Performance evaluations are subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.<p>> <i>In each of these cases, I brought these issues to HR and senior executives and was assured the problems would be handled. Yet in each case, there was no follow up to address the concerns — until the day I was accidentally copied on an email from a senior HR director. In the email, the HR director told a colleague that I seemed to raise concerns like these a lot, and instructed her to “do some digging” on me instead.<p>Then, despite being rated and widely known as one of the best people managers at the company, despite 11 years of glowing performance reviews and near-perfect scores on Google’s 360-performance evaluations, and despite being a member of the elite Foundation Program reserved for Google’s “most critical talent” who are “key to Google’s current and future success,” I was told there was no longer a job for me as a result of a “reorganization,” despite 90 positions on the policy team being vacant at the time.</i>
<i>” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.”</i><p>Wow this literally sounds like an episode of The Office (S1 E2)<p>Definitely not the most damning thing in this article but the one that really jumped out for me.<p>Can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea
I think Google have pushed themselves into a corner, where it would be difficult for them to win. Companies like Microsoft and Apple which don't care about Employee unrest would continue to wrestle contracts like JEDI and Chinese market, and continue growing.<p>Bing continues to operate and censor in China, but nobody bats an eye. But people don't encourage boycotting MSFT because of it. Apple Maps works in China too. China is a substantial market for Apple. Apple keeps removing Apps on the behalf of the Chinese government (recently removed an App used by Hong Kong protestors), and on iOS it is almost impossible for a non tech user to install apps outside of app store.<p>I think what all this will do is encourage companies to refrain from things like "Don't be evil", since once you do that the geanie is out of the bottle, and you won't just be compared to your peers, but be held to a substantially higher standard.
> In the email, the HR director told a colleague that I seemed to raise concerns like these a lot, and instructed her to “do some digging” on me instead.<p>A lesson on how to fire somebody you disagree with. You need paper to show a series of bad behavior, but because there is no prior bad paper you deliberately produce it moving forward to use as a weapon.<p>I have been through this myself. A manager at a prior company was very unhappy with my periodic separations for scheduled military training. He mentioned that scheduling such separations from work was harming my career and would immediately follow that with some excuse to justify my near termination. Those are illegal communications.<p>I ignored this for a while because I loved my coworkers. He must have finally brought his frustrations to HR for action, because suddenly one day the negative communications stopped and the formal written documentation started. Somebody had educated him on the lawful approach. I finally just left and found work elsewhere.
It sounds like product teams were deliberating circumventing his team. Hard to imagine anybody being able to serve in this role if their partner teams are unwilling to work with them.<p>Sidenote: the fundamental problem with Google's performance review process is that you get to choose who reviews you, and nobody chooses to get reviewed by somebody they quarreled with. As a result, claiming you had good performance reviews is more or less meaningless. It really just means your manager liked you. It says little about how good you are at working with others.
The article talks about Google's relationship with China and it's encouraging to see that there were people standing up in the company and pushing back. But I also wonder what author would think about <a href="https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/" rel="nofollow">https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/</a><p>Google essentially was becoming an arm of the US State Department. With Schmidt and Jared Cohen saying things like "What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first". That seems somewhat benign but then it crosses into Google directly helping the US government drumming up support for Syria air strikes by putting links to government propaganda right on front/search page.<p>I often wonder what Larry and Sergey really think of Google now. Is this the company they dreamed Google would become? Are they proud how their "child" has grown.
Call me cynical but there are so many incentives to all parties here it’s hard for one not to roll one’s eyes at this.<p>I’m not American, but...<p>Dude is a politician:
“Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine.”<p>He <i>knows</i> of the anti big tech sentiment right now, Liz Warren “break’em up” and all that. This piece is coming out at a very convenient time where the media is hungry for yet more scandals at Google, it’s sure to get the author’s name talked about.<p>“Enter the Chinese market in 2006...users were getting more information than before, even if there was censorship of some topics... In China, the government not only demands full access to a company’s user data and infrastructure...”<p>I don’t believe Google pulled out of China <i>just</i> not to be evil. I believe they did so to avoid feeding Baidu with even more expertise than they already had, given the already cross-pollinated rankdex/pagerank algo.<p>“...in December 2017, Google announced the establishment of the Google Center for Artificial Intelligence in Beijing”<p>Given the feedback loop of technology flowing military->private sector->military and the vast amount of Chinese nationals acquiring American expertise and returning to China or Chinese gov-controlled biz poaching talent from the US (see Andrew Ng) I wouldn’t be surprised if the US Gov instructed Google and others to open such facilities in China as a way to “fight back”. This is a tech arms race just as hypersonic weapons are.<p>“...I returned home to Maine. It’s where I was born and raised, and where I was taught basic values like the importance of working hard, standing up for what is right, and speaking the truth. Sharing my story with my neighbors and my family has helped me understand why I was so often in conflict with the company’s leaders as Google changed.“<p>That paragraph is sure to touch the hearts of many of the voters in the state of Maine which the author is a candidate for the 2020 elections. I trust he’ll use his considerable wealth, accumulated over the 11 “conflicting years“ as a Google exec to fund his campaign.<p>PS: That diversity exercise is grotesque.
> Two weeks after leaving Google, I returned home to Maine. It’s where I was born and raised, and where I was taught basic values like the importance of working hard, standing up for what is right, and speaking the truth.<p>The folksy tone at the end had me expecting some kind of agenda on behalf of the author with writing the article. Lo and behold, she's a political candidate.<p>The whole article feels like someone trying to control their past narrative as they preprare to enter public life. She never 'left' for ethical reasons - she was fired then offered a crappy role.
<i>It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks.</i><p>An unfortunate fact that catches many by surprise is that bullying is not against company policy in some of the FAANGs. In fact, some of them were founded by bullies and have a culture that glorifies such behavior.
> I used those words myself in 2010 as Head of Public Policy for Asia Pacific, when I executed the company’s landmark decision to stop censoring Search results in China, putting human rights ahead of the bottom line.<p>This guy VPs. He's making it sound as if they cured cancer. What google did is agree to the law in China, and then started to break it. Those are horrible laws, but those were rules of the game from day 1.<p>Google did that _purely_ for PR - they could've just shutdown their service, instead of starting to break the local laws, they suddenly disagreed with.<p>What Google did which such an horrible execution, is made Chinese government even more paranoid and destroyed any trust in USA tech companies.
I do wonder if any of this articles cost Google anything when it comes to hiring. Will people just take the big fat compensation or does google actually feel any pressure due to negative press.<p>In my mind at-least, I no longer reply to Google recruiters or consider Google as a respectable employer anymore.
> <i>and after the Chinese government attempted to hack into the Gmail accounts of human rights advocates in 2009</i><p>Not really relevant to the story, but this was always a lie. The reason that China hacked Google had nothing to do with spying on activists. It’s a cover story for a counter-intel op.<p>China hacked the “PRISM”-like feature in order to see which of their spies had been burned, based on whether or not the US government had wiretaps on those accounts.<p><a href="https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-and-breaches/google-aurora-hack-was-chinese-counterespionage-operation/d/d-id/1110060" rel="nofollow">https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-and-breaches/google-auro...</a><p><a href="https://www.cio.com/article/2386547/-aurora--cyber-attackers-were-really-running-counter-intelligence.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cio.com/article/2386547/-aurora--cyber-attackers...</a>
oh wow! Isn't this just blatant sexism and racism ?<p>> It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.
I wonder if Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon employees ever dare to say such things about their company polices. No wonder these companies are thriving. Sad thing is When startups and new corporations would like to use the clouds then they don't check the human rights policies and work culture and instead of Google goes to such corporation and then Google executives think Why are we even on moral policing part? As this doesn't help. So problem lays within us, like me using Windows 10 in computer and buying things from Amazon.
The original title gives a very different impression than the posted title. Here's the original:<p>"I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left."
Happened to know quite a few people from Google who has been frustrated by the policy made by his team and they clearly disagree with many of it’s implementation details. It might be interesting to hear from insiders how much they appreciate his org
imho, the author's being disingenuous when describing the cringeworthy diversity exercises.<p>The point of those exercises is to make you cringe at name-calling and stereotyping. To take the thoughts out of peoples' minds and put them in ether so all can see how cringey these labels are.
That all seems... pretty damning. Not very surprising, but pretty damning.<p>Google definitely needs to outright fire the HR partner who was stupid enough to write that they should "do some digging" on a staff member down. They're clearly a liability.
This was a great read. Nothing like a story from the inside to highlight that senior executives at Google really don't care about human rights and just how far down the slippery slope they've already gone.
I think we in free countries have an obligation to keep our companies from being accomplices to human rights violations. There seems to be a lack of regulation.
> Our 2010 decision to stop cooperating with Chinese government censorship on Search results was the first time a non-Chinese corporation stood up to the Chinese government.<p>I didn't bother reading the rest of the post after that claim.<p>Maybe he means that Google was the first non-Chinese corporation to stand up to the Chinese government specifically regarding Internet search?
Key conclusion:<p>> Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down.<p>I think we've reached a stage where this is true for all of tech. SV libertarians may balk at this, but this kind of regulation is the only thing that will change the incentives. It will make the financial cost of doing evil high enough that profit-driven product execs will no longer have the option to pursue these paths.<p>In a certain sense, that regulation actually protects the company's character, allowing the success of good ideas, penalizing the profit-at-all-costs execs.
Newsflash - he wasn't Google's head of international relationships like he claims. I keep seeing people in insignificant positions trying to present themselves like somebody they aren't. For example, account managers trying to make it sound like the manage large teams while it's an entry level sales role, or tech leads trying to use it as a formal title (it's not - basically everyone going for L4 is a tech lead, and you can self-proclaim).
I switched to DDG after Google's Dragonfly fiasco. The only way to stop Google from going to bed with the communist mass murderers is to threaten their domestic profits.
So the high-level sociopaths have taken over to increase profits at any cost, and Ross has chosen to leave for big politics and use the moment to show his principled approach. P.S. everybody should read the gervais principle book: it's 101 of the corp politics.
TL;DR: The founders checked out and greed trumped ethics.<p>Anyhow, here's IMO the key take away / question:<p>> I think the important question is what does it mean when one of America’s marque’ companies changes so dramatically. Is it the inevitable outcome of a corporate culture that rewards growth and profits over social impact and responsibility? Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing? Finally, what are the implications for all of us when that once-great American company controls so much data about billions of users across the globe?
> the simple but powerful guidance “Don’t be evil.”
> ... I joined Google in 2008, when those words still mattered.<p>Oh, sure, sure. You weren't saving everyone's private information forever. You weren't sending a copy of everything to the NSA. You weren't lobbying to get regulatory breaks on data centers. No, Google was perfectly saintly 10 years ago.<p>... (reading further down)<p>Ah, so, this guy is telling us the problem with Google is in _China_. Hilarious.<p>> But each time I recommended a Human Rights Program, senior executives came up with an excuse to say no.<p>Ok, so - perhaps I can give the author the benefit of the doubt and believe he is a very naive man for believing a corporation like Google would allow for something like this.
> But there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members.<p>Proud to work for Google?
> A new CEO was hired to lead Google Cloud and a new CFO was hired from Wall Street, and beating earnings expectations every quarter became the key priority.<p>So, IOW, they became what every other big company has become. It's not about employees. It's not about customers. It's not about product. It's only about returning every penny they possibly can to shareholders.
Oh look another article/first hand account from an insider trashing Google and how it forgot its core mantra. Even it's own founders jumped ship.<p>Personally This is good to see as was also having a hard time giving away my three Google Home speakers for Christmas(white elephant exchange). Majority of my family members did not want their creepy listening devices in their houses. Neither do I every again even though I enjoyed using them!
"Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights — had cost me my career."<p>Did these people ask you to?<p>If I'm a bit cynic I would say it starts with China, then move to internal politics but in the end he only really quit because he was "soft-fired".<p>Still, some great information in his post.
Not first the first time, I'd like to point out that the people that instituted and cared for the amazing cultural values of Google in its first ten years are loooong gone.<p>They're all rich beyond belief and completely burnt out from carrying that torch (Jeff Dean maybe being the exception).<p>Unfortunately, before they bailed, they didn't take the time to select their replacement properly, as in: handing over the reins to people with the same kind of ethos, moral values and more importantly, the same kind of backbone.<p>Instead, they left the superb thing they had created in the hands of a new gen of execs who either don't even understand how one can say "Don't Be Evil" in a business context or - Sundar being a prime example - strictly don't have the shoulders, charisma, leadership or vision to run something like Google.<p>Google has turned in yet another faceless corporation run by a bunch of greedy execs who are only in it to make as much money as they can. Given how much power Google has concentrated in the hands of a few, this is pretty terrible.
> I joined Google in 2008, when those words still mattered. I saw them used to guide product designs that put the company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz.<p>How is that !evil? Putting the company's success above user needs would seem to fall squarely into the evil category.<p>> Although difficult, I was intensely proud of the principled approach the company took in making this decision. [pulling out of China]<p>How naive. This wasn't a principled decision centered on user rights. This was protecting the company's non-China reputation. Can't have Chinese hackers infiltrating Google writ large. Google decided that the best defense was to pack up their toys.<p>As should be obvious to the author considering his later experience:<p>> But each time I recommended a Human Rights Program, senior executives came up with an excuse to say no.<p>His solution:<p>> Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight.<p>So, become China-lite? I think there is a reasonable answer in there somewhere, that could be expressed with much more nuance. But as-is, sorry but he sounds like a clown.<p>That said, I've only cherry-picked the parts of the article I don't like. There's plenty to like. I'd read it more generously if he didn't have an ulterior motive at hand.