
One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions - jmsflknr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/one-google-staffer-fired-two-others-put-on-leave-amid-tensions
======
say_it_as_it_is
What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured
the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side
effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights.

Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever
needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside
world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your
values (we swear).

This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost.

James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do
the same. This is what people do among their own.

Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the
only people who the company encouraged socializing with.

Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration
agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing
employees hearts and minds.

Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with
and pursue activism. You aren't hired to do that. While you are naive for
thinking you could, it's not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.

~~~
aedron
With 20 years experience under my belt, it is my firm belief that the
workplace is not a place to discuss politics, religion, or other highly
personal and divisive issues. Obviously, this extends even more to the
workplace itself bringing these topics up.

I'm not aggressive or even obvious about this disposition, I just gently steer
clear of violating it. I feel the same should apply to companies, fine if you
want to make a stand on some political issue, but don't make a show of it,
because it implies that all your employees should agree with your position.

People in the world have different opinions on things, we need to be able to
work with eachother on shared interests without making every place and
occasion a battleground. If not in the workplace, then where?

On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God
forbid, the workplace a 'family'. My relationship to my employer is a
professional one, trying to disguise this by intermingling personal feelings
can only end in tears, when one day you discover that it was such all along,
only you deluded yourself (or let yourself be led) into thinking differently.

~~~
matthewmacleod
The problem is, though, that politics is inherently tied up in actions related
to the workplace.

Let’s say one of your colleagues or managers occasionally makes decisions that
would be frowned upon by some people. Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let
slip that they passed over a female candidate because they thought she might
have a child soon. Or maybe they passed on a gay man because they didn’t think
he should be working in a role where he’d interact with children.

This is a political act. Deciding to respond to it, or to ignore it, is also a
political act. If this culture is widespread, it would seem reasonable to
object to it at a company-wise level. It seems infeasible to separate politics
from employment in that sense.

~~~
rhodysurf
Those examples are not really political, but they are illegal.

~~~
bregma
They were commonplace and accepted twenty years ago. They're illegal now
because of politics and political activism.

~~~
username90
Pretty sure they have been illegal for way longer than 20 years, for example
the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978 and discriminating based on
sexual orientation has been illegal since 1992, at least in California.

The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is
like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland
has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more
protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly
accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their
rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and
ignore them.

------
skissane
> The documents concerned a mandatory tool that was recently installed on the
> Google Chrome browser on workers’ computers, the employees said. In October,
> some Google employees raised concerns that the Chrome extension was an
> internal surveillance tool designed to monitor their attempts to organize
> protests. It would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event
> with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to an employee memo
> that outlined concerns about the tool

From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to
monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they
could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe
they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing
that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)

~~~
robbya
Installing an extension to monitor employee use of a company computer is legal
and generally accepted behavior.

If the Google calendar is for a personal gmail account, then accessing the
calendar details server side is a huge privacy breach.

~~~
chongli
It’s not legal if employers specifically use it to disrupt employees’ attempts
to organize. The NLRA specifically grants employees the right to organize and
it prohibits employers from monitoring these organizing employees.

The fact that Google employees, in this case, may not be considering forming a
union at this time is irrelevant. The meetings they are having may prompt them
to form one at a later time. Either way, their freedom of association is
protected.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Like it was a "safety hazard" to have too many people at once in the smoking
area behind the textile mill. It is a slippery slope to try to tease apart
what is, and what isn't, interference right?

Google also has a clause in their employment agreement that says you agree to
them putting surveillance software on your devices, company supplied _and_
personal, as a condition of your employment. I asked about that one, got the
HR response "Well I suppose you could interpret it that way, but that isn't
what we mean." and I said, "Okay, lets change it to say what you mean." and
got the "Well we really aren't in a position to change these documents, it
would be a mess trying to track a zillion individual agreements." etc etc.
That rabbit hole of pushing back and forth leads to "perhaps Google isn't the
right place for you." :-)

~~~
defen
> Google also has a clause in their employment agreement that says you agree
> to them putting surveillance software on your devices, company supplied and
> personal, as a condition of your employment.

