this piece is from 2016... it's funny how one more year can transform something from a visionary piece into a pile of bullshit.
- sctb 9y ago
  We ban users for posting such vacuous flamebait as this, so would you please say something civil and substantive or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - soufron 9y ago
    Sorry, that was too quick. The idea was to insist on the contradiction of having piece praising Google HR practices while the company is known to lack diversity and allowing personal development.
stoev 9y ago
I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently. It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them. Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees. I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.
- dogruck 9y ago
  That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added). Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments. Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this. But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
  - xxs 9y ago
    The article was published on the 25th of Feb, 2016 (so 2016 in the title).
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    > But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News. Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.
m3kw9 9y ago
The fact that they think there is perfection in such a thing should already be the wrong path to go down on
- Top19 9y ago
  Reminds me of the scene in The Circle where Tom Hanks says “we believe in the perfectability of human beings!”. Google is such a frightening, creepy company that really tries hard not to be. Kind of like the guy who breaks into a girl’s home with a gun screaming “why won’t you go out with me I’m a nice guy”. If you work for Google no offense, you’re still competitive on the job market and Google became creepy as a function of emergence rather than anyone’s choice, but still wanted to say something...
codewardenh 9y ago
Edit: can't reply at this time so had to edit in place - it would be good to get some discussion if others disagree with my experience, downvoting silently and avoiding conversation is a shame. In time we will actually see that Google overly filters and selects and decides on the candidates it chooses, and that singular overarching, overbearing process guarantees they end up with a homogenised staff that all think and act the same. My three years there were a lesson in what to avoid when hiring. Difference of thought is seen as being against the hivemind. It is encouraged and tolerated only as much as to flush out all the individuals not on message. Sadly even with with xooglers, the Stockholm syndrome is strong and persists many external roles later. Friends don't let friends work for Google.
0xbear 9y ago
Google is a very “sink or swim” place, and these well intentioned studies aren’t going to change that. I suspect they get funded in part for their positive PR aspect. Anecdotally, two of the three teams I worked in at Google were among the highest performing if you look at impact and results, and there was nothing “touchy-feely safe space” about them. It was pretty much “deliver or GTFO”, and how you feel about any of it didn’t matter one iota.
- oxryly1 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm guessing that if you're underperforming and you bring up how you feel psychologically unsafe you'll still get drummed out all the same. Which validates your unsafe feeling...
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  When you say GTFO, what is it exactly that you mean? Have you seen anyone fired or punished for underperformance?
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    You won’t be fired per se. You just won’t perform well against your peers an will feel like shit because of that. After some time you’ll leave on your own accord to a team where demands aren’t quite as high. There are plenty of those around: it’s a huge company now, and demanding, high performance teams that do something that actually matters are a small minority.
- itronitron 9y ago
  How do any of us know what the other means by 'touchy-feely safe space' ? I am pretty confident I have never worked in such an organization although someone with a different work experience might disagree. Same goes for 'deliver or GTFO' << that pretty much defines every work environment even though they are all different.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    What I’m saying is that at no point in my rather lengthy stint at Google were my feelings even a passing consideration to anybody in my chain of command. A couple of peers cared, but even there the environment is much more impersonal than in other companies I’ve worked at. And that’s _good_ for things like code quality etc, because your design won’t gain approval if it sucks no matter how chummy you are with your peers or boss. Same with code reviews, you will regularly get mercilessly savaged with the most pedantic nitpicking you’ve ever seen, sometimes to the point where your blood would boil. And that’s how it’s supposed to be if you want excellent engineering. But it’s not the most hospitable atmosphere for you as a person.

155 points by nbmh 9y ago

This article is adapted from Duhigg's book, Smarter Faster Better.[0] I remember it being an interesting read. [0] http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster-better/ http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster-better/

philprx 9y ago

2016. Please title your post with year when posting older things.

jxi 9y ago

That’s a really long read. Can anyone summarize?

