8 ms·

I think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did th

I think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did this so that they could get the benefits of creativity, which inherently requires emotional engagement, which requires that you not repress your emotions. (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.) The part that's biting them is that now that they're 100,000 people, creativity is wasted anyway, because any brilliant new product idea will get killed long before launch and if it doesn't it'll probably catastrophically damage Google's brand. So the upside of this cultural decision is worthless to them, and the downside is incredibly chaotic and difficult to manage. I think we'll see a shift away from this at Google, but I think other startups will still consciously embrace it. When you're 10 people and are about to go out of business if you don't come up with a brilliant idea, your incentives are dramatically different from when you're 100,000 and make tens of billions from your existing business lines every quarter.

nradov 7y ago
Why do you think that creativity requires emotional engagement? I haven't found that to be the case.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Personal experience, but it's also been born out by studies: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-and-science/201909/what-emotions-help-creativity https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-a... https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creative https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creat... https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02660/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0266... TL;DR: It's not the specific emotion that matters (indeed, there's evidence that having mixed emotions, where you can synthesize aspects of them, is crucial to creativity), it's the motivational intensity behind it.
  - rudedogg 7y ago
    This seems like a pretty big stretch. The realization that mixed emotions (as in happy/angry) being useful for creative thought somehow can be applied here?
reaperducer 7y ago
You can be creative and still act like a professional in a professional environment. One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today. (Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)
- geodel 7y ago
  Advertising agencies are lot smaller than 100K employees. Also if there are very big agencies they are distributed and individual country/city offices are responsible for clients. Beyond corporate functions there are no business "best practices" to be enforced by headquarters.
  - trynewideas 7y ago
    WPP alone is 130k. There are a few at that scale, just like the vast, vast majority of tech companies aren't Google's scale.
    - 1986 7y ago
      WPP is a holding company for a number of smaller agencies - having previously worked for a holding company-owned agency (holding companies dominate the advertising agency space), no one considers themselves e.g. a WPP employee, and culture is very much set at the individual agency level.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 7y ago
  Since when were advertising agencies button-up affairs? Crispin Porter is down the street from me and they seem to be every silly brogrammer stereotype, just in a different market. Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such. That's Mike Judge levels of ridiculousness.
zarkov99 7y ago
How did being assertive and bringing your whole self to work work out for James Damore?
- Sebguer 7y ago
  If you're saying his 'whole self' was 'women are inherently inferior to me' than I'd say it worked out as it should have.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Can you link to where he said that as specifically as possible? I have read his paper and it doesn't say that.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Is it simpler but less civil to just to call out an entirely false representation of Damore’s position, than to entertain it asking for evidence?
      - zarkov99 7y ago
        The hope is that people who are in good faith will look for the evidence and through their failure to find it come to change their views.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Why should this opinion (just for the sake of argument assuming that it is, which I don’t think) have any effect on his employment status if there were otherwise no problems?
throwGuardian 7y ago
I do not believe chronic bouts of performative outrage leads to anything creative, inside or out of the workplace. If one's "whole self" cannot meaningfully function without getting constantly triggered, the problem is with the normalization of such "whole self" concepts
- ellius 7y ago
  The problem is you don't get to pick and choose who your culture affects. If you hire people with those opinions and then tell them they need to watch what they say, other employees get the same message. You may have people who aren't political at all, but they see people being punished for expressing their opinions and decide they too better modify their behavior.
- laughinghan 7y ago
  Performative outrage? Constantly triggered? Are we talking about the same company? Paying someone $90 million to leave after allegedly assaulting someone [0] isn't something that happens "constantly", and seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have strong opinions about. And there's nothing "performative" about successfully rolling back mandatory arbitration [1], which studies have found is stacked in favor of employers and muzzles employees [2], and which the ABA now recommends against [3]. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-assault-harassment-policy-sundar-pichai-walkout-changes https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-as... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mandatory-arbitration https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mand... [3]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/law_practice_magazine/2019/MA2019/MA2019Highlights/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications...
