
Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-13/google-culture-war-escalates-as-era-of-transparency-wanes
======
sandworm101
Only a subset of Google docs were ever shared like this. The lawyers never
shared. The internal security people had private files. HR had its files. The
people doing the financial reporting were/are bound by all manner of rules.
Google's famed internal openness was only ever for a subset of docs meant for
developers, not anything like a free/open data policy.

~~~
crazygringo
Yeah this article really seems to confuse the monorepo and files.

The monorepo was always accessible to all. First day on the job, you can
literally see all the source code. Which is crazy cool. (With a few exceptions
I'm sure, but not many.) I'm assuming that's not changing?

But any time someone creates a Google Doc it defaults to private. People will
then share it with other editors and then their team as necessary.

It happens _all the time_ that you follow a link to a deck to try to
understand what a team is working on, and you get a "no permission" and have
to e-mail them to explain why you want to see it... and you usually get
permission within a few hours but sometimes you needed to look something up
quick before a meeting and missed the chance.

Most of the time it's not out of any great secrecy, just that teams don't want
other teams to misunderstand info out of context, like whether a team is
actually pivoting or just exploring it or just brainstorming internally.

~~~
vl
While monorepo is still a thing, they created a feature called “silos” to
allow secret projects, to prevent fiascos like Dragonfly (censored search in
China) and Maven (DOD drone image recognition) which both were discovered from
monorepo.

Ironically, Allo cancelation was discovered by Allo team from a comment in a
check in which was made by mistake days/weeks before the announcement.

~~~
badfrog
The feature is actually called silos? I thought the hip thing to do was tear
down all the silos in a company?

~~~
username90
Other companies tries to be like Google, while Google tries to be like other
companies.

------
fishnchips
I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s
a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is
leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash
you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t
want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of
frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

~~~
Ididntdothis
“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to
change the company from within.”

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good
one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better
to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next
thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to
change things.

~~~
dmix
Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due
to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially
for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless
they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently
to do culture stuff.

There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either
failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a
bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are
apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard
to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written
about their culture.

~~~
wayoutthere
> Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due
> to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you.
Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because
everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the
dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get
better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level.
And probably not even then without that person spending all their political
capital.

I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but
tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going
to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an
exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work
culture expensive.

~~~
dmix
I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically.

This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the
pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like
telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's
office workplaces.

~~~
wayoutthere
I would also say it's not a good idea to burn bridges; which is what
inevitably happens when you run around telling people the reason you're
leaving is because the company sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway
(see my original comment), and you risk coming off as toxic to people you
might want to give you a recommendation later in your career.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I think giving honest feedback at exit is a good thing and I view it as
showing respect. I would probably avoid the word “sucks” though.

~~~
wayoutthere
Right, but the place for the honest feedback is the exit interview. Spare your
co-workers your grievances; they probably already know why anyway.

~~~
dmix
This just boils down to social skills really. Some people are just killjoy
grievance machines though so it's worth noting.

------
zer0faith
Kent Walker voiced his opinion about not sharing all information because folks
did not agree

"programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker
with an automated email every time they opened any document at all"

I can't help but feel maybe their culture is a little toxic?

~~~
khalilravanna
I think the chief legal officer sending out a memo to the whole company is a
little bit more than “voicing an opinion”. Nevermind when you add in the
context of the actual actions taken against employees who were breaking the
rules (firing).

As for the toxic thing, it’s 100,000 person company, I personally wouldn’t
read into a couple bad apples spamming someone.

That being said, I think it’s hilarious so maybe I’m biased (and toxic).

~~~
badfrog
> That being said, I think it’s hilarious

I think there are many things that would be hilarious and also should get
people fired.

~~~
khalilravanna
100%. Finding humor in things and lacking the judgement/empathy to see how
harmful they play out in the real world should be a very clear boundary.

------
Vysero
"Other employees say they are now afraid to click on certain documents from
other teams or departments because they are worried they could later be
disciplined for doing so, a fear the company says is unfounded."

“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without
fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

------
AzuraJergen
It will be interesting to see how companies will engage with culture wars in
the upcoming years. I expect it to get back to firing of employees to create
cultural hegemony, something that will be frowned upon in some societies.

~~~
StevePerkins
We're 12 years into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

Moreover, the 2008 crash didn't really affect the tech workforce as harshly as
the 2001 dot-com crash.

Altogether, this means an ENTIRE GENERATION of tech workers has NEVER really
experienced a true labor market bloodbath in their career. Doesn't even fully
comprehend what one looks or feels like. Believes that protesting your own
employer, or management tolerating a fragmented internal culture, is _normal
and natural_ rather a temporary aberration.

As a 40-something who was around for the dot-com crash, I feel a blend of
resentment and pity for the younger crowd. The next time the pendulum swings,
and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will
react to the reality of that landscape.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than
> labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that
> landscape.

Google employees probably have so much money laying around after years of
working there that they don’t care anymore.

