Google Management Insights: About Personnel Matters No Less
June 16, 2022
Google is an interesting company. Should we survive Palantir Technologies’ estimate of a 30 percent plus chance of a nuclear war, we can turn to Alphabet Google YouTube to provide management guidance. Keep in mind that the Google has faced some challenges in the human resource, people asset department in the past. Notable examples range from frisky attorneys to high profile terminations of individuals like Dr. Timnit Gebru. The lawyer thing was frisky; the Timnit thing was numbers about bias.
“Google’s CEO Says If Your Return to the Office Plan Doesn’t Include These 3 Things You’re Doing It Wrong. It’s All About What You Value” provides information about the human resource functionality of a very large online advertising bar room door. Selling, setting prices, auctioning, etc. flip flop as part of the design of the digital saloon. “Pony up them ad collars, partner or else” is ringing in my ears.
The conjunction of human resources and “value” is fascinating. How does one value one Timnit?
What are these management insights:
First, you must have purpose. The write up provides this explanatory quote:
A set of our workforce will be fully remote, but most of our workforce will be coming in three days a week. But I think we can be more purposeful about the time they’re in, making sure group meetings, collaboration, creative brainstorming, or community building happens then.
Okay, purpose seems to be more organized. Okay, in the pre Covid era why did Google require multiple messaging apps? What about those social media plays going way back to Orkut?
Second, you must be flexible. Again the helpful expository statements appear in the write up:
At Google, that means giving people choices. Some employees will be back in the office full time. Others will adopt a hybrid approach where they work in the office three days a week, and from home the rest of the time. In other cases, employees might choose to relocate and work fully remotely for a period of time.
Flexibility also suggests being able to say one thing and then changing that thing. How will Googlers working in locations with lower costs of living? Maybe pay them less? Move them from one position to another in order to grow or not impede their more productive in office colleagues? Perhaps shifting a full timer to a contractor basis? That’s a good idea too. Flexibility is the key. For the worker, sorry, we’re talking management not finding a life partner.
Third, you must do something with choice. Let’s look at the cited article to figure out choice:
The sense of creating community, fostering creativity in the workplace collaboration all makes you a better company. I view giving flexibility to people in the same way, to be very clear. I do think we strongly believe in in-person connections, but I think we can achieve that in a more purposeful way, and give employees more agency and flexibility.
Okay, decide, Googler. No, not the employee, the team leader. If Googlers had choice, some of those who pushed back and paraded around the Google parking lot, would be getting better personnel evaluation scores.
Stepping back, don’t these quotes sound like baloney? They do to me. And I won’t mention the Glass affair, the overdosed VP on his yacht, or the legal baby thing.
Wow. Not quite up to MIT – Epstein grade verbiage, but darned close. And what about “value”? Sort of clear, isn’t it, Dr. Gebru.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2022
Could a Male Googler Take This Alleged Action?
June 15, 2022
It has been a while since Google made the news for its boys’ club behavior. It was only a matter of time before something else leaked and Wired released the latest scandal: “Tension Inside Google Over A Fired Researcher’s Conduct.” Google AI researchers Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie thought of the idea of using AI software to improve AI software? Their project was codenamed Morpheus and gained support from Jeff Dean, Google’s AI boss, and its chip making team. Goldie and Mirhoseini discovered:
“It focused on a step in chip design when engineers must decide how to physically arrange blocks of circuits on a chunk of silicon, a complex, months-long puzzle that helps determine a chip’s performance. In June 2021, Goldie and Mirhoseini were lead authors on a paper in the journal Nature that claimed a technique called reinforcement learning could perform that step better than Google’s own engineers, and do it in just a few hours.”
Their research was highly praised, but a more senior Google researcher Satrajit Chatterjee undermined his female colleagues with scientific debate. Chatterjee’s behavior was reported to Google human resources and was warned, but he continued to berate the women. The attacks started when Chatterjee asked to lead the Morpheus project, but was declined. He then began raising doubts about their research and, with his senior position, skepticism spread amongst other employees. Chatterjee was fired after he asked Google if he could publish a rebuttal about Mirhoseini and Goldies’ research.
Chatterjee’s story reads like a sour, girl-hating, little boy who did not get to play with the toys he wanted, so he blames the girls and acts like an entitled jerk backed up with science. Egos are so fragile when challenged.
