Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes(bloomberg.com)
bloomberg.com
Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-13/google-culture-war-escalates-as-era-of-transparency-wanes
430 comments
Only a subset of Google docs were ever shared like this. The lawyers never shared. The internal security people had private files. HR had its files. The people doing the financial reporting were/are bound by all manner of rules.
Google's famed internal openness was only ever for a subset of docs meant for developers, not anything like a free/open data policy.
I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.
Kent Walker voiced his opinion about not sharing all information because folks did not agree
"programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all"
I can't help but feel maybe their culture is a little toxic?
"programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all"
I can't help but feel maybe their culture is a little toxic?
"Other employees say they are now afraid to click on certain documents from other teams or departments because they are worried they could later be disciplined for doing so, a fear the company says is unfounded."
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It will be interesting to see how companies will engage with culture wars in the upcoming years. I expect it to get back to firing of employees to create cultural hegemony, something that will be frowned upon in some societies.
> A group of Google programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The deluge of notifications was meant as a protest to what they saw as Walker’s insistence on controlling the minutiae of their professional lives.
Wow. Just wow. The level of highschool-level unprofessionalism displayed here is shocking to me. Are these the people we have trusted all of our personal secrets with?
Wow. Just wow. The level of highschool-level unprofessionalism displayed here is shocking to me. Are these the people we have trusted all of our personal secrets with?
I know it's kind of a tangent, but I want to point out that Google is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks, are trained not to fraternize with the rest of Google's employees, and are of a markedly different racial and cultural makeup than the rest of Google's employees.
Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an estimated $8,000,000,000)?
So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored by design by the other two groups.
Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually quit Google over this.
(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth.)
Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an estimated $8,000,000,000)?
So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored by design by the other two groups.
Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually quit Google over this.
(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth.)
Google's mistake was to brand themselves as a moral cause. When you do that, you send out a beacon to some of the most righteous smart people on earth and they become employees. Righteousness and smarts is a toxic self-undoing mix.
If Google wants to kill their special culture that's up to them, but I hope they know that without the "Google magic", a lot of their failings as a company become a lot less forgivable. For example, you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it.
If you make big changes, just do it. Don’t explain it at length. If you explain it, you give people room to argue and hem and haw and ends up being counterproductive. It’s an invitation to bikeshedding.
The "radical transparency" is probably just propaganda (on management's part) and self-delusion (on some employee's part).
It says:
> When google was founded... Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could ... dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps
Oh, how transparent! You get look at more source code. Such a deep dark company secret! Or you could track someone's calendar. Amazing! ... not.
"Nearly all internal documents" likely means "...except the import stuff": Finances, investor relations, interactions with the US government, senior management internal discussions. Did employees have access to any of that? I doubt it.
It says:
> When google was founded... Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could ... dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps
Oh, how transparent! You get look at more source code. Such a deep dark company secret! Or you could track someone's calendar. Amazing! ... not.
"Nearly all internal documents" likely means "...except the import stuff": Finances, investor relations, interactions with the US government, senior management internal discussions. Did employees have access to any of that? I doubt it.
I wonder why these types of gossipy internal company strife articles are never written about big news orgs. For example, I'd love to know how 2k+ reporters who work at Bloomberg feel about their recent editorial decisions re: Mike Bloomberg's campaign. Is it that these orgs are so ideologically homogenous that everyone mostly agrees?
I may get downvoted for this but IMO these days everything is a collapse. Of course the same policies can’t apply when you are 100,000 large vs when you were smaller. Look at this complaint by one employee on transparent policy
“In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the targeted employee feel uncomfortable”
I mean its ok to change with time, if you get stuck in the past then you are not seeing the real problem that google is too big to be 100% open for internal employees. This is when you see out of context protests and mob attacks.
“In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the targeted employee feel uncomfortable”
I mean its ok to change with time, if you get stuck in the past then you are not seeing the real problem that google is too big to be 100% open for internal employees. This is when you see out of context protests and mob attacks.
