Google Management Method Called Interrogation by CNBC
November 21, 2019
DarkCyber, happily ensconced in rural Kentucky, does not know if the information in “Google Employees Protested the Interrogation of Two Colleagues by Company’s Investigations Team, Memo Says” is accurate.
But the headline alone is quite interesting. The news story states:
The memo said Berland’s [a Google employee objecting to certain Google projects] questioning lasted 2.5 hours and was conducted by Google’s global investigations team, which allegedly told the employees that they were “not decision-makers” but that they would relay the workers’ message “up the chain.”
The memo seems to have been written by Googlers unhappy with the interaction of some Google professionals and two employees who had voiced concerns about the company’s work for the US government.
Please, read the original CNBC story.
DarkCyber jotted down several observations while two of my team and I tried to figure out who was on first:
1. The meeting was described as an interrogation. That in itself is an interesting word. Maybe interrogation is the wrong word, but it is clear that the meeting was not the equivalent of what my mother called a “kaffeeklatsch.”
2. The meeting involved an investigations team. DarkCyber did not know that Google had such a team, but presumably CNBC is confident that the ever popular online advertising company does. Does the investigations team have a uniform or maybe a badge with the cheerful Google logo?
3. Two and a half hours. My goodness. That’s longer than many feature films. The length of time brings some images to the forefront of the DarkCyber team’s hive mind. Here’s one that one of the programmer analysts called up from his Apple iPhone. (The objectivity of the iPhone search function must be considered, if not investigated.)
A cheerful setting for an informal chat or not?
Net net: If the CNBC story is accurate, Google’s management methods are quite interesting. Not even the high school science club to which I belonged in 1958 considered interrogation of non science club members. Grilling a science club member was simply not on our club members’ radar.
How times have changed!
Stephen E Arnold, November 21, 2019
Google: The Emerging Cancel Culture
November 16, 2019
Google has terminated a number of products and services. My favorite is Web Accelerator, but you may have other candidates. The cancel phenomenon — whether practiced by Microsoft with its wonderful Zune product or Hewlett Packard’s fascinating Autonomy deal — means that big companies change their minds. Poof. Time, money, and maybe a customer are two are vaporized.
Cancelled. Some in government may use the phrase “with extreme prejudice” to signal this approach to an ill-advised decision, a wonky product, or a troublesome entity.
The Verge, a real news outfit, published “Google Is Scaling Back Its Weekly All-Hands Meetings after Leaks, Sundar Pichai Tells Staff.” The write up approach this cancel culture move as “scale back”, noting that the Verge stumbled upon an email from Google’s CEO to the Googlers. The Verge revealed:
In the note, Pichai begins by praising what Google has achieved through its large workforce. “But in other places — like TGIF — our scale is challenging us to evolve,” he writes. “TGIF has traditionally provided a place to come together, share progress, and ask questions, but it’s not working in its current form.” He writes that employees “come to TGIF with different expectations,” with some looking to hear about “product launches and business strategies” and others looking for “answers on other topics.” Only about 25 percent of the company watches the meeting each week, Pichai says. He also says that there has been “a coordinated effort to share our conversations outside of the company after every TGIF” and that those efforts have “affected our ability to use TGIF as a forum for candid conversations on important topics.”
“Google Will No Longer Hold Weekly All-Hands Meetings Amid Growing Workplace Tensions” explains:
Google is getting rid of one of its best-known workplace features: TGIF, its weekly all-hands meeting. The company confirmed to CNBC that it will instead hold monthly all-hands meetings that will be focused on business and strategy while holding separate town halls for “workplace issues.”
Yep, unfriended, terminated, modified, or cancelled. Mostly the same action spun in different ways.
Several observations:
- What’s the best way to avoid problematic staff? Avoid them? That’s one approach, and a path less fraught with legal hassles than firing the un-Googley.
- Google’s challenges span numerous legal hassles from US jurisdictions. Is it 50 for 50 now? Not even major leaguers can bat 1,000. Google can and is. How many strike outs await?
- The chest X-ray matter (please, see Fast Company’s story)
- The billion dollar dust up with Oracle is back in court, the Supreme Court no less. See the Silicon Angle story, please).
What’s up?
Google’s activities are increasingly interesting. My phrase for the firm’s approach to management is HSSCMM which is short hand for high school science club management method. What adds a handful of kokum to the digital stew served in the employees’ only cafeteria.
How many Googlers enjoy this rare and hard to find spice? Perhaps Googler’s analysts can quantify their data and provide some insight. A Google Trends diagram might show a curve like this one from Scientist Cindy?
