Google is a very “sink or swim” place, and these well intentioned studies aren’t going to change that. I suspect they get funded in part for their positive PR aspect. Anecdotally, two of the three teams I worked in at Google were among the highest performing if you look at impact and results, and there was nothing “touchy-feely safe space” about them. It was pretty much “deliver or GTFO”, and how you feel about any of it didn’t matter one iota.
You won’t be fired per se. You just won’t perform well against your peers an will feel like shit because of that. After some time you’ll leave on your own accord to a team where demands aren’t quite as high. There are plenty of those around: it’s a huge company now, and demanding, high performance teams that do something that actually matters are a small minority.
How do any of us know what the other means by 'touchy-feely safe space' ? I am pretty confident I have never worked in such an organization although someone with a different work experience might disagree. Same goes for 'deliver or GTFO' << that pretty much defines every work environment even though they are all different.
What I’m saying is that at no point in my rather lengthy stint at Google were my feelings even a passing consideration to anybody in my chain of command. A couple of peers cared, but even there the environment is much more impersonal than in other companies I’ve worked at. And that’s _good_ for things like code quality etc, because your design won’t gain approval if it sucks no matter how chummy you are with your peers or boss. Same with code reviews, you will regularly get mercilessly savaged with the most pedantic nitpicking you’ve ever seen, sometimes to the point where your blood would boil. And that’s how it’s supposed to be if you want excellent engineering. But it’s not the most hospitable atmosphere for you as a person.
Obviously it’s not possible to hire just “the best”, but I can confirm one thing: the quality of their engineering talent is very high, and a lot of the best people in their respective fields work there.
Yeah, I'm guessing that if you're underperforming and you bring up how you feel psychologically unsafe you'll still get drummed out all the same. Which validates your unsafe feeling...
Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article.
The way this works is:
1/ Google crunches some data
2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT)
3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)
Do you work at Google, or what are you basing these bold assertions on?
FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I can assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.
Of course Google takes building effective teams seriously (and rightly so, it's People Ops org does good work), but that doesn't really have anything to do with the dynamic here.
I also read the article and saw no data points or anything that would suggest "some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers" had any numbers to work with. (beside that certain employees were involved)
You could read it that way, but it's something that I see in many different organisations when talking to people about how they do the data science-in'
The thing is that confirmation bias is real, and cost and time often preclude the use of strong systems to exclude it. Additionally The Tribe quickly develop narratives which then dominate funding and discussion. Phrases like "we've moved to execution".
He didn't say anything at all about OP's ability to read the article. "bold assertions" clearly refers to the 3 points he lists and you seem to be deliberately misreading.
OP made some very bold claims about how Google works internally and unless he's a first-hand witness (Google employee), he really needs to provide some data of his own to back his assertions up.
I read the OPs comment as partly a comment on how Google has been releasing social commentary without releasing the raw studies specifically on gender and salary. They were being investigated for cheating women on salary.
I read the response from the Googler as an appeal to authority. If Google doesn’t release the study, they open themselves up for conjecture and skepticism.
To criticize OP for being inaccurate is fine, but absent any references, Google is making the same argument as the Googler.
Or he’s suggesting that if he worked at Google he would face an immediate disciplinary measure. He said he’s a manager so he’s involved in the prosecution that J. D. denounced (and was fired for).
Reminds me of the scene in The Circle where Tom Hanks says “we believe in the perfectability of human beings!”.
Google is such a frightening, creepy company that really tries hard not to be. Kind of like the guy who breaks into a girl’s home with a gun screaming “why won’t you go out with me I’m a nice guy”.
If you work for Google no offense, you’re still competitive on the job market and Google became creepy as a function of emergence rather than anyone’s choice, but still wanted to say something...
"…the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues."
"When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well."
The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?).
I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.
It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...
> It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...
I'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do.
> One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
What isn't mentioned is that the 'Mind in the Eyes' test is used to assess autism and spectrum conditions.
If that kind of empathy is necessary for good teamwork then the neuro-diverse are at a disadvantage in that type of work and systematically excluded from companies that do all of their work in teams. Companies that take this seriously could assess where teamwork is important - and where it isn't - and hire appropriately.