Whitney Grace, June 15, 2022
Zuckbook: Getting Tagged As a Digital King Lear
June 13, 2022
The Zuckbook (now officially known as Meta as in I never “meta” drop out who wanted to be king) may be facing some headwinds. Sure, there is the Jeeves-like British spokesperson to make everything seem so good. But the idea that the company is investigating the nominal number two leader at Zuckbook for inappropriate something is interesting. I believe this individual hails from the Google which had to deal with a baby in the legal department. Wow. Those Googlers. That Metazuck. Governance is these outfits’ core competency not.
A few other issues are identified in “Meta Is in Serious Trouble. Here’s Why.” The write up states:
It would appear that the biggest hurdle that Meta faces is slowing revenue growth, something that has already started to show its effects on Meta’s plans.
Ah, ha, money.
But is this the only ripple in the king’s toga? Nope. Consider:
- Virtual reality, a money pit
- The metaverse, a money pit
- The Zuck watch, a money pit
- The Google, an ad damper.
In sum, the Zuckbook faces innovation woes, money woes, and big plan woes.
As the semi-interesting observation of the character Albany spouted:
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face.
There you go. King Lear had an outcrop of stone. The Zuck has a chunk of an island. Good places.
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2022
Google Management Methods: When High School Science Club Members Do Not Communicate
June 10, 2022
I have zero clue if this “real news” story is correct. It could be that a former Onion writer landed some gig writing work and here she be: “Google Apparently Had No Idea a Top Google Maps Feature Was Removed.” According to the write up,
the Android Auto version of Google Maps comes with multiple display options, including a satellite mode. Thanks to this view, users can navigate with satellite imagery
But “after a recent update, the satellite mode has mysteriously disappeared.”
Management at the Alphabet Google YouTube entity operates with Snorkel like efficiency. Accuracy? Close enough for horse shoes?
The write up stated:
But as it turns out, the search giant didn’t actually pull the satellite mode on purpose. A member of the Android Auto team and Community Specialist on Google’s forums is now asking for additional information on the whole thing…
Coordination, effective communication, and clear lines of authority when Google-ized foster this type of “who’s on first?”
Forget Onion. Think Abbott and Costello.
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2022
Alphabet Google and the Caste Bias Cook Out
June 3, 2022
The headline in the Bezosish Washington Post caught my attention. Here it is: “Google’s Plan to Talk about Caste Bias Led to Division and Rancor.” First off, I had zero idea what caste bias means, connotes, denotes, whatever.
Why not check with the Delphic Oracle of Advertising aka Google? The Alphabet search system provides this page of results to the query “caste bias”:
Look no ads. Gee, I wonder why? Okay, not particularly helpful info.
I tried the query “caste bias Google” on Mr. Pichai’s answer machine and received this result:
Again no ads? What? Why? How?
Are there no airlines advertising flights to a premier vacation destination? What about hotels located in sunny Mumbai? No car rental agencies? (Yeah, renting a car in Delhi is probably not a good idea for someone from Tulsa, Oklahoma.) And the references to “casteist” baffled me. (I would have spelled casteist as castist, but what do I know?)
Let’s try Swisscows.com “caste bias Google”:
Nice results, but I still have zero idea about caste bias.
I knew about the International Dalit Solidarity Network. I navigated the IDSN site. Now we’re cooking with street trash and tree branches in the gutter next to a sidewalk where some unfortunate people sleep in Bengaluru:
“Caste discrimination” means if one is born to a high caste, that caste rank is inherited. If one is born to a low caste, well, someone has to sweep the train stations and clean the facilities, right? (I am paraphrasing, thank you.)
Now back to the Bezoish article cited above. I can now put this passage in the context of Discrimination World, an employment theme park, in my opinion:
Soundararajan [born low caste] appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias. Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday [June 1, 2022] and viewed by The Washington Post. India’s engineers have thrived in Silicon Valley. So has its caste system. [Emphasis added.]
Does this strike you as slightly anti” Land of the Free and Home of the Brave””? The article makes it pretty clear that a low caste person appealing to a high caste person for permission to speak. That permission was denied. No revealing attire at Discrimination World. Then another person who judging by that entity’s name might be Indian, quits in protest.
Then the killer: Google hires Indian professionals and those professionals find themselves working in a version of India’s own Discrimination World theme park. And, it seems, that theme park has rules. Remember when Disney opened a theme park in France and would not serve wine? Yeah, that cultural export thing works really well. But Disney’s management wizards relented. Alphabet is spelling out confusion in my opinion.