~~~
d1zzy
If that money is mostly captured in coastal overexpensive housing, the same
property that would be hardest hit if something largely negatively impacts
tech companies/workforce, then they have much less money than one might expect
:)

------
tpmx
> A group of Google programmers created a tool that allowed employees to
> choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any
> document at all, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The
> deluge of notifications was meant as a protest to what they saw as Walker’s
> insistence on controlling the minutiae of their professional lives.

Wow. Just wow. The level of highschool-level unprofessionalism displayed here
is shocking to me. Are these the people we have trusted all of our personal
secrets with?

~~~
tpmx
Seriously though: Is this something the ~2 billion people holding Google
accounts need to think about?

Previously we sort of all trusted Google employees to be competent, smart and
_professional_.

Should we still do that with these internal divisions becoming public?

Over the past few years I've taken to a habit to do the more personal searches
about things about personal medical issues etc from a separate browser
installation (with no Google cookies) using duckduckgo.com or bing.com. I just
don't trust Google with _new_ personal secrets any more.

------
carapace
I know it's kind of a tangent, but I want to point out that Google is serviced
by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the
major perks, are trained not to fraternize with the rest of Google's
employees, and are of a markedly different racial and cultural makeup than the
rest of Google's employees.

Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies
colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large
part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an
estimated $8,000,000,000)?

So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell
they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is
more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom
that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored
_by design_ by the other two groups.

Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their
exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the
former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually
quit Google over this.

(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-
life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird
experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and
returned to Earth.)

~~~
weiming
> is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not
> included in the major perks

Isn't this about government (IRS et al.) categorization of contractors vs.
employees and not about GOOG specifically? IIRC there is a specific reason
contractors cannot receive employee perks or even participate in team morale
events.

~~~
ggm
Do you not think it says something, nobody much talks about google having
worker-ants in uniforms? The IRS issue is why they have to wear a yellow star,
yes. But the question is not that they wear the star its _what the fuck is the
culture which normalizes this_

~~~
seneca
> Do you not think it says something, nobody much talks about google having
> worker-ants in uniforms?

No, not really. It says that people realize that low skill work isn't valued
the same as high skill work. That's exactly what anyone with a basic
understanding of economics would expect. It's not a human rights issue that
people that are easier to recruit and replace aren't offered the same perks.

> wear a yellow star

This is so hyperbolic as to be offensive. Comparing people in a voluntary
employment role to the victims of the holocaust is incredibly tone deaf and
hysterical.

~~~
ggm
If a company insists a class of workers wear uniforms and a huge primary
cohort do not, then the hyperbole is grounded in a fundamental problem. The
uniform exists to mark them out. The function of the uniform is not to their
benefit, it's to their detriment. The origin of the yellow star was
functionally identical: mark the tainted that the righteous shall know them.

~~~
lonelappde
It's so people know who the staff are when they need help in the cafe.

~~~
ggm
And who the cleaners and gardeners and menials are. The ones not allowed in
the nice places except to clean them and get out.

Overall Google employs roughly equal number of staff and contractors, the
latter are in significantly different terms of employment. The functional
maintenance and service staff were an outsource, they many be an in-house now,
but you would have to be in denial to pretend they are not an underclass. My
visit to mountain view was an eye opener.

------
golemotron
Google's mistake was to brand themselves as a moral cause. When you do that,
you send out a beacon to some of the most righteous smart people on earth and
they become employees. Righteousness and smarts is a toxic self-undoing mix.

~~~
malvosenior
If you add making a bunch of money on top of that you have the ultimate
combination of toxicity. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, echo chambers, thinking
you're an expert on matters outside of your field, random and inappropriate
activism... Google brought all of it on themselves.

Google is now a blight on our industry (in terms of invasive technology and
cargo cult copying of their culture and policies). It's so huge and entrenched
that it will take a Microsoft amount of time for its relevance to die but
thankfully it's going in that direction.

