A woman has regrets about how it changed work culture

First Person: The Story of Google, Apple, Google, and Silicon Valley through the Lens of Modern Technology and Industrial Human Rights (Extended Version)

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From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is “First Person.” It feels like a tour through a bygone era if you review mission statements of tech companies from their early years. We were told to think differently by Apple. Facebook aspired to make the world more open and connected. Their unofficial motto was simple. Don’t be a bad person.

It was clear what the message was to their workers. The job was more than just a paycheck. It was a moral calling. And that philosophy spread out beyond Silicon Valley and changed what the rest of us thought corporate work culture should be. The motto, “don’t be evil,” has been taken out of its handbook by now. And across Silicon Valley, there have been brutal layoffs and harsh action taken against worker activism.

When Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, it was a relatively new public company and had just landed for the first time at the top of Fortune’s list of the top 100 companies to work for. She used to work in marketing and became known as the Bard of Google for her internal emails celebrating the company’s culture.

There are a lot of layoffs in tech companies. You run an online forum for tech folks. What kinds of words are they using to describe what’s happening right now?

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. And that’s what Google did to us. I worked with people that are not allowed to bring us in for lunch to say goodbye and can bring any random person off the street.

Google Big Tech Work Culture: An Experience Illearned from my first Google AdS/Client (before I knew Google was a big tech company)

I want to dig into some of those ideas. But I want to first ask you about your own journey, because you really know these tech companies. You got into tech right out of college? I mean, how did you land at Google?

It was a few years after the Google IPO. Facebook was starting to heat up. And soon, we’d see Twitter, and Instagram, Square, all these companies. And that was the subject of the news. It was covered with so much detail that it seemed as though it was an exceptional place to work.

And I thought, wow, this is an amazing opportunity. I did not know what I would do there. I wasn’t a computer science student. I was an English major who worked at the “Humor Magazine.” Not the cookie cutter corporate type of gal. And nevertheless, I was just absolutely entranced by the company. I almost didn’t care what job it was.

I am not sure if I can believe it. I believe I wrote in my journal that it looked like it. It had a colorful color menu inside of the offices. There were bouncy balls, and cork boards, climbing walls. I mean, it was sort of this paradise for a young person. 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: What Google, Googlers, and Google’s Future (and the Future) Wanted to Share with Google

They gave it to me, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. It was in the department that dealt with communications. The internal communications team put me on there. I worked on internal news. And then I also managed a weekly event called TGIF, which was, for many years, hosted by the founders Larry and Sergey. I also sent emails to people.

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 are times when I would wonder if it is a real job.

I would say I was guzzling it. And not only that, I was helping manufacture it. I sent out a weekly email. It was just a routine thing announcing the TGIF topic, the weekly staff meeting.

The themes of the company are quirky and dreamy, and I would always take them in a strange and weird way. And this is when I earned the nickname the Bard of Google.

I think that it’s precisely what the opposite of what Larry and Sergey intended for the company. They told us that we are not a conventional company, but we do intend to be one. Well, it has become a conventional company, thanks to the internet. A lot of the tech companies are.

The way that the workplace was designed was to foster innovation and creativity across departments, offices and departments alike to get people to play volleyball and cross promote an idea. And so I think that they were trying to inspire maximum creativity out of their employees.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

Google Life: A New Workplace for Humans and Humans. Google Life in Mountain View, California. When Larry Page and Sergey met

This is Google in Mountain View, California. Personal trainers can be found on the site. Google doesn’t just take care of their employees’ bodies. They also do their laundry. There are 18 different cafes. The meals are free. Only at Google.

And that was really how it was presented. I used to give tours of that time as well. I remember vividly that they were often foreign journalists. A French journalist told me that this laundry rooms and cafeterias are obviously a plot to keep the workers here all the time. This is exploitative. They just want you to never leave.

And I was struck by the cynicism of the perspective. Because I’m here listening to Larry and Sergey talk about why these offices are built this way. And it’s a very progressive vision.

Yeah, I think that Larry Page was singularly obsessed with doing impossible and crazy ideas. And that’s when Google X was formed, which was supposed to be a lab for moonshot thinking. This is where they came up with the idea to cure death and Larry Page’s quote that it was too small a problem for a company with all of its resources, should be focused on extending life. And.

