I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are far fewer people.
It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion.
Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)
I remember the Founder's Letter included with Google's IPO in 2004 - "Google is not a traditional company. We do not intend to become one." It looks like they became one.
The other interesting takeaway for me is how long-term equilibria can leave holes that may be exploited by short-term-focused actors. When Google was young, it's say-anything culture was a big competitive advantage: it let them hire people who were nearly unhireable elsewhere because they were too free with their opinions or too difficult to work with, and it let people be more open about their emotions, which is a prerequisite for creativity. Many of these people were immensely productive, building key systems. But as Google grew, this same culture would've led to the destruction of the company, so eventually management is forced to clamp down on it. Not before making the founders and many employees fabulously wealthy and reshaping the industry, though.
Every company becomes a "traditional" company because only traditional companies have survived. If alternative structures worked well then we would've seen them by now.
Also I'm willing to be that a startup's lack of bureaucracy and momentum lets it experiment and move faster rather than just a carefree internal attitude. I've been in midsize companies on both sides of the free-culture spectrum and have never noticed any major difference in talent or capabilities.
> If alternative structures worked well then we would've seen them by now
Well let’s not go this far. Human civilization has existed for a tiny portion of time, modern civilization even less so. There’s PLENTY of time for better structures to be discovered.
Within current historical and cultural context, legal and technology frameworks etc the dataset is big enough to give some confidence that better structures won’t be found tomorrow or in the next 5 years.
It's not a pissing contest; it's a misunderstanding of giving equal weight to two incredibly different probabilities. When Fox News says it's important to have a discussion about climate change and give 50% time to those for and against it, they are conveniently ignoring that 98% of scientists believe in climate change and 2% don't. But they are essentially saying both viewpoints are equally important, even though one is widely accepted to be true by the scientific community.
Yes, it's certainly possible that thinking different (or being contrarian, or stubborn, or creative, or whatever you want to call it) will lead to something great! It is also extremely unlikely unless you are in a brand new field such as quantum physics 100 years ago that whatever idea you had has already been considered by countless people before you and you are not special.
The reason most startups fail is more than just bad execution. It's because most startups weren't meant to exist because they just don't solve a problem people are willing to pay enough to make the company a profit. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it if you really think you're onto something - but you should be aware the odds are wildly against you.
this site suddenly becomes conservative and doesn't even think progress is possible
Progress is possible. The thing is, that progress doesn't necessarily take the form that people wish it would take in their utopian fantasies. If we use history as a guide, we find that progress almost always takes a form with would have been unimaginable to past generations, if not at times even a little shocking to them. For example: The progress of agricultural technology, and its ability to feed people with unprecedented efficiency would have been considered wonderful and utopian by our forebears, until they started looking into some of the disturbing details.
A realistic, nuanced view of issues involving human factors and group psychology often incorporates elements of both the progressive and conservative mindsets. Both viewpoints are needed for effective, balanced government.
This is an absurd statement and demonstrably false on several fronts.
1) large corporations that do exist are quite different,for example there are cooperative member-run organisations like John Lewis that have been very successful. Additionally, different countries, say compare Germany, US and Italy will have different corporate structure and culture.
2) There is a massive body of academically reviewed research that demonstrates that managers and executives are affected by fads that measurably reduce productivity (such as open plan offices) and often unwilling to change even when more efficient methods are presented
3) In corporate governance there is large mount of conflict of interest. Take Skyrocketing executive pay in the past 30 years, frequent bubles, tax evasion, large amount of fraud in financial sector. etc. Does that look like an optimal, balanced system?
Actually, there's a TED talk where the implementers of remote, self-contained ATMs in India had to modify their procedures and deliberately rough up and age their paper money. Otherwise, people didn't believe that the crisp, perfect paper money that came out of those remote ATMs was real money.
If it was really ₹2000, someone would already have roughed it up already.
Look up WL Gore and Associates. They have thrived on a very different company power structure. Or maybe their founder was right and the power structure wasn't different (he thought official power structures were not where the power was held, and therefore dispensed with them in order for unofficial power structures to more easily come to the fore).