------
Causality1
If Google wants to kill their special culture that's up to them, but I hope
they know that without the "Google magic", a lot of their failings as a
company become a lot less forgivable. For example, you can't be as fucking
god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it.

~~~
zbentley
> you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without
> something to make up for it

Like near-total dominance in multiple market spaces?

They don't need great customer service or continued innovation to remain
absolutely ubiquitous for decades to come.

------
mc32
If you make big changes, just do it. Don’t explain it at length. If you
explain it, you give people room to argue and hem and haw and ends up being
counterproductive. It’s an invitation to bikeshedding.

~~~
wayoutthere
I think Google has finally embraced the fact that they're an advertising
company and they're not going to change the world for the better. This means
they need to drive off the idealistic hackers that built the company and
replace them with corporate drones who aren't focused so much on building an
empire as much as protecting it.

This has been happening at both Google and Facebook over the last 5 years. I
think the fact that they're driving off their most talented (and expensive!)
employees is part of the plan for transitioning from explosive growth to
maintenance. The growth mindset has become a liability for them.

~~~
tarsinge
Tangentially related I hope developers will realize that the current stack
inherited from them is basically enterprise software made for large teams of
interchangeable developers, just with better marketing than J2EE 15 years ago.

For reference: [https://martin.kleppmann.com/2008/05/11/ruby-on-rails-vs-
jav...](https://martin.kleppmann.com/2008/05/11/ruby-on-rails-vs-java-
enterprise.html)

> I believe that if there was a full standard distribution for Java EE (e.g.
> Icefaces+JSF+Seam+EJB3+JPA+Hibernate+Glassfish, to name just one possible
> API stack out of thousands of different combinations), people would write a
> lot more good documentation for that particular stack, and it would become a
> lot easier for more developers to start using it effectively. With the right
> tools and good documentation, productivity could potentially be about the
> same for Rails and Java, but at the moment Java is shooting itself in the
> foot in this regard.

~~~
jolux
Spring has basically accomplished the “as productive as Rails” part, as has
ASP.NET Core, which would be my personal preference.

~~~
sho
You must be joking. A good Rails dev will run absolute rings around any java
or .NET effort no matter what tools they're using. I don't even think I'm
being subjective here; I work with java (well, kotlin/scala) devs and even
they wouldn't say anything like that.

Rails has disadvantages yes, concurrency and its lack of ability to support
long-running tasks foremost amongst them, IMO. But dev speed, for standard
"startup web app" features? There is no contest and I'm baffled as to why you
would claim otherwise.

~~~
jolux
You work with Java devs? Have you actually tried using the Java or .NET web
frameworks? They’ve come a long way.

------
einpoklum
The "radical transparency" is probably just propaganda (on management's part)
and self-delusion (on some employee's part).

It says:

> When google was founded... Nearly all of its internal documents were widely
> available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could
> ... dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps

Oh, how transparent! You get look at more source code. Such a deep dark
company secret! Or you could track someone's calendar. Amazing! ... not.

"Nearly all internal documents" likely means "...except the import stuff":
Finances, investor relations, interactions with the US government, senior
management internal discussions. Did employees have access to any of that? I
doubt it.

------
tqi
I wonder why these types of gossipy internal company strife articles are never
written about big news orgs. For example, I'd love to know how 2k+ reporters
who work at Bloomberg feel about their recent editorial decisions re: Mike
Bloomberg's campaign. Is it that these orgs are so ideologically homogenous
that everyone mostly agrees?

~~~
neonate
More likely it's that they don't cover themselves, or each other, with nearly
the same scrutiny.

------
cryptozeus
I may get downvoted for this but IMO these days everything is a collapse. Of
course the same policies can’t apply when you are 100,000 large vs when you
were smaller. Look at this complaint by one employee on transparent policy

“In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of
tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information
about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the
targeted employee feel uncomfortable”

I mean its ok to change with time, if you get stuck in the past then you are
not seeing the real problem that google is too big to be 100% open for
internal employees. This is when you see out of context protests and mob
attacks.

------
tlear
So let me get this straight these busybodies wrote some code to spam companies
lawyer with notifications.. and they did not get all fired on the spot?

------
mcrad
I'm always surprised about workers attitudes on "transparency". Google created
a monster, not only internally, but among troves of idealists in corporate
America/SV who distrust structure and strategy in the business world, in lieu
of free-for-all style of management. To the googlers who whined about Walker's
memo: you are a total disgrace to the business of engineering.

