Absolutely nothing about the structural discontent emerging in staff.
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.
Unless it there is more behind the scenes, the letter is basically saying:
We don't want to deal, or like/enjoy dealing with this pesky employee stuff. We don't have the time, energy, or enjoy it, and they'd rather do something else with their time and money.
They are in a position where they either crack-down on their culture to more of a corp like, and appear to go full evil, or be even more lenient, and risk small 'intolerant' groups or activists taking over and creating disruptions to the business. Whatever they do at this point, they will be either painted as the bad guys in the media (if they go full on evil corp); or the 'dysfunctional' company, if they allow even more discontent and become more 'college/academic like'.
Basically, their employees situation is becoming such a PITA for them, they'd rather not deal with it and quit the company and do something else, more interesting, instead....
They realize that they just don't enjoy dealing with the creature/organization that they created.
Basically, it is the CEO's version of: "it is not you, but it is me" line of break-up, and we all know what that line means.
I think that's a cynical view of the situation. These guys have grown a college startup into one of the world's most valuable companies. They're rich beyond imagination. More importantly, they're getting close to being 50. Would you want a day job if you could retire 15 years earlier than most, especially considering Google has served as a vehicle to explore a ton of other projects they've been interested in (since maybe people would think, why not start another company?).
Makes total sense, I'm sure they're looking forward to spending time on their yachts with their families and not in meetings 8 hours a day.
I think they will regret it. Google was once a real special company. Their IPO filling, their stance on China, those were principled, courageous stands that came straight from Larry and Sergey. To see their beautiful baby turn into another mega-corp, as hypocritical as any, colonized by activists and careerists bent on distorting the social fabric to advance ideologies and profits? Contemplating that turn of events when you had the power to stop it but chose not to? That has to suck, even when you are doing the contemplation from your yacht.
I think what they learned in the intervening 15 years is that there are very strong structural forces pushing corporations towards the "traditional company" form that everybody hates, and that even as CEO, even as controlling shareholders, they were powerless to stop them.
At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
You're right. One of these forces is how in a sufficiently large organization you're practically guaranteed to attract a critical mass of bad actors, people with rare but extremely harmful personality types. In an open culture, these bad actors can find each other and coordinate, creating massive problems for the whole organization. Traditional big companies are robust against these bad actors --- unfortunately at the cost of many other desirable characteristics. Smaller companies (maybe up to 10k headcount) can get without the necessary safeguards because, due to their small size, they don't attract a critical mass of rare but extremely harmful personalities.
Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.
For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
I think you are misreading it, I am not judging Sergei and Larry negatively....
What I am saying is that their decision makes total sense, and there is no reason to chide on them on 'why they are not dealing with the employe' problems, but quitting' as the OP did.
Really, this is just a: Peace out guys, we are moving on...
And there is nothing wrong with it, as google is not really dealing with an existential threat right now....
Same as somebody quitting their job, when it is not enjoyable anymore... and they have been doing the same thing for years. Billionares are people after-all....
I judge them pretty negatively. People like Bezos, Jobs, or even Gates never really spent so much time building this PR image of being for the greater good, holier-than-though, "making the world a better place." Everyone knows "don't be evil", but how about their recruiting catch phrase "do cool things that matter." Even the "not a conventional company" tag line is relevant here.
Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.
I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.
The difference between Amazon and Google is that google controls access to information and in some respects can shape public opinion. When Bezos gets greedy, its through some better product like faster cheaper shipping.
Reasonable people differ on all these projects. It's not "abundantly clear" at all. What you feel strongly about might be another's subtle trafeoff. You don't get to decide which disagreements you'll allow and which you'll prohibit. That's the privilege of the people who own the company. The main problem with Google over the past few years is this idea among a small but vocal group of employees that they have the right to run the company merely because they feel strongly about certain issues.
I think it's impossible to be cynical enough about a guy who blacklisted a company from his search engine because they used his service to show a picture of his backyard as a way of illustrating the privacy violations his company enabled.
Does a CEO of a 100,000 employee company ever have this kind of low level management?
