Google HR: Dissent Is Poor Mental Health
March 10, 2021 2:31 PM   Subscribe

In a recent report from NBC News, a number of current and former Google employees report that in response to their claims of racist and sexist behavior, the company's HR department would in response advise them to take medical leave to "deal with their mental health" while doing nothing to deal with the actual complaint. Furthermore, several employees would find themselves transferred out of a job after returning from said leave.

This comes on the firings of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and diversity recruiting specialist April Curley, both revolving around pushback on racism in Google's research and policies.
posted by NoxAeternum (42 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Least surprising report ever.
posted by clawsoon at 2:34 PM on March 10, 2021 [38 favorites]


That's some grade-a gaslighting right there. "you are still unhappy when we did nothing? Must be mentally ill!"
posted by emjaybee at 2:48 PM on March 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


It's the apotheosis of wellness culture meeting the racism and sexism of the tech industry. The problem is not the system, but you, the individual, for being affected by the unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Take care of yourself, because we won't!
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:13 PM on March 10, 2021 [51 favorites]


Did Google merely adopt the Late Soviet technique of sending dissidents to mental hospitals or did they reinvent it?
posted by jamjam at 3:15 PM on March 10, 2021 [21 favorites]


I really need to get my gmail address out of all my other various Internet accounts.
posted by krisjohn at 3:19 PM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


The Yellow Screensaver
posted by clew at 3:24 PM on March 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


Huh. I look forward to feigning surprise when Google goes on to adopt James Damore's moronic screed as a policy statement.
posted by klanawa at 3:27 PM on March 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


This is the same Google that "fired" an executive accused of sexual misconduct by giving him $90 million.
posted by meowzilla at 3:30 PM on March 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


emjaybee — the term "gaslighting" gets misapplied a lot, but holy shit, this is a textbook example.
posted by adamrice at 3:49 PM on March 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


Did Google merely adopt the Late Soviet technique of sending dissidents to mental hospitals or did they reinvent it?

Google’s has free snacks and ball pit, totally different.
posted by mhoye at 3:52 PM on March 10, 2021 [18 favorites]


That reminds me of my previous therapist tried to say something vaguely like, activism and mental health are an unwise combination for an individual pursue, or something to that effect. It's an old conservative tactic, to dismiss progressives as having mental health issues, and a profession that does this says more about the state of the profession than about people who are progressives and activists.
posted by polymodus at 3:55 PM on March 10, 2021 [8 favorites]


Cruz, who is Mexican American and prefers to be identified by the pronouns they/them

flames on the side of my face

Oh, they prefer to be identified by those pronouns, do they? So nice that NBC News is willing to grant this special favor for this special snowflake! Just use their goddamn pronouns and spare us from these condescending transphobic dogwhistles.

OK, actually reading TFA now.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 3:56 PM on March 10, 2021 [29 favorites]


This is the same Google that "fired" an executive accused of sexual misconduct by giving him $90 million.

Andy Rubin created Android which Google later acquired. Not defending him, but I'm sure the terms of his contract was always going to pay him well. It's less the money that was an issue than their attempt to cover it up, especially since Page personally told him he had to leave.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:06 PM on March 10, 2021


I expected so so much more from a company whose reason for being is to suck up huge swaths of cash by getting people to consume from the comfort of a screen
posted by armoir from antproof case at 4:22 PM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


To be fair, there are a lot of people there doing very good and valuable work

But then there is HR. “The resources to help the big humans keep the small humans in check”
posted by armoir from antproof case at 4:51 PM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


It is the old saying that HR is there to protect the company, not the workers.

Google's Head of International Relations wrote why he quit. It was mostly about Google trying to get into China. But what struck me was this:


At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.

In each of these cases, I brought these issues to HR and senior executives and was assured the problems would be handled. Yet in each case, there was no follow up to address the concerns — until the day I was accidentally copied on an email from a senior HR director. In the email, the HR director told a colleague that I seemed to raise concerns like these a lot, and instructed her to “do some digging” on me instead.


That's got to be the most brain dead diversity exercise I've ever heard of. And their response to his complaints was to start investigating him.
posted by eye of newt at 5:00 PM on March 10, 2021 [42 favorites]


How It Started: Don't be evil
How It's Going: Don't bother HR
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:09 PM on March 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


> eye of newt: "At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise”"

This basically a worse version of the Diversity Day episode of The Office. Except, y'know, in real-life and not a sitcom.
posted by mhum at 5:18 PM on March 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


“We have a well-defined process for how employees can raise concerns and we work to be extremely transparent about how we handle complaints,” said Jennifer Rodstrom, a Google spokeswoman. “All concerns reported to us are investigated rigorously, and we take firm action against employees who violate our policies.”
It looks like they are transparently handling complaints by taking firm action against the employees.
posted by pulposus at 5:20 PM on March 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


It is the old saying that HR is there to protect the company, not the workers.