~~~
slumpt_
Do you season the boot before you lick it?

~~~
mcrad
Ha! Get back in your bubble you sellout

------
tubbs
Archive: [http://archive.is/iO1ls](http://archive.is/iO1ls)

------
scottlocklin
I'd like to think they're just engaging in internal sabotage as a form of
activism, like the OSS field manual for disrupting organizations suggests:

[https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/](https://corporate-
rebels.com/cia-field-manual/)

Seems to have this effect anyway, and I support the google workers trying to
destroy this evil company.

------
RickJWagner
Not surprising. Corporate entities will tolerate employee 'activism' so long
as it doesn't interfere with day-to-day business. Once that line is crossed,
the business is going to start providing guidelines that focus attention where
it needs to be.

This is how it should be. Activism is fine and belongs in personal lives and
organizations dedicated to the cause. It does not belong in companies with a
diverse workforce.

------
kjgkjhfkjf
Perhaps Google is less transparent than it once was, but once again it seems
like people are lamenting the passing of a Google culture that never really
existed. Parts of Google's monorepo were restricted to specific owning teams
over a decade ago, and sending email to an executive would get you a talking-
to from your manager if they didn't like the tone of it.

------
fg6hr
Wow, 5 posts attacking Google in the HN top right before Christmas. That can't
be a coincidence. Someone with money clearly has personal issues with Google,
but I don't see what this is to do with Christmas. P.S. I'm not defending
Google as it's indeed done some questionable things, but 5 posts at the same
time is really rare event.

------
ignoramous
> _The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t
> required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud
> business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can
> handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it
> more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors._

The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases
towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive
documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1]
and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].

> _Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos
> to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors.
> Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people
> building its operating system are doing, and vice versa._

I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo
orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise
quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To
me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own
separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by
design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under
wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent
documentation.

I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit
too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not
possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn.
The learnings / information weren't _pull_ anymore, you had to get it _pushed_
to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common
thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not
sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the
scale at which the company was operating.

Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things
on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be _secret_ , got you
nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had
a special mention of how you needed to improve _earn trust_ and tone down
_learn and be curious_ [3], just because...

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526)

------
GauntletWizard
So long as people are leaking Google's "Internal Culture" like a sieve, can
someone upload the xtranormal "Borgmon Readability" video somewhere? Even
though I'm a huge fan/proponent of Prometheus... I feel like that video is a
necessary warning to those going in.

~~~
aoki
you should try offering three peer bonuses

------
mikelward
> “It was that way since the early days of Google, and it’s that way now,”
> [Walker] wrote.

Then the article ends with

> “Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” [Humu]
> wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”

------
beamatronic
Who’s in place to be the next Google? Amazon has built all the foundational
pieces for scalable cloud services. Could we see Amazon Mail? Amazon Calendar?
Etc....

------
C1sc0cat
This is just another tail function department wanting to enhance its role,
very common for HR, Building services etc.

------
neonate
[https://outline.com/etcKaN](https://outline.com/etcKaN)

------
devit
Regarding the data policy, is the reason that the risk of someone leaking
information is now being perceived as higher than in the past?

If so, why? Have there been leaks? Is there a plan to hire a bunch of new less
vetted employees?

Or maybe it's a manipulative attempt to make those with undesirable cultural
traits (including a desire for internal openness) leave the company without
saying so explicitly?

~~~
Infinitesimus
Check out this piece [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-
fires-w...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-
workers.html)

The excuse is that those for abusing that freedom to gather information
outside the scope of their jobs (no details given though).

Plus I think they recently cancelled the Friday meetings because information
was being leaked to the media. Inevitable at a large corporation but when a
few people act this way, if ruins it for everyone

------
Despegar
The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the
start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made
money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being
"Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots.
Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be
evil".

All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech
company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your
brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this
lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed
by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google
transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.

~~~
emtel
Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be
the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most
of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We
didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads
were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if
you want, but that's a different matter.

And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted
to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But,
everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception
necessary.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading
the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love
to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work,
ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally
misunderstood what google is.

See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is
technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It
is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because
the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The
statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by
default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize
all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this
reduction.

Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer
services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those
services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work
on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they
will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google
attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making
machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes.

(To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only
that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is
focused.)

~~~
soylentcola
It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make
their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and
justify the cost of that ad time.

But to everyone else, they're a source of information and entertainment that's
available to anyone with an antenna, a tuner, and a speaker/display.

And again, it's not as if broadcast media are universally great, but there's
value in them outside of the advertising business.

~~~
riversflow
>It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make
their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and
justify the cost of that ad time.

Yes. I would call broadcast TV advertisers. Have you given mass media a
critical analysis lately? It’s chalk full of subtle product placement and
other brainwash, on top of in-your-face advertisements every few minutes. The
Simpsons made fun of this a decade ago, and it seems to have only gotten
worse. I limit television exposure just the same as Google exposure.