JepZ 9y ago
Hey downvoters, I find that a reasonable request. The comments here and in the old thread do not seem to recommend to read it, so if someone already read it, please be so kind to summarize it for the rest of us.
- izacus 9y ago
  Well... read it? Is expecting an intelligent person on HN to read what is essentially a two-page article really too much?
indubitable 9y ago
Google wanted to optimize teams. Couldn't find any patterns that show why one team does better than another. Saw psychology report indicating that having people free to express themselves is important for team performance, as if this is a major revelation. Rest of the paper focuses on a single anecdote that is supposed to show this.
- indubitable 9y ago
  As an aside, I am familiar with and critical of the psychology report [1] they reference in this article. The paper had a psychologist break people into groups and then perform tasks like plan a shopping trip. The psychologist's data indicated that the sum of the measured aptitudes of the teams did not correlate against their performance, so they then jumps from that to suggesting that therefore individual aptitude does not affect team performance. I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does. [1] - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scien...
  - bobby_the_whale 9y ago
    "It's not fair when you reason better than us!" -- Psychologists United Now (PUN)
- ozim 9y ago
  Actually not, people free to express themselves was not major point. Major point was like from Dale Carnegie 'Don't criticise condemn or complain'. People do not like to be criticised and they work better if they feel no one is judging them.
retrogradeorbit 9y ago
Don't waste your time.

blatherard 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399

dinoleif 9y ago

Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article. The way this works is: 1/ Google crunches some data 2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT) 3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)

dinoleif 9y ago
I made a mistake. It turns out that there are actually 9 articles as part of that series, so I have to make a correction: There is not a single piece of useful data in any of those 9 articles.
- sgift 9y ago
  And useful data is defined as ...? This is an NYT article, not a scientific paper. No idea what you expected here ..
huzzar 9y ago
Disregarding the article, there is plenty of open and available research for this have a look here http://cci.mit.edu/mciresearchpage.html http://cci.mit.edu/mciresearchpage.html
jpatokal 9y ago
Do you work at Google, or what are you basing these bold assertions on? FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I can assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.
- jamra 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that working at google somehow impacts OP's ability to read the article and determine if the article cites data?
  - 9y ago

bobby_the_whale 9y ago

The New York Times also started to write clickbait head lines. That's exactly what the world needs: more clickbait. The article is just another glorification of data for nothing but attention and branding of the religion called Google. Gamification of the work place where it is tracked with how many people you have had lunch sounds like a dystopia straight from Black Mirror. It appears that Google's employee force seems to consist out of easily offended weak individuals with lots of social problems. Visit a tech talk with Google employees present, wait for one of them to ask a question and observe their behavior. Just like the pan-sexual squirrel oriented 0.001% of the world these weird people try to convince the rest of the world that what they are doing is normal in such publications. It's not normal; it's sick. We used to lock these people up such that the people upholding and paying for the fabric of society wouldn't be bothered by these mentally ill people. Tech companies found a way to extract value out of some of these mentally ill people and as such a cost reduction results for governments as well as a tax increase. The downside is for their co-workers which need to cope with literally, crazy people.

mtgx 9y ago
I've stopped believing in NYT's "integrity" since a few years ago. It's even worse for political news. As an example, just yesterday I heard about Donna Brazile's admissions that Hillary rigged the primary election by controlling even who the DNC got to hire and how she essentially laundered huge donations to her campaign through the DNC. Sounds like the story of the day, considering Donna Brazile was the former DNC chair, right? (even if only for a few months) But if I searched for "Donna Brazile New York Times" on Google, all I get to see is a story on how Hillary Clinton won an award and "shed tears" in the same day. NYT's political bias is palpable. That's why so many people believe Trump when he says mainstream media is "fake news". No, I'm not a Trump supporter at all, just pointing out that this sort of blatant bias in mainstream media makes it so much easier to believe even someone like Trump when he points it out, because it's ringing true to people.
- naturalgradient 9y ago
  The NYT has run of the most effective ad campaigns in recent years, somehow placing itself as the last bastion of 'objective reporting', and the intellectual smugness that comes with it. From my observation, they are giving platform to just one side of the debate in many issues, e.g. title IX legislation, where they are portraying a move that is supported by a number of reputed law professors[0] as another Trump goverment vs the victims argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/weakening-college-sex-assault-policies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/weakening-college... Yes, it's an opinion article, but by choosing to give platform to just one side of the opinion, they are making a political choice. [0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-title-ix/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-title...