So let me get this straight these busybodies wrote some code to spam companies lawyer with notifications.. and they did not get all fired on the spot?
I'm always surprised about workers attitudes on "transparency". Google created a monster, not only internally, but among troves of idealists in corporate America/SV who distrust structure and strategy in the business world, in lieu of free-for-all style of management. To the googlers who whined about Walker's memo: you are a total disgrace to the business of engineering.
Archive: http://archive.is/iO1ls
So long as people are leaking Google's "Internal Culture" like a sieve, can someone upload the xtranormal "Borgmon Readability" video somewhere? Even though I'm a huge fan/proponent of Prometheus... I feel like that video is a necessary warning to those going in.
Not surprising. Corporate entities will tolerate employee 'activism' so long as it doesn't interfere with day-to-day business. Once that line is crossed, the business is going to start providing guidelines that focus attention where it needs to be.
This is how it should be. Activism is fine and belongs in personal lives and organizations dedicated to the cause. It does not belong in companies with a diverse workforce.
This is how it should be. Activism is fine and belongs in personal lives and organizations dedicated to the cause. It does not belong in companies with a diverse workforce.
Perhaps Google is less transparent than it once was, but once again it seems like people are lamenting the passing of a Google culture that never really existed. Parts of Google's monorepo were restricted to specific owning teams over a decade ago, and sending email to an executive would get you a talking-to from your manager if they didn't like the tone of it.
Wow, 5 posts attacking Google in the HN top right before Christmas. That can't be a coincidence. Someone with money clearly has personal issues with Google, but I don't see what this is to do with Christmas. P.S. I'm not defending Google as it's indeed done some questionable things, but 5 posts at the same time is really rare event.
> The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors.
The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1] and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].
> Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa.
I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent documentation.
I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn. The learnings / information weren't pull anymore, you had to get it pushed to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the scale at which the company was operating.
Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be secret, got you nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had a special mention of how you needed to improve earn trust and tone down learn and be curious [3], just because...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526
The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1] and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].
> Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa.
I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent documentation.
I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn. The learnings / information weren't pull anymore, you had to get it pushed to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the scale at which the company was operating.
Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be secret, got you nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had a special mention of how you needed to improve earn trust and tone down learn and be curious [3], just because...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526
> “It was that way since the early days of Google, and it’s that way now,” [Walker] wrote.
Then the article ends with
> “Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” [Humu] wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”
Then the article ends with
> “Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” [Humu] wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”
Who’s in place to be the next Google? Amazon has built all the foundational pieces for scalable cloud services. Could we see Amazon Mail? Amazon Calendar? Etc....
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This is just another tail function department wanting to enhance its role, very common for HR, Building services etc.
Regarding the data policy, is the reason that the risk of someone leaking information is now being perceived as higher than in the past?
If so, why? Have there been leaks? Is there a plan to hire a bunch of new less vetted employees?
Or maybe it's a manipulative attempt to make those with undesirable cultural traits (including a desire for internal openness) leave the company without saying so explicitly?
If so, why? Have there been leaks? Is there a plan to hire a bunch of new less vetted employees?
Or maybe it's a manipulative attempt to make those with undesirable cultural traits (including a desire for internal openness) leave the company without saying so explicitly?
The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil".
All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.
All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.
Interesting. The first thought that popped into my head as I read the article was ..this is the corporate version of the evolution of the rise and fall of communism.
Prediction: Google will be in 20 years what Soviet Russia became at around 2000s.
They will go from utopia to totalitarian to insignificant player in a few decades.
Why this happens puzzles me..I grew up when Soviet Russia/USSR was still alive and then watched it go away. And see where it is at now. I don’t understand it. It’s like a mystery. But the pattern to dissolution is inevitable.
Prediction: Google will be in 20 years what Soviet Russia became at around 2000s.
They will go from utopia to totalitarian to insignificant player in a few decades.
Why this happens puzzles me..I grew up when Soviet Russia/USSR was still alive and then watched it go away. And see where it is at now. I don’t understand it. It’s like a mystery. But the pattern to dissolution is inevitable.