8 ms·

Google CEO says company genuinely struggling with employee trust

63 points by andrewstuart 7y ago

phaedryx 7y ago
Well, here's a few things off of the top of my head that have eroded my trust: 1. Contracts with the Department of Defense 2. Participation in project PRISM 3. The Google Graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) 4. Abandoning "Don't be evil"
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  I think this Pichai quote was striking: > He said he tries “to understand when I feel there is something which caused breaking of trust and see what we can do to improve,” adding that “it’s definitely gotten harder to do this at the scale we are doing it.” It's funny how concepts that any 15-year-old could grasp become "harder to understand" when someone offer you millions of dollars to not understand them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    That goes both ways. Google employees live extremely pampered lives and expect to go on doing so, while protesting the things the company does in order to provide them that.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      I’m fairly confident there is no need for Google to do anything to keep making boatloads of money.
- shubhamjain 7y ago
  I wonder if the foundational idealism ("don't be evil") is acting more like a baggage. Look at Microsoft. There were dissenting voices in the company regarding their involvement with the military, but the CEO was blunt. "We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy” [1] On the other hand, Google had to back down [2]. I don't think this would work out for Google in the long term, that is, if they keep caving in to pressure from employees. Maybe trust erosion is inevitable if you're trying to pretend you're not just another profit-making corporation. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18240300/microsoft-ceo-defends-pentagon-contract-ar-headsets-employee-outcry https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18240300/microsoft-ceo-de... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01/google-to-drop-pentagon-ai-contract-after-employees-called-it-the-business-of-war/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01...
  - dwoozle 7y ago
    Microsoft has a less passionate employee base. They want to show up and get their check and go home to their families. Not as many single twenty somethings who take a lot of pride in being “Googlers” and care a lot about what that means.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      This is a dysfunction in Google’s culture, not Microsoft’s. Being a “member” of a company shouldn’t be akin to being a member of, say, a church.
  - Traster 7y ago
    I'm actually quite impressed by that line from Microsoft, it's clear, well thought out, and communicates a simple moral principle that can be used to reason about their entire policy. It's also quite bold in that it clearly implies that it won't co-operate with non-democratic regimes on projects they think are wrong, which I'm sure is not a zero cost decision.
- asuffield 7y ago
  > 2. Participation in project PRISM I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. All the statements made in https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html are true at the time they were written. The sentiment in the title of that post accurately reflects how everybody involved felt about it. (I can't talk about whether they're still true because I've not been there in nearly two years, I wouldn't know)
  - mdrachuk 7y ago
    > I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. But from the blog: > We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. Does not match up
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      A small but not insignificant number of employees move between the security services and Google each year. In fact, the design of the NSA's interception nodes, rulesets and filtering systems resemble strongly many of Google's internal technologies (as evidenced by a leaked config file in the snowden documents)
    - Youden 7y ago
      Sure it matches up. The poster, today, is aware of how PRISM worked. The blog author, then, was not aware that PRISM existed.
  - kerng 7y ago
    Still remember the picture from the NSA with a line between two Google data centers and the Google frontend terminating SSL and traffic between datacenter being in cleartext. And there was this big smiley face from the NSA on the slide!
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    How sure are you that you would have known if there was collaboration? It's not as if that would be widely announced, even internally.
- belltaco 7y ago
  The big thing for me was when they started using GPS and WiFi location data on Android phones a few years ago to track which physical stores you visited, for advertising purposes. Somehow people here didn't think it was a big deal. If it was, say Microsoft, that did the same, I think it'd have been a big controversy. I think there's a bunch of "Google good, MS and Apple bad" mentality that lets Google get away with a lot of things.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    What harm did that cause you (or anyone)?
andrewstuart 7y ago
Google could improve.
- justicezyx 7y ago
  Well you underestimate how complicated it is to run Google, and assumed Sundar isn't doing the best possible job.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Even if you don't underestimate Google, there are really 2 options: current management is not doing the best job, or they're doing the best job but the company size prevents improvements (Google itself should be changed).
Porthos9K 7y ago
Gee, I wonder why.
diveanon 7y ago
Google is struggling with "transparency at scale" which is just business speak for "our employees won't just shut up and do their jobs".
- arcticbull 7y ago
  In a way. Transparency at scale is truly challenging because as you grow bigger you naturally end up with more diversity of opinions and thoughts. Diversity (and transparency) isn't easier -- though it is of course valuable. When you combine autonomy at the lower levels with large quantities of diversity your company moves in lots of directions. What they're struggling with IMO is either (1) front-line folks have too much autonomy and are moving in directions that no longer reflect the views of leadership or (2) the beliefs of the executive team do not materially line up with those of the majority of employees anymore. In either case, it's a tough problem to be sure.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  It should be 'shut up' but it comes across as pandering. A strong man approach could be utilized, but a liberal fully open organization doesn't run that way.
