The way the company was restructured into different divisions with distinct product areas changed the incentives when it came to pursuing controversial projects like reopening Search in China or working with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Take the Department of Defense. One of the divisions is Google Cloud. They want to be number one in cloud computing. They want to beat Amazon and Microsoft and the other competitors in the market. So for the senior vice president in charge of that division, it’s a no-brainer to take military contracts. At the end of the day, what matters is increasing revenue for that division.
The early Google was different. Back then, it was clear that 90 percent of Google was Search, and everything else was free fun stuff that would eventually redirect people to Search. So you could make the argument that if Google engages in projects that compromise its credibility, people will trust Google less, and Search revenue will go down. Now that the company is split up into these separate fiefdoms, it’s harder to make that case. Cloud doesn’t really care if they take a controversial contract that undermines trust in Search.By the same token, I’d imagine there’s less room for projects like Google Books in the new structure.
Yeah. It’s more hierarchical and has less of that academic feel. The number of engineers and product managers and designers that you can have working on your project is driven by the business case for that project. It’s far less of the freewheeling atmosphere of, “Sure, we can have ten or fifty people working on this experimental thing without knowing whether there’s revenue there or not.”
So there are fewer organic projects growing out of the curiosity of small teams. The direction is coming from the top and reflects specific business objectives, such as the need to break into this market or beat this competitor.In the earlier situation with Google Plus, you said that the feedback mechanism was working. Employees raised their concerns and were able to make a change. By contrast, the rank-and-file campaigns around Dragonfly and Project Maven looked a lot different. They were bigger, more combative, and even spilled into the media. What changed?
In the Google Plus situation, there was an escalation path and a dialogue between rank-and-file workers and upper management. It was mediated by a senior engineer on the project who served as a kind of liaison. He would answer the questions about the real-names policy at TGIF, Google’s weekly all-hands meeting, with a level of candor and humanness that the other execs did not really exude.
It was clear that he understood the reason people had problems. He was willing to compromise—even if there were challenges, even if it was going to take a while. He also had credibility on both sides: as one of the project’s technical leaders, he was trusted by the rank-and-file engineers, but he was also trusted by upper management. Management was used to respecting his technical decisions, so they respected his arguments about other aspects of the project as well.
He left Google a couple of years ago. When he did, we lost a good liaison between the two sides. But as Google has gotten larger, I also think there’s a growing feeling among the executives that this kind of back-and-forth isn’t worth it. They feel impatient. They don’t have time.Presumably the reorganization you’ve been describing amplifies this tendency. In a more hierarchical structure, executives can rely more on directives than dialogue.
Sundar has said on more than one occasion that Google doesn’t run the company by referendum. Which is not something that anybody has actually asked for! It’s a very strange response to employee concerns.
The point is not necessarily to make every decision democratically but to at least help employees understand the reasons why a decision has been made. Then they’re free to disagree, and can refuse to work on the project, or even leave the company. But these days, the answers from management just come across as business-speaky and vague. They try to placate people without actually showing that they’ve understood the substance of the concerns that have been raised. That makes it hard to feel heard, or even to know your own feelings about a specific project.Do you think that your feelings about certain projects would have been different if the executives had done a better job of explaining the reasoning behind them?
Dragonfly is one where I could see an ethical gray area. We were building a search engine that gave the Chinese government the ability to censor certain topics and pages, and to surveil specific citizens and their searches.
On the other hand, people in China currently use Baidu, which is not very good.11 It returns all kinds of wrong answers about medical information that they search for. We know that’s a problem. We know they’re not going to get effective treatment. Baidu is bad for their health. So you could argue that if Google provided better search results with better medical knowledge, the Chinese people using our search engine would be healthier and live longer lives.
I could see plausible arguments on either side. I could even line up on the side of Dragonfly being a net good if Google leadership had showed signs that they had understood and thought about these ethical issues ahead of time instead of after the fact—only after people raised concerns. After you’ve already built the prototype is not really the time to start thinking about the ethical ramifications. And the arguments that were actually presented by the executives were very bad. Like, as a college freshman I would’ve been able to tell that they weren’t valid arguments.It seems like the gap between rank-and-file Googlers and upper management is growing pretty dramatically in this period.
A lot of what was missing was the mediation aspect. With Google Plus, we had somebody who could act
