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Google vs. Google: How Nonstop Political Arguments Rule Its Workplace
- Apocryphon 8y agoWhen corporations begin to take on the wealth, power, and size of nation-states, is it no wonder that they may have the same variety of opinion as one?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoMost small to medium sized businesses have employees with a variety of opinion. But most businesses are mature, follow pretty standard norms of work decorum, and people leave their political positions out of their interactions with coworkers.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoIt should be that way, but it is not in the Bay Area.
- mathgladiator 8y agoShould it? Sure, it detracts from the organizations mission. It's counter productive. However, if you eat all your meals at campus, then where else express politics? I think this is more about companies taking over too much of life and life bleeds into work.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoMy impression from the article (and Damore case) is not that discussing politics is a problem per se - the problem is people there taking their politics up to 11, and forgetting any kind of rationality or even common sense on the way.
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- gweinberg 8y agoGoogle has the variety of opinion of a communist nation state.
- montyf 8y agoI enjoyed your comment despite it being light gray. I never considered Google to be particularly rich in "opinions". Some buy into the culture more than others, but the workers are mostly left-wing. I also think a better term than opinion here is "radical ideology", which is more accurate and less vague. But yes, I found the comparison to communism to be quite apt,though it applies to much of SV. People are afraid of saying something they shouldn't. Even though the consequences may not be as severe as in the USSR, you can still lose your career for something like saying you agree with Trump on anything.
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- realusername 8y agoThat's an interesting train of thoughts, in the same way, we criticise countries for not being democratic enough, whereas now we have corporations more powerful than most countries but with zero democracy inside them, the top has all the power
- tdb7893 8y agoI'm really surprised that they don't avoid these sorts of political conflicts at work. It makes me really curious what the company culture is like
- lallysingh 8y agoThe culture is senior year / early grad school for CS majors.
- xienze 8y agoIt used to be the prevailing wisdom in corporate America that discussions about religion and politics have no place in the office. It can only lead to conflict and furthermore, WTF does it have to do with the task at hand? I mean, pretty obvious stuff, right? But somewhere along the way the inmates started running the asylum, so to speak, and political discourse and activism became an integral part of the work place (although I’d argue this is more of a Bay Area/startup phenomenon, you obviously see very little of this in stuffy corporate gigs). Who knows the exact underlying reason for this, but it is what it is. My understanding from the Damore case is that Google has internal message boards that discuss all sorts of political topics and things predictably get quite heated and has lead to people being blacklisted and fired. Nasty stuff, other companies should pay attention to what’s happening at Google.
- darepublic 8y agoBut didn't Damore have to attend compulsory diversity classes, that solicited feedback from its attendees? So you are supposed to take your medicine and say it tastes wonderful eh.
- gizmo686 8y agoIts wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company you pretty much had to attend. Even this statement might be over stating it, as we here much more from the employees who feel like they have to attend (and might then complain about it), then the ones who don't and would have no reason to ever bring it up.
- lallysingh 8y ago> “Google has created a level of entitlement which is hard to claw back,” A proper sense of entitlement used to be considered (tongue in cheek) a basic requirement of fitting in at Google.
- asfasgasg 8y agoAnyway, it's not clear that anyone is making any attempt to "claw back" this sense of entitlement. It's always been this way and there isn't any evidence I'm aware of it's doing damage to the bottom line, so why would they try to control it.
- decebalus1 8y agohttps://archive.fo/zBjZe https://archive.fo/zBjZe
- panarky 8y agoMost businesses focus on the business mission and suppress distractions from that mission. Debates about ethics, politics and public policy are seen as unwelcome distractions. But Google is a different kind of company. Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission. As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains". You may be skeptical about this and see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy, but the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture. So it should be no surprise that there's constant and vigorous debate at Google about what's right and wrong. Seems to be working pretty well for them [1]. [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht... [1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-earnings-power-accelerating https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-ea...
- nlowell 8y agoGoogle is not the only company that believes it has a moral compass or has a mission beyond profit.
- panarky 8y agoIf you can find another company Google's size with a similar cultural drive to be a force for good in the world, you'll probably find their employees also have vigorous debates about what's right and wrong.
