Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Culture of Things podcast. I'm your host, Brendan Rogers and Today is episode 67. Today I'm talking with ex Google employee Taras Kobanek. Taras is famous or infamous for a document he wrote as a Google employee questioning Google's anti racism actions. He was eventually sacked by Google and shared his experiences on Tucker Carlson Tonight, he in the US and trigonometry, which is a free speech YouTube show and podcast. Today we're focused on having a chat around Taris's experiences at Google. The good, the bad and the ugly. Taras, welcome to the Culture of Things podcast.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Hello Brandon, glad to be here.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: How's my Ukrainian? My Ukrainian. Talking about your last name or pronouncing your last name?
[00:00:48] Speaker B: It was pretty close. Tarasko Bernank.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Yeah, excellent mate. I don't have this roll on the tongue actually, so no worries Ma. Now you were sacked by Google, we'll go into a little bit of that. We'll get you to give some background. But I hear you've got another job finally or you're about to start a job in the new year.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Yeah, unless they fire me before I even manage to start. Let's see how it goes.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Surely not, surely not. You can't have it happen twice, can you?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: I try to exceed expectations.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Good on you, buddy. Good on you. Well look, thanks for coming on Taras. I know you've said you've been in high demand a number of months ago around this experience and just sharing your experiences and I know we're not. I watched Trigonometry. You were very articulate, very measured and it wasn't about beating anyone up or anything, it was just sharing your experiences, which is fantastic. Which is what I really look to unpack today, mate. So thanks again for coming on.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Thank you. My pleasure, mate.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: How about first of all you give us. I gave you a little brief introduction and a brief biography. How about you share a little bit of your background and leading into Google. And now we're at.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Today I have graduated university and with a degree in theoretical physics. Although I wouldn't hire myself as a physicist. I've never worked in that field and probably wasn't that great to begin with. Most of my experience was in IT, but as a network engineer and everything related and I even actually switched to something closer to Google specialty way later. I worked on some data processing but Google was probably my first job as a software engineer. Proper job.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: So mate, just tell me about the. I guess maybe that first period of time at Google, that first sort of three months or so. You must have been excited you'd got a job at a big company. Just share those initial experiences with us.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Sure. It was very exciting and not just because of Google. It was my basically second trip outside of Exussr. My first trip was for my on site interviews with Google for two days. So everything was new to me. I was excited to try to live in a new, more civilized country. I was excited about being a part of a huge company working on bleeding age technologies and such. So yeah, I was very hopeful and I liked it. And at the beginning the experience was great because at the beginning you just go through a lot of trainings and you get some slack because you are supposed to become familiar with a lot of internal technologies, tools and so on. So you can kind of do whatever you want to a degree. You still have to work on your projects but you have much more freedom and it was great. And it generally it can be great at Google because Google has so much, so many resources of different kinds and so much of them and a lot of different projects and everyone can potentially find the project they're interested in. Though generally it's a huge gamble, a lottery because your success in the company depends on not as much on your particular skills or even on your project, but on I would say the manager you get. And you don't often know that in advance and even when you try to change teams later, it is not always clear what kind of manager you are moving to. And despite everything that the company says, the manager has huge influence on your future because your manager defines what kind of projects are available in the team, what kind of projects you get and what kind of approvals you get, how you are getting represented, presented before the company in performance reviews and such. And if your manager is not good at that or is not interested in that, if your manager is not capable of mentoring you, explaining companies culture and processes that are in place, you are missing important information and then just additional burden on you. Burden that is normally supposed to be handled by managers and unfortunately it's not as visible from the beginning. But if you start looking around you see that really people there are people that are very happy and that have great managers and there are great managers there and there are people that are absolutely miserable there because of bad mismatches with managers or just with managers not being that great. So there is a lot of hope there, but it is a lottery.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Taras, what was it about that experience or your time at Google where you started to maybe question some of the things what did you see that started to send your mind racing and eventually put you into a place of actually putting a document together.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: It wasn't the first document that I tried to write and share. That particular document even started with slightly different premise. It ended up describing racially related initiatives at the company. But we were getting some messages about changes to language. For example, I believe it was 2018, Google has decided to or even 2017 has decided to stop using words master slave as in technical terminology like the main system and the backup system system and such and replace it with whatever main, secondary, something like that. And immediately the company got a lot of proposals of what else to remove from the language and there was a pause for some time, but it started creeping in in 2020 and while it wasn't getting official, we were getting messages that we shouldn't use offensive language and such. And some doc started appearing around describing things that could have been potentially questionable. Like the word grandfathering. That to me as maybe non English native speaker sounds like fathering is when you create something or start something, whatever. And grandfathering to me did sound like you doing something, not directly, but through something else, maybe through mentoring someone and helping to create something. But actually it was referring to segregation time like mid 20th century in the US about some policies limiting access for black people to voting or something. I don't know whether it's the only meaning of grandfathering, but it was one of the examples of words we were advised not to use. And I was actually trying to list my thoughts on that topic, but I realized that my document was ending having up two different types of topics on language and on race. Because grandfathering in this case it was both on language and on race, but there were many other words that were not race related. For example, and I ended up writing my document regarding racial ideologies first because we had been having conversations inside the team, including with my manager and my manager wanted to hear my thoughts in order to escalate them if needed be. So I decided to help him a bit and list it in a document and share with him. And it didn't go that well.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: What was it that didn't go well?