Putting this in the context of Google’s approach to regulating what one can say and not say about Snorkel wearing smart software people, the company has a knack for sending signals about equality. Googlers are not sitting around the digital camp fire singing Joan Baez’s Kumbaya.
Googlers send signals about caste behavior described by the International Dalit Solidarity Network this way:
Untouchables’ – known in South Asia as Dalits – are often forcibly assigned the most dirty, menial and hazardous jobs, [emphasis added] and many are subjected to forced and bonded labour. Due to exclusion practiced by both state and non-state actors, they have limited access to resources, services and development, keeping most Dalits in severe poverty. They are often de facto excluded from decision making and meaningful participation in public and civil life.
Several observations:
- Is the alleged caste behavior crashing into some of the precepts of life in the US?
- Is Google’s management reacting like a cow stunned by a slaughter house’s captive bolt pistols?
- Should the bias allegations raised by Dr. Timnit Gebru be viewed in the context of management behaviors AND algorithmic functions focused on speed and efficiency for ad-related purposes be revisited? (Maybe academics without financial ties to Google, experts from the Netherlands, and maybe a couple of European Union lawyers? US regulators and Congressional representatives would be able to review the findings after the data are gathered?)
- In the alleged Google caste system, where do engineers from certain schools rank? What about females from “good” schools versus females from “less good” schools? What about other criteria designed to separate the herd into tidy buckets? None of this 60 percent threshold methodology. Let’s have nice tidy buckets, shall we? No Drs. Gebru and Mitchell gnawing at Dr. Jeff Dean’s snorkeling outfit.
I wonder what will be roasted in the Googley fire pit in celebration of Father’s Day? Goat pete and makka rotis? Zero sacred cow burgers.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2022
Apple Disdain: The Right to Repair? Absolutely, Well, Sort Of…
May 23, 2022
I read “Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1.1 Ounce Battery.” The allegedly true write up reports:
Apple has been lobbying to suppress right-to-repair policies around the country, with the company accused of doing everything it can to keep customers from repairing their own phones.
Now Apple wants to be helpful.
What’s needed to insert a battery in a current iPhone?
The article states:
I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. I couldn’t believe just how big and heavy they were considering Apple’s paying to ship them both ways.
The repair kit strikes me — and this is my opinion — what some lower-class real journalist might describe as a bright digital finger for anyone who thinks he/she/it/them can repair an Apple device. Doesn’t the vaunted Apple manufacturing method utility robots or individuals richly compensated in OSHA and EPA approved facilities to make the gizmos for thick fingered humanoids? In my experience, humans are less than zero when it comes to precision assembly of gadgets and gizmos. What about those rows of happy workers I recall seeing in unverified write ups about worker abuse, child labor, and happy re-education campers? My view is that those “people” are M2 chip powered robots manufactured by other robots to look a bit like moms, dads, college students, and others looking for truly rewarding, intellectually engaging work.
Therefore, when a mere real humanoid customer buys and breaks a device, the non-Deep Fake customer is 100% responsible for trotting to the Apple store, assuming it is open due to assorted medical and Genius considerations. The sausage-fingered real humanoid who wants to do an iPhone repair on his/her, its/thems kitchen table may work with light from the flickering middle finger. I hope there is an Apple logo tattooed on the hand itself. That’s exception design grammar, is it not?
How customer centric is the Apple approach to the right to repair an iPhone? The write up concludes:
It would be an understatement to say that Apple has a history of resisting right-to-repair efforts.
Now what purpose does that really big digital middle finger serve? The answer may appear in “I Can’t Imagine a Day without Proctology,” available from Amazon for less than $7.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2022
Google High Schools It Again
May 4, 2022
Dr. Satrajit Chatterjee may have been kicked out of the Google High School Science Club. The shame!
The alleged truth appears in “Another Firing Among Google’s AI Brain Trust and More Discord.” The venerable New York Times, owner of Wordle, states:
Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.
Googzilla has been eager to make clear that its approach to smart software is the one best way. Sure, some may disagree — Just don’t complain too loudly or work at Google are a couple of tips. I have pointed out that the nifty approach used by the online ad company can demonstrate “drift”. I call this tendency the “close enough for horseshoes” approach. I mean that if something is good enough for ad matching, then the same system will work for other Googley things. Do you want to stand in front of a Waymo or let the Google output your health index? Sure you will. You just don’t know it yet.
