When I started, Eric Schmidt was in charge. He seemed fine with having a loose, university-style atmosphere. Different teams worked on different things. Some of them succeeded and some of them didn’t. But the company made a ridiculous amount of money from Search so it didn’t really matter that much.
Then Larry Page became CEO in 2011, and things started to change.How?
He introduced a lot more structure and hierarchy. Previously, there were relatively few divisions. Most projects were under Search—one might be web search, another might be book search. Larry reorganized the company into major product areas. Search was a division, but not the only one; there was also Android, Cloud, and so on. And he put a senior vice president in charge of each of them.
Right away, there was less of that university atmosphere where you could just walk up and talk to anybody about their project and maybe help them out with it. Now the decisions were coming down from the senior vice president who was in charge of that product area. And those decisions were being driven by business objectives: overall, the company started caring more about the business and less about whimsical projects. Google started to become more like a typical big company.You mentioned that you first encountered TVCs when working on Google Books. As the company began to change and become more corporate, did you notice more and more contractors around?
I can’t think of a specific moment where there was a sudden influx. But percentage-wise, more and more of Google became temporary workers. It’s now a majority—Google employs more TVCs than full-time employees.5 It was probably 10 or 20 percent when I started.
At first, the introduction of TVCs seemed justified. Google is not in the business of hiring people to do everything. It doesn’t have the time. So having some third party manage that seemed like it made sense. But over time, Google has gone from, “There’s this special project that needs a few hundred people who have skill sets that no Googler currently has,” to taking full-time positions and turning them into temporary or contract positions.For example?
Recruiters. I had some awareness of this when I arrived, because it was in the middle of the Great Recession. Before, recruiters were full-time employees. But after the financial crisis, they scaled down hiring and basically fired a bunch of people because they had nothing to do. Then when they spun hiring back up again, résumé screeners and college recruiting coordinators were hired on a temporary basis. I remember older employees who had been there longer than me grumbling about it. They used to know the recruiting folks in this office or that office. Then they started turning over every year or two.
It makes everyone’s life worse. That’s the point. I worked on one project where we hired a third-party design firm to do the web design for a data visualization that we were gonna release publicly. And that was incredibly obnoxious from an engineering perspective because they can’t see our code base. So I’m writing some stuff and they’re writing some stuff and when we stick it together it’s a giant mess because we’re not all developing in the same place.In addition to more hierarchy and more contractors, what were some of the other elements that started to change how you felt about the company?
The first thing that occurs to me is Google Plus.
Google Plus was meant to be a social networking competitor of Facebook. From the start, a decision was made that people were going to have to use their real names on Google Plus. A bunch of Googlers then pointed out that this policy was problematic for a bunch of reasons. Trans people may be known by different names in different contexts. Sex workers might not feel safe using their real name. More generally, anybody who doesn’t want to be automatically doxing6 themselves for the opinions they post on the internet might not want to use their real name.Why did management want real names?
Their main argument was that anonymous discourse on the internet is toxic. The idea was that if you made people sign up with their real name, there would be less bad online behavior, less trolling.
I very specifically remember an exec making an analogy to a restaurant. When you go to a nice restaurant, you have to wear a shirt and pants. If you want to eat at home, you can eat wearing whatever you want. But as members of polite society, we accept certain restrictions.
The analogy landed extremely poorly on a bunch of people internally. These execs have millions of dollars and are basically public figures. Of course they don’t have a problem with using their real names, so they couldn’t possibly imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to. Also, from a logical standpoint, their argument didn’t make a lot of sense. You can come up with an alias that looks like a real name and post the most toxic stuff in the world. It’s not violating the names policy that’s the problem—it’s the behavior you’re engaging in.So what happened?
It took a while, but Googlers were able to push back and get the policy changed. It ended up in the state that I think should have been the state initially: you can type anything you want into the name field, so long as it’s not offensive or you’re not impersonating anyone. In fact, I remember one particular instance in which we disabled Neil Gaiman’s account for impersonating Neil Gaiman! He escalated on Twitter, and Googlers went and fixed it.It sounds like the real-names policy on Google Plus was an early example of a rift between rank-and-file Googlers and management.
Yes. Although in the subsequent years, many more rifts manifested and grew wider. Because back then, the feedback mechanism within Google was still working. There was still a measure of trust.
People on the Internet Are JerksWhen did that trust start to break down?
The Damore memo was
