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I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are f

I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are far fewer people. It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion. Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight. It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable. It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)

ChuckMcM 7y ago
My tenure overlapped ('06 - '10) and the discussions were lively. There were (and probably still are) interesting meta-terms like 'centathread' which was a topic that had received >= 100 replies (the gmail threading limit at the time). That said, the change in policy (what is cited at least) reads a bit like "Let's create air cover for management actions to separate trouble makers from the company." Where trouble makers has enough vagueness in it to cover a wide swath of things. That allows for 'for cause' termination which is more financially advantageous to the company than simply laying someone off. So to the extent that Google didn't want to be a 'traditional' company with all its rules and opaque policies and structures, it clearly is learning through experience the motivations that companies have for establishing those sorts of rules. What I find disappointing is that after reproducing the experiment and getting the same results, they aren't able to come up with any other solution than the centuries old authoritarian one. I feel like they missed an opportunity here.
- SllX 7y ago
  There’s a decent chance this centuries old authoritarian method, which is more like millennia old, is actually the best way of dealing with it. Humans are more or less the same as a few millennia ago. Our technology is more advanced, we’ve more or less covered every corner of the planet, we have birthed billions of humans and built millions of organizations of every stripe, and dealt with as many management issues as there were and are people. We haven’t significantly advanced in our cognitive capabilities, we’ve just learned how to outsource more to experts and computers. If there’s one difference between us and us a few millennia ago, it would be that there are so many more humans on the planet that we probably don’t have a role in society for everyone. Under, e.g. a feudal System, every person had a functional role, and those that didn’t could at least point a spear in more or less the correct orientation. Vagrants of course were prosecuted and often pressed into service doing something somewhere for somebody. In 2018, Google had ~99K full time employees. That’s larger than most cities, and historically, most countries. At that scale, you eventually need to tell most of them sit down, shut up and fall in line. Check their problems at the door, and if they really really need to fight about something, do it off premises on their off time without company resources, just to keep the peace.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    I don't disagree, but I will contrast that with my later experience at IBM (when they bought Blekko). IBM had at the time 400,000+ employees, so more than four times the employee base of Google. IBM is over a hundred years old at this point so have been doing this about five times longer than Google has. In IBM's case they came at it from the opposite direction. Fifty years ago there was practically zero horizontal communication in the ranks and they were interested in increasing that to get better dispersal of thoughts and ideas throughout the company. As a result they were deploying and encouraging a sort of internal social network to improve cross flow and get more things out.
    - SllX 7y ago
      You raise an excellent point, and going over-totalitarian is just as likely to crush innovation as anything else. However, I think taking an authoritarian stance on politics, religion and so on in the workplace, so long as it is done in a respectful manner and puts everyone on the same level, is completely appropriate. When you are a group of ten, and that’s your entire company, you can get away with a lot. Everyone is going to know each other, maybe a little more intimately than some of them would prefer. Your CEO might also be your drinking buddy and a good wingman. That’s the nature of a small organization. At 2K, things don’t have to be quite so intimate, you don’t have to know everyone by face and name, just get along with them well enough to do your jobs. I’m not going to try and guess where the tipping point is, but at 99K or 400K, there isn’t a lot of difference between the organization ability you need. Everyone has their own ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything, some teams might get along better than others, but politics and religion and the like have led to actual wars between smaller masses of people. If you have 99K on your payroll, not all of them are going to like and respect each other. Not every team is going to have perfect cohesion with every other team. You still want civility. Every one of those 99K or 400K people has their own ambitions and dreams and reasons for getting out of bed at whatever time of day they crawl out of bed. But there is a time and a place for it, a whole wide world and life outside that of your employer’s little world, where not everyone is necessarily on the same payroll. Absolutely if you can build an internal social network for your workers, that’s great! If they want to debate politics outside of work, that’s great too! It is still entirely appropriate to moderate that network, and draw a few hard lines where you think it is appropriate.