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Rubin was accused by, if I recall correctly, a woman he'd been in a relationship with and then dumped? He denied her accusations and as it was all behind closed doors there's no way to ever resolve it. That shouldn't be in the public realm at all, let alone people having strong opinions about it! Honestly if Google really kicked him out because of an unsubstantiable claim by some woman with an axe to grind, or some private sexual perversions .... after all he did for Google? $90M is probably too little for what they gave him. That's like, less than a year's CEO salary.
majormajor 7y ago
> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.) I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building. It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.
  - beenBoutIT 7y ago
    It's because these extraordinarily stupid individuals started out with the same shitty American k-12 education as the rest of us and then went out of their way to make it worse by believing things that are patently false. Someone unable to grasp the basics isn't worth getting into a technical discussion with. There aren't many of these 'basics' that I would consider an instant DQ, although Holocaust Denial, Being Superstitious, Cannibalism, Flat Earth Belief, etc. would fit the bill.
  - baddox 7y ago
    Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      Literally nobody has time for that. Take a question like “Will this tool meet requirement x?” - you want every person on the team to verify that for themselves?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.) This was the same logic that allowed talented men to turn their workplaces into a very unwelcoming place for women by allowing them to make sexual jokes, proposition their coworkers, and have business meetings in strip clubs. If you are going with the “take your whole self to work” spiel you can argue that sexuality is a bigger part of most people’s lives than politics. So if we can ask for co-workers to not discuss their latest bedroom exploits, surely we can ask for people to not talk about politics at work.
- zaptheimpaler 7y ago
  Its ridiculous to equate talking about politics to sexual harassment. Talking politics doesn't magically turn you into a chauvinist.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Not in general. James Damore was likely a singular exception.
- pm90 7y ago
  I don’t think they’re the same thing. It might be a generational thing, but younger workers are at ease and fluid with Gender and gender based identities. There is a culture of respect that I see in this generation that might be hidden by the absolutely pathetic situations under which many of them live today due to reasons unrelated to their talents and work ethic. But this is changing, Google embraced that change but it’s struggling with it today for uncertain reasons.
BurningFrog 7y ago
The informal "just be yourself" spirit can work quite well in a small startup team. Google used to be just that, and they made untold billions from it, so it's not surprising that they held on to remnants of that spirit for too long. Now they're a gigantic megacorp, and need to act the part. ...and life goes on, everything is different but also the same...
anonygler 7y ago
I disagree with this. This is like comedians raging against cancel culture. It’s possible to both be funny and be conscious :: It’s possible to be creative and not fixated on political activism.
- alexnewman 7y ago
  You notice basically everyone funny is raging against outrage culture
SquishyPanda23 7y ago
It's true that Google doesn't need creative all stars. It needs line workers, and there's no way its culture of whimsical creativity could have survived expanding so much and so quickly. Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it. The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture. The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money. This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons. Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.
- pm90 7y ago
  They could try to split up. The separation into Alphabet seems almost a dream for regulators who can just separate them. I mean, just think about it. Standard Oil had the same monopoly over a valuable resource (oil then, Software and Data today) that Google has today (fine, Facebook etc too... but there is no Facebook search; also they are monopolies over different kinds of digital products). They need to be broken up; their successors will probably end up becoming quite big over time; rinse, rise, repeat. Capitalism is an amazing thing. Only the strongest survive but then they dominate everything and strangle the market itself. Fuck that, keep the markets free of such control by non state actors.
  - SquishyPanda23 7y ago
    They can't break up because ads drives something like 80-90% of revenue.
  - 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
> It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former. I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.
- username90 7y ago
  It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? For example, it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future. The same applies everywhere, and going by the book is always the least creative thing you can do. Of course often going by the book is the best solution you have, but it is hard to argue that it doesn't reduce creativity in the workplace.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? I can't imagine my being an R or a D having any connection with engineering creativity. > it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future I give an evaluation of their ability to do the job, and let the HR dept. fret about the company's social equity agenda. I don't choose my friends based on if their politics/religion align with mine, either.
kanox 7y ago
> actively courted assertive people with opinions Is that something that companies do on purpose? Because such an environment sounds like absolute hell. I want to spend my time dealing with technical problems not arguing with people's egos.

