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Google Employees Explain How They Were Retaliated Against for Reporting Abuse

199 points by ForFreedom 7y ago

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
This is covering a full document of 45 google employees' claims of sexually/racially motivated abuse, toxic workplace experiences, and retaliatory behavior upon attempting to report such. Here is the link to the full document: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427199-Examples-Retaliation-at-Google.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427199-Examples-Ret...
- seph-reed 7y ago
  I was speaking with some friends about this recently, and how it seems a lot like the uncanny valley effect. Relatively, Google has made a lot of effort to not be racist/sexist. They're working towards not being those things (though still evil for other reasons), but somewhere in between the start and finish is this uncanny valley where scandals are super likely to happen. My friends and I all had different theories on why it's so prone to scandals, but we could agree that: 1. it still wasn't fully equal 2. it was equal to empower people to retaliate against the inequalities 3. there's a good chance some people were patting theme-selves on the back without fully achieving the goal When we were talking about it, it was in the context of Meow Wolf. But it also seems to scale to a lot of West Coast politics.
  - gowld 7y ago
    Yes. At a normal crappy company, this isn't news. But at a company you hold to a higher standard (for whatever reason - perhaps its PR, perhaps because they are leaders, perhaps because they are rich enough to be challenged to be better), it's news.
  - nabnob 7y ago
    Google has mostly focused on hiring more diverse candidates, and investing in bootcamp type projects. These initiatives help Google by increasing the pool of workers from which they hire, so they can look progressive while saving money. Now, actually fighting misogyny and racism within the company has the potential to affect their bottom line, because it involves holding people in power accountable. If they have a staff engineer or VP who's accused of sexual assault, firing him or putting him on leave could impact productivity.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I don't really know what anyone* can do to address some of these, as unacceptable as the occurrence of these stories are. Reading through the document (linked to by SolaceQuantum), there's one case where someone felt unprotected by HR because they asked HR not to investigate and HR did, and claimed to have fired the person for other HR problems. I'm not sure what HR should have done there. Are they supposed to not at least investigate serious accusations so they know what happened, even if they never reveal who reported the manager? There are other stories where someone claims something that can't be proven and that was either not witnessed, or must have been denied by everyone. Yeah it sucks if everyone on your team is protecting a douche, but... is HR supposed to intervene and fire someone because only one person claims something happened? edit: *I mean anyone in HR. Obviously the team members protecting people are at fault in the first place. If you're on the victim side of this, you have to have a paper trail. Even messaging a coworker, "Didn't [boss]'s joke bother you? Where he/she [dropped the N-word | kept talking about sex]?" Then HR investigation can't say there's no evidence. If it progresses to the point of a lawsuit, now you actually have evidence.
- dominotw 7y ago
  > someone felt unprotected by HR How can this ever be true. Why would someone possibly expect HR to protect them. Isn't it basic commonsense that HR( or anyone) works for person who pays them. Their job is to protect their employers from you ( not the other way around). I've never worked at a place where this wasn't true. Maybe this should be taught in college or something.
  - trenning 7y ago
    If you ever want to proceed with legal actions against the company then you have to put it into record somewhere which typically means reporting incidents to HR. Which ultimately leads to getting fired. What else are people supposed to do? It's a shitty unwinnable situation for employees, I've been on the shit end of this stick before at a different tech co for complaining and was retaliated against. It's not fun and I feel sympathy for anyone who's lives are being turned over because of it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cybersnowflake 7y ago
More evidence, as if we needed any more, that past a certain point being 'woke' is an exercise in futility. The most 'woke' megacorp in the world can't do it. The most 'woke' countries in the world can't do it. (theres more whining and complaining about socjus in Scandanavia per capita than just about anywhere else in the world). No matter how far you go in tearing down the patriarchy or intersecting the insectionality, the complaints and neuroticism will simply expand to match your 'enlightenment'. “I identify as a LatinX female" Seriously, if I went back in time before the 10-20 years ago where the brainwashing kicked in, would I be able to find any normal person anywhere in the world who would honestly tell me this sounds like a well adjusted sane individual who wouldn't in all probability be a human headache for everyone around them? Lol.