I speak for myself only of course, but jumping to defend Google with broadcast
tv made me laugh.

~~~
soylentcola
Didn't intend to "defend" any company or industry really. Just wanted to point
out that there are multiple transactions taking place.

Advertiser/ad platform is one of them, but it's not the only one.

------
jelliclesfarm
Interesting. The first thought that popped into my head as I read the article
was ..this is the corporate version of the evolution of the rise and fall of
communism.

Prediction: Google will be in 20 years what Soviet Russia became at around
2000s.

They will go from utopia to totalitarian to insignificant player in a few
decades.

Why this happens puzzles me..I grew up when Soviet Russia/USSR was still alive
and then watched it go away. And see where it is at now. I don’t understand
it. It’s like a mystery. But the pattern to dissolution is inevitable.

------
simion314
Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe
culture should shut up and leave?

I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true
to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to
criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or
Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.

~~~
airstrike
> Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new
> unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

Yes. Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent
leave to force their hand. Anything else is mostly just noise.

~~~
maxlamb
I think the point OP was making is that dozens of people died because
executives as Boeing “shut down” concerns that some long time engineers had.
I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products but I think the point is
hoping that a half a trillion dollar monopoly will change its ways because
lots of employees leave is wishful thinking and might only happen if it
results in a catastrophe. Google can replace them easily and regardless a
majority of their profit comes from search which only requires a small
fraction of their employees to keep operating at profit.

~~~
simion314
>I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products

Google is experimenting with self driving cars and they are always interested
in working for the military or the police. I want the employees to talk if
they feel something is not right rather then do the Uber thing and disable the
safety because the code was garbage and had too many false positives.

------
galangalalgol
I did not know they had this transparency policy. Did it (hopefully) exclude
documents containing personal information? Google has a lot of info ona lot of
people, surely every employee can't access all of it?

~~~
hknd
When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...)
created internally by employees.

Getting access to personal information within Google is very, very difficult -
it's not like you can query the user's sql table and get all the PII.
Everything PII related is highly protected.

Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's
say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone.
This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv
change that).

It's an awesome philosophy if everybody plays by the rules and doesn't leak
stuff to the outside world. Sometimes people create "Ideas Docs", "Best
practice docs", "Design Docs", "Algo Docs" etc, and then receive feedback from
random Googlers which accidentally stumbled upon them. It's also a fantastic
way of knowledge transfer as anyone can look up the design doc for problem X
of product Y and read about it.

~~~
saalweachter
> Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g.
> let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next
> Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by
> default (you can obv change that).

False; Google docs have always[1] been private by default, and must be
explicitly shared, either with individuals, groups, or made world-readable.

[1] I mean, I wasn't around for the earliest releases of Google docs, but even
before Larry was CEO the sharing was off by default. That's just a sane
default, because if you forget to share your document the first person you
send it to will let you know, but if you forget to unshare you only find out
the hard way.

~~~
cromwellian
I’ve been at Google for 10 years and I don’t think that’s true. I distinctly
recall the public by default era.

~~~
saalweachter
You've got years on me, and my memory from before 5-6-7 years ago is fuzzy,
but it's definitely not _new_.

~~~
nostrademons
I started 11 years ago and left 5.5 years ago and new Docs were public by
default the whole time I was there. When I left there were murmurs about
making Docs private by default but it hadn't happened yet.

------
macspoofing
Sometimes you have to stand-up to your employees. Having a small group of
activists driving your business decisions is unsustainable. Google is a
multinational behemoth, and as much as it likes to think of itself as a small
nimble progressive startup, those days are long gone.

>Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company,
who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product
developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such
investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the
Pentagon and China.

Google had the benefit of obscene profits from their ad business that let the
rest of the company do whatever, which also enabled internal activists to
exert pressure for them to not do business with the American government.

~~~
xiphias2
Google had obscene profits _because_ of the rest of the company. Mano of us
were working on weekends because we thought that it's a different company. And
it was.

~~~
macspoofing
>we thought that it's a different company. And it was.

What do you mean a 'different company'. You mean different in that it wouldn't
do business with the American government? Different in that it would bow to a
small pool of activists to drive business decisions?

~~~
xiphias2
All engineers were driving business decisions in the past actually. The
headcounts were centrally set, but the whole team usually had one or two main
focuses that it could execute on.

When Larry became the CEO, the whole thing changed. He took an engineer driven
organization and changed it into a PM driven organization, just what Microsoft
had under Steve Ballmer. And if there are too many PMs, engineers become Go
pieces that PMs try to steal from eachother all the time.

