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Internal 'Civil War' Pits Google Against Its Own Employees

Sunday May 19, 2019. 06:34 PM , from Slashdot/Apple
Google employees 'want a say in and control over the products they build,' reports Fortune, in an article headlined 'Inside Google's Civil War':

As the so-called techlash has cast a pall over the entire sector, organized employee pushback is slowly becoming part of the landscape: Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change; at Microsoft, employees say they don't want to build technology for warfare; at Salesforce, a group has lobbied management to end its work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency... But nowhere has the furor been as loud, as public, and as insistent as it has been at Google. That's no surprise to Silicon Valley insiders, who say Google was purpose-built to amplify employee voices.

With its 'Don't be evil' mantra, Google was a central player in creating the rosy optimism of the tech boom. 'It has very consciously cultivated this image,' says Terry Winograd, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford who was Google cofounder Larry Page's grad school adviser and would go on to serve on the company's technical advisory board. 'It makes them much more prone to this kind of uprising.' Page, now 46, and cofounder Sergey Brin, 45, intentionally created a culture that encouraged the questioning of authority and the status quo, famously writing in their 2004 IPO letter that Google was not a conventional company and did not intend to become one... Now Google finds itself in the awkward position of trying to temper the radical culture that it spent the past 20 years stoking.

Boasting more than 100,000 employees between Google and its parent company, Alphabet, executives acknowledge that the company is struggling to balance its size with maintenance of the principles, like employee voice, that were so foundational... The walkout was an inflection point, a sign that the company is now poised to disrupt something even more foundational to our economic system: the relationship between labor and capital. It's a shift that could perhaps begin only in Silicon Valley, a place that has long believed itself above such traditional business concerns -- and, more to the point, only at this company, one that hired and retained employees on the premise of do no evil. Now employees seem determined to view that manifesto through their own lens and apply it without compromise, even at the cost of the company's growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/fqYO_eaKlSM/internal-civil-war-pits-google-against-its-own-...
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