
Google vs. Google: How Nonstop Political Arguments Rule Its Workplace - mcenedella
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-vs-google-how-nonstop-political-arguments-rule-its-workplace-1525190574
======
decebalus1
[https://archive.fo/zBjZe](https://archive.fo/zBjZe)

------
disposable467
Posting from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

There are a lot of internal discussion groups - it is just an internal Google
groups thing so anyone can create a group about anything. Often they are
purely work related (e.g. groups for specific tools/services/teams that people
can join), but there are some that are not work related.

I'd say that these sort of political debates are the _extreme_ outliers. I've
never encountered any significant political debate/argument during my 6 years
at Google, but then I don't go looking for it on the groups. From my
experience people at google are well-mannered, polite and respectful;
disagreement of course occurs but is usually handled professionally without
much fuss.

What does happen though is that although we do have an online tool to vote up
questions for the TGIF meetings, you get "regulars" who ask in-person
questions at TGIF in Mountain View. These people are often fine, but there are
a couple who clearly have their own political/moral axe to grind. I find these
people the most irritating, since unlike the questions which have been voted
up to the top on the online tool, they don't need votes to ask their
questions. This can give their opinions -minority or majority held- more
apparent credibility than they might otherwise deserve if it had been left to
the online voting only.

There is also a lot of focus from certain groups on purely US related things -
e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or
democratic in the HR system. These blinkered people asking these in-person
questions in California don't realise that they live in one country, and that
the political parties in that country aren't the same as the ones in others
(most countries are not a two party polatised system like it is in the US)

TL;Dr there are jerks if you go looking for them but 99.9% of the time yiu
just do your job and no one wants to know or cares what your political or
moral views are.

~~~
john_moscow
>e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or
democratic in the HR system.

Sorry, what? You have to formally register your political views with the HR?

~~~
talmand
Can't know which people to mistreat if you can't label them from the
beginning.

Regardless, I believe the statement was more like certain groups are trying to
get something in the HR for people to volunteer such information. Not that the
company has it as mandatory.

Which, by the way, is an incredibly horrible idea. Not only does it open the
door for certain people to mistreat other people, as I said; it also creates
the situation where certain types of people will treat others that don't
volunteer such information as suspicious. As in, "what do you have to hide?"

------
sero2nine
I have a job role that has brought me into regular contact with Google as an
external partner for the last five years. I won’t go into specifics, other
than to say that what used to be admiration has entirely faded.

Their culture really turns me off. I am a mid-30’s white male, for the record.

A few months ago, I visited one of their main campus locations.

When I walked in the door, there was a group of female employees huddled in
the lobby having some sort of private discussion. When they saw me walk in the
door, I received what I can only describe as a “death glare” from them. I felt
like I was walking into a junior high school cafeteria and interrupted the
cheerleader table. It was at that level of childish tribalism and latent
tension.

I know this sounds thin skinned. I regularly have been involved with Amazon,
Microsoft and others and never got a vibe approaching open cliquish behavior.

I talked about it to some minority friends and their response was: “well maybe
that is how minorities are used to being looked at in these environments.”

I can’t remember ever giving anyone a death stare in my career because they
were a minority or due to their gender.

I wouldn’t work there.

~~~
stephenitis
With the description given, I think your argument is shallow. An Odd
experience with one group of woman at one campus is unfortunuate but doesn't
make for a good representation of ~88,000 full-time employees, the company
culture, and a result of the policy in question.

~~~
CardenB
Exactly. I can't believe how many upvotes anecdata gets on HN so regularly
these days.

~~~
ignoramceisblis
If you dismiss every data point (anecdote) you come across, one at a time, of
course you can eventually say there's no pattern: you dismissed all of the
data.

------
panarky
Most businesses focus on the business mission and suppress distractions from
that mission. Debates about ethics, politics and public policy are seen as
unwelcome distractions.

But Google is a different kind of company. Google was founded on a set of
ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission. As
described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good
things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".

You may be skeptical about this and see it as either naïveté or as a cynical
ploy, but the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results
is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.

So it should be no surprise that there's constant and vigorous debate at
Google about what's right and wrong. Seems to be working pretty well for them
[1].

[0] [https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-
letter.ht...](https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html)

[1]
[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-ea...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-earnings-
power-accelerating)

~~~
gnarbarian
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim
may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than
under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes
sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us
for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience." -CS Lewis

Politics/religion and business don't mix, you will alienate half your
potential audience and piss off your employees. When was the last time your
car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you?