rkagerer 7y ago
Got news for you, it's not just employees.
adamsea 7y ago
“ But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google’s Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers. Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed. ”
pnako 7y ago
I'm not convinced that it would be bad for shareholders to properly split the company, instead of having a holding like Alphabet. I don't think you can mix a defense contractor and an advertising company that has a lot of public scrutiny, for the same reason tobacco companies and breakfast cereal companies tend to be separate entities (despite doing essentially the same thing: selling agricultural commodities to consumers).
- cactus2093 7y ago
  What I genuinely don’t understand about all these split up tech companies arguments, is I don’t see how you’ll end up with a small company from this process (I also don’t see why smaller is necessarily better, but that’s a separate point). If you split google search and ads from everything else in alphabet, it’s still a multi hundred billion dollar business. If you split Facebook proper from Instagram from the rest, you’ll have a couple of multi hundred billion dollar companies. What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty?
  - jariel 7y ago
    Chrome, Android, Search/Ads/Gmail/Apps, Google Cloud could feasibly be split.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty? Because it’s constrained to its niche. Let’s say split search/ads from the rest of Google. It’s still a money-printing machine but what can it spend that money on? It has to pay dividends to shareholders rather than propping up YouTube and GMail and Google Cloud and cross-pollinating data with them. Ditto if any of them become profitable. Shareholders win, regulators win, its good for everyone. Us split-advocates aren’t just knee-jerks, we have thought about this.
  - Traster 7y ago
    The problem of these companies isn't size, it's their make up. Google only has an advertising business because they're dominant in search. The point of these businesses isn't to make the total size of the companies smaller, it's to increase competition. The advertising side of Google might be as big as it was before the split, but once it actually has to compete with other companies for ad space on Google's search engine there's suddenly a competitive market for advertising on search that previously there wasn't. Without the monopoly on search result ads Google's ad business suddenly won't be able to leverage that into being dominant selling adverts through their Adsense. It's about the fact that there is an entire market that has been closed because Google has a monopolistic power to bundle.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I don't think anyone is surprised by this struggle. I have noticed in my life that there are people who operate on a principle that is sometimes called out as "It's not illegal if you don't get caught." Clearly that statement isn't literally true. The essence of the colloquialism is that rules are "arbitrary" and following them, when you don't have to fear the consequence of breaking them because you are unlikely to get caught violating them, is for "chumps." (sorry, another colloquialism). What is lost on people is that people who don't follow rules erode trust. Especially when they could have easily followed a rule and didn't anyway. That trust erodes and is difficult if not impossible to recover. And not surprisingly those same people who are so happy to have "gotten away with it" have no idea that at some point in the future they are going to need that trust and it won't be there.
- jariel 7y ago
  This is not about people skirting the rules, this is a poignantly political concern. "Hiring an exec who supported Trump's travel ban" is purely a political issue. Temporarily halting travel from a list of countries designated by the Obama administration as 'dangerous' - specifically because there's a degree of lawlessness and/or the governments can't/won't cooperate with background checks etc. has very reasonable arguments supporting it. (FYI the nations were Libya/Yemen/Syria/Somalia/Sudan/Iraq - all of which have dysfunctional governments unable to provide reliable identity information - and Iran, which has other problems). Note that Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Indonesia, Saudi, Oman, Pakistan etc. etc. and the vast majority of states with many Muslim citizens were not affected. Contextualising this within Trump's ugly rhetoric is another thing entirely and this part subject to interpretation. If Googlers are going to be discontent about an issue like this then I'm afraid it's game over for their peace - because they are effectively internalising American political discord. Google's direct participation in China etc. is another issue entirely, much more salient as it directly reflects 'what Google is doing' - but even this can be very complicated. Google is essentially 'choosing' a very specific political ethos which is problematic in itself because most of us tend to confound our own version of morality with that of others in a very intolerant manner.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
crowdglass 7y ago
Google tightly colludes with government agencies to illegally spy on the American people. They insta-fired James Damore for writing a memo that criticized the dangers of Google's political echo chamber. Read for yourself (https://firedfortruth.com https://firedfortruth.com) and draw your own conculsion as to whether or not he was being a mind-bendingly sexist bully, as the media claimed. They routinely kill off successful products with little or no warning and no migration path. YouTube refuses to provide clear guidelines to content creators, instead censoring and demonitizing anything that does not abide an ever-narrowing and increasingly violent political narrative. They engage in massive amounts of AdWords fraud to drive up their revenue numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google What did they expect?
3xblah 7y ago
