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I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. On the "evil point h

I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. On the "evil point haired boss" level it seems these types of things like their internal message boards cause a lot of trouble for the company. On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff. Maybe Google just seems to get it's dirty laundry aired out. I've been working in this field for 20 years not including my internships in college and I've never worked any company that seemed to have as much of this weirdness as Google seems to. Maybe it's an artifact of them having a money printing machine and then a ton of employees who seem to work on items other than the money printing machine which don't really matter to the company's bottom line. From the outside it just seems like a never ending series of stories about ultra-toxic management.. all of which greatly exceed anything I've seen in my career.

takeout 7y ago
What do you mean by "internal social justice" stuff?
- ben7799 7y ago
  This current story does not sound like anything weird is going on but some of the stories it sounds like some employees spend a majority of their time setting up protests internally. It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.
  - Tade0 7y ago
    Perhaps they aren't and perhaps that's not relevant because they're not important enough. Tends to happen in large organisations.
  - Bayart 7y ago
    I'm guessing it's from people spending too much time at the company and having poor work/private life separation.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      Free food, laundry, gym, haircuts, recreation, a swim-in place swimming pool with a lifeguard...it's almost like Google sets it up to blur those work/private life lines.
- cj 7y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+google+employee+walkout+ai+retaliation https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...
- paulcole 7y ago
  It's code for anything that is unrelated to straight white males. Edit: Tell me I'm wrong lol.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - leereeves 7y ago
    Don't you see that you're reinforcing the image that "SJWs hate straight white males"?
    - paulcole 7y ago
      Sorry if I wasn’t clear: Anyone who uses SJW as a carefully chosen pejorative is the hateful one in these situations.
    - kupiakos 7y ago
      I think they're referring to specifically the trend that negative usage of the term SJW is usually by cishet (non-LGBT) white men regarding discussion of policies/politics that would not directly benefit them.
      - leereeves 7y ago
        Everyone is advocating policies that directly benefit them. It's only ever a problem for the left when straight white males do so. Surprisingly, straight white males are just like everyone else, advocating their own self-interest. That's not evil, that's natural.
        paulcole 7y ago
        AFAIK it’s possible to go against your natural urges and do things that benefit other people. We do live in a society and not a cave. I mean, it’s natural to hunt for my dinner but sometimes I have a salad instead of trapping and eating the neighbor’s cat.
GoodJokes 7y ago
Maybe you should care about what they are doing to their employees. What you experience might have something to do with your identity, which I don’t know.
grape_eater 7y ago
I work for Google, can confirm many of the points you've made. While I haven't experienced any toxicity at Google, your analysis of the internal communication culture raises really good points. On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were swiftly shut down. The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press. Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.
- buboard 7y ago
  Isn't that forum huge legal liability for the company if employees start suing each other?
- stcredzero 7y ago
  As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press. Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. It's not just scale in numbers of people. It's also scale in terms of the potential value which can be captured by viral campaigns and media attention. When a "scene" is out of the way and non-mainstream, there can be a high degree of trust. However, when the "scene" gets hot, and there's some serious money and power to be gained, the sociopaths and other bad actors start coming out of the woodwork. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
- ben7799 7y ago
rainyMammoth 7y ago
It seems to me that Google also attracts more far-left employees than any other big company. I find it extremely ironic that those employees accept to be employed by the biggest censorship machine ever made, being paid close to the highest salaries in tech and then complain and plan walkouts in order to virtue signal and feel good about themselves.
- malandrew 7y ago
  It's not really that ironic. Censorship can come from both the far-left and far-right. Both ends of the political spectrum tend towards authoritarianism.
- antepodius 7y ago
  Censorship's not really partisan. Whoever's in power has a motive to censor. Right now, the gatekeepers of the internet tilt left-wing; so it's left-wing censoring you see more of on the internet/in colleges. Back when the institutions were right wing, it was reversed.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Is it possible that having a way to internally air grievances has, up until recently, made it less likely for people to air their grievances outside the company?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 7y ago
I think the theory behind it is that when you're dissatisfied with an organization, you have two options: Voice (speak up and hope to change things from within) or Exit (leave the organization and find or found a new one). And at least when I was there, ~5 years ago, Google executives really, really wanted you to choose Voice. Because the history of Silicon Valley is basically built upon talented engineers choosing Exit and creating the company that eventually replaces you. Google itself was mostly built by people who did exactly that - its early (pre-2005) employees were practically a who's-who of alumni from Xerox Parc, Western Digital, Bell Labs, JPL, Netscape, Sun, and academia. I dunno if it's the same today - I chose Exit 5 years ago (and my grievances were a lot smaller than most of what I hear in the press today - I generally enjoyed my time there, I just didn't feel like it was a place where my professional goals could be accomplished), and a lot of the people I see Exiting recently are folks I thought were very committed to exercising their Voice when I was there. As a Google shareholder this makes me a little uneasy, but perhaps it's the nature of a corporation that internal dissent just doesn't work when you get to 100,000 employees.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  Also, "Voice" comes in two variants: Internally, or externally. Much more preferable for the company if employees complain on an internal board rather than Reddit, HN, or Blind.
