“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.”

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff.

There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.

> Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital.

I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.

I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically.

This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.

This person is describing their own experience; what you're saying is that you haven't had that. Which is great for you, but it's not universal.

Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.

You're also making a lot of assumptions about me but I'd rather not make this anecdotal. I would have probably agreed with OP when I was 18 after watching Fight Club a hundred times that was what modern business life was like. But I've had a large variety of jobs in my life from working outdoors, brutal factory floor jobs in an auto factory and a wood flooring plant, to office-space style boring corporate HQ jobs for a big brand, to tech companies for the last decade and it's hardly the standard. Especially once you get past lower level drudgery work.

I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.

I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job.

It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)

I would also say it's not a good idea to burn bridges; which is what inevitably happens when you run around telling people the reason you're leaving is because the company sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway (see my original comment), and you risk coming off as toxic to people you might want to give you a recommendation later in your career.

Very few people think their company is perfect, and being able to be honest about a company's shortcomings without resorting to "it sucks here" and similarly unhelpful non-constructive criticism is a sign of emotional maturity. People leave all the time, for various reasons, and most places I've worked that actually conduct exit interviews are genuinely curious as to why high performing employees leave.

I hesitate to say they "care" because I think that gives the wrong impression. Everybody wants to make a little more money, get a little more freedom in deciding their priorities, get a little more flexibility in their hours, etc. So if you say your only reason you're leaving is that you want more money, they're probably not going to give everyone a 10% raise next quarter. But if you have well thought out grievances that can be addressed without spending millions of dollars or completely changing the structure of the company, I think you'd be surprised how willing executives would be to try and make things better.

I think giving honest feedback at exit is a good thing and I view it as showing respect. I would probably avoid the word “sucks” though.

Right, but the place for the honest feedback is the exit interview. Spare your co-workers your grievances; they probably already know why anyway.

This just boils down to social skills really. Some people are just killjoy grievance machines though so it's worth noting.

I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company.

If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature.

Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so.

A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.

Googlers are trained not to think of themselves as leaves, but as roots. That's the source of the friction.

The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.

I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.

* Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.*

Then size is the problem.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.

Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary.

Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.

On the other hand, the United States was created by people who preferred the former.

The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle.

Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too.

Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive.

Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.

I agree. You see the same mindset in politics where people fanatically stick to one party or the other but barely can formulate an own opinion on issues.

>I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one

Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed.

You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example.

And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM )

Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.

there are democratic companies (called cooperatives) if you think workplace democracy is important, you should join one.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one.

This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things.

If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody.

Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.

This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics:

-stay and fight to fix

Vs.

-vote with your feet and compete

Each of these have positives and negatives :)

Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?

Yes. In general it’s better to either stay or come back. Otherwise we are concentrating more and more into “good” countries and leave other countries behind. I understand it from an individual perspective but in the big picture I don’t think it’s a good thing. In the US it’s the same. Tech people and companies concentrate in a few centers. It’s probably better for companies and employees but not very good for the whole country.

In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.

Sounds like you need to read up on unions.

By and large unions focus on pay and conditions, not corporate direction.

Insofar as unions do anything political it is usually inappropriate and better done through actual regulation so all companies obey in a coordinated fashion.

Hard disagree. A union is there solely to give employees a proper voice at the company. That this has by and large been to support working conditions historically is only because it was the issue of highest importance.

If the concern is corporate direction, the union has a seat at the table as well.

Labor unions serve to protect workers from poor physical working conditions...and in some cases their fragile ego too???

I think that's not a bad thing. For big companies like that it is impossible to drive them out of the market with a competing company, so if you want to change it makes sense to do so from within. Especially since its such a powerful corporation they will always find people to replace the ones that leave, so your leaving doesn't actually help your cause all that much. Much better to stay inside and exert your power from within.

> So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

(Quote from the post above yours, emphasis mine.)

I read the post you're replying to as saying they didn't understand why people don't just go work somewhere else, rather than burn out with futile attempts at trying to change the corporation from within. Whether they are right or not I can't really speculate in, just thought it interesting that we seem to have had different takeaways from the comment.

