First Person: The Rise and Fall of Google and the Rise of Google, Facebook, and the Tech Support — Words That Explain Tech Company Success and Layoffs
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From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is “First Person.” If you flip back through the mission statements of tech companies in their early years, it feels like a tour through a bygone era of techno optimism. Apple wanted us to think differently. Facebook aspired to make the world more open and connected. And Google, their unofficial motto was simple. Don’t be evil.
I think you are trying to raise a good point about the nature of work in tech companies. The tipping point was when Musk made it known that only hardcore workers would be welcome at the company. Tech CEOs were so excited about this that they were drooling.
Claire Stapleton saw all of this from the inside. She spent 12 years at Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, in corporate communications. Claire is writing a newsletter for people in the tech world. It’s called appropriately, “Tech Support.” In it, she gives advice to those rethinking their place in an industry they say took advantage of them.
Claire, there is a lot of news about tech companies and layoffs. You are the administrator of an online forum. What words are being used to describe the current events?
Some of the most common words I’ve seen over the past few weeks are dehumanizing, horrible, humiliating. Let me just — I’m just going to pull up one thing because someone left a comment to me that was very — hold on. Yeah, OK. “Getting laid off is one thing, but being disowned by your family after 18 years is another. It is what Google did to us. When I worked with people, they wouldn’t let me bring our lunch to say goodbye, but they could bring any person off the street.
Google: How Did You Get Your Google Ads? How Do You Wanna Go to Tech? What Did You Want to Learn About Google?
I want to learn more about those ideas. You know these tech companies, so I want to know about your own journey. Right, you got into tech in 2007, right? I mean, how did you land at Google?
Yeah, so I came to Google through college recruiting. I went to a job fair. And there was, alongside JPMorgan and The Gap, there was a table for Google. The time was a big boom for tech.
And I thought, wow, this is an amazing opportunity. I had no idea what I would do there. I was not a computer science student. I worked for a magazine calledHumor Magazine. Not the cookie cutter corporate type of gal. I was just completely entranced by the company. I almost did not care about what the job was.
I didn’t think it was true. I think I wrote in my journal that it looked like it was — the colors were punched up in Photoshop. The offices had a color combo similar to kindergarten. There were bouncy balls, and cork boards, climbing walls. It was a great place for a young person to be. The cafeterias were incredible, the farm-to-table cuisine. And the people seemed incredibly dynamic, ready just to dive in and improve the world.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Google Big Tech Work Culture: A Wonderful Place to Work – When Larry and Sergey Got Their Words and I Really Want to Be the Best
I didn’t even really know what it was going to be from the description as they gave it to me. There was a room in the communications department. The internal communications team put me on it. So I worked on internal news. TGIF was a weekly event that was hosted by Larry and Sergey for many years. And I also sent emails around.
And my remit, as it was presented to me, was to reflect the specialness of the company back to Googlers, to get them as engaged in what Google was doing, as excited in Google’s mission as they could possibly be, because that was how the company was going to continue its reign of innovation and being the best company ever.
I thought it was a really wonderful place to work. And I think that was genuine. I think there were definitely times where I would wonder, is this kind of a made up job?
I will say I was guzzling the Kool-Aid. I was assisting in manufacturing it. I sent out a weekly email. It was just a routine thing announcing the TGIF topic, the weekly staff meeting.
I like to use the company’s themes in a very quirky and dreamy way. And this is when I earned the nickname the Bard of Google.
Yeah. So I mean, I think Larry and Sergey had so much philosophy around the workplace. They said that we don’t intend to be a conventional company and that Google is not a conventional company.
The way the workplace is designed is to foster innovation and creativity in order to get people together to play volleyball, and cross-pollinate an idea. I think they wanted their employees to be the best they could be.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Google Lifer: When Larry Page Founded the Lab in Mountain View, Calif. It Was an Opportunity for a New Workplace to Move to New York
This is Google in Mountain View, California. Personal trainers are on site. Google doesn’t just take care of their employees’ bodies. The company does laundry as well. Google has 18 different cafes. All the meals are free. Only at the internet giant.