- aaron-lebo 8y agoVery few people think they are doing evil, most people think they are doing good. Humans first and foremost justify their actions. Google's overriding value is money. That's what they care about. If it wasn't that way they would operate differently. What it appears like is Google operates in a way that prioritizes money and then later justifies it with this notion of "doing good", but that's vague enough to literally mean anything. You think I'm exaggerating, but look at any number of organizations that have done things which nobody considers good and then look at how their members justify it. It always happens. How easy it to justify making 300k a year while pumping out walled garden mediocrity? It's really easy. Chiming in feels like sour grapes, but this notion that a massive corporation gives a fuck about anything but it's own existence doesn't seem realistic.
- sqdbps 8y agoThat might be the case but given their biases it's hard to take the WSJ's spin at face value. They're agenda is to hurt google and with this one I'm guessing they want to further damage google's image with conservative culture warriors. As for the issue at hand, even if it might not be as drastic as described it's definitely affecting business most evident by some rank and file employees' public objection to their DoD AI work. Fixing matters will involve more than intranet discussion moderation, it's about hiring. Perhaps they should optimize for a different kind of prospect.
- weberc2 8y agoI didn’t perceive any spin, and I’m a liberal. Perhaps we’re so in tune with predominantly left-leaning media that we’ve come to perceive balanced, centrist articles as biased?
- gizmo686 8y agoI commented about this the last time [0] the Damore issue came up here. Google's culture (as represented by this article and the Damore issue) is anti-liberal. This is one of the cases where liberals and leftists are not on the same side. EDIT: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16416016#16416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16416016#16416416
- sqdbps 8y agoAnd I'm libertarian (more or less). I think they probably made too much of disparate incidents and assumed strong connections between them and between them and the damore case. At any rate, there is too much baggage there to take anything they publish about google at face value.
- quadrangle 8y agoWhat's a libritarial?? Oh wait, edited parent, um now that I read the original, "libertarian" still looks odd to me, although it's spelled correctly.
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- MichaelMoser123 8y agoThe article mentions 'Talks at Google' : I think that this channel was much more interesting something like two years ago; Is that just my impression? Does anybody know what happened to these talks and how they turned lame?
- vowelless 8y agoThis is such a bizarre article. How normal is this type of work culture in the valley? Doesn't it make sense to keep politics and personal choices outside of the workplace? Is it really important to bring in a PETA person to talk about animals feeling prejudice at one of the biggest tech companies that makes money via advertisements?
- Cookingboy 8y agoThis type of work culture is very normal in Silicon Valley.
- john_moscow 8y agoI think this all comes from too many smart people left with too little meaningful things to do. So they get bored and start playing the usual 1000+ years old game of forming cliques and figuring out who's more important. Kinda comes from the current investment climate.
- co_worker_87725 8y agoEvery fucking office, every workplace, every barbecue and famly gathering since November 8, 2016, has been a fucking Nightmare Mode political minfield. And half of everything anyone says is unsafe. Shit is fucked. I hate the news. I don’t like talking to human beings, pretty much at all now. If the conversation doesn’t start of politicized, give it five minutes, and then someone might interject, disagree, you have to pick a side, draw a weapon and make a decision about who to fight alongside, or against, possibly to the death, or at least enough to establish enemies for life. I’m done with all of you. Just go away. Stop talking to me. I don’t even want to pan handle for some spare change, whether you have it or not.
- us-focus 8y ago> Every fucking office, every workplace, every barbecue and famly gathering since November 8, 2016 Perhaps in USA.
- Aunche 8y agoI can't read the article, but I'm willing to bet that it's focusing on a small subset of loud opionated Googlers and convienently ignoring the 99% of employees who don't care about politics as long as they're getting paid.
- eitally 8y agoThe other thing that seems to be largely true is that these "loud opinionated Googlers" are the ones in the Bay Area. You don't hear about things like this from other offices, even the other large offices in the US (Cambridge, NYC, Seattle/Kirkland).
- traek 8y agoGooglers are definitely loud and politically opinionated at the NYC office. Seattle/Kirkland tends to be older, more domestically settled people hired from Microsoft/sometimes Amazon, so just demographically it’s no surprise that they don’t agitate as loudly for social justice.
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- disposable467 8y agoCorrect. There is debate from other places of course, but 99% of people just get on with their job and leave the arguments up to those in MTV who give a shit. MTV can be very blinkered - rightly or wrongly the people there forget that people outside of SV - let alone outside of the USA - exist.