How is it impossible? Plenty of big companies — including tech companies — have been driven out of the market by competitors.

Not a googler myself, but if I had to guess I'd say they feel a sense of ownership in Google employees at other companies might not. I think that sense of ownership is warranted, if not in a strictly legal sense. If a Google employee feels that, it seems natural to want to see it change for the better, and stick around to help influence it to do so.

Moreover, the sheer size and power of Google means that changing its culture changes how it interacts with the world, which could have far-reaching consequences. Seems natural to want to see that impact improve.

The impression I have (as an outsider) is that Google is a totalitarian institution, in the same way universities are for undergraduates: it encourages employees to centre their entire lives around Google.

They provide employment, food, transportation, leisure activities, social validation; in some cases housing. It's no wonder employees (especially young ones fresh from the bosom of Mother Academe) who have their entire sense of self wrapped up in being a Googler are hesitant to just walk away from that.

I think the term is “total institution”—a totalitarian institution wouldn’t actually tolerate factionalism and infighting.

>> I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

How much of that is simply due to vesting schedules?

Not just for Google, but broadly in tech, that doesn't quite work. If you jet, you lose un-vested equity. Oh, and you are also forced, in many cases, to spend a boatload of current cash to exercise vested options and get stuck with illiquid holdings for 5 or more years.

Google (and most large established tech companies) give RSUs instead of options, so you don’t have to spend any money to exercise them, but your point about vesting is good.

Google RSUs also vest monthly (and no longer has a cliff at 1 year, you start venting 1 month after you join) so as far as I can tell it’s exactly equivalent to salary but paid in shares of GOOG rather than dollars. Waiting for vesting shouldn’t keep anyone around for more than 1 month.

>> Google RSUs also vest monthly (and no longer has a cliff at 1 year, you start venting 1 month after you join) so as far as I can tell it’s exactly equivalent to salary but paid in shares of GOOG rather than dollars. Waiting for vesting shouldn’t keep anyone around for more than 1 month.

This all the more reason employees dont "just quit" and join another company. Say they quit and join Amazon -- now they are stuck on a 15/15/30/40 vesting plan and just kicked all their comp into a future year that may or may not arrive. Say they quit and join a typical startup, now they have a 1yr vest.

Amazon vests 5/15/40/40, even worse than you said.

See "golden handcuffs".

This is not true at Google, you can trade all your vested equity ave the not vested ones should be replaced by a similar amount in your next job.

Google pays pretty well which makes it hard to leave, ave there is a lot of nice people to work with.

>> equity ave the not vested ones should be replaced by a similar amount in your next job.

If you are in the money, you're losing a LOT of money when you leave, join a new company, and get struck new equity at a higher strike.

You can ask the new company to match your unvested equity at current market value.

I assume that the culture of employee activism or at least advocacy being encouraged and fostered by internal systems of communication was probably part of the selling point for a lot of people to begin with. I agree with your premise though - Google established a different kind of relationship when they did the brainwashing/cultural indoctrination. This is the kind of genie that gets let out of a bottle when you do that and then you change up your culture after the fact.

>I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google.

I'm not. Google encouraged it. Now they are forced to quash that culture because you can't run a multinational business that way. When profitability starts drying up in the ad business, you'll see a further shift.

> Google encouraged it.

Everyone's story is different but I joined in 2008 and it took me about a week to understand that the company did not want employees to get involved in a way that would affect day-to-day operations. As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon. As a different example, you could organise Irish-speaking evenings, and again - pat on the back. But try to push for an Irish language version of Google interface, and you can get in trouble if you make enough noise that decision makers hear about it. Both of these are actual examples I saw first hand.

I suppose what I'm trying to argue here is that adult people with average emotional intelligence understand the difference between what's said and what's meant. So I find the argument that 'Google encouraged it' rather weak, especially for the insiders. The only thing I know is that leaving Google was back then one of the most difficult decisions of my life, despite being aware of conditioning I've been subjected to. Looking back, it was the best decision of my career, except that I should have left 2 years prior.

>adult people with average emotional intelligence understand the difference between what's said and what's meant.