While true, there's more nuance to this as well. Part of protecting the company is not allowing people to do stupid shit that will harm it, which is why good, smart HR does tackle things like racist and sexist behavior - because those things can do damage to the company in a number of ways, and thus it's in the corporate best interest to nip them in the bud before that happens.

The problem at Google is that you have leadership that wants the benefit of looking like a good corporate citizen without actually being one - and since leadership signs HR's checks, HR is tasked with trying to serve two masters. The problem is that all it takes for the jig to be up is for things to slip once, and you can't be perfect forever, no matter how hard you try.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:22 PM on March 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


It is the old saying that HR is there to protect the company, not the workers.

I would consider a report by NBC News to be "not protecting the company".
posted by sideshow at 6:41 PM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


I can't help but laugh at how Google has utterly forsaken the naive ideal of "Don't Be Evil." Those fuckers got one taste of corporate greed and immediately turned into one of the most evil companies in the world. They never once looked back. If you wrote a story like this, about a company that set out with the goal of making the world a better place for everyone and then turned into the slimiest shithole as soon as real money was on the line... well I guess folks unfamiliar with what Capitalism does to a motherfucker might find that unrealistic.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:59 PM on March 10, 2021 [12 favorites]


I can't help but laugh at how Google has utterly forsaken the naive ideal of "Don't Be Evil."

It's not naive as much as it is a cynical evasion of actual policies. I'm sure their health and safety policy is more than “Don't hurt people”; that's because safe working practices are government mandated, so it's in employers' interest to keep their firm compliant. There's no government oversight of good corporate citizenship, though, so they're free to employ a slogan that doesn't really mean anything.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:20 PM on March 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


I think the word Google was derived from gulag.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:33 PM on March 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


The last time I reported a serious issue with leadership to my employer's people team, they decided that I must be in need of counseling, put out helpful "you have options" brochures in all the kitchens, and forwarded my complaint to the leader that was its focus. I took this to mean that they weren't interested in receiving such reports in the future and have found other more productive ways to compel their attention.
posted by Callisto Prime at 8:29 PM on March 10, 2021 [8 favorites]


they're free to employ a slogan that doesn't really mean anything.

The thing is, they don't even employ it as a slogan anymore! They removed it from their public "What We Believe" page in 2015, and demoted it from the beginning to the very end of their internal code of conduct in 2018. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, claims he suggested it, saying he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," and as far as that he was right. There's no way to remove "Don't be Evil" without it looking like you're saying "Okay, Time to be Evil"

Google did it anyway. Yeah, maybe in actuality it's a meaningless platitude, but they still couldn't be bothered to even pretend to stick to it.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:48 PM on March 10, 2021 [13 favorites]


To be fair, there are a lot of people there doing very good and valuable work

I am genuinely struggling to work out who is doing good and valuable work at Google. They have an effective monopoly on Web crawling; their search product is profoundly less useful than it was 10 years ago; YouTube is the world's greatest fascism pipeline and it routinely fails creatives on its platform; Gmail hasn't had a useful update in years amidst several kind of awful ones; Maps keeps cannibalising the good work done by the competition it buys out; the Android team is dwindling as Google gets bored of it; the Chrome team seems determined to make IE 2.0 and ruin the open Web all over again; the Home is a surveillance device; and Google's corporate structure encourages birthing products like Plus, Glass and Stadia that have no audience, no ecosystem, no post-launch support, and get killed in a couple of years once everyone involved gets a promotion.

Maybe whoever's still supporting Docs and Sheets? They're good products.

It's a big company pulled in a lot of directions, and until this comment it didn't occur to me just how little I value or trust of what they do.
posted by Merus at 9:01 PM on March 10, 2021 [38 favorites]


Google search is awful, I can never find stuff I really want. The first page is typically infested with online media, not with truly diverse and deep and useful information that serves real people.
posted by polymodus at 11:05 PM on March 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


polymodus or anyone, do you have search engines you prefer?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:25 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


dances_with_sneetches: "I think the word Google was derived from gulag."