- mc32 7y ago
  But what is the alternative? The problem is diametric opinions end with two people (no company involved). What is the company to do to get people with opposing views to “get along”? Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent). How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize? I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)
  - okusername 7y ago
    Problem solved: There should be no "opinion" at the workplace outside professional topics. Unless you're the person in charge of the Tibet strategy, your opinion should stay at home. It's a workplace, not your buddy's couch.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      The workplace is part of society, of course opinions belong there.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      I agree but what if the employer takes a position on Tibet? Or more likely on any hot potato topic (gender equality, Trump, pushing the political debate either side if the company has the ability to do so, etc).
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    Good example :-) The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground. For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."
apple4ever 7y ago
Great points. There are plenty of areas to discuss politics, and at work doesn't have to be one of them. I've studiously avoided talking to anybody at work about politics, as it usually only serves to anger people if you don't agree. I've had a successful career of doing that.
- new2628 7y ago
  That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life, hardly any topic remains apolitical. Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life. Do a historical survey of people who tried to suffuse politics completely through the lives of their followers. For completeness, look also at the actions of religions in the same way. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politics, movements of any kind which demand the entirety of the lives of their followers are often perpetrators of the worst things. As a counterpoint, look to times and places where people are free to be open, to be themselves, and to choose how they live. There is also a power in the dispersal of power. Many call this freedom. Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..." The way Robert Heinlein put it was something like this: "The end product of politics is like the result of peristalsis. It's not very pleasant, but it's no less vital to your health and well being." I think this is a good analogy. Imagine having a cocktail party conversation with someone singularly obsessed with their digestive tract.
    - new2628 7y ago
      I surely enjoy wild associations as much as the next guy, but I meant more pedestrian topics such as: - are you eating meat or are you vegetarian? - do you take a car to work or ride a bike or take public transportation? - do you drink tap water or bottled water? - do you send your kids to private or public school? Now try discussing any of these in depth "without politics".
d1zzy 7y ago
I agree, rules that govern large organizations didn't grow out of "mean bosses doing mean stupid things" but out of need for such a large organization to work well together. But, while that is true, it doesn't necessarily mean people will like the new Google, everyone's got their own personal taste in how the work culture should be and regardless of having very rational reasons why the culture is changing in some way, people that enjoyed the previous culture are likely to not enjoy as much the new one, resulting in increased difficulties hiring and keeping them.
- LordFast 7y ago
  Similarly, as the size and footprint of a company grows, the parameters controlling/sustaining the growth/maintenance of said company also change as well, thus changing the required talent profile accordingly. EDIT: for the sake of the completion of thought, I want to add that the opposite is also true: a young company in a fast growing innovative industry can afford to hire a different kind of talent without harming its growth, and as the industry matures, they simply can't afford to keep doing that.
nostrademons 7y ago
I remember the Founder's Letter included with Google's IPO in 2004 - "Google is not a traditional company. We do not intend to become one." It looks like they became one. The other interesting takeaway for me is how long-term equilibria can leave holes that may be exploited by short-term-focused actors. When Google was young, it's say-anything culture was a big competitive advantage: it let them hire people who were nearly unhireable elsewhere because they were too free with their opinions or too difficult to work with, and it let people be more open about their emotions, which is a prerequisite for creativity. Many of these people were immensely productive, building key systems. But as Google grew, this same culture would've led to the destruction of the company, so eventually management is forced to clamp down on it. Not before making the founders and many employees fabulously wealthy and reshaping the industry, though.
