I'm no Google apologist, but there's nothing nefarious about this. Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble. It's the equivalent of a lawyer telling his client to go drinking and have a fun night out with the district attorney.
Rule #1: Never talk to the police without your lawyer being present
Rule #2: Don't create a paper trail that is going to make you look bad when it gets subpoenaed
I personally think that Google needs to be broken up into 10 different companies. And I would love to live in a world where companies face antitrust enforcement because of concrete actions. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a carelessly worded email is going to cause you more legal troubles than actual anti-competitive behavior.
>I'm no Google apologist, but there's nothing nefarious about this. Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble.
Similarly, why the heck would Google want to have employees discuss controversial topics like politics and religion as well? Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.
It hurts my soul every time I reminded that companies have no cap on how much they can 'donate' to politicians. Imagine a world where there was no money in politics.
You can think of it as tantamount to one's network, and the amount of influence within that network. Basically, "it's not what you know, it's who you know".
It's pretty rich to claim the who-you-know culture in China is not influenced by money. Bribery is how you get everything from good grades, to good employment, promotions, get out of jail etc.
if you really need someone to give you a breakdown + application of the idea of fungibility to bribes to see the distinction, here you go:
when you bribe a teacher for a better grade, you aren't utilizing a relationship to induce a change in outcome, you are utilizing money, money that holds value independent of who is providing the bribe.
edit:i am making the assumption that parent read at least the wiki blurb of what the parent is replying to.
Money helps you get to know people, particularly in China for things like getting grades and jobs. If, after you give them money, they then "know" you, money was still part of the equation.
I don't know about other PACs, but the one that my firm organizes is funded entirely from employee donations; no corporate money at all.
It has stated policy goals that are basically about creating an environment that's good for the firm's business and then gives a 50:50 split between the two major parties for federal campaigns.
I just can't get too excited about this being a bad thing.
It's OK because it's my money, and donating to a PAC like this is just a straightforward way to donate to candidates who support a business environment that's good for my employer.
Pertinent to this article, if there were antitrust regulations with teeth, you wouldn't have monopolies and their associated profit levels. This would both limit spending and limit the incentive for spending since they wouldn't have an incentive to create barriers to entry for competition through regulation.
To be clear, there are limits for direct political donations. What was decided, correctly, in the Citizens United vs. FEC case was the right for political activism from non-campaign affiliated entities (like corporates, nonprofits, labor unions, etc.). The context for that decision was FEC's attempt to censor a film from a conservative group made in response to FEC's refusal of classify Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 as political 'expenditure' (a film which had a clearly stated goal of getting Bush out of office). The FEC set a bullshit 'bona fide commercial film maker' as a standard for their decision, and when Citizen's United restablished itself as a film maker, their next film (an anti-Hillary documentary) was also found to be in violation. In no universe was FEC's policy fair and objective. From wikipedia, here's a crazy argument the government tried to make:
"During the original oral argument, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart (representing the FEC) argued that under Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the government would have the power to ban books if those books contained even one sentence expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate and were published or distributed by a corporation or labor union. In response to this line of questioning, Stewart further argued that under Austin the government could ban the digital distribution of political books over the Amazon Kindle or prevent a union from hiring an author to write a political book."
Isn't that an insane conjecture? This exchange by itself probably lost the FEC the case.
>Imagine a world where there was no money in politics.
Such a world never existed, does not exist, and will never exist. Politics are a center of power. You can ban money all you want, but all you'll accomplish is create a 'black market'. I posit that you do not want to live in such a world.
> Such a world never existed, does not exist, and will never exist. Politics are a center of power. You can ban money all you want, but all you'll accomplish is create a 'black market'. I posit that you do not want to live in such a world.
The same is true of many areas of society. Medical doctors, company executives, the police, etc. all have power and there's good money involved. Still we have laws against fraud, insider trading, bribery, abuse of power, and so forth. While there are transgressions, by and large things seem to work, and when we find new kinds of transgressions, the reaction is not to throw our hands up and say "it'll always be like this!" but to fix the laws.
Which is to say: I don't get the defeatism about regulation here. Laws work. Making actions illegal and threatening a hefty prison term is an effective way of reducing their occurrence.
Now it may be hard to get such laws passed, but that's another story.
I argue that democracy would be better if politicians cared about what people want. Not the top-of-their-head soundbite wants, but the actual needs driving those individual desires.
Ironically enough I believe that the current democracy we live in is effectively quite close to the original democracy, as it manifested in the city-state of Athens and wider ancient Greece. Only 3% of the total population had a vote: namely those with family titles or enough wealth.[ß]
These days we'd call it plutocracy or oligarchy.
ß: It doesn't really matter what the general population does with their votes when less than 3% get to choose what options are on the ballot in the first place.
Ask yourself: who were responsible for putting him on the ballot in the first place? And why? Because from looking where I am (read: not in the US), the correct choice in 2016 elections would have been "neither". But that's not a choice available - choosing not to vote is entirely different from voting "none of the above".
The comment wasn't intended as "bait". I used to be in the camp that money was basically all that was necessary to drive an election. Trump's campaign proved me wrong. The establishment did everything they could to discredit him. He spent basically half the money as his competitor. He still won.
I think money is still a problem in politics, but I think the model that money is the driving contributor is too simple.
As an aside, “neither” is an option in the U.S. but too many people have been convinced a third party vote is equivalent to throwing their vote away and thus it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy
Well... Money is a necessary requirement, because it buys visibility in all forms of media. But if we calmly look at what went on, Trump did more than just blast himself out to everywhere he could. Yes, he's an unhinged demagogue, but he also played the media remarkably well. (Calling in to a newsroom and getting unsolicited airtime in the middle of an otherwise redundant programme?)
> As an aside, “neither” is an option in the U.S. but too many people have been convinced a third party vote is equivalent to throwing their vote away
You missed my point. The option I'm talking about is not "neither". It's "none of the above". You need a way to actively express that you, as a voter, have considered the available named options and rejected all of them. Not by wasting a protest vote or abstaining to vote in the first place.
I don't believe I'm saying this, but I honestly think an Australian-style mandatory voting regime would do well in the US. At least that would force the states' hands and make voter suppression a hell of a lot harder to attempt. Combine that with ballots that always have "none of the above" option, and you might start to see something shift.
What would you think happens to legitimacy if "all options were bad" gets a larger share of votes than your supposedly winning candidate?
I think what Trump did was run a far more efficient campaign in terms of what his money provided in the media. He was able to to leverage free publicity by aligning his personality with the incentives of the attention economy.
Thanks for clarifying on the "neither" issue. I would be an advocate of a "none of the above" vote option. In my mind, it does much as the same as if people voted third party. I wasn't equivocating a third party vote to a protest vote. At a certain point, when the percentage of third party votes reaches a certain tipping point those who feel like it's a wasted vote may be convinced it's a viable option. But I also think there are other (possibly more pragmatic) voting schemes like ranked voting that are being implemented at lower levels in the country.
I would be strongly against mandatory voting and I think it could make the system even worse. I think it's important to recognize that you also have the right not to vote just like you have the right not to own a firearm, have the right not to speak up even though you have the freedom of speech etc. A "right" is not equivalent to an "obligation". I think there's issues with uninformed votes as it is and this could be exacerbated by mandatory voting. Sometimes the appropriate choice is to refrain from voting rather than casting an uninformed vote.
> > to figure out which version of your word people like best.
> It sounds like you're arguing that democracy is better if the politicians don't know what the people want?
I have no particular objection to politicians knowing what people want. But that wasn't how I think the money is being spent.
Rather, the use I was pointing out is centered on figuring out what people want to hear.
So, less "what positions would the voters prefer we take" and more "How can we package the policies our donors prefer such that voters choose us over the opposition". Spin, in other words.
Donating to politicians only has an effect to the extent that some voters insist on voting for the most well-funded politicians. They are the real problem because they are the ones actually deciding who gets into government. You should vote against all high donation-receiving politicians to help cancel out those soul-hurting votes.
Unfortunately, most of the people who complain about this stuff don't actually care enough to vote against it, and they become part of the problem themselves.
There are other candidates but they don't spend enough for people to know they exist. Vote for one of them. It doesn't matter which because they won't win but they don't have to. They just have to "steal" enough votes from one of the major party candidates to cause them to lose. Next time round, they'll have to adjust their policy to be against political donations in order to win back those activist voters.
It doesn’t matter how you vote. Money in politics will win every time. Blaming the voters is victim blaming. This is just late stage capitalism at its finest.
Don't blame the lobbying, blame the fact that lobbying is legal.
All industries learn over time that it's an arms race and without spending the money they'll be in a vulnerable position.
The real fix is to elect those who would regulate or get rid of money in politics and punish those to take these lobby money. That's what people should focus on not how much the tech industry needs to spend on buying politicians like most other industries have done before.
> Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.
Equal pay regardless of gender is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow women and nonbinary folks from advocating at work for equal pay?
Equal opportunity for people of color is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow people of color from advocating at work for equal opportunity?
Accommodation for disability is a political question. Paid time off for pregnancy is a political question. What rights we grant to older employees is a political question. Whether LGBTQ folks can be fired for being out is a political question.
The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me. From my perspective, things at my workplace seem quite "neutral". But when I get to know people who are at all different, I find that the workplace is not at all neutral towards them.
I would consider those political questions to be directly related to the current workspace, and so allowed to talk about. Most of the time what people refer to is activism (our company should support X, because I think X is the correct political action) when talking about neutral environments, at least from what anecdotal observations of the many times this argument has come up on HN.
As well, I wouldn't consider long arguments during work about opinions on {current political topic} to be relevant or even useful. (If you really desire such, then outside work time is prevalent, though you have to be careful of pressuring coworkers into such activities if they don't want to discuss politics at all with work).
If LGBTQ benefits are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to talk about same-sex marriage? Is it acceptable to advocate for pro-LGBTQ policies more broadly? If not, why not? It's all part of the same thing, no?
If H-1B visas are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to advocate that our company should support the removal of a politician who is anti-immigrant? Again, it's all part of the same thing, no?
When I start thinking about it, a lot of these workplace issues are connected to broader issues...
I try to frame those issues as "Is this within the bounds of the value I agreed to provide in return for this pay?" If "no", but my moral code demands I speak, then I'm out. Sorting out expectations directly with supervisors or HR also seems advisable where unclear.
Valuable employees leaving due to company misses on important social issues is itself a very powerful form of advocacy.
People in the minority when it comes to political views would be better off in a workplace that isn't allowed to discuss politics. Especially if they're getting triggered and trying to shame people, or openly protesting company decisions.
So for example, you're saying that in workplaces where women are in the minority, they are better off in a place where they're not allowed to advocate for their own rights (inside and outside the workplace)?
Wouldn't they be better off in a workplace where they could, you know, ask for the things that they think would make them better off?
You appear to be moving the goalpost here. Or perhaps I was my fault for not being clear. My policy was referring specifically to discussing politics within the workplace.
As for your question, everyone is of course allowed to ask for more pay. This is not what I'd call politics, but simply salary negotiation. If you're suggesting something different. Then yes, you generally aren't going to help yourself within an organization by calling your boss a sexist who needs to promise to stop being a sexist. Or whatever it is you're specifically proposing.
> they are better off in a place where they're not allowed to advocate for their own rights (inside and outside the workplace)?
