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Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech

255 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

obese_by_nature 7y ago
Pichai is no saint either having supported a Saudi dictator. I think most people would agree that Google is doing things that are far from the greater good. Because it's a public company it will always feel the pressure to do more unethical things.
tumetab1 7y ago
Notice, this is long article. Around 12 000 words or 30 pages.
- molteanu 7y ago
  It's endless and it doesn't get to the point.
  - tantalor 7y ago
    What is the point?
    - HillaryBriss 7y ago
      I think the article tries to make the following case: 1. There's a ton of dissatisfaction in the Google employee base 2. It's distracting company management and hurting the company core mission (making cash) 3. It won't go away any time soon (FWIW, I believe the case is overstated.)
    - jonbronson 7y ago
      That the company culture ain't what it used to be.
- jmkni 7y ago
  I generally enjoy longform journalism but this is an exhausting read. May have been better as a series of articles.
- notacoward 7y ago
  Does Wired even have editors? Any editor who's not incompetent beyond belief would have told Nitasha Tiku that it's not necessary to include every single detail from three years' worth of notes. In fact, the excess verbiage makes it less impactful than it could have been. A good editor would have trimmed this to one half or even one third of its current length, and it would have been better without the bloat.
  - jcranberry 7y ago
    Don't be ridiculous. The New Yorker regularly has articles of this length if not longer. It's ordinary longform journalism.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      There's nothing wrong with something being longer if the content warrants it. Complex topics require lengthy exposition. But that requires the writer to write, to arrange and connect things into a coherent narrative. That's not what happened here. This is a thin article, padded out to novella length with repetition and irrelevancy. Again, it's not bad that the article exists. It just needed a better editor.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Google will have no problem identifying the infidel based on a phrasing analysis.
molteanu 7y ago
Read the 1st part. Didn't understand a thing. What is this article about, anyway?
- Traubenfuchs 7y ago
  > What is this article about, anyway? Privileged people making lots of of money acting like spoiled kids despite having limitless alternative options.
  - molteanu 7y ago
    Got it. Skiping it. Thanks for the tldr.
- checktheorder 7y ago
  >What is this article about, anyway? It's about 12000 words long.
ryanmercer 7y ago
There's algae in the tube feeding the ice machine in my company's break room, multiple wet ceiling tiles all year long, signs telling us to literally not wipe our feces on the walls in the bathroom, shared desks with other shifts, a constant smell of mold and I make 35k a year, no chance of promotion at all without taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to get a 4-year degree in literally anything, at a rabidly anti-union company, in a state where an employee can basically fire you for no reason at all. Man, I wish I had the problems of these Goooglers. Sure, sexism and racial discrimination is bad bad bad, but this happens at the vast majority of employers. If I and/or my co-workers tried to do one of these walkouts, security would be there when we came back to take our badges and tell us to leave or the police would be called. I find it extremely difficult to feel any sympathy for these folks because they have it much better than I do, and extremely better than millions of people in the United States and billions of people worldwide. A cursory Google search (ha, maybe I should have used Bing) on-site physicians, paid PATERNITY leave, death benefits, leave of absence to pursue education, having Google on your CV probably helps tremendously if you try and get a job somewhere else, Google allows employees to spend 20% of their time pursuing a project that they are passionate about, apparently Googlers can bring their pets to work, have access to all sorts of other benefits like shuttles/food/recreation that simply do not exist for the vast majority of people in the world. The lifter in my work chair has been broken for years now, it has recently started tilting to the left as well, it is 12 years old. Our windows 10 upgrade removed a functional calculator, something I use every few minutes, requiring me to either buy a calculator or use Google for work-related maths. There are 3 microwaves and 2 small refrigerators for 100~ employees. In the winter the upper 60's are not uncommon in the office with the upper 70's and lower 80's not uncommon in the summer with business casual dress mandatory. Need to go to the doctor, be prepared to at least take a half day which you have to request well in advance most of the time with about a month and a half blacked out every year where no one can take time off. Need a personal day, well you better fake sick and call in and if you call in 2-3x in a 6 month period you're now on their radar and risking verbal warning territory. I'm sorry, but I just can't feel sorry for them.
- kace91 7y ago
  > signs telling us to lierally not wipe our feces on the walls in the bathroom This is not like the other details. What the hell caused that?
buboard 7y ago
This is so sad. You should guys all quit in protest. You deserve better than this. I mean it, goo
- java-man 7y ago
  goo is listening!
peterwwillis 7y ago
> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. A cute meme that people like to repeat because it 'sounds right', not really accurate. Gmail was someone's pet project, Earth was purchased, and Translate was a boring statistical analysis program for 10 years. I mean, really, how "wild" does your mind have to be to write a crappy CRUD app or design an algorithm?
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  You're being downvoted but I agree with you. Most of the work here at Google is frankly of the very boring day to day software engineering slog -- bisecting crashes, fixing emergency issues, reading and writing long documents. Coddled geniuses doesn't really describe how things get done. It's more like, keep the geniuses (or not-geniuses) coddled, so they don't get annoyed with doing what is really not-very-sexy work :-)
- Traubenfuchs 7y ago
  To me, Google Maps/Earth seems to be one of the most advanced web apps in the world. Gmail and Translate are, indeed, not extremely exciting.
  - jcheng 7y ago
    At the time Gmail was introduced, it's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and influential it was. Totally raised the bar for web apps everywhere by making effective use of XHR, which at that time was hardly known even to web developers. An absurdly large amount of storage space (1GB when Hotmail was 10MB, IIRC?), fast and effective search. There's a reason Google was the most loved and respected company in tech for years, and IMHO Gmail was a huge part of that.
    - peterwwillis 7y ago
      But does it really take a coddled genius whose mind runs wild to develop a modern web app and give it lots of storage space? Or was it just a cool idea that a team of regular-old software developers decided to implement?
yourbandsucks 7y ago
There's some kind of lesson here. 99% of other companies, especially big companies, do way less than Google to accommodate social justice activists. Yet they seem to be least happy at Google. Buddha was onto something about human nature.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Can you expand on the last sentence? I don't understand how it connects with the rest.
  - cromka 7y ago
    If I recall correctly, it's about that human beings should be rewarded for their work adequately, not in abundance.
  - yourbandsucks 7y ago
    Desire is the root of suffering. They've got the paychecks, the perks, and even their politics are constantly validated. But they're not happy.