- cco 7y ago
  You live long enough to become a terrible company, bought by one, or go bankrupt.
  - rch 7y ago
    Surely counterexamples exist... W. L. Gore and Associates? Rocky Mountain Institute? Renaissance Technologies?
  - retbull 7y ago
    Traditional doesn't mean terrible. You can use cultural queues from previous versions without taking the toxic parts.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Certainly a 100,000 person company is going to have characteristics that someone who generally prefers a 1,000 or 100 person company may not much like. But not all large companies become "terrible" companies--whatever that means exactly. As the peer comment notes, there are also companies that remain private and mostly small and march to their own drummer. Of course, those can easily end up in family control spats and the like. Nothing's perfect but I'm not sure the lesson is everything sucks or dies in the end.
jonas21 7y ago
> Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight. But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment? During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible. Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?
- patcon 7y ago
  Yep, feels like there's a bias in here. The "big experiment" that is on our radar (which is supposedly proving that free culture is a liability after all) is only big and on our radar to discuss because it reached such success compared to other companies (and it grew under those same conditions we're maybe implying are being proved wrongheaded?)
- Spooky23 7y ago
  You could look at message boards in the public space, Yammer, etc and draw the same conclusions. Online communities always have a critical mass where increasingly strong moderation is required.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  Organizational structure is a massive influence on any organization's outputs, and seems over and over to be substantially more important than the personal attributes or credentials of the pool of employees. This is discussed by Clay Christensen in the context of disruption tech theory, it's enshrined in hacker lore as Conway's Law, and I'm sure is well known across many other domains. One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense. It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.
tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
This! All categories break down but many arise out of some reasonable necessity. The categories of "work life" and "personal life" are useful categories. I see no reason why I should discuss politics with someone I work with. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
quotemstr 7y ago
This. I've been saying for a long time now that 2010-era Google will be in business school textbooks for generations as an example of why we have a taboo against contentious issues in the workplace. It's like the old demotivational poster said: "it might be the case that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others".
- malandrew 7y ago
  "A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea" - Dutch proverb
cynoclast 7y ago
> money, politics, and religion. when did money sneak into that list?
dr_dshiv 7y ago
I kinda wish this was about out of control religious debates.
freshhawk 7y ago
> traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion That is not a particularly widespread tradition globally or historically. And I personally think everyone should be incredibly skeptical of it. I've never met anyone with power who followed this tradition, and plenty who are kept powerless by the always-one-sided application of these traditions. These subjects are difficult to discuss because they are important, I find it far easier to believe that this toxicity comes from default of not talking to your family/friends/community about some of most important aspects of your life.
- eldavido 7y ago
  Another view might be that it's impolite or rude to bring it up. Consider that other people might not want to talk about these things, and by bringing them up yourself, you're prompting others to share their own opinions, which they may not (for whatever reason) feel comfortable sharing. There's also the reality that many of these conversations just aren't productive. Best-case scenario, one person talks, the other talks, maybe they learn a little about each other, or their mutual empathy is enhanced. But a lot of times, it seems like two otherwise civil people find out things about each other that actually degrades their relationship. "Too much information" is real and at 34, I've learned there are some questions that just aren't going to lead to a productive conversation, on balance.
  - freshhawk 7y ago
    The unproductive version is a big problem, precisely because people don't have the social skills to navigate it because it is so often taboo. So the options are to make it taboo or to adapt. "don't speak about these important things, we don't have the EQ to handle this conversation" is a strong pro-status quo political stance to take and couching it in apolitical terms is dishonest.
jammygit 7y ago
I've almost always found it completely beneficial when workplaces discourage talking about politics or religion. Everyone just gets along better, and that's a good thing for a work environment