- nkingsy 7y ago
  Seems like we are learning by doing how this stuff should be handled. Some people in the gray areas are going to get burned, some complaints will be considered too much, and eventually we will get through the white supremacist patriarchal backlog and move on to some other new cultural change process, hopefully carbon.
  - triangleman 7y ago
    Wow so let me see if I get what you're saying: The ends justify the means. Want to make an omelette, gotta break a few eggs. And by the way, the real civil rights issue we should be focusing on is global warming?
    - ndarwincorn 7y ago
      Environmental degradation always has a civil rights dimension. You think the folks that make money off treating the earth like shit want to live in the filth they create?
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    > Some people in the gray areas are going to get burned, The ends justify the means right?
claudeganon 7y ago
I hope that Googlers can work toward creating a labor organization that helps them resolve these issues, because in light of all this and after Google HR’s involvement in the wage-fixing scandal, it seems obvious that things are pretty rotten in terms of their internal governance.
- And1 7y ago
  Yeah I agree. Given that a company can ignore HR if they choose to, I'm not sure how else workers can expect to be protected from this kind of thing.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  That raises some interesting questions about dynamics and alternatives. HR is infamous for their primary role being liability prevention or more crudely stated ass-covering. Do you know of any alternative systems in place to resolve issues? Even if Google wanted to form some sort of employee handled board or arbitration to decide how to handle accusations they would still be liable. And that is ignoring messy office politics involved in that sort of empowerment, bad actors, or just flaws of many parajudicial systems. That companies would still be liable isn't neccessarily a bad thing as otherwise it could be delegated into a bigotted council and violate all sorts of discrimination laws at will. Any innovative system would need to address those issues as well.
  - hardlianotion 7y ago
    Possibly: recognise a union.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Honestly at the highest paid tech company in the world a union isn't the answer. They need to hire people that fit their culture better or change their culture to match their people.
      - claudeganon 7y ago
throwawaysea 7y ago
What came of the employees threatening physical violence against James Damore? Were they fired?
- gowld 7y ago
  Link to more info?
  - busterarm 7y ago
    Just look at the documents submitted as discovery for his lawsuit. The chat logs and emails are all there.
- username90 7y ago
  I think a few of them were, I know at least one did. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-engineer-says-he-was-fired-for-posts-defending-diversity/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-engineer-says-he-was-fired-...
dvt 7y ago
HR is not your friend and HR will never be your friend. In a post-2008 world, it baffles me that people still think that somewhere, deep-down, multi-billion dollar conglomerates have employees' best interests at heart. How quickly we forgot people losing their lifelong savings and entire pension funds going bust. Only to have the government bail out the exact same charlatans that dropped the ball in the first place. Corporate culture is very much a zero-sum game, and I think a pinch of cynicism (or heck, realism) can go a long way.
- trthomps 7y ago
  I completely agree. If I ever find myself in the situation of one of these stories, aka the victim, I will be going straight to an employment lawyer before HR to discuss my options. Hopefully meeting with HR with my lawyer present.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    I’m curious, how do the pricing compare? Having a lawyer at an HR interview is certainly $800 already (at $300/hr), with what, 2% chances of succeeding a trial, and say 15% chances of getting a settlement, but also months of dragging. lawsuit and difficulty to focus on a new job, assuming you find a new employer. Do people really get settled for dozens of thousands of dollars?
    - staticautomatic 7y ago
      If the suit survives a motion to dismiss, all the time.
  - Jach 7y ago
    Yeah. Never underestimate domain expertise either. They love to deal with someone who's "smarter" but who lacks that knowledge. It's weird that HR has to be such an adversarial entity though. One might naively expect them to provide some kind of useful utility beyond protecting the company, even if that's their primary purpose... In my only rather mundane interaction with them, not as a victim or anything, at the suggestion of the office manager I tested the waters with a complaint about people bringing their kids into the office and letting them roam. I still recollect a surreal feeling from the HR rep telling me how they liked how carefully and precisely worded my email was -- it felt like a sign of them telling me they know that I know not to trust them and that my distrust is justified since without such careful wording it'd be trivial to paint me as a parent- or child-hating monster, or whatever, who is the real problem. I got more than I expected out of the exchange (a reminder was sent out to the office that it's against the rules -- not that it stopped anyone the following summer) but the experience alone from satisfying my curiosity on whether HR could be useful with even this one minor annoyance was worth the risk (real or imagined) of backfire.
