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This is so hilariously wrong that I don't even know where to start. Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free d

This is so hilariously wrong that I don't even know where to start. Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free discussion of politics wasn't banned during my time there because everyone was capable of understanding precisely the opposite of what you're describing: that differing views on the world exist and are attributable to more than just whether someone is a good or bad person. When you scale to a hundred thousand employees, you can't keep your bar that high, and you have to start letting in people who more closely resemble the average narrow-minded, maximalizing dumbass. For a little while that meant the company needed to bow to the more culturally-powerful regressive left (esp when things leaked, for PR reasons), but as the culture war heats up, the only winning move for a company with a (classical) liberal founding culture is to discourage political engagement at all.

deleted 7y ago
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the-pigeon 7y ago
I've worked for a lot of small startups some mid-sized companies in California over the last decade. I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk. I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cheald 7y ago
  "Over the last decade" is a critical qualification, I think. This phenomenon emerged in the early 2010s, by my best reckoning. This sounds an awful lot like nostalgic pining for the good old days, but there was a time not too long ago that daring to hold an opinion that others around you disagreed with wasn't an existential threat to your career. Things shifted really hard, really fast.
- defen 7y ago
  > I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk. Reminds me of https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-the-powerless/#tabs https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-th...
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I'm not making any statement about "small and mid sized California companies". I'm talking specifically about Google. The more time I spend away from there, the more I realize what an incredibly unique place Google is (or perhaps, was). > I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers. The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma. It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify). I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.
major505 7y ago
Basically: One person: smart. A lot of people: dumbass idiots.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I think that's usually used to describe group dynamics, but my model here has less to do with that and more to do with having to lower the bar for each individual, because scaling hiring massively (in an increasingly competitive labor market) is difficult without lowering standards.
giantsloth 7y ago
Just FYI for anyone reading the above comment, "regressive left" and "classical liberal" are right wing dog whistles used by the likes of Dave Rubin/Ben Shapiro/Steven Crowder/Tucker Carlson/etc, to co-opt the word "liberal" and pretend being right is also being liberal and to cast a broad net over anything left of center right Democrats. Additionally, emotionality being cast in a disparaging light is another tactic used by the right to paint people left of themselves as "hysterical" and therefore wrong, which is logically fallacious. You can both be emotional and correct. Google's culture always was, and always has been to hire people to generate profit, as all for profit businesses (and I'm not assigning a moral judgement on profit, profit is fine). Having a collegiate and ostensibly intelligent atmosphere was for hiring PR. More people have more access to more information and unfortunately a lot of that information is cherry picked and provides confirmation bias. Kids these days haven't gotten dumber at Google, technology has changed, and the political discourse has changed. The person who commented has demonstrated himself to be logically fallacious, ill tempered and steeped in culturally right talking points, and this is the same person saying that Googlers these days are less intelligent and hysterical.
blackflame7000 7y ago
Or maybe Google's interview process is flawed by emphasizing whiteboard skills over people skills.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I'm the first to say how horribly broken tech hiring is, but that's relative to an ideal. I frankly don't know of any other way to hire at large scale and ensure a baseline of quality across the company. Google leaned heavily on whiteboard interviews during my time there too, so that doesn't explain shifts in employee norms and culture.
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    I think they should give the option of completing a larger project on their own instead of whiteboarding questions. For example, Symantec gave a practice problem where you had to basically build a mini-virus checker with wildcards (* and ?) and they selected the submissions with the fastest times to interview. I really enjoy performance-based problems and trying to optimize threading, memory, and caching but whiteboard interviews don't really give me that opportunity to showcase those talents. I like solving big problems and whiteboard questions really test your ability to memorize trivial ones. The actual interview was much less whiteboarding and more explaining your code to make sure you actually wrote it. It felt like a more classical interview where they aren't trying to see if you are full of BS because they already had an actual work sample that was representative of an actual type of problem likely to be experienced on the job.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

the-pigeon 7y ago

I've worked for a lot of small startups some mid-sized companies in California over the last decade. I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk. I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cheald 7y ago
"Over the last decade" is a critical qualification, I think. This phenomenon emerged in the early 2010s, by my best reckoning. This sounds an awful lot like nostalgic pining for the good old days, but there was a time not too long ago that daring to hold an opinion that others around you disagreed with wasn't an existential threat to your career. Things shifted really hard, really fast.
defen 7y ago
> I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk. Reminds me of https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-the-powerless/#tabs https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-th...
wutbrodo 7y ago
I'm not making any statement about "small and mid sized California companies". I'm talking specifically about Google. The more time I spend away from there, the more I realize what an incredibly unique place Google is (or perhaps, was). > I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers. The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma. It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify). I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.

major505 7y ago

Basically: One person: smart. A lot of people: dumbass idiots.

wutbrodo 7y ago
I think that's usually used to describe group dynamics, but my model here has less to do with that and more to do with having to lower the bar for each individual, because scaling hiring massively (in an increasingly competitive labor market) is difficult without lowering standards.

giantsloth 7y ago

Just FYI for anyone reading the above comment, "regressive left" and "classical liberal" are right wing dog whistles used by the likes of Dave Rubin/Ben Shapiro/Steven Crowder/Tucker Carlson/etc, to co-opt the word "liberal" and pretend being right is also being liberal and to cast a broad net over anything left of center right Democrats. Additionally, emotionality being cast in a disparaging light is another tactic used by the right to paint people left of themselves as "hysterical" and therefore wrong, which is logically fallacious. You can both be emotional and correct. Google's culture always was, and always has been to hire people to generate profit, as all for profit businesses (and I'm not assigning a moral judgement on profit, profit is fine). Having a collegiate and ostensibly intelligent atmosphere was for hiring PR. More people have more access to more information and unfortunately a lot of that information is cherry picked and provides confirmation bias. Kids these days haven't gotten dumber at Google, technology has changed, and the political discourse has changed. The person who commented has demonstrated himself to be logically fallacious, ill tempered and steeped in culturally right talking points, and this is the same person saying that Googlers these days are less intelligent and hysterical.

blackflame7000 7y ago

Or maybe Google's interview process is flawed by emphasizing whiteboard skills over people skills.

wutbrodo 7y ago
I'm the first to say how horribly broken tech hiring is, but that's relative to an ideal. I frankly don't know of any other way to hire at large scale and ensure a baseline of quality across the company. Google leaned heavily on whiteboard interviews during my time there too, so that doesn't explain shifts in employee norms and culture.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  I think they should give the option of completing a larger project on their own instead of whiteboarding questions. For example, Symantec gave a practice problem where you had to basically build a mini-virus checker with wildcards (* and ?) and they selected the submissions with the fastest times to interview. I really enjoy performance-based problems and trying to optimize threading, memory, and caching but whiteboard interviews don't really give me that opportunity to showcase those talents. I like solving big problems and whiteboard questions really test your ability to memorize trivial ones. The actual interview was much less whiteboarding and more explaining your code to make sure you actually wrote it. It felt like a more classical interview where they aren't trying to see if you are full of BS because they already had an actual work sample that was representative of an actual type of problem likely to be experienced on the job.