With the power that Google has as a conduit for information, having any sort
of political bias in presenting information is frighteningly Orwellian. Their
recent egregious transgressions has caused me to avoid their products wherever
possible. The most ironic thing IMO is their willingness to neuter one of the
most amazing free speech platforms that has ever been created, YouTube. I've
switched off their search engine and now primarily use duckduckgo and bing.
I'm also using the brave browser. I am distancing myself from that company as
fast as alternatives present themselves.

~~~
scarmig
> When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political
> opinion on you?

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=F09](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=F09)

The idea that any apolitical company exists is fanciful. Simply giving
employees the right to political opinions is hardly a reason to boycott the
company; it's a reason to support it.

That said, Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions is itself
problematic.

~~~
smsm42
Lobbying is different. Democracy is for finding how to define common policy,
lobbying can be (though not always is) a legitimate part of this. This is
different, for example, from refusing to do business with people holding
certain political opinion or actively trying to silence them.

> Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions

It's not even that. It's "tolerance only for opinion which nobody out of the
list of groups that are allowed to object finds objectionable". The groups of
course are defined by Google HR politics. So if you are animal rights activist
and group in power dislikes you - you're not tolerated and even people in
Google that want to hear you can't. If this is "tolerance" then what is
intolerance, I wonder?

------
Aunche
I can't read the article, but I'm willing to bet that it's focusing on a small
subset of loud opionated Googlers and convienently ignoring the 99% of
employees who don't care about politics as long as they're getting paid.

~~~
eitally
The other thing that seems to be largely true is that these "loud opinionated
Googlers" are the ones in the Bay Area. You don't hear about things like this
from other offices, even the other large offices in the US (Cambridge, NYC,
Seattle/Kirkland).

~~~
traek
Googlers are definitely loud and politically opinionated at the NYC office.

Seattle/Kirkland tends to be older, more domestically settled people hired
from Microsoft/sometimes Amazon, so just demographically it’s no surprise that
they don’t agitate as loudly for social justice.

------
co_worker_87725
Every fucking office, every workplace, every barbecue and famly gathering
since _November 8, 2016_ , has been a fucking Nightmare Mode political
minfield. And half of everything anyone says is unsafe.

Shit is fucked. I hate the news. I don’t like talking to human beings, pretty
much at all now.

If the conversation doesn’t start of politicized, give it five minutes, and
then someone might interject, disagree, you have to pick a side, draw a weapon
and make a decision about who to fight alongside, or against, possibly to the
death, or at least enough to establish enemies for life.

I’m done with all of you. Just go away. Stop talking to me. I don’t even want
to pan handle for some spare change, whether you have it or not.

~~~
us-focus
> Every fucking office, every workplace, every barbecue and famly gathering
> since November 8, 2016

Perhaps in USA.

------
pxlpshr
The sheer volume of news that comes across the wire every minute of every day
is out of control.

I was working in online media 5 years ago and the number of sites using bots
to compile half-baked articles that a junior editor could quickly tweak to
meet his 10+ article a day quota was disheartening. Again, that was 5 years
ago. Now we have today's news automation capabilities + political drama +
Facebook/Twitter/Slack/et al, and you've magnetized millions of consumers with
a reality TV soap opera that has infected everything.

Google is at the center, and so is Facebook and Twitter as distributors.
They've all built information vacuums which tailor news & content based on
your profiles, search intent, visit history, purchasing habits, and predictive
attributes to target you. However, no matter how sophisticated the AI/ML
becomes – the underlying program is still written by a human and expressed
biases are engrained the day we're born. And, they will never go away.

In a company and environment like today, I'm not sure how one can begin to
escape the discussions around society and politics while operating an
organization that has a larger GDP than Switzerland coupled with uncontested
scale that touches nearly every person worldwide...

------
grellas
To all startup founders: if you think that any part of this mix of ethical
infighting and jockeying for position among employees will be good for your
venture, think again - do your business honestly and with integrity and focus
single-mindedly on executing on a sound business model and the ethics will
take care of itself. The rest is divisive and distracting. Perhaps Google is
big and dominant enough to rise to a higher level but, for mere mortals, the
tried and true way is probably the best.

------
rdtsc
> animals can be subject to prejudice just as people can, as part of the
> company’s “Talks at Google” series. Another group of employees said the
> topic was offensive to humans who face racism, and they protested.

I read that a few times and I just fail to parse it. Can anyone explain the
idea there. How are the topics connected? Is there something obvious I am
missing or it is supposed to be satire which points that people can offended
about anything.

> The dilemma is especially striking at tech companies, which typically cast
> themselves as open meritocracies

Not like all tech companies. Google milked morality perception for years
"Don't be evil etc...". It has no doubt paid huge dividends. "We are not like
those crusty old evil companies with suits and ties, we are young playful,
cool and super-nice! Come join us!".

Even though it is a huge tech giant which tracks millions of people, know what
they email, what credit cards they use, what sites they visit, lobbies the
government more than financial giants, defense contractors or telecom
companies, somehow deep down the first instinct I have is still to think of it
as cutesy little startup with colorful letters that does search better than
AltaVista. A small underdog that everyone loves to root for. Their morality
marketing is really that good.

And well people bought into that propaganda and now they are finally paying
for it internally. So animal rights activists are somehow fighting with racial
justice ones. And besides getting invited to product management meetings, one
gets invited to talks about how their coworkers sexually identify as "a
yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin".

> The Google spokeswoman said an employee working on Talks at Google on a
> volunteer basis unilaterally made the decision to cancel the talk

Aha, I think they are slowly, after great fanfare and drama, realizing that
maybe the workplace should just be for work. People will just start objecting
to any talks. Doesn't matter the topic, because with a few rhetorical tricks,
an intelligent enough person can be offended (or claim to be offended) by
anything.