The problem is that you have to have some forms of effort in coordination and there aren't a while lot of models for that in actual practice. There are a few different topologies.
Where I work is becoming more of a traditional company in many ways. But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.
>But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.
So it assumes a very in-person culture for one thing.
Which is fine. But it basically excludes models based on people communicating in a more distributed way. And that probably strictly limits size and geographic diversity.
Nothing wrong with that. I can say I'm building a company in X location. I want everyone to come into the office and we're not looking to get big. That's fine. Among other things, you've described every local manufacturing, wtc. business.
I am not sure that's the assumption behind it, but I do agree these things are products of assumptions.
I have ideas for how I would organize a company if I had a blank slate. However, usually if you start getting investment, the discussions get more restricted.
I kinda of see what you are pointing at, but by definition every alternative structures we’ve seen survive long enough is now part of our tradition, so “traditional”.
I don’t see this as just a play on word, there is a wide variety of existing models that worked, and I’d also totally see a new model emerge and become “traditonal” when adopted widely enough. The world changes, companies should to.
Google was also smaller, which both makes political discussions feel more personal and allows maintaining a political bias in recruiting/hiring because you don't need to fill headcount as urgently. I would absolutely believe that a company of 100 SJWs bringing their whole self to work contracting with a company of 100 MAGA hat wearers bringing their whole self to work would be more productive than putting all 200 of them in a single company and imposing the traditional politeness restrictions of a corporate job.
So the question in my mind is, why did Google need to grow?
>100 SJWs [...] contracting with a company of 100 MAGA [...] would be more productive than putting all 200 of them in a single company and imposing the traditional politeness restrictions of a corporate job.
So the question in my mind is, why did Google need to grow?
I had trouble parsing what you wrote but I think the question you're asking (growth with employees vs growth by contractors?) is answered by Coase's "The Nature of the Firm": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
EDIT to reply: I don't think it's about "diversity". OP specifically asked ", why did Google need to grow?"
Presumably, the question could be expanded as "why did Google need to grow to 100,000 _employees_?" instead of
"only have ~1000 core employees on Google payroll and augment with 99,000 _contractors_". (The reason given by Coase is that activities mediated by too many unnecessary external vendors with contracts is less efficient than hiring people into the firm.)
I left it open for OP to clarify what he was asking but I don't think it's about diversity.
I'm specifically saying that political diversity (sometimes inaccurately called "diversity of thought") is disruptive. If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so—how do you get the psychological safety to tell each other hard truths about their work?
(As for demographic diversity, the SJW population and to a lesser the MAGA population have that, empirically it doesn't inherently cause strife.)
If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so
As someone who had grown up in a part of the country, where my parents had to drive almost 50 miles to hang out with people vaguely of the same ethic group, let me posit that the real problem is:
People who don't think certain other people should get to simply exist.
On the other hand, a company full of people who genuinely believe in fundamental human rights, self determination, live and let live, and the equality of people (even of people they don't like or agree with) does just fine. My former company did just fine with that. Democrats interacted with republicans, with people of faith, with atheists, with people of all backgrounds and skin colors.
The problem is with people who go around "seeking" people with the wrong opinion. Frankly, this reminds me of the same kind of "seeking" that some people who turned out to be racist enacted with me as a young adult, questioning me to find out how "American" I was to justify mistreating me. (Even some of them know better than to attribute to genetics what should be attributed to culture.) The similarity with which some people (who claim to be about "love" and "justice") enact the same "seek, then persecute" pattern is eerie to me.
I'd rather have someone who would use a racial slur on me, then accord me some meritocratic respect later, than someone who assumes I should think, vote, and affiliate a certain way based on my skin color, then gets outraged if my compliance to their expectations isn't 100%. True liberals are live and let live. It's false to be "liberal" and then demand ideological compliance -- or else. Doubly so if that reaction is based on identity.
The issue isn’t that contractors are less productive, nor are they less capital efficient. The issue is they are less easily controlled. You can’t just issue a directive via email and expect them to obey it because that will put their legal status as contractors in jeopardy. You can’t just demand they use your equipment or follow corporate policy.