Sorry, I think I was unclear. I meant, discussing inside the workplace issues that are relevant to their lives inside and outside work.
> As for your question, everyone is of course allowed to ask for more pay. This is not what I'd call politics, but simply salary negotiation.
OK. Let's take it a few steps further?
Are women allowed to say, "you know, women are paid less than men for most jobs in this country, let's advocate that this not be the case at our company?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, our company shouldn't be supporting X politician, because they're not in favor of equal pay for equal work?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, just as our company advocates for laws and regulations that we think are beneficial to our core technical business (software or whatever), we should also advocate for laws and regulations that are good for our people, like paid maternity leave."
And, just step back: Does it give you any pause that we're having a conversation about what what women are allowed to say?
unishark's comment was about people with minority viewpoints, not people who are part of a visible minority. For example, a woman might be the only female in a programming team, and therefore a visible minority, but her views on what gender equality means might be shared by most of the rest of the team, meaning tha she does not have a minority viewpoint.
So you're saying, (WLOG) women who happen to disagree with the prevailing (male) viewpoint are better off in offices which disallow discussion of politics. Because by telling everyone that they can't talk about political issues relevant to women, they don't have to shoulder the burden of the majority disagreeing with them?
But...by assumption, the majority disagrees with them? I don't get it.
I mean, just hypothetically, suppose some group was discriminated against at work. Women, Black folks, LGBTQ folks, folks with disabilities, whatever. This discrimination is "political", in that Serious Politicians disagree about whether it's right. I hope you don't think this is a stretch. You're saying that in a world where they couldn't advocate for themselves by talking about the issues they face, they'd be better off?
If this is about what's best for them, why not let them choose?
Do we have to be the gatekeepers of what's good for them or not?
Sorry I don't believe you I have seen that data from some Large UK tech companies and the sex discrimination was very obvious, as well as race, and disability.
OK, that's your view on the gender pay gap. I disagree, but set that aside for a moment.
We were talking about whether it's appropriate to discuss one's opinion on the pay gap -- among other things -- at work, despite its being political. Seems like you're saying it is appropriate? Like, if a woman who reported to you came to you asking for more money to reach parity with a male colleague, I guess you'd say, "I am a hiring manager etc etc and the emperor has no clothes, here's why you make less"? If you think that's OK, then we're in agreement on this point that this is an acceptable topic for work.
As someone who has managed people myself, I think it would be highly relevant to my business function to know where my fellow managers stand on this issue.
FWIW, if I thought any protected class (or even non-protected) was the basis for a lower-than-deserved pay, I would take that to HR and/or file a whistleblower report. You're talking about illegal activity.
Casually surveying people's opinions on breaking the law and potentially leaving an incriminating paper trail that could harm the company seems similar the antitrust topic in the article.
I'd say discussions of any illegal activity on the company's behalf should be directed toward HR / legal.
You're straw manning my position. You can advocate for your rights as provided by existing legal and regulatory policies. If an individual feels they have been harassed or discriminated against, that individual has a right to engage their company to rectify this situation, through mechanisms like filing a grievance with company HR department, or their union (if part of one), or through the legal system.
What I'm against is creating a corporate culture that openly biases for or against certain political parties, religious or secular beliefs, or contentious policy or culture issues (like abortion). Keep those things out of the workplace, because those topics elicit emotional responses, and you want to maintain a neutral professional environment.
>The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me.
I'm glad you had a comfortable life. Don't throw your personal experience on the rest of us. You being 'youngish cishet white man" says nothing about the experience of others with those same immutable characteristics.
> Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.
Workplaces like Google are inherently political because they manage vast amounts of data and their actions have implications on millions—even billions of people. Ignoring this is just complacency.
Why should you only do activism outside of work? If we actually want to change institutions for the better, it helps quite a bit if the people running the institutions are also trying to change thing too. If you don’t want to get involved for whatever reason, that’s fine but I think it’s unfair to say no one should
Also, for basically it's entire existence Google has been a political organization. It had a firm stance on gay marriage long before Obergefell v. Hodges set it as the law of the land.
The search engine wouldn't have had a special rainbow stripe at the top for certain search terms if the company wasn't deeply political on the subject.
Why should the political opinions of the employees be preferred over those of everyone else? They're a very unrepresentative sample of people that the company's actions affect. There's a reason we have democracy, not programmerocracy.
Political changes aren't objectively "for the better". If that was true, they wouldn't be political decisions, but business decisions. The whole reason they're political is that we can't determine if they're good or bad scientifically so we resort to distributed opinion instead.
> Why should the political opinions of the employees be preferred over those of everyone else?
The people who are complicit to violence perpetrated by the company they work for are inherently making the same decision as those who are activists. Either way you end up with a programmerocracy, so why not try to reduce harm on others then? Maybe what you advocate for isn’t perfect, but if you can’t avoid politics in your workplace, why don’t you fight for what you believe in?
> Political changes aren't objectively "for the better". If that was true, they wouldn't be political decisions, but business decisions.
Very few things are objective. Some would argue that nothing is objective. This is not a reason not to act.
> we resort to distributed opinion instead
This is not true. I think it is safe to say that political decisions in our global society are overwhelming made by a very small group of highly elite individuals.
So the workplaces are going to stop contributing to political parties and lobbyists, then? I can expect that any day now? That’s good to know, thanks!
Or did you perhaps mean that it’s only the workers that ought to be “neutral” and silent in their politics? Yes, that seems more likely to be what you meant.
Less relevant now so much WFH is going around, but I just don't want to be a captive audience to my most politically enthusiastic coworkers. I wouldn't want my employees to have to suffer each other or to have to consider political compatibility on teams. There would be reasons to have political opinions when those were relevant to the work being done or the company's actions, but it's not to much to ask people to keep their irrelevant-to-work politics out of the workplace.
No, workers are supposed to be silent about it AT WORK. They can donate to whichever party they want outside of work.
And, presumably, if the company is making political contributions to help it accomplish its goals, I'd imagine workers could discuss that and make suggestions inside work. But when you're just discussing your personal politics, you can do it elsewhere.
I was on the fence about the backlash, but ultimately what sealed the deal for me is his response to the situation.
As presumed-CEO and leader, he needs to have the confidence of his organization, and also the ability to address controversial difficult topics. He failed on that.
He finally did the right thing by stepping down. He would have always carried the weight of the mismanagement of the response to the employee-criticism, and that is what killed him ultimately.
A CEO position isn't a reward, it's a service position, and I believe that no one is entitled to it. (Ditto many forms of leadership) So to complain about how unfair it was to him, perhaps we should think about how unfair it was to the employees of the organization who had to deal with situation instead.
Only a world where the feelings of the CEO are the most important thing in the entire company does this difference really matter.
As CEO your job is (a) leadership and (b) communications. He failed at both, badly. Perhaps he should have reached out to internal resources more (HR, PR, crisis PR, etc), but these are things I expect a CEO to figure out.
I'm not teaching a new hire coder what a computer is. Nor am I teaching a CEO about PR and communications!
Except he walked straight into another CEO position and it's never been a problem despite everyone knowing about his donation to a political group.
Literally all he did was monetarily support a cause ($3,100) in private. He was not out there making statements or instituting changes to the company.
What does that have to do with "leadership and communications"?
I certainly don't align with his political position but respect people's right to hold one without fear or favour.
It has to be one of the most egregious acts of employee activism. And look where it got Mozilla now, the politically palatable replacement has driven it into the ground while it's only held afloat with money from Google.
I have no particular reason to believe Eich would have done better than his replacement. The marketplace has not been kind to mozilla's entire business model.
Brave has grown every month since launch, while Firefox has shrunk. But it's all coincidence, uncorrelated, meaningless; inevitable for Firefox, and yet nothing to do with me for Brave, I'm sure. :-|
Basically this. I don't know where the idea has crept in to people's minds that work places are a politically neutral environment, but that's not a principle that holds true in general. Union shops can require their employees who are union members to phone bank for politicians the union favors.
Work is highly political and I don't think anybody has ever pretended otherwise.
I mean, hell, political campaigns themselves are workplaces too. ;)
> Or did you perhaps mean that it’s only the workers that ought to be “neutral” and silent in their politics? Yes, that seems more likely to be what you meant.
No, because workers are free to be non-neutral outside the workplace. Workplaces don't contribute to political parties, an environment isn't a donor. And that's the point: the workplace environment should be neutral.
Yes. Support for prop 22 is a business decision that doesn't require the hearts and souls of every worker in Uber. I'd be surprised if Uber engineers, PMs, designers, etc - basically everyone other than public-facing leadership and the few involved in crafting Uber's public policy - were required to actively express support for prop 22 in the workplace or anywhere else. The average Uber worker should be perfectly able to go about their workday without diving into a political debate about prop 22.
Workers have to work with other workers. If workers have to deal with overhearing other workers preaching about Trump or against Trump, against or for one race or another, maybe a gender argument, maybe whether God exists or abortion is naughty - that's a shit environment. We get paid to code or sell or manage, not to hear opinions being spewed across the room.
So it is different, despite your snarky comment. A company lobbying doesn't affect your 40, 50 hr work week.
If my coworkers were harboring opinions being against certain races (i.e. racism) that they simply didn't say out loud, I would certainly feel deeply uncomfortable being in their presence, and that absolutely affects my work week. Telling people to just not talk about it doesn't really make that any better: in fact, it probably makes it worse.
> In the scenario you describe, how would you be aware of their racism if they didn't discuss it at work?
Well, I suppose if there were no minority employees in that workplace, it would be kind of hard to tell, but otherwise, it often isn't that hard. And if you are in the minority, you almost certainly can tell since, in a thousand tiny subtle ways, you're constantly being told you don't belong.
If they didn't say it out loud how would you even know, and what does it mean to harbor feelings? You read their diary? Saw it in their eyes? Used your intuition?
Aren't you worried you could be wrong if that's the standard, or someone could use that standard against you and be wrong?
To the extent they can, Google assumes its employees are mature adults and can discuss just about anything.
The rare exceptions usually result from collision with legal constraints on that policy, such as conversations that can get the company in legal trouble. Because whether or not Google as a company wants everything open for debate, US employment law makes it fairly clear that there are some things you're not allowed to say---for financial securities reasons, hostile workplace reasons, and lawsuit vulnerability reasons.
>Google assumes its employees are mature adults and can discuss just about anything.
By that reasoning, why have any policies at all - after all 'mature adults' should know how to handle themselves.
The reality is that even (and especially) with mature adults, it's perfectly reasonable to set policies and rules on conduct. Making it clear to not engage in emotionally-charged 'debates' about contentious topics is perfectly inline with good corporate governance. Your coworker next desk over may have wildly different views on abortion, politics, religion, but none of that should matter in getting the job done you're paid for. Ideally you shouldn't even know, or care what their personal views are on societal issues.
In that context, Google is in an unusual position as arbiters of what people consider to be truth.
Having political discussions about things such as whether the utility of trans people being able to communicate broadcast-wise to all people interested in trans issues versus the utility of school systems regulating what students that have been entrusted to their care can see unsupervised is part of the job, when you work in YouTube and are designing the system for flagging content as objectionable or non-monetizable.
On top of that, Google believes there's a point of philosophy that good ideas can come from anywhere, so they encourage engineers passionate about a topic to use proper channels to weigh in on sensitive subjects. User of proper channels is key, which is why there are trainings.
