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I turned down an offer from Google (cloud) because I didn't want to work for a company that was so focused on politics internally. This was just after they fired Damore, not that I agree or disagree with his opinion, but because Google seems promote internal fighting. That type of culture doesn't appeal to me.
You just outed yourself. I wish I was joking, but anything other than instant condemnation of what he wrote gets you labelled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "status quo" in the workplace (at least in this rather narrow subsector of "tech") is far from politics-free, so I'm not sure that your comment makes much sense.
I think what they mean by status quo is the political and power dynamics. Not how much "politics" is discussed.
I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…
> I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists You say that like it's a given truth - do you have anything to back up that assertion? FWIW, I don't recall Google courting "activists", though they obviously did court people who were highly invested in their education and careers, and of course there is probably a non-0 correlation with those types of people and "activists". I also would…
Sure, and this is just one of many examples:
They have been very proactive in this space for a long time.
Nobody actively courted activists. It's more just than tech startups generally skew younger and newer generations want their companies to reflect their own values. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And these companies are not in complete chaos. In fact apart from the James Damore incident there hasn't been any significant change in the company cultures.
Yes, actually they did actively court them. Here's one of many examples:
Younger generations are not politically homogeneous, Google picked a political position and pushed it hard.
I turned down an offer from Google (cloud) because I didn't want to work for a company that was so focused on politics internally. This was just after they fired Damore, not that I agree or disagree with his opinion, but because Google seems promote internal fighting. That type of culture doesn't appeal to me.
I turned down an offer from Google (cloud) because I didn't want to work for a company that was so focused on politics internally. This was just after they fired Damore, not that I agree or disagree with his opinion, but because Google seems promote internal fighting. That type of culture doesn't appeal to me.
>not that I agree or disagree with his opinion You just outed yourself. I wish I was joking, but anything other than instant condemnation of what he wrote gets you labelled.
You're right though, what we just saw with the linux foundations tone policing and the Lindsay Shepherd situation absolutely confirm this. There is a very effective group of activists that can make life hell for you if you don't hate the same things as them with the same fervor.
I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…
The part that's biting them is that now that they're 100,000 people, creativity is wasted anyway, because any brilliant new product idea will get killed long before launch and if it doesn't it'll probably catastrophically damage Google's brand. So the upside of this cultural decision is worthless to them, and the downside is incredibly chaotic and difficult to manage.
I think we'll see a shift away from this at Google, but I think other startups will still consciously embrace it. When you're 10 people and are about to go out of business if you don't come up with a brilliant idea, your incentives are dramatically different from when you're 100,000 and make tens of billions from your existing business lines every quarter.
Are all-hands meetings actually ever useful to anyone or ever more than merely internal PR?
So even if you're 100% cynical about it and thinking the all-hands are just internal PR, it was still a positive change, because you got to see upper management, see them talk about where the company was going and why, and they had to "defend" their direction.
Of course, the flipside to this is that if it seems like upper management doesn't have their shit together, meetings like these make that obvious, which can torpedo morale.
I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…
I think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did this so that they could get the benefits of creativity, which inherently requires emotional engagement, which requires that you not repress your emotions. (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about po…
I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…
To be clear, "keep politics out of the workplace" is another way of saying "I'm okay with the status quo, and if you don't like it I don't want to hear about it at work".