I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views. That's kinda natural once you reach a certain size and your colleagues may as well be randos on the street.
To be fair, that's a learning most businesses stumbled upon decades ago, it's the new generation of "re-invent management" companies that are speedrunning HR policy.
Time to re-read "I can tolerate anybody except my out-group."
That article is all I can think about whenever these political problems come up at Google. Here's a link for anyone interested: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
I don't recommend reading it unless you can tackle the entire thing though
>But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”
Wow. Yeah. Being accepting and loving is hard. It's one of the hardest things you can do, but only if that person is part of your out group.
I think they overestimated just how willing certain people are to not do their jobs and sit around arguing while being paid.
If timewasting was the problem, wouldn't they be clamping down on all unproductive conversation, not merely the political?
I mean, wasting 10 minutes is wasting 10 minutes, whether I'm talking about politics or football or TV.
But one is just unproductive (you being idle) the other one is counterproductive (you upset others and divert their attention) and multiply the counter-productivity.
Yeah, I've met people with views so different from mine that our professional relationship was at stake.
Once it was a woman who seriously thought white men needed to be excluded from things to make up for all the time they oppressed everyone else. It was like socially-acceptable maliciousness.
When you talk politics, you risk having people reveal extreme views that really accomplish nothing but put a wedge in an environment what's supposed to be collaborative.
I think this is a major point, because even when you deal with really strong sports rivalries, it seems to be mostly play acting like they hate each other's teams. Actual hurt feelings are pretty rare expect for anger at particular events in a game (for example, bad ref call). With politics, it hits something much deeper in people and gets people to be side tracked for far longer, as well as possibly causing reductions in mood that translate to worse productivity.
Right, if counterproductive conversation was the real problem, then Google should shut down access to HN, b/c I'm sure the aggregate drain on Googlers' productivity is much more than point to point office conversations...
I read HN to remain current. This is work for me.
And I'm going to brag that my company was lightyears ahead of Google on this one. We don't allow political debates. Such a time waster. But HN is educational.
Scrolling through HN while your code compiles != full on political debates at work.
I’m on a group chat with a couple old friends and when someone starts a debate on a topic I’m passionate about we go hard and we go deep. Suddenly it’s two hour later and here I am trying to do some quick demography with raw data from the census bureau to prove a point.
I’ve started blocking the chat until after work because debates do tend to rage sometimes. And we’re old friends with a grounding empathy and shared experiences to fall back on. Doing the same thing with coworkers during work hours? I would’ve banned it too.
But professional jobs are not on the clock like that - salaried jobs aren't paid by the hour.
I recently had a conversation with someone who works at Google, and she mentioned how in her opinion Google hires a lot of smart people but has a good chunk of them doing very lame work.
So perhaps that's not too far fetched. I've had jobs that didn't keep me interested or seemed menial, and I will admit to holding a lot of online threads during those work hours. Nowadays, when I'm at work I'm often too busy and interested in what I'm doing to think about other things that are happening.
> I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views. That's kinda natural once you reach a certain size and your colleagues may as well be randos on the street.
I think it is not so much due to size, but due to the extreme ideological polarization of American society during the last decade.
When before it was normal to hear and accept - and god forbid, even stay friends- with people that had different political opinions from yours, as of late, that has become quite difficult.
The book 'the big sort' by bill bishop goes into this phenomenon in further detail.
I am not sure how well this generalises but, in my experience, it is very possible to achieve this IF you have a business/culture that is motivated.
An example of this working is in investment management. The job is largely about groups of people arguing with each other. Often this comes down to differences in "world view".
Some places get around this by just hiring people with the same "world view". But other places take the more robust approach of hiring different people and encouraging more argument. I am not sure if this works because they just don't hire very dogmatic people (a group that is very over-represented in tech) but it can/does work (and does scale up to thousands of employees).
Definitely, large groups that have members across society ban these discussions (the Masons is one example). If you are hiring/recruiting anyone, then no politics is smart. But this isn't the case here. It is possible...if you are motivated. From what I have seen, the Googler approach is to be actively unmotivated.
It is easier to think everyone else is dumb and you are smart than acknowledge you are wrong or don't know. Investment management is unusual, the feedback loop is clear. You are as smart as your last trade. That promotes a robust self-image. I can see why the average Googler doesn't have these traits. They seem to be in the job description (i.e. a lot of people want to work at Google because that will mean they are smart). You reap what you sow.
I think the magic here is just about the 1% media controlling elite getting better at breaking up the remaining 99% into infinitesimally small factions so oxygen is sucked up from talking about real issues.
When we turn the narrative of everything from "respecting differing world views" into "respecting nazis/dictators/bigots" etc and turn everyone into a world saving moral crusader upon whom humanity's salvation rests on, it's a very invigorating and powerful message that takes intellectualism away from discussions.