Google Archipelago
posted by chavenet at 4:30 AM on March 11, 2021


polymodus, I prefer duckduckgo.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:35 AM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]


If anyone has a maps alternative (especially for android phones) I would love to hear it. The only thing it seems designed to do is say directions at me. If I have the audacity to attempt to look at the map myself it sends the whole app into a tizzy of blurring out street names or place names or anything relevant.
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:18 AM on March 11, 2021


Anyway, to the article: When she[...] advised that Google address the issue internally, her manager brusquely responded, telling her that her suggestion was not relevant, the woman said.

"Hey, maybe we should address this disparity you just showed you have data on"
"THAT'S IRRELEVANT!"
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:26 AM on March 11, 2021


Now I am thinking about how much accommodation was made in my old workplace for sexists & racists. I had a colleague whose work was being moved from a male manager to a female manager. He was mad about this and basically demanded his old boss back. The company agreed. As far as I know, to this day he is managed by this man, who does not oversee his work product or really any of the details of what his job is, and then that (also sexist) manager stays in contact with the woman who should be managing him because she is in charge of all of his work. This accommodation is actually a pretty big hassle for the company! They could just live up to their supposed ideals of equality and tell him to work for a woman or get the hell out!
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:44 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


I think I can wrap my head around the thinking that leads to a company offering mental health counseling to someone whose discrimination complaint wasn't upheld. But you'd better have a ton of faith that your HR investigative process will never get things wrong in these cases if you're going to implement that policy. And anyone who believes that HR never gets things wrong should probably be offered mental health counseling.
posted by HiddenInput at 8:04 AM on March 11, 2021


we take firm action against employees who violate our policies
This sounds great, if a little vague, until you realize the “policy” is always “don’t make waves.”

This article, though, is a great example of a trend I’ve been noticing that bears watching: “Self-care” is a great idea for individuals to undertake on their own initiative, for their own benefit, and expecting employers to respect the essential humanity of their employees is pretty obvious. Instead, what we’re seeing here is the language of “self-care” being weaponized as a victim-blaming tool. Giving people with external problems advice on internal solutions is a trendy, highly-encoded way of saying “that’s a you problem.”

“My workload is overwhelming.”: “Here’s a link to a site with time and stress management techniques.”

“My boss is a dictatorial bully.”: “Here’s a pamphlet about mindfulness exercises.”

“This entire place is built on enabling socially maladjusted wealthy white boys to say whatever horrible thing pops into their heads to anyone with practically no consequence.”: “Oh, you must have missed the ‘radical candor’ training. I’ll sign you up for the next round.”

Oh, you’re back? Obviously you’re bad at self-care. Take some time off to talk to a therapist and then if you decide you even want to come back you can try to find somebody who’ll take you.
posted by gelfin at 8:06 AM on March 11, 2021 [19 favorites]


I think I can wrap my head around the thinking that leads to a company offering mental health counseling to someone whose discrimination complaint wasn't upheld.

Or to someone whose complaint WAS upheld! "We dealt with the person who caused the problem but we understand you may still experiencing reverberations from this and we want to make sure you are supported."
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:35 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]


we take firm action against employees who violate our policies

This sounds great, if a little vague, until you realize the “policy” is always “don’t make waves.”


I read that as an indirect threat to those being quoted, and to those thinking about talking to journalists: "If we catch you leaking to the press, we'll fire you quickly and cruelly".
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:16 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


If anyone has a maps alternative (especially for android phones)

Happy user of Nokia's HERE for... uh... ever since it came out? I stopped updating the app itself when they introduced the freemium version, so I wouldn't get ads, but the maps are still updated.
posted by gakiko at 4:54 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


HERE has saved me more than once. I drove out of Internet coverage and decided to check Google maps to see where I was. If Google maps was on the whole time it might have created a cache of the area, but I didn't so it had no data and couldn't get any data, so it said "no Google maps for you!"

Called up the HERE app, which has the entire state pre-loaded, and I was good to go. I should definitely use it more often.
posted by eye of newt at 8:52 PM on March 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


One of the major motivations for cutting Sojourn [a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to learn about implicit bias and how to navigate conversations about race and inequality] is that the company doesn’t want to be seen as anti-conservative,” one Google employee familiar with the company’s diversity programming said in an interview. “It does not want to invite lawsuits or claims by right-wing white employees about Google discriminating against them.
NBC News: Current and ex-employees allege Google drastically rolled back diversity and inclusion programs
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:43 PM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


i used to be someone else: NBC News: Current and ex-employees allege Google drastically rolled back diversity and inclusion programs

So they made a big deal out of kicking James Damore out, and then basically implemented his memo?

Figures, the fuckers.
posted by clawsoon at 3:56 PM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


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