That's not what we're talking about. Content policies for YouTube is something that needs to be worked out by the content team. I'm talking about internal debate and activism around contentious topics.
>so they encourage engineers passionate about a topic to use proper channels to weigh in on sensitive subjects
Sure they do. I'm sure they are perfectly OK with engineers being passionate about Trump, pro-life, religion... Yeah..
It's clear as day that pretty much everyone in this thread has a blind-spot because they just so happen to agree with the culture of a San Francisco company pushing progressive values. If you moved to rural Alabama and now you were inundated with conservative values and politics to the point where you were worried about your job if you did not consent, for example, signing your name on some conservative petition, I bet you would see the value of keeping the workplace neutral.
I've seen this first hand. There is a Director at my workplace that goes on pro-choice rants all the time. Her assistant confident to me that she's actually pro-life but feels like she has to agree publicly (and like her Facebook rants) because she needs her job. How is that good? What's the point of engaging in a pro-choice vs pro-life debate at work when you're trying to build a widget.
> Sure they do. I'm sure they are perfectly OK with engineers being passionate about Trump, pro-life, religion... Yeah.
They aren't not okay with it. You will, of course, run the risk that your fellow engineers will think you're an idiot, especially if you fail to back up your position with evidence and consider other people's positions on the topic. But refraining from actively discouraging such conversation is part of the whole "bring your whole self to work" culture at Google.
I do believe they have cooled somewhat on the topic however, after they encountered both a wave of leaks of internal company correspondence and the Damore fiasco, which was bad press for them whether or not they were in the right to terminate him.
Sure but why would they care? They're not going to get into massive existential trouble because employees have strong views on political issues except that on anti-trust, a paper trail of internal people saying "we are too powerful and should be broken up" will cause them a huge issue.
If it's the politics of antitrust attention in Google's direction, then it can provide liability to Google. An employee saying in an email "Wow, they didn't want to sell to us so we crushed them. Antitrust folks won't like it but it's what they get for not selling to us."
That, or other language about "crushing" competition isn't going to play well when an antitrust investigation reveals it.
Yes it is. Just because you set up a false choice of "you're with me or against me" doesn't mean the rest of us have to play your game. Yes there is such a thing as leaving politics out of the workplace.
>Talking about politics provides no liability to Google.
I don't know about that. Nevertheless, it also creates a toxic environment, because there are a lot of contentious cultural and political issues that elicit emotional reactions and the vast majority of people will have a a wide variety of nuanced opinions on those, so all you're doing is introducing strife and toxicity with no benefit to the business.
Political neutrality is a cultural attribute diametrically opposed to "change the world" narratives and "eat your meals at the office" work-life balances. A lot of company cultures are politically neutral. Google isn't.
That said, a company controlling what their employees say in public about matters of strategic commercial importance doesn't strike me as politically pointed. It's a business acting like a business.
>Political neutrality doesn't exist. “Do not discuss politics” is a defense of the status quo
Yes there is such a thing as 'political neutrality'. Every time you contract a plumber, you engage in 'political neutrality', because neither your nor the plumber interrogate yourselves on your political affiliations. You want your plumbing fixed for a fair price, and the plumber wants to get paid for a job well done and get back home in time for dinner.
Just because you set up a false choice of "you're either with me or against me", doesn't mean the rest of us will play your little game.
Restricting discussion about religion could be a Title VII violation, and restricting discussion about politics could run afoul of voter suppression laws.
This is both a scary and weird comment. Everything we do is politics in some form. Even the decision on what toilet paper to use is political and can have both social and environmental impacts.
No. When you go to MacDonald's to get a Happy Meal, what politics do you engage in? When you contract a plumber, do you interrogate him on his political affiliation?
You are misunderstanding what is being meant by political.
> When you go to MacDonald's to get a Happy Meal, what politics do you engage in?
You’re McDonalds experience is the direct result of political decisions, from the smoothness of your drive due to decisions on infrastructure maintenance, to the amount of traffic due to the political decisions decades earlier about city planning and public transit, to the cost of the meal due to trade agreements, labor laws, wage laws, corporate tax code, etc. to your risk of getting sick due to safety regulations, to the materials used in the happy meal box and toy due to environmental laws, recycled material subsidies (or lack of them), to child safety laws, to tort law and the likelihood and success rate of civil suits.
> When you contract a plumber, do you interrogate him on his political affiliation?
No, but the cost and availability of plumbers is a result of politics. From laws and regulations on trades jobs, to labor laws and the likelihood of the plumber being in a union, to government investment into tradecrafts jobs training programs, to the laws governing required certifications (if any) and the associated cost of obtaining those, what the laws are governing landlord/tenant responsibilities if you rent or are a landlord, and on and on.
The way your life plays out day to day, and in totality, is fundamentally shaped at every level by “politics”, the laws written, and the way in which they are enforced (or not).
You can torture language all you want to fit your ideology, but just be clear that is what you're doing. If you argue everything is political, then nothing is political. It is now a meaningless term that conveys no information because hey, that candy bar I just ate? Political! That dog walk I did? Political!
How about we commonly understood concepts to convey ideas? How does that sound to you?
> If you argue everything is political, then nothing is political.
Yeah, that’s not how it works. Just because you choose to not think about political decisions that shaped your plumber selections, McDonalds trip, or the city ordinance that bans or allows your breed of dog you are walking doesn’t mean they cease to exist. The world doesn’t disappear just because you close your eyes.
What you are really saying is those politics don’t matter to you, so in your mind they don’t exist. Well, they do exist to others. The labor laws and minimum wage laws enacted by a politician or vote are important to those burger flippers. The dismantling of union protections matter to that plumber and effect how much he is able to charge. Your lack of interest, or your lack of knowledge, of how politics shaped those situations does not separate those politics from the situations or make the politics not there. Nor does me speaking about those things bring about the politics, as I am merely highlighting something that was always there. I am not making it political, it always was. I am bringing it to your awareness.
Let’s look at a more extreme example to hopefully illustrate the point. Say you live in the American south during the 60s. You just want to go get a burger and fries. How could that be political? It’s just a succulent meal after all. Well you are not choosing to eat at a “whites only” restaurant. While you might not care, might not think anything about it, and might have not had a political thought in your head, that doesn’t magically separate the action from the underlying politics that shaped the way it happened and the fact that that action is political and is important to some other people. But if someone says you should be supporting Jim Crow laws by only shopping at whites only establishments, to you they are the ones making it political when in reality, it is already intrinsically political and they are merely highlighting the political aspect that always existed.
Limiting free speech is never a good idea. Not for any reason.
Google is picking a decent and fair path by allowing anything except anti-trust. Honestly, go to Google where you can be authentic and human about things.
And the thing is every thing James said was correct. And he advocated for policies that would help everyone and eliminate the disparate impact on minorities by doing things like flex time or letting people move to part time for a little bit after a major life event (like having a child).
So many scholars, lawyers, and employment commissions disagree with the assertion that everything Damore said was correct that I don't think it's even worth covering this ground again.
James bumped up against the fact that regardless of what Google wants in terms of a free exchange of ideas internally, it's an American company and retaining staff under American employment law and the law of the state of California, among other states.
Once it became clear that what he said could be interpreted as creating a hostile work environment, the company's hands were basically tied on having to let him go. The alternative would have been much worse for the bottom line. And the subsequent lawsuits and dismissals have made it basically clear that he had no legal leg to stand on.
Would Google be happy if one of their employee made a statement which triggered a Title VII civil rights lawsuit? Is support of BLM a political statement or one based on race? If it’s a political statement, then opposing it, isn’t a potential Title VII violation as political preference isn’t a protected class? But if it’s a racial issue, could someone make a case the opposing it is a Title VII violation?
I have no idea what the answer is, and wouldn’t want my employees engaged in such a discussion as it could potentially come back as a lawsuit.
In that same context, I wouldn’t want James Damore writing his memo. Equally, the reason he was writing his memo was possibly because there were other conversations happening around race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. If those conversations were encouraging the advancement of the disadvantaged members of one of those classes, you could argue that is a violation of Title VII.
Damore's main mistake was doubling and then tripling down. Had he clarified that he did not understand that his memo could create a hostile work environment, there might have been some leeway for the company to retain him.
He made it quite plain that he thought he'd done nothing wrong. At that point, Google is either retaining one employee or facing a class action lawsuit risk. And he wasn't nearly 10x enough to justify retaining him. ;)
Should he is a moral question that I'm not interested in arguing on HN, but I doubt he practically would have been. Especially if he'd done so anonymously, obviously.
He also probably could have avoided being fired if he apologized and clarified that he did not realize that his musings on the subject could create a hostile work environment. He instead chose to double down that he'd done nothing wrong.
> Would Google be happy if one of their employee made a statement...
Would the worker be happy if their boss tells them how to speak, what to speak, and what they can't speak about?
Honestly, Googlers work very hard. This isn't as big of an issue as people are making it out to be.
How do you want foster freedom and lessen control/restrictions? Seriously.
The idea that we should limit speech...is a very dangerous path to even think about. All thoughtful points are moot compared to how those policies can be abused and destroy an entire civilization. Nazi Germany wasn't too long ago. China restricted a doctor's speech about sounding the alarm on Covid19 (so it's more recent too).
If society (a collection of individuals) continue to think that it's "okay" to restrict someone's opinions (for any justification), they make society weaker. Truth wins out. Not authoritarianism.
But...back to my main point of responding to you. Googler (and other tech companies) aren't a DC think tank. They're building and shipping things. They work hard. And those that are highly skilled, want the autonomy in work. If you restrict that autonomy, you restrict your talent pool of workers. Maybe you think that's a good choice (Coinbase would agree) but...in the long-term, IMHO, freedom is more powerful than control.
I think that's a great philosophy for structuring a democratic republic form of government, but trying to apply that philosophy universally to all circumstances and all human interaction leaves it a giant untested hypothesis.
It would be nice if truth always won out. That would be cool. Insufficient data to say for sure that it does.
Even for a democratic country, the problem is that sometimes it takes too long for "Truth to win out". We're seeing this more and more with social media and "anyone can publish" combined with the speed of the internet. Sure, the truth may eventually win out regarding whether or not drinking bleach is a good idea, but several people have gotten badly hurt and/or died before the "truth won out". Or consider how many innocent children may have died due to the anti-vaxxers? A related aphorism comes to mind. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
Consider this quote from a recent NY Times article[1]
"These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans: that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way. At the very least, we should understand that it isn’t the only way. Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies."
> Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble.
There is another view, and another analogy.
A monopoly that closes ads accounts without any explanation (pointing to their 'terms of use' is not an explanation)
A monopoly that removes apps without any explanation
A monopoly that swallows competition, their patents to further suffocate market space
Is just evil.
Small businesses hurt, consumers manipulated and fair competition practices are poisoned.
So an analogy would be a private contractor for state prison system, is threatening their employees not to talk in public about their practices. While being investigated for corruption, unfair usage of federal and state empowerment, and unfair treatment of the prisoners.
I think this would be ok as far as legal practice, but hardly something one would applaud to, given the context.
Completely agree here, and I hate Google. A business is not a democracy.
I have worked for a company acquired by a Private Equity that was universally hated by managers and employees alike. They didn’t even want to hear problems internally in quiet. It still wasn’t appropriate to trash them or talk to the media while you were an employee.
If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.
