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Based on past incidents, I'd venture that Google employees are free to speak up only as long as they speak up with the "right" opinions on a vast range of topic

Based on past incidents, I'd venture that Google employees are free to speak up only as long as they speak up with the "right" opinions on a vast range of topics. "You can say whatever you want, as long as it's this".

rogerkirkness 6y ago
Overton window.
- jancsika 6y ago
  Not only that, but also-- regulatory capture. If Google's competitors didn't have a Justice Department that blatantly serves their own interests of investigating Google, then Google would have no incentive to keep their employees from discussing anti-trust law. Government cronyism is why corporations can't simply let us have nice things.
jakevoytko 6y ago
This is true, but Google also had very specific guidance around this topic when I worked there (10-5 years ago). We received specific training about this. The core message was approximately, "You don't understand the legal trouble that you're going to get yourself into by talking about markets, competitors, competition, etc. Innocent words or phrases may have very specific legal definitions or implications that may be surprising to you. Speculating about these things will bring you trouble, the amount of which which will also surprise you. At Google, we don't talk about ourselves in relationship to our competitors, we only talk about ourselves in relationship to our customers"
- adt2bt 6y ago
  As someone who just recently joined Google and took a training on this, I can confirm this is still pretty much the gist of the messaging.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  To clarify: this covers both internal and external communication. This kind of training is not unique to Google, either. I got very similarly themed training at Eaton (a manufacturing conglomerate). In both cases, I was left with the impression that the employer had been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication in some lawsuit.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    It's boilerplate advice a corp will get from corp lawyers, who can cite you the specific cases where an employer has been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication. Here's the trick: In the event a lawsuit goes to discovery, who decides what's in scope to enter evidence? Hint: it's not the corporation. Nor is it the employee who made the (in context, at the time) innocuous statement that used the wrong keywords in a way that can be taken out of context.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Is it really true that an employee speculating about the monopolistic nature of their employer might get themselves into legal hot water? If Google got taken down by one of their developers saying 'our employer kind of seems anticompetitive to me...' in an email, would that developer really have anything to fear from the government? It seems like the corporation is protecting itself with this sort of advice.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Depends on how you define legal trouble. Getting hauled in to testify before a judge or Congress would certainly qualify as legal trouble for me. Perhaps not direct legal trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Correct. Primarily to protect the corporation. Indirectly, to protect the individual employee, because if a lawsuit going south harms the business prospects, the company might have to downsize, cut benefits, cut bonuses, &c.
  - jakevoytko 6y ago
    The point they made around this was roughly, "Let's say that the US Government is making a case. If they can argue that you used your personal email, personal phone number, or ANYTHING for work at any point, they're going to subpoena as much of your private communications as possible and find a way to use the most embarrassing stuff to encourage you to cooperate." I left this part out of my other post because I was a little fuzzier on the details of what they said, but this was the gist. Edit: clarity
    - brandmeyer 6y ago
      In typical Google fashion, there is a semi-automated system for taking snapshots of employees' email history and workstation disk images when discovery demands it. The snapshot feature is even sold as part of ~~G Suite~~ Google Workspace under the Vault product. As `shadowgovt` pointed out: Its a judge and the lawyers who get to decide what does and doesn't get covered by the process.
- tytso 6y ago
  This is boilerplate which you'd also find at other companys as well. In fact, the language was almost identical to what I saw at IBM. General counsels at big companies share "best practices" at their own conferences dedicated for corporate laywers. I've been a guest speaker talking about open source issues at legal conferences where they were talking about best practices for OSS compliance; it's not an accident that many company's OSS policies are very similar. So policies like "require annual, mandatory training for anti-harassment training", and "how to communicate with care", etc., are going to be remarkably similar across companies.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
While I don't necessarily have as pessimistic a take on this, I do agree this article is evidence as to why I am so often against social activism by companies. Companies, all companies, the "good" and the "evil", will only ever engage in activism that is not a threat to their bottom line. Given that constraint, it means the activism is incredibly cheap in my opinion. I mean, look at all the recent BLM support from large corporations. I mean, on one hand I'm glad to see them doing this. On the other, I know the only reason they are doing this is because it's pretty easy for them - it's largely already supported by their employees and the bulk of their customers see it positively. I can guarantee if it could negatively affect their long term prospects they wouldn't have done it. For example, I remember quite clearly that in the late 80s and early 90s you'd hear nary a peep of support on LGBT issues from corporations, and even some of the more progressive companies had to do it with coded language (language gays understood but straight people were oblivious to). It was only when gay rights were already largely supported did corporations jump on the bandwagon. Again, I'm not saying this is totally a bad thing, but I do think it is a cheap, easy thing. And if you know a company is never willing to do the hard thing, why put any weight into its opinions on these topics in the first place?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Doesn't this apply to most people as well? Most people are happy to vote for rent control - unless they're a landlord. Most parents will vote for higher property taxes if it means better schools, but most childless homeowners will not. Most urbanites will vote for gun control, most hunters will not. People who walk or take public transportation to work will vote for higher gas taxes, people with 2 hour commutes will not. Heck, isn't one of the claims leveled against liberal white suburbanites that they will happily fight for minority rights in the abstract, but then fight for zoning codes that in practice keep minorities (other than high-earning Asians) out of their neighborhoods anyway? Social movements that succeed tend to take this into account, and frame things in ways that are not zero-sum. I lose nothing by letting gays marry; my heterosexual marriage is still just as legitimate. I lose nothing by allowing abortions - as a male, I'm not going to get one anyway. I lose nothing when YC seeks out qualified minority & female applicants; I have plenty of advantages of my own, I don't need that extra attention. I lose nothing when Black Lives Matter - my life still matters too, we just need to fix the institutional systems that let a black person get shot dead with no repercussions to the killer. (Personally, I think the left has made some very large tactical errors recently by ignoring this principle - fights over things like affirmative action, political correctness, and white privilege are all because the debate has been framed as "You must lose something in order for life to be fair", which isn't a great way to persuade people.)
vbmallon 6y ago
Yes, Google employees can post rants on Twitter as long as it is the party line. Some of those rants remind me of "spontaneous" pro party demonstrations of children wearing red neck scarves in North Korea.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's a little more complicated than that, but to a first approximation, you're basically correct. Worth noting, of course, is most Google employees actually believe in the party line. Like, it's not an act... They are at will employees working for an employer they believe in. Google doesn't tend to retain long employees who stop believing in the mission or the execution of the mission (because having Google on your resume opens a door to them basically taking any other job).
  - bxfarmer 6y ago
    I guess many of the recent hires believe the party line. But some of the worst Twitter cases are from people who got into Google early and ostensibly adopted the party line in the last 8 years. These would perhaps get any other job, but whether they could keep it is another story.
zobzu 6y ago
"You're free to speak up and they're free to fire you"
- webmaven 6y ago
  “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France
sillysaurusx 6y ago
(This is true everywhere, not just Google, though. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as an employee who doesn’t get in hot water for bringing unwanted attention to the business.)
newacct583 6y ago
> past incidents [...] vast range of topics You mean gender representation. There was one incident.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Oh, definitely not. There have been many. It's a huge company, so it's done plenty of good and bad things. The one you're talking about is one of the more famous ones.
awerawerawrjhui 6y ago
James Damore would agree with this analysis.
darkwizard42 6y ago
No, I think this is just sound legal advice. You, as a line level employee and not in the legal department, should NOT discuss any matters that have legal scrutiny. There is no "party line" outside of the legal line here.