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      I hope you don't mind me riffing on this idea. I'm very much compatible with this mindset, but in the case of those pursuing social justice, and still suffering, I think there is something more. I have a colleague who ran into a software design problem lately. He is looking at all of the apparent possible options and none of them seem like they will result in good code. He's gone on the internet to see if someone else knows the solution to the problem, with no luck. Then he's spent time to see if anyone has written any frameworks that solve this problem. While some claim to have solved the problem, a purusal of the code show the cure to be at least as bad as the the disease. What can he do? To me, this is the same kind of problem with the same kind of result. When we first see a problem, or instinct is to go and look for a solution. We go to experts to find out what the answer is. We look at proven best practices in order to find out what we need to do. Strangely, though, the advice of the experts and the best practices often lead to situations that are at least as bad as our original problem. Why? The reason is that we are taking an internal problem and looking for external answers. Buddha said that life is suffering. This is not to say that we should give up and have a defeatist attitude, I think. It's more that you just can't escape it: life is suffering. And code is bad. (In case you are wondering just how crazy I can be, I once gave a talk in public about how code is literally karma ;-) ). We have to accept the suffering first (or bad code) and then start "acting skillfully". There isn't an external answer that will solve our problems. The guru on the mountain doesn't have the answer because they don't know what the question is. The carefully built system does not work for our issue, because our issue never existed when the system was built. One of the things I've found about people pursuing social justice is that, on average, they tend to be intelligent people. The more they pursue the justice, and the more the society gives them leeway to do so, the more unhappy they get -- because they discover that their answer is not matched with the problem they are trying to solve. All of that energy has been put forward to solve the problem and they very slowly learn that they might not have the correct problem. Of course some people are always blind and they keep burning the witches, even finding new witches to burn after they run out of the first ones. However, I have found that the majority get really unhappy the farther they progress down this road.
segmondy 7y ago
My eyes are hurting from seeing these articles whining about their misery while collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Most companies have issues, and these issues are not "Company" issues but PEOPLE issues. Once you're large enough, you are going to have people with differing opinions, beliefs and values. These are going to clash. If you happen to be on the losing side and don't learn to accept it, you will find yourself miserable. Accept it and solider on to change if you truly believe in your fight. There are folks out there working minimum wage jobs who are truly miserable, back breaking labor, standing on their feet all day, standing in the hot sun or out in the cold weather, avoiding dangerous machinery and avoiding trying to be maimed or worse loose their life. Dealing with stupid harassment and constant abuse from their boss who makes a $1 more above minimum wage. Folks out there are really going through it. It doesn't mean that we don't have tough challenges in tech, but we have become spoiled and a bunch of whiners. The majority of the population are outside the industry and they roll their eyes when these type of articles come out and these incessant complaints don't endear them to us.
- wruza 7y ago
  In developer words, it’s zeroth world problems.
- high_derivative 7y ago
  My inside-FAAMNG experience has been that most employees seem to be not interested in the politics and are primarily focused on doing good work (people in their 20s), or on putting in their 8 hours and going home to their families (people >30 mostly, of course they also want to do good work, just have additional new priorities in a young family). Then there is a vocal minority who leverage that no individual's performance really affects the money printing machine. They blatantly view the company and its resources as a means to further their political goals. They come across as incredibly entitled and tone-deaf against the actual working class or people actually suffering from oppression (say, women being incarcerated in Iran for decades for taking off their veils, or protesters in HK). No matter how petty and entitled the request, anything denied is interpreted as some larger act of "violence" against them. What I didn't/don't understand is why management allowed that to happen. Either they actually believe in the political goals themselves, are afraid of the conflict, or believe it just does not matter for the company. I think what management fails to understand often is that giving in to a demand is not viewed with gratitude but merely as accepting what's naturally right and good. In other words, giving in to demands 1..n does not give you credit when demand n+1 is posed. The ultimate conflict is just delayed.
nvk 7y ago
What's the TL;DR? Spend 5 min reading the first few blocks couldn't make out what's this about.
chadlavi 7y ago
Google doesn't even pay well enough to treat people poorly. They're wagering an awful lot on the premise that working for Google is prestigious enough to sustainably attract and retain talent. Meanwhile a smaller tech startup will pay better and give you way more of a hand in shaping the product, and maybe even not work you 80+hours a week. I'm not sure what the appeal of the big names is for devs.
- trevyn 7y ago
  A smaller tech startup only pays better if you pick the right one and it has an exit. One appeal of the big names is exactly that — name recognition. It does a lot for the ego when everyone you meet knows that your employer provides free massages and a sushi bar for lunch.
  - chadlavi 7y ago
    Free massages and sushi bars don't pay rent! And I'm not talking about mythical exit money, I'm talking about cold hard biweekly salary. I make more money at a small startup than it seems I would make at Google, for example.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      I think your situation is more unusual than you think. Small startups vary a lot in what they pay, and in what they can afford to pay. Mostly it's lower than FAANG pay.
    - mrep 7y ago
      You sure about that [0]? [0]: https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/
    - jeen02 7y ago
      95% of small tech startups won't pay anywhere near what Google would offer.
    - mav3rick 7y ago
notacoward 7y ago
> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. That statement needs to be challenged. The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great. I believe this boundary-less freedom to focus on whatever's most interesting and ignore everything else is why issues like privacy and social impact have been routinely shortchanged at companies like Google and Facebook. We've seen where that leads. (It leads to some characteristic technical problems too but that's not the topic right now.) "Don't be evil" and similar promises don't fulfill themselves. At FAANG scale, sticking to such promises requires a certain amount of focus and discipline every working moment, not just a few people spending more time on internal groups/lists than doing technical work. I know that's going to rub most employees at those companies the wrong way, but that doesn't make it untrue. P.S. I work at one of those companies. I do know how they work, and I'm not criticizing for criticism's sake. I'm trying to get at what I think is necessary for me and my colleagues to better ourselves and do things we can be proud of.
- throwaway77384 7y ago
  That statement needs to be challenged. The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great. Your whole post seems to be very reasonable, but there is one thing I'd like to mention, which is that you will immediately run into problems if you have rigid standards for what constitutes a "genius" and who is part of the just "the normal engineers". A "genius" can't very easily be defined. Historical examples like Mozart or Einstein make it easy to think that there are only a few geniuses whose talent is immediately entirely obvious to everyone, and the rest of society is merely average. That is not true. To bring that kind of potential about in many people who thought they were not geniuses prior to encountering an environment where their skills are fostered is one of the greatest advantages a company could possibly have. Some might just call this "good HR", or "caring about people". I have worked in companies where there were people who truly cared about their employees and about their strengths (and who could not afford the obvious "geniuses") and who thus almost "created" these geniuses. I know there are many ways in which I am simplifying this and I know that no company should try to employ purely geniuses. I have worked in a small team of six "very, very advanced" people in their respective fields. It was basically impossible to create any kind of cohesion. I would suspect it would be similar with other teams of "geniuses". Maybe not, but I think you are overall right in what you say, but it is so incredibly important to understand that the lines between a "genius" and a "run of the mill" developer may be more blurred than most people expect.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Wow, that was a fun read - a reminder why I support Wired with a digital subscription. I have some sympathy for Google, as flawed as they sometimes might be. I base this on experience working as a contractor at Google and also having just retired from a job managing a deep learning team at a large financial institution. Both companies seemed (to me) to make a large effort in diversity, ethics, etc. training and a general atmosphere of fairness. That said, problems occur in large organizations. Really off topic, but I dream of a world with smaller corporations, a more decentralized world. I don’t know how we are going to get there.