> I have worked for a company acquired by a Private Equity that was universally hated by managers and employees alike. They didn’t even want to hear problems internally in quiet. It still wasn’t appropriate to trash them or talk to the media while you were an employee.
> If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.
I'm curious, how did the PE situation you described work out? Did enough people leave to make change happen?
i mean this is kind of elementary. You wouldn't go work for a church if you wanted to preach atheism. Its against the immediate interest of the company which you re supposed to be working for, so by definition you are a deadweight employee
I don't see what the point of the article might be (except as click bait to get ad views, of course). I had exactly the same training when I worked at IBM, every year. "Never talk about dominating the market", yadda yadda yadda. It's sound legal advice that I would expect all corporate employees would get. VMWare won't want their employees to talk about how they dominate the VM indusrty; EMC wouldn't want their engineers talking about their enterprise storasge arrays "crushing the competition", and so on.
And at all companies, the standard line is, "never send in e-mail anything that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times, or might cause you to be deposed as a witness in a courtroom." And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.
All of this is not unique to Google, but applies to any company with half-way competent lawyers and a half-way competent HR department.
Oh.... and if you are sure that your product has flaws that might cause people to get killed, or cause medical information to be inappropriately leaked, etc., the proper path is to schedule a meeting with your team lead and the product counsel on the issue.
Not only did I have to certify that I received this kind of training every year at every large corporation that I've worked at (and yes, this includes Google), this was also covered in my MIT Sloan School class, "Legal issues for I/T Managers" that I took as continuing education when I worked in MIT Network Operations and served as Tech Lead for Kerberos V5 development.
I'm really surprised at the comments in Hacker News on this article. Doesn't everyone get this fundamental, basic legal training? IMHO every single practicing engineer should!
Taking your example, that you are sure that your product has flaws that might cause people to get killed - and assuming you're not mistaken, as your example didn't say that:
There's a big difference between "You should immediately tell your manager and legal" and "You should not tell anyone in the company other than that, state the facts plainly in clear terms, or leave a paper trail"
The former is your ethical obligation to keep people alive - but the latter is mandating employees to always participate in cover-ups, which is obviously unethical.
The right way to handle an engineering problem with ethical implications is to handle it carefully, internally and via the appropriate channels. It is wholly inappropriate to make something public that very likely can be handled appropriately without the public fallout. I would call it unethical to your coworkers to create unnecessary damage to your team or your company by ignoring the appropriate process for handling sensitive internal issues.
If things are being shoved under the rug by management, that is an entirely different issue.
> I would call it unethical to your coworkers to create unnecessary damage to your team or your company by ignoring the appropriate process for handling sensitive internal issues.
That argument would call it unethical for a robber to tip off the police about their gang's upcoming heist.
> If things are being shoved under the rug by management, that is an entirely different issue.
If those processes were known to be effective then they would be sold based on that, not on how they keep you out of trouble.
> And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.
I would. If I spoke up about something dangerous to management, and they ignore the problem in a way that allowed someone to die because of it, I abso-fucking-lutely do not want to be their scapegoat. Leaving a paper trail is an important security measure here (and good ethics).
If you must leave a paper trail, you send it to the product counsel and to the technical lead with the heading that this is privileged communication for the purpose of getting legal advice. (At least in the US; the legal situation around privileged communications may be different in different countries.)
IANAL but I thought the idea of directing an email or communication to a colleague and CC'ing counsel and adding "privileged communication" doesn't actually make it privileged communication unless it's also truly an attempt to get legal advice. Although maybe that's your point, because then it would be discoverable? If it's privileged communication and remains as such than it cannot be discovered, so I am not sure what paper trail is being left? I am confused.
Yeah, definitely don't just cc your counsel, mark it and expect it do be protected. While that may contribute to the argument that it's protected neither of those are sure-fire ways to make sure the communication is actually not discoverable
It's an antitrust instruction employees at very large companies are given. If you're #1 to #4, it's important. If you're #326 in your industry, it's not an issue.
> And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.
It's not my responsibility to help cover the company's ass if my they take a shortcut that gets people killed or help them avoid legal consequences for illegal or boundary-pushing behavior. My highest loyalty is not to their shareholders, and paying me a salary doesn't change that.
It's absolutely (clickbait) to get ad views -- that's the whole company's business.
It's also a political stance that aligns with said company's political disposition and (more importantly) chosen market segmentation.
Finally, this company (desperately wants to believe that it) stands to increase its profitability if it strikes back against the forces that have lowered that profitability.
The point of the article is the claim that Google wasn't so extreme about this before. If true, this means that they're seriously concerned with the ongoing anti-trust probes, and don't see them as something that's likely to go away.
> And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.
You don't see the fucking problem with this policy?
Ultimately, I guess the solution here is that this "training" ought to be considered as damning as the kind of speech that it tries to forbid.
This is like trying to get out of a drunk driving ticket by smoking weed and wearing a blindfold.
No, it's not like that at all. What you don't want is a bunch of nerds with no idea what they are talking about writing an email that says "I don't think this follows standard safety practices" because then that will be admitted into court even if the author has no knowledge whatsoever about industry standard practices.
The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.
I get that damping down language on "dominating the market" isn't going to hurt anyone.
But on engineering matters, it does seem problematic to put legal before technical. Instead of people using the medium they would otherwise use to communicate something they are concerned about, they are supposed to stop, think about the company's image, and instead remember to bring it up in person tomorrow? Don't dare email a guy you know on the other production line to see if he's noticed the same pattern? This does seem like a nudge toward sweeping problems under the rug.
I don't believe that delay is part of the training. As I recall, the training advises people with such concerns to raise the matter with their product counsel immediately.
ETA by the way, the training does not discourage people from making statements of fact in discoverable docs, it discourages people from drawing conclusions of law. If you emailed Bob down on the production line to mention that you had 42 failed gFrobs on Tuesday, and asked Bob how many he had, that's not discouraged. If you were to instead mail Bob and said "Those Panamanian safety regulators are gonna be pissed, LOL!" that is discouraged.
Give them a call. Walk over to their desk. There's no need to wait, but there's also no need to present things out of context.
There are two kinds of companies: Companies that advise their employees to watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued before. Most large companies are in the latter group.
In tech, it's much more obvious - unless you're working on hardware, the odds of your code directly posing a threat to life is rather low. The odds that some passionate employees may start a discussion on a large email group discussing ongoing legal action against your company that's been in the news, and that they will say something misinformed that will get quoted out of context, is incredibly high.
Never say anything in an email that you wouldn't want presented out of context in a courtroom. And unless you want all of your emails to be legally mandated to be retained for a few years, I'd avoid talking about anything relevant to ongoing or potential lawsuits over discoverable mediums.
> watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued
Yes I see how this has come about. I'm trying to say that it's not a very healthy place for our society to have ended up.
And I'm explicitly not talking about discussing ongoing legal action, or speculating about politics. I'm talking about technical matters, and communication bandwidth between people close to the coalface who may notice some pattern, and people higher up from whom this might be hidden, if the incentives are wrong.
Sometimes talking to people in person is the best from all perspectives, sure. But illiterate societies never built jet airliners.
"Hey Cheryl, let's meet tomorrow and confirm we've considered all possible concerns on the privacy constraints around data storage for X" is preferable to putting in an email "Cheryl, we need to meet tomorrow. If we launch X as is, there's a huge privacy hole and we're going to get sued."
In essence, that's all the training says regarding this topic.
It still seems that every time you push people from vividly describing what the problem is, as they see it, to cloaking it in something bureaucratic like "considered all possible concerns", you get lower bandwidth.
And, both your setups imagine the main course being a verbal meeting tomorrow, no notes, only memories. Sometimes this is a great way to hash out problems. Sometimes it's not. Maybe the underling is scared that his words will be twisted by Cheryl on the way to big boss Bob, and would prefer to write it down to cover his ass... and if he can't, maybe he convinces himself it's not a big deal, and doesn't tell Cheryl at all.
If the underling has a reason to be scared, they should commit it to writing. But that's a different scenario than the one the training is talking about. The training is talking about how to avoid accidentally shooting oneself in the foot by misunderstanding what can happen in legal discovery.
> The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.
So uh, don't talk about potential engineering problems that might kill you, and after the first response pushing back, you characterize the people highlighting these issues as a "bunch of nerds."
Honestly, no clue why people could possibly have a problem with corporate America, seems pretty healthy and non-toxic to me.
Some people reading your post [1] believe you're saying either that aircraft designers are less qualified than lawyers to determine whether an aircraft is airworthy - or that aircraft designers should prioritise protecting their employer's money over protecting their passengers' lives.
Or.. you could document what safety practices you do follow, and refer to those when people get curious. Or take their concerns seriously if it's not covered already.
There are ways to raise issues related to product safety that don't potentially leave you in the very uncomfortable position of being a witness in a court proceeding. (Trust me, this is not going to be a pleasant experience, so if you don't care about your fiduciary duty to your employer, you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing. "No Senator, that's not exactly what I meant....")
> so if you don't care about your fiduciary duty to your employer
Your duties are to:
1. Society at large
2. Your users
3. Yourself
4. Your company
In that order.
> you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing.
Or the company could, y'know, keep its shit together and steer clear of stuff that people raise congressional hearings about, rather than just trying to sweep it under the rug.
>the company could keep its shit together and steer clear of stuff that people raise congressional hearings about
I'm sorry but is this not exactly what is being said? To steer clear of instructing other employees to perform anti-competitive behavior? I think you may be misinterpreting the parent post.
That's the point of the training. Determination of whether a behavior is anti-competitive is specifically not something a software engineer is trained in. They aren't lawyers. The law on this topic is huge, nuanced, and deeply technical.
Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.
In this particular case, I think Google is far more worried about new legislation passing that would redefine what "anti-competitive" means, such that it's definitely applicable to Google - and that its own employees pointing out instances of monopoly abuse would contribute to the probability of such a law, and its severity.
But in this context, from the perspective of society as a whole trying to decide what the law should be, the personal opinion of Google employees does matter, regardless of what's presently legal.
> That's the point of the training. Determination of whether a behavior is anti-competitive is specifically not something a software engineer is trained in. They aren't lawyers. The law on this topic is huge, nuanced, and deeply technical.
This is ultimately an ethical question, not a legal one.
But I guess if you come in with the mindset of "might makes right" then you won't see the distinction.
> Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---
Surely the equivalent would be lawyers weighing in on the spec of what the "privacy coding" should do. Which is very much something that they ought to do?
> people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.
This whole discussion is a perfect example of why this silo mentality is fucking toxic. You don't need to be a chef to point out that the food is rancid.
No, and that's exactly the kind of categorical error that software engineers make and Google seeks to avoid. Merely speculating on the topic in writing can be used against Google in a court of law.
Google encourages the software engineers to point out the food is rancid. Via the proper channels, so they don't accidentally put something somewhere that leads to a New York Times headline that says "FAMOUS FOOD TASTER SAYS FOOD IS RANCID---SHOULD RESTAURANT BE SHUT DOWN?" The training is about how to have the desired effect without the undesired effect.
I don't see how. Acknowledging what behavior is anti-competitive is generally done by a court, not by us random posters on HN. (If you're a federal prosecutor with some authoritative insight here then please disclose :)
How do you imagine the company "keeps its shit together" if employees are going around like a disorganized bag of cats making legally discoverable documents about topics they don't understand?