If you are happy just having the job done, and don’t need the ability to control details of execution then contractors are often more efficient. (Depends on the task and the market)
The danger is, you may find your contractors start selling to your competitors. Then you need to compete on your core product.
Most corporate strategies don’t boil down to “have a competitive core product” they boil down to “control as many aspects of your market as you can so the cost of entry is too high for others to follow”.
The larger issue is that if we accept a correct scope of work to be including someone's sense of social justice, then what happens when you now have a lot of people from very different cultures perhaps with very different views of cultural topics such as gender.
If we accept that culture influences politics, then cultural diversity means necessarily political diversity does it not?
It's the same way in every endeavor. People get used to doing things a certain way, and forget the reason why. Try a different way, and relearn the reason why :-)
It's a reason why hiring some older people is worthwhile. They can tell you why things are done in way X, so you can avoid costly mistakes.
This. Worked at HP for years. It was a pretty great company for the most part.
Until Carly Fiorina joined. Amazing how one person can so transform a company - in a bad way. It started almost immediately. But buying Compaq really accelerated it. Companies like Compaq that have been in a slow death spiral throw off good employees.
That leaves low performing politically focused who protect their own. When they get purchased and “integrated” and they start filtering throughout the parent - like an infection, spreading their poison and killing it from the inside out.
HP was on a downward trajectory before that. Which is why Fiorina ended up on board. As a colleague of mine notes at the time "Bring back Lew Platt" was not really a strategy either. I do think the big computer companies of the era reached a certain ceiling beyond which it was challenging to grow.
Haha this prompted a flashback to an all-hands we had when purchased by Lucent, led by Fiorina and her minion Lance Boxer (you might think that's from a comic book, but literally that was his name... for when the pugilistic becomes pornographic). She talked about how we were all in for the long haul together, and was gone to HP within months...
Certainly a 100,000 person company is going to have characteristics that someone who generally prefers a 1,000 or 100 person company may not much like. But not all large companies become "terrible" companies--whatever that means exactly.
As the peer comment notes, there are also companies that remain private and mostly small and march to their own drummer. Of course, those can easily end up in family control spats and the like.
Nothing's perfect but I'm not sure the lesson is everything sucks or dies in the end.
My tenure overlapped ('06 - '10) and the discussions were lively. There were (and probably still are) interesting meta-terms like 'centathread' which was a topic that had received >= 100 replies (the gmail threading limit at the time).
That said, the change in policy (what is cited at least) reads a bit like "Let's create air cover for management actions to separate trouble makers from the company." Where trouble makers has enough vagueness in it to cover a wide swath of things. That allows for 'for cause' termination which is more financially advantageous to the company than simply laying someone off.
So to the extent that Google didn't want to be a 'traditional' company with all its rules and opaque policies and structures, it clearly is learning through experience the motivations that companies have for establishing those sorts of rules.
What I find disappointing is that after reproducing the experiment and getting the same results, they aren't able to come up with any other solution than the centuries old authoritarian one. I feel like they missed an opportunity here.
There’s a decent chance this centuries old authoritarian method, which is more like millennia old, is actually the best way of dealing with it.
Humans are more or less the same as a few millennia ago. Our technology is more advanced, we’ve more or less covered every corner of the planet, we have birthed billions of humans and built millions of organizations of every stripe, and dealt with as many management issues as there were and are people.
We haven’t significantly advanced in our cognitive capabilities, we’ve just learned how to outsource more to experts and computers. If there’s one difference between us and us a few millennia ago, it would be that there are so many more humans on the planet that we probably don’t have a role in society for everyone. Under, e.g. a feudal System, every person had a functional role, and those that didn’t could at least point a spear in more or less the correct orientation. Vagrants of course were prosecuted and often pressed into service doing something somewhere for somebody.
In 2018, Google had ~99K full time employees. That’s larger than most cities, and historically, most countries. At that scale, you eventually need to tell most of them sit down, shut up and fall in line. Check their problems at the door, and if they really really need to fight about something, do it off premises on their off time without company resources, just to keep the peace.