jorblumesea 7y ago
Do Google employees understand that most people hate their jobs and you work because you have to?
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in action.
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    I never know how seriously to take Maslow. It resonates intuitively for some people I guess. But he just made the theory up. There's not a lot of scientific evidence to support it. "In their extensive review of research based on Maslow's theory, Wahba and Bridwell found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Cr...
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      it would be very difficult to convince me that maslow's hierarchy is wrong. I don't mean the specifics of the hierarchy, but the idea behind it. Sure, maybe the specific hierarchy isn't right, but the idea that some needs have to be satisfied before a person can contribute to other needs is absolutely spot on. I know this from life experience. So to convince me that the underlying idea is wrong would take a hell of a lot of evidence.
pcstl 7y ago
I find it somewhat hypocritical that this article describes Google as a safe haven of dissent and open discussion, while it is pretty unanimous that expressing even slightly right-of-center opinions at Google will have you ostracized and possibly fired.
- esoterica 7y ago
  I'm willing to bet you have a pretty wild idea about what "slightly right of center" means. The most recent "conservative" Googler in the news whining about being fired (Cernekee) was an open white supremacist.
  - theflyinghorse 7y ago
    I'll bite just because I'm curious. I support strong border control and Canadian style immigration (point based/merit based). Where on the spectrum do you believe this idea lies?
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  Google circa 2010 and Google circa 2019 are very different companies.
  - bogwog 7y ago
    The article did a good job of explaining the events that led to that. Basically just a bunch of internal controversies involving shit-slinging, leaks, and basically what has become the standard for internet discussion in the past few years have combined to erode the trust and protections employees had to openly discuss even their far-right/left beliefs without retaliation.
- jayd16 7y ago
  I can't really speak from experience but almost certainly it follows that open dissent will be greeted with open dissent. As for retaliation, that's something else.
- einpoklum 7y ago
andrew_ 7y ago
It's disappointing that the author didn't take the opportunity to choose language that didn't provide a distinct slant to the article. An objective tone would have been totally achievable and this would've been marked as a fairly good summation of a rather tumultuous few years for the giant.
- techslave 7y ago
  that’s not what wired is about. don’t be disappointed at the author.
- jonbronson 7y ago
  Spot on. It was an otherwise very thorough retelling of the Google timeline.
- humanrebar 7y ago
  But half-credit for the summary of Demore's views. It was surprisingly even handed about that other than saying he thought women were per se neurotic. Tonally, it is telling that some personalities had descriptions of their emotional states (from what source?) while others only had their actions and opinions described.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    There's no way of knowing from the outside, but this seems relevant: "For this article, WIRED spoke with 47 current and former Google employees. Most of them requested anonymity."
  - manfredo 7y ago
    One key misrepresentation: > In the memo, Damore wrote that hiring practices aimed to increase diversity “can effectively lower the bar” at Google. Damore wrote that Google "...lowered the bar by reducing the false negative rate." Unsurprisingly, almost every news outlet chopped off the last 6 works of the sentence.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    fwiw, "neurotic" in the way he used it was specifically the psychology definition, where it's one of the main personality traits in people. The popular definition doesn't really match this.
deskamess 7y ago
I have a feeling Amazon would not tolerate this level of push back to products and business strategy (and they have the corresponding "don't care" reputation!). Google management seems to give in so much and if you are a GOOG shareholder you could have a real case here (re the Maven project). [Disclosure: I am not a GOOG shareholder]. Management has to keep the interests of the company at heart - they are legally bound to do whats best for the company. One could argue that getting involved in AI+Warfare is bad for the image of the company, but the revenue it brings in as well as getting an entry into defense dollars would be a huge benefit for its nascent cloud division. Whether you like it or not, employees will have personal opinions and it is great to accommodate their expression of such opinions. However, as a public company, GOOG management has legal obligations too. As conflicts with and demands of management increase, and it impacts revenue, we shall see top level management excuse themselves from interacting this openly with employees. Unfortunately, more open and liberal companies are also more susceptible to such attacks and lawsuits when compared to a corp that is more authoritarian.
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  For a company like Google, which is highly dependent on getting and keeping highly skilled tech workers, "What is good for the company" often involves keeping employees happy. Google got to where it is by aspiring to have the best working conditions available, and much of its talent came for that reason. You can build companies other ways--just like Amazon did--but changing that deal out from under the employees who came based on that deal would be quite disruptive and result in turmoil during the transition. Would things be better for the company coming out the other side of such a transition? Hard to say, but the costs would be quite high.
  - mrzacarias 7y ago
    Yup, I think that summarizes what is happening there
- Despegar 7y ago
  Google is effectively controlled by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt through their voting shares. In fact the stated reason for having a dual class of shares was so they can "manage the company for the long run".
LMYahooTFY 7y ago
As of now the most popular comments here seem to decry the notion that anyone making six figures could ever relay an experience of misery. This is utterly non-sensical. The article, to me, seems to imply that perhaps working at a radically free corporation doesn't yield pure bliss and benefit. Is there some reason this article needs to balance out any possible misery with all the luxurious amenities Googlers enjoy? Does anyone actually think that it's not possible someone could have a miserable experience at Google?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- buboard 7y ago
  > that it's not possible someone could have a miserable experience at Google? I think that. Google employees are at the top of the pyramid, so if the article was true, they would have left for an almost identical salary nearby. The fact that they don't means that either google pays way above its direct competitors (it doesnt) or these people are outright lying, and their actions speak louder than 12k words
  - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
    I disagree. Concluding that because they don't "just switch jobs" means they're being dishonest seems very flippant. In fact, the idea that any organization on the planet could be exclusively a place where only happiness exists, and no one could be misfit, is patently absurd. I see an implication in your response that money buys happiness and there are no other significant factors worth mentioning. Am I wrong?
  - everythingswan 7y ago
    Fong-Jones, Whittaker, and Stapleton did resign as per this story.
    - lizthegrey 7y ago
      hi, I'm at honeycomb.io now, and having a blast! :)
izzydata 7y ago
I don't think "misery" isn't the right word here.
kaitai 7y ago