The training this story is about is how the company keeps its shit together. They remind employees that doing things correctly, safely, and within the law is a shared responsibility.
I think the idea is that there are people who think their desire to do whatever they want is more important than their employer's right to limit bad publicity and legal risk. A quick re-watch of the movie Erin Brockovich might illuminate why this could happen but there are obviously other reasons.
It would be noteworthy if a company didn't restrict their employees from publicly talking about legal and regulatory matters. What they're doing here is standard practice.
Average employees aren't in a position to speak accurately about antitrust matters anyway. If they misspeak, it will certainly be used against the company regardless of the actual merit.
>It would be noteworthy if a company didn't restrict their employees from publicly talking...
No it would NOT. It is absolutely noteworthy if they do such a nefarious, un-american thing.
Banning speaking on behalf of their employer. Sure. Go nuts.
Banning speaking as a private citizen because you have an opinion you wish to express in public as a private citizen representing the opinions of yourself?!?
FFS!
Are you actually serious about that???
You can't push back against that hard enough. Surely? Freedom, opposition to totalitarianism. The right to speak your mind. Even if Google doesn't like your opinion and your opinion is objective wrong, to hell with them. Freedom.
I think the part of that sentence you conveniently left out of the quote is the most critical. One would be wise to not talk about matters of which they know nothing about, especially if it harms their employer. I think this SV tendency to speak and rally against their employers at every turn is cutting off your nose to spite your face and comes from a place of extreme privilege.
> One would be wise to not talk about matters of which they know nothing about, especially if it harms their employer.
Hmmm...
After Google interviewed a candidate for an executive job
last year, that person sent a follow-up email to Sundar
Pichai ... the candidate asked about the antitrust implications
of a potential merger.
That's an absolutely valid question for a executive candidate to be asking their potential employer, considering concerns over recent years. However:
An antitrust question to Mr. Pichai was seen as inappropriate,
raising questions about the candidate’s judgment.
Not being able to ask material questions about the very environment they're being asked to perform in, is frankly bizarre.
It could also have been inappropriate if the “executive “ position being applied for was significantly beneath the CEO. The article does not say why it was in appropriate.
It’s frustrating to see it suggested that highly intelligent members of the civic community (Google employees for example) “know nothing about” antitrust policy or law.
Regular citizens definitely do know lots about that and represent a voice we need to hear. We should not at all be silent and leave that solely to attorneys or Congress - that’s what gets us into the problem where the laws are selectively enforced in exchange for political favoritism and regulatory capture.
It's fine (and a good thing) for everyone to have a deep understanding about how the rules work and to have opinions about how the rules _should_ work. This is true whether you are talking about the current state of anti-trust laws and how they are interpreted by the courts, or the current state of patent laws and how they are interpreted by the PTO and the courts. It's complicated, though, and there are a lot of side effects when you make changes to what is in effect a very complex system. What might work well for one industry might not work well for other industries, and "I know justice and morality when I see it" works about as well as "I know obscenity when I see it".
The real problem though is that most people don't have this deep understanding, and what's worse, don't realize that they are really clueless. This is especially true with software engineers, who think they can understand everything. (About the only more arrogrant people are physicists at certain national labs who are sure they can design cluster file systems, since after all, it all resolves down to F=ma, and they know physics. :-)
The problem is that law and regulations make the x86 instruction architecture look regular, orthogonal, and logical. And having software engineers trying to draw legal conclusions --- applying the facts to the rules as they current stand --- is about as scary having lawyers designing a storage stack. (There are of course exceptions; I know of some lawyers who started out in computer science, and then went to law school, and there are also some computer programmers who have learned enough about law to understand how little they actually know, but at least know when to call in the specialists.)
But sure, we should know lots about public policy issues, and dive down deep enough so that each of us can understand the tradeoffs --- and in general, there are always tradeoffs to pretty much any public policy preference. Trying to make assertions without paying any attention to nuance will get you something like a certain US politician currently up for re-election. (And to be fair, the reason why the law has so many exceptions and irregularities is due to trying to work around the downsides of the obvious simple rules.)
The distinction here is that Google employees are not legally banned from speaking as a private citizen about the company they work for. They just won't be employees of Google for much longer after Google finds out.
I don't like that any more than you do. Corporations have far too much power in the US, and way more control over the lives of ordinary citizens than they should. But, there's nothing against the rules here. And, that's the way big corporations like it.
Note that Google employees are still free to donate money or otherwise assist organizations calling for Google to be broken up. While Google may not like this, it's highly unlikely they'll ever find out about it.
> While Google may not like this, it's highly unlikely they'll ever find out about it.
if you donated or is affiliated with _any_ political cause, and google fired you for that reason, then they've committed illegal discrimination against you.
However, this political affiliation/activism needs to be conducted outside working hours, lest it be associated with google's official public stance or incur liabilities. You actions as an employee could be misrepresented as the position of google, and they are well within their rights to restrict how you represent yourself during office hours, and they should also be allowed to prevent you from mis-representing yourself too (i.e., you cannot use your position as an employee to act as an agent of political activism or affiliation unless authorized by the owners of google).
> if you donated or is affiliated with _any_ political cause, and google fired you for that reason, then they've committed illegal discrimination against you.
I believe that's only the case in California and a handful of other states.
For instance: "Can an employer fire or discriminate against an employee based on political beliefs? You may be surprised to learn that, for many employees, the answer is yes." [0]
> The distinction here is that Google employees are not legally banned from speaking as a private citizen about the company they work for. They just won't be employees of Google for much longer after Google finds out.
A distinction without a difference, the intended effect is still the same: discouraging people from speaking out.
> I don't like that any more than you do. Corporations have far too much power in the US, and way more control over the lives of ordinary citizens than they should. But, there's nothing against the rules here.
Then surely the focus should be on changing the rules and pushing back what little we can, not making excuses about how it is technically not illegal.
Speaking out about legal violations is not only allowed, it's protected by whistleblowing laws. It's an adversarial process, but legally protected.
What Google frowns upon, and will terminate an employee legally for, is speculation outside of that legally-protected space. So going to the SEC with evidence Google is acting bad? Legally protected. Circulating in an email "hey, is thing X that team Y is doing monopolistic?" No, and you'll get canned for having that discussion in an unprivileged environment without legal counsel present.
Look, I'm not making an excuse. I'm telling you how it is. The problem here is that big corporations have captured the political process in this country. Your representatives in Washington probably don't represent you; they're responsive to the people who fund their campaigns, and, unless you're a billionaire or something, that's not you.
Well, TBH, "banning employees from using certain everyday terms because they have specific legal usages and the company can be sued for $$$ if the words were taken out of context" is one of the most American things I can think of.
Manager at a multi-national corporation. This definitely isn’t unique to the US. If anything, it’s more ubiquitous in regions with higher degrees of regulation.
The whole thing has been taken out of context here. It’s basically just “here’s how you avoid saying anything that can be taken out of context and used against us”.
If you are freedom absolutist then you have to agree that Google has a freedom of association right to fire you if they don't like the things you are saying.
It's funny how the people who adamantly oppose any restrictions on "freedom" don't realize "freedom" cuts both ways - if you have the unlimited freedom to do what you want then other people also have the unlimited freedom to punish you if they don't like what you are doing.
While I don't entirely agree with the poster above, I think there can be a notable difference in freedoms that your post ignores. People and corporations are two separate groups, and you may want more freedoms for either or even both. Like, I'm for individual freedoms, but companies have the potential for more abuse than a single person not liking you does, and so they should be far harsher regulated (and they are, though some may want more/less) in how they behave towards individuals.
If I, as an employee of google, say a bunch of stuff about google antitrust, it doesn't matter how often I say I'm speaking "not in my capacity as an employee of google."
It will be reported as "google employee says <>". It _will_ be taken as a statement that is believed by "google employees".
Worked at numerous small companies. General stance by lawyers is if you write down a legal issue without consulting them first, they will have you fired six ways to Sunday. It is a big de.
Except James Damore wasn’t one but got labeled so anyway. It’s not okay to selectively allow or prohibit speech. Everyone should be able to say anything. It’s just words.
Or by that reasoning you could say anything you liked in the Soviet Union when Stalin was the big cheese but of course there were repercussions. Once upon a time we were taught there was a /fundamental/ difference between freedom, justice and Stalin's Soviet reigime that we were (and still are) dead against. The difference, which is a significant one right now, is not fundamental. It is just a difference of degree of those repercussions.
He used company resources and an internal forum so that doesn't fit under OP's description of being "a private citizen representing the opinions of yourself."
And he was fired for creating a hostile work environment for his colleagues. Not for his private views.
Once again, it seems the issue is less about Google (or any company) restricting you having a personal opinion about issues that affect the bottom line at work, but instead is about the disingenuous pretense that they don't restrict you.
Don't be evil. Unless it affects our bottom line. Think Different. Unless you're a monopoly, then think the same as every other monopoly has. Move fast and break things. Their things, not our things.
Cut the shit "Make us money" is the corporate manifesto.
This just means that companies are predictable. Google is at least thinking long term and takes on huge projects, unlike most non-tech companies. I love that they finally launched Waymo even if the scale is small right now.
Tesla wants to make money just like Enron, but their strategies are quite different.
This is why it's important to consider realpolitik when thinking of company ethics or morals.
Companies have people who will want profit before all else, and they will have people who truly want to value certain user values. The interaction between people is far too difficult to model as a consumer, so it's better to consider the business model, or, more weakly, how a decision affects social capital, thereby affecting this model. This helps create "trustless" scenarios, in which the "morals v profit" quandary is meaningless because both align to some degree.
For example, take Apple and Google. Google profits heavily from adverts, so it is not only sensible but natural that Apple, as a strong rival in the OS field who have no business incentive to do so, should lean heavily into this, exploiting and actualising this gap in business-model-incentive. Likewise, Apple profits heavily from phone hardware: it is sensible and natural that Google, who somewhat rival Apple in this field, should desire somewhat to try and present their phones as being less overpriced.
This is far harder glean information from, of course, and PR can be as genuine as it can be deceiving. But it's a useful tool in a savvy consumer's arsenal, methinks, especially for large decisions or with companies whose practises and profits are well-known (as opposed to, say, a brand of toothpaste).
The first software startup I worked for absolutely did not have all of its software licenses arranged properly. Seats were passed around, and unlicensed cracked software was used to create public facing product.
Officially? None of this was recorded. Unofficially, the stance was quite clear: worrying about licensing is something companies that have more to lose than two sticks and a rock can afford to do.
Based on past incidents, I'd venture that Google employees are free to speak up only as long as they speak up with the "right" opinions on a vast range of topics. "You can say whatever you want, as long as it's this".
This is true, but Google also had very specific guidance around this topic when I worked there (10-5 years ago). We received specific training about this. The core message was approximately, "You don't understand the legal trouble that you're going to get yourself into by talking about markets, competitors, competition, etc. Innocent words or phrases may have very specific legal definitions or implications that may be surprising to you. Speculating about these things will bring you trouble, the amount of which which will also surprise you. At Google, we don't talk about ourselves in relationship to our competitors, we only talk about ourselves in relationship to our customers"
To clarify: this covers both internal and external communication.
This kind of training is not unique to Google, either. I got very similarly themed training at Eaton (a manufacturing conglomerate). In both cases, I was left with the impression that the employer had been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication in some lawsuit.