"But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google's Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers. Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed." If I am not mistaken Google has recently made a change to its Chrome browser (77.0.3865.105) that removed the ability to disable javascript, cookies, etc. (via chrome://settings/content or clicking to the left of the address -- "site information" -- in the address bar) for all websites when in Guest mode. It can still be disabled for individual websites. Assuming I am not mistaken, suprisingly, I have not read anything about this change. Is it possible there was no intent to stop users from turning off javascript and cookies and this was simply another example of a "flawed implementation".
- 3xblah 7y ago
  One theory is that the update is making it impossible for Chrome to save settings when in Guest Mode and chrooted in Developer Mode. Probably not intentional but frustrating because it will neither be noticed nor fixed by Google.
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    ChromeOS/Chrome gets new update and sure enough, problem is partially "fixed". Now there is a new settings page: chrome://settings/content/all These settings seems to stick, however the ability to globally turn off cookies and javascript remains broken. Also, it is so time consuming to change settings for each site, one has to wonder if this inconvenience is deliberate.
klingonopera 7y ago
I don't see where the problem is with hiring someone who supports Trump's travel ban. I disagree with it and I wouldn't want to drink a beer with that person, but on which level would this hinder me professionally working with that person so long as that person does not abuse their power for their political views, which we must assume, until it can be proven otherwise? Isn't that what democracy is all about? Has the work environment become so casual, that we cannot set aside our differences in a professional setting?
- riversflow 7y ago
  >I disagree with it and wouldn’t want to drink a beer with that person. Wow, are you projecting an image with that statement? Just realize that your attitude of blind judgement of others perpetuates this partisan divide. Not wanting to talk to someone based on a differing policy perspective is /exactly/ the problem. This breaks our republic. You should desire to try and understand their perspective and enlighten them to yours. Honestly sickening to read that.
  - klingonopera 7y ago
    Erm? I'm saying that I wouldn't want to spend my personal time with someone who supports that, that's my own business, but that I wouldn't mind working with them, because that's a professional environment. The Googlers are the ones who'd do neither, so what do you think of them?
    - riversflow 7y ago
      >that’s my own business And I’m saying that by not engaging with people you disagree with based on politics in your personal life you are shirking your civic duty. It’s selfish, short sighted, and intellectually dishonest behavior. Seriously reconsider because it reveals a certain closed mindedness and breeds partisanship and tribalism in others; things I’m guessing you aren’t for based on parent comments. I think a business is a business, it has its own charter to follow and it seems fair that it’s within the abilities of that charter to limit the speech of at-will employees to some extent. I can’t believe Google is putting up with this behavior from employees, and makes me think their hiring process needs a rework and reaffirms the feeling I have that Google has a culture of immaturity. It just seems like a personal attention grab to me on the part of the Googlers. They should leave if they feel so strongly. People who really think the people they work for are evil defect, possibly after leaking information or making a mess, but usually posthaste. Google is letting them make a mess right now.
charliebrownau 7y ago
No fucking shit Google like so many American companies have turned into LEFT WING ACTIVIST platforms
charliebrownau 7y ago
No farking Shit A massive amount of American corporations worth over USD$1-10 million have become in 2009-2019 political activist platforms instead of serving simple business concept of selling a product or proving a service to every single INDIVIDUAL no matter the individuals attitubes , this was one of the core fundamental principles of business pre 2010/pre woke era You sold something to the customer, customer paid, customer was anonymous
dwoozle 7y ago
As soon as TGIFs started leaking, Pichai had to start treating them like public press conferences, resulting in them now being completely devoid of content.
repolfx 7y ago
Googlers are overwhelmingly young compared to what they used to be. What these people want most, beyond the usuals of money and perks, is for their employer to give them moral structure in life and the constant reassurance that they are good people - something they've been told since birth is the most important thing to be but with nearly no guidance on what that means, beyond the plots of Disney movies. In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates. This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there. The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.
- banmeagaindan2 7y ago
  The university system will implode and there will be a lot of political turbulence when these institutionalized young adults struggle to adjust. Putting children for half the population into the education system with the expectation of higher wages through knowledge work when they came out the other side was delusional. Our middle class still believes in a kind of information perpetual motion machine.
- casefields 7y ago
  That was the nicest, most vicious attack on the pathos and ethos of Googlers I've read in a while. Ouch.
- 7y ago
finnthehuman 7y ago
I'm surprised they still had any trust at all. I thought it was pretty obvious - especially after dragonfly - that the company is only going through the motions of caring to pacify their employees concerns. The moral questions that face google's rank and file are so poorly discussed in the tech sector or by society at large I'm not surprised that they only get rankled when the company does something that can be blogged about with a hot take. I guess it's good that things like "military contracts" and "former Trump staffer" can penetrate thick skulls, but they're many many years past nip-it-in-the-bud phase. They have no intention of establishing an overarching moral philosophy and have set themselves up to just rationalize questions away as come up.
rambojazz 7y ago
Non-paywall link?