- tanilama 8y agoMajority of its employees are in Bay Area, the rest of the offices are insignificant comparing to bay area.
- pxlpshr 8y agoThe sheer volume of news that comes across the wire every minute of every day is out of control. I was working in online media 5 years ago and the number of sites using bots to compile half-baked articles that a junior editor could quickly tweak to meet his 10+ article a day quota was disheartening. Again, that was 5 years ago. Now we have today's news automation capabilities + political drama + Facebook/Twitter/Slack/et al, and you've magnetized millions of consumers with a reality TV soap opera that has infected everything. Google is at the center, and so is Facebook and Twitter as distributors. They've all built information vacuums which tailor news & content based on your profiles, search intent, visit history, purchasing habits, and predictive attributes to target you. However, no matter how sophisticated the AI/ML becomes – the underlying program is still written by a human and expressed biases are engrained the day we're born. And, they will never go away. In a company and environment like today, I'm not sure how one can begin to escape the discussions around society and politics while operating an organization that has a larger GDP than Switzerland coupled with uncontested scale that touches nearly every person worldwide...
- charlysl 8y agoThis article lacks focus. It starts well, sticking to the headline, but then all kinds of stories we already know about Google and other tech giants start rolling in, on and on.
- jadedhacker 8y agoGood, let large powerful companies have robust internal debate. Suppressing it in the name of efficiency will lead to the kinds of terrible decisions industry is known for. Google is currently providing support for TensorFlow to assist the pentagon's drone assassination program. They ought to be taking a hard look at themselves.
- stephenitis 8y agoI might play devil's advocate from a, lessor of two evils, perspective and argue that supporting the Pentagon's use of tensorflow in this use case might lower the number of civilian casualties in a battle or wartime.
- perseusmandate 8y agoExtrajudicial killings aren't made legal by a half-assed Phil 101 utilitarianism argument. They are still in violation of human rights, international law, in some cases laws protecting American citizens. The argument you are espousing is the same one that justified the use of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus without anything to show for it.
- disposable467 8y agoPosting from a throwaway account for obvious reasons. There are a lot of internal discussion groups - it is just an internal Google groups thing so anyone can create a group about anything. Often they are purely work related (e.g. groups for specific tools/services/teams that people can join), but there are some that are not work related. I'd say that these sort of political debates are the extreme outliers. I've never encountered any significant political debate/argument during my 6 years at Google, but then I don't go looking for it on the groups. From my experience people at google are well-mannered, polite and respectful; disagreement of course occurs but is usually handled professionally without much fuss. What does happen though is that although we do have an online tool to vote up questions for the TGIF meetings, you get "regulars" who ask in-person questions at TGIF in Mountain View. These people are often fine, but there are a couple who clearly have their own political/moral axe to grind. I find these people the most irritating, since unlike the questions which have been voted up to the top on the online tool, they don't need votes to ask their questions. This can give their opinions -minority or majority held- more apparent credibility than they might otherwise deserve if it had been left to the online voting only. There is also a lot of focus from certain groups on purely US related things - e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or democratic in the HR system. These blinkered people asking these in-person questions in California don't realise that they live in one country, and that the political parties in that country aren't the same as the ones in others (most countries are not a two party polatised system like it is in the US) TL;Dr there are jerks if you go looking for them but 99.9% of the time yiu just do your job and no one wants to know or cares what your political or moral views are.
- john_moscow 8y ago>e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or democratic in the HR system. Sorry, what? You have to formally register your political views with the HR?
- asfasgasg 8y agoNo. Read it more carefully. There is someone who asks that they be allowed to register which political view they favor. There is no such system to actually register one's political views.
- grellas 8y agoTo all startup founders: if you think that any part of this mix of ethical infighting and jockeying for position among employees will be good for your venture, think again - do your business honestly and with integrity and focus single-mindedly on executing on a sound business model and the ethics will take care of itself. The rest is divisive and distracting. Perhaps Google is big and dominant enough to rise to a higher level but, for mere mortals, the tried and true way is probably the best.