~~~
smsm42
> Can anyone explain the idea there

The idea is that something being offensive is inherently subjective. If you
claim being offended, you are offended. Offending people - at least people
that Google management is inclined to listen to - is a no-no. Consequently, if
you want to veto a speaker, you just need to proclaim your offense. There's no
proof required because there's no proof possible - there's no objective test
for being offended, only your feelings, of which you are the only judge. As
soon as you decided to proclaim your veto, that's it, the deed is done.

Why people at Google decided to veto PETA speaker - who knows. But there's no
point in digging deeper than that and trying to find logic in it - there's no
logic in this setup.

> People will just start objecting to any talks.

That'd work if the decision were impartial. But an anonymous "employee working
on Talks at Google" doesn't have to be impartial.

~~~
talmand
>> there's no logic in this setup.

That's why if I'm ever presented with such a setup I would protest by voting
to veto everything, even the talks I would be interested in. If any one person
is to be censored by such drivel, then none should be heard until the divisive
and bigoted system is removed.

Of course, people who run such a system would immediately remove my ability to
vote. Which, in a way, would prove a point.

------
lallysingh
> “Google has created a level of entitlement which is hard to claw back,”

A proper sense of entitlement used to be considered (tongue in cheek) a basic
requirement of fitting in at Google.

~~~
asfasgasg
Anyway, it's not clear that anyone is making any attempt to "claw back" this
sense of entitlement. It's always been this way and there isn't any evidence
I'm aware of it's doing damage to the bottom line, so why would they try to
control it.

------
vowelless
This is such a bizarre article. How normal is this type of work culture in the
valley? Doesn't it make sense to keep politics and personal choices outside of
the workplace? Is it really important to bring in a PETA person to talk about
animals feeling prejudice at one of the biggest tech companies that makes
money via advertisements?

~~~
john_moscow
I think this all comes from too many smart people left with too little
meaningful things to do. So they get bored and start playing the usual 1000+
years old game of forming cliques and figuring out who's more important. Kinda
comes from the current investment climate.

------
Apocryphon
When corporations begin to take on the wealth, power, and size of nation-
states, is it no wonder that they may have the same variety of opinion as one?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Most small to medium sized businesses have employees with a variety of
opinion. But most businesses are mature, follow pretty standard norms of work
decorum, and people leave their political positions out of their interactions
with coworkers.

~~~
WillPostForFood
It should be that way, but it is not in the Bay Area.

~~~
mathgladiator
Should it? Sure, it detracts from the organizations mission. It's counter
productive. However, if you eat all your meals at campus, then where else
express politics? I think this is more about companies taking over too much of
life and life bleeds into work.

~~~
TeMPOraL
My impression from the article (and Damore case) is not that discussing
politics is a problem per se - the problem is people there taking their
politics up to 11, and forgetting any kind of rationality or even common sense
on the way.