  - drawkbox 7y ago
    Allowing "Voice" internally is a pressure release valve that is also stated inside the company as mentioned, so maybe issues can be fixed. In a way it is a bit like some democracy in a company rather than the usual authoritarian/dictatorial workplaces we have where usually dissent and opinions against the borg direction is stifled and attacked by the vogons. Democracy is also a pressure release valve that looks messy but doesn't blow up like authoritarianism does eventually. Better to let the proles, sharecroppers, and feudal peasants have their airing of grievances, fix if you can, if not find ways to route around the issues.
paulcole 7y ago
> it seems like employees waste a lot of time on ... all the internal social justice stuff The nerve.
alexashka 7y ago
People will talk regardless. I have to chuckle at this mindset of time wasted. What do you think people at Google do, work at an assembly line and are given an extra break to discuss things on a message board? Non-trivial work requires that you goof off at least half of the time. Regarding 'it's never happened to me' arguments. Please realize that the world is varied and complex. Basic statistics will tell you that in a group of 100k people, chances are, somebody is getting harassed legitimately, let alone thinking they are being harassed or treated unfairly. Why is that at all hard to believe? Give me any 100k population and I can write articles ranging from 'great success' to 'great discrimination' indefinitely. It's just basic odds.
rifung 7y ago
> On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff. I work at Google, opinions are my own. If anything, having your employees spend their time on a internal site seems like a great idea because even their fun time is spent "within" the company. It's not like the alternative is they just don't do things besides work.. the alternative is they spend that time on HN, Reddit, or Youtube
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  There are also numerous third-party places one could hang out and discuss exactly the same things. The infamous Border Patrol facebook group comes to mind. At least Google leadership can see what people are saying.
groundlogic 7y ago
12-20 years ago, one of my largest life goals was to work for Google. (It's not anymore. I found other fun and rewarding jobs.) I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  The whole country is rather politicized (some of it actually violent). Google doesn't force employees to pretend that's not the case. Maybe a good idea, maybe bad.
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    In hindsight.. it seems like it could become their downfall. It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking? Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround. I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.
    - edmundsauto 7y ago
      Perhaps they couldn't stop it, or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit? Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral? That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?
      - groundlogic 7y ago
        > Perhaps they couldn't stop it Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.) > or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit? No-one apart from you is calling this tampering. > Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?
paganel 7y ago
The employees creating memes on the company’s time is not the issue here, the issue is active discrimination against pregnant women at said company.
- jvagner 7y ago
  Scrolled down pretty far to catch this point being elevated.
Alex3917 7y ago
> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. They have to by law. If they don't take active measures to prevent their employees from talking about non-work things during work, which they don't, then by law they aren't allowed to prevent them from organizing for better working conditions during work.
saagarjha 7y ago
> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. They're not the only large company that does this; I think companies allow this because they know that employees will end up making memes anyways and it's a lot better that they end up on an internal board than an ad-hoc external one. (Aside: I'm not sure some of the people making those "memes" understood how they're supposed to work. The puffin one is a misuse of the template…)
kaitai 7y ago
I don't understand what the f(*& kind of message board this is where a person says, "Hey, I'm having concerning health symptoms & me & my baby might die" and her manager says, "You're not meeting expectations as a manager, all of a sudden!" and this is called "internal social justice stuff". Complications of pregnancy involving hemorrhage and an early C-section are serious and not really a "management style" issue, and I don't understand why this discussion instead focuses on "dirty laundry", "internal social justice stuff", "wast[ing] a lot of time on these internal sites," "creat[ing] Memes on company time".
nitwit005 7y ago
Used to work at Salesforce, which has it's own social network thing called Chatter. The most popular group internally was Airing of Greavances (Seinfeld joke), which was entirely to gripe. The management has been asked about the group a few times, and they've noted it all ends up on glassdoor anyways. Old article from 2012 where it is brought up: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of-grievances-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of... They did seem to get a lot of value out of that group over time. They had some people monitoring it and legitimately tried to fix some of the complaints (not always successfully, of course).
JetSpiegel 7y ago
> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.

