Should have added, I worked one place we got acquired by a giant company that most here would say is really f*cking evil (TM) and even there I never detected any of the toxic stuff these Google stories talk about.
That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different axis of evil.
I should've been more explicit - I haven't experienced any toxicity at Google. However, due to its internal communication culture Google is far more prone to blowups of well-publicized scandals than other companies of similar size. I'll edit my post to make it clearer.
For sure.. it sounds like Google has more of a problem with everything becoming public as opposed to a higher % of people behaving badly.
Stuff like being able to call a Town Hall Meeting to criticize the decisions of upper management seems unique to Google though. Imagine that happening at some place like Oracle!
I’m curious how you reconcile the admission that you work at a place with bigoted witch hunts with the claim that you’ve never experienced any toxicity. What is your position on the war with Eastasia?
Google is a huge company, so why's that so hard to believe? In fact I'm curious how you'd so easily write off the whole company and everyone who works there from few pieces of bad press.
I think it's possible to work inside a giant war machine that causes all sorts of suffering, while on the inside, it's all brightly lit, comfy, people are polite and even compassionate to each other, both at and outside of work. We can be very reflected and open to criticism even, though only within a specific framework of abstractions and euphemisms, which aren't inherent to the people working there, but rather inherent to the the culture, or the profession, etc.
Maybe like the cells in the body of a criminal and those in the body of the saint aren't really different, per se, and it's more about the state between them. I don't know how to put this well, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a word for how something can behave very differently if you rearrange its parts, or excite them in a different order, etc.
That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different axis of evil.