Transparency and directness – I have always been a pretty passionate guy, especially at Waze. After the acquisition, I was invited to speak on many different Google panels and events and very quickly, I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG… I actually stopped speaking at events where the majority appreciated what I was saying but the minority that was offended by something (words and not content) made it a pain. I began watching what I said, what I discussed and began wearing a corporate persona (I was still probably one of the less PC characters at Google but this was my cleaned up act…). I value transparency and feel that people should bring themselves to work but that also means a certain tolerance of people not saying something exactly as you would like them to or believing something you don’t. That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it’s off to HR for you…
This is from Noam Bardin, “Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?“, PayGo. It time stamps as “a few seconds ago,” but I know that can’t be right because I read it this morning. That’s a picture of Bardin at the top.
Bardin was CEO at Waze, one of my favorite apps when I’m driving. (Because I have a radar detector, the warning about cops is less valuable to me when I’m driving than the warning about cars parked on the side of the road.) Waze was bought out by Google some years ago.
The whole article is full of insights, some of which Arnold Kling has highlighted. It’s really a beautiful analysis of incentives. The part I quote above is one of the most disturbing. Bardin’s comment about Google on the issue of words versus content reminds me of Professor Henry Higgins’s comment, in his My Fair Lady song, “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?”, about the French: “The French never care what they do, actually, As long as they pronounce it properly.”
Similarly, the people at Google’s HR don’t care how terrible are the things you say as long as you use the right words. I’m sure this is an exaggeration and that Bardin knows it’s an exaggeration, just as I’m sure Henry Higgins was exaggerating, but Bardin’s making an important, and concerning, point.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Feb 28 2021 at 5:59pm
This kind of dysfunctional corporate culture can only survive because antitrust law is not enforced. It’s not just about politics, part of the reason why Google is so notorious about killing products is career incentives for coming up with a new half-baked products, but none for the hard slog of baking it all the way through.
Sightline
Feb 28 2021 at 6:49pm
Having worked at Corptech, and startups, and everything in between, his whole essay points towards that explains a lot of what he and many of us have observed; namely that the huge margins of Corptech have removed both the connect to and consequences from business performance for the average employee.
Bardin connects this to compensation and a sense of entitlement but there are numerous other trends (including employee activism) that result from this phenomenon; when one’s job is entirely disconnected from any sort of tangible business result, focus tends to things someone can derive tangible value from: one’s own internal status, comfort, or pet causes.
Usually it’s around this time that rot sets in; however Corptech is so insanely profitable and locked in to its markets that it can go for decades before the results become apparent. Look at IBM in the 70s and 80s or Microsoft in the 2000s for an example. Now, of course, we are seeing employees go after each other in the public sphere rather than purely internally; a very new phenomenon.
Kling talks about the Dunbar number; there is another number (higher than Dunbar; I would put it at about 3-400 P&L employees) above which the average employe focuses inwards, not outwards.
Phil H
Feb 28 2021 at 8:44pm
Absolutely bizarre. Do you swear at work?
Personally, I love to swear. I have a filthy mouth, and I value swearing as a resource for humour and self expression. But at work, I don’t swear. I was taught that as a kid! And in the corporate workplaces where I have been, no one else swears, either. (Or at least, it’s vanishingly rare.)
This guy went on public panels and swore, and funnily enough, someone complained. That’s not a sign of workplace dysfunction! That’s just what happens when you behave inappropriately in a professional context.
Kevin Dick
Mar 1 2021 at 1:04am
I’m sorry, but this is culturally obtuse.
Different subcultures have different rules. I’ve been part of the Silicon Valley startup scene since 1992. At many startups _not_ swearing in certain circumstances would be considered odd and lower your status.
It’s not all surprising that someplace like Google would cause some cultural confusion. It is unquestionably corporate, but it was a startup and acquires something like a startup a week (though most of these are “immaterial” because Google is so large and thus never disclosed).
MikeW
Mar 1 2021 at 1:12am
He mentions four-letter words once, but my impression is that was only a minor part of what he’s talking about. The mention of PC seems to be the bigger issue. Having to watch what you say very carefully to avoid offending anybody, because some people take offense so easily.
Brandon Berg
Mar 1 2021 at 3:47am
Swearing is ubiquitous in tech. I’ve worked at four companies that are household names, and people swore extensively at all of them. I haven’t worked at Google, but I would be very surprised if it were an exception.