It's boilerplate advice a corp will get from corp lawyers, who can cite you the specific cases where an employer has been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication.
Here's the trick: In the event a lawsuit goes to discovery, who decides what's in scope to enter evidence?
Hint: it's not the corporation. Nor is it the employee who made the (in context, at the time) innocuous statement that used the wrong keywords in a way that can be taken out of context.
This is boilerplate which you'd also find at other companys as well. In fact, the language was almost identical to what I saw at IBM. General counsels at big companies share "best practices" at their own conferences dedicated for corporate laywers. I've been a guest speaker talking about open source issues at legal conferences where they were talking about best practices for OSS compliance; it's not an accident that many company's OSS policies are very similar.
So policies like "require annual, mandatory training for anti-harassment training", and "how to communicate with care", etc., are going to be remarkably similar across companies.
Is it really true that an employee speculating about the monopolistic nature of their employer might get themselves into legal hot water? If Google got taken down by one of their developers saying 'our employer kind of seems anticompetitive to me...' in an email, would that developer really have anything to fear from the government? It seems like the corporation is protecting itself with this sort of advice.
The point they made around this was roughly, "Let's say that the US Government is making a case. If they can argue that you used your personal email, personal phone number, or ANYTHING for work at any point, they're going to subpoena as much of your private communications as possible and find a way to use the most embarrassing stuff to encourage you to cooperate."
I left this part out of my other post because I was a little fuzzier on the details of what they said, but this was the gist.
In typical Google fashion, there is a semi-automated system for taking snapshots of employees' email history and workstation disk images when discovery demands it.
The snapshot feature is even sold as part of ~~G Suite~~ Google Workspace under the Vault product.
As `shadowgovt` pointed out: Its a judge and the lawyers who get to decide what does and doesn't get covered by the process.
Indirectly, to protect the individual employee, because if a lawsuit going south harms the business prospects, the company might have to downsize, cut benefits, cut bonuses, &c.
Depends on how you define legal trouble. Getting hauled in to testify before a judge or Congress would certainly qualify as legal trouble for me. Perhaps not direct legal trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
While I don't necessarily have as pessimistic a take on this, I do agree this article is evidence as to why I am so often against social activism by companies. Companies, all companies, the "good" and the "evil", will only ever engage in activism that is not a threat to their bottom line. Given that constraint, it means the activism is incredibly cheap in my opinion.
I mean, look at all the recent BLM support from large corporations. I mean, on one hand I'm glad to see them doing this. On the other, I know the only reason they are doing this is because it's pretty easy for them - it's largely already supported by their employees and the bulk of their customers see it positively. I can guarantee if it could negatively affect their long term prospects they wouldn't have done it.
For example, I remember quite clearly that in the late 80s and early 90s you'd hear nary a peep of support on LGBT issues from corporations, and even some of the more progressive companies had to do it with coded language (language gays understood but straight people were oblivious to). It was only when gay rights were already largely supported did corporations jump on the bandwagon.
Again, I'm not saying this is totally a bad thing, but I do think it is a cheap, easy thing. And if you know a company is never willing to do the hard thing, why put any weight into its opinions on these topics in the first place?
We can't, in general, rely on companies to be on the forefront of activist work or to push the boundaries, for exactly the reasons that you outlined, but I think the role they play in rounding up the stragglers is also very important.
To pick a specific example, you're completely correct when you call out that a lot of companies only started visibly supporting LGBT causes quite recently, when the social momentum was obviously moving that direction, and there was a direct profit incentive to pridewashing things. I know many members of the LGBT community who are against corporate involvement in pride events for precisely that reason, and I know many LGBT people who find it very disingenuous that companies might be profiting off rainbow marketing while not (or only recently) having non-discrimination policies, or offering equal coverage for health insurance to their LGBT employees.
On the other hand, I would contend that the pride washing and corporate push into LGBT rights is a large reason why they haven't backslid as quickly during the last 4 years as they might otherwise have done, and why there's still broad public support for marriage equality even in the face of a possible reversal of Obgerfell after the inevitable SCOTUS appointment. The activists did the work, but a few years of corporate pridewashing, seeing rainbows on every t-shirt, cereal box, soda can, and brand of tennis shoe normalized things for a group of people who wouldn't have ever listened to the activists who are pushing on things. There's real social value in signaling "Supporting LGBT rights is the cheap, easy thing that we're obviously going to do because everyone agrees it's the right thing". It won't change the mind of the active bigot, but there are a whole lot of people who will just go along with the majority opinion on social issues, and corporate signaling is perhaps the defacto way to signal the majority opinion on social issues.
Thanks very much - you've helped me crystalize my thoughts and have expressed things in a way much better than I did (even to myself). This is exactly the type of value I like to get from HN.
Corporations that do this look at their customer demographics and if their demographics support BLM then so do they. They will reflect their customer base.
They're not effecting any change in this way. The change has already been done. They're just riding on its coat tails.
Doesn't this apply to most people as well? Most people are happy to vote for rent control - unless they're a landlord. Most parents will vote for higher property taxes if it means better schools, but most childless homeowners will not. Most urbanites will vote for gun control, most hunters will not. People who walk or take public transportation to work will vote for higher gas taxes, people with 2 hour commutes will not. Heck, isn't one of the claims leveled against liberal white suburbanites that they will happily fight for minority rights in the abstract, but then fight for zoning codes that in practice keep minorities (other than high-earning Asians) out of their neighborhoods anyway?
Social movements that succeed tend to take this into account, and frame things in ways that are not zero-sum. I lose nothing by letting gays marry; my heterosexual marriage is still just as legitimate. I lose nothing by allowing abortions - as a male, I'm not going to get one anyway. I lose nothing when YC seeks out qualified minority & female applicants; I have plenty of advantages of my own, I don't need that extra attention. I lose nothing when Black Lives Matter - my life still matters too, we just need to fix the institutional systems that let a black person get shot dead with no repercussions to the killer. (Personally, I think the left has made some very large tactical errors recently by ignoring this principle - fights over things like affirmative action, political correctness, and white privilege are all because the debate has been framed as "You must lose something in order for life to be fair", which isn't a great way to persuade people.)
When a corp is hiring "all diverse" as google likes to put it, you do lose something. You lose your time and effort in getting a job because corps that are doing quotas will interview you despite to intention to hire. They do it because their interview stats and demographics are scrutinized by the government and they need their interview demographics to look good on paper.
As for BLM anyone can see the riots, looting, arson, and destruction that has affected places like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha. The riots have cost over two billion dollars in damages. Those are not damages to the government. Those are damages to ordinary people and business owners. Housing values go down, police protection is eroded, and some people were beaten or lost their lives.
Yes, anyone can see the violence that happened in Charlottesville and the white supremacist that ran a car into people killing a woman. Anyone can see the 17 year old white supremacist in Kenosha that killed two and injured one. Anyone can see the statistically disproportionate state sponsored violence against minorities that results in their murder on the street during daylight like George Floyd.
Minority votes are being suppressed, they make less money than their white counterparts, they have less access to higher education, less access to nutritious food, and they’re disproportionately dying during a pandemic.
But sure, let’s ignore reality and talk about your narrow view on housing prices and police “protection”.
A 17 year old drives across state lines, goes to a city meets up with a militia that has ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazis, then kills two people and injures a third.
If you don’t see the issues there, you’re part of the problem.
Kenosha is right next to the state border; he lived close to Kenosha on the other side of that border. What does it matter that he crossed state lines?
> kills two people and injures a third
All of whom were violently attacking him (one of them with a gun), as can be seen from numerous videos of the incident.
> ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazis
[citation still needed]
> you’re part of the problem
I'm proud to be part of the problem if the opposite of "problematic" is to accept provocative claims without evidence.
Corporate activism is cheap, but it's also fairly required at this point. Non-activism on certain subjects would be viewed in a highly negative sense which can impact recruitment and sales. There is really no alternative to corporations showing public support for certain issues.
I suppose this does devalue the activism, but I'm not really sure activism is the point. It's more about solidarity with the change, and cementing its place in "normal" society.
It's a little more complicated than that, but to a first approximation, you're basically correct.
Worth noting, of course, is most Google employees actually believe in the party line. Like, it's not an act... They are at will employees working for an employer they believe in. Google doesn't tend to retain long employees who stop believing in the mission or the execution of the mission (because having Google on your resume opens a door to them basically taking any other job).
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France
(This is true everywhere, not just Google, though. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as an employee who doesn’t get in hot water for bringing unwanted attention to the business.)
No, I think this is just sound legal advice. You, as a line level employee and not in the legal department, should NOT discuss any matters that have legal scrutiny. There is no "party line" outside of the legal line here.
Oh, definitely not. There have been many. It's a huge company, so it's done plenty of good and bad things. The one you're talking about is one of the more famous ones.
If Google's competitors didn't have a Justice Department that blatantly serves their own interests of investigating Google, then Google would have no incentive to keep their employees from discussing anti-trust law.
Government cronyism is why corporations can't simply let us have nice things.
Googler here. This is pure and simple click-bait. We are asked not to speculate on legal matters precisely so that it doesn't get misrepresented in the media or in lawsuits. I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?
Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.
It's entirely predictable that Google would have this policy. It's also entirely predictable that the NYT would write this article. However, the article still contains interesting detail and will be informative for a lot of the NYT's general readership who don't work for a (somewhat controversial) big corp. Dismissing it as 'simple click-bait' is an over-reaction. Not improved at all by the snark in your second paragraph.
> I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?
If you are even slightly historically aware, US labor history is one of the most violent and adversarial in world history. We've had plenty of strikes in this country where the company literally murdered employees. Google itself has been convicted of suppressing engineering wages.
I honestly am so baffled that all these liberal "woke" people suddenly come to the defense of a company (who along with small oligarchy of peers) now own 90 percent of the internet. They think its fine that the company suppress internal and external free speech, especially on the most important items to them.
There is literally no competently run company that will let an employee say things in public or recorded chat logs that could potentially cost them billions of dollars in lawsuits if found in discovery. This policy is neither unreasonable nor specific to Google at all. Does it also offend you that banks don't allow their employees to speculate about committing securities fraud?
If you get paid in company stock it's entirely in your interest to agree to let your company take measures to not get sued for billions of dollars, especially if those measures have ~0 actual negative impact on you. So why would employees push back against a banal rule regarding antitrust speculation?
Part of it is that Google does a very good job making it FEEL like employees are making a lot of money, plus they have all these perks, which are mostly gimmicks.
The reality is that Google, Facebook, and Apple make at least 2x what they spend on software engineers. Good software engineers are enormously valuable. They are making products used by billions of people.
Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house! This is the most lucrative sector of the economy (like Banking was before, and Chemicals was before that), and the best grads go there. Adjusted they are still making less than bankers did in the 80s.
We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down. That kind of thing would never happen in a fair economy. I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down, which may hurt Google stock, but would benefit the whole development community.
> We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down.
True, but Facebook was the one that busted the cartel by ignoring the anti-poaching agreement and hiring employees away anyway. Not the government! That seems to prove that the job market is at least competitive enough for cartels to be unsustainable in the long run.
> I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down
This is clearly contradicted by looking at the job market. The fact that the best paying companies are pseudo-monopolies like Apple and Google, or extremely well-funded startups/unicorns that aspire to pseudo-monopoly status by spending their way there with VC money, is evidence that tech monopolies are good, not bad for tech wages (at least if you're good enough to land a job at one of the monopolies).
