Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 600 posts

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#251

Post by chance_state »

1000units wrote: post #236
chance_state wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember other "uncomfortable" or probing questions that were asked? Just out of curiosity. I work for a company that holds similar "town halls" where employees are able to ask anonymous questions of management and they can get pretty brutal sometimes ("why is turnover so high?", "why is upper management's compensation so much higher than others?", etc).

My work has this too and it gets a little embarrassing when people reveal they fundamentally misunderstand the relationship they have with their employer.

ha! I completely agree.

Some of the questions are genuinely things that everyone is thinking but too afraid to ask, and some are complaints from employees to management that are as old as time.

But with both types, it at least gives people the feeling that they can be heard.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#252

Post by ellius »

throwGuardian wrote: post #248
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not believe chronic bouts of performative outrage leads to anything creative, inside or out of the workplace. If one's "whole self" cannot meaningfully function without getting constantly triggered, the problem is with the normalization of such "whole self" concepts

The problem is you don't get to pick and choose who your culture affects. If you hire people with those opinions and then tell them they need to watch what they say, other employees get the same message. You may have people who aren't political at all, but they see people being punished for expressing their opinions and decide they too better modify their behavior.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#254

Post by geofft »

Gunax wrote: post #246
burtonator wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewed at Etsy about a year or two ago and the interviewer was asking me about politically charged topics. How I would handle workplace gender complaints. How they should handle racial diversity in the work place, etc. It was really clear I was giving wrong answers. I told them flat out that I think people should be judged by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin and that the company should…

Wait... those are the wrong things to say? They are practically textbook PR cliches. They are not necessarily what people would actually do, but they sound like the correct answer in interview-speak.

Er, if the question is "How would you handle someone you manage telling you of sexual/racial discrimination," the correct cliche answer is absolutely not to say "I judge people by the content of their character and pretend the color of the skin doesn't exist," or some equivalent form like "If the behavior would be acceptable if the people in the situation had different gender/race, then it's definitely acceptable." That would count as ignoring a report of discrimination that you're legally obligated to not ignore.

(We'd need to know more details about the question and the answer to be sure.)

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#255

Post by coetzeesg »

manigandham wrote: post #46
triceratops wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the political position picked by the site you provided?

Google and most SV companies are somewhere between left to far-left.

Google and the other SV companies do nothing to change the relations between it's workers and the product of their work, nor do they do that for any other companies. They are 100% pure capitalist. There is nothing Left about them.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#257

Post by geofft »

malvosenior wrote: post #5

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…

Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire.

What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement contracts. That doesn't mean that the right answer is that you should accept such forms of revenue and reject the employees who don't support it. That just means you have to choose. What they're regretting is simply that they can't have it both ways.

(Also, GitHub in particular is trying to endorse a particular form of politics at work - they've been defending the practices of ICE in their internal and external communications. If opposition to ICE is political, support of ICE is political too, no?)

Google and GitHub are trying to turn into IBM and Oracle. That's fine, but they should remember that they were originally trying to beat IBM and Oracle. And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#258

Post by bendbro »

geofft wrote: post #257
malvosenior wrote: post #5

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…

Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire. What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement con…

> And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.

They should be surprised as it hasn't ever happened before. That's not to say that it won't or shouldn't happen, it just would be surprising.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#259

Post by joshuamorton »

manigandham wrote: post #220
joshuamorton wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you Isn't this what you're doing now: shouting down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you about the place of political discussion in the workplace? Edit: To rephrase since you missed what I was getting at: you are advocating for institutional support in silencing people who express views with which you disagree in the workplace. That…

No, I'm discussing. This isn't a workplace, it's a public internet forum. Nobody is prevented from participating here by my posts. You're free to discuss whatever you want as well. Replying to your edit => A workplace is different than the state. You do not have complete freedom within a corporation, and expression is very different from beliefs. Nobody cares about your beliefs, but your expression will be limited to…

You didn't actually address my question, and I made no mention of the state. I'm going to quote you again: you claimed that

> When you protest against it publicly in the workplace and shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you, then we have a problem.

I'm asking if you think that's generally true. For example, if you actually believe this, you would presumably make no attempt to silence me if I protested something in the workplace, as doing so would be taking exactly the action you object to.

Presumably you would internally object to my protesting something, and we both agree that that's alright. But were you to express that concern outwardly, say by asking me to stop, it would be shouting down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you about workplace conduct. And therefore we would have a problem, or more correctly, you would have a problem with yourself.

In other words, we encounter a bit of a paradox. How you resolve this paradox is of paramount importance: the value system you use to resolve this paradox becomes the values you use in the workplace.

I'm using this to illustrate a point: there isn't a "null" position. Nebulously banning "political" views doesn't work unless you're clear about what makes something political. And people will disagree with you on those things. Its much less painful to ban things based on content (say: cursing or insults) than "how political it is", because the second is just an excuse to let your values implicitly bias the local Overton window without acknowledging that.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#260

Post by aprdm »

geofft wrote: post #257
malvosenior wrote: post #5

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…

Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire. What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement con…

I read the "how Google works " book and I can't help but question myself if they built what they built despite of the culture.

The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture.

If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.

Google feels sometimes very much like startups with VC money just being inefficient and burning other people money, except of course, Google is burning it's own money that is generated from the non sexy / cool stuff (ads and enterprise email / storage )...

Post reply on HN