— it sounds incredibly grandiose. 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 his job as the leader of the company was to make sure that every person had opportunities to do social good. It was high-minded and thought- provoking. 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.

This new kind of workplace has you in it. The job felt like a dream compared to other jobs. When did the way you saw the company start to shift?

Yes. I got an opportunity — a transfer opportunity — to move to New York in 2012. At this point in time, I had been at the company for five years. I have seen many people leave the company when they change jobs and I was restless at the same time. I started to feel an 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. Here I’d been singing and celebrating Google culture internally. And here, I was going to start shipping, and selling, and singing the praises of Google to the outside world.

Creative Lab does naming and branding for different early-stage Google products. 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 there immediately 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 surprised that there were people who had red badges. They don’t get vacation days. They don’t get Google benefits. They can’t use the massage program. They can’t use the gyms.

I know. A good massage program — I mean, it’s — Yes. They do not have the same ability to speak up about their working conditions. According to the company, the most important thing for high-performing, productive, happy teams is psychological safety.

The level of psychological safety and team health is not the same as being a contractor. It was a real challenge selling the magic of the internet to a large audience. It was like that on a day-to-day basis.

We started this conversation talking about hearing from people still inside these companies who are feeling really destabilized by what’s going on in tech right now. You have your ear to the ground, as you say. The tech world is undergoing a major realignment.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

The Nightmare Fuel: YouTube’s Golden Child of the Golden Age of Technology and America’s Next-to-Leading-Minimal Technology

Yes. Long-time golden child of the Google company portfolio. The societal issues that were coming to a fervor at the time of Trump’s election in 2016 hit YouTube particularly hard. The hope that these companies would transform society was waning because of the golden glow surrounding them.

My remit was social media with an emphasis on YouTube’s values. So what that meant is that we were constantly briefed onnightmare fuel, which is the content on the various social media handles. That was what we called 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 found a dead person hanging on a tree. I guess he posted it to his fans on a vlog.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

The YouTube Corporation: What did it really want to be about in the 21st century? The message was out there, and that’s what YouTube wanted to do

There had been no restrictions with the content on the site. Freedom of expression was always its main value. But what does freedom of expression look like in a time when some very dangerous things are going on? So my job was to prove out and demonstrate to the world YouTube’s net value to society. It is difficult to do that job if you do not really believe that it is true.

I don’t think that’s the case, but I do believe that the executives decided to stand for things, and that’s what happened there. They wanted to be out there talking about LGBTQ youth. This is a time when there were anti-trans bills going around. There was a lot of discussion of race in America. We are going to do more for Black creators.

What creators really wanted was more protection against harassment, against hate speech, and often times, it was the same thing. They were looking for brand safety. 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

Why do we think of logos instead of concrete actions? What made you want to think of Google? Why did you start thinking about logos?

Can you tell me more? What made you want to think of logos instead of concrete action?

I feel that it showed a sense of meaninglessness which I hadn’t felt before, as my job was more about making executives feel like we are doing all these great things than it was about my job. It feels like the world is starting to burn. And it just felt like we were trying to take credit for solving the world’s problems when we were actually making them worse.

So you’re starting to realize that the world outside of Google is being royaled by increasing polarization. In the year 2017), the #MeToo Movement brought awareness to harassment in the workplace. When did that cultural turmoil come in through Google’s front door?

“The New York Times” broke the story about a Google executive getting paid $90 million after he was asked to leave, essentially, after claims, one of which the company itself had found credible. From my viewpoint, that was the point.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

Why Not a Walk Out? – Rubin’s Story on Google’s Mom’s Email List – An Employee’s Viewpoint

So I — from my old job of working on TGIF, I was always subscribed to a million email lists at Google. The moms group was part of the email group. The email list is anonymous. That email list exploded the day that Rubin’s story broke.

And this was not a political list. People are talking about how hard it is being a working mom, or they are selling chairs in Mountain View. And what came through was, sure, some outrage at this bombshell story. The amount of stories that women had of all the shit they had put up with surprised me.

It revealed a lot to me, such as how universal the differences between ideals of the company and what people actually do was, and how close the ideals were to each other.