I don't disagree, but I will contrast that with my later experience at IBM (when they bought Blekko).
IBM had at the time 400,000+ employees, so more than four times the employee base of Google. IBM is over a hundred years old at this point so have been doing this about five times longer than Google has.
In IBM's case they came at it from the opposite direction. Fifty years ago there was practically zero horizontal communication in the ranks and they were interested in increasing that to get better dispersal of thoughts and ideas throughout the company. As a result they were deploying and encouraging a sort of internal social network to improve cross flow and get more things out.
You raise an excellent point, and going over-totalitarian is just as likely to crush innovation as anything else.
However, I think taking an authoritarian stance on politics, religion and so on in the workplace, so long as it is done in a respectful manner and puts everyone on the same level, is completely appropriate.
When you are a group of ten, and that’s your entire company, you can get away with a lot. Everyone is going to know each other, maybe a little more intimately than some of them would prefer. Your CEO might also be your drinking buddy and a good wingman. That’s the nature of a small organization.
At 2K, things don’t have to be quite so intimate, you don’t have to know everyone by face and name, just get along with them well enough to do your jobs.
I’m not going to try and guess where the tipping point is, but at 99K or 400K, there isn’t a lot of difference between the organization ability you need. Everyone has their own ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything, some teams might get along better than others, but politics and religion and the like have led to actual wars between smaller masses of people. If you have 99K on your payroll, not all of them are going to like and respect each other. Not every team is going to have perfect cohesion with every other team.
You still want civility. Every one of those 99K or 400K people has their own ambitions and dreams and reasons for getting out of bed at whatever time of day they crawl out of bed. But there is a time and a place for it, a whole wide world and life outside that of your employer’s little world, where not everyone is necessarily on the same payroll.
Absolutely if you can build an internal social network for your workers, that’s great! If they want to debate politics outside of work, that’s great too! It is still entirely appropriate to moderate that network, and draw a few hard lines where you think it is appropriate.
Typically, bureaucracy and internal policies are what kills innovation in large established companies, not lack of political debate. It takes so much energy and internal politics to make the smallest changes that an organisation constituted of otherwise smart knowledgeable people will only produce mediocrity.
But what is the alternative? The problem is diametric opinions end with two people (no company involved). What is the company to do to get people with opposing views to “get along”?
Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent).
How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize?
I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)
The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.
For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."
I love that suggestion and I've borderline fantasized about initiatives like that. I always wonder why debate-focused activities aren't more popular. A few obstacles usually come to mind:
1) Top-down, it's hard to convince people of the value of this who don't already see the value. It's hard to attach a KPI to it, hard to attribute changes. Or at least, from some POVs.
2) It's hard to be sure there will be participation. It's easy to pop off via text when you're procrastinating or got (self-)baited into a conversation. Scheduling discussion time / debate club or whatever feels like a chore.
3) It takes work. Like, to actually have a good debate about something takes time to think, engage, research, reflect and iterate the conversation. Not to mention the willingness. As above, it's easier to engage in junk food discourse than it is to challenge yourself, patiently tune your message over time or advance a dialectic.
But that said, those all feel like workable problems. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if this is one of those cases where nobody has mustered enough will and attention to give it a real shot.
Mediation and coaching are certainly great ideas for non-traditional approaches, although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.
Beside, you won’t get the Dalai Lama with all the tools at his avail to accept the mainstream Chinese point of view.
That said I wouldn’t mind if a company tried this approach out of curiosity to see how it works out.
> although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.
That's the thing, Google banks multiple BILLION dollars in free cash every quarter. Lets say you build a 'company within the company' and give it a budget of $100M a YEAR. That is a pretty sizable enterprise for what is funded out of about 1% of the cash that would otherwise just sit around in 'cash and cash equivalents'.
One might think that an executive management team might say, "Hmm, if we spend 1% of our free cash flow on improving the communications of all of our employees, what effect will that have on their productivity?" Will they be "more productive" or "less productive" ? They already have the null hypothesis results to compare to.
To make a comparison, a more "traditional" company might consider starting up a private bus service to move their employees from their homes to work and back again was too resource intensive. And yet that is exactly what Google did.