Dr. Chatterjee was concerned that the information presented in the delightful, easy-to-read article “A Graph Placement Methodology for Fast Chip Design” added some flair to the write up. (Like most real science, this allegedly accurate paper is behind a paywall; however, you may be able to view it. Good luck!) Here’s the summary of the Googlers’ assertions about its smart software platform:
In this work, we propose an RL-based approach to chip floorplanning that enables domain adaptation. The RL agent becomes better and faster at floorplanning optimization as it places a greater number of chip netlists. We show that our method can generate chip floorplans that are comparable or superior to human experts in under six hours, whereas humans take months to produce acceptable floorplans for modern accelerators. Our method has been used in production to design the next generation of Google TPU.
Got that. The translation is that the Google can design chips without too many humans: Cheaper, better, faster and don’t push back with “Pick two”.
Dr. Chatterjee did and he allegedly has an opportunity to find his future elsewhere; for example, working at Dr. Timnit Gebru’s organization, a home for some Xooglers who crossed mental swords with Dr. Jeffrey Dean and his acolytes.
The New York Times, in Gray Lady fashion, asserted:
Dr. Chatterjee’s dismissal was the latest example of discord in and around Google Brain, an A.I. research group considered to be a key to the company’s future. After spending billions of dollars to hire top researchers and create new kinds of computer automation, Google has struggled with a wide variety of complaints about how it builds, uses and portrays those technologies. Tension among Google’s A.I. researchers reflects much larger struggles across the tech industry, which faces myriad questions over new A.I. technologies and the thorny social issues that have entangled these technologies and the people who build them.
Googlers can fiddle with mobiles in meetings, wear torn T shirts, and sleep on the floor under their workstation mini-desk. Just don’t disagree with the One True Way.
What if Drs. Chatterjee and Gebru are a little bit correct in their assertions that the GOOG’s smart software is dorky in many ways. What if these little dorkies add up to delivering 60 confidence in the outputs.
As I said, “close enough for horseshoes” works when burning through ad inventory. However, applied to other domains that horseshoe might land in the crowd and knock a two year old for a loop. Not good unless someone in the Google High School Science Club can address a cranial fracture.
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2022
Does Apple Have a High School Management Precept: We Are Entitled Because We Are Smarter Than You
April 19, 2022
The story “Ex-Apple Employee Takes Face ID Privacy Complaint to Europe” contains information about an Apple employee’s complaint to the “privacy watchdogs outside the US.” I have no insight into the accuracy or pervasiveness of Apple’s alleged abuses of privacy. The write up states:
Gjøvik [the former Apple employee blowing the privacy horn] urges the regulators to “investigate the matters I raised and open a larger investigation into these topics within Apple’s corporate offices globally”, further alleging: “Apple claims that human rights do not differ based on geographic location, yet Apple also admits that French and German governments would never allow it to do what it is doing in Cupertino, California and elsewhere.”
What I find interesting is that employees who go to work for a company with trade secrets is uncomfortable with practices designed to maintain secrecy. When I went to work for a nuclear engineering company, I understood what the products of the firm could do. Did I protest the risks some of those products might pose? Nope. I took the money and talked about computers and youth soccer.
Employees who sign secrecy agreements (the Snowden approach) and then ignore them baffle me. I think I understand discomfort with some procedures within a commercial enterprise. A new employee often does not know how to listen or read between the lines of the official documents. My view is that an employee who finds an organization a bad fit should quit. The litigation benefits attorneys. I am not confident that the rulings will significantly alter how some companies operate. The ethos of an organization can persist even as the staff turns over and the managerial wizards go through the revolving doors.
As the complaint winds along, the legal eagles will benefit. Disenchanted employees? Perhaps not too much. The article makes clear that when high school science club management precepts are operational, some of the managers’ actions manifest hubris and a sense of entitlement. These are admirable qualities for a clever 16 year old. For a company which is altering the social fabric of societies, those high school concepts draw attention to what may be a serious flaw. Should companies operate without meaningful consequences for their systems and methods? Sure. Why not?
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2022
The Google: What Is the Problem? We Protect Puppies?
April 19, 2022
I read a paywalled write up with the title “A Former Employee at Google’s AI Lab DeepMind Says the Firm Seems Obsessed with Saving ITs Own Reputation after She Went Public with Claims of Sexual Harassment and Assault.” No talk about puppies, which Google wants to save. Now that’s a headline which tells the story in my opinion. So rather than summarizing the rather troubling allegations in the write up, I want to call attention to the management aspects of this alleged misstep.