63 points by andrewstuart 7y ago

Well, here's a few things off of the top of my head that have eroded my trust: 1. Contracts with the Department of Defense 2. Participation in project PRISM 3. The Google Graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) 4. Abandoning "Don't be evil"

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
I think this Pichai quote was striking: > He said he tries “to understand when I feel there is something which caused breaking of trust and see what we can do to improve,” adding that “it’s definitely gotten harder to do this at the scale we are doing it.” It's funny how concepts that any 15-year-old could grasp become "harder to understand" when someone offer you millions of dollars to not understand them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  That goes both ways. Google employees live extremely pampered lives and expect to go on doing so, while protesting the things the company does in order to provide them that.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I’m fairly confident there is no need for Google to do anything to keep making boatloads of money.
shubhamjain 7y ago
I wonder if the foundational idealism ("don't be evil") is acting more like a baggage. Look at Microsoft. There were dissenting voices in the company regarding their involvement with the military, but the CEO was blunt. "We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy” [1] On the other hand, Google had to back down [2]. I don't think this would work out for Google in the long term, that is, if they keep caving in to pressure from employees. Maybe trust erosion is inevitable if you're trying to pretend you're not just another profit-making corporation. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18240300/microsoft-ceo-defends-pentagon-contract-ar-headsets-employee-outcry https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18240300/microsoft-ceo-de... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01/google-to-drop-pentagon-ai-contract-after-employees-called-it-the-business-of-war/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01...
- dwoozle 7y ago
  Microsoft has a less passionate employee base. They want to show up and get their check and go home to their families. Not as many single twenty somethings who take a lot of pride in being “Googlers” and care a lot about what that means.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    This is a dysfunction in Google’s culture, not Microsoft’s. Being a “member” of a company shouldn’t be akin to being a member of, say, a church.
- Traster 7y ago
  I'm actually quite impressed by that line from Microsoft, it's clear, well thought out, and communicates a simple moral principle that can be used to reason about their entire policy. It's also quite bold in that it clearly implies that it won't co-operate with non-democratic regimes on projects they think are wrong, which I'm sure is not a zero cost decision.
asuffield 7y ago
> 2. Participation in project PRISM I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. All the statements made in https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html are true at the time they were written. The sentiment in the title of that post accurately reflects how everybody involved felt about it. (I can't talk about whether they're still true because I've not been there in nearly two years, I wouldn't know)
- mdrachuk 7y ago
  > I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. But from the blog: > We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. Does not match up
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    A small but not insignificant number of employees move between the security services and Google each year. In fact, the design of the NSA's interception nodes, rulesets and filtering systems resemble strongly many of Google's internal technologies (as evidenced by a leaked config file in the snowden documents)
  - Youden 7y ago
    Sure it matches up. The poster, today, is aware of how PRISM worked. The blog author, then, was not aware that PRISM existed.
- kerng 7y ago
  Still remember the picture from the NSA with a line between two Google data centers and the Google frontend terminating SSL and traffic between datacenter being in cleartext. And there was this big smiley face from the NSA on the slide!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  How sure are you that you would have known if there was collaboration? It's not as if that would be widely announced, even internally.
belltaco 7y ago
The big thing for me was when they started using GPS and WiFi location data on Android phones a few years ago to track which physical stores you visited, for advertising purposes. Somehow people here didn't think it was a big deal. If it was, say Microsoft, that did the same, I think it'd have been a big controversy. I think there's a bunch of "Google good, MS and Apple bad" mentality that lets Google get away with a lot of things.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  What harm did that cause you (or anyone)?