Larry and Sergey have been obviously taking on less of a role since Sundar took over as CEO of Google. They've been at Google for more than two decades and are mega billionaires. Do people really think that this has anything to do with agitation among employees?
As a former Googler who stays in touch, there doesn't seem to be structural discontent emerging in staff. There were a few news stories about people complaining, but Google employs about 100,000 people, so any news story involving less than 1000 of them being unhappy can't really count as "structural discontent".
The walkout referred to was over a year ago, so I wouldn't call that discontent "emerging". If anything, that demonstrates that discontent is diminishing, because there hasn't been another similar walkout.
I don't get the constant critiques of this. They fired employees who encouraged others to leave their jobs. That's not really "retaliation", is it? Were a competitor to do that, Google would have a case for tortious interference. Why is it any different when it's "organizing"? It's not like this was a unionization attempt, which might have some legal protection.
Actually, organizing around workplace conditions (in this case, alleged sexual violence by Google executives) is a protected action under US labor law. So, yes, it would be retaliation and no, they’re not allowed to do that.
You posted that someone needed to demonstrate "structural discontent" via a news story involving at least 1K employees. They linked to one involving 20K. And your response to that is: "This proves that discontent is diminishing?"
You set the challenge, they exceeded it 20x, and you've not made a believable case that this shows "content is diminishing." In fact exceeding your original demands by 20x seems to thoroughly show that the basis for the claim is true.
For anyone pointing to "structural discontent" at Google, you guys seem to be very out of touch with reality. Compared to 99% of other large corporations (in US, or worldwide), Google is heaven on Earth as a place to work at. $200k entry level comp, lots of perks, very smart people all around you, open culture, coolest stuff to work on, cutting edge tech stack and great tools, future technologies being invented right next to you (or by you!), etc, etc. There are problems, or course, because you're bound to have problems in any 100k organization, but at other places it's so much worse. Try working at any company on Fortune 500 list, other than FAANG, or at any government agency, and see how much tolerance for "discontent" is there. The amount of BS per $ you will have to endure there is simply incomparable.
Or maybe you want to hold Google to higher standards just because it's Google? Why exactly?
This has nothing to do with the post you replied to.
Plus this retort essentially boils down to "Google pays well and other companies are even worse so quit complaining!" Restating the compensation argument multiple different ways, and the cutting edge argument multiple times doesn't really address the actual underlying complaints being made (Google's partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities).
If you want to talk corporate morals, sure, relevant. If you just want to brag that Google pays super well and is less evil than [more evil companies] this seems like a whole other discussion that sidesteps the issues. Which isn't to say it is untrue, just irrelevant.
Ok, let's talk about specific issues that cause complaints. Google is a for-profit company, and it answers to shareholders who want to make money. Why would Google not engage in those practices you deem immoral if that's what the shareholders want? I use Google products daily. So for me the question is - does Google need to engage in "partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities", in order for me to enjoy using its products in the future? Will such activities hurt or help Google in the long run?
I would hope that every single person - including shareholders, managers, and employees - holds our fundamental values like peace, freedom, or justice higher than their desire to maximise profits.
The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.
We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.
Sure we can hope, but in reality if Google is not profitable someone else will take its place. If Google does not cooperate with Chinese government someone else will take its place.
Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?
As long as Google cares, it is a net win for humanity. Even the worst-case scenario that Google is later bought by an immoral company is a better outcome for humanity than Google immediately becoming immoral.
I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.
The walkout was a bait and switch. It was organized (using underhanded means --- for example, a rogue employee force pushing a desktop background update to everyone without authorization) on the basis of protesting Google's payout to Andy Rubin. Fine.
But at the same time, a small number of employees put together a document (without public input) making "walkout demands" and ever since, this small but very vocal group of employees has been going around claiming that 20,000 people support the list of demands in this doc. Not the case. Total lies, in fact.
Hey Lacker. I'd be curious about whether there is a bias around the seniority level/situation in the pool of people you keep in touch with. People I've talked to, ranging from new hires to old timers, have generally trended toward being more discontent and cynical about the company as a whole.
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.