There are growing calls for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to step down.
Me in 2017: Google needs a new CEO, but dumping Sundar Pichai is not enough: When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry. “Since its 1990s heyday, Silicon Valley has transformed from an unruly collection of aggressive upstarts disrupting existing industries to a flabby collection of near-monopolies, now busy enforcing gentry-liberal norms on their employees and customers. Whether it’s censoring right-leaning political figures, or firing employees who dare say something truthful but politically incorrect, there’s not much of the old startup spirit there. These are flabby overstaffed Big Business corporations, run by their HR departments. You might find more dynamism at General Motors, these days.”
Related: Google’s Culture of Fear inside the DEI hivemind that led to gemini’s disaster. “Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems.”
Get woke, go broke. But getting woke may well be a symptom of a deeper management dysfunction. “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. . . . 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.”
h/t Glenn Reynolds