One key point is the speed with which the Google responds to employee inputs. The article points out that the whistle blower found that the Google moved slowly. Google wants Web sites to respond quickly. Management appears to have a different time scale if the allegations are accurate. The managerial review process was “drawn out.”
Another interesting item is that after a management shuffle, the new Top Googler at DeepMind admitted that the “case” was “complex.” That’s not surprising. It is quite difficult to figure out why a query like “search and retrieval” returns information about “information retrieval.” I do not want information about “information.” With a fundamental issue with providing on point results to a simple query about a topic of interest to a company providing Web search results, Google misses the mark. Has the company missed the mark with personnel lingo? I noted that the management lingo in use at the Google is P&C which stands for people and culture. What? Does this mean personnel?
And finally, the write up includes this anecdote about a certain mobile phone whiz at the Google:
The New York Times had reported that Google had “protected” senior executives accused of misconduct over the past decade, such as Android creator Andy Rubin. Rubin denied the claims. Google subsequently changed its policies on dealing with sexual harassment claims.
Management change. No mention of an attempted suicide, baby making in the legal department, or the Dr. Timnit Gebru matter.
Net net: The management methods in use at Google are, to use a favorite word of the Google founders, “interesting.” This word is, however, less compelling than harassment, sexual violence, self-harm, and similar terms which add zest to the interactions of a manager and an employee. Alleged interactions, of course. P&C does not appear to be an acronym for politically correct at the Google. I associate P&C with other words, which I am not comfortable mentioning. Puppies? I am okay with puppies. So is the GOOG.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2022
Teams Tracking: Are You Working at Triple Peak?
April 14, 2022
I installed a new version of Microsoft Office. I had to spend some time disabling the Microsoft Cloud, Outlook, and Teams, plus a number of other odds and ends. Who in my office uses Publisher? Sorry, not me. In fact, I knew only one client who used Publisher and that was years ago. We converted that lucky person to an easier to use and more stable product.
We have tried to participate in Teams meetings. Unfortunately the system crashes on my Mac Mini, my Intel workstation, and my AMD workstation. I know the problem is obviously the fault of Apple, Intel, and AMD, but it would be nice if the Teams software would allow me to participate in a meeting. The workaround in my office is to use Zoom. It plays nice with my machines, my mostly secure set up, and the clumsy finger of my 77 year old self.
I provide the context so that you will understand my reaction to “Microsoft Discovers Triple Peak Work Day for Its Remote Employees.” As you may know, Microsoft has been adding features to Teams since the pandemic lit a fire under what was once a software service reserved for financial meetings and some companies that wanted everyone no matter what to be in a digital face to face meeting. Those were super. I did some work for an early video conferencing player. I think it was called Databeam. Yep, perfect for kids who wanted to take a virtual class, not a presentation about the turbine problems at Lockheed Martin.
Microsoft’s featuritis has embraced surveillance. I won’t run down the tools available to an “administrator” with appropriate access to a Teams’ set up for a company. I want to highlight the fact that Microsoft shared with ExtremeTech some information I find fascinating; to wit:
… when employees were in the office, it found “knowledge workers” usually had two periods of peak productivity: before lunch and after lunch. However, with everyone working from home there’s now a third period: late at night, right before bedtime.
My workday has for years begun about 6 am. I chug along until lunch. I then chug along until dinner. Then I chug along until I go to sleep at 10 pm. I like to think that my peak times are from 6 am to 9 am, from 10 am to noon, from 1 30 pm to 3 pm, and from 330 to 6 pm. I have been working for more than 50 years, and I am happy to admit that I am an old fashioned Type A person. Obviously Microsoft does not have many people like me in its sample. The morning, as I recall from my Booz, Allen & Hamilton days, the productive in the morning crowd was a large cohort, thousands in fact. But not in the MSFT sample. These are lazy dogs its seems.
Let’s imagine your are a Type A manager. You have some employees who work from home or from a remote location like a client’s office in Transnistia which you may know as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. How do you know your remotes are working at their peak times? You monitor the wily creatures: Before lunch, after lunch, and before bed or maybe to a disco in downtown Tiraspol.
How does this finding connect with Teams? With everyone plugged in from morning to night, the Type A manager can look at meeting attendance, participation, side talks, and other detritus sucked up by Teams’ log files. Match up the work with the times. Check to see if there are three ringing bells for each employee. Bingo. Another HR metric to use to reward or marginalize a human personnel asset.
I will just use Zoom and forget about people who do not work when I do.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2022
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