andrewstuart 7y ago

Google could improve.

justicezyx 7y ago
Well you underestimate how complicated it is to run Google, and assumed Sundar isn't doing the best possible job.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 7y ago
  Even if you don't underestimate Google, there are really 2 options: current management is not doing the best job, or they're doing the best job but the company size prevents improvements (Google itself should be changed).

Porthos9K 7y ago

Gee, I wonder why.

diveanon 7y ago

Google is struggling with "transparency at scale" which is just business speak for "our employees won't just shut up and do their jobs".

arcticbull 7y ago
In a way. Transparency at scale is truly challenging because as you grow bigger you naturally end up with more diversity of opinions and thoughts. Diversity (and transparency) isn't easier -- though it is of course valuable. When you combine autonomy at the lower levels with large quantities of diversity your company moves in lots of directions. What they're struggling with IMO is either (1) front-line folks have too much autonomy and are moving in directions that no longer reflect the views of leadership or (2) the beliefs of the executive team do not materially line up with those of the majority of employees anymore. In either case, it's a tough problem to be sure.
friendlybus 7y ago
It should be 'shut up' but it comes across as pandering. A strong man approach could be utilized, but a liberal fully open organization doesn't run that way.

rkagerer 7y ago

Got news for you, it's not just employees.

adamsea 7y ago

“ But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google’s Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers. Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed. ”

pnako 7y ago

I'm not convinced that it would be bad for shareholders to properly split the company, instead of having a holding like Alphabet. I don't think you can mix a defense contractor and an advertising company that has a lot of public scrutiny, for the same reason tobacco companies and breakfast cereal companies tend to be separate entities (despite doing essentially the same thing: selling agricultural commodities to consumers).

