18
votes
The Great Google Revolt: Some of its employees tried to stop their company from doing work they saw as unethical. It blew up in their faces.
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- Title
- The Great Google Revolt
- Authors
- Kate Conger
- Published
- Feb 19 2020
- Word count
- 7517 words
One thing I wonder about and which isn't really explored in this article, is dissent versus activism, and what is the difference? And I think it might be about questioning decisions versus questioning authority.
The kind of dissent that I thought Google encouraged from the beginning was the kind where you disagree with a policy, gather evidence for making a change, and write a document or some slides presenting a case to the decision-makers that they should do something different. It's what I imagine a lawyer would do, strongly making a case, but ultimately recognizing the decision-makers' authority to decide for everyone. The way to make a change is to persuade them.
This doesn't seem to be what activism as understood by activists is about? That seems to be at least in part about questioning the basis of authority, saying that you are, or should be, a decision-maker in your own right. It's saying you deserve power beyond what was delegated to you.
When that line gets crossed, the relationship fundamentally changes.
Hmm I think questioning decisions often gets treated as questioning authority, and I think that sometimes questioning authority can actually be good for business. Rigid architectures of authority can actually persist in making mistakes in ways that can cause routine issues to continue unsolved, or worse it can lead to catastrophic blind spots. There's a really good book that I think hits on this called "Seeing Like A State" with the subtitle of "How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed". Basically while a bureaucratic structure by design tries to create a unidirectional flow of information for the sake of efficiency, sometimes that can create a rigid and unyielding structure that is at inevitable risk of catastrophic failure. In those circumstances, it is in everyone's best interest for the workers to question authority. It is even in the best interest of the shareholders and the business owner. This is counter-intuitive but it is the foundation of the modern HR system, and I think in certain ways Google's immaturity as a corporation here illuminates why they haven't figured out the function of HR in a business. If they continue to fail to value this role in their corporate strategy, I think it is likely they will have a catastrophic failure in their future.
I've read a review of "Seeing like a State" and it's pretty interesting. Note, however, that many people are in favor of increasing legibility and state capacity, at least when they are used to things being legible and it benefits them. For a political example, many of my relatives take it granted that everyone has a driver's license (or alternative ID) and are incredulous that checking ID's when voting could possibly be bad. Not having an ID just seems sketchy.
I am not sure how this connects with employer-employee relations, though?
The book is more nuanced than "measuring is bad" :). It does a good job of describing some contexts that predicate the failure states of systems, political, economic, and technical. This is why it connects.
Related, but obviously anecdotal:
I applied for an internship at Google and had an online coding challenge with one hard and one easy question. A lot of people get follow up interviews, even when they only answer the easy question correctly and I am very sure I also answered the harder question in an optimal way (with a good runtime).
The questions that you also got asked to see whether you are a good fit, were questions like:(paraphrasing) 'if my employer asks me to do something that I feel is unethical, I would still do it' -> I answered no.
I mean I never felt that this was a cause, and there could be lot's of other reasons. Just figured people would be interested that this is part of the internship questionnaire
As paraphrased, I think the only answer that makes sense is, well, it depends what you mean by unethical?
One way to answer that is, yes, there are things I definitely wouldn't do. But there are also things I think might be wrong where I would ask for an explanation, but wouldn't necessarily try to stop the train.
Did you not get a follow up? Your post doesn't specify.
I did not. I did very well on the pre interview - online, but I did not get any personal interview.
I think the article misses the boat in portraying this largely as a struggle within large company, and not trying to think through the larger ethical issues in most software companies. The "we're paid to write code, now just write code for all comers" is pretty pervasive. And maybe that's OK, but the number of developers who haven't even thought about it disturbs me.
Mike Monteiro's Ruined by Design is a decent starting point on the wider issues.