oliverx0 7y ago
I realise I might get downvoted here because of an unpopular point of view, but some of these comments raise a few flags: “I reported it up to where my manager knew, my director knew, the coworker’s manager knew and our HR representative knew. Nothing happened. I was warned that things will get very serious if continued,” So EVERYONE knew and they still disagreed with their point of view. Warned them that accusations without proof like that would get serious. Does that make them evil? “I whistle blew a colleague who used the N-word in jokes. HR found nothing conclusive” So HR investigated, found nothing conclusive. What is the alternative? The did their job and arrived to a conclusion. Just because the conclusion did not match the accusation, now Google is evil? “when I was sexually harassed on my former team by my [team lead] I quickly reported it to my manager. I was told I was ‘overreacting’ and that I should just ‘get over it.’” Again, this seems to be a subjective stance. Your manager thought you were overreacting, given whatever proof / accusations you provided. Just because he / she did not agree with it, does not mean they are evil.
- reroute1 7y ago
  Right, there isn't enough evidence provided to actually verify or judge any of these. In itself they are pretty useless anonymous claims.
- gowld 7y ago
  So, because there is no permanent evidence of the harm, is the reporter "evil"? ("Evil" is your term.)
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    It was investigated and there was no harm?
  - oliverx0 7y ago
    No, I don't think reporting is evil. I quoted the word evil because the article mentioned sarcastically Google's motto. I think raising these issues is important, but saying things like: “It’s been infuriating to watch Google make statements about the alleged things the company does to fight and prevent discrimination and retaliation" is wrong when the company is clearly trying to address them.
wolco 7y ago
Many of these sound like they come from junior members disillusioned with how things work. Things like my manager didn't listen to me so I feel belittled. I have the second most experience so he should have. The company then moved me to a different team and I wasn't second in command so I lost my leadership. Doesn't the manager pick the team? If you don't support his vision and want to use a different approach being moved to a different team may be the best solution. What does this person want Google to do? Talk to the manager and tell them to listen to change the approach and listen to this team member because they have different ideas and they need to feel heard. Google can't get involved at that level and start second guessing technical details just because someone needs to be heard. They will judge the manager by the project's overall goals. The problem is google is giving too much freedom to employees who are use to a little bit more handholding and structured interactions.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  That’s not what the article says: > “I witnessed first hand (and was told second-hand) of several situations where women were being belittled, insulted and ignored. As the person with the second-longest tenure on the team, I suggested in a few 1:1s that my manager confront some of these issues,” wrote another Googler. “Because of my advocacy I was removed from my tech lead position and moved to another team along with the only woman left under my then-manager.” Is it a smoking gun? No, but it’s curious that one of the longest tenured members of the team was removed from their leadership position and moved to another team only after speaking up about harassment.
  - v64 7y ago
    We don't have the information necessary to determine whether the two events are correlated or coincidental.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    It's only curious because we're selectively viewing the stories of the subset of people who protested or reported bad behavior and subsequently received poor ratings. The people who speak out and don't subsequently receive poor performance ratings or get moved to a different team are not displayed here. Thus it produces an illusion of causality.
zimbatm 7y ago
To put things in perspective, 45 employees represent ~0.14% of all the women working at Google (based on wikipedia and [1]). Given my perception of humans and abusive corporate structures, I am actually quite impressed! Obviously the article doesn't tell us anything on the collection methodology, or try to put things in perspective. The reader is free to apply their bias and infer the meaning that suits them the best. [1]: https://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/ https://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/