That was the way it was presented. I used to give tours around that time as well. I remember vividly, that often these would be foreign journalists. And a French journalist said to me, this laundry rooms, and cafeterias, this is obviously a plot to keep the workers here all the time. This is exploitative. They want you to stay.
I thought, wow, what a cynical perspective. Sergey and Larry talk about why they built their offices this way. And it’s a very progressive vision.
Larry Page was obsessed with doing impossible and crazy ideas. The lab was supposed to be a place for moonshot thinking. So this is where their idea came to cure death that Larry Page has an amazing quote that curing cancer was too small a problem for a company like Google with all of its brainpower, with all of its resources, that really they should be focusing on extending life. And.
It sounds like something out of a movie. Larry Page said, if only we could have two million people working at this company, think of all the good we can do in the world. Think of all the problems we can solve that governments can’t. He said that as leader of the company, his goal was to make sure every person had the chance to do social good. I mean, it was quite high-minded philosophical stuff. It was not BS from what I thought at the time.
I think that I thought of myself as a Google lifer, which is funny because, really, that’s not the typical millennial attitude is stay at one company your whole career. But I felt that it didn’t really even matter what my role was at Google. I was a part of something that was really historic.
So, you have arrived in this new type of workplace. You’ve said that the job felt like a dream compared to other kinds of work. The company started to shift when you saw it.
Yes. I got an opportunity — a transfer opportunity — to move to New York in 2012. I’ve been at the company five years. I had a sense of being restless even when it was a scene change, a role change, or some other change in the company. I was starting to feel a sort of itch.
And I got offered what I thought was the absolute perfect opportunity working at Google’s internal creative agency, which is called Creative Lab. I was singing and celebrating within the confines of the company. I was going to start shipping and selling things here and sing the praises of a company I have worked for.
The Creative Lab names and brands products from the early stages of the internet giant. But it also does a lot of traditional advertising, so Super Bowl ads and that sort of thing. I think that their motto is, remind the world what it is they love about Google. At least it was back then.
The environment shocked me. The majority of the creatives there — so the people who were doing the work of these campaigns — were temps, vendors, and contractors. I was shocked that there were some people who had red badges. They do not have vacation days. They don’t have access to any of the benefits that come with being a member of the search engine. They can’t use the massage program. They are not allowed to use the gym.
I know. A good massage program. Yes. They do not have the same ability to speak up about their working conditions. And as Google always said, the most important thing for creating high-performing, productive, happy teams is psychological safety.
There is a difference in psychological safety and team health when you are a contractor. And so I was — it was a real strain to sell the magic of Google. My day-to-day felt like that.
We started talking about people still in these companies who are very worried about what is happening in tech right now. You have your ear to the ground, as you say. The tech world is undergoing a huge realignment.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Google Big Tech Work Culture (The YouTuber of the Nightmare Fuel): The YouTuber Who Came to Japan in the Suicide Forest
Yes. Long-time golden child of the Google company portfolio. The societal issues that were getting the most attention when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 were hitting YouTube particularly hard. So the golden glow that had surrounded these big tech companies, the optimism, and the hope that they would transform society, that was waning big time.
My remit was social media with an emphasis on YouTube’s values. As we called it, we had a daily briefing every single day called “nightmare fuel”, which was the meaning of managing YouTube’s social media. That was our nickname for it. And it is.
Oh, it was unbelievable. But you can imagine in this era, there was, of course, Logan Paul, very powerful YouTuber at the time, cavalierly filmed himself in Japan in what’s called the suicide forest. He discovered a dead person hanging from a tree. I guess it was posted to his young fans in a vlog.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
YouTube: Where Do You Stand? What Have You Meant to Tell Us? What Do You Mean? How Have You Knew? Why Do You Want to KNOW?
So you’re really on the front lines of articulating the company’s position to people like me who were asking some pretty difficult questions about how YouTube was spreading disinformation, or radicalizing people through its algorithm, or having all these terrible things. I mean, how did you answer? What argument did you make?
Well, I think that what happened there is that YouTube decided, and the executives decided, that they wanted to stand for things. They wanted to speak about the issues of queer youth. There were anti-trans bills at this time. There was a lot of discussion of race in America. We want to do more for Black creators.