> The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.
The easy solution is to just do what has always been common sense: don’t talk politics at work. Because even the if there is healthy debate, at the end of the day people are petty about people on “the other team.” For example, I’ve gotta imagine being outed as a Trump voter at Google has to put a huge target on your back.
Problem solved: There should be no "opinion" at the workplace outside professional topics. Unless you're the person in charge of the Tibet strategy, your opinion should stay at home.
I agree but what if the employer takes a position on Tibet? Or more likely on any hot potato topic (gender equality, Trump, pushing the political debate either side if the company has the ability to do so, etc).
Great points. There are plenty of areas to discuss politics, and at work doesn't have to be one of them.
I've studiously avoided talking to anybody at work about politics, as it usually only serves to anger people if you don't agree. I've had a successful career of doing that.
I enjoy discussing politics, at work too, however, you have to do it in a respectful way. Politics is like religion, you will never directly convince anyone of anything, but if you can expose them to new ideas, and watch them either incorporate or challenge these ideas, it's a really rewarding discussion. You also have to limit these discussions to willing participants.
In my time at Google, there were tons of people who felt they had the right answer, and had to convince everyone else who was wrong to come around to their views.
>you will never directly convince anyone of anything
Policy is the surface level of a deep tree of rational beliefs. No one will ever be convinced of policy because each sees their favored policy as rational due to the underpinning structure of beliefs.
Discussions that don't begin with the core beliefs are bound to lead nowhere, you're right.
You're right in that a lot of policy debate these days is folks talking past each other, ignoring their irreconcilable fundamental assumptions. But a discussion artifically limited to discussing those in the abstract will go nowhere. Most people best converse productively at the level of a series of examples.
I agree. A big reason for not achieving something in an activity (whether a discussion, a software project or something else) is not being clear what you want to achieve in the first place.
That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life, hardly any topic remains apolitical.
Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life.
Do a historical survey of people who tried to suffuse politics completely through the lives of their followers. For completeness, look also at the actions of religions in the same way.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politics, movements of any kind which demand the entirety of the lives of their followers are often perpetrators of the worst things.
As a counterpoint, look to times and places where people are free to be open, to be themselves, and to choose how they live. There is also a power in the dispersal of power. Many call this freedom.
Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
The way Robert Heinlein put it was something like this: "The end product of politics is like the result of peristalsis. It's not very pleasant, but it's no less vital to your health and well being." I think this is a good analogy. Imagine having a cocktail party conversation with someone singularly obsessed with their digestive tract.
I'm trying to say this as politely as possible, but... are you serious?
If you seriously cannot have conversations at this level without them turning into political discussions, you really need to reflect on your conversational habits. It is absolutely not normal or healthy if you can't talk about drinking water without it turning political.
My SO is a vegetarian. It comes up a lot, both with my friends (who are all meat eaters) and newly met people alike, but I seriously cannot think of one single time it has turned into a political issue.
If these topics are frequently turning political for you, it's on you.
In places where there's more political diversity, people aren't so uptight. They know there are others who aren't like them, that's OK, and we all sort of get on with our lives. I grew up in Illinois and it feels this way.
Whereas in northern California, the "muscle" of respectful tolerance doesn't get as much exercise. People are a lot more alike and if you stand out, it seems weird. Which is kind of ironic for a place that's supposedly bought into "diversity" or "tolerance".
Yes. I am truly trying my best to understand your viewpoint here, but I honestly don't understand why you imply that those questions, or even any questions similar to them, would be necessary parts of a conversation about vegetarianism. In all of the various discussions we've had with each other and with other people, even very in-depth ones about her reasoning for being a vegetarian and how other people are not vegetarian, not once has any three of those questions come up.
The original point was in-depth discussion of things like dietary restrictions necessarily come to political questions. The counter-argument seems to be "don't discuss anything in depth."
That is not at all the counter argument. It is very possible (easy, even, at least for me and my work/social circle) to have very in depth conversations about vegetarianism without bringing up any of the questions you posed. As I said in my previous comment, my SO and I have in-depth conversations all the time with people regarding vegetarianism and not once has any of those questions surfaced.