If the companies were broken up they would make less money, and the reason why software engineers make so much money in the first place is that the pseudo-monopoly created by network effects allows for massive profits, at least some of which trickle down to the engineers. Software engineering is not in any sense harder than any other kind of engineering. The only reason why FAANG engineers make more money than electrical or civil engineers is their employers make way more money too.
The thing about monopolies is tech skills are portable across verticals. So if you have a monopoly on search, you can squeeze advertisers for money because there is no competition. But you can't squeeze your employees the same way, because they can jump ship to other non-search-engine tech companies and their skills will translate. So the monopoly power in the search space allows them to make a lot of money while the lack of monopoly power in the job market means they have to give some of those profits to their employees to stay competitive in hiring.
> Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house
You can definitely afford a home on a FAANG income (especially if your spouse also works). Let's say you make $300-$400k / year and your spouse makes another $100+k. You definitely have plenty of options within your budget.
Maybe you can't buy a large single family house in the middle of the city, but do you think the typical banker owned a McMansion with a yard in Manhattan? You can't bring your provincial suburban values with you if you want to live in a big city.
It's unfortunate that the headline sounds like pure clickbait, because the story contains examples of Google's behavior being more suspicious than the headline suggests.
But, as far as the title is concerned, it seems common sense to prevent employees from talking about potentially very expensive legal issues, when every internal emails and chat logs can be potentially quote-mined by adversaries in future lawsuits.
Quote mining isn’t a possibility, it’s an inevitability.
Now here’s something: if corporations like Google are worried about quote mining, what does this mean for your personal search history, and how you may face in a secret court for some “national security” charge in 2027?
I don't think the threat model is comparable. Quote-mining is a problem for Google because it's an effective strategy between multinational companies wielding a hundred lawyers. On the other hand, if the government decides I'm a terrorist, they will "take care of" me, and they don't need some stinking search log to justify their action.
FWIW, my employer probably also wouldn't like me commenting on imminent legal issues that risked affecting their bottom line, but they don't mind me talking about much else politically speaking.
This is a twist on the famous Upton Sinclair quote. Google has everything to gain by extending their "live at work" strategy to political conversations, until those political conversations affect them.
Byline: "A company operating in the shadow of government regulators has some very particular rules about what workers can say about it."
I don't know where the reporter gets the sense that they're "very particular." It's pretty common sense: "You are not a lawyer; don't speculate on points of law in discoverable media."
Years ago, I worked for a public sector organisation that had both staff and contractors. In IT, we had to create accounts for them all. For the staff, HR had a central database with all their details, so we just sucked that database into our identity management system. For contractors, there was no central database of who the contractors actually were, that knowledge was distributed across all the departments that employed contractors. Finance knew how much money was being spent and who the contracting agencies were, but didn't keep records of who the individual contractors were.
I said: "Can't we just get HR to put the contractors in their database too? We can have a different person type or something to make the staff-vs-contractor distinction clear"
I was told: "HR will never agree to that. The unions keep on asking for statistics on how many contractors are employed and how many hours they work. HR can truthfully answer 'we don't know'. If HR puts the contractors in their database, then they will know, and then they might have to tell the unions."
I'm sure lawyers at Google have studied the Microsoft antitrust case, where one of the big lessons was that anything you write in an email will be used against you by the Justice Department [1] -- so this is not at all surprising. In fact, I'm a bit shocked there's no mention of the Microsoft case in the article.
This is normal and expected. Where I work we have rules about what we can say in written communication. Hyperbole and jokes will not be interpreted that way if an audit or subpoena finds it. A court might decide that we didn't mean exactly what we said, but we don't even want to deal with a court case in the first place. Not only because it directly consumes money to put up a defense but also because it can restrict our ability to make money and could tarnish our name.
We also have rules against talking to press. We can send them to a department that will handle that communication, but in general they won't get anything from us because it's easy to put a negative spin on anything we say.
> ...employees are told to assume that every document and email will end up in the hands of regulators, so they should refrain from using certain words or phrases. “We are not out to ‘crush,’ ‘kill,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘block,’ or do anything else that might be perceived as evil or unfair,” according to a slide used in the training, which The New York Times reviewed.
In my experience, these policies exist largely to avoid negative PR hits.
I wouldn't be surprised if these kind of policies also change culture and behavior for the better. Or maybe another phrasing makes it clearer: If your boss has a slide deck on crushing the competition that could cause some impressionable folks to bend the rules just a little.
I'm pretty sure it is to avoid legal problems. Being deposed on what you might have said in a meeting 8 years ago is a lot different than being deposed about the complete chat history of what you said 8 years ago.
The article is a nice piece of spin. It seems they started with a narrative and fit the facts to it.
I've taken the trainings referred to in the article and I never once thought they were designed to dissuade discussions about antitrust issues. A more banal interpretation is that Google wants to create a culture that emphasizes creating good products not at the expense of competitors.
I've never felt inhibited about having conversations with employees about these issues. The fact is that most of the employees I've discussed these issues with don't think Google is violating antitrust regulations.
My personal opinion is that a certain segment believe that Google should just be broken up because their data collection practices whether or not there are any real antitrust violations and just see this as a tool to accomplish that end.
Anti-trust is a hack.. We need proper taxation. Large corporations like Google have TONS of advantages that small companies have so it's easier for big companies to get bigger.
Part of this is taxes... if we just taxed them properly they wouldn't grow large and wouldn't need to be broken up.
Companies don’t pay taxes, people pay taxes. Companies may be the ones signing the checks to IRS, but they’re not the ones footing the bill.
The only difference is that for big companies it’s worth their while to have lots of accountants working the books, the same way it’s worth it to have lots of engineers fine-tuning the tech.
Isn't that telological in that it assumes that "proper taxes" are in service is to make it easier for smaller companies to compete?
The advantages over small companies aren't neccessarily a problem - in the same way that it isn't a problem that a fabric mill makes hand weaving uncompetitive and that a skilled weaver makes a rank amateur uncompetitive.
Large corporations can buy legislation. The reason you don't want companies to get too big is because they get undue influence on the system that regulates them.
> In other words: progressive taxation destroys wealth creation.
No, progressive taxation destroys wealth concentration.
I understand that when the pockets that wealth is concentrated in are your own, it might feel like destruction in a "who-moved-my-cheese" sense, but the fact is, no wealth is destroyed.
The morality or ethics of progressive taxation are a separate matter. What I was addressing is whether wealth is destroyed by redistribution in the form of a progressive tax code (which was being characterized as wealth destruction).
Arguably, at taxation extremes, wealth creation does suffer: too high and you remove some of the incentive to earn more (if there were a 100% tax rate above a certain bracket, for example), too low and government can't afford to enforce property rights and your incentives are to invest in protecting what you have (or can grab).
But in the very broad middle, the data shows that progressive taxation does not reduce the incentive to create wealth, and in fact the creation of wealth by most measures ends up being higher overall.
What is the difference to me, as an individual, what happens to the wealth once it's been taken from me?
Since I'm not spending it to further my own goals (e.g. by charitable donation to a cause whose values I share), does it matter whether that money has been spent on something someone else values, or literally burned?
Have you ever seen a current Google employee clearly denounce Google's privacy practices? It seems they are very loud and keen to organize when it comes to issues that closely affect them, but the mass surveillance of the general population usually takes a back seat.
1) Googlers have some internal insight into how the privacy practices mechanically work; that insight engenders trust.
2) Googlers who don't find a level of trust very quickly get turned off to what the company's mission is and take their high-paying skillset elsewhere.
I mean, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Gathering the information is implied right there in the mission statement. People who aren't comfortable with the ramifications of gathering and using lots of information seek employment elsewhere.
Or the person could work to change the mission. Look at what Satya Nadella did for Microsoft. If an employee doesn’t believe in a company’s direction they are totally within their right to try to effect change to shift the direction of the company.
I know researchers who worked at Microsoft and moved to Google and ,at least during their time there, they said accessing even aggregated user data for research purposes meant jumping through a lot more hoops at Google but the outside image is often the opposite for some reason
Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo? And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?
Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies (In addition to a complete misunderstanding of the criteria on which your own job is evaluated on)?
I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.
I understand that this is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, because it exposes a rather obvious double standard.
The question is more whether Google would fire someone for circulating such a thing. Outsiders will always howl about something, but the interesting question to me is what Google would do.
In California, that could be interpreted as creating a hostile work environment (political affiliation is a protected class).
In general, political affiliation is not a protected class, and employers are, in fact, allowed to fire people for being too Republican. Or too Democratic, for that matter.
Since it hasn't happened yet, that's not the correct question to ask. The correct question to ask is whether they should fire someone for circulating such a thing.
I for one, believe that you shouldn't spend your time at work having to defend yourself against these sorts of attacks, regardless of whether you are a liberal, a conservative, a Martian, or a reptilian. As a consequence of the above, I believe that you shouldn't spend your time at work making these sorts of attacks. But, as we can see in this thread, this, strangely enough, seems to be an unpopular outlier of an opinion.
> Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?
In academia, you could publicly collect signatures under such manifesto, and people would be afraid not to sign.
In Google... dunno, someone has to try. Unless it already happened.
> Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?
Lefty shrinks churn out studies finding that conservatives are authoritarian, wet the bed, kick puppies, you name it, we've heard it all. So I doubt your premise since I've seen the reaction to this stuff being published, and it's usually more bemusement than anything else.
But nothing Damore wrote was personally insulting to women like calling them "authoritarian." His larger point was that women have, in aggregate, different interests than men.
Say, for the sake of argument, that there are some distinctly masculine priorities and distinctly feminine priorities. If so, our base assumption should be that they are equally morally valid.
And there's plenty of evidence, e.g. college graduation rates, that professional women are somewhat more capable than men at identifying their interests and acting on them.
That means that if men and women pursue occupations to different degrees, our default assumption should be that they're intelligent and capable and making decisions in their best interest, not that they're victims.
That could all be true and it's still possible that engineering is an unfriendly climate for women. The hard fact is there used to be a lot more women programming and it declined in the '80s.
But to whatever extent there's a real feminine preference, we ought to respect women expressing such a preference and not try to save them from it.
> And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?
If, as Damore was, the manifesto is entirely supportive of the effort, it's hard to see why it would be unacceptable. If the company has set out to do a thing, and someone wants to help them do it, you can't fire them for that.
> Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies
No, you can't fire them for it even if they do poor work. Especially when, like Google, you still have trouble hiring as many women in engineering as you want.
Damore's interpretation of the data may have been amateurish, but he's presenting some analysis that could be improved upon to figure out a better strategy to achieve those goals.
You're claiming a double standard, but if Google was serious about employing more women, they'd act on these ideas, even if the action was to dig into them and say "nope, this stuff is wrong." Not fire the guy.
The picture the firing of Damore paints is that Google was more interested in showing that they cared about hiring more women than actually succeeding in hiring more women.
> I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.
The right-wing media is as garbage as any other media.
Even if the press were good, you've a cacophony of opinions, so you can't make them all happy. You're better off sticking up for your employees.
No, they wouldn't. Instead of wasting their energy on having to justify their existence, they'd rightly complain to HR that the manifesto author is creating a hostile, prejudiced work environment for them.
And their media would back them up on this, while calling for the head of the author.
You shouldn't have to fight to justify your right to work, when someone uses generalizations and statistics to call it into question.