cactus2093 7y ago
What I genuinely don’t understand about all these split up tech companies arguments, is I don’t see how you’ll end up with a small company from this process (I also don’t see why smaller is necessarily better, but that’s a separate point). If you split google search and ads from everything else in alphabet, it’s still a multi hundred billion dollar business. If you split Facebook proper from Instagram from the rest, you’ll have a couple of multi hundred billion dollar companies. What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty?
- jariel 7y ago
  Chrome, Android, Search/Ads/Gmail/Apps, Google Cloud could feasibly be split.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty? Because it’s constrained to its niche. Let’s say split search/ads from the rest of Google. It’s still a money-printing machine but what can it spend that money on? It has to pay dividends to shareholders rather than propping up YouTube and GMail and Google Cloud and cross-pollinating data with them. Ditto if any of them become profitable. Shareholders win, regulators win, its good for everyone. Us split-advocates aren’t just knee-jerks, we have thought about this.
- Traster 7y ago
  The problem of these companies isn't size, it's their make up. Google only has an advertising business because they're dominant in search. The point of these businesses isn't to make the total size of the companies smaller, it's to increase competition. The advertising side of Google might be as big as it was before the split, but once it actually has to compete with other companies for ad space on Google's search engine there's suddenly a competitive market for advertising on search that previously there wasn't. Without the monopoly on search result ads Google's ad business suddenly won't be able to leverage that into being dominant selling adverts through their Adsense. It's about the fact that there is an entire market that has been closed because Google has a monopolistic power to bundle.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I don't think anyone is surprised by this struggle. I have noticed in my life that there are people who operate on a principle that is sometimes called out as "It's not illegal if you don't get caught." Clearly that statement isn't literally true. The essence of the colloquialism is that rules are "arbitrary" and following them, when you don't have to fear the consequence of breaking them because you are unlikely to get caught violating them, is for "chumps." (sorry, another colloquialism). What is lost on people is that people who don't follow rules erode trust. Especially when they could have easily followed a rule and didn't anyway. That trust erodes and is difficult if not impossible to recover. And not surprisingly those same people who are so happy to have "gotten away with it" have no idea that at some point in the future they are going to need that trust and it won't be there.

jariel 7y ago
This is not about people skirting the rules, this is a poignantly political concern. "Hiring an exec who supported Trump's travel ban" is purely a political issue. Temporarily halting travel from a list of countries designated by the Obama administration as 'dangerous' - specifically because there's a degree of lawlessness and/or the governments can't/won't cooperate with background checks etc. has very reasonable arguments supporting it. (FYI the nations were Libya/Yemen/Syria/Somalia/Sudan/Iraq - all of which have dysfunctional governments unable to provide reliable identity information - and Iran, which has other problems). Note that Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Indonesia, Saudi, Oman, Pakistan etc. etc. and the vast majority of states with many Muslim citizens were not affected. Contextualising this within Trump's ugly rhetoric is another thing entirely and this part subject to interpretation. If Googlers are going to be discontent about an issue like this then I'm afraid it's game over for their peace - because they are effectively internalising American political discord. Google's direct participation in China etc. is another issue entirely, much more salient as it directly reflects 'what Google is doing' - but even this can be very complicated. Google is essentially 'choosing' a very specific political ethos which is problematic in itself because most of us tend to confound our own version of morality with that of others in a very intolerant manner.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago

crowdglass 7y ago

Google tightly colludes with government agencies to illegally spy on the American people. They insta-fired James Damore for writing a memo that criticized the dangers of Google's political echo chamber. Read for yourself (https://firedfortruth.com https://firedfortruth.com) and draw your own conculsion as to whether or not he was being a mind-bendingly sexist bully, as the media claimed. They routinely kill off successful products with little or no warning and no migration path. YouTube refuses to provide clear guidelines to content creators, instead censoring and demonitizing anything that does not abide an ever-narrowing and increasingly violent political narrative. They engage in massive amounts of AdWords fraud to drive up their revenue numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google What did they expect?

3xblah 7y ago

"But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google's Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers. Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed." If I am not mistaken Google has recently made a change to its Chrome browser (77.0.3865.105) that removed the ability to disable javascript, cookies, etc. (via chrome://settings/content or clicking to the left of the address -- "site information" -- in the address bar) for all websites when in Guest mode. It can still be disabled for individual websites. Assuming I am not mistaken, suprisingly, I have not read anything about this change. Is it possible there was no intent to stop users from turning off javascript and cookies and this was simply another example of a "flawed implementation".