Just cancel that. Unfriend!
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2019
Google: Chronicle Is Not a Sci Fi Disaster Film. It Just Seems Like It
November 12, 2019
“Google’s Cybersecurity Project ‘Chronicle’ Imploding” may not be true. If the information in the Economic Times is accurate, Google has created another business school case study about Silicon management methods, what DarkCyber describes with this acronym HSSCMM (high school science club management methods).
In 2018 Alphabet, the rejiggered “owner” of Google was created to be what the write called “an independent start up.”
Yeah, that sounds good.
The goal of Chronicle was modest: “Revolutionize cybersecurity.”
Yeah, that sounds even better.
Engadget reported in June 2019:
The cybersecurity company launched in January 2018, and it released its first commercial product, Backstory, in March. In a blog post, Chronicle CEO and co-founder Stephen Gillett said Google Cloud’s cybersecurity tools and Chronicle’s Backstory and VirusTotal are complementary and will be leveraged together.
The Economic times’ write up states:
Google’s cybersecurity project named “Chronicle” is imploding in trouble and some employees feel its management “abandoned and betrayed” the original vision, media reports said.
Staff, including the CEO, have looked for green pastures elsewhere. Chronicle was moved back to the Google mother ship. Salaries were a sore point. It seems Chronicle employees were paid less than other “real” Googlers.
Let’s assume that the information is maybe, sort of accurate. In this non sci-fi thought space, here are some observations:
- Thinking, assembling, announcing, and doing can be enhanced with management. No management, problems. Google seems beset with some non-linear challenges.
- The life span of this Google activity seems brief: January 2018 to November 2019. Is the time between launch and problems becoming more abbreviated?
- Google’s moon shot factory may be veering more and more into a boundary world: Big ideas fail due to the humans working on creating a reality.
To sum up: Chronicle may be another marker on the management superhighway. On the other hand, the Chronicle issue is real.
We’re back to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer, who observed:
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
My high school science club was unreal but real as well. Click here for the theme song to Chronicle. Sorry, I meant Twilight Zone.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2019
Google Protest: An Insulting Anniversary
November 2, 2019
DarkCyber noted this write up in CNet, an online information service, which may not be capturing too many Google ads in 2020. Here’s the title and subtitle of the story:
The headline is Googley; that is, it is designed to make the story appear in a Google search results list. The jabber may work. But what may not be as efficacious is building bridges to the Google itself. For example, the write up states:
The Google protests [maybe about sexual matters, management decisions, money?] didn’t achieve everything their organizers were seeking. Several Google workers and former workers are dissatisfied with the company’s response. Organizers say the company has done the bare minimum to address concerns, and employees allege that it has retaliated against workers and sought to quash dissent. “They’ve been constantly paying lip service,” said one Google employee who was involved with the walkout. “It’s insulting to our intelligence,” said the person, who requested anonymity because of fear of retribution from the company.
Then the observation:
Google declined to make its senior leadership team, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Sundar Pichai and human resources chief Eileen Naughton, available for interviews. In a statement, Naughton touted changes Google has made over the past year, including streamlining the process for people to report abuse and other problems.
A few observations may be warranted:
- Google’s management methods may follow the pattern set in high school science clubs when those youthful wizards confront something unfamiliar
- A problem seems to exist within the GOOG
- Outfits like CNet are willing to explain what may be a Google shortcoming because Google is not longer untouchable.
Interesting? If paid employees won’t get along and go along, how will that translate into Google’s commitment to enterprise solutions? What if an employee inserts malicious code in a cloud service as a digital protest? What if… I don’t want to contemplate what annoyed smart people can do at 3 am with access credentials.
Yikes. Insulting.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2019
Google: The World of Borges Is Real
October 27, 2019
“Google CEO: The Company Is Genuinely Struggling with Transparency, Employee Trust” is paradoxical. Google has become similar to one of the imaginary confections of Jorge Luis Borges’ Shadows and fantasy are difficult to distinguish, even more problematic to understand.
The write up channels Bloomberg:
In early October, Google employees reportedly discovered a previously unknown team within the company that is building a surveillance tool to “monitor workers’ attempts to organize protests and discuss labor rights.
How can a company which asserts “Google understands your search requests better after altering its algorithm.”
DarkCyber wonders if Google’s senior management relies on the company’s “machine learning fairness” methods.
As Borges noted:
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
Poor Google.