Lots of folks here are complaining there's no TL;DR, and I find that many of the comments (including my previous comment here) are essentially irrelevant to the article & simply rehashing the same old things we always talk about on HN... getting to be like old married people here.... So here's my TL;DR, in an effort to refocus the conversation to what I think is interesting about the article. * First, the article does not discuss personal misery at all, so if you're talking about rich people whining about their problems, notice you're in old-married-people conversation mode, having an irrelevant yet comfortable and reassuring conversation. * The article is long and has a broad arc, contrasting "don't be evil" with 1) Google's steps and missteps in China, 2) Google's tensions with the US government, and 3) Google's controversies over sexual harassment payouts and the Damore memo (HN's favorite!). 1 & 2) The article alternates employee walkouts over the Trump travel ban (tension with US gov), the initial entry into the Chinese market (tension with the employees and the US gov), the exit from the Chinese market (Google employees in China sad, US employees joyful), the Maven project (working for US Dept of Def, trying to downplay it to employees), the political backlash for dropping Maven (US Gov: Google is evil & unpatriotic), and the Dragonfly project for bringing Google back to China (unpatriotic like I said right?). * The geopolitical push and pull is discussed in terms of employee opinions and government opinions. The harassment and diversity issues are discussed in terms of employee opinions and media and internet opinions/doxxing/etc. The larger idea is to compare the internal and external forces pushing on Google and Alphabet's C-suite and examine where they're going. So. Do you think the comparison of internal activism re: Dragonfly & Maven to internal activism re: the harassment payouts is warranted? To what extent should Google be following the lead of its employees, and how should it do that when employees disagree? Do capitalism and "not being evil" fundamentally conflict?
- humanrebar 7y ago
  The only thing the article conspicuously omits is that the controversies were regularly hashed out on HN, Reddit, etc. A Martian reading the article might assume the controversy mostly stayed on Google internal platforms and right-wing corners of the internet. As you point out, that was clearly not the case.
MGzBezycyjEQrk5 7y ago
lesson learned: large companies can afford to be wasteful. google can afford to fight all these ideological battles and employee spats because of their large revenue. If they weren't raking in so much dough, I doubt they would be willing to humor employees complaints on the scale cited in Wired (an entire social network for employees and supported by the company?). I'm sure similar incidents occur at other large corporations. They definitely happen at mid-sized companies, albeit with lower intensity. working in HR for google must be quite the safari
- skybrian 7y ago
  Well, yes, and there are lots of other things Google can do because they have so much money, like their various research projects. But remember that Google+ was a company-wide initiative intended to compete with Facebook, which is kind of a big deal. Yes, they had lots of money to throw at it, but it was for a purpose. The internal version was originally for testing. (Also, the business version of Google+ is still a product as part of G suite.)
JeremyBanks 7y ago
The comments here, paraphrased: those entitled tech they don’t know how much better they have it than people under oppressive governments, how dare they use their position to try to prevent their companies from helping oppressive governments!
serioussecurity 7y ago
Everyone here seems to think that if you have a good job you shouldn't be involved in labor organizing, because everyone else has it worse? Isn't the point that everyone should be organizing because working conditions everywhere are much worse than they could be, and the organizing at Google is a case study for how organizing works at one particularly unusual company?
- ummonk 7y ago
  Furthermore, those who have a good job are the most empowered to organize because they don't have to worry about how they will put bread on the table.
seren 7y ago
This is the most shocking part > “the only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to no-platform all of them.” Shouldn't it rather be the heads of the hydra ?
- waqf 7y ago
  Gorgons have snakes growing from their hair and presumably that's what's being referred to (though I agree that the author of the quote is probably confused). But "the medusa" is also an error at another level, because one should write either "Medusa" or "the gorgon". Medusa was the name of a specific gorgon.
sudosteph 7y ago
I sense there are certain parallels between this article and the one recently on HN about the challenges at Yale. As an "outsider" to both Yale and Google, I admit the problems in both cases seem over-wrought, but I can't deny that the people involved feel very emotionally invested so I am still curious to see what can be learned. Both articles present insider perspectives lamenting how internal conflicts within highly exclusive organizations were pushed into the public sphere through leaking and protesting. Both organizations are experiencing disconnects between people in various roles (admins vs students, execs vs employees) and a sense of loss of culture. So my thoughts are: - is this a generational culture shift? Less trust in internal systems and better access to outside publishing means young people aren't making a real effort to stay within the system to discuss? - is "internal transparency" an impossible thing at scale in the modern era? Keeping things internally private doesn't work because you only need one bad actor out of thousands to leak everything? - are the culture of Yale and Google really that special, or were they just really well marketed? Why are people so personally and emotionally invested in these organisations? Are all big orgs like this now, or were the cultures at these particular spots just well evolved for loyal following?
- skybrian 7y ago
  We're reading about them because they are the center of attention and they leak. But I also have a sense that lots of things that were considered positives in the early days of the Internet have become negatives, or are simply taken for granted. For example, growth was once considered good, but now it's bad. Giving services away for free is ho-hum at best and maybe suspicious. Trying to fix Internet problems is greeted with deep suspicion based solely on who is doing it. Personalization was once good, but now it's bad. And so on. That's inevitably going to result in a different internal culture at an Internet company than back in the days when Google's search engine first appeared on the Internet and got near-universal respect.
malicioususer11 7y ago
yo have u guiz seen da social network lololol. :3
tempsolution 7y ago
"if Damore had applied the same arguments to race" Yeah right, because gender and race are interchangeable. Because the difference between women and man are the same as having a different skin color or culture. LOL. And people like this actually made it to be the top Google executives. What a joke.
irinai13 7y ago
Tried to read article. It's long and meandering, lede is buried. Is there a TLDR somewhere?
lunias 7y ago
happiness = reality - expectations
- OrgNet 7y ago
  if you expect reality, you have zero happiness?
  - lunias 7y ago
    Yes, but I interpret it as: you'd be content; no positive or negative change in happiness. Of course it's just a pseudo equation.
    - OrgNet 7y ago
      so if you expect more then reality, you have negative happiness because you will never get it?
      - lunias 7y ago
        Yes, but not because you'll never get it. It's just that at that moment the reality of your situation is different than what you expected (in a negative way).
einpoklum 7y ago
Utter self-delusion - either by the author, or by Google employees, or possibly both. Google has been evil from... well, depends on how you look at it, but if not from Day One, then certainly by the time they started GMail. The whole point is to maintain a vast surveillance network over as many Internet users as possible (later also mobile phone users), to try to capture as much of what they do. The use is for deeply personal and intrusive ads, but also for mass government control (NSA gets copy of everything, remember), individual government control and intervention (through subpoenas by less-secretive agencies), and gradually - the shaping of public opinion and knowledge through more and more targeted changes of search results and content recommendations. And of course - nothing is ever erased, nor will it ever be. Oh, also: > To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. Google didn't invent any of this stuff. They were just able to put a lot of compute power and storage behind it before others did.
maynman 7y ago
It's worth a watch if you haven't seen Joe Rogan's podcast with James Damore. I think it adds some much needed context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo
franczesko 7y ago
In my opinion, this is why workplaces should be neutral and no personal ideologies or beliefs shouldn't be allowed to be expressed to keep it that way.

