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Photo source: Vox
The world's largest IT companies are experiencing a crisis of confidence. Not only from the outside
The last year and a half has been difficult forGoogle (that is, Alphabet, of course, but the old-fashioned way is more familiar), and the New Year holidays were marked by at least two high-profile publications on this topic. Editorialggstudied the materials and tells what is known about the crisis within the “good corporation.”
Good Corporation on the Warpath
In October 2018, 4,000 Google employeessigned a petition against cooperation with the Pentagon and the provision of developments for military purposes, and 10 people quit because of the information that emerged. The company was forced to abandon participation in the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) project and lose $10 billion in favor of its “cloud” competitors.
Also in 2019, Google is under pressureemployees and the public did not extend cooperation within the framework of another project with the Pentagon – Maven. Maven uses artificial intelligence to enhance drone strikes. Google has been working to develop machine learning algorithms that would help the Pentagon strengthen its overall surveillance capabilities. The company tried to justify to employees that its part of the work was “non-violent” in nature and concerned only video surveillance. But one way or another, all such Pentagon projects are related to military operations or counterinsurgency. According to Gizmodo estimates, we are talking about a contract worth $9-$15 billion. Therefore, Google sought to defend the project to employees.
As a result, in addition to monetary losses and strainedrelations between management and subordinates for Google, both of these stories were also marked by a PR crisis, since the company had previously sought to build an image of being socially oriented.
Tidbit China
In October 2018, Pichai confirmed that Google was working on a censored version of the search engine for China.
In 2010, the corporation left the Chinese market.due to censorship. The country's authorities demanded not only full access to user data and company infrastructure, but also full cooperation on their part to ensure that Chinese users see only content that meets government standards.
Former head of global affairs at GoogleRoss LaJounesse remembers how important it was for Google at the time to defy the regulator, which was constantly tightening censorship. In making its decision regarding China, the corporation was guided by the principle of staying there as long as it did more good than harm. At some point, she could no longer adhere to this principle and left. It was a historical event – For the first time in the world, a non-state company refused something to the Chinese government.
But the billion-dollar Chinese market – too mucha tasty morsel for many, and many years later Google did not give up the dream of reaching it again. Mostly, according to LaJounesse, this thought haunted the company's new managers, who no longer shared the values of the veterans.
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Photo source: Engaged
But what is even more surprising for the “veterans”Google is that secret projects have appeared in the company. Dragonfly started in 2017 and only those involved knew about it. The first news about a censored search engine for the Middle Kingdom leaked to the media in August 2019. In the fall, 1,000 company employees signed a public letter demanding that they abandon Dragonfly. They were also supported by organizations that fight for human rights. LaJounesse was among those who tried to dissuade Google management from returning to a country where human rights were being violated. As a result, the project was abandoned. True, there was no particular desire on the part of the Chinese government to give it a go; negotiations took place at a very low level and eventually stopped.
According to LaJounesse, the unit thatdeals with the cloud platform, also did not hide the existence of contracts with the government of Saudi Arabia. It even wanted to hire its own team to review projects for compliance with safety principles and company policies. LaJounesse's tasks included monitoring compliance with human rights and UN requirements, and the further the company went, the more it moved away from these norms, interacting with dictatorial regimes. But the icing on the cake for the former head of international cooperation at Google was the opening of a center in Beijing in 2017 that focused on developments in the field of AI. He left his post.
Harrasment without punishment
Another protest against management's actionsAlphabet dealt with sex scandals and workplace harassment. In the fall of 2018, employees of the corporation staged a protest against the fact that those who were involved in the scandals were not only not punished, but also left the company with a golden parachute. Among the accused was “father” Android Andy Rubin. 20,000 people, or about 20% of the corporation's employees, joined the protest. They demanded that the results of the investigation be published. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised to implement them and implement a system that would allow harassment to be reported.
Instead, in April of this year it became known aboutpressure on two protest organizers – Claire Stapleton of YouTube and Meredith Whittaker of Google Open Research. In the summer, both employees left Alphabet. But the employees of the corporation did not give up attempts to unite in order to oppose the company's management in cases where they did not agree with it.
In mid-November 2019, Alphabet fired one ofemployees and two more were suspended from work on charges of mishandling the personal data of colleagues. According to Bloomberg, Google said it fired the employee for disclosing names and personal information in the media. One of those suspended sought out and distributed confidential documents outside of his job, while another monitored the individual calendars of employees working on community platforms. The publication reports that they were all activists who fought for their rights at Google. Another, earlier Bloomberg investigation says that the fired man discovered a secret Google development, a browser extension that would allow people to find organizers of mass protests within the company. For example, if someone creates an event on the calendar for more than 10 rooms or 100 participants. Google denies that this was the purpose of developing the tool. They say they created it to teach employees not to invite large numbers of people to meetings unnecessarily.
Reporters also found that the company overFor several months, she developed a tool to search for posts that caused discontent among employees and to moderate the company's internal forums. According to some Google users, the tool already appeared on their computers in October this year.
The end of free thought
Publications in Bloomberg, CNN and New York Timesfocus on the fact that at Google there is a growing tension between employees and management. Previously, the company encouraged employees to speak out about company projects and policies at special meetings. But it looks like this is coming to an end. On the eve of 2020, CNBC published an article entitled “Google Veterans: The Company Has Become Unrecognizable,” in which journalists exposed even more problems within the corporation based on interviews with current and former employees.
In 2019, there were changes in corporate culturebig changes, and the departure of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which both former tops did not really explain, became a sign of these changes, the publication says. Before leaving, both acknowledged problems with trust, which is difficult to scale across 100,000 employees. Former HR director Lazlo Bock previously pointed this out; according to him, the company has changed so much that not all current employees know what it was like before. Martin Casado, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes that the brain drain from Google is now simply colossal. Several other interlocutors of the publication said that bureaucracy has increasingly become the reason for dismissal from Google lately. Previously, the corporation was famous for its ability to discuss problems with management, but this is no longer the case. Some employees claim that the company began to chase the number of personnel, so rather weak participants appeared in the teams.
The triumph of intolerance
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Photo source: National Files
In a publication on Medium LaGunesse leads yetseveral cases of insults and harassment in the workplace, when senior colleagues raised their voices and brought the younger ones to tears, humiliated each other because of race, etc. The former manager tried to convey the problem to HR, but it turned out that the department was somewhat abolished and some of the tasks were transferred, in his opinion, to insufficiently competent specialists. LaGuness claims to have left the company in support of national minorities, the LGBT community and human rights in general. In his opinion, the problem began to grow due to the fact that Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved away from the leadership and problems of the corporation, leaving everything in the care of new top managers.
The crisis of trust and transparency is recognized by the CEO himselfAlphabet Like the founding fathers, Pichai associates it with “growth problems.” True, he himself spoke out about this in the framework of commenting on yet another crisis moment for Google. When the company hired a former White House employee, Miles Taylor, who officially supported the ban on Muslim entry and the tightening of visa requirements. And it stirred up another wave of indignation at Google.