But time and time again, when you really talk to creators, what they really wanted was better protection against harassment, against hate speech. They wanted the brand to be safe. Advertisers wanted brand safety to be able to run an ad and not have it be on a al-Qaeda video or something.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
What did it feel like to be called upon to do logos at a big tech work culture? A glimpse from Google’s front door
Can you tell me more about that? What did it feel like to be called upon to come up with logos rather than concrete action?
I think it just highlighted a sense of meaninglessness, which I had really not felt in my previous years, that my job didn’t matter, or my job was really about slide decks and making executives feel like we’re doing all these great things. It seems like the world is starting to burn. It felt like we were taking credit for the problems when in fact we were making them worse.
So you’re starting to realize that the world outside of Google is being royaled by increasing polarization. Sexual harassment at the workplace was brought to the fore in the #MeToo movement. I don’t know when cultural turmoil came through the front door.
The New York Times reported that a man got paid $90 million after being asked to leave and the company found the claims to be credible. From my perspective, that was the turning point.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Why don’t women walk out? How Google can make the most empowered workplace in the world, not just a male executive? The moms email list
So I — from my old job of working on TGIF, I was always subscribed to a million email lists at Google. And this one email group was the moms group. The moms email list, which is an anonymous list. That email list exploded when the Rubin story broke.
And this was not a political list. This is people talking about how hard it is to be a working mother, or that I have a bumble chair for sale in Mountain View. And what came through was, sure, some outrage at this bombshell story. But I was just shocked by the amount of stories that women had of all the crap they’d put up with, essentially.
And I think it really revealed to me this underbelly that I had certainly experienced in Creative Lab, and in different ways in my disillusioning experience at YouTube, and how universal that was, where there was this gap between the ideals of Google as a company, and what people’s actual experience was.
We were supposed to be the most empowered workplace in the world. Why didn’t people feel able to complain against a male executive in their organization? From that email list I said why not walk out.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Google Walkout: Time is up on sexual harassment, abuse of power, systemic racism, and everything is going to change… It’s time for Google, right?
And if anyone’s interested in helping plan this thing, I’ve set up another Google group here, all internal, this is using the company’s tools. And that was a Friday night. I got up Saturday morning. I was aware that we were onto something.
Time is up on sexual harassment. Time is up on abuse of power. Time is up on systemic racism. It’s time enough is enough. We want structural change in the name.
Forced Arbitration for sexual harassment and abuse claims was ended in the wake of the walkouts. But it also further clamped down on the internal transparency and openness that had been its hallmark, according to Stapleton, who helped organize the walkouts and left Google in 2019 after the company allegedly retaliated against her. (Google said at the time that an internal investigation found no evidence of retaliation.)
But they had decided to say that this Andy Rubin payout as well as the other executive payouts were in the past. We are not proud of it. That was a different time in the past. Things are better now. We are going to make a systemic change.
I’m thinking about how you had spent most of your career celebrating this company and now you’re at the head of a protest against it. Did you see walking out as challenging the status quo of the company culture at that time?
I did. I felt brave and conviction in doing it because I had been unhappy. I will also say, though, that in my Google brain of the time, and being — having been so nourished on the idealism of Google from the early years, I believed that, on some level, the company would welcome this challenge because Google — of course, things might have gone astray or gone off-course.
They strayed from these ideals. The ideals still mattered to the company. And of course, they would want to fix these issues that were being raised. There is a lot of naivete in that. But I genuinely believed that this was going to be a positive moment for the company in one way or the other.
Yeah. I think that is a pretty rosy view to take of one of the biggest corporations in the world that doesn’t always live up to what it preaches.
How did I walk out? What I learned from my first encounter with the Doc Martens boots and what I had to do in my role as a researcher
Initially there was an embrace of the organizers. This weird misunderstanding of what the walkout was, is what I was asked to give my lessons learned about by my manager. And as part of this, I was presented with a pair of Doc Martens boots to celebrate my activism. I mean, it was absurd.
Normally, things went on for a few weeks. And then I got on a routine one-on-one Zoom with my manager. Out of nowhere she laid out a restructuring of my role. And that began my retaliation ordeal.