255 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

Pichai is no saint either having supported a Saudi dictator. I think most people would agree that Google is doing things that are far from the greater good. Because it's a public company it will always feel the pressure to do more unethical things.

tumetab1 7y ago

Notice, this is long article. Around 12 000 words or 30 pages.

molteanu 7y ago
It's endless and it doesn't get to the point.
- tantalor 7y ago
  What is the point?
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    I think the article tries to make the following case: 1. There's a ton of dissatisfaction in the Google employee base 2. It's distracting company management and hurting the company core mission (making cash) 3. It won't go away any time soon (FWIW, I believe the case is overstated.)
  - jonbronson 7y ago
    That the company culture ain't what it used to be.
jmkni 7y ago
I generally enjoy longform journalism but this is an exhausting read. May have been better as a series of articles.
notacoward 7y ago
Does Wired even have editors? Any editor who's not incompetent beyond belief would have told Nitasha Tiku that it's not necessary to include every single detail from three years' worth of notes. In fact, the excess verbiage makes it less impactful than it could have been. A good editor would have trimmed this to one half or even one third of its current length, and it would have been better without the bloat.
- jcranberry 7y ago
  Don't be ridiculous. The New Yorker regularly has articles of this length if not longer. It's ordinary longform journalism.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    There's nothing wrong with something being longer if the content warrants it. Complex topics require lengthy exposition. But that requires the writer to write, to arrange and connect things into a coherent narrative. That's not what happened here. This is a thin article, padded out to novella length with repetition and irrelevancy. Again, it's not bad that the article exists. It just needed a better editor.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Google will have no problem identifying the infidel based on a phrasing analysis.

molteanu 7y ago

Read the 1st part. Didn't understand a thing. What is this article about, anyway?

Traubenfuchs 7y ago
> What is this article about, anyway? Privileged people making lots of of money acting like spoiled kids despite having limitless alternative options.
- molteanu 7y ago
  Got it. Skiping it. Thanks for the tldr.
checktheorder 7y ago
>What is this article about, anyway? It's about 12000 words long.

ryanmercer 7y ago

There's algae in the tube feeding the ice machine in my company's break room, multiple wet ceiling tiles all year long, signs telling us to literally not wipe our feces on the walls in the bathroom, shared desks with other shifts, a constant smell of mold and I make 35k a year, no chance of promotion at all without taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to get a 4-year degree in literally anything, at a rabidly anti-union company, in a state where an employee can basically fire you for no reason at all. Man, I wish I had the problems of these Goooglers. Sure, sexism and racial discrimination is bad bad bad, but this happens at the vast majority of employers. If I and/or my co-workers tried to do one of these walkouts, security would be there when we came back to take our badges and tell us to leave or the police would be called. I find it extremely difficult to feel any sympathy for these folks because they have it much better than I do, and extremely better than millions of people in the United States and billions of people worldwide. A cursory Google search (ha, maybe I should have used Bing) on-site physicians, paid PATERNITY leave, death benefits, leave of absence to pursue education, having Google on your CV probably helps tremendously if you try and get a job somewhere else, Google allows employees to spend 20% of their time pursuing a project that they are passionate about, apparently Googlers can bring their pets to work, have access to all sorts of other benefits like shuttles/food/recreation that simply do not exist for the vast majority of people in the world. The lifter in my work chair has been broken for years now, it has recently started tilting to the left as well, it is 12 years old. Our windows 10 upgrade removed a functional calculator, something I use every few minutes, requiring me to either buy a calculator or use Google for work-related maths. There are 3 microwaves and 2 small refrigerators for 100~ employees. In the winter the upper 60's are not uncommon in the office with the upper 70's and lower 80's not uncommon in the summer with business casual dress mandatory. Need to go to the doctor, be prepared to at least take a half day which you have to request well in advance most of the time with about a month and a half blacked out every year where no one can take time off. Need a personal day, well you better fake sick and call in and if you call in 2-3x in a 6 month period you're now on their radar and risking verbal warning territory. I'm sorry, but I just can't feel sorry for them.

kace91 7y ago
> signs telling us to lierally not wipe our feces on the walls in the bathroom This is not like the other details. What the hell caused that?

buboard 7y ago

This is so sad. You should guys all quit in protest. You deserve better than this. I mean it, goo

java-man 7y ago
goo is listening!

peterwwillis 7y ago

> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. A cute meme that people like to repeat because it 'sounds right', not really accurate. Gmail was someone's pet project, Earth was purchased, and Translate was a boring statistical analysis program for 10 years. I mean, really, how "wild" does your mind have to be to write a crappy CRUD app or design an algorithm?

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
You're being downvoted but I agree with you. Most of the work here at Google is frankly of the very boring day to day software engineering slog -- bisecting crashes, fixing emergency issues, reading and writing long documents. Coddled geniuses doesn't really describe how things get done. It's more like, keep the geniuses (or not-geniuses) coddled, so they don't get annoyed with doing what is really not-very-sexy work :-)
Traubenfuchs 7y ago
To me, Google Maps/Earth seems to be one of the most advanced web apps in the world. Gmail and Translate are, indeed, not extremely exciting.
- jcheng 7y ago
  At the time Gmail was introduced, it's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and influential it was. Totally raised the bar for web apps everywhere by making effective use of XHR, which at that time was hardly known even to web developers. An absurdly large amount of storage space (1GB when Hotmail was 10MB, IIRC?), fast and effective search. There's a reason Google was the most loved and respected company in tech for years, and IMHO Gmail was a huge part of that.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    But does it really take a coddled genius whose mind runs wild to develop a modern web app and give it lots of storage space? Or was it just a cool idea that a team of regular-old software developers decided to implement?

yourbandsucks 7y ago

There's some kind of lesson here. 99% of other companies, especially big companies, do way less than Google to accommodate social justice activists. Yet they seem to be least happy at Google. Buddha was onto something about human nature.