I showed my SO this thread and she laughed at the notion that she apparently can't discuss her lifestyle (she takes a car to work and drinks tap water, too) without it being political.
I suspect, as another commenter said, that this is apparently a cultural aspect where I and those around me have always grown up talking to people about such topics without any of them becoming political, while apparently others have not had such 'training'.
There is a confusion here. These are certainly ethical issues, that may be discussed at the level of the particular personal ethics practiced by particular people. Immediately jumping to the political is a particular (and particularly unpleasant) way of answering these questions, but not the only way. I would never eat chimpanzee, but I would consider eating horse. My friend would never eat horse, but would consider eating veal. We can discuss this from an ethical perspective. We don't have to lower the discussion to politics.
It's a good question; I may not have a satisfactory answer. There is something uncontrollable about the political. It always stands in relation to the rest of humanity, and we can't control or necessarily even predict what they will decide. Whereas, even if I take inspiration from other humans whom I treat as ethical exemplars, my sense of ethics comes ultimately from myself.
Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...
> Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...
If so, then we would assume that people who see a distinction there would also see nothing wrong with different countries having different political orders, for example stronger gender roles, procreation being tied to marriage, and marriage being tied to household business? We might assume that authoritarians would want to stamp out such variations and individualists would assume that different cultures can organize things like marriage and business differently?
But that doesn't match our observations I think, so it has to be something different. Either that or everyone is secretly an authoritarian when it comes to disagreements regarding social order and ethics of relationships or when we decide to be because it is "really important."
I don't feel that assumption is warranted, but I'm not surprised that someone else does. For myself, I definitely prefer some political orders to others.
Even so, I recognize that some authoritarian polities produce better lives for many of their subjects than some less authoritarian polities do. There's always room for improvement. A situation in which husbands don't beat wives because the people are educated in humane fashion is strictly superior, in my estimation, to one in which husbands don't beat wives because that would invite devastating punishment from the state. Even that latter situation is strictly superior to one in which husbands do beat wives and the state reserves its devastating punishments for other purposes.
However, that is not to say that the society blessed by humane education should make war on either of the other two, or on some society like our own in USA that is in some sense an average of all three. Humane culture is best spread by example, not by the sword.
By the way I agree that we should lead by example but I don't know how you can get beyond the fact that different evils are so different they cannot be directly weighed off each other.
For example how do you weigh the draining of capital by foreign companies agains the purported benefits of liberating people from family and family business expectations (which my wife by the way definitely does not want to be liberated from)?
It is possible to simply not seek authority. We can opine without seeking to enforce our opinions on others. I was no fan of TPP, but I never took any action that was motivated by that opinion.
It's usually the vegetarian (vegan) that starts it, so if it doesn't turn into an issue, your SO has the non-escalation skills, not all of your meat-eating normies.
I'm curious if you live in San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Portland or any "woke" city. The point you're replying to is palpable as someone that has lived in two of these places, but I agree that it would sound absurd based on my experience living in places that aren't highly woke.
That said, my SO and I travel frequently (and due to the nature of our work, our friend group is very varied in terms of where they come from, with several of them being ex-SFers/ex-NYCers, etc). I honestly can't think of any increased politicization when talking with non-Texan friends versus Texan friends.
These are all very easy to discuss at work without politics. You ask, "Do you have any dietary restrictions? If so you should make sure to read the menu closely, it'll tell you what the dish contains."
There, now I know as much as I need to about my coworker's diet. We're here to work and if you're going to be a member of a _diverse_ community with a shared goal you're going to need to accept that other people live their lives differently than yours and that's ok. I don't need to know the reason my coworker is a vegetarian I just need to let them know if my cookies that I brought to work contain animal products.
If you refuse to get along the result will be internal strife and the shared goal, a successful company, a working community, etc. will fail.
Sure you can. You can have an attitude of tolerance, of acceptance, and embrace different opinions/stances. Judge a little less, worry a little less about what others do.