ChuckMcM 7y ago

My tenure overlapped ('06 - '10) and the discussions were lively. There were (and probably still are) interesting meta-terms like 'centathread' which was a topic that had received >= 100 replies (the gmail threading limit at the time). That said, the change in policy (what is cited at least) reads a bit like "Let's create air cover for management actions to separate trouble makers from the company." Where trouble makers has enough vagueness in it to cover a wide swath of things. That allows for 'for cause' termination which is more financially advantageous to the company than simply laying someone off. So to the extent that Google didn't want to be a 'traditional' company with all its rules and opaque policies and structures, it clearly is learning through experience the motivations that companies have for establishing those sorts of rules. What I find disappointing is that after reproducing the experiment and getting the same results, they aren't able to come up with any other solution than the centuries old authoritarian one. I feel like they missed an opportunity here.

SllX 7y ago
There’s a decent chance this centuries old authoritarian method, which is more like millennia old, is actually the best way of dealing with it. Humans are more or less the same as a few millennia ago. Our technology is more advanced, we’ve more or less covered every corner of the planet, we have birthed billions of humans and built millions of organizations of every stripe, and dealt with as many management issues as there were and are people. We haven’t significantly advanced in our cognitive capabilities, we’ve just learned how to outsource more to experts and computers. If there’s one difference between us and us a few millennia ago, it would be that there are so many more humans on the planet that we probably don’t have a role in society for everyone. Under, e.g. a feudal System, every person had a functional role, and those that didn’t could at least point a spear in more or less the correct orientation. Vagrants of course were prosecuted and often pressed into service doing something somewhere for somebody. In 2018, Google had ~99K full time employees. That’s larger than most cities, and historically, most countries. At that scale, you eventually need to tell most of them sit down, shut up and fall in line. Check their problems at the door, and if they really really need to fight about something, do it off premises on their off time without company resources, just to keep the peace.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but I will contrast that with my later experience at IBM (when they bought Blekko). IBM had at the time 400,000+ employees, so more than four times the employee base of Google. IBM is over a hundred years old at this point so have been doing this about five times longer than Google has. In IBM's case they came at it from the opposite direction. Fifty years ago there was practically zero horizontal communication in the ranks and they were interested in increasing that to get better dispersal of thoughts and ideas throughout the company. As a result they were deploying and encouraging a sort of internal social network to improve cross flow and get more things out.
  - SllX 7y ago
    You raise an excellent point, and going over-totalitarian is just as likely to crush innovation as anything else. However, I think taking an authoritarian stance on politics, religion and so on in the workplace, so long as it is done in a respectful manner and puts everyone on the same level, is completely appropriate. When you are a group of ten, and that’s your entire company, you can get away with a lot. Everyone is going to know each other, maybe a little more intimately than some of them would prefer. Your CEO might also be your drinking buddy and a good wingman. That’s the nature of a small organization. At 2K, things don’t have to be quite so intimate, you don’t have to know everyone by face and name, just get along with them well enough to do your jobs. I’m not going to try and guess where the tipping point is, but at 99K or 400K, there isn’t a lot of difference between the organization ability you need. Everyone has their own ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything, some teams might get along better than others, but politics and religion and the like have led to actual wars between smaller masses of people. If you have 99K on your payroll, not all of them are going to like and respect each other. Not every team is going to have perfect cohesion with every other team. You still want civility. Every one of those 99K or 400K people has their own ambitions and dreams and reasons for getting out of bed at whatever time of day they crawl out of bed. But there is a time and a place for it, a whole wide world and life outside that of your employer’s little world, where not everyone is necessarily on the same payroll. Absolutely if you can build an internal social network for your workers, that’s great! If they want to debate politics outside of work, that’s great too! It is still entirely appropriate to moderate that network, and draw a few hard lines where you think it is appropriate.
mc32 7y ago
But what is the alternative? The problem is diametric opinions end with two people (no company involved). What is the company to do to get people with opposing views to “get along”? Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent). How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize? I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)
- okusername 7y ago
  Problem solved: There should be no "opinion" at the workplace outside professional topics. Unless you're the person in charge of the Tibet strategy, your opinion should stay at home. It's a workplace, not your buddy's couch.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    The workplace is part of society, of course opinions belong there.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    I agree but what if the employer takes a position on Tibet? Or more likely on any hot potato topic (gender equality, Trump, pushing the political debate either side if the company has the ability to do so, etc).
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Good example :-) The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground. For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."

apple4ever 7y ago

Great points. There are plenty of areas to discuss politics, and at work doesn't have to be one of them. I've studiously avoided talking to anybody at work about politics, as it usually only serves to anger people if you don't agree. I've had a successful career of doing that.

new2628 7y ago
That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life, hardly any topic remains apolitical. Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
- stcredzero 7y ago
  That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life. Do a historical survey of people who tried to suffuse politics completely through the lives of their followers. For completeness, look also at the actions of religions in the same way. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politics, movements of any kind which demand the entirety of the lives of their followers are often perpetrators of the worst things. As a counterpoint, look to times and places where people are free to be open, to be themselves, and to choose how they live. There is also a power in the dispersal of power. Many call this freedom. Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..." The way Robert Heinlein put it was something like this: "The end product of politics is like the result of peristalsis. It's not very pleasant, but it's no less vital to your health and well being." I think this is a good analogy. Imagine having a cocktail party conversation with someone singularly obsessed with their digestive tract.
  - new2628 7y ago
    I surely enjoy wild associations as much as the next guy, but I meant more pedestrian topics such as: - are you eating meat or are you vegetarian? - do you take a car to work or ride a bike or take public transportation? - do you drink tap water or bottled water? - do you send your kids to private or public school? Now try discussing any of these in depth "without politics".

d1zzy 7y ago

I agree, rules that govern large organizations didn't grow out of "mean bosses doing mean stupid things" but out of need for such a large organization to work well together. But, while that is true, it doesn't necessarily mean people will like the new Google, everyone's got their own personal taste in how the work culture should be and regardless of having very rational reasons why the culture is changing in some way, people that enjoyed the previous culture are likely to not enjoy as much the new one, resulting in increased difficulties hiring and keeping them.