------
tdb7893
I'm really surprised that they don't avoid these sorts of political conflicts
at work. It makes me really curious what the company culture is like

~~~
xienze
It used to be the prevailing wisdom in corporate America that discussions
about religion and politics have no place in the office. It can only lead to
conflict and furthermore, WTF does it have to do with the task at hand? I
mean, pretty obvious stuff, right? But somewhere along the way the inmates
started running the asylum, so to speak, and political discourse and activism
became an integral part of the work place (although I’d argue this is more of
a Bay Area/startup phenomenon, you obviously see very little of this in stuffy
corporate gigs). Who knows the exact underlying reason for this, but it is
what it is.

My understanding from the Damore case is that Google has internal message
boards that discuss all sorts of political topics and things predictably get
quite heated and has lead to people being blacklisted and fired. Nasty stuff,
other companies should pay attention to what’s happening at Google.

~~~
darepublic
But didn't Damore have to attend compulsory diversity classes, that solicited
feedback from its attendees? So you are supposed to take your medicine and say
it tastes wonderful eh.

~~~
gizmo686
Its wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company you
pretty much had to attend. Even this statement might be over stating it, as we
here much more from the employees who feel like they have to attend (and might
then complain about it), then the ones who don't and would have no reason to
ever bring it up.

~~~
asfasgasg
> Its wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company
> you pretty much had to attend.

Even that seems unlikely. Certainly, managers have to be trained about
compliance and inclusiveness, but was JD a manager? I guess not.

------
MichaelMoser123
The article mentions 'Talks at Google' : I think that this channel was much
more interesting something like two years ago; Is that just my impression?
Does anybody know what happened to these talks and how they turned lame?

------
kingkongjaffa
As an outsider it sounds like the business culture is fractured and devolved
into hives of politically correct virtue signalling.

------
charlysl
This article lacks focus. It starts well, sticking to the headline, but then
all kinds of stories we already know about Google and other tech giants start
rolling in, on and on.

------
tanilama
> struggles to tame a workplace culture of nonstop debate

Make them busy with overwhelming work

------
nodesocket
As somebody who used to live in the bay area, for the most part there aren't
debates and conversations to be had. If you are fiscally conservative or
republican you are evil, racist, sexist, and have no moral compass.

I find it comically hypocritical they claim to be inclusive and an open
company. Alternative viewpoints are not accepted, and even if you can make
logical arguments you are dismissed and bullied. Frankly a lot of the
viewpoints in the bay are very extreme, and disconnected from the vast
majority of American's.

------
jadedhacker
Good, let large powerful companies have robust internal debate. Suppressing it
in the name of efficiency will lead to the kinds of terrible decisions
industry is known for. Google is currently providing support for TensorFlow to
assist the pentagon's drone assassination program. They ought to be taking a
hard look at themselves.

~~~
stephenitis
I might play devil's advocate from a, lessor of two evils, perspective and
argue that supporting the Pentagon's use of tensorflow in this use case might
lower the number of civilian casualties in a battle or wartime.

~~~
perseusmandate
Extrajudicial killings aren't made legal by a half-assed Phil 101
utilitarianism argument.

They are still in violation of human rights, international law, in some cases
laws protecting American citizens.

The argument you are espousing is the same one that justified the use of
torture and the suspension of habeas corpus without anything to show for it.

------
sqdbps
That might be the case but given their biases it's hard to take the WSJ's spin
at face value.

They're agenda is to hurt google and with this one I'm guessing they want to
further damage google's image with conservative culture warriors.

As for the issue at hand, even if it might not be as drastic as described it's
definitely affecting business most evident by some rank and file employees'
public objection to their DoD AI work.

Fixing matters will involve more than intranet discussion moderation, it's
about hiring. Perhaps they should optimize for a different kind of prospect.

~~~
weberc2
I didn’t perceive any spin, and I’m a liberal. Perhaps we’re so in tune with
predominantly left-leaning media that we’ve come to perceive balanced,
centrist articles as biased?

~~~
sqdbps
And I'm libertarian (more or less). I think they probably made too much of
disparate incidents and assumed strong connections between them and between
them and the damore case.

At any rate, there is too much baggage there to take anything they publish
about google at face value.

~~~
quadrangle
What's a libritarial?? Oh wait, edited parent, um now that I read the
original, "libertarian" still looks odd to me, although it's spelled
correctly.

