It's been interesting to watch "center your social life on work" come home to roost for Google. (And to a lesser degree other large tech companies.) Unionizati

It's been interesting to watch "center your social life on work" come home to roost for Google. (And to a lesser degree other large tech companies.) Unionization is the most direct concern for a company, but it's not the first time this has burned them. Actions from the walkouts to the government contract protests have been encouraged by Google's promotion of non-work connections, and enabled their inability to crack down without destroying the entire "work at Google!" narrative. It didn't get much news focus, but even the Gender Memo story tied into this - totally aside from its content, it was first posted to an internal "Skeptics" mailing list. How could it possibly have sounded like a good idea for a company to have an internal mailing list devoted to discussing controversial ideas and rejecting conventional wisdom? By odds alone, Google was eventually going to run into some outrage-sparking mess like that just by encouraging people to bring their entire lives to the office.