We were supposed to be the most empowered workplace in the world. Why did people not feel like they could actually raise a complaint against a manager or against a male executive in their organization? I said from that moms email list, why not a walk out?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

Time is Up on Sexual Harassment, Time Is Up on Systemic Role of Power: A rosy view of a giant corporation

I set up another group at the company and if anyone is interested in helping, they should do so. And that was a Friday night. And I woke up Saturday morning and I knew that we were onto something.

Time is up on sexual harassment. Time is up on abuse of power. It’s time for systemic racism to stop. Enough is enough. Structural change is what we demand.

The executives from the company played it in a very clear way. The CEO of the company, Sundar, had sent an email to the company saying if people want to participate with it in this, they’re totally welcome to, which was great publicity for us as walkout organizers.

They decided that the payouts of Andy Rubin as well as the other executives were not new. And we aren’t proud of it. But that was not the current time. Things are better now. And we will make this systemic change.

I think about what you spent your career celebrating about this company and how you are at the head of a protest against it. Was walking out challenging the status quo of the company culture at that time?

I did. I think I felt like doing it was worth it because I had been unhappy. I thought that the challenge would be welcomed by the company, since it probably would not have gone astray, as a result of being nourished on the idealistic side of the company.

They deviated from the ideals. But the ideals still mattered to the company. They would want to fix the issues that were being raised. There is a lot of carelessness 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 of one of the biggest corporations on the planet, because it just exposed how it doesn’t always practice what it preaches.

What I Learned About the Google Big Tech Work Culture, When I Was a Little Girl: Walk Out with a Man, and I Quit When I Finished My Job

The walk out organizers got an embrace. I was strangely asked by my manager to tell him what I learned about the walkout, which was weird because it was a misunderstanding and also co-opting. I was given a pair of Doc Martens boots to celebrate my activism. I mean, it was absurd.

I think things went on for a few weeks. And then I got on a routine one-on-one Zoom with my manager. And she laid out, what felt to me out of nowhere, a restructuring of my role. And that was the beginning of my response.

It’s — I understand how they have come up with some vague language to say this didn’t happen. It quickly became hostile for me to be in. And I was pregnant.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

How do tech workers get what they want from their employers? A few years ago when I was running a tech company and I was ejected from a building by security

Yeah, so on my last day, my entire team had been flown out to Malibu for an offsite. They did yoga at a mansion in Malibu. I just couldn’t believe this.

Here I was ejected from the building as everybody else was laughing along with the goats. So I just, I cleaned up my desk. And yeah, remarkably enough, I was escorted from the building by security. And yes, that was it.

I heard a lot about how people were excited to organize workers, and increase their consciousness around worker power, which was very different from what I had heard previously, like in 2007, or 2008.

So I started an advice column for tech workers. That wasn’t me thinking I had the answers to any of this. But quite simply for myself, I had no idea of how to answer the question, now what?

There’s 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.

The culture is grim, that’s what I think, and psychological safety is one of the most important parts of any work environment. It kind of has 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. There is a point in the way people’s careers were stopped that is cruel.

Tech companies seem to be undergoing a McKinsey-esque efficiency exercise and there will be a lot of shocking and heartbreaking stories. I think it is important to remember that work will not love you back, so I think it is important to hear these stories.

I think that the tech companies gain power and gain billions and trillions of market share through a kind of manipulation of culture. I was a big believer and enjoyer of the culture and it’s hard for me to stomach when I hear that. A recipient of it in many ways.

Culture can be a way of controlling norms and controlling workers. Giving them all sorts of perks is a way of getting what you want out of people, and 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?

I think that culture was about getting control of power. And what’s happening right now is another kind of power grab by the bosses.

“At the end of the day, and probably at the beginning of the day, there is an abiding devotion to revenue and seemingly endless growth,” another employee affected by the January mass layoff told CNN. That comes with no thought to employees welfare in the end.

Then you had Mark Zuckerberg saying this is going to be the year of efficiency. And all of this focus on workers, and company culture, and the perks, I think obscures the fact that there’s been a lot of mismanagement of these companies. He put billions into the metaverse. If this will play out as an investment, it’s still not known. The entitlement and absurdity that I see is the executives, not the workers.