LordFast 7y ago
Similarly, as the size and footprint of a company grows, the parameters controlling/sustaining the growth/maintenance of said company also change as well, thus changing the required talent profile accordingly. EDIT: for the sake of the completion of thought, I want to add that the opposite is also true: a young company in a fast growing innovative industry can afford to hire a different kind of talent without harming its growth, and as the industry matures, they simply can't afford to keep doing that.

nostrademons 7y ago

I remember the Founder's Letter included with Google's IPO in 2004 - "Google is not a traditional company. We do not intend to become one." It looks like they became one. The other interesting takeaway for me is how long-term equilibria can leave holes that may be exploited by short-term-focused actors. When Google was young, it's say-anything culture was a big competitive advantage: it let them hire people who were nearly unhireable elsewhere because they were too free with their opinions or too difficult to work with, and it let people be more open about their emotions, which is a prerequisite for creativity. Many of these people were immensely productive, building key systems. But as Google grew, this same culture would've led to the destruction of the company, so eventually management is forced to clamp down on it. Not before making the founders and many employees fabulously wealthy and reshaping the industry, though.

cco 7y ago
You live long enough to become a terrible company, bought by one, or go bankrupt.
- rch 7y ago
  Surely counterexamples exist... W. L. Gore and Associates? Rocky Mountain Institute? Renaissance Technologies?
- retbull 7y ago
  Traditional doesn't mean terrible. You can use cultural queues from previous versions without taking the toxic parts.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Certainly a 100,000 person company is going to have characteristics that someone who generally prefers a 1,000 or 100 person company may not much like. But not all large companies become "terrible" companies--whatever that means exactly. As the peer comment notes, there are also companies that remain private and mostly small and march to their own drummer. Of course, those can easily end up in family control spats and the like. Nothing's perfect but I'm not sure the lesson is everything sucks or dies in the end.

jonas21 7y ago

> Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight. But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment? During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible. Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?

patcon 7y ago
Yep, feels like there's a bias in here. The "big experiment" that is on our radar (which is supposedly proving that free culture is a liability after all) is only big and on our radar to discuss because it reached such success compared to other companies (and it grew under those same conditions we're maybe implying are being proved wrongheaded?)
Spooky23 7y ago
You could look at message boards in the public space, Yammer, etc and draw the same conclusions. Online communities always have a critical mass where increasingly strong moderation is required.
cookiecaper 7y ago
Organizational structure is a massive influence on any organization's outputs, and seems over and over to be substantially more important than the personal attributes or credentials of the pool of employees. This is discussed by Clay Christensen in the context of disruption tech theory, it's enshrined in hacker lore as Conway's Law, and I'm sure is well known across many other domains. One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense. It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago

This! All categories break down but many arise out of some reasonable necessity. The categories of "work life" and "personal life" are useful categories. I see no reason why I should discuss politics with someone I work with. It seems like a recipe for disaster.

quotemstr 7y ago

This. I've been saying for a long time now that 2010-era Google will be in business school textbooks for generations as an example of why we have a taboo against contentious issues in the workplace. It's like the old demotivational poster said: "it might be the case that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others".

malandrew 7y ago
"A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea" - Dutch proverb

cynoclast 7y ago

> money, politics, and religion. when did money sneak into that list?

dr_dshiv 7y ago

I kinda wish this was about out of control religious debates.

freshhawk 7y ago

> traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion That is not a particularly widespread tradition globally or historically. And I personally think everyone should be incredibly skeptical of it. I've never met anyone with power who followed this tradition, and plenty who are kept powerless by the always-one-sided application of these traditions. These subjects are difficult to discuss because they are important, I find it far easier to believe that this toxicity comes from default of not talking to your family/friends/community about some of most important aspects of your life.

eldavido 7y ago
Another view might be that it's impolite or rude to bring it up. Consider that other people might not want to talk about these things, and by bringing them up yourself, you're prompting others to share their own opinions, which they may not (for whatever reason) feel comfortable sharing. There's also the reality that many of these conversations just aren't productive. Best-case scenario, one person talks, the other talks, maybe they learn a little about each other, or their mutual empathy is enhanced. But a lot of times, it seems like two otherwise civil people find out things about each other that actually degrades their relationship. "Too much information" is real and at 34, I've learned there are some questions that just aren't going to lead to a productive conversation, on balance.
- freshhawk 7y ago
  The unproductive version is a big problem, precisely because people don't have the social skills to navigate it because it is so often taboo. So the options are to make it taboo or to adapt. "don't speak about these important things, we don't have the EQ to handle this conversation" is a strong pro-status quo political stance to take and couching it in apolitical terms is dishonest.

jammygit 7y ago

I've almost always found it completely beneficial when workplaces discourage talking about politics or religion. Everyone just gets along better, and that's a good thing for a work environment