rnernento 7y ago
For this to be meaningful in any way I'd love to see some statistics as to how many people Google employs (broken down by gender/cultural background/etc.) and then see their complaint rate. I'd then like to see it compared against other companies. While the anecdotal evidence is salacious it's not really useful in determining whether or not they're "evil".
a4e329e1270a 7y ago
This boycott and these comments are being orchestrated by Liz Fong-Jones. Liz Fong-Jones is a transexual activist, and an offender in sexual harassment themselves. I'm posting this on a throwaway for obvious reasons. I worked at Google from 2010-2014. Over the summer of 2012 or 2013, I joined an Eve Online "Corporation" (guild) with Liz, and another one of my coworkers. It was a crazy place. Liz had a fanatical hatred of "Rape Jokes". Rape was not a joke to Liz. Rape was a fantasy that Liz was all too happy to describe in great detail. The corporation was "Kink Friendly". I'm embarrassed to say that that was part of the appeal to me - I'm happy to tie my girlfriends up as part of roleplay. Liz's fantasies were a great deal more detailed and a great deal less fantasy oriented than I would like. I left that corporation after a while, though not as quickly as I should have. I was young, I was confused, and based on the success of her "Real Names Considered Harmful" letter, I believed that Liz was a credible, accredited leader. The same coworker who introduced me to Liz would, several times, invite me to join them for lunch at "Club Z". I declined - Partially because something seemed off, mostly because I was satisfied with the lunches at Google. I would only later find out that "Club Z" is not a lunch place - It's a (rather infamous) Gay Bathhouse here in Seattle. While I was in that corp, though, I was sexually assaulted by a former friend. About a year I knew and had considered a friend had some out as bi, and had "Confessed their love" to me... by forcefully kissing me at a party. I was embarrassed, I was not interested, and I made it pretty politely clear, to which they reacted badly. Now they had come out as "trans", and received an outpouring of support from mutual friends. Said friends convinced me to give them another chance. At their urging, I agreed to hang out with this friend, at a "Movie Night". A movie night which no-one else showed to. Said former friend pressured me to try weed, which I had never done before. Okay. Red flag. I was dumb, and I regret it. Said friend offered to show me his "Uncle's" stash of Child Pornography. I already suspected they were a pedo, but, yeah. Should have run right then, was drunk. Said "friend" then tried to force himself on me. I am not bigger, but I am strong, and I forced them off. I was also drunk, and spent several uncomfortable hours waiting to sober up, repeatedly fending off unwanted advances. Anyway: Being dumb, having listened to too much of the bullshit excuses, I went to the only Trans* person I knew to talk about it. Liz. They told me how much I was in the wrong, how important it was for Trans* people to explore their sexuality, and called me a monster for not having responded positively. "What if a biological woman had hit on you?" - The tired old canard was trotted out. I do not have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by Liz Fong-Jones. I only know that they hang out with, and are supported by, people who were long overdue for censure. People who were repeatedly able to convince others that they were the victims despite their clear aggression.
humble_engineer 7y ago
They weren't retaliated against, the company investigated their claims and realized that some of them were the problem, not the people who allegedly abused them.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
Back in 2007 Google was apparently a decent place to work, not much going on politically and mostly developer-led: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75470. In 2009 it was about the same, but managers started complaining: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552976. In 2010 a lot more managers were hired. In 2011 Google started killing products and developers lost a lot of credibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557672. Managers suddenly gained the upper hand and started pushing revenue as the bottom line. The smarter or well-connected developers started leaving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277. By 2013, 20% time was "dead": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466. I didn't follow Google workplace standards much after that, but my general impression is it continued declining, more management pressure and relatively lower pay/benefits for new workers. Then we started getting leaks from inside Google in 2017 and life at Google has been "miserable" since then. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684463) The only obvious solution is to start firing people; Google has been in growth mode for a long time and managers perform their jobs a lot better when they're worried about themselves. This could happen naturally as a reaction to ad revenue flattening out or maybe Google will shift to a high-turnover culture like Amazon.