nradov 7y ago

Why do you think that creativity requires emotional engagement? I haven't found that to be the case.

nostrademons 7y ago
Personal experience, but it's also been born out by studies: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-and-science/201909/what-emotions-help-creativity https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-a... https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creative https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creat... https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02660/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0266... TL;DR: It's not the specific emotion that matters (indeed, there's evidence that having mixed emotions, where you can synthesize aspects of them, is crucial to creativity), it's the motivational intensity behind it.
- rudedogg 7y ago
  This seems like a pretty big stretch. The realization that mixed emotions (as in happy/angry) being useful for creative thought somehow can be applied here?

reaperducer 7y ago

You can be creative and still act like a professional in a professional environment. One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today. (Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)

geodel 7y ago
Advertising agencies are lot smaller than 100K employees. Also if there are very big agencies they are distributed and individual country/city offices are responsible for clients. Beyond corporate functions there are no business "best practices" to be enforced by headquarters.
- trynewideas 7y ago
  WPP alone is 130k. There are a few at that scale, just like the vast, vast majority of tech companies aren't Google's scale.
  - 1986 7y ago
    WPP is a holding company for a number of smaller agencies - having previously worked for a holding company-owned agency (holding companies dominate the advertising agency space), no one considers themselves e.g. a WPP employee, and culture is very much set at the individual agency level.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
monocasa 7y ago
Since when were advertising agencies button-up affairs? Crispin Porter is down the street from me and they seem to be every silly brogrammer stereotype, just in a different market. Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such. That's Mike Judge levels of ridiculousness.

zarkov99 7y ago

How did being assertive and bringing your whole self to work work out for James Damore?

Sebguer 7y ago
If you're saying his 'whole self' was 'women are inherently inferior to me' than I'd say it worked out as it should have.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Can you link to where he said that as specifically as possible? I have read his paper and it doesn't say that.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Is it simpler but less civil to just to call out an entirely false representation of Damore’s position, than to entertain it asking for evidence?
    - zarkov99 7y ago
      The hope is that people who are in good faith will look for the evidence and through their failure to find it come to change their views.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Why should this opinion (just for the sake of argument assuming that it is, which I don’t think) have any effect on his employment status if there were otherwise no problems?

throwGuardian 7y ago

I do not believe chronic bouts of performative outrage leads to anything creative, inside or out of the workplace. If one's "whole self" cannot meaningfully function without getting constantly triggered, the problem is with the normalization of such "whole self" concepts

ellius 7y ago
The problem is you don't get to pick and choose who your culture affects. If you hire people with those opinions and then tell them they need to watch what they say, other employees get the same message. You may have people who aren't political at all, but they see people being punished for expressing their opinions and decide they too better modify their behavior.
laughinghan 7y ago
Performative outrage? Constantly triggered? Are we talking about the same company? Paying someone $90 million to leave after allegedly assaulting someone [0] isn't something that happens "constantly", and seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have strong opinions about. And there's nothing "performative" about successfully rolling back mandatory arbitration [1], which studies have found is stacked in favor of employers and muzzles employees [2], and which the ABA now recommends against [3]. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-assault-harassment-policy-sundar-pichai-walkout-changes https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-as... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mandatory-arbitration https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mand... [3]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/law_practice_magazine/2019/MA2019/MA2019Highlights/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications...
- thu2111 7y ago
  Rubin was accused by, if I recall correctly, a woman he'd been in a relationship with and then dumped? He denied her accusations and as it was all behind closed doors there's no way to ever resolve it. That shouldn't be in the public realm at all, let alone people having strong opinions about it! Honestly if Google really kicked him out because of an unsubstantiable claim by some woman with an axe to grind, or some private sexual perversions .... after all he did for Google? $90M is probably too little for what they gave him. That's like, less than a year's CEO salary.