[00:09:01] Speaker B: If only I knew. I believe I was never told something specific. I was told a lot of small stuff like that my document was listing cherry picked examples or I was putting fuel to the fire, or that it was offensive or that style of it was so bad that it was even possible to somehow edit it to improve it. And I can understand such criticism, but at the same time people telling me that we're totally ignoring examples listed in my document. Examples about the company actually cherry picking some evidence to support racial related ideologies and instead of moderating things and calming everything down, actually also putting fuel to the fire as they said.
So I would say it was kind of hypocritical both the approach of the company and the reaction to my document. But the main reason for it going wrong was probably the topic being too sensitive and the company was just afraid that it might become some sort of a scandal and it just decided to shut it down as soon as possible.
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Taras, can you just give us a little bit of a flavor of the timeline that happened, maybe from the initial sort of document and then maybe these revised documents and now the four page one that's easily accessible on the Internet and we'll certainly link to that in the show notes, but just a bit of a time series and then when those things happen, conversation with the manager and eventually you being sacked.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: These racial ideologies went into overdrive after the death of George Floyd in the us So I don't remember the date but it was something like beginning of summer I believe. And then we started getting messages from all the management, basically cascading first the CEO sends a message, then some senior vice president, vice president for your project, vice president for your location and such. And everyone was advising us to educate ourselves on racism and read books like White Fragility by Robin Diangelo or the book by Ibrahim X. Candy or whatever. And we were telling that things are so racist that basically all the problems for black people are because all white people are inherently racists and such. And it was first of all it was to me a huge exaggeration and second, I didn't see what it was trying to achieve because to me it did look like it wasn't solving the problem, it was just getting some PR credit, let's say from the whole situation.
So I wrote my document end of July, something like 29th of July 2020 my manager read it a week later and over three weeks I was getting some pressure to remove the document. I was asking for help to rewrite the document so it would be more acceptable if my version wasn't.
You can certainly argue that my language there was not that great as in English and the style not being perfect and such. But I was asking, okay, maybe I don't know how to do these things. Could you please help me to understand how to properly do that? And I was getting responses like, no, we are not going to spend time on that. I was just getting pressured into removing the document. And I had a meeting on 31st August 2020 with my manager and with an HR representative where I was given a written warning listing every transgression the company was able to find and demanding the removal of the document. Which by the way, is related to the statement, the official statement Google has given to Tucker Carlson's show this summer when I was there, because the company has stated that I was absolutely not fired for writing this or any other document. But all my communications with my manager over three weeks were about this document. And the written warning was explicitly stating displeasure of the company with my document and was demanding removal of the document. So I don't know whether it was one hand not knowing what the author was doing, that different parts of the company were not able to communicate inside of each other, or it was an attempt to misrepresent the truth, like, no, he wasn't fired for writing the document, he was fired for not removing the document or whatever, or it was just a clear lie, but that was the statement by the company. And in that meeting I did the last attempt to explain myself and to get some assistance into making like improving the situation. And I asked two things. First, whether it was possible for me to update the document and in order to make it more compliant with demands by the company. And I was told no, the company, the document had to disappear.
And second question of mine was, okay, I removed the document, but I have concerns. What do I do with these concerns? I was told that later the company might get me in touch with someone to talk to. That was not specific and the outcome wasn't clear. So I basically was told to make the document inaccessible without having a chance to make my concerns heard. And as such I didn't see a point in continuing that. So I refused to remove the document. Well, technically they were asking me to make the document inaccessible. They were stating explicitly they were not asking me to delete the document, but it was strange demand, like you can keep the document, just make sure nobody ever sees it again.
So I refused that and they immediately fired me.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: At any stage before some of these conversations and some of the written documents took place, were you led to believe that you were an employee that was producing subpar work or some behavioral issues because it was noted by Google that you're a regularly disruptive employee to others as well? Did you have any indications that that was the case?