Our culture has become a toxic stew caused by everyone forgetting to mind their own business; partially because people think that because politics does have a part of everything people do (hence the etymology of the term), that it gives them the right to control others. Fascism is the end result.
>Sure you can. You can have an attitude of tolerance, of acceptance, and embrace different opinions/stances. Judge a little less, worry a little less about what others do.
Completely agreed on that point. In fact that's how politics should be discussed.
But if we consider politics to be "what should we do as a society?" then you can't avoid political discussions in those topics still, right? You can only seek to discuss such topics tolerantly and maturely, I think.
I will admit to having avoided arguing with one of my colleagues about whether it is irresponsible to have more than one child in the current state of the world (he thinks it is, and I have three kids).
I would generally find all of the above somewhat too pedestrian as topics, if they come up too often. Also, I've discussed all of the above at work with coworkers recently, and when things do veer into the political, they don't go too deep (though at my current job, we're free to be quite acerbic) and the conversation veers away to something else.
I guess we treat the avoiding taboo topics more like not driving on the lines, and less like driving over a minefield. We generally avoid for safety's sake, and don't expect things to blow up immediately if there is a bit of driving over the line.
I don't think this is true anymore. Even war doesn't impact my life. We've been at war almost 20 years now and the only difference it's made in my life is airport trips are more annoying. And even if war did impact my life more directly, I don't see how discussing it at work would be helpful in any way.
Living in Europe and being a bit closer to the war zones, I can tell you it has affected my life in a large number of ways. It is a big reason why a lot of my voting in the US is for whoever seems more anti-war (within reason).
I also vote anti-war. Would you mind sharing some tangible examples of how it's affected your life? I'm not looking for a debate, I'm genuinely curious.
1. I was commuting between Sweden and Denmark when the refugee crisis (people fleeing our efforts at proxy civil war in Syria, and our efforts at direct war in Iraq and Afghanistan) caused the Swedes to have to close their borders. This was not controversial. Migrationverket could not house the number of refugees who showed up and so refugees were sleeping on the street in Sweden in November. This lead to hours of lost time every day and eventually the loss of a contract that lead to the commute, and eventually after that, to a stagnation in my work (I left Sweden for Germany in part for that reason). You would see whole families with nothing trying to get somewhere they would have some sort of chance.
2. My kids have been subject to some harassment due to the fact that they are mixed SE Asian/White, and therefore could probably pass for Afghan. This was true in both Sweden and Germany.
3. Now the lines to get things like work permits or blue cards renewed are getting longer and longer (because of capacity shortage in civil servants) which means that when I go to get this renewed, I need to plan six months to a year in advance. A large problem here is the fact that the refugees are impacting the immigration service departments. Its to the point I am considering giving up US citizenship for German citizenship just to get around that problem.
There are of course more. Not getting into the amusing problem Sweden has with hand grenades and plastic explosives (organized crime gangs scaring each other late at night by setting off bombs and grenades, though I suppose that's better than drive-by shootings).
I'm sorry that your kids have been harassed. It's very hard to watch it happen to them. My son is 6 years old, non-verbal, and diagnosed with autism. In my son's case, how do I explain bigotry (and he clearly feels it)? In your kids' case, they may understand the explanation, but still struggle to reconcile the feeling.
Yeah. In one of the worse incidents in Germany, to the credit of Germans, the majority of adults in the around came to my kids' defense. I tell them to try to be thankful for the culture of being helpful, but it was a hard thing for them.
For a long time my oldest hated Germany after that. I actually feel bad because both of being part of the Berlin tech boom that is causing rents to rise really fast (and price many Germans out of the city) and also for the fact that refugees are being used to undercut wages (I know of too many cases of refugees being paid under minimum wage to ignore that dynamic).
But that doesn't excuse ranting at my kids as they are walking down the street.
Yes, nowadays attempting to “stay out of” politics simply leads to people accusing you of actively supporting the status quo. You can’t win, once a political culture has taken root around you.
I think you can accept or be neutral on the assertion that "the personal is political", without it entailing that you actually live in a state of political engagement. After all, the professional ought not be personal.