majormajor 7y ago

lazyasciiart 7y ago
I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.
- beenBoutIT 7y ago
  It's because these extraordinarily stupid individuals started out with the same shitty American k-12 education as the rest of us and then went out of their way to make it worse by believing things that are patently false. Someone unable to grasp the basics isn't worth getting into a technical discussion with. There aren't many of these 'basics' that I would consider an instant DQ, although Holocaust Denial, Being Superstitious, Cannibalism, Flat Earth Belief, etc. would fit the bill.
- baddox 7y ago
  Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Literally nobody has time for that. Take a question like “Will this tool meet requirement x?” - you want every person on the team to verify that for themselves?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.) This was the same logic that allowed talented men to turn their workplaces into a very unwelcoming place for women by allowing them to make sexual jokes, proposition their coworkers, and have business meetings in strip clubs. If you are going with the “take your whole self to work” spiel you can argue that sexuality is a bigger part of most people’s lives than politics. So if we can ask for co-workers to not discuss their latest bedroom exploits, surely we can ask for people to not talk about politics at work.

zaptheimpaler 7y ago
Its ridiculous to equate talking about politics to sexual harassment. Talking politics doesn't magically turn you into a chauvinist.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Not in general. James Damore was likely a singular exception.
pm90 7y ago
I don’t think they’re the same thing. It might be a generational thing, but younger workers are at ease and fluid with Gender and gender based identities. There is a culture of respect that I see in this generation that might be hidden by the absolutely pathetic situations under which many of them live today due to reasons unrelated to their talents and work ethic. But this is changing, Google embraced that change but it’s struggling with it today for uncertain reasons.

BurningFrog 7y ago

The informal "just be yourself" spirit can work quite well in a small startup team. Google used to be just that, and they made untold billions from it, so it's not surprising that they held on to remnants of that spirit for too long. Now they're a gigantic megacorp, and need to act the part. ...and life goes on, everything is different but also the same...

anonygler 7y ago

I disagree with this. This is like comedians raging against cancel culture. It’s possible to both be funny and be conscious :: It’s possible to be creative and not fixated on political activism.

alexnewman 7y ago
You notice basically everyone funny is raging against outrage culture

SquishyPanda23 7y ago

It's true that Google doesn't need creative all stars. It needs line workers, and there's no way its culture of whimsical creativity could have survived expanding so much and so quickly. Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it. The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture. The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money. This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons. Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.

pm90 7y ago
They could try to split up. The separation into Alphabet seems almost a dream for regulators who can just separate them. I mean, just think about it. Standard Oil had the same monopoly over a valuable resource (oil then, Software and Data today) that Google has today (fine, Facebook etc too... but there is no Facebook search; also they are monopolies over different kinds of digital products). They need to be broken up; their successors will probably end up becoming quite big over time; rinse, rise, repeat. Capitalism is an amazing thing. Only the strongest survive but then they dominate everything and strangle the market itself. Fuck that, keep the markets free of such control by non state actors.
- SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  They can't break up because ads drives something like 80-90% of revenue.
- 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

> It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former. I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.

username90 7y ago
It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? For example, it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future. The same applies everywhere, and going by the book is always the least creative thing you can do. Of course often going by the book is the best solution you have, but it is hard to argue that it doesn't reduce creativity in the workplace.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? I can't imagine my being an R or a D having any connection with engineering creativity. > it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future I give an evaluation of their ability to do the job, and let the HR dept. fret about the company's social equity agenda. I don't choose my friends based on if their politics/religion align with mine, either.

kanox 7y ago

> actively courted assertive people with opinions Is that something that companies do on purpose? Because such an environment sounds like absolute hell. I want to spend my time dealing with technical problems not arguing with people's egos.