- sero2nine 8y agoI have a job role that has brought me into regular contact with Google as an external partner for the last five years. I won’t go into specifics, other than to say that what used to be admiration has entirely faded. Their culture really turns me off. I am a mid-30’s white male, for the record. A few months ago, I visited one of their main campus locations. When I walked in the door, there was a group of female employees huddled in the lobby having some sort of private discussion. When they saw me walk in the door, I received what I can only describe as a “death glare” from them. I felt like I was walking into a junior high school cafeteria and interrupted the cheerleader table. It was at that level of childish tribalism and latent tension. I know this sounds thin skinned. I regularly have been involved with Amazon, Microsoft and others and never got a vibe approaching open cliquish behavior. I talked about it to some minority friends and their response was: “well maybe that is how minorities are used to being looked at in these environments.” I can’t remember ever giving anyone a death stare in my career because they were a minority or due to their gender. I wouldn’t work there.
- stephenitis 8y agoWith the description given, I think your argument is shallow. An Odd experience with one group of woman at one campus is unfortunuate but doesn't make for a good representation of ~88,000 full-time employees, the company culture, and a result of the policy in question.
- CardenB 8y agoExactly. I can't believe how many upvotes anecdata gets on HN so regularly these days.
- ignoramceisblis 8y agoIf you dismiss every data point (anecdote) you come across, one at a time, of course you can eventually say there's no pattern: you dismissed all of the data.
- rdtsc 8y ago> animals can be subject to prejudice just as people can, as part of the company’s “Talks at Google” series. Another group of employees said the topic was offensive to humans who face racism, and they protested. I read that a few times and I just fail to parse it. Can anyone explain the idea there. How are the topics connected? Is there something obvious I am missing or it is supposed to be satire which points that people can offended about anything. > The dilemma is especially striking at tech companies, which typically cast themselves as open meritocracies Not like all tech companies. Google milked morality perception for years "Don't be evil etc...". It has no doubt paid huge dividends. "We are not like those crusty old evil companies with suits and ties, we are young playful, cool and super-nice! Come join us!". Even though it is a huge tech giant which tracks millions of people, know what they email, what credit cards they use, what sites they visit, lobbies the government more than financial giants, defense contractors or telecom companies, somehow deep down the first instinct I have is still to think of it as cutesy little startup with colorful letters that does search better than AltaVista. A small underdog that everyone loves to root for. Their morality marketing is really that good. And well people bought into that propaganda and now they are finally paying for it internally. So animal rights activists are somehow fighting with racial justice ones. And besides getting invited to product management meetings, one gets invited to talks about how their coworkers sexually identify as "a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin". > The Google spokeswoman said an employee working on Talks at Google on a volunteer basis unilaterally made the decision to cancel the talk Aha, I think they are slowly, after great fanfare and drama, realizing that maybe the workplace should just be for work. People will just start objecting to any talks. Doesn't matter the topic, because with a few rhetorical tricks, an intelligent enough person can be offended (or claim to be offended) by anything.
- smsm42 8y ago> Can anyone explain the idea there The idea is that something being offensive is inherently subjective. If you claim being offended, you are offended. Offending people - at least people that Google management is inclined to listen to - is a no-no. Consequently, if you want to veto a speaker, you just need to proclaim your offense. There's no proof required because there's no proof possible - there's no objective test for being offended, only your feelings, of which you are the only judge. As soon as you decided to proclaim your veto, that's it, the deed is done. Why people at Google decided to veto PETA speaker - who knows. But there's no point in digging deeper than that and trying to find logic in it - there's no logic in this setup. > People will just start objecting to any talks. That'd work if the decision were impartial. But an anonymous "employee working on Talks at Google" doesn't have to be impartial.
- nodesocket 8y agoAs somebody who used to live in the bay area, for the most part there aren't debates and conversations to be had. If you are fiscally conservative or republican you are evil, racist, sexist, and have no moral compass. I find it comically hypocritical they claim to be inclusive and an open company. Alternative viewpoints are not accepted, and even if you can make logical arguments you are dismissed and bullied. Frankly a lot of the viewpoints in the bay are very extreme, and disconnected from the vast majority of American's.
- tanilama 8y ago> struggles to tame a workplace culture of nonstop debate Make them busy with overwhelming work
- kingkongjaffa 8y agoAs an outsider it sounds like the business culture is fractured and devolved into hives of politically correct virtue signalling.