mikekchar 7y ago
Can you expand on the last sentence? I don't understand how it connects with the rest.
- cromka 7y ago
  If I recall correctly, it's about that human beings should be rewarded for their work adequately, not in abundance.
- yourbandsucks 7y ago
  Desire is the root of suffering. They've got the paychecks, the perks, and even their politics are constantly validated. But they're not happy.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    I hope you don't mind me riffing on this idea. I'm very much compatible with this mindset, but in the case of those pursuing social justice, and still suffering, I think there is something more. I have a colleague who ran into a software design problem lately. He is looking at all of the apparent possible options and none of them seem like they will result in good code. He's gone on the internet to see if someone else knows the solution to the problem, with no luck. Then he's spent time to see if anyone has written any frameworks that solve this problem. While some claim to have solved the problem, a purusal of the code show the cure to be at least as bad as the the disease. What can he do? To me, this is the same kind of problem with the same kind of result. When we first see a problem, or instinct is to go and look for a solution. We go to experts to find out what the answer is. We look at proven best practices in order to find out what we need to do. Strangely, though, the advice of the experts and the best practices often lead to situations that are at least as bad as our original problem. Why? The reason is that we are taking an internal problem and looking for external answers. Buddha said that life is suffering. This is not to say that we should give up and have a defeatist attitude, I think. It's more that you just can't escape it: life is suffering. And code is bad. (In case you are wondering just how crazy I can be, I once gave a talk in public about how code is literally karma ;-) ). We have to accept the suffering first (or bad code) and then start "acting skillfully". There isn't an external answer that will solve our problems. The guru on the mountain doesn't have the answer because they don't know what the question is. The carefully built system does not work for our issue, because our issue never existed when the system was built. One of the things I've found about people pursuing social justice is that, on average, they tend to be intelligent people. The more they pursue the justice, and the more the society gives them leeway to do so, the more unhappy they get -- because they discover that their answer is not matched with the problem they are trying to solve. All of that energy has been put forward to solve the problem and they very slowly learn that they might not have the correct problem. Of course some people are always blind and they keep burning the witches, even finding new witches to burn after they run out of the first ones. However, I have found that the majority get really unhappy the farther they progress down this road.

segmondy 7y ago

My eyes are hurting from seeing these articles whining about their misery while collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Most companies have issues, and these issues are not "Company" issues but PEOPLE issues. Once you're large enough, you are going to have people with differing opinions, beliefs and values. These are going to clash. If you happen to be on the losing side and don't learn to accept it, you will find yourself miserable. Accept it and solider on to change if you truly believe in your fight. There are folks out there working minimum wage jobs who are truly miserable, back breaking labor, standing on their feet all day, standing in the hot sun or out in the cold weather, avoiding dangerous machinery and avoiding trying to be maimed or worse loose their life. Dealing with stupid harassment and constant abuse from their boss who makes a $1 more above minimum wage. Folks out there are really going through it. It doesn't mean that we don't have tough challenges in tech, but we have become spoiled and a bunch of whiners. The majority of the population are outside the industry and they roll their eyes when these type of articles come out and these incessant complaints don't endear them to us.

wruza 7y ago
In developer words, it’s zeroth world problems.
high_derivative 7y ago
My inside-FAAMNG experience has been that most employees seem to be not interested in the politics and are primarily focused on doing good work (people in their 20s), or on putting in their 8 hours and going home to their families (people >30 mostly, of course they also want to do good work, just have additional new priorities in a young family). Then there is a vocal minority who leverage that no individual's performance really affects the money printing machine. They blatantly view the company and its resources as a means to further their political goals. They come across as incredibly entitled and tone-deaf against the actual working class or people actually suffering from oppression (say, women being incarcerated in Iran for decades for taking off their veils, or protesters in HK). No matter how petty and entitled the request, anything denied is interpreted as some larger act of "violence" against them. What I didn't/don't understand is why management allowed that to happen. Either they actually believe in the political goals themselves, are afraid of the conflict, or believe it just does not matter for the company. I think what management fails to understand often is that giving in to a demand is not viewed with gratitude but merely as accepting what's naturally right and good. In other words, giving in to demands 1..n does not give you credit when demand n+1 is posed. The ultimate conflict is just delayed.

nvk 7y ago

What's the TL;DR? Spend 5 min reading the first few blocks couldn't make out what's this about.

chadlavi 7y ago

Google doesn't even pay well enough to treat people poorly. They're wagering an awful lot on the premise that working for Google is prestigious enough to sustainably attract and retain talent. Meanwhile a smaller tech startup will pay better and give you way more of a hand in shaping the product, and maybe even not work you 80+hours a week. I'm not sure what the appeal of the big names is for devs.

trevyn 7y ago
A smaller tech startup only pays better if you pick the right one and it has an exit. One appeal of the big names is exactly that — name recognition. It does a lot for the ego when everyone you meet knows that your employer provides free massages and a sushi bar for lunch.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  Free massages and sushi bars don't pay rent! And I'm not talking about mythical exit money, I'm talking about cold hard biweekly salary. I make more money at a small startup than it seems I would make at Google, for example.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    I think your situation is more unusual than you think. Small startups vary a lot in what they pay, and in what they can afford to pay. Mostly it's lower than FAANG pay.
  - mrep 7y ago
    You sure about that [0]? [0]: https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/
  - jeen02 7y ago
    95% of small tech startups won't pay anywhere near what Google would offer.
  - mav3rick 7y ago

notacoward 7y ago

> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. That statement needs to be challenged. The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great. I believe this boundary-less freedom to focus on whatever's most interesting and ignore everything else is why issues like privacy and social impact have been routinely shortchanged at companies like Google and Facebook. We've seen where that leads. (It leads to some characteristic technical problems too but that's not the topic right now.) "Don't be evil" and similar promises don't fulfill themselves. At FAANG scale, sticking to such promises requires a certain amount of focus and discipline every working moment, not just a few people spending more time on internal groups/lists than doing technical work. I know that's going to rub most employees at those companies the wrong way, but that doesn't make it untrue. P.S. I work at one of those companies. I do know how they work, and I'm not criticizing for criticism's sake. I'm trying to get at what I think is necessary for me and my colleagues to better ourselves and do things we can be proud of.

throwaway77384 7y ago
That statement needs to be challenged. The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great. Your whole post seems to be very reasonable, but there is one thing I'd like to mention, which is that you will immediately run into problems if you have rigid standards for what constitutes a "genius" and who is part of the just "the normal engineers". A "genius" can't very easily be defined. Historical examples like Mozart or Einstein make it easy to think that there are only a few geniuses whose talent is immediately entirely obvious to everyone, and the rest of society is merely average. That is not true. To bring that kind of potential about in many people who thought they were not geniuses prior to encountering an environment where their skills are fostered is one of the greatest advantages a company could possibly have. Some might just call this "good HR", or "caring about people". I have worked in companies where there were people who truly cared about their employees and about their strengths (and who could not afford the obvious "geniuses") and who thus almost "created" these geniuses. I know there are many ways in which I am simplifying this and I know that no company should try to employ purely geniuses. I have worked in a small team of six "very, very advanced" people in their respective fields. It was basically impossible to create any kind of cohesion. I would suspect it would be similar with other teams of "geniuses". Maybe not, but I think you are overall right in what you say, but it is so incredibly important to understand that the lines between a "genius" and a "run of the mill" developer may be more blurred than most people expect.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Wow, that was a fun read - a reminder why I support Wired with a digital subscription. I have some sympathy for Google, as flawed as they sometimes might be. I base this on experience working as a contractor at Google and also having just retired from a job managing a deep learning team at a large financial institution. Both companies seemed (to me) to make a large effort in diversity, ethics, etc. training and a general atmosphere of fairness. That said, problems occur in large organizations. Really off topic, but I dream of a world with smaller corporations, a more decentralized world. I don’t know how we are going to get there.