3xblah 7y ago
One theory is that the update is making it impossible for Chrome to save settings when in Guest Mode and chrooted in Developer Mode. Probably not intentional but frustrating because it will neither be noticed nor fixed by Google.
- 3xblah 7y ago
  ChromeOS/Chrome gets new update and sure enough, problem is partially "fixed". Now there is a new settings page: chrome://settings/content/all These settings seems to stick, however the ability to globally turn off cookies and javascript remains broken. Also, it is so time consuming to change settings for each site, one has to wonder if this inconvenience is deliberate.

klingonopera 7y ago

I don't see where the problem is with hiring someone who supports Trump's travel ban. I disagree with it and I wouldn't want to drink a beer with that person, but on which level would this hinder me professionally working with that person so long as that person does not abuse their power for their political views, which we must assume, until it can be proven otherwise? Isn't that what democracy is all about? Has the work environment become so casual, that we cannot set aside our differences in a professional setting?

riversflow 7y ago
>I disagree with it and wouldn’t want to drink a beer with that person. Wow, are you projecting an image with that statement? Just realize that your attitude of blind judgement of others perpetuates this partisan divide. Not wanting to talk to someone based on a differing policy perspective is /exactly/ the problem. This breaks our republic. You should desire to try and understand their perspective and enlighten them to yours. Honestly sickening to read that.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Erm? I'm saying that I wouldn't want to spend my personal time with someone who supports that, that's my own business, but that I wouldn't mind working with them, because that's a professional environment. The Googlers are the ones who'd do neither, so what do you think of them?
  - riversflow 7y ago
    >that’s my own business And I’m saying that by not engaging with people you disagree with based on politics in your personal life you are shirking your civic duty. It’s selfish, short sighted, and intellectually dishonest behavior. Seriously reconsider because it reveals a certain closed mindedness and breeds partisanship and tribalism in others; things I’m guessing you aren’t for based on parent comments. I think a business is a business, it has its own charter to follow and it seems fair that it’s within the abilities of that charter to limit the speech of at-will employees to some extent. I can’t believe Google is putting up with this behavior from employees, and makes me think their hiring process needs a rework and reaffirms the feeling I have that Google has a culture of immaturity. It just seems like a personal attention grab to me on the part of the Googlers. They should leave if they feel so strongly. People who really think the people they work for are evil defect, possibly after leaking information or making a mess, but usually posthaste. Google is letting them make a mess right now.

charliebrownau 7y ago

No fucking shit Google like so many American companies have turned into LEFT WING ACTIVIST platforms

charliebrownau 7y ago

No farking Shit A massive amount of American corporations worth over USD$1-10 million have become in 2009-2019 political activist platforms instead of serving simple business concept of selling a product or proving a service to every single INDIVIDUAL no matter the individuals attitubes , this was one of the core fundamental principles of business pre 2010/pre woke era You sold something to the customer, customer paid, customer was anonymous

dwoozle 7y ago

As soon as TGIFs started leaking, Pichai had to start treating them like public press conferences, resulting in them now being completely devoid of content.

repolfx 7y ago

Googlers are overwhelmingly young compared to what they used to be. What these people want most, beyond the usuals of money and perks, is for their employer to give them moral structure in life and the constant reassurance that they are good people - something they've been told since birth is the most important thing to be but with nearly no guidance on what that means, beyond the plots of Disney movies. In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates. This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there. The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.

banmeagaindan2 7y ago
The university system will implode and there will be a lot of political turbulence when these institutionalized young adults struggle to adjust. Putting children for half the population into the education system with the expectation of higher wages through knowledge work when they came out the other side was delusional. Our middle class still believes in a kind of information perpetual motion machine.
casefields 7y ago
That was the nicest, most vicious attack on the pathos and ethos of Googlers I've read in a while. Ouch.
7y ago

finnthehuman 7y ago

I'm surprised they still had any trust at all. I thought it was pretty obvious - especially after dragonfly - that the company is only going through the motions of caring to pacify their employees concerns. The moral questions that face google's rank and file are so poorly discussed in the tech sector or by society at large I'm not surprised that they only get rankled when the company does something that can be blogged about with a hot take. I guess it's good that things like "military contracts" and "former Trump staffer" can penetrate thick skulls, but they're many many years past nip-it-in-the-bud phase. They have no intention of establishing an overarching moral philosophy and have set themselves up to just rationalize questions away as come up.

rambojazz 7y ago

Non-paywall link?