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2019
Google: Managing Staff a Challenge
September 24, 2019
DarkCyber is not sure about the accuracy of “Exclusive: Google Insider Turns Over 950 Pages Of Docs And Laptop To DOJ.” The story appeared on Saraacarter.com (the second “a” is a middle initial). Ms. Carter’s about page states:
Sara A. Carter is a national and international award-winning investigative reporter whose stories have ranged from national security, terrorism, immigration and front line coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sara A. Carter is currently an investigative reporter and Fox News Contributor. Her stories can be found at saraacarter.com. She formerly worked as a senior national security correspondent for Circa News.
The write up asserts that:
A former Google insider claiming the company created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms – in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content – delivered roughly 950 pages of documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division Friday.
The story is dated August 13, 2019, and DarkCyber spotted the link on September 23, 2019. In August 2019, Project Veritas revealed that the alleged Google insider is / was Zachary Vorhies.
Project Veritas does have a Google Document Dump page. You can view the files and download them at this link. A representative document is “Algorithmic Discrimination from and Environmental Psychology Perspective: Str5ee-Inducing Differential Treatment.”
The write up is an academic review of findings which, upon reflection, are mostly common sense. Manipulation can be accomplished via stress causing and stress relieving.
What struck DarkCyber as interesting is that the cache of documents has not made much of a splash in the last few weeks.
Other observations include:
- Unlike the now long-offline Google research papers which I cited in my 2003 Google Legacy monograph, the documents in this cache are more touchy-feely.
- Google’s ability to control its confidential documents appears to have some gaps.
- The “insider” turned canary reveals that Google is not generating happy Xooglers.
Net net: The high school science club approach to management may need some upgrades.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2019
Chef Cooks Up a Management Stew
September 24, 2019
What happens when a programmer deletes open source software? The answer is to cancel a contract with the US government.
Information about this interesting not-so-passive resistance moment surfaced on the Chef blog. Barry Crist allegedly wrote:
While I and others privately opposed this and various other related policies, we did not take a position despite the recommendation of many of our employees. I apologize for this. I had hoped that traditional political checks and balances would provide remedy and that our relationship with our various government customers could avoid getting intermingled with these policies. However, it is clear that checks and balances have not provided relief to the fundamental issues of the policies in question. Chef, as well as other companies, can take stronger positions against these policies that violate basic human rights. Over the past year, many of our employees have constructively advocated for a change in our position, and I want to thank them.
The fix?
Do not renew the US government contracts. Donate money to groups “that help vulnerable people impacted by the policy of family separation and detention.”
Vice describes the employee’s deleting code and the Chef decision to dump US government contracts this way:
a ballooning activism community within tech companies and the broader tech community.
DarkCyber finds the employee push back interesting for several reasons:
- The failure of management to manage is a characteristic of a number of technology-centric firms
- Employee activism can derail a company’s business processes
- The push back appears at this point in time a function associated with educated professionals.
Without a resolution, will US government agencies turn to non-US companies to provide needed software and systems?
Will employees demand a say in what a commercial enterprise does to generate revenue to pay those who work for the organization?
Will stakeholders tolerate intentional erosion of revenues because employees can destroy or possibly corrupt data, software, and systems because of a personal perception about rightness?
Will the digital Druckers at Gartner, Gerson Lehrman, and Booz Allen offer advice which solves this management puzzle?
Without organization and span of control, work at some firms may be difficult to complete in a satisfactory manner. Getting paid to do work was a contract. An employee does this task and gets paid. If the employee does not do the work or destroys that work, the contract is broken.
Then what?
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2019
Information Technology Outsourcing: Good or Bad?
September 18, 2019
One of the early twentieth century woes was outsourcing IT jobs. These jobs were sent to India, China, and other places in Asia. The outsourcing was a topic for comedy sketch shows and a political slogan for right and left wingers. There is more to IT outsourcing than we think, especially in the United Kingdom. Computer Weekly shares a new side about IT sourcing in the article, “IT Outsourcing Is Increasing, But Not As We Know It.” There is nothing new bout the growing demand for IT workers, but service providers have changed what they offer their customers.
The outsourcing statistics are worrying for the United Kingdom economy, because Whitelane Research and PA Consulting discovered that 71% of UK organizations plan to outsource the same amount or more of their services in 2019, according to a survey of 760 IT deals. The same study showed that the same organizations are going to insource less at 16%, compared to 22% in 2018. The main reasons for the outsourcing is how traditional service providers are being changed to meet customer demands and businesses streamline operations, such as automation, AI, and mobile apps.
An IT expert said:
“ ‘Technology-driven challenger organizations are transforming the way services are delivered and consumed across sectors,’ said Manish Khandelwal, IT transformation expert at PA Consulting.”