jorblumesea 7y ago

Do Google employees understand that most people hate their jobs and you work because you have to?

brandmeyer 7y ago
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in action.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  I never know how seriously to take Maslow. It resonates intuitively for some people I guess. But he just made the theory up. There's not a lot of scientific evidence to support it. "In their extensive review of research based on Maslow's theory, Wahba and Bridwell found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Cr...
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    it would be very difficult to convince me that maslow's hierarchy is wrong. I don't mean the specifics of the hierarchy, but the idea behind it. Sure, maybe the specific hierarchy isn't right, but the idea that some needs have to be satisfied before a person can contribute to other needs is absolutely spot on. I know this from life experience. So to convince me that the underlying idea is wrong would take a hell of a lot of evidence.

pcstl 7y ago

I find it somewhat hypocritical that this article describes Google as a safe haven of dissent and open discussion, while it is pretty unanimous that expressing even slightly right-of-center opinions at Google will have you ostracized and possibly fired.

esoterica 7y ago
I'm willing to bet you have a pretty wild idea about what "slightly right of center" means. The most recent "conservative" Googler in the news whining about being fired (Cernekee) was an open white supremacist.
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  I'll bite just because I'm curious. I support strong border control and Canadian style immigration (point based/merit based). Where on the spectrum do you believe this idea lies?
compiler-guy 7y ago
Google circa 2010 and Google circa 2019 are very different companies.
- bogwog 7y ago
  The article did a good job of explaining the events that led to that. Basically just a bunch of internal controversies involving shit-slinging, leaks, and basically what has become the standard for internet discussion in the past few years have combined to erode the trust and protections employees had to openly discuss even their far-right/left beliefs without retaliation.
jayd16 7y ago
I can't really speak from experience but almost certainly it follows that open dissent will be greeted with open dissent. As for retaliation, that's something else.
einpoklum 7y ago

andrew_ 7y ago

It's disappointing that the author didn't take the opportunity to choose language that didn't provide a distinct slant to the article. An objective tone would have been totally achievable and this would've been marked as a fairly good summation of a rather tumultuous few years for the giant.

techslave 7y ago
that’s not what wired is about. don’t be disappointed at the author.
jonbronson 7y ago
Spot on. It was an otherwise very thorough retelling of the Google timeline.
humanrebar 7y ago
But half-credit for the summary of Demore's views. It was surprisingly even handed about that other than saying he thought women were per se neurotic. Tonally, it is telling that some personalities had descriptions of their emotional states (from what source?) while others only had their actions and opinions described.
- skybrian 7y ago
  There's no way of knowing from the outside, but this seems relevant: "For this article, WIRED spoke with 47 current and former Google employees. Most of them requested anonymity."
- manfredo 7y ago
  One key misrepresentation: > In the memo, Damore wrote that hiring practices aimed to increase diversity “can effectively lower the bar” at Google. Damore wrote that Google "...lowered the bar by reducing the false negative rate." Unsurprisingly, almost every news outlet chopped off the last 6 works of the sentence.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  fwiw, "neurotic" in the way he used it was specifically the psychology definition, where it's one of the main personality traits in people. The popular definition doesn't really match this.

deskamess 7y ago

I have a feeling Amazon would not tolerate this level of push back to products and business strategy (and they have the corresponding "don't care" reputation!). Google management seems to give in so much and if you are a GOOG shareholder you could have a real case here (re the Maven project). [Disclosure: I am not a GOOG shareholder]. Management has to keep the interests of the company at heart - they are legally bound to do whats best for the company. One could argue that getting involved in AI+Warfare is bad for the image of the company, but the revenue it brings in as well as getting an entry into defense dollars would be a huge benefit for its nascent cloud division. Whether you like it or not, employees will have personal opinions and it is great to accommodate their expression of such opinions. However, as a public company, GOOG management has legal obligations too. As conflicts with and demands of management increase, and it impacts revenue, we shall see top level management excuse themselves from interacting this openly with employees. Unfortunately, more open and liberal companies are also more susceptible to such attacks and lawsuits when compared to a corp that is more authoritarian.

compiler-guy 7y ago
For a company like Google, which is highly dependent on getting and keeping highly skilled tech workers, "What is good for the company" often involves keeping employees happy. Google got to where it is by aspiring to have the best working conditions available, and much of its talent came for that reason. You can build companies other ways--just like Amazon did--but changing that deal out from under the employees who came based on that deal would be quite disruptive and result in turmoil during the transition. Would things be better for the company coming out the other side of such a transition? Hard to say, but the costs would be quite high.
- mrzacarias 7y ago
  Yup, I think that summarizes what is happening there
Despegar 7y ago
Google is effectively controlled by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt through their voting shares. In fact the stated reason for having a dual class of shares was so they can "manage the company for the long run".

LMYahooTFY 7y ago

As of now the most popular comments here seem to decry the notion that anyone making six figures could ever relay an experience of misery. This is utterly non-sensical. The article, to me, seems to imply that perhaps working at a radically free corporation doesn't yield pure bliss and benefit. Is there some reason this article needs to balance out any possible misery with all the luxurious amenities Googlers enjoy? Does anyone actually think that it's not possible someone could have a miserable experience at Google?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
> that it's not possible someone could have a miserable experience at Google? I think that. Google employees are at the top of the pyramid, so if the article was true, they would have left for an almost identical salary nearby. The fact that they don't means that either google pays way above its direct competitors (it doesnt) or these people are outright lying, and their actions speak louder than 12k words
- LMYahooTFY 7y ago
  I disagree. Concluding that because they don't "just switch jobs" means they're being dishonest seems very flippant. In fact, the idea that any organization on the planet could be exclusively a place where only happiness exists, and no one could be misfit, is patently absurd. I see an implication in your response that money buys happiness and there are no other significant factors worth mentioning. Am I wrong?
- everythingswan 7y ago
  Fong-Jones, Whittaker, and Stapleton did resign as per this story.
  - lizthegrey 7y ago
    hi, I'm at honeycomb.io now, and having a blast! :)

izzydata 7y ago

I don't think "misery" isn't the right word here.