It’s — I understand how they have come up with some vague language to say this didn’t happen. It quickly became a hostile environment to be in. And I was pregnant.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
What do tech workers think about their work? A guide for tech workers to become a better person and to spend their time in tech companies, not how they feel about their jobs
Yeah, so on my last day, my entire team had been flown out to Malibu for an offsite. And they spent their day doing goat yoga at a mansion in Malibu. I was not sure how I could believe this.
I was thrown out of the building as other people laughed with the goats. So I just, I cleaned up my desk. And yeah, remarkably enough, I was escorted from the building by security. And yeah, that was it.
I really began to realize that there were some very big questions being raised by tech workers when I spoke out about the nature of work after the Google workers walked out. And I think a lot of people seem to be really reevaluating how they’re choosing to spend their time and their mindset or approach to the companies where they offer so much of themselves.
I began an advice column for tech workers. I was not thinking that I had the answers to this. I didn’t know how to respond to the question, now what?
And so I have a Substack where I publish letters from tech workers and respond to them. And I also keep a Discord server where that’s become a very active daily discussion space where people are just batting around life in late capitalism, life in these big tech companies, struggling with issues of meaning and purpose.
Yeah, I think that the culture is quite grim, that — Google itself said that psychological safety is one of the most important parts of any work environment. And that’s kind of been destroyed.
I was shocked by the number of people who were laid off during paternity or maternity leave, or who were on disability leave. I mean, there’s a cruelty is the point moment going on with the way that people’s livelihoods were curtailed.
“The Era of Happy Tech Workers is Over”: What the CEO and IT Management had to Learn from the First Three Years of Technology Company History
I think it’s like the New York Times Opinion headline, “The Era of Happy Tech Workers is Over.” There’s a new way of hiding behind mission statements about changing the world. The mask was pulled off. You just said work will not love you back. What do you mean by that?
I think that the tech companies gain power and gain billions and trillions of market share through a kind of manipulation of culture. It is hard for me to stomach as a big believer and an enjoyer of culture, I guess. A recipient of it in many ways.
Culture can be used to control workers. Giving them all these sorts of lavish perks and whatever, it’s a way of getting what you want out of people, getting them to give more. If you feel so grateful to be there and so lucky to be there, and you’re just hanging on, do you really feel comfortable asking for a raise and pushing back when you see something that doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel ethical?
In a lot of respects, culture was supposed to consolidate power. And what’s happening right now is another kind of power grab by the bosses.
One employee that was affected by the January mass layoff told CNN that revenue and growth is a top priority at the beginning of the day. There is nothing thought to the welfare of employees in the end.
I think there is a shift in power back to the management. If I could give a basic overview, I think it would be that management is out of ideas and direction and forgot where they came from.
Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing I want to ask you. We can see that the tech companies are just like everyone else, and that’s what makes us feel good. They are grabbing power. They’re acting callously when they feel they have to.
But broadening this out, they had such a huge impact on corporate culture in America. If you are making coffee, like Starbucks, or you are selling air conditioners, it doesn’t matter. Most companies have now adopted this mission-driven jargon that seeks to make workers think they are part of something larger than the bottom line, and to invoke this idea of family and trust.
I believe it will. Tech employees are now called workers in one very recognizable way. The sense that we are labor is shifting things around. There’s more talk of unions and other traditional solidarity building.
If a person asks how to relate to your work, how should you deal with it? What should I believe in my job and place of employment? If you were giving advice to all those young tech workers that you saw at your last day at Google milling around, what would you tell them?
Well, I think I definitely recommend a heavy dose of wariness of the kind of corporate propaganda. Again, irony. Because I was a happy propaganda shiller for many years. And then to just divorce your sense of vocation, and work, and meaning from the job as much as possible.
First Person: A Conversation with Google Founder and CEO, Orme and Arthur, for the New York Times Opinion, 2023/23/opinion
I think that part of what I’ve recovered since leaving is my own voice. What do I have to say? And that’s a really difficult exercise for me. And I’m envious of people that never really lost that connection to their own voice and sense of purpose and meaning.
For so many years, I gave that to the internet search engine, Google. I’ve been really inspired by tech workers who shared with me that they have a clear, on-paper mission and lens on the world that’s company agnostic.