199 points by ForFreedom 7y ago

This is covering a full document of 45 google employees' claims of sexually/racially motivated abuse, toxic workplace experiences, and retaliatory behavior upon attempting to report such. Here is the link to the full document: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427199-Examples-Retaliation-at-Google.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427199-Examples-Ret...

seph-reed 7y ago
I was speaking with some friends about this recently, and how it seems a lot like the uncanny valley effect. Relatively, Google has made a lot of effort to not be racist/sexist. They're working towards not being those things (though still evil for other reasons), but somewhere in between the start and finish is this uncanny valley where scandals are super likely to happen. My friends and I all had different theories on why it's so prone to scandals, but we could agree that: 1. it still wasn't fully equal 2. it was equal to empower people to retaliate against the inequalities 3. there's a good chance some people were patting theme-selves on the back without fully achieving the goal When we were talking about it, it was in the context of Meow Wolf. But it also seems to scale to a lot of West Coast politics.
- gowld 7y ago
  Yes. At a normal crappy company, this isn't news. But at a company you hold to a higher standard (for whatever reason - perhaps its PR, perhaps because they are leaders, perhaps because they are rich enough to be challenged to be better), it's news.
- nabnob 7y ago
  Google has mostly focused on hiring more diverse candidates, and investing in bootcamp type projects. These initiatives help Google by increasing the pool of workers from which they hire, so they can look progressive while saving money. Now, actually fighting misogyny and racism within the company has the potential to affect their bottom line, because it involves holding people in power accountable. If they have a staff engineer or VP who's accused of sexual assault, firing him or putting him on leave could impact productivity.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I don't really know what anyone* can do to address some of these, as unacceptable as the occurrence of these stories are. Reading through the document (linked to by SolaceQuantum), there's one case where someone felt unprotected by HR because they asked HR not to investigate and HR did, and claimed to have fired the person for other HR problems. I'm not sure what HR should have done there. Are they supposed to not at least investigate serious accusations so they know what happened, even if they never reveal who reported the manager? There are other stories where someone claims something that can't be proven and that was either not witnessed, or must have been denied by everyone. Yeah it sucks if everyone on your team is protecting a douche, but... is HR supposed to intervene and fire someone because only one person claims something happened? edit: *I mean anyone in HR. Obviously the team members protecting people are at fault in the first place. If you're on the victim side of this, you have to have a paper trail. Even messaging a coworker, "Didn't [boss]'s joke bother you? Where he/she [dropped the N-word | kept talking about sex]?" Then HR investigation can't say there's no evidence. If it progresses to the point of a lawsuit, now you actually have evidence.

dominotw 7y ago
> someone felt unprotected by HR How can this ever be true. Why would someone possibly expect HR to protect them. Isn't it basic commonsense that HR( or anyone) works for person who pays them. Their job is to protect their employers from you ( not the other way around). I've never worked at a place where this wasn't true. Maybe this should be taught in college or something.
- trenning 7y ago
  If you ever want to proceed with legal actions against the company then you have to put it into record somewhere which typically means reporting incidents to HR. Which ultimately leads to getting fired. What else are people supposed to do? It's a shitty unwinnable situation for employees, I've been on the shit end of this stick before at a different tech co for complaining and was retaliated against. It's not fun and I feel sympathy for anyone who's lives are being turned over because of it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cybersnowflake 7y ago

More evidence, as if we needed any more, that past a certain point being 'woke' is an exercise in futility. The most 'woke' megacorp in the world can't do it. The most 'woke' countries in the world can't do it. (theres more whining and complaining about socjus in Scandanavia per capita than just about anywhere else in the world). No matter how far you go in tearing down the patriarchy or intersecting the insectionality, the complaints and neuroticism will simply expand to match your 'enlightenment'. “I identify as a LatinX female" Seriously, if I went back in time before the 10-20 years ago where the brainwashing kicked in, would I be able to find any normal person anywhere in the world who would honestly tell me this sounds like a well adjusted sane individual who wouldn't in all probability be a human headache for everyone around them? Lol.

