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I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising t

I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted. There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents. This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger". This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments. I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them. This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.

lovich 7y ago
>I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?
- manigandham 7y ago
  Isn't that push exactly what's happening? The decision making power is still concentrated and many of original hires are still there so I'd imagine there's plenty of oversight and momentum involved in the company's direction. But the ongoing and increasing protests clearly show there's a change in attitude, or at least by a very vocal minority.
- repolfx 7y ago
  I didn't describe a neutral Google internally: looking back, it's possible there were a bunch of closet Marxists who felt uncomfortable admitting that. I doubt it because in other offices I've never seen people on the left hold back from publicly announcing their views (it's called virtue signalling for a reason!), but I guess it's possible. The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google. During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out. As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up. The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.

lovich 7y ago

>I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?

manigandham 7y ago
Isn't that push exactly what's happening? The decision making power is still concentrated and many of original hires are still there so I'd imagine there's plenty of oversight and momentum involved in the company's direction. But the ongoing and increasing protests clearly show there's a change in attitude, or at least by a very vocal minority.
repolfx 7y ago
I didn't describe a neutral Google internally: looking back, it's possible there were a bunch of closet Marxists who felt uncomfortable admitting that. I doubt it because in other offices I've never seen people on the left hold back from publicly announcing their views (it's called virtue signalling for a reason!), but I guess it's possible. The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google. During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out. As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up. The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.