Where do you think teamwork is not important? Such circumstances are vanishingly rare at best, mostly debatable, and will get rarer as humanity's ambition increasingly exceeds the capabilities of individuals. Meanwhile, having the ability to work with others will always be better than not.
Writing novels has always been a primarily-solo activity. I don't see demand for those dropping off drastically.
The guy who re-plumbled my house was working there alone pretty much all the time. That seems to be a common way of working in many trades, and plumbers don't seem desperate for work.
A fair number of bits of heavily-used software started out as one person's project (many of the successful ones do eventually morph into community projects, but titles like "benevolant dictator for life" show that community doesn't necessarily mean a flat "team" setup). Lots of programming languages fall in this category. Sublime Text. Indy games (and, not so very long ago, the majority of games). Building software as a solo endeavour does seem to be somewhat out of fashion right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't work.
What's your definition of teamwork? If it is that in order to complete a large task (e.g. building an iPhone) that it is beneficial to work together with others, it's obvious, because even the best engineer in the world doesn't live long enough to fix everything currently.
If however you are saying that there exist many tasks for which you actually work together to come up for a solution for a known problem, I doubt that.
Case in point: Perelman.
To make it more concrete: if one is using cloud services, is one working together with that could service people? Is that teamwork? I don't think so. Yet, it is cooperation.
In jobs where you need to hold a heavy object in place such that someone else can put a nail somewhere is only teamwork, because of technological limitations. Robots that can do this already exist, but they are too expensive. As such, I also don't count those classes of work as teamwork.
Taking the above into consideration, what remains of your "teamwork"?
Perhaps "teamwork" is not the best term, if it invites such a narrow interpretation. But even for mere "cooperation" as you put it, empathy is needed. In your cloud service example, if a client ever needs tech support, at least the support person is trying to read the client's mind, or they're not doing their job. Even in the case of holding up heavy objects, don't underestimate the value of sensitivity to the other person's needs; I've been on both sides of screwups in that area.
GP asked about hiring at companies, so solo projects are either not germane, or an illusion. Are you the only dev on a project that serves larger business goals? You're on a team! You need to understand how your work fits in with others' efforts, and either adjust or explain how others should adjust instead, most likely both. Oh, and don't forget to document everything, another empathy-heavy task. I think we all know this; it's just another way of discovering the meme that devs who understand the business go farther.
Part of the point I was trying to make is that those "large projects" you were talking about are going to become more common and more important, out-competing smaller teams that are almost by definition less capable in terms of feature output. If a solo dev outcompetes a team, it's because they were better at empathizing with customers. If that's not exactly teamwork, it doesn't avoid the problem, either.
I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently.
It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them.
Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees.
I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.
Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).
Ah! I think you are onto something there. I noticed it as well; Reddit is the worst offender as even serious and well founded comments are butchered and lighthearted/funny ones are upvoted in the 10000s. If you have better stuff to do, you will just think; fuck it then I don't answer. I would love to have good discussions with new peers online, but doing that in open court seems to attract the weirdos so I just go do something else.
So that said; where do people go online who want to have serious (tech) discussions? Must be some secret place with a person like Linus kicking everyone out he doesn't like at first offense.
So far this seems the best we have, and this is the only community I really will comment in. I think keeping up such a community means we have to ensure that the serios and well founded comments are upvoted, and the lazy/annoying/"funny" comments are kept off.
Personally I found Hacker News to be the best place for serious and thought-out comments. Research and critical thinking is rewarded (most of the time), while silly jokes (when not embedded in more substantial comments) and inflammatory content are frowned upon. It's actually a joy to read comments here, while I really dread —and often avoid— it on other sites.
Apart from that, technical forums for specific topics, like the ones for certain Linux distributions or other open source projects, have their merits; but they are naturally limited in the breadth of topics discussed. (Some might have very interesting and broad off-topic discussions though)
I largely agree, but HN has some blind spots in this regard - most discussions about the workplace, open plans, working from home and especially interviewing almost invariably descends into angry rants and borderline conspiracy theory. My gut feeling is that this had been pretty constant, but the comparison of this thread with two years ago suggests otherwise.