nkingsy 7y ago
Seems like we are learning by doing how this stuff should be handled. Some people in the gray areas are going to get burned, some complaints will be considered too much, and eventually we will get through the white supremacist patriarchal backlog and move on to some other new cultural change process, hopefully carbon.
- triangleman 7y ago
  Wow so let me see if I get what you're saying: The ends justify the means. Want to make an omelette, gotta break a few eggs. And by the way, the real civil rights issue we should be focusing on is global warming?
  - ndarwincorn 7y ago
    Environmental degradation always has a civil rights dimension. You think the folks that make money off treating the earth like shit want to live in the filth they create?
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  > Some people in the gray areas are going to get burned, The ends justify the means right?

claudeganon 7y ago

I hope that Googlers can work toward creating a labor organization that helps them resolve these issues, because in light of all this and after Google HR’s involvement in the wage-fixing scandal, it seems obvious that things are pretty rotten in terms of their internal governance.

And1 7y ago
Yeah I agree. Given that a company can ignore HR if they choose to, I'm not sure how else workers can expect to be protected from this kind of thing.
Nasrudith 7y ago
That raises some interesting questions about dynamics and alternatives. HR is infamous for their primary role being liability prevention or more crudely stated ass-covering. Do you know of any alternative systems in place to resolve issues? Even if Google wanted to form some sort of employee handled board or arbitration to decide how to handle accusations they would still be liable. And that is ignoring messy office politics involved in that sort of empowerment, bad actors, or just flaws of many parajudicial systems. That companies would still be liable isn't neccessarily a bad thing as otherwise it could be delegated into a bigotted council and violate all sorts of discrimination laws at will. Any innovative system would need to address those issues as well.
- hardlianotion 7y ago
  Possibly: recognise a union.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Honestly at the highest paid tech company in the world a union isn't the answer. They need to hire people that fit their culture better or change their culture to match their people.
    - claudeganon 7y ago

throwawaysea 7y ago

What came of the employees threatening physical violence against James Damore? Were they fired?

gowld 7y ago
Link to more info?
- busterarm 7y ago
  Just look at the documents submitted as discovery for his lawsuit. The chat logs and emails are all there.
username90 7y ago
I think a few of them were, I know at least one did. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-engineer-says-he-was-fired-for-posts-defending-diversity/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-engineer-says-he-was-fired-...

dvt 7y ago

HR is not your friend and HR will never be your friend. In a post-2008 world, it baffles me that people still think that somewhere, deep-down, multi-billion dollar conglomerates have employees' best interests at heart. How quickly we forgot people losing their lifelong savings and entire pension funds going bust. Only to have the government bail out the exact same charlatans that dropped the ball in the first place. Corporate culture is very much a zero-sum game, and I think a pinch of cynicism (or heck, realism) can go a long way.

trthomps 7y ago
I completely agree. If I ever find myself in the situation of one of these stories, aka the victim, I will be going straight to an employment lawyer before HR to discuss my options. Hopefully meeting with HR with my lawyer present.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  I’m curious, how do the pricing compare? Having a lawyer at an HR interview is certainly $800 already (at $300/hr), with what, 2% chances of succeeding a trial, and say 15% chances of getting a settlement, but also months of dragging. lawsuit and difficulty to focus on a new job, assuming you find a new employer. Do people really get settled for dozens of thousands of dollars?
  - staticautomatic 7y ago
    If the suit survives a motion to dismiss, all the time.
- Jach 7y ago
  Yeah. Never underestimate domain expertise either. They love to deal with someone who's "smarter" but who lacks that knowledge. It's weird that HR has to be such an adversarial entity though. One might naively expect them to provide some kind of useful utility beyond protecting the company, even if that's their primary purpose... In my only rather mundane interaction with them, not as a victim or anything, at the suggestion of the office manager I tested the waters with a complaint about people bringing their kids into the office and letting them roam. I still recollect a surreal feeling from the HR rep telling me how they liked how carefully and precisely worded my email was -- it felt like a sign of them telling me they know that I know not to trust them and that my distrust is justified since without such careful wording it'd be trivial to paint me as a parent- or child-hating monster, or whatever, who is the real problem. I got more than I expected out of the exchange (a reminder was sent out to the office that it's against the rules -- not that it stopped anyone the following summer) but the experience alone from satisfying my curiosity on whether HR could be useful with even this one minor annoyance was worth the risk (real or imagined) of backfire.