rogerkirkness 6y ago

Overton window.

jancsika 6y ago
Not only that, but also-- regulatory capture. If Google's competitors didn't have a Justice Department that blatantly serves their own interests of investigating Google, then Google would have no incentive to keep their employees from discussing anti-trust law. Government cronyism is why corporations can't simply let us have nice things.

jakevoytko 6y ago

This is true, but Google also had very specific guidance around this topic when I worked there (10-5 years ago). We received specific training about this. The core message was approximately, "You don't understand the legal trouble that you're going to get yourself into by talking about markets, competitors, competition, etc. Innocent words or phrases may have very specific legal definitions or implications that may be surprising to you. Speculating about these things will bring you trouble, the amount of which which will also surprise you. At Google, we don't talk about ourselves in relationship to our competitors, we only talk about ourselves in relationship to our customers"

adt2bt 6y ago
As someone who just recently joined Google and took a training on this, I can confirm this is still pretty much the gist of the messaging.
brandmeyer 6y ago
To clarify: this covers both internal and external communication. This kind of training is not unique to Google, either. I got very similarly themed training at Eaton (a manufacturing conglomerate). In both cases, I was left with the impression that the employer had been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication in some lawsuit.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's boilerplate advice a corp will get from corp lawyers, who can cite you the specific cases where an employer has been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication. Here's the trick: In the event a lawsuit goes to discovery, who decides what's in scope to enter evidence? Hint: it's not the corporation. Nor is it the employee who made the (in context, at the time) innocuous statement that used the wrong keywords in a way that can be taken out of context.
bigbubba 6y ago
Is it really true that an employee speculating about the monopolistic nature of their employer might get themselves into legal hot water? If Google got taken down by one of their developers saying 'our employer kind of seems anticompetitive to me...' in an email, would that developer really have anything to fear from the government? It seems like the corporation is protecting itself with this sort of advice.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Depends on how you define legal trouble. Getting hauled in to testify before a judge or Congress would certainly qualify as legal trouble for me. Perhaps not direct legal trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Correct. Primarily to protect the corporation. Indirectly, to protect the individual employee, because if a lawsuit going south harms the business prospects, the company might have to downsize, cut benefits, cut bonuses, &c.
- jakevoytko 6y ago
  The point they made around this was roughly, "Let's say that the US Government is making a case. If they can argue that you used your personal email, personal phone number, or ANYTHING for work at any point, they're going to subpoena as much of your private communications as possible and find a way to use the most embarrassing stuff to encourage you to cooperate." I left this part out of my other post because I was a little fuzzier on the details of what they said, but this was the gist. Edit: clarity
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    In typical Google fashion, there is a semi-automated system for taking snapshots of employees' email history and workstation disk images when discovery demands it. The snapshot feature is even sold as part of ~~G Suite~~ Google Workspace under the Vault product. As `shadowgovt` pointed out: Its a judge and the lawyers who get to decide what does and doesn't get covered by the process.
tytso 6y ago
This is boilerplate which you'd also find at other companys as well. In fact, the language was almost identical to what I saw at IBM. General counsels at big companies share "best practices" at their own conferences dedicated for corporate laywers. I've been a guest speaker talking about open source issues at legal conferences where they were talking about best practices for OSS compliance; it's not an accident that many company's OSS policies are very similar. So policies like "require annual, mandatory training for anti-harassment training", and "how to communicate with care", etc., are going to be remarkably similar across companies.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

