Excerpts from this must-read article about the woke hellscape that is Google:
“woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems”
“according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its ‘overdiversification’ problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results”
“Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager”
“nobody’s in charge”
“AI tool erasing white people from human history”
“employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported… The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma”
“But the company’s zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence”
“The phrase ‘culture of fear’ was used by almost everyone I spoke with”
“One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including ‘zie/hir,’ ‘ey/em,’ ‘xe/xem,’ and ‘ve/vir’), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution”
“One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it’s siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team”
“Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company”
“In the words of one senior engineer, ‘I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google.'”
“It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?… ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.'”
“A strange kind of dance between Google’s Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge”
“At Google, it’s exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers”
“from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like ‘build ninja’ (cultural appropriation), ‘nuke the old cache’ (military metaphor), ‘sanity check’ (disparages mental illness), or ‘dummy variable’ (disparages disabilities)”
“There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products”
“The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating”
“[according to Google’s management] Gemini’s problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color”
“Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That’s interesting, I guess. But it’s not a technology company”