The problem with not defining boundaries and instead relying on some fuzzy notion of understanding the subtext is that it leads to confusion. The James Damore fiasco demonstrates this. They guy actually thought he could write an opinion on a highly controversial and inflammatory topic without repercussions. Why did he think that? The vast majority of HR departments would explicitly discourage it and the company culture (especially at a multinational) would make it clear this isn't a topic for the corporate intranet. But he was confused enough that he thought this was ok because he probably though Google is different and is OK with employees debating political and social positions on company boards. That's what I mean by 'Google encouraged it'.

The fact that they even have internal discussion boards is a cultural choice of Google. Most companies don't have such a thing. But culture is always implicit, not explicit. If Google had traditions of encouraging those types of discussions and Damore engaged with that, it's still on Google for promoting that atmosphere. The fact that it got leaked and then there was blowback and the leadership reacted to that blowback in the way they did signaled a cultural shift to Google employees and prospective Google employees. That's okay. Corporate cultures change sometimes. It's unknown whether that will be good for Google in the long run or not, but just because some companies think that such a discussion is not ok does not mean that it wasn't implicitly acceptable at Google when Damore did it.

Actually, J.D. can be the one to organize software developers into a em.. guild: an organization with membership fees, staff lawyers, accountants and all that. The organization could start with the non-compete agreements nonsense. He's surely a controversial figure, but that only makes him more visible, and he has personal reasons to start such an organization. With the 250/month fee you only need 150 members to get the ball rolling. The memberships need to be sufficiently obscured and Damore has the suitable background to get the anonymity right. One idea is to use the DBAs - name aliases that can be registered with your company to hide your identity. Every member would be an LLC, but I'm sure software devs have money and ability to overcome this minor obstacle.

> The problem with not defining boundaries

Isn't that what a successful socialisation process should equip you with?

No. No socialisation process is going to equip you to maneuver around a bureaucracy with ill-defined boundaries. That's why you need a defined process with rules so that people know where they stand. Damore thought he was in the clear because others posted about controversial positions and the company didn't have any rules about it and seemingly encouraged it. It turns out there were secret unwritten rules that he crossed and cost him his job.

Human society is all about infinite overlapping boundaries and rules for them and games people play and violations thereof.

"Successful socialization" is pretty nebulous. I think it's a phrase to imply that some people who are objectively functioning in society "don't count" as socialized.

Anybody can be successful in whatever respect until one day they aren't.

You can really, really not like any given person, but if you question whether Damore lacked/lacks basic socialization, then what do you make of Martin Shkreli, or Donald Trump? Are you ok until you get sentenced to prison? Or can you be a failure until you become POTUS? If you've failed at basic socialization yet held a six figure job at Google, what would you be if instead you were a supermarket cashier, but with the same beliefs and personality?

> As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon.

Awhile back people did ask for it and did secure said benefits, prior to the national legalization of gay marriage even.

So, in this case, organizing around and asking for those benefits did work.

I've always likened it to the early days of computing when it was "Big Blue" vs everybody. Small upstarts like Apple were very much the Hippy compared to the Button-Down Square.

That Hippy rebel spirit is/was very much an identifying characteristic of `Silicon Valley`. I'd even say that Google is the poster child of Silicon Valley v2.0, and the people that work there might even resent the inevitable conservative slide that makes Google in 2019 look more like IBM in 1989. I know I resent that.

I suspect "corporatist" might be a better term than conservative.

This is fairly cynical but i think it's one consequence of the economic boom. During recessions and recovery aftermath there are rarely issues like this, people are generally grateful for their jobs, not looking to pick fights over it. Not saying that is a better situation since it enables more corporations to exploit their employees, but the pendulum has swung pretty far the other way. Will be interesting to see what happens next recession.

Yeah it does feel overwhelming. I'm actually starting to think that some of this may be targeted. Meaning that actively political people (of any political affiliation) are actively looking to get hired at Google and stir shit up. One way to confirm this theory is to get the the seniority of people that start these internal movements/arguments/threads/etc.

The 4 people recently fired that were labour activists had tenure of 11, 8, 4, and 1 years.