oliverx0 7y ago

I realise I might get downvoted here because of an unpopular point of view, but some of these comments raise a few flags: “I reported it up to where my manager knew, my director knew, the coworker’s manager knew and our HR representative knew. Nothing happened. I was warned that things will get very serious if continued,” So EVERYONE knew and they still disagreed with their point of view. Warned them that accusations without proof like that would get serious. Does that make them evil? “I whistle blew a colleague who used the N-word in jokes. HR found nothing conclusive” So HR investigated, found nothing conclusive. What is the alternative? The did their job and arrived to a conclusion. Just because the conclusion did not match the accusation, now Google is evil? “when I was sexually harassed on my former team by my [team lead] I quickly reported it to my manager. I was told I was ‘overreacting’ and that I should just ‘get over it.’” Again, this seems to be a subjective stance. Your manager thought you were overreacting, given whatever proof / accusations you provided. Just because he / she did not agree with it, does not mean they are evil.

reroute1 7y ago
Right, there isn't enough evidence provided to actually verify or judge any of these. In itself they are pretty useless anonymous claims.
gowld 7y ago
So, because there is no permanent evidence of the harm, is the reporter "evil"? ("Evil" is your term.)
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  It was investigated and there was no harm?
- oliverx0 7y ago
  No, I don't think reporting is evil. I quoted the word evil because the article mentioned sarcastically Google's motto. I think raising these issues is important, but saying things like: “It’s been infuriating to watch Google make statements about the alleged things the company does to fight and prevent discrimination and retaliation" is wrong when the company is clearly trying to address them.

wolco 7y ago

Many of these sound like they come from junior members disillusioned with how things work. Things like my manager didn't listen to me so I feel belittled. I have the second most experience so he should have. The company then moved me to a different team and I wasn't second in command so I lost my leadership. Doesn't the manager pick the team? If you don't support his vision and want to use a different approach being moved to a different team may be the best solution. What does this person want Google to do? Talk to the manager and tell them to listen to change the approach and listen to this team member because they have different ideas and they need to feel heard. Google can't get involved at that level and start second guessing technical details just because someone needs to be heard. They will judge the manager by the project's overall goals. The problem is google is giving too much freedom to employees who are use to a little bit more handholding and structured interactions.

jakelazaroff 7y ago
That’s not what the article says: > “I witnessed first hand (and was told second-hand) of several situations where women were being belittled, insulted and ignored. As the person with the second-longest tenure on the team, I suggested in a few 1:1s that my manager confront some of these issues,” wrote another Googler. “Because of my advocacy I was removed from my tech lead position and moved to another team along with the only woman left under my then-manager.” Is it a smoking gun? No, but it’s curious that one of the longest tenured members of the team was removed from their leadership position and moved to another team only after speaking up about harassment.
- v64 7y ago
  We don't have the information necessary to determine whether the two events are correlated or coincidental.
- manfredo 7y ago
  It's only curious because we're selectively viewing the stories of the subset of people who protested or reported bad behavior and subsequently received poor ratings. The people who speak out and don't subsequently receive poor performance ratings or get moved to a different team are not displayed here. Thus it produces an illusion of causality.

zimbatm 7y ago

To put things in perspective, 45 employees represent ~0.14% of all the women working at Google (based on wikipedia and [1]). Given my perception of humans and abusive corporate structures, I am actually quite impressed! Obviously the article doesn't tell us anything on the collection methodology, or try to put things in perspective. The reader is free to apply their bias and infer the meaning that suits them the best. [1]: https://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/ https://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/

rnernento 7y ago

For this to be meaningful in any way I'd love to see some statistics as to how many people Google employs (broken down by gender/cultural background/etc.) and then see their complaint rate. I'd then like to see it compared against other companies. While the anecdotal evidence is salacious it's not really useful in determining whether or not they're "evil".