Radim 9y ago

TL;DR: "…the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues." "When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well." The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?). I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.

gaius 9y ago
which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...
- microcolonel 9y ago

soufron 9y ago

Well they learned the perfect team should be composed of the best breed of white males, between 25 and 45, and that they should be sufficient, arrogant, and leaning to the far-right when possible - but using progressive rhetorics. Lol.

soufron 9y ago
Oh, this piece is from 2016... it's funny how one more year can transform something from a visionary piece into a pile of bullshit.
sctb 9y ago
We ban users for posting such vacuous flamebait as this, so would you please say something civil and substantive or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- soufron 9y ago
  Sorry, that was too quick. The idea was to insist on the contradiction of having piece praising Google HR practices while the company is known to lack diversity and allowing personal development.

stoev 9y ago

I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently. It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them. Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees. I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.

dogruck 9y ago
That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added). Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments. Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this. But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
- xxs 9y ago
  The article was published on the 25th of Feb, 2016 (so 2016 in the title).
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News. Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.

m3kw9 9y ago

The fact that they think there is perfection in such a thing should already be the wrong path to go down on

Top19 9y ago
Reminds me of the scene in The Circle where Tom Hanks says “we believe in the perfectability of human beings!”. Google is such a frightening, creepy company that really tries hard not to be. Kind of like the guy who breaks into a girl’s home with a gun screaming “why won’t you go out with me I’m a nice guy”. If you work for Google no offense, you’re still competitive on the job market and Google became creepy as a function of emergence rather than anyone’s choice, but still wanted to say something...

codewardenh 9y ago

Edit: can't reply at this time so had to edit in place - it would be good to get some discussion if others disagree with my experience, downvoting silently and avoiding conversation is a shame. In time we will actually see that Google overly filters and selects and decides on the candidates it chooses, and that singular overarching, overbearing process guarantees they end up with a homogenised staff that all think and act the same. My three years there were a lesson in what to avoid when hiring. Difference of thought is seen as being against the hivemind. It is encouraged and tolerated only as much as to flush out all the individuals not on message. Sadly even with with xooglers, the Stockholm syndrome is strong and persists many external roles later. Friends don't let friends work for Google.

0xbear 9y ago

Google is a very “sink or swim” place, and these well intentioned studies aren’t going to change that. I suspect they get funded in part for their positive PR aspect. Anecdotally, two of the three teams I worked in at Google were among the highest performing if you look at impact and results, and there was nothing “touchy-feely safe space” about them. It was pretty much “deliver or GTFO”, and how you feel about any of it didn’t matter one iota.

oxryly1 9y ago
Yeah, I'm guessing that if you're underperforming and you bring up how you feel psychologically unsafe you'll still get drummed out all the same. Which validates your unsafe feeling...
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
When you say GTFO, what is it exactly that you mean? Have you seen anyone fired or punished for underperformance?
- 0xbear 9y ago
  You won’t be fired per se. You just won’t perform well against your peers an will feel like shit because of that. After some time you’ll leave on your own accord to a team where demands aren’t quite as high. There are plenty of those around: it’s a huge company now, and demanding, high performance teams that do something that actually matters are a small minority.
itronitron 9y ago
How do any of us know what the other means by 'touchy-feely safe space' ? I am pretty confident I have never worked in such an organization although someone with a different work experience might disagree. Same goes for 'deliver or GTFO' << that pretty much defines every work environment even though they are all different.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  What I’m saying is that at no point in my rather lengthy stint at Google were my feelings even a passing consideration to anybody in my chain of command. A couple of peers cared, but even there the environment is much more impersonal than in other companies I’ve worked at. And that’s _good_ for things like code quality etc, because your design won’t gain approval if it sucks no matter how chummy you are with your peers or boss. Same with code reviews, you will regularly get mercilessly savaged with the most pedantic nitpicking you’ve ever seen, sometimes to the point where your blood would boil. And that’s how it’s supposed to be if you want excellent engineering. But it’s not the most hospitable atmosphere for you as a person.