How would Google even know about your personal devices? That seems to only
make sense if you intend to use your personal device for work.

~~~
manfredo
It's not even an unusual condition. At Dropbox, starting some time in either
2018 or 2019 we had to install a remote administration app on our devices if
we wanted to connect to corp vpn or to log into corporate google accounts.
Mostly so that the device could be wiped if it was lost, IIRC.

~~~
daemin
Another reason not to have work email, chat, or any other work system on your
personal phone/pc/etc.

I think it is a good incentive to disconnect from the workplace.

------
kjgkjhfkjf
Although it's generally quite hard to get fired from Google, leakers have
always been dealt with severely. Google once upon a time fired a member of the
original Macintosh team for leaking information about the Christmas bonus.

My guess is that the increased closing off of various documents is to do with
the increased amount of confidential partner-related information as Google
scales its cloud business.

But, as is often the case with Google, much of the disillusionment here seems
to be due to unrealistic expectations and nostalgia. There have always been
secretive projects at Google. Chrome was super-secret; you needed special
authorization to get into the Google+ area; you needed special authorization
to get into areas where new Android hardware was being worked with; you needed
special authorization to get into the X area; etc.

~~~
Iv
> unrealistic expectations

Basically thinking "Don't do evil" and being a profitable competitive
corporation are compatible.

~~~
Nokinside
There is nothing evil in keeping company secrets secret.

~~~
francisofascii
Unless the secret is evil.

------
seibelj
How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can
believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have
anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from
doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I
support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that
their job adheres to whatever weird thing they like.

~~~
mason55
> _You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ
> doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it
> prevent us from doing our jobs._

It's easy to say this if your coworker likes football and you think sports are
dumb.

But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-
American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say
"Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay?

~~~
cmdshiftf4
>But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-
American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say
"Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay?

Yes yes, we can all dream up the very worst case scenario and other outliers.
As someone else pointed out, companies generally have contract clauses that
even govern social media whereby if you represent the company poorly you'll be
fired. I'm sure that easily extends to your proposed sign waving homophobe.

The point the GP made was that most people have a lot more in common than they
differ on, but in this hyper-politicized era those differences have been
magnified to become an issue of pure division and likely shouldn't be brought
into work with you.

~~~
mike00632
You know, in most parts of the world and in many parts of the United States,
being accepting to gay people is the outlier.

See TikTok's banning LGBT content and Facebook's banning HIV drug awareness
ads.

~~~
grzte
TikTok is not (only) banning LGBT content, they are banning political stuff
altogether.

~~~
mike00632
Being LGBT isn't the same as being political. It's not a subset of politics.
Being accepting of gay people or prejudice against them might align with the
two parties in the United States but someone's existence and visibility isn't
inherently political. The point is that China (and many others in the world)
are taking a stand against LGBT people, not just to preserve their hold on
political power.

------
xhkkffbf
I've liked many things about Google over the years and I still admire many
parts of their stack. But this crazy internal political culture is bound to
end in a big kaboom and it looks like this might be it.

Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business.
Google has skirted this rule for some time but now it's not going to be
pretty.

~~~
ahelwer
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business

This 'rule' is a purely artificial construct encouraged to ensure the common
employees keep their heads down and let those in charge continue screwing over
them and/or society. The history of organized labor involves no less than
straight murder of labor activists by company owners.

~~~
manfredo
Yeah, no. I broadly agree with the what many activists at tech companies are
supporting, but think that its deliberate attempts to make the workplace more
political are unproductive or backfiring. When it gets to the point that a
significant percentage of employees are feigning or exaggerating support for
political positions to fit in, you have a problem. And the tech companies I've
worked at in the SF Bay Area for the last four years have been in that
position.

~~~
rtpg
fighting against the creation of a union is just as a political act as trying
to create one (as an example).

Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a
political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers
our emplyoer has" is a political act.

Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The
apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political
processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same
willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.

~~~
manfredo
Perhaps in an non-standard understanding of what is and isn't political. An
apolitical office is political in the same sense that secularism is a
religious stance. It's not catering to any specific religion: it is equally
exclusive of all religions. Similarly, an apolitical office doesn't prevent or
directly influence the political activity of workers - it just relegates that
political activity to spaces outside the office.

> Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a
> political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers
> our emplyoer has" is a political act.

That isn't keeping politics out of the workplace - it's the exact opposite.
That's explicitly bringing politics _into_ the workplace by trying to tell
coworkers what views they should have. Curbing this behavior is exactly what
keeping politics out of the workplace is about.

> Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The
> apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political
> processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same
> willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.

For the third time, Keeping politics out of the workplace does not oppose any
view. It's about making clear that the office is not a space for political
activity. Yes, the apolitical thing is to not intervene in others' political
process.

The reality is, bringing politics into the workplace is a very significant
intervention in people's political lives. In the politically active offices
I've worked in, plenty of employees feigned support for things they didn't
support because they felt it was expected of them. Co workers whose views were
part of the company majority dominated the conversation, because co-workers
with minority viewpoints didn't want to risk repercussions for voicing
unpopular views.

So if you want a company that does not intervene in others' political lives,
keeping politics out of the workplace is the most effective approach.

~~~
thundergolfer
> Perhaps in an non-standard understanding of what is and isn't political.

"Politics is a set of activities associated with the governance of a country
or an area. It involves making decisions that apply to group of members" \-
Wikipedia

> An apolitical office is political in the same sense that secularism is a
> religious stance.

This sentence doesn't make any sense as Secularism is a political concept and
not a "religious stance".

An office can never be an apolitical entity, given that it involves the
organisation of people and decision making about their activities, AND that
office necessarily interacts with wider society which is unavoidably a
political area.

When you think about it, it's really quite baffling that people can think they
can spend almost 30% of their waking life within some system that is devoid of
political relevance. Life is political. Society is political. What you do in
your work and career is one of the most politically impactful parts of a
persons life.

To be generous, treating the workplace as devoid of politics is just support
of the status-quo.

Not sure whether I should belabour this point...

> Yes, the apolitical thing is to not intervene in others' political process.

Given that many people are socialists and want to live in a society where say,
Education, is a public good and managed by public institutions, then simply
maintaining private educational institutions is intervening in the "political
process" of others.

~~~
manfredo
> "Politics is a set of activities associated with the governance of a country
> or an area. It involves making decisions that apply to group of members" \-
> Wikipedia

And thus, an office in which this "set of activities" is not permitted is an
apolitical office.

> An office can never be an apolitical entity, given that it involves the
> organisation of people and decision making about their activities, AND that
> office necessarily interacts with wider society which is unavoidably a
> political area.

I think you're failing to distinguish between an apolitical office, and the
company being an "apolitical entity". A company of any significant size is
going to end up interacting with politicians. But this does not mean that its
offices cannot be apolitical spaces. I do not know why you seem to insist that
this is the case. All that is necessary for an office to be an apolitical
space is to make political activity off limits in the office.

> When you think about it, it's really quite baffling that people can think
> they can spend almost 30% of their waking life within some system that is
> devoid of political relevance. Life is political. Society is political. What
> you do in your work and career is one of the most politically impactful
> parts of a persons life.

Life and society are indeed political. Sure, some people may want to bring
politics into the 30% of their lives that they spend in the office. But plenty
of other people are happier when a company has employees use the 70% that is
spent outside of the office.

> To be generous, treating the workplace as devoid of politics is just support
> of the status-quo.

For the fourth time, absence of a political view is not the support of any
view. This is a toxic "you're with us or you're against us" mentality and it's
exactly this kind of thing that people are sick of hearing from their co-
workers.

> Given that many people are socialists and want to live in a society where
> say, Education, is a public good and managed by public institutions, then
> simply maintaining private educational institutions is intervening in the
> "political process" of others.

And in an apolitical office they are free to organize activism to push
politicians towards achieving those ends - during the 70% of the time they
spend outside of work.

