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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#51

Post by ohazi »

shadowgovt wrote: post #48
ohazi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just a convenient excuse. The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is: "If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about literally everything that this company does , then maybe it…

Who is "we" and "you" in this context? At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on…

I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what is ethical. They are not the same.

I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise hell if they think it isn't.

I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this human responsibility to a corporate legal team.

Part of what these corporate policies are deliberately designed to do is condition employees into believing that "deferring to the legal team" is where their responsibility ends. They want to convince you that this checks the box for both "legal" and "ethical" so that you feel like you've done your duty, and now you don't need to think about the ethics of your work anymore. This is what I meant by corporations "brainwashing" their employees. But you're always on the hook for the ethics of your work.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#52

Post by greatgib »

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago.

Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details)

And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement.

Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.

I had a lunch with a few people including some Google engineers a few days after the leak. A discussion started about this topic, and the googlers said things like: "what a scandal the leak, we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead. If anyone in the company find who he his, we would seriously punch his face".

I was surprised, because, this was just a leak of the features, same content has what would have been disclosed in the PR announcement. Personally I would be happy that people have so much interest in my product that they spontaneously reshare early details about it. I did not see where the offense was for some random engineers of the company.

So, I asked them, and they told me that they felt that the insider "stole their announcement of their product".

I told them that it is ridiculous, because as an engineer you should like that your product is known, and that people hear and talk about it. But it should personally make no difference if the feature list/preview is published a few days earlier by a leak instead of by a random PR guy or by a big head of the company.

The only offended one might be the big head and the PR/marketing guys that had their plan ruined, but not common Google software engineer salarymen.

But the Googlers were not able to understand this idea, and then, they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.

So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

In the exact same way that there are dictator led countries were most of the inhabitants are blindly following whatever the dictator says is the truth!

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#53

Post by delusional »

tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

I agree that others do the same, but the observation that vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning.

If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it they also can't recognize it when it happens.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#54

Post by ajb »

tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

Yes and no.

Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being better. if you make your product 1% better than the competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone has to go out and win the market after the product is built. And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really, motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#55

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

skybrian wrote: post #44
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been a devout practitioner of a religion whose views on the world differ in key parts from the established scientific consensus? Have you ever been affiliated with a political party that was highly popular (or a monoparty even) in your country but was held in contempt by the rest of the world because of how totalitarian/inhumane it was? In both cases, you could read whatever, even critical information a…

I understand what you’re getting at and there is certainly a lot of closed-mindedness going around. I don’t think any organization is immune to this. But there are also a lot of employees who have strongly opposed various Google policies and engaged in various political activity based on that, so the groupthink doesn’t seem to be working very well? Also, the company leaks like a sieve these days. Even before that, th…

Isn't continuing to work for a company that has policies you strongly oppose an example of successful groupthink?

I suppose you could make a case for continuing if the policies are/have been/could realistically be changed.

But if that's unlikely?

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#56

Post by CPLX »

skybrian wrote: post #8

This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant? Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation. It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some th…

This is what’s known as a Stringer Bell warning[0] and it doesn’t reflect well on the organization who has to make it this aggressively.

Yes, it stands to reason that if you’re engaged in a potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you put in writing.

However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from using common sense words for your regular business operations then it’s a pretty clear red flag that your actions may be subjecting you to legal liability.

[0] https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#57

Post by laurent92 »

titzer wrote: post #32
skybrian wrote: post #8

This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant? Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation. It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some th…

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

> The email policy has no other purpose

Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled way according to GDPR.

But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, since they don’t do support ;)

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#58

Post by shadowgovt »

ohazi wrote: post #51
shadowgovt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "we" and "you" in this context? At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on…

I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what is ethical. They are not the same. I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise hell if they think it isn't. I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this human responsibil…

I agree with you. But one can raise hell by advocating to get the legal team on board as quickly as possible and making it clear that there's a significant issue that needs to be considered without using the words that will get the company half a million dollars of billed in-court attorney time whether or not there was actually any ethical issue.

That's the key difference and the purpose for constraining what ends up in discoverable media.

There is, perhaps, a meta-ethical question of whether companies should, in general, be factoring into their calculus ways to minimize the government's capacity to hinder their activities. It's a good question. I don't have an answer that's universally true. I suspect if we sit down and consider it, we find lots of circumstances where it's not in the best interests of anyone to just hand the government a company's throat to be slashed. After all, especially if we're talking about the United States, it's not like the government itself has proven a bastion of ethical reasoning either.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#59

Post by laurent92 »

gumby wrote: post #38
titzer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

> They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours .

How does he keep track of relationship history with someone? Commitments? Goals?

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#60

Post by pyrale »

skybrian wrote: post #8

This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant? Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation. It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some th…

From don't be evil to don't leave a paper trail...
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