kaitai 7y ago

Lots of folks here are complaining there's no TL;DR, and I find that many of the comments (including my previous comment here) are essentially irrelevant to the article & simply rehashing the same old things we always talk about on HN... getting to be like old married people here.... So here's my TL;DR, in an effort to refocus the conversation to what I think is interesting about the article. * First, the article does not discuss personal misery at all, so if you're talking about rich people whining about their problems, notice you're in old-married-people conversation mode, having an irrelevant yet comfortable and reassuring conversation. * The article is long and has a broad arc, contrasting "don't be evil" with 1) Google's steps and missteps in China, 2) Google's tensions with the US government, and 3) Google's controversies over sexual harassment payouts and the Damore memo (HN's favorite!). 1 & 2) The article alternates employee walkouts over the Trump travel ban (tension with US gov), the initial entry into the Chinese market (tension with the employees and the US gov), the exit from the Chinese market (Google employees in China sad, US employees joyful), the Maven project (working for US Dept of Def, trying to downplay it to employees), the political backlash for dropping Maven (US Gov: Google is evil & unpatriotic), and the Dragonfly project for bringing Google back to China (unpatriotic like I said right?). * The geopolitical push and pull is discussed in terms of employee opinions and government opinions. The harassment and diversity issues are discussed in terms of employee opinions and media and internet opinions/doxxing/etc. The larger idea is to compare the internal and external forces pushing on Google and Alphabet's C-suite and examine where they're going. So. Do you think the comparison of internal activism re: Dragonfly & Maven to internal activism re: the harassment payouts is warranted? To what extent should Google be following the lead of its employees, and how should it do that when employees disagree? Do capitalism and "not being evil" fundamentally conflict?

humanrebar 7y ago
The only thing the article conspicuously omits is that the controversies were regularly hashed out on HN, Reddit, etc. A Martian reading the article might assume the controversy mostly stayed on Google internal platforms and right-wing corners of the internet. As you point out, that was clearly not the case.

MGzBezycyjEQrk5 7y ago

lesson learned: large companies can afford to be wasteful. google can afford to fight all these ideological battles and employee spats because of their large revenue. If they weren't raking in so much dough, I doubt they would be willing to humor employees complaints on the scale cited in Wired (an entire social network for employees and supported by the company?). I'm sure similar incidents occur at other large corporations. They definitely happen at mid-sized companies, albeit with lower intensity. working in HR for google must be quite the safari

skybrian 7y ago
Well, yes, and there are lots of other things Google can do because they have so much money, like their various research projects. But remember that Google+ was a company-wide initiative intended to compete with Facebook, which is kind of a big deal. Yes, they had lots of money to throw at it, but it was for a purpose. The internal version was originally for testing. (Also, the business version of Google+ is still a product as part of G suite.)

JeremyBanks 7y ago

The comments here, paraphrased: those entitled tech they don’t know how much better they have it than people under oppressive governments, how dare they use their position to try to prevent their companies from helping oppressive governments!

serioussecurity 7y ago

Everyone here seems to think that if you have a good job you shouldn't be involved in labor organizing, because everyone else has it worse? Isn't the point that everyone should be organizing because working conditions everywhere are much worse than they could be, and the organizing at Google is a case study for how organizing works at one particularly unusual company?

ummonk 7y ago
Furthermore, those who have a good job are the most empowered to organize because they don't have to worry about how they will put bread on the table.

seren 7y ago

This is the most shocking part > “the only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to no-platform all of them.” Shouldn't it rather be the heads of the hydra ?

waqf 7y ago
Gorgons have snakes growing from their hair and presumably that's what's being referred to (though I agree that the author of the quote is probably confused). But "the medusa" is also an error at another level, because one should write either "Medusa" or "the gorgon". Medusa was the name of a specific gorgon.

sudosteph 7y ago

I sense there are certain parallels between this article and the one recently on HN about the challenges at Yale. As an "outsider" to both Yale and Google, I admit the problems in both cases seem over-wrought, but I can't deny that the people involved feel very emotionally invested so I am still curious to see what can be learned. Both articles present insider perspectives lamenting how internal conflicts within highly exclusive organizations were pushed into the public sphere through leaking and protesting. Both organizations are experiencing disconnects between people in various roles (admins vs students, execs vs employees) and a sense of loss of culture. So my thoughts are: - is this a generational culture shift? Less trust in internal systems and better access to outside publishing means young people aren't making a real effort to stay within the system to discuss? - is "internal transparency" an impossible thing at scale in the modern era? Keeping things internally private doesn't work because you only need one bad actor out of thousands to leak everything? - are the culture of Yale and Google really that special, or were they just really well marketed? Why are people so personally and emotionally invested in these organisations? Are all big orgs like this now, or were the cultures at these particular spots just well evolved for loyal following?

skybrian 7y ago
We're reading about them because they are the center of attention and they leak. But I also have a sense that lots of things that were considered positives in the early days of the Internet have become negatives, or are simply taken for granted. For example, growth was once considered good, but now it's bad. Giving services away for free is ho-hum at best and maybe suspicious. Trying to fix Internet problems is greeted with deep suspicion based solely on who is doing it. Personalization was once good, but now it's bad. And so on. That's inevitably going to result in a different internal culture at an Internet company than back in the days when Google's search engine first appeared on the Internet and got near-universal respect.

malicioususer11 7y ago

yo have u guiz seen da social network lololol. :3

tempsolution 7y ago

"if Damore had applied the same arguments to race" Yeah right, because gender and race are interchangeable. Because the difference between women and man are the same as having a different skin color or culture. LOL. And people like this actually made it to be the top Google executives. What a joke.

irinai13 7y ago

Tried to read article. It's long and meandering, lede is buried. Is there a TLDR somewhere?

lunias 7y ago

happiness = reality - expectations

OrgNet 7y ago
if you expect reality, you have zero happiness?
- lunias 7y ago
  Yes, but I interpret it as: you'd be content; no positive or negative change in happiness. Of course it's just a pseudo equation.
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    so if you expect more then reality, you have negative happiness because you will never get it?
    - lunias 7y ago
      Yes, but not because you'll never get it. It's just that at that moment the reality of your situation is different than what you expected (in a negative way).

einpoklum 7y ago

Utter self-delusion - either by the author, or by Google employees, or possibly both. Google has been evil from... well, depends on how you look at it, but if not from Day One, then certainly by the time they started GMail. The whole point is to maintain a vast surveillance network over as many Internet users as possible (later also mobile phone users), to try to capture as much of what they do. The use is for deeply personal and intrusive ads, but also for mass government control (NSA gets copy of everything, remember), individual government control and intervention (through subpoenas by less-secretive agencies), and gradually - the shaping of public opinion and knowledge through more and more targeted changes of search results and content recommendations. And of course - nothing is ever erased, nor will it ever be. Oh, also: > To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. Google didn't invent any of this stuff. They were just able to put a lot of compute power and storage behind it before others did.

maynman 7y ago

It's worth a watch if you haven't seen Joe Rogan's podcast with James Damore. I think it adds some much needed context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo

franczesko 7y ago

In my opinion, this is why workplaces should be neutral and no personal ideologies or beliefs shouldn't be allowed to be expressed to keep it that way.