I think it’s honestly ridiculous to suggest people are trying to get hired into Google to be political activists. We have no evidence of this and I’d need a lot to start believing it.

Most employees working at companies (even Google) are seeking to just get their work done, be productive, draw a paycheck, and get some friendly socialization done along the way. It isn't a setting where they are seeking to fight political battles, argue about moral values, generate anxiety, be subject to leaks/doxxing, etc. But that's the exact environment created at places like Google where employee activism isn't shut down.

Effectively, a minority of these employees are using company time/resources to engage in personal activities. Often those employees are highly-vocal, cutthroat about shutting down others' differing views, and the voices of others who are just trying to get things done are not represented. I think the lack of an anonymous channel for others to push back is a big problem because there is no psychological safety afforded to the majority of employees.

Put another way, employee activism is an unscientific popularity contest where most people don't want to participate in the contest.

> they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ

Never once have I heard anyone describe Google in such high regard while working there. We're encouraged to be autonomous, self aware, thinking people, believe it or not. There are many things I agree and disagree with that Google does and expressing that is perfectly fine.

Typically, I'd agree. However, I think leaving isn't a great option for a lot of FAANG employees.

They have two options:

1. Maintain high pay at another FAANG. Depending on perspective, at least one of those is no better than Google.

2. Take a significant pay cut to work somewhere else.

Google attracts quite a few people who, were they not doing industry, would be in academia. There tends to be a lot of philosophy of why things are done overlapped with what is done.

You say you are surprised but then provide a perfectly good explanation in the next sentences of your comment. It is not much different from nation-states indoctrinating their citizens to "love their country". Moreover, some degree of indoctrination seems essential for any large-scale organization. They simply begin to collapse without it.

I think it's because Google started and sold itself as the Do No Evil company that inspired 1,000s to more to get into tech; aspire to want to work for or with such a company.

In the end we learn Google does evil for the sake of profits and many those who they inspired have become disenchanted.

When your hiring process encourages critical thinkers, don't be surprised when they become critics.

It's actually with any company which gives you that much of freedome and voting power. And people hate it if something is being taken away.

I mean, worker organization is never a bad thing. Just like democracy is good for decision-making in government, it's also good for decision-making in the institution that dominates most employees' lives: their employer.

Probably the result of years of social engineering played upon the protesters. They fail to see Google is not their friend. But also fail to see that the part they play as Google employees is not that important either.

I see a very different explanation which could also explain this pattern. Employee activism doesn't make the news that often, but it's actually pretty common - as long as the activism doesn't challenge any core element of the business.

If you want your call center to be more ecofriendly or your consulting firm to support Fight For $15, you may or may not get support but you probably won't see consequences. In tech itself, I've watched plenty of people push for green policies, or organize donations to support immigrants, or even recruit for the DSA with no issues at all. But they were recruiting for border reforms and political groups, not workplace unions and H-1B liberalization - and certainly not user privacy. When it comes to the Kickstarter union or Wayfair stopping sales to the CBP, the accommodation dries up fast.

That doesn't mean the activism is insincere, or even about not making waves: there's also a powerful selection effect invovled. If you're passionate about the environment, you probably don't take a job at Shell, or you quit in protest. But if you're passionate about LGBT issues, there's much more reason to be optimistic about workplace activism, and it's mcuh easier to reconcile keeping your job while you do it.

So what's up with Google? They used to do one thing in one way, then branched out rapidly, so they have lots of employees who bypassed the normal selection effects. And now they do everything, so every issue is simultaneously non-central to Alphabet as a whole and a direct challenge to some component of it. We haven't heard much about Google employees protesting search ranking algorithms or advocating for GDPR, because that's been selected against from the beginning. But AI, military work, internal transparency, and even corporate hierarchy are comparatively new issues for Google. The people who object aren't gone yet, and nobody can tell what's fundamental and what's safe to challenge.

This week Bezos said he wants to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, at Amazon.

Nurturing a work culture of employees who care and are passionate has always been a goal for many companies.

There is also the money. Truckloads and truckloads of money.