“First Person” is a production of New York Times Opinion. We would love to hear what you had to say about this episode. Our email is [email protected]. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
This episode was produced by Orme and Arthur. It was edited by two females and a male. There are original tunes by Pat McCusker, Anna Jones, and other people.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html
Google Layoffs: Is It Really OK? An Employee Saying That Google is Not Immune Against Cybercrime and Wall Street CFOs
Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. The other members of the first person team are, from left to right,,,,,,,,, and. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury. I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
On the morning of January 20, one Google employee had to call tech support after getting hit with an unusual error message when they tried to log in to their work system.
The cuts were the latest example of a culture shift they say has been going on at the company for years. A culture that prized openness and feted employees has increasingly been tested and eroded by internal scandals, walkouts, mounting public scrutiny, business demands and the reality that despite the best efforts of prior leaders, or more likely because of those efforts, Google has in fact become one very large corporation.
“I think tech is maybe no longer immune,” one former employee said, adding that the layoffs marked “sort of the first move, or maybe the final move, of Google and a lot of the other tech companies becoming a little more normal.”
In an interview with CNN, Stapleton said that he cared about the people and the mission more than the tube slides and climbing walls.
The emergence of new-age companies that sought to emulate its example with open floorplans, in-office ping pong tables, and luxury offsite events was set in motion by the example of Google. A number of people think 2015 will be a turning point.
One person affected by the layoffs said that if you hire bankers and CFOs from Wall Street, you move away a bit from what the founders had in mind. He said the founders were heavily invested in the company so they signed off on this.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-employee-culture/index.html
Google Layoffs Employees: The Case of a Digital Human-Computer Interface and the Context of the Collaborative Culture
“That’s a great example of the tension in the culture … everybody had open calendars forever,” she said, “that you could see anybody’s calendar was almost a flex of the culture, like, we’re so trusting and open. Suddenly, they wanted to roll that back to protect the power.
More recently, former employees say, Google has pulled back on material perks like in-office massages and travel and offsite meeting budgets. “I think a lot of us were hoping that it would be enough to keep our jobs because they were cutting all these expenses,” one laid off worker said.
One former employee, who had a job that advocated for user well-being and Balance in Users Relationship with Technology, was upset when they got shut down and cut out of conversations and projects while trying to push for employee wellbeing practices. The former employee took a mental health leave.
The former employee said that he had to reconcile the idea of belonging and being inclusive, but could not actually show up.
“The company is dealing with some real challenges, whether you have the legal and regulatory backdrop … and we have a macroeconomic backdrop that is at best uncertain,” said Scott Kessler, global tech sector lead at research firm Third Bridge. In February, the company posted a sharp decline in profits for the final three months of the previous year, and they are likely to fall again in the current quarter.
Despite some frustrations with how the layoffs were carried out, Google didn’t entirely abandon its commitment to employees in the process, Rout noted. Tech giants provide generous packages for recently laid off employees and affected US employees received 16 weeks of salary in addition to other benefits.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-employee-culture/index.html
The Attitude of Google: What Makes it a Better Place to Work? An Employee’s Perspective on the Company Culture and Disconnectedness
“There’s kind of a myth in tech that a lot of folks believe, that with a good work ethic and your own strong performance, you’ll be able to remain employed,” Lawrence told CNN. “But I think we’ve seen that you can’t just rely on individually doing your best, we need to collectively work together and organize.”
Stapleton added that while Google will almost certainly remain a desirable place to work, as one of the world’s preeminent tech companies, the draw for employees may now be more about material perks like salary than the creativity and camaraderie that once defined the company’s culture. In other words, it will be perceived like a more conventional company.
A person who used to work for the company claimed that GOOGLE painted “You Belong” on a wall of their building about a month before they were laid off. It was part of an internal campaign to build up employees’esteem.
The employee said that she put the sticker on her laptop because she loved it so much. The message was a dark joke after the layoffs.
“It’s like, you belong here, but also 12,000 of you are now not allowed to even be on the campus [anymore],” the employee said. Communication loss, a disconnection and direction lost were some of the factors that led to the company being disconnected.