> One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women’s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes.
..and they couldn’t just say “Grace Hopper”? These people have used computers before, right?
Go find the drunkest pledge in a Stanford frat house, give him media training a stylist and a personal trainer, and ten years to craft a corporate ideolect through twitter threads and founders' retreats. That's how you get the archetypal tech CEO.
As a class they are overwhelmingly incurious people, and would barely notice if you swapped their industry out for Big Tobacco or bombs. They care exactly as much about tech as Jeffrey Epstein did about finance.
Grace Hopper is the goat but I'm not sure she would have immediately come to mind for me. Actually, if someone asked me to name any hero of mine, irrespective of sex, I don't know if I could quickly name someone. Is it really a huge indictment?
I actually enjoyed the first hand experience of an early-ish Google described at the beginning. For those with enough tenure in tech, was this ethos unique (at the time)? Or was it typical of successful, tech-heavy startups? I could believe an early Sun might've felt similar but I don't know.
When claire stopped writing the tgif emails I was very sad, among others I talked to. When I heard, years later, about all this bs she went through, it helped crack the illusion for me. So sad.
This story naturally ends after Claire's departure, but "that the era of sanctioned dissent was over" did not mean that dissent was over. The lesson for many was that "asking nicely" wasn't working. I believe that realization that real power was needed to in order to make change was a big part of why the Alphabet Workers Union was able to get off the ground. Of course it hasn't gotten the numbers to actually build much power, sadly.
Google figured out how to create a classless suite of internet services for anyone on Earth with an internet connection to use. I struggle to see how this didn't meet their original goals, what people celebrated about Google, and what made Google such an attractive place for people like the author to work.
What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?
> “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.)
And yet I'd much prefer to have one kid with cancer be saved and allowed to live an average lifespan than to have thousands of old rich people extend their extractive existences for decades.
I can't help but see most of this as Claire using her gift of elegant prose and crafting narratives to retell a story of a prodigy that had a great product-market fit in the beginning then was unable to maintain relevancy while becoming bitter at the people around her. It must be so difficult to start out as a shining star then watch something you helped shape grow away from you. It looks like some powerful people at Google tried very hard to keep her with all these dramatic job changes. I always thought the walk-out seemed more dramatic and showy than people actually working for positive change (virtue signaling for their careers/to get their 5min), but I was very much on the outside. Seems hard all around.
The Voice of Google - should be silenced. I don't want to hear any more Google propaganda in general. From "acceptable ads" to trying to kill ublock origin - enough is enough.
I'm struck at how brutal it is to be a woman in even pseudo-progressive tech spaces at times. How talking the talk does nothing if HR and leadership quickly and quietly work to undermine at all and make life hell. The HR line of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" always feels surreal.
James Damore won, we're living in his world. Or the Gamergate world. It makes me wonder why though, it's not as if half the country and many of the engineers don't still have the same progressive values. Honestly I think it's just the power of the rich men with all the money. SWE's labor power has been slipping away ever since Elon's "let that sink in" and this will only continue to accelerate.
Google, Apple, Amazon, MS etc don't seem to be the default place for top EECS grads anymore. Maybe middling candidates and H1b prisoners but 4.0 GPA grads with personal projects end up at NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. And Meta, because they still pay insane.
> in 2023, Google laid off some twelve thousand people, representing around six per cent of its workforce, and, in the years that followed, an estimated four hundred thousand jobs were eliminated across tech
This right here, ooh you're so close! Those 400k people were fired because white collar workers, as a bloc, became powerful, and started making demands of management, demands like "you should do something about social inequality." During the height of the pandemic, most of that energy was focused on race. And those demands were met! C-suite executives and board members were forced by their white collar employees to implement DEI initiatives at work, put pronouns in their email signatures, have complex conversations about social power and race and gender at company all-hands. These same people are now sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Did they do those DEI things in 2021 because they wanted to, or because they had to? And if they had to, what power compelled them? Remember: these people gave 90 million dollars to someone who coerced one of his own employees to do oral sex on him in a hotel room!
The way I read this is that a company will sacrifice everything (in this case, incredible corporate culture) to maintain the balance of power between management and employee. As soon as I started reading about internal organizing, I knew exactly where this story was going to end.
Your job description re-written at the drop of a hat, sudden re-org and alienation from coworkers, feeling like an interloper at your own job, sudden gaslighting - that is what real power looks like. The only reason she was not immediately fired is because of actual labor laws, which H.R. knows inside and out. Were those laws not on the books every single one of those googler moms in that group chat would be fired within 24 hours. They probably were all pushed out in a manner exactly like Claire within the span of a few months. With a paper trail to CYA in case of a suit.
I remember this period of Google very vividly, it felt absolutely surreal to see everything about the company immediately leaked to the press and getting insane media coverage. Younger me was very skeptical and it was hard for me to reconcile what the truth was given the broader political climate and my own anecdata that none of the women I worked with empathized with or shared the experiences of the internal activists.
At the time, I had a gutt feeling that all of the stories I read on internal threads and that the loudest voices, largely came from women in non-engineering/product roles, and this article (+book) has somewhat confirmed that for me. Even Sergei cheated on his wife with a woman in marketing in 2013.
Since the majority of Google is engineers, I believe Claire's movement ultimately failed because most of the company (again, engineers), looked to their peers and didn't see any of the systemic issues the movement espoused.
27 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 46.0 ms ] thread..and they couldn’t just say “Grace Hopper”? These people have used computers before, right?
As a class they are overwhelmingly incurious people, and would barely notice if you swapped their industry out for Big Tobacco or bombs. They care exactly as much about tech as Jeffrey Epstein did about finance.
I wish to hope that more and more people are seeing the hollowness of all that these corporations posture and profess.
What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?
And yet I'd much prefer to have one kid with cancer be saved and allowed to live an average lifespan than to have thousands of old rich people extend their extractive existences for decades.
This right here, ooh you're so close! Those 400k people were fired because white collar workers, as a bloc, became powerful, and started making demands of management, demands like "you should do something about social inequality." During the height of the pandemic, most of that energy was focused on race. And those demands were met! C-suite executives and board members were forced by their white collar employees to implement DEI initiatives at work, put pronouns in their email signatures, have complex conversations about social power and race and gender at company all-hands. These same people are now sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Did they do those DEI things in 2021 because they wanted to, or because they had to? And if they had to, what power compelled them? Remember: these people gave 90 million dollars to someone who coerced one of his own employees to do oral sex on him in a hotel room!
The way I read this is that a company will sacrifice everything (in this case, incredible corporate culture) to maintain the balance of power between management and employee. As soon as I started reading about internal organizing, I knew exactly where this story was going to end.
Your job description re-written at the drop of a hat, sudden re-org and alienation from coworkers, feeling like an interloper at your own job, sudden gaslighting - that is what real power looks like. The only reason she was not immediately fired is because of actual labor laws, which H.R. knows inside and out. Were those laws not on the books every single one of those googler moms in that group chat would be fired within 24 hours. They probably were all pushed out in a manner exactly like Claire within the span of a few months. With a paper trail to CYA in case of a suit.
At the time, I had a gutt feeling that all of the stories I read on internal threads and that the loudest voices, largely came from women in non-engineering/product roles, and this article (+book) has somewhat confirmed that for me. Even Sergei cheated on his wife with a woman in marketing in 2013.
Since the majority of Google is engineers, I believe Claire's movement ultimately failed because most of the company (again, engineers), looked to their peers and didn't see any of the systemic issues the movement espoused.