a4e329e1270a 7y ago

This boycott and these comments are being orchestrated by Liz Fong-Jones. Liz Fong-Jones is a transexual activist, and an offender in sexual harassment themselves. I'm posting this on a throwaway for obvious reasons. I worked at Google from 2010-2014. Over the summer of 2012 or 2013, I joined an Eve Online "Corporation" (guild) with Liz, and another one of my coworkers. It was a crazy place. Liz had a fanatical hatred of "Rape Jokes". Rape was not a joke to Liz. Rape was a fantasy that Liz was all too happy to describe in great detail. The corporation was "Kink Friendly". I'm embarrassed to say that that was part of the appeal to me - I'm happy to tie my girlfriends up as part of roleplay. Liz's fantasies were a great deal more detailed and a great deal less fantasy oriented than I would like. I left that corporation after a while, though not as quickly as I should have. I was young, I was confused, and based on the success of her "Real Names Considered Harmful" letter, I believed that Liz was a credible, accredited leader. The same coworker who introduced me to Liz would, several times, invite me to join them for lunch at "Club Z". I declined - Partially because something seemed off, mostly because I was satisfied with the lunches at Google. I would only later find out that "Club Z" is not a lunch place - It's a (rather infamous) Gay Bathhouse here in Seattle. While I was in that corp, though, I was sexually assaulted by a former friend. About a year I knew and had considered a friend had some out as bi, and had "Confessed their love" to me... by forcefully kissing me at a party. I was embarrassed, I was not interested, and I made it pretty politely clear, to which they reacted badly. Now they had come out as "trans", and received an outpouring of support from mutual friends. Said friends convinced me to give them another chance. At their urging, I agreed to hang out with this friend, at a "Movie Night". A movie night which no-one else showed to. Said former friend pressured me to try weed, which I had never done before. Okay. Red flag. I was dumb, and I regret it. Said friend offered to show me his "Uncle's" stash of Child Pornography. I already suspected they were a pedo, but, yeah. Should have run right then, was drunk. Said "friend" then tried to force himself on me. I am not bigger, but I am strong, and I forced them off. I was also drunk, and spent several uncomfortable hours waiting to sober up, repeatedly fending off unwanted advances. Anyway: Being dumb, having listened to too much of the bullshit excuses, I went to the only Trans* person I knew to talk about it. Liz. They told me how much I was in the wrong, how important it was for Trans* people to explore their sexuality, and called me a monster for not having responded positively. "What if a biological woman had hit on you?" - The tired old canard was trotted out. I do not have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by Liz Fong-Jones. I only know that they hang out with, and are supported by, people who were long overdue for censure. People who were repeatedly able to convince others that they were the victims despite their clear aggression.

humble_engineer 7y ago

They weren't retaliated against, the company investigated their claims and realized that some of them were the problem, not the people who allegedly abused them.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

Back in 2007 Google was apparently a decent place to work, not much going on politically and mostly developer-led: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75470. In 2009 it was about the same, but managers started complaining: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552976. In 2010 a lot more managers were hired. In 2011 Google started killing products and developers lost a lot of credibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557672. Managers suddenly gained the upper hand and started pushing revenue as the bottom line. The smarter or well-connected developers started leaving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277. By 2013, 20% time was "dead": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466. I didn't follow Google workplace standards much after that, but my general impression is it continued declining, more management pressure and relatively lower pay/benefits for new workers. Then we started getting leaks from inside Google in 2017 and life at Google has been "miserable" since then. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684463) The only obvious solution is to start firing people; Google has been in growth mode for a long time and managers perform their jobs a lot better when they're worried about themselves. This could happen naturally as a reaction to ad revenue flattening out or maybe Google will shift to a high-turnover culture like Amazon.