takeout 7y ago

What do you mean by "internal social justice" stuff?

ben7799 7y ago
This current story does not sound like anything weird is going on but some of the stories it sounds like some employees spend a majority of their time setting up protests internally. It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.
- Tade0 7y ago
  Perhaps they aren't and perhaps that's not relevant because they're not important enough. Tends to happen in large organisations.
- Bayart 7y ago
  I'm guessing it's from people spending too much time at the company and having poor work/private life separation.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    Free food, laundry, gym, haircuts, recreation, a swim-in place swimming pool with a lifeguard...it's almost like Google sets it up to blur those work/private life lines.
cj 7y ago
https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+google+employee+walkout+ai+retaliation https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...
paulcole 7y ago
It's code for anything that is unrelated to straight white males. Edit: Tell me I'm wrong lol.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 7y ago
  Don't you see that you're reinforcing the image that "SJWs hate straight white males"?
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Sorry if I wasn’t clear: Anyone who uses SJW as a carefully chosen pejorative is the hateful one in these situations.
  - kupiakos 7y ago
    I think they're referring to specifically the trend that negative usage of the term SJW is usually by cishet (non-LGBT) white men regarding discussion of policies/politics that would not directly benefit them.
    - leereeves 7y ago
      Everyone is advocating policies that directly benefit them. It's only ever a problem for the left when straight white males do so. Surprisingly, straight white males are just like everyone else, advocating their own self-interest. That's not evil, that's natural.
      - paulcole 7y ago
        AFAIK it’s possible to go against your natural urges and do things that benefit other people. We do live in a society and not a cave. I mean, it’s natural to hunt for my dinner but sometimes I have a salad instead of trapping and eating the neighbor’s cat.

GoodJokes 7y ago

Maybe you should care about what they are doing to their employees. What you experience might have something to do with your identity, which I don’t know.

grape_eater 7y ago

I work for Google, can confirm many of the points you've made. While I haven't experienced any toxicity at Google, your analysis of the internal communication culture raises really good points. On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were swiftly shut down. The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press. Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.

buboard 7y ago
Isn't that forum huge legal liability for the company if employees start suing each other?
stcredzero 7y ago
As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press. Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. It's not just scale in numbers of people. It's also scale in terms of the potential value which can be captured by viral campaigns and media attention. When a "scene" is out of the way and non-mainstream, there can be a high degree of trust. However, when the "scene" gets hot, and there's some serious money and power to be gained, the sociopaths and other bad actors start coming out of the woodwork. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
ben7799 7y ago

rainyMammoth 7y ago

It seems to me that Google also attracts more far-left employees than any other big company. I find it extremely ironic that those employees accept to be employed by the biggest censorship machine ever made, being paid close to the highest salaries in tech and then complain and plan walkouts in order to virtue signal and feel good about themselves.

malandrew 7y ago
It's not really that ironic. Censorship can come from both the far-left and far-right. Both ends of the political spectrum tend towards authoritarianism.
antepodius 7y ago
Censorship's not really partisan. Whoever's in power has a motive to censor. Right now, the gatekeepers of the internet tilt left-wing; so it's left-wing censoring you see more of on the internet/in colleges. Back when the institutions were right wing, it was reversed.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Is it possible that having a way to internally air grievances has, up until recently, made it less likely for people to air their grievances outside the company?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nostrademons 7y ago