Do you disagree with this premise? If so, what if the facts happened to fall against your assumption? How are you so sure that facts and reality are on your side in this question? Are you an expert on the subject? What if the experts disagree with you? Do you then endorse the circulation of such a manifesto, because it's fact-backed?
Then they have to burn their time coming up with examples and evidence to defend against a badly-architected argument in the first place.
... which starts to smell like a hostile work environment. Not that that's, technically, illegal if the hostility is about political affiliation (unless the employee is in California).
It takes about 1 second to come up with some examples.
And the memo would be very reasonable to write if it were true, and if the company were actively discriminating in favor of conservatives, like Google was with women.
Trivial anecdotal counter-examples that you can come up with in 1 second are not established, general, consensus-supported, empirically-gathered, peer-reviewed facts.
Since you are focusing so much on facts, let me ask a simple question:
If the facts actually supported the hypothetical line of argument I proposed, would you consider the publication of an anti-conservative manifesto to be acceptable workplace behaviour, under your moral framework, and under the laws of the state of California?
Please don't try to re-frame this question by focusing on whether or not the facts support the line of argument. For the sake of argument, suppose that they did.
- Colin Kaepernick
- They've been trying to cancel Planned Parenthood for as long as I can remember
- The tea party movement was a frequent practicer of cancelling other conservative voices (e.g. charges of being RINOs)
- Trump and his base have canceled many conservatives who did not like Trump
- It feels like the whole "fake news" thing is a form of cancel culture
This really has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. It has to do with who is in power. When conservatives held the political reigns, they "cancelled" all marriages that didn't align with their traditional values. (for instance).
We're faced with many more authoritarians of a leftist persuasion these days, but that doesn't mean conservatives have any fewer authoritarians in their ranks. It's a problem of constraining power in general.
Man....... equivocating "being cancelled on Twitter because you said something misogynistic" with the pre-2005 reality of "same sex relationships will send you to jail in Oklahoma" is a profound lack of perspective, even by the standards of HN.
"Cancellation" isn't censorship and it's certainly not a human rights violation. Get a grip.
There's a lot more to cancellation than losing a twitter account, it's about the instinct to silence and control those who disagree with you. And the underlying process is the same. Conservatives often think they are doing the lords work, and anyone who opposes them is evil and not worthy. And liberals often think they have the market on virtue cornered, and anyone who is opposed is a nazi/racist/xenophobe. And I'm only slightly exaggerating.
Edit: And I should add, that I did pick an example that was unfair to the right since it is worse than what is typically described as cancellation. So i apologize for that imbalance, but my basic point is still that the real issue is illiberal authoritarian elements that appear across the entire spectrum of left-to-right -- regardless of the degree to which they've so far been able to flex their muscles.
> Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?
The actual argument is that conservatives have lower Openness to Experience on average and they're thus less likely to be interested in working at a company like Google, that places such a high value on being open and stuff - this doesn't mean that Google is inherently ideological or biased against conservatives! It's an argument about people's individual interests and preferences, not skills or ability.
Except for the parts that aren't that. Which I honestly can't think of an analogy for. If you're making that argument, don't go on a tangent about cultural marxism.
So that everyone is clear there's a very big difference between Google saying:
1) Use the right language concerning things like 'market dominance'.
2) Not wanting Googlers to have public opinions which are against the companies opinions
3) Suppressing voices over very material causes for concern i.e. whistle blowing.
The more nuanced issue is #1.
If Google legit doesn't believe they are a monopoly player, then they have to make sure that everyone acts and behaves in that manner, and uses the right language. If personnel go around talking about 'dominating the market' that could be effectively 'used against them' irrespective of the material nature of ostensible market domination.
A lot of this kind of stuff is vague, political, words have power etc. and things can be taken way out of context.
It's not wrong for Google to want staff to use the right words to describe market situations correctly.
Of course this means something different if in fact, objectively speaking they're trying to get people to actually misrepresent reality.
I'm sure there's a few more things you can't talk about at Google too. But the NY Times should at least do a better job of remembering their own stories.
The title seems like a click bait. Generally you don't want employees to talk about active legal cases.
All companies will learn this the hard way when during the discovery the other team of lawyers bring casual internal conversation between employees as evidence into the court.
This is a pretty standard practice in big tech companies especially after the Microsoft v. U.S. case. When a seemingly naive internal memo can make the company broken up, then why would you allow your employee to write it down from the first moment?
> Ultimately, if the Justice Department or other regulators asked for those documents, Google would have the option of declaring them secret communication.
What if they just banned English from all company documents and let people use a smattering of all other languages the employees know? With some documents in Chinese, some in Swahili, some in Spanish, and the most confidential documents in obscure tribal languages, it would be fun to watch the Justice department try to piece things together.
For employee productivity they could just hand out AR goggles that translate everything in sight automatically to a language the employee knows -- they're Google, after all.
Or simply invent a company-specific language that uses the same words as English but with some words switched up, e.g. Customer -> Clown, Stock market -> Circus, Earnings -> Feast, etc.
I'm not sure if it's accurate that they would "simply..." but I think the consistent thing I've heard from my lawyer friends is that judges do not like to be deceived or misrepresented to or have their time wasted. You should not try to be "clever" with them, even if you think you've been clever with the law.
This approach combines all three of those things, it involves deceiving a judge or jury with language games, misrepresenting that these words or languages have hidden meanings, and wasting their time in deciphering what was really communicated.
This would be akin to everyone at Google typing in qwerty but using a keyboard setting that interprets the keypresses as dvorak, and also having an extension that substitutes characters viewed from fellow employees back to qwerty. How the message is stored or exchanged doesn't change the material fact that one employee intended to write "competitor" and another employee read "competitor" and in depositions both would admit to those facts.
They do piece it together in cases in which that is an issue. Translators are cheaper than attorneys by an order of magnitude and they are available in large quantities. This behavior described just consists of dopey attempts to evade discovery that will not work to obstruct federal investigators. All it does it call into question the character of the company, which does annoy the government and the court and will make the company look worse.
Courts often need to employ _chains_ of interpreters: for example, one to translate from English to Spanish, one to translate from Spanish to one Mayan language, and one to translate from that Mayan language to a different, more obscure Mayan language spoken by a monolingual defendant.[1]
Chinese and Swahili would give them no trouble at all.
1: Real example from my friend who represented such a person in an immigration hearing.
The simplest explanation is that Google execs genuinely believe in good faith that they’re not doing anything illegal, so they wouldn’t think to invent such a scheme.
Yup that's just literally every company... speculating about how "we will crush our competition and dominate the market" can lead to legal trouble more so than talking about other contentious topics.
Is this even legal? Can a company prevent employees from talking about the company breaking the law. I don't see how this could be enforceable. Assuming they are indeed found to have broken the law.
Folks need to grasp the distinction between the company requiring employees to be careful about using specific terms like 'market dominance' vs. speaking up.
Using terms like 'market dominance' may have legal implications, they surely will have populist implications as anti-trust issues are as much political as anything else.
So instructing staff to 'not speak about Google's market position' is very reasonable, because words have power and implications beyond what most employees probably believe when they're using them.
This is somewhat different from asking people to 'not have opinions' and a totally different league from trying to suppress whistle-blowers etc..
TRUTH is suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/intellectual property etc https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014
A little over a year ago, while working at Google I needed to work from home for personal reasons. HR told me “we have done extensive studies and it doesn’t work so take a personal leave”. Okay. In another issue I suggested to my manager we stop using “blacklist” and “whitelist”. He said no one else had a problem with those names and of this was a personal issue take it up with HR
Google will never change unless forced to. I quit soon after.
The "blacklist/whitelist" issue is still circulating and appears to be getting some traction. I just had a manager on my team bring up migrating away from them and our management chain was generally supportive.
I thought it was slightly ridiculous until I saw the suggested alternatives of "allowlist" and "denylist". These really are better terms: they're completely self-describing and match the verbs that you'd usually be using when referencing a denylist. Only downside is they don't have the same number of letters (and so don't line up if you put them one after another in code), but that can be worked around.
Google's a big beast, and it's not as homogeneous as people from the outside looking in sometimes assume. Hell, I'm pretty sure nobody really knows everything that's going on in it.
Try to show up for work in a MAGA hat, and see if you're still employed by lunch. Google employees are, at best, free to support the dogma approved by Google.
I’d bet it would have the same effect simply having a photo of them wearing such attire (outside of work, in an appropriate setting) published on social media. Google is, from what I gather, extremely polarized:
Does the NY times use a shitty AI bot to write these taglines? I find it hard to believe someone who worked as a journalist and wasn't in a coma for the last decade would suggest that google employees are "free to speak up".
Generally speaking (and regardless of personal position on the topic) any company which has a dedicated "diversity" commissar isn't a place you can speak freely.
>Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons.
I'd love to see what would happen to a Google employee who tries to argue that sexual harassment laws and policies are stifling normal social interactions, empowering the vicious and overly sensitive to destroy anyone who upsets their particular sensibilities, and creating an overall climate of fear and conformity.
As a non-lawyer, such an employee is probably stepping into relatively dangerous territory committing to discoverable media open speculation that the law under which the company operates is bad.
It's not the company that might hold them accountable; it's the government, if the government's looking for evidence that either individual employees break law regarding hostile work environment or there's a pattern that can be established that the company either encourages or turns a blind eye to creation of hostile work environment.
That sort of speculation is for a law salon or (anonymously) Reddit, not an internal mailing list.
Criticizing sexual harassment law is not sexual harassment, not even a "hostile work environment" violation.
On the other hand, employees criticizing the company for not sufficiently punishing sexual harassment is exactly the kind of evidence you're talking about.
employees criticizing the company for not sufficiently punishing sexual harassment are protected by whistleblower law.
Employees trying to build an Orwellian counter-story that punishing sexual harassment as the law requires creates a hostile work environment are treading on thin ice. Very easy to misinterpret that; I wouldn't commit it to discoverable media.
Sexual harassment law does not prohibit the criticism of sexual harassment law. Any district judge who tried to enforce it that way would almost certainly find himself overturned on appeal. You are simply wrong about that.
You are required to follow your legal obligations in America but you are not required to like them or to not complain about them.
It probably depends significantly on the criticism. "sexual harassment law is bad because women don't deserve protection" probably creates a hostile work environment.
In general, I'd consider it a thin ice category for discussion inside the company in written format.
It's commonplace for employment contracts to restrict your ability to represent the company to the press. Depending on the seniority and visibility of your position this may extend towards so-called "ethics clauses" where you will be in breach of your contract if you disparage the company or otherwise associate the company they don't want to be associated with.
Just look at Amy Cooper [1].
But it goes further than that. It's generally a good idea not to do anything that might lead to a heading like:
"Employee of X says [bad thing about X]"
When I worked at Google, I made it a point never to comment publicly on any issue or thread where I could possibly be quoted. That's just commonsense and (IMHO) completely reasonable for your employer. I'd suggest that if anyone chafes against such restrictions that they should probably seek other employment.
Rule #1: Never talk to the police without your lawyer being present
Rule #2: Don't create a paper trail that is going to make you look bad when it gets subpoenaed
I personally think that Google needs to be broken up into 10 different companies. And I would love to live in a world where companies face antitrust enforcement because of concrete actions. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a carelessly worded email is going to cause you more legal troubles than actual anti-competitive behavior.