Maintaining an apolitical office is not an endorsement of the status quo or
any other viewpoint. It prevents people who want to change the status quo from
bringing their politics into the office, but also prevents those people who
want to defend the status quo. The only thing is does is it makes people carry
out their political activity in a space other than the office.

~~~
Faark
> but also prevents those people who want to defend the status quo.

You don't have to defend the status quo, if no one is allowed to challenge it.
In other words your ideal office is set in favor of the status quo. And a
century ago, would likely not have hired women or blacks. Since that would
have been "political".

Thing is, I'm actually in favor of this. Most companies should probably stick
to avoiding politics as good as possible and give their employees freedom to
do whatever they want outside of work. At the same time, "X employee does [bad
thing]" headlines make this damn hard, and thus the company will have to
distance itself from what such employees do... worst case by terminating the
relationship.

Long story short, having a highly divided society will lead to a lot of pain.
No way around it. Finding ways to work against those divisions before they get
even worse, even if that means conflict, seem more important than to just bury
one's head in the sand.

~~~
manfredo
You are erroneous in your belief that bringing politics into the workplace is
a means to work against division. Quite the opposite. When politics are
brought into the workplace, political discussion is monopolized by people with
power (be it explicit authority, or social influence) and exclude people whose
politics are opposed to them. Politics, by nature, tends to divide people
which is precisely why companies that want to avoid a divided workforce don't
allow politics in their workplace.

------
tehjoker
"The tracking had made the staff of those departments feel unsafe, the
spokeswoman said."

...said the largest worldwide private spy agency the world has ever known.

~~~
throw_m239339
"unsafe" is clearly hyperbolic here, their physical safety isn't threatened.
Their "safe place" AKA ideologic echo chamber? Sure.

~~~
toraobo
> A Google spokeswoman said the company is investigating the employees who
> were placed on leave. One of them had searched for and shared confidential
> documents outside the scope of their job, while the other tracked the
> individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human
> resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the
> staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said.

This sounds like actual harassment of individual employees who happen to work
in a department that is seen as "the enemy".

------
chance_state
>In the past, one of the employees said, employees could review internal
documents for virtually any project underway within the company. In recent
years, however, more projects have become closed off and accessible only to
smaller groups on a “need-to-know” basis, the employee said.

>Earlier this year, following a series of leaks to the media, Google
executives tightened their grip. They shut down thousands of contractors’
access to company documents, citing security concerns. Google’s senior
managers, meanwhile, warned employees not to access or share certain
documents.

Can someone explain what the controversy is here?

It reads like two people exfiltrated documents and shared them with the media
to further their political (?) ends, after being part of a larger group that
was warned not to do so.

~~~
josefx
> Can someone explain what the controversy is here?

Google had some rather controversial projects that officially got shutdown
over employees being rightfully concerned. An example would be the highly
censored Chinese dragonfly search engine. Google clamping down on project
information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when
you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable.

~~~
chii
> Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could
> be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers
> that kind of project acceptable.

it's daft, but upper management/owners can choose to do the most profitable
project, and the employee's choices are to quit or comply (or give reasons why
the project is not profitable, and offer an alternative).

An employee cannot really complain/shutdown the project on moral/political-
ideology grounds, at the cost of shareholder profit, while they themselves
suffer no ill consequence (since they get paid a salary regardless).

~~~
Nasrudith
> An employee cannot really complain/shutdown the project on moral/political-
> ideology grounds, at the cost of shareholder profit, while they themselves
> suffer no ill consequence (since they get paid a salary regardless).

I disagree - there are certainly things which would justifiably get shut down
and cause them to not have an employee base if they went through with it. They
are just so unnormalized that it is not only implicit but they don't even have
names for it. It is perfectly legitimate that the untoward would face demands
because it isn't what they signed up for. There are all sorts of depraved
things which could be done for profit which anyone remotely moral and
reasonable would nope out of - often because it is already stupidly illegal.
In a healthy system this aspect goes unnoticed because nobody even tries for
it because it would be foregone disaster in the same way attempting a coup in
a healthy democracy would just end with the instigator in jail very quickly.

The alternative logical result of the logic would be that when every cannery
workers quits when the management decides to sell canned human flesh would
hold the workers at fault and not the depraved cannibal manager. An extreme
example but it demonstrates that the principle would have its limits.

The reverse principle doesn't hold entirely either. Sailors thinking they
signed up for timber shipping and finding they would be engaged in
privateering with a letter of marquee or transporting slaves would be very
within their rights to demand sticking to the enterprise. However objecting to
hauling finished lumber instead of timber would be unreasonable of the workers
unless there was say a safety issue from load distribution and vessel design.

------
spaceribs
As an engineer, I revel in avoiding these monolithic supercorps. I don't know
why anyone would want to work in centralizing innovation and creativity into
the hands of a few greedy people.