And the other thing is that the company may itself be actively involved in politics that some of its employees may object to. Google actively tries to control the political debate through youtube. Its positive discrimination policies may be considered by some of its employees as objectably discriminatory.
I can understand that the company will not tolerate anyone publicly disagreeing with its political stance but it is a natural thing for their employees to discuss the politics of their employer between them.
Though given the little tolerance of large companies for disagreeing their politics (not just in the Silicon Valley), the said employees would be well advised to not do so in writing.
> Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment?
During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible.
Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?
You could look at message boards in the public space, Yammer, etc and draw the same conclusions. Online communities always have a critical mass where increasingly strong moderation is required.
Organizational structure is a massive influence on any organization's outputs, and seems over and over to be substantially more important than the personal attributes or credentials of the pool of employees. This is discussed by Clay Christensen in the context of disruption tech theory, it's enshrined in hacker lore as Conway's Law, and I'm sure is well known across many other domains.
One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense.
It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.
I am not sure if google could have done that but there is always the realization to be made that small is beautiful. At some point growth turns into taking on more useless people and then you need more money to fund all of them and then you need to turn to unethical practices. Perhaps the google founders could at some point have decided to buy back as much of their stock as possible and after that they no longer would have needed to make as much money as possible and could have just kept having the greatest search engine with a little advertising on the side.
Yep, feels like there's a bias in here. The "big experiment" that is on our radar (which is supposedly proving that free culture is a liability after all) is only big and on our radar to discuss because it reached such success compared to other companies (and it grew under those same conditions we're maybe implying are being proved wrongheaded?)
> traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion
That is not a particularly widespread tradition globally or historically. And I personally think everyone should be incredibly skeptical of it.
I've never met anyone with power who followed this tradition, and plenty who are kept powerless by the always-one-sided application of these traditions.
These subjects are difficult to discuss because they are important, I find it far easier to believe that this toxicity comes from default of not talking to your family/friends/community about some of most important aspects of your life.
Another view might be that it's impolite or rude to bring it up.
Consider that other people might not want to talk about these things, and by bringing them up yourself, you're prompting others to share their own opinions, which they may not (for whatever reason) feel comfortable sharing.
There's also the reality that many of these conversations just aren't productive. Best-case scenario, one person talks, the other talks, maybe they learn a little about each other, or their mutual empathy is enhanced. But a lot of times, it seems like two otherwise civil people find out things about each other that actually degrades their relationship. "Too much information" is real and at 34, I've learned there are some questions that just aren't going to lead to a productive conversation, on balance.
The unproductive version is a big problem, precisely because people don't have the social skills to navigate it because it is so often taboo. So the options are to make it taboo or to adapt.
"don't speak about these important things, we don't have the EQ to handle this conversation" is a strong pro-status quo political stance to take and couching it in apolitical terms is dishonest.
I agree, rules that govern large organizations didn't grow out of "mean bosses doing mean stupid things" but out of need for such a large organization to work well together. But, while that is true, it doesn't necessarily mean people will like the new Google, everyone's got their own personal taste in how the work culture should be and regardless of having very rational reasons why the culture is changing in some way, people that enjoyed the previous culture are likely to not enjoy as much the new one, resulting in increased difficulties hiring and keeping them.
Similarly, as the size and footprint of a company grows, the parameters controlling/sustaining the growth/maintenance of said company also change as well, thus changing the required talent profile accordingly.
EDIT: for the sake of the completion of thought, I want to add that the opposite is also true: a young company in a fast growing innovative industry can afford to hire a different kind of talent without harming its growth, and as the industry matures, they simply can't afford to keep doing that.
This! All categories break down but many arise out of some reasonable necessity. The categories of "work life" and "personal life" are useful categories. I see no reason why I should discuss politics with someone I work with. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
I've almost always found it completely beneficial when workplaces discourage talking about politics or religion. Everyone just gets along better, and that's a good thing for a work environment
This. I've been saying for a long time now that 2010-era Google will be in business school textbooks for generations as an example of why we have a taboo against contentious issues in the workplace.
It's like the old demotivational poster said: "it might be the case that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others".
It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion.
Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)