The traditional service providers might be changing, but they, along with smaller players, are increasing their IT spending. The same IT expert observed:
“’Technology investments are growing, presenting significant opportunities for established service providers and new entrants with differentiated offerings,’ said Khandelwal. ‘Service providers that are able to transition from traditional delivery and commercial models without compromising the service quality are looking at an exciting future ahead.’”
Organizations want to meet their customers’ demands, while achieving their business goals at the same time. This requires changing the traditional service structure, but also how companies are established and how they spend their money. It does not look good for growing local economies, but it could offer individuals the ability to start businesses when they might never had the chance. It is tough balance to keep, but no one knows what the results will be.
Whitney Grace, September 18, 2019
YouTube May Be Too Big to Monitor or Fail
September 17, 2019
A friend if mine who shall remain nameless, but who is a Baby Boomer and not technology illiterate once said that the United States government should just shut down the entire Dark Web. I burst out laughing at this statement and incredulously he asked why I guffawed. After explaining how wide spread the Dark Web is, the number of countries involved, and using the “herding cats” metaphor my point was made. Google is facing the same problem as it tries to sanitize YouTube, you can read the story from IT Wire.
YouTube is a big Web site and its expanse does not know an end. Google’s CEO Sundar Puchai stated to CNN that it was too difficult to clean up the entire video platform. YouTube tends to obey the US’s First Amendment Right to Freedom of Speech, but there is a mega backlash when it comes to YouTube hosting harmful content.
The definition of “harmful and malicious” content varies. The general consensus is videos related to neo-Nazism, white supremacy, racist, nudity, promoting terrorism, sexism, hate speech, and anything that specifically targets ethnic or social groups in a negative fashion fits the harmful definition.
Pichai said that using a combination humans and machines Google has gotten 99% of YouTube sanitation right, but videos still sneak between the upload cracks. This reminds me of Web filters “supposed’ to protect children from harmful Internet content, but they always took things to the extreme. Pichai admitted that while he wants the harmful content on YouTube to be well below 1%, he admitted that any large scale system will have a trace amount of fraud, take credit cards for example. Pichai remained silent when confronted with a conspiracy question:
“Asked why YouTube had taken nearly seven years to remove videos claiming that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 never took place, Pichai did not give a straight answer, but danced around, saying he wished that the company had gotten to the task of removing such videos much earlier. The Google chief was not asked about the fact that numerous alternative media sites have now been demonetized as a result of the purge of content which Google says is unsuitable for YouTube.”
Yep, impossible.
Whitney Grace, September 17, 2019
Yeah, We Are Sorry. Very, Very Sorry
September 8, 2019
If you do not remember the name James Damore, he was a former Google employee who authored the Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber aka the Google memo that described Google’s diversity as an “ideological echo chamber,” where the company believes that disparities are caused by oppression and attempts to fix them through reverse discrimination. Google fired James Damore after the memo made the rounds inside and outside the company. One Redditor named TiredOfLying4Google posted, “I Helped Google Screw Over James Damore” in the James Damore subreddit.
TiredOfLying4Google started that he/she saw the memo internally a month before it went viral. Google human resources did nothing, except send the memo up the reporting chain as internal feedback. When Damore’s memo leaked, Google took action:
“Unfortunately, the memo started spreading within the company. The floodgates opened and previously silent employees started talking. To quell dissent, we: told executives to write to their employees condemning the memo; manipulated our internal Memegen to bias the ratings towards anti-Damore posts (the head of Memegen is an “ally” to the diversity cause); and gave every manager talking points on what to tell their reports about the memo. In all our communications, we concentrated on how hurt employees purportedly were and diverted attention from Google’s discriminatory employment practices and political hegemony, never mind the science.”
TiredOfLying4Google continued that the company wanted to make an example of Damore, so they spied on him and tried to find a reason to terminate his employment. They did not discover anything, but his devices became extremely slow and probably prevented him from rallying support. Upon his dismissal, Google employees were afraid to speak up. TiredOfLying4Google also said that Google’s reputation took a hit.
Damore apparently knew about Google’s dubious practices, including Dragonfly-the censored Chinese search engine. TiredOfLying4Google was surprised Damore did not report those secrets, claiming Damore probably cared about Google.
Google took more extreme measures by cancelling an employee town hall to address the controversy, placed the blame on “alt-right trolls”, planted information with journalists, and controlled the entirety of the NLRB case and class action lawsuit. Google used its money, influence, and power to create false information to support dismissing Damore and keeping their employees in line. Damore does not hold any power and Google will continue to hold sway.
Whitney Grace, September 8, 2019
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