KevinDC
Mar 1 2021 at 10:34am
Yes, at pretty much every job I’ve ever had. Possibly there’s a cultural barrier here that makes this seem unusual from your perspective, but people using so-called “swear words” in the workplace in the United States is about as common as a rainy day in Seattle – the norm, rather than the exception.
And I’m pretty confident that tech companies aren’t some island of verbal purity where use of swearing is unusually taboo. If you read anything that looks into the workplace in places like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc, it appears the exact opposite is true. I’m thinking of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, or stories showing internal employee communications at places like Google (employee communication boards where employees at Google were expressing outrage at James Damore, for example), and so on. Employees at all levels of these organizations swear regularly and freely in both casual and official communication. That’s just a fact.
And it’s in light of this fact that it seems just a tiny bit bizarre to suggest those complaints against Bardin were genuinely motivated by people being sincerely upset that they heard someone say a bad word, rather than the bad word simply being a pretext.
robc
Mar 1 2021 at 10:56am
It is not just the US, when I worked in Switzerland, my Swiss boss said all the best swearing was in English. You could tell when something was serious because they switched from German swears to English ones.
I was working primarily with scientists and engineers.
Floccina
Mar 1 2021 at 4:02pm
To all above most of my work experience most people have not used swear words.
Brandon Berg
Mar 1 2021 at 4:47am
I’m skeptical that this is true even as a stylized fact. An obvious high-profile counterexample is James Damore. His diversity whitepaper didn’t use any offensive words or phrasing, and did not attack anyone personally, but the content was a direct attack on the prevailing dogma on the causes of women’s underrepresentation in tech.
I think it’s probably true that you can get away with saying some pretty vile things, as long as you’re promoting, rather than dissenting from, left-identitarian ideology, but I don’t think wording or phrasing is the main issue.
David Henderson
Mar 1 2021 at 9:00am
Point taken, and even though I don’t know Bardin, I would be over 90% sure that he would agree with you. He stated it inaccurately.
MikeW
Mar 1 2021 at 12:55pm
I don’t know, I think it fits. I think by the right words, he means words that disagree with their ideology… that is, not the words per se, but the meaning conveyed by them.
David Henderson
Mar 1 2021 at 1:26pm
It absolutely fits. That’s why I said that he said it inaccurately. I think most readers will get what he meant and not be diverted into the direction that Brandon Berg went.
Jon Murphy
Mar 1 2021 at 8:58am
That’s a fascinating article. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the issues that Gary Miller examines in his book Managerial Dilemmas in that there are tradeoffs between hirearchy and dynamicism. Indeed, if we take Mr. Bardin’s discussion as generally accurate, it appears that Google is making some of the same managerial mistakes Sears made that Miller discusses.
RPLong
Mar 4 2021 at 10:45am
I’ve worked at a couple of tech startups outside of Silicon Valley, and my experience is that tech employees are some of the most passive communicators I have ever encountered. That passivity also includes passive-aggressive behavior as well.
Passive communication is dysfunctional communication. It causes all sorts of interpersonal problems, and it’s nearly impossible to get any good work done in an environment in which passive communication is the norm.
An often-overlooked fact about Google, and a few other tech firms, including one of the ones I worked for, is that Google employees are subject to an internal ratings system, meaning that every employee rates every other employee. Literally, a popularity contest. Now, imagine that you work in an organization where passive communication is expected of you, and where you can be punished via the use of an anonymous ratings system. It’s just a recipe for dysfunction.
To the extent that these organizations set the tone of American corporate culture, it’s a bad sign. But it is also inevitably temporary. I look forward to the day when some other industry becomes the cultural beacon of society.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Mar 5 2021 at 1:23am
I wish I could muster some sympathy for Mr. Bardin. His business philosophy seems to be hell is other people: he wants do be able to do whatever he wants (like hiring and firing employees at will), but other peoeple, like his employees, corporate headquarters, the judicial system, get in the way. Not only that, what he wants is incoherent. He wants independence for his company while still being owned entirely by another company.
Above all, he wants, in the passage quoted, to be gratuitously offensive. He won’t settle with being just truthful, as he himself all but admits, he wants to be offensive while he’s being “truthful, and is fishes for our pity, he whines as if he had been fired, when his leaving Google was, apparently, a voluntary act that happened many years after he entered it.
Like I said, I wish I could feel some sympathy for him, but I don’t.
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