In my seven years at Google, one of the most shocking moments came after I questioned our fixation with the word “guys.”
It was 2017, and Google had been facing gender pay gap allegations when I attended an unconscious bias training. Rather than directly discuss the issue, the instructors were obsessed with word choice, focusing on replacing “guys.”
“You should be aware that the term ‘guys’ is gendered and could be alienating for some Googlers, so instead you should be referring to groups of people you work with as ‘team’ or ‘folks’,” one session leader said.
When I challenged the instructor, raising skepticism that this language change would address the real issue, I got shouted down.
“How dare you!” a colleague said from the other side of the room. Other participants, and the instructor, began to scold me. I nearly got shouted out of the session.
Google used to be a place to ask questions. “You must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in their 2014 book How Google Works. “When you learn of something going off the rails, and the news is delivered in a timely, forthright fashion, this means — in its own, screwed-up way — that the process is working.”
Inside Google today, the process is not working. Previously accessible Google executives have disappeared, once acceptable questions can’t be asked, and a dispassionate arrogance has taken hold. Unsurprisingly, the company’s deficient culture is showing up in the product, most vividly in its recent Gemini debacle. As a user and shareholder, I’m concerned.
Let me give you my best explanation for how we got here. When I joined Google in 2015, the company’s culture of openness was in full swing. It was a universal practice to attend its weekly TGIF meetings and listen to Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or their lieutenants) offer candid, direct answers to probing employee questions, asked in-person or via ranked online submissions.
At these meetings, there were a few brave, recurring characters who asked confrontational in-person questions every week. Not every answer was great — for a few years the livestream offered live sentiment analysis and bad answers would immediately get lambasted on the internal meme page, memegen — but most of the time the information was high-quality, creating a culture of tuning in and taking the information sharing seriously.
Then, a shift began in 2017 when Google engineer James Damore circulated a memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” His controversial memo questioning Google’s diversity practices noted that “Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.” Damore zeroed in on “psychological safety,” a concept that Google had validated through research, and made sacrosanct to management, as critical to the effectiveness of teams.
Rather than reaffirm Google’s culture of open questioning and psychological safety by actively challenging Damore’s assertions, leadership fired Damore and ended the discussion. The irony wasn’t lost on the media — a CNN piece at the time noted that the fallout represented “perhaps the biggest setback to what has been a foundational premise for employees: the freedom to speak up about anything and everything.”
Google leadership did further damage to the company’s open culture following employee protests of military contracts and executives’ alleged sexual harassment. Following this employee action, Sundar effectively killed TGIF in 2019. He not only abandoned the weekly cadence, but also ended live questions, increasing the prevalence of skipped-over submitted questions and evasive “corp speak” responses. While supposedly due to leaks, the media widely and correctly interpreted this event as the culmination of Google’s abandonment of its open ethos. We stopped tuning in.
The closing of Google’s open culture harmed the product. Perhaps a more empowered and vocal Google employee base would have pushed for its nascent large language models to be incorporated within the languishing Google Assistant, or have stood up and flagged the uncomfortable flaws in Gemini’s image generation. Instead, Google’s AI strategy looks unmoored.
When the process of learning about something going off the rails isn’t working, it’s about what’s not said — the unasked questions at team meetings and product reviews, and the leaders not held accountable in public forums, that can result in a derailment.
Since Google’s 2023 mass layoffs, its employees have been more likely than ever to keep quiet. The layoffs, which were supposedly to correct over-hiring during the pandemic, impacted numerous long-tenured employees (myself included) without clear rhyme or reason. As a result, my former colleagues now tell me that it feels like everyone is at risk.
Lacking the forums for public questioning — and feeling their precarious job security — Google employees no longer feel fully able to speak up within the company. If Google doesn’t work to restore its ethos of open questioning, it will repeatedly suffer the same unnecessary embarrassment it has endured over the past months, much to the detriment of its shareholders and users.
Representatives for Google did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Big Technology is a newsletter about tech and society by independent journalist Alex Kantrowitz.