While I don't necessarily have as pessimistic a take on this, I do agree this article is evidence as to why I am so often against social activism by companies. Companies, all companies, the "good" and the "evil", will only ever engage in activism that is not a threat to their bottom line. Given that constraint, it means the activism is incredibly cheap in my opinion. I mean, look at all the recent BLM support from large corporations. I mean, on one hand I'm glad to see them doing this. On the other, I know the only reason they are doing this is because it's pretty easy for them - it's largely already supported by their employees and the bulk of their customers see it positively. I can guarantee if it could negatively affect their long term prospects they wouldn't have done it. For example, I remember quite clearly that in the late 80s and early 90s you'd hear nary a peep of support on LGBT issues from corporations, and even some of the more progressive companies had to do it with coded language (language gays understood but straight people were oblivious to). It was only when gay rights were already largely supported did corporations jump on the bandwagon. Again, I'm not saying this is totally a bad thing, but I do think it is a cheap, easy thing. And if you know a company is never willing to do the hard thing, why put any weight into its opinions on these topics in the first place?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 6y ago
Doesn't this apply to most people as well? Most people are happy to vote for rent control - unless they're a landlord. Most parents will vote for higher property taxes if it means better schools, but most childless homeowners will not. Most urbanites will vote for gun control, most hunters will not. People who walk or take public transportation to work will vote for higher gas taxes, people with 2 hour commutes will not. Heck, isn't one of the claims leveled against liberal white suburbanites that they will happily fight for minority rights in the abstract, but then fight for zoning codes that in practice keep minorities (other than high-earning Asians) out of their neighborhoods anyway? Social movements that succeed tend to take this into account, and frame things in ways that are not zero-sum. I lose nothing by letting gays marry; my heterosexual marriage is still just as legitimate. I lose nothing by allowing abortions - as a male, I'm not going to get one anyway. I lose nothing when YC seeks out qualified minority & female applicants; I have plenty of advantages of my own, I don't need that extra attention. I lose nothing when Black Lives Matter - my life still matters too, we just need to fix the institutional systems that let a black person get shot dead with no repercussions to the killer. (Personally, I think the left has made some very large tactical errors recently by ignoring this principle - fights over things like affirmative action, political correctness, and white privilege are all because the debate has been framed as "You must lose something in order for life to be fair", which isn't a great way to persuade people.)

vbmallon 6y ago

Yes, Google employees can post rants on Twitter as long as it is the party line. Some of those rants remind me of "spontaneous" pro party demonstrations of children wearing red neck scarves in North Korea.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's a little more complicated than that, but to a first approximation, you're basically correct. Worth noting, of course, is most Google employees actually believe in the party line. Like, it's not an act... They are at will employees working for an employer they believe in. Google doesn't tend to retain long employees who stop believing in the mission or the execution of the mission (because having Google on your resume opens a door to them basically taking any other job).
- bxfarmer 6y ago
  I guess many of the recent hires believe the party line. But some of the worst Twitter cases are from people who got into Google early and ostensibly adopted the party line in the last 8 years. These would perhaps get any other job, but whether they could keep it is another story.

zobzu 6y ago

"You're free to speak up and they're free to fire you"

webmaven 6y ago
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France

sillysaurusx 6y ago

(This is true everywhere, not just Google, though. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as an employee who doesn’t get in hot water for bringing unwanted attention to the business.)

newacct583 6y ago

> past incidents [...] vast range of topics You mean gender representation. There was one incident.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Oh, definitely not. There have been many. It's a huge company, so it's done plenty of good and bad things. The one you're talking about is one of the more famous ones.

awerawerawrjhui 6y ago

James Damore would agree with this analysis.

darkwizard42 6y ago

No, I think this is just sound legal advice. You, as a line level employee and not in the legal department, should NOT discuss any matters that have legal scrutiny. There is no "party line" outside of the legal line here.