I think the theory behind it is that when you're dissatisfied with an organization, you have two options: Voice (speak up and hope to change things from within) or Exit (leave the organization and find or found a new one). And at least when I was there, ~5 years ago, Google executives really, really wanted you to choose Voice. Because the history of Silicon Valley is basically built upon talented engineers choosing Exit and creating the company that eventually replaces you. Google itself was mostly built by people who did exactly that - its early (pre-2005) employees were practically a who's-who of alumni from Xerox Parc, Western Digital, Bell Labs, JPL, Netscape, Sun, and academia. I dunno if it's the same today - I chose Exit 5 years ago (and my grievances were a lot smaller than most of what I hear in the press today - I generally enjoyed my time there, I just didn't feel like it was a place where my professional goals could be accomplished), and a lot of the people I see Exiting recently are folks I thought were very committed to exercising their Voice when I was there. As a Google shareholder this makes me a little uneasy, but perhaps it's the nature of a corporation that internal dissent just doesn't work when you get to 100,000 employees.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
Also, "Voice" comes in two variants: Internally, or externally. Much more preferable for the company if employees complain on an internal board rather than Reddit, HN, or Blind.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Allowing "Voice" internally is a pressure release valve that is also stated inside the company as mentioned, so maybe issues can be fixed. In a way it is a bit like some democracy in a company rather than the usual authoritarian/dictatorial workplaces we have where usually dissent and opinions against the borg direction is stifled and attacked by the vogons. Democracy is also a pressure release valve that looks messy but doesn't blow up like authoritarianism does eventually. Better to let the proles, sharecroppers, and feudal peasants have their airing of grievances, fix if you can, if not find ways to route around the issues.

paulcole 7y ago

> it seems like employees waste a lot of time on ... all the internal social justice stuff The nerve.

alexashka 7y ago

People will talk regardless. I have to chuckle at this mindset of time wasted. What do you think people at Google do, work at an assembly line and are given an extra break to discuss things on a message board? Non-trivial work requires that you goof off at least half of the time. Regarding 'it's never happened to me' arguments. Please realize that the world is varied and complex. Basic statistics will tell you that in a group of 100k people, chances are, somebody is getting harassed legitimately, let alone thinking they are being harassed or treated unfairly. Why is that at all hard to believe? Give me any 100k population and I can write articles ranging from 'great success' to 'great discrimination' indefinitely. It's just basic odds.

rifung 7y ago

> On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff. I work at Google, opinions are my own. If anything, having your employees spend their time on a internal site seems like a great idea because even their fun time is spent "within" the company. It's not like the alternative is they just don't do things besides work.. the alternative is they spend that time on HN, Reddit, or Youtube

compiler-guy 7y ago
There are also numerous third-party places one could hang out and discuss exactly the same things. The infamous Border Patrol facebook group comes to mind. At least Google leadership can see what people are saying.

groundlogic 7y ago

12-20 years ago, one of my largest life goals was to work for Google. (It's not anymore. I found other fun and rewarding jobs.) I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.

lallysingh 7y ago
The whole country is rather politicized (some of it actually violent). Google doesn't force employees to pretend that's not the case. Maybe a good idea, maybe bad.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  In hindsight.. it seems like it could become their downfall. It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking? Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround. I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    Perhaps they couldn't stop it, or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit? Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral? That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?
    - groundlogic 7y ago
      > Perhaps they couldn't stop it Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.) > or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit? No-one apart from you is calling this tampering. > Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?

paganel 7y ago

The employees creating memes on the company’s time is not the issue here, the issue is active discrimination against pregnant women at said company.

jvagner 7y ago
Scrolled down pretty far to catch this point being elevated.

Alex3917 7y ago

> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. They have to by law. If they don't take active measures to prevent their employees from talking about non-work things during work, which they don't, then by law they aren't allowed to prevent them from organizing for better working conditions during work.

saagarjha 7y ago

> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. They're not the only large company that does this; I think companies allow this because they know that employees will end up making memes anyways and it's a lot better that they end up on an internal board than an ad-hoc external one. (Aside: I'm not sure some of the people making those "memes" understood how they're supposed to work. The puffin one is a misuse of the template…)

kaitai 7y ago

I don't understand what the f(*& kind of message board this is where a person says, "Hey, I'm having concerning health symptoms & me & my baby might die" and her manager says, "You're not meeting expectations as a manager, all of a sudden!" and this is called "internal social justice stuff". Complications of pregnancy involving hemorrhage and an early C-section are serious and not really a "management style" issue, and I don't understand why this discussion instead focuses on "dirty laundry", "internal social justice stuff", "wast[ing] a lot of time on these internal sites," "creat[ing] Memes on company time".

nitwit005 7y ago

Used to work at Salesforce, which has it's own social network thing called Chatter. The most popular group internally was Airing of Greavances (Seinfeld joke), which was entirely to gripe. The management has been asked about the group a few times, and they've noted it all ends up on glassdoor anyways. Old article from 2012 where it is brought up: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of-grievances-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of... They did seem to get a lot of value out of that group over time. They had some people monitoring it and legitimately tried to fix some of the complaints (not always successfully, of course).

JetSpiegel 7y ago

> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.