92
FORTUNE.COM // JUNE.1.19
As the so-called techlash has cast a pall
over the entire sector, organized employee
pushback is slowly becoming part of the
landscape: Amazon workers are demand-
ing more action from the company on
battling climate change; at Microsoft,
employees say they don’t want to build
technology for warfare; at Salesforce, a
group has lobbied management to end its
work with the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection agency. Meanwhile, there’s not a
company in the sector that isn’t grappling
at some level with the ways bro-gramming
culture has made tech a toxic space for
women and employees of color.
But nowhere has the furor been as loud,
as public, and as insistent as it has been at
Google. That’s no surprise to Silicon Valley
insiders, who say Google was purpose-built
to amplify employee voices. With its “Don’t
be evil” mantra, Google was a central
player in creating the rosy optimism of the
tech boom. “It has very consciously culti-
vated this image,” says Terry Winograd, a
professor emeritus of computer science at
Stanford who was Google cofounder Larry
Page’s grad school adviser and would go
on to serve on the company’s technical
advisory board. “It makes them much more
prone to this kind of uprising.” Page, now
46, and cofounder Sergey Brin, 45, inten-
tionally created a culture that encouraged
the questioning of authority and the status
quo, famously writing in their 2004 IPO
letter that Google was not a conventional
company and did not intend to become one.
Some workers say Google’s promise
to remain unconventional is in question.
Interviews with 32 current and former
employees revealed a demarcation between
what several called “Old Google” and “New
Google.” Whether there’s a clear-cut line
between these eras—the company got its
start in a Menlo Park, Calif., garage in 1998,
when Page and Brin were still Ph.D. stu-
dents at Stanford—depends on whom you
ask. But there is a pattern in how they de-
scribe the change: At Old Google, employ-
ees say they had a voice in how the company
was run. At New Google, the communica-
tion and trust between the rank and file and
executives is in decline. Decision-making
power, some say, is now concentrated at theT STARTED IN TOKYO ON Nov. 1, 2018,
when 100 employees walked out
of Google’s office at 11:10 a.m.
local time. Thirteen hours later,
the elevators at the company’s
New York City headquarters
were so packed that workers
took the stairs down to the street
to protest. Google employees in
Austin observed two minutes
of silence for victims of sexual
assault as part of their dem-
onstration. In San Francisco, hundreds of employees gathered
across from the historic Ferry Building and chanted “Time’s Up
at Google” and held signs with slogans like “Workers’ Rights Are
Women’s Rights” and “Free Food Safe Space.”
After Googlers in Sydney walked out, 25 hours after Asia had
kicked things off, 20,000 Google employees in 50 cities around
the world had joined their colleagues to protest the company’s
handling of sexual harassment.
The spark that ignited the walkout was a New York Times article
that had appeared a week earlier, reporting that Google paid
former executive Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package, despite
facing a sexual misconduct accusation Google deemed credible. (In
a statement to the Times, Rubin said the story contained “numer-
ous inaccuracies about my employment.”)
It was the first time the world had seen such a massive worker
protest erupt out of one of the giants of the technology industry—
and certainly the first time outsiders got a glimpse at the depth of
anger and frustration felt by some Google employees. But inside
the Googleplex, the fuel that fed the walkout had been collecting for
months. Tensions had been on the rise as employees clashed with
management over allegations of controversial business decisions
made in secret, treatment of marginalized groups of employees,
and harassment and trolling of workers on the company’s internal
platforms. “It’s the U.S. culture war playing out at micro-scale,” says
Colin McMillen, an engineer who left the company in February.
To many observers, the tech workforce—notoriously well-paid
and pampered with perks—hardly seems in a position to complain.
And it’s a surprising tune to hear from employees of one of the
titans of Silicon Valley, a place that has long worshipped at the
altar of meritocracy and utopian techno-futurism. But in the past
few years, the industry’s de facto mission statement—change the
world (and make money doing it!)—has been called into question
as examples of tech’s destructive power multiply, from election in-
terference to toxicity on social media platforms to privacy breaches
to tech addiction. No one is closer to tech’s growing might, as well
as its ethical quandaries, than the employees who help create it.
“People are beginning to say, ‘I don’t want to be complicit in this,’ ”
says Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research group
and is one of the walkout organizers. Workers are beginning to
take responsibility, she says: “I don’t see many other structures in
place right now that are checking tech power.”