[00:16:49] Speaker B: There are two things here. First of all, the behavior the company has listed, multiple examples of people reporting my messages on internal messaging boards and I have mentioned something on trigonometry. But basically at some point I advise I recommended university lectures, Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson and I got reported from recommending them and mentioning this terrible, terrible person. I asked once questions about not even diversity initiatives at the company, but a proposal to change those diversity initiatives. And I asked for a reason behind that. Basically someone was asking why the company wasn't hiring more veterans. And the question is fine, but I decided to ask like what's the purpose to to hire veterans specifically if they have some specific skills useful, then can we talk about those skills and maybe we can figure out who else might have in the population those skills. And for asking this question, I was reported for allegedly questioning and challenging diversity initiatives at the company and the HR acted on that, which was contrary to the previous statement by the CEO after James Damore got fired. On the official blog Google, Sundar Pichai wrote a statement back then saying that actions by James Damore were not okay, but also people being afraid to ask questions and speak their minds is also not okay and people should be able to dissent and even challenge diversity programs and such. And less than a year later HRS reprimand me for asking a question about diversity initiatives. So again, I don't know whether it was stating something that VCO wasn't going to enforce or whether it was the total inability of the CEO to actually make the company to move into that direction. But it's just yet another example of how stated things and actual things differ at Google.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: What would you say to people out there that listen to this and think, oh, you know, Taras is just a disgruntled employee of Google, ex employee of Google.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Sure they should think that because what else they know? And I just might be so I'm hoping people won't just believe my words. I am trying to mention certain facts. So like the post by the CEO, the document, my document is available on Fox News website and it lists other examples of what happened there and People can just check and use it as a bunch of examples. The company hasn't challenged the facts stated there. The company challenged my perception of these facts, basically. So I'm not asking people to believe me. I'm just trying to lay out certain facts and I hope that I would be able to outline where facts end and my evaluation of these facts starts. But people are free, of course, to make their own decisions and if someone decides to challenge my perception, great.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: After all, you are a software engineer, mate. You love a challenge, right?
[00:20:26] Speaker B: It's not like it's always comfortable, but it would be a certainly dumb idea to demand people to just trust my word for all of this. If I was listening to this podcast, for example, I would keep in mind the next thing that yeah, I might be lying, that's a possibility. But then if I'm lying about facts that a lot of people know, and most of the things that I mention are common knowledge, at least inside the company and some are even outside, then there are going to be plenty of people challenging my lies and I probably wouldn't risk it. So you can challenge my decisions and my perception, but at least you can verify facts or believe that if some facts were not true, then they would have been challenged already and then people can make their own decisions based on that.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: And as I said at the top of the show, we will put a link to the document in the show notes to make it very easy for people to access. And there's a number of links in your document. I want to talk about one of those links because it's one of the key things at the start of the document that you go into and it's the anti racist allyship starter pack that you refer to. Can you just give us a little bit of context about what is the anti racist allyship starter pack at Google?
[00:21:55] Speaker B: It was a spreadsheet listing a bunch of articles that people were getting recommended to read and educate themselves on the topic of racism and such. I saw that LA Ship pack getting shared inside of the company and from my perspective it was a grassroots initiative. So it wasn't the company forcing that onto people, but the excuse that it was grassroots initiative stops working. Since I later got reprimanded for asking questions whether this allyship PAC was within policies. At some point I submitted a couple of questions to some company wide meeting and one of these questions was linking, I believe to that pack. And I was asking whether statements like white people have no culture and what do we do with white people or whatever, are they considered to be within company's policies that prohibit racial based discrimination. And someone reported me for posting that question through official channels specifically for people asking questions. I was reported for questioning anti racism materials or something like that. And again HRS acted on that. So it wasn't just some person reporting me. It was probably some HR accepting that report, then sending it to the HR responsible for our team. That HR was sharing it with my manager. They both wrote and signed the written warning with quotes from these cases when I was getting reported. So it was responsibility of at least 2 or 3 managers and hrs at the company for reprimanding me for asking a question whether it was within policies. So if you do that, you cannot already avoid responsibility for that pack going around. And in addition to that, while that was a grassroots initiative, there was a different document listing slightly different links that was getting shared by the top management, I believe from the CEO himself, but certainly from senior vp, from our vice president, by vice presidents responsible for our office and such. And that other pack also encourages white people to educate themselves and their children and lists as advice reading Books by Robin D'Angelo and Ibrahim X Candy yeah.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Mate, I've had a extensive look at the document. It is a Google document, not a Microsoft spreadsheet. So they're at least using their own tools.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: I meant spreadsheet as in Google spreadsheet.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Yes mate. One of the first things I see and the first section is titled On Whiteness and it says, you know, there's links to all sorts of documents, as you say, but 75 things white people can do for Racial justice why Feminism is White supremacy in heels, White fragility as you referred to. And white people have no culture. I'm a big believer in the phrase culture is a reflection of leadership and the CEO of Google being Sundar Pickal, if that's how you pronounce it, