I have never once received a response to an email that I wrote to a Google executive who is on the board now. It just doesn’t happen. They’re busy people. Maybe they read it, maybe they don’t. Either way, it’s not a useful mechanism for feedback. And as the company and the number of controversies have grown so much larger, the all-hands meeting has become much less useful. You can’t have a dialogue if all you get to do is ask one question every week or two.
It’s also become harder to know who to even ask. When Dragonfly first became widely known internally, it wasn’t clear who was running the project. This felt intentional: the execs went into panic mode when Dragonfly was discovered, so they stonewalled. It wasn’t clear who you could ask questions of other than Sundar, and that remained the case for the first month or so that we knew about it. It is extremely weird not to have an escalation path that doesn’t involve going up the org chart to your CEO.But the worker-led campaigns did produce real changes. Google appears to have pulled back from Dragonfly, saying they have no plans to launch a search engine in China. In the summer of 2018, Google announced that it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven. And later that year, Google dropped out of the bidding war for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure [JEDI], a major cloud computing contract with the Pentagon.
I have a friend whose opinion is that Google strongly believes in doing the right thing—so long as it doesn’t cost Google money.
Honestly, I don’t know what the right level of cynicism is. With the JEDI contract, Google probably wouldn’t have won anyway because Amazon is so heavily favored.12 So, when the employee advocacy started, the execs might have figured they could placate the workers by not competing for something that they weren’t going to win anyway.Do you think Google executives are still looking for ways to placate? It seems like the tone has grown more hostile than that.13
There’s definitely been a major loss of trust on both sides. One way this manifests is through leaking: information that would have previously remained confidential keeps getting leaked to media outlets.
This creates a vicious cycle. Execs feel like they can’t say anything useful because anything they say might end up on Twitter. And workers don’t feel listened to because the execs aren’t saying anything useful—which then makes them more likely to try methods of pressure that don’t involve keeping the conversation inside the company.
If I were Google leadership I don’t know how I would break this cycle. It’s probably mathematically impossible at this point.Presumably leaking can be impulsive: someone gets mad, and they talk to a reporter. But you’re saying that it can also be strategic. What’s the strategy?
Media pressure is currently among the most useful forms of pressure that workers can exert on Google. They try to inflict a PR hit on the company for doing controversial things.
This can also affect hiring and retention. If Google is seen by engineers who have many job prospects as a place that’s doing uncool or unethical work, people will simply take another job elsewhere. It’ll be harder for Google to get talent and in some cases to retain the existing talent because people object to these projects.
A Deep BenchDo you think that Google has been particularly fertile ground for white-collar worker organizing compared with other big tech companies? It seems like management’s sensitivity to bad PR on the one hand and the relatively open internal culture on the other have played important enabling roles in these campaigns. I’m not sure the environment would be quite as favorable at a place like Amazon, for example.
Google certainly is its own separate world in terms of company culture. I get the feeling from folks at Amazon or Microsoft or other places that they have fewer company-wide forums in which rank-and-file employees can express their displeasure about something.
To be clear, these forums aren’t just about social or political or product issues. There are many mailing lists that anybody can join. There are mailing lists for people who like skiing and people who like video games and people who like music. There are mailing lists for people who are trying to go walk their dogs together every Thursday or whatever.
So Google’s culture does seem somewhat unique in that way. The mailing lists make it easy to quickly organize a couple hundred to a couple thousand people around an issue. You saw that with all of the worker campaigns, going back to Google Plus. The feeling that I get from workers at other companies is that this sort of culture doesn’t exist elsewhere.Ultimately, you decided to leave the company. Can you tell us why?
At some point, it felt like the controversies were stacking up faster than we could handle them. I could have made the decision to ignore them and just go heads-down on my engineering work. For a while, I tried.
Over the years, even as my feelings about the company grew more complicated, I had felt an ethical duty to stay and to continue doing what I could to push for changes in the direction of certain projects. I knew that I could apply more pressure from within the company than from outside. But eventually it felt like there was no way that I could usefully participate in that process. I lost faith that my opinions would be reflected in product decisions anymore. So I decided to leave.
Other people made different choices. Some people resigned much sooner. Some people are still around. One reason I felt all right about leaving, in fact, was because we’ve got a deep bench now. It’s far from over. There are a lot of people inside who are going to keep pushing.
5The Data Scientist
Ever since the region