I've also had a couple of brushes recently where what I considered reasonably calm and uncontroversial posts on a technical subject got alternating up and down votes for hours. I don't recall that happening before.
I can't count the number of times recently that I've starting composing a comment on here, only to decide against posting it due to laziness and/or disinterest in the response. In fact, just a minute ago, while writing this comment, I decided not to post this comment, hit the back button and started scrolling on. But then a minute later realized what I was doing and decided to come back and comment.
Maybe that's just a sign of my growing older, but I think some of it might be the degradation of the community's general moral.
I do this all the time. It's a form of rubber ducking.
Articulating myself, to myself, even if I don't share it, is often worthwhile. Why do I agree? Disagree? Is my observation novel? Enough to share?
Once I figure out what I'm thinking, do I care enough to share? Is the recipient worth my time? Do I really want to interrupt someone who's digging themselves into a hole?
This has been my view for a while too. Most internet forums I use are a shadow of their former selves.
When I first started browsing hn I was blown away with how smart and insightful the posts were. Ideas I had never thought of and quite a few I struggled to even comprehend.
Are you sure it's not because you're better educated and harder to impress? I thought the same thing until I did a deep dive on some old articles and the comments weren't noticably different.
Probably a factor, I also think it's partly because the forums I use at the moment used to be programming centric, but have since broadened their appeal. Hn to Tech business, reddit to literally everything. Lobste.rs has been a fantastic alternative for decent discussion
I was the hub of a PC-Relay network (the FidoNet era), a moderator on CompuServe, and very active on various game boards. It's never been any different.
Social circles have a life cycle, span.
When the current one sours, go find the next one. Or start a new one with some friends.
I think Clay Shirky's article about a group being its own worst enemy applies. Probably monkeyspheres too.
As the internet population increased the mean intelligence went down. Such an obvious and expected trend, I have to wonder if you're ok. Maybe you're so well-trained that you stop thinking when you jump to a conclusion.
That's only obvious if you take it as a given that the more money you have the smarter you are. Besides that, has there been a large change in the portion of the population with Internet access since 2016? And, besides that, the supposed "proof" the Internet has gotten stupider is becoming critical of Google.
> That's only obvious if you take it as a given that the more money you have the smarter you are.
Intelligence isn't a ladder, so that wouldn't make sense in any context. Effective understanding of the relationship of Google vs God vs a domestic country's population vs yourself, does require some sophistication that involves general intelligence (in aggregate) and education. There are correlations with median income and these factors. As the population of the world gains access, simplistic fears about shadowy organizations are bound to gain ground from a myriad of historical and cultural parallels, as the median education level falls (among other associated factors, like wealth).
I wonder if it's simpler than that: Google (Alphabet) has destroyed a lot of good will in the past two years, and the comments in the section reflect that.
I can think of several instances in the past two years that makes me mistrust them more, such as taking down accounts at random and taking a peron's entire digital life with it (causing me to move as much as possible off of Google), the random flagging of documents (aka, they actively scan them and will take off content they don't like), etc.
On the stock Android phone (I have a Nexus), it has felt that they have been trying actively to suck up as much data as possible (the final straw for me to put on a custom ROM is when their google keyboard sent everything I typed to thir servers, effectively making it a keylogger).
I personally think the skeptism they have now is very warrented, and the days "Don't be evil" is long gone.
That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all.
One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc."
While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.
Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. We should of course base our opinions of writings based on what is written instead of what is written about, but the vast majority of people do not do this. And it goes both ways. Is the response to this publication of the article unreasonably negative, or was the response to the original publication unreasonably positive? And of course as you aptly point out there's a much greater concern about bias in reporting now a days, and an article that is essentially a single sided puff piece for a company/individual/field/etc is something that is going to draw far more scrutiny than it might have not all that long ago.
> Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years.
I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me.
Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.