I would like to ask you this thing. Because we can look at this reckoning with tech and think, OK, the tech companies have shown themselves to be just like everybody else. They’re grabbing power. They act heroically 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. The goal of the mission-driven jargon that most companies use is to make workers feel like they are part of something bigger than the bottom line and to invoke the idea of family and trust.

It has metastasized to every part of corporate America. Do you think this unmasking of the tech companies will impact the broader conversation about work and the way workers understand their place in the system?

Google Big Tech Work Culture: What Can I Say About It? Or How Should I Tell Them? And What Should I Say to Tech Workers?

As you think back, if someone comes to you now and asks, how should I relate to my work? What should I believe in what I’m hired to do? 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. It was another irony. I was happily propaganda shiller for a long time. To just get rid of your sense of vocation and work and meaning as much as possible.

I think my own voice is a part of what I have recovered since I left. What do I have to say? And that’s a really difficult exercise for me. I am envious of people who have a strong sense of purpose and meaning.

But I outsourced that to Google for so many years. 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.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html

The New York Times Opinion: A Tale of Three Disappearing Employees: Google Tech Support Behaving Like It Was The Last Move

It is a production of the New York Times Opinion. Tell us what you thought of this episode. We have an email that is first [email protected]. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

This episode was produced by Wyatt Orme with help from Derrick Arthur. It was edited by Anabel Bacon and Kaari Pitkin, mixing by Pat McCusker. The original music was composed by the three writers: Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole.

Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker do fact-checking. The rest of the team is made up of a number of people. Special thanks to all of the above. I am referred to as 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.

Three employees spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, saying they were among the 12,000 workers who lost their jobs that day. While the extent of the layoffs was staggering, and by far the largest cuts in its history, it was the way the cuts were handled that stunned many inside and outside the company.

“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.”

Google laid off employees: What they wanted to see was what they said, and how they realized their authentic self-expression in terms of user relations with technology

It was not the tube slides or the free wi-fi that drew me to it, but the people, the mission and the sense that it was very creative and freewheeling, that drew me to it.

The emergence of a wave of companies that wanted to emulate its example with open plans, in-office ping pong tables, and offsite events was set off by the example of Google. But many point to 2015 as a turning point.

“You hire bankers and CFO positions from Wall Street and then they tend to want to please Wall Street, and you move away a little bit from what maybe the founders had intended,” one former employee affected by the layoffs said. He said that the company’s founders continued to be heavily invested in the company.

“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. They wanted to roll that back in order to protect the power.

In-office massages, travel and offsite meeting budgets have been taken away from Google by the past few years. “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, whose job was to work across various teams advocating for user well-being and balance in users’ relationship with technology, grew frustrated after repeatedly getting shut down and “cut out of conversations” and projects while trying to also push for employee wellness practices. The former employee took a mental health leave.

“One of the things that I was really addressing in my leave, in terms of burnout, was this sense of trying to reconcile the difference between the talk about belonging,” the former employee told CNN, “and realizing that even with all the talk of inclusivity, I couldn’t actually show up as my whole, authentic self to work.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-employee-culture/index.html

The Google Story of Loss: How Google’s Digital Ad Business Became a Myth in the Age of Crowdfunding

Alphabet grew its workforce by more than 50,000 employees over the past two years as booming demand for its services during the pandemic boosted profits. But in more recent quarters, the company’s core digital ad business had slowed as recession fears caused advertisers to pull back their spending.

Despite some frustrations with how the layoffs were carried out, Google didn’t entirely abandon its commitment to employees in the process, Rout noted. Affected US employees received at least 16-weeks salary in severance, in addition to other benefits, among the most generous packages provided to recently laid off employees by tech giants.

Lawrence spoke with CNN and said that there was a myth in tech that people thought would allow them to remain employed. I think we have seen that you can’t rely on someone to do their best and you need to 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.

About a month before the January layoffs, one former employee said Google painted “You Belong” on one of the walls in their working area. It was part of a larger internal campaign to build morale among employees.

I loved that sticker so much I put it on my own laptop, the employee said. But after the layoffs, the message felt like “a dark joke.”

“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. “There was some disconnection there, some communication loss about the company and the direction we were going.”