~~~
pheug
The greed as well? Normal jobs aren't paying anything close to 200-300k+ that
you'd be pulling at FAANG/HFT.

~~~
akhilcacharya
$200k-$300k is now the 1-3 years out of new grad pay scale for those companies
for what it’s worth.

------
catalogia
> _" the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the
> community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said.
> The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the
> spokeswoman said. [...] The suspensions have been a hot topic of discussion
> at the company in the last week, stoking anger among some workers and
> prompting claims that Google is punishing people who have taken a stand
> against management"_

To what extent do the involved parties agree on the facts as presented in this
article? It seems incredible that any Google employees would be upset that
somebody was fired for what amounts to stalking other employees. I assume they
don't believe that's what actually happened, or they're just being totally
unreasonable..

~~~
jessaustin
Is that a good way to cope with confusing events, to assume that other people
are just being totally unreasonable?

~~~
catalogia
> I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, __OR__ they're
> just being totally unreasonable..

I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I
perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part
of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity
to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the
other side believes the facts of the case are.

~~~
jessaustin
The first possibility, that of inaccurate reporting, is _always_ likely. If
that turns out not to be the case, the next most likely possibility is
probably _not_ that these brilliant people who are paid extravagantly to
create and maintain a wide array of popular products and services are "totally
unreasonable". I would suggest that they might have a different cultural
understanding of workplace privacy norms. Their different understanding might
be "wrong" in a universal sense, but it isn't for that reason unreasonable.

For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness;
more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large
organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but
of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those
secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic,
however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important
organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of
humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at
building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that
humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to
the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were
being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the
organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast
sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect
that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be
online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem
arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with
more openness.

Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob
might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is.
Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I
know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the
engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either
resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will
soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace
privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you.
Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)

~~~
catalogia
> _" People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's
> work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so
> that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate."_

If that's an accurate characterization of what the employee doing the calendar
tracking was doing, then I agree that it was reasonable in the context of
Google employment. However that would mean the article is very misleading as I
suspected. The article says the subjects of the tracking felt unsafe, which
says to me the tracked employees weren't sympathetic to the cause and believed
motive for the tracking to be intimidation or harassment.

I have never and would never work for google so I can't say for sure, but I
doubt openness as espoused by the company ever meant using openness to
intimidate or harass others. _IF_ that is what the employee in question was in
fact doing, then it seems plainly unreasonable to me that anybody would defend
it. I find it hard to believe such behavior was ever part of [official]
company culture.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I think the surmise in your last paragraph is basically correct. I have no
idea if there was any stalking going on. My calendar is public within the
company like everyone else, but I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable if I
found that an enemy were using that information to harass or intimidate me,
and I would expect management to deal with that severely. This goes twice for
engineers stalking HR people, since generally the HR folks have much less
power and influence in the organization.

------
teddyh
It baffles me why anyone with any expectations of privacy would even work at
Google in the first place. “Privacy for me, but not for thee”?

------
hliyan
Sometimes, people problems can't be solved by technological means. Sometimes
you just have to talk to people. A while back I was contemplating introducing
a small app for team members to express sentiments (whether they're feeling
stressed, satisfied, unappreciated, worried etc), but I eventually decided
that nothing beats a private conversation.

~~~
catalogia
The theory behind managers soliciting anonymous comments from workers is that
this cuts through preference falsification. Preference falsification is when
somebody lies about their beliefs or opinions, often due to perceived social
pressure or lack of trust. Preference falsification is a real problem, not
just in business settings but throughout the broad domain of human
interaction.

Unfortunately soliciting anonymous comments is often ineffective at combating
preference falsification because when a boss tells their workers that comments
are anonymous, the workers simply don't believe it (and often they're right
not to.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification)

~~~
lobotryas
I love getting “anonymous” quarterly employee surveys that have a unique ID
embedded in the URL. That’s not even trying.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
The anonymous ID is fine, and not the way you’re going to be outed. They
aren’t lying to you.

A manager of a handful of employees generally knows what their employees sound
like, what issues are important to them, and knows which ones tend to go
against the grain.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Welcome to Bluechipworld, Google.

Microsoft has been here for some time.

Apple is still trying to get comfortable, but has picked out a favorite chaise
lounge.

Facebook should be showing up, any day, now.

------
cryptica
>> The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe

It's very strange how often this idea of 'feeling unsafe' is coming up in the
media now. It seems that either:

\- People have become more fragile/sensitive; or

\- People have become more aggressive.

I think it may be both. I think corporations create extremely unnatural,
oppressive and coercive environments which makes people more outwardly
sensitive but inwardly more aggressive.

~~~
repolfx
Physical safety trumps most other things in our culture, rightly so.

So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by
claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates
"lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.

The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace,
for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a
white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay. The
justification for sexism and racism was stated as creating a "safe" and
"collaborative" environment. Implication: straight white men are unsafe.
Except when they're teaching, of course. Then they're needed, so stop being
unsafe.

There's nothing new about this sort of abuse. Orwell focused on the way
leftists constantly manipulate language in 1984 with the idea of Newspeak.
Consider the contradictory term "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how every
communist country calls itself a People's Republic despite not being a
republic, nor run by/for the people.

~~~
Faark
> So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by
> claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates
> "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.

People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany. It starts with
a shift in sentiment and you probably want to stop that before it gains
momentum. That makes me understand how e.g. the "there are good people on both
sides" comment made people feel unsafe.

> workplace example

That seems so much like a right wing caricature of "the left" that I'd like to
read a source to make sure it isn't just exactly that. Not that I'd expect
this to never happen... stupid people can be found everywhere in society. A
more plausible scenario leading to this might be affirmative action (something
I'd expect you to vehemently disagree with anyway) having its budged cut and
someone still trying to go through with it by combining multiple things into
one, even if this subverts pretty much the entire purpose. I'd expect
reasonable lefties to have a similar stance on gayness checks as they have for
sex checks on bathrooms... people will generally do the right thing and
abusers should suffer consequences.

~~~
repolfx
Look at codebar.io and then adjust your priors for what you consider a "right
wing caricature". In particular read [https://codebar.io/student-
guide#eligibility](https://codebar.io/student-guide#eligibility) (straight
white men not eligible) and the preamble on the first page.

No reasonable lefties spoke up against this. Indeed they defended it as
necessary and proportionate, as they did when the company started
discriminating against men in other ways.

 _People didn 't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany_

Comparisons to the Nazis are especially stupid in this context because you're
right, they didn't just start killing Jews. They started by banning them from
various high-status roles and jobs, describing them as the source of problems,
hypothesising a Zionist Conspiracy to explain why so many Jews were running
rich companies etc.

And that's exactly what we see happening today against ordinary white guys.
These days if we're CEOs/on company boards/in high earning jobs it's a problem
that needs a "solution" (sound familiar?), it's the result of a conspiracy of
the patriarchy, and the solutions start with banning white men from
educational opportunities, speaking opportunities, replacing them on boards
and so on.

No reasonable lefties spoke up about any of this in Germany either, because
the left is fundamentally built on narratives about oppression by one identity
group of another. It always has been. It gives people easy excuses for their
situation in life. Whether it's the proles vs the capitalists, Jews vs the
Aryans, women vs men, blacks vs whites, LGTBQ vs straight white men, if
there's a way to treat people as lumpen groups and pit them against each other
then you'll find the left doing so as much as they can. The 21st century is no
different.

------
chkaloon
Interesting the arms race in the incognito browser wars. One day I can read
Bloomberg for free incognito, the next day they detect it. Then a Chrome
update and the cycle repeats. Firefox seems to be a little behind in the
fight.

I do pay for sites I read on a regular basis. Can't justify a subscription for
a once a month read, however. Maybe we need 99 cents per article model, kind
of like buying songs on the old iTunes.

------
auiya
Tech worker unions are something that's probably been a long time coming.
Rather than commit subversive outbursts putting your job in jeopardy,
organize. You'll be much more effective in large numbers.

------
lobotryas
After what happened to Damore I am happy to hear that Google’s “activism”
culture is finally getting pushback because they became bold enough to attack
the company’s financial interests.

~~~
throw_m239339
Executes realized that the "mob" is coming after them, not only their
business, but after them on a personal stand point, and they would be right,
so they are attempting to crackdown on it before a full on rebellion.

It was "OK" when activism was directed at the competition or randos on social
media or GitHub or "conservatives", and they encouraged it, not realizing
these activists were extremists or had ties to ideologues.

But one can be certain "Google 2020" will look more like "IBM 2010" than
"Google 2010".

This will be US election year soon, it's going to get nasty on all fronts.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/vSZr8](http://archive.is/vSZr8)

------
xwdv
At our company if the HR goes through your social media, and finds any
evidence you may be socially activist or virtue signaling or otherwise very
loudly proclaiming your disapproval of something some entity is doing, you
will not be hired. You will not even get a call back. You will be labeled as a
potential troublemaker (not in the good way) and be placed on the blacklist.

~~~
inferiorhuman
And what if you do not give HR access to your social media?

~~~
javagram
If you’re already keeping your social media protected/private, that seems like
a pretty good sign that you’re not a political troublemaker or activist.

Private social media accounts don’t have virality or reach.

I keep my own twitter and facebook private because I have no interest in
accidentally igniting a feeding frenzy if I post something wrong on social
media. But it’s equally true that if I wanted to make a fuss about something
at my employer or elsewhere, my posts will go nowhere since only a small
number of people can see or access them.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_If you’re already keeping your social media protected /private, that seems
like a pretty good sign that you’re not a political troublemaker or activist.
_

How do you figure that? I keep most of my social media stuff private but I
would happily participate in, for instance, a unionization campaign and I will
vocally support the sorts of folks that people like Damore seek to condemn.

~~~
repolfx
Damore didn't condemn anyone, that's just a smear attack.

~~~
inferiorhuman
True, he's just biologically incapable of understanding anything beyond his
immediate situation.

------
s3r3nity
Is it "tensions" if 1 or 2 out of 100's of 1000's of employees get fired?

------
rounce
Why 'staffer' instead of 'employee'?

------
sjg007
From the outside, it sounds like Google is imploding...

------
buboard
The Google news section sounds a lot like White House news lately.

------
Briel
This was an interesting in-depth article about series of leaks and internal
turmoil that Google experienced:

[https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-
misery...](https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-
happiest-company-tech/)

1\. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote
a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why
there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's
attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men.

On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list
called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for
libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog
Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral
inside Google.

Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal
with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full
management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document
had leaked to Gizmodo.

2\. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was
called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as
Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train
a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new
drone footage could be analyzed automatically.

There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which
includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and
immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group
for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in
a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into
different groups.

3\. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations
among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015,
appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared
that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google
employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color.

For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many
of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks
were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them?

4\. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in
stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of
hidden-camera footage from inside Google.

~~~
someguydave
Google’s management made a mistake when they fired Damore. Picking a
sacrificial lamb to appease their own employee-activist mob has created an
uncontrollable monster. Meanwhile, they signaled that non-activists from
flyover states should view Google with suspicion. Now, Google needs political
goodwill to weather the next round of federal investigations.

------
yannis7
and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei?

~~~
ur-whale
> and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei?

They're long gone, enjoying their billions, and left poor Sundar holding the
bag like a deer in the headlights.

------
myga
Good. Crush activists, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of
their women.

~~~
dang
Creating accounts to break the site guidelines will get your main account
banned as well, so please don't do that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Simulacra
The farm is starting to get riled up.

------
sys_64738
Is "Do No Evil" still a Google trademark? Seems like they've not used it for a
long time so perhaps the TM expired.

~~~
mason55
No, they dropped it a few years ago

~~~
V-eHGsd_
it was don't be evil and no they didn't drop it.

[https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct/](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/)

it's at the bottom.

~~~
perl4ever
They moved it to the basement with Milton.

~~~
sys_64738
Bobs?