People are starting to realize that the productivity gains of automation aren't being shared by everyone, and they've decided to blame the automators instead of the politicians. I am slightly concerned that being a developer will become anathema in certain circles. (As usual, I blame Reagan)
As someone inside the US, I feel like there was a theme of opposition to fracking not long ago, and it switched to opposition to tech, almost as if it was orchestrated. This could be just my paranoid tendencies speaking, but if the anti-silicon valley sentiment is largely genuine, why does it seem to me like the anti-fracking sentiment has disappeared from the forums I read? It's as though some astroturfing campaign was attacking what was perceived as the strongest industry in the American economy, and when it didn't make much of a difference, moved on to another target.
That is an interesting observation that does seem true. However, I also think there's a very benign explanation for it. Something we forget is that news agencies are not benevolent. The themes a news organization publishes are not going to be based upon what is most valuable to society, but what is most valuable to them.
Right now all traditional media (mostly as opposed to social media) is seriously struggling. Traditional media has been experiencing constant downsizing/layoffs and other consequences. And this includes big names like the New York Times. Cable news networks are likely only continuing along since they're owned by huge, profitable, corporations that can subsidize their operation in exchange for the valuable ability to use them to push agenda.
So what I'm getting at here is that if public reception and 'excitement' towards anti-fracking started to decline, news agencies would begin to cover it less and move to more exciting things that bring in the clicks which bring in the revenue. Blaming Silicon Valley is something that will likely continue to bring in hits since we live in this really paradoxical economy. By most of all measures, our economy is doing terrifically - yet simultaneously we're seeing things like real wages remaining stagnant for decades. So people want things to blame. And Silicon Valley is an easy target as it's seen as a realm of excess and increasingly societal apathy on part of the big players. This [1] single [phenomenally well framed] image is likely an embodiment of how many see the increasing divide. Makes for good clicks in any case!
The same story can generate different conversations depending on the tenor of early comments, who makes those comments, who sees those comments, and if and what response those comments illicit. Things as small as whether or not a post appears on a weekend or weekday (the previous was a Thursday -- $ date --date="618 days ago") makes a difference.
On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.
That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added).
Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments.
Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this.
But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
> But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.
This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed this (I havn't)? Could probably do a word count on the top 30 articles over the course of a few months to find out.
I think it's because team management in tech, despite acknowledgement of the results of these studies, hasn't actually integrated the results meaningfully, so we're not really better off 2 years later.
Hey downvoters, I find that a reasonable request. The comments here and in the old thread do not seem to recommend to read it, so if someone already read it, please be so kind to summarize it for the rest of us.
Google wanted to optimize teams. Couldn't find any patterns that show why one team does better than another. Saw psychology report indicating that having people free to express themselves is important for team performance, as if this is a major revelation. Rest of the paper focuses on a single anecdote that is supposed to show this.
As an aside, I am familiar with and critical of the psychology report [1] they reference in this article. The paper had a psychologist break people into groups and then perform tasks like plan a shopping trip. The psychologist's data indicated that the sum of the measured aptitudes of the teams did not correlate against their performance, so they then jumps from that to suggesting that therefore individual aptitude does not affect team performance.
I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does.
Actually not, people free to express themselves was not major point. Major point was like from Dale Carnegie 'Don't criticise condemn or complain'. People do not like to be criticised and they work better if they feel no one is judging them.
The NYT has run of the most effective ad campaigns in recent years, somehow placing itself as the last bastion of 'objective reporting', and the intellectual smugness that comes with it.
From my observation, they are giving platform to just one side of the debate in many issues, e.g. title IX legislation, where they are portraying a move that is supported by a number of reputed law professors[0] as another Trump goverment vs the victims argument:
Sorry, that was too quick. The idea was to insist on the contradiction of having piece praising Google HR practices while the company is known to lack diversity and allowing personal development.
Edit: can't reply at this time so had to edit in place - it would be good to get some discussion if others disagree with my experience, downvoting silently and avoiding conversation is
a shame.
In time we will actually see that Google overly filters and selects and decides on the candidates it chooses, and that singular overarching, overbearing process guarantees they end up with a homogenised staff that all think and act the same.
My three years there were a lesson in what to avoid when hiring. Difference of thought is seen as being against the hivemind. It is encouraged and tolerated only as much as to flush out all the individuals not on message.
Sadly even with with xooglers, the Stockholm syndrome is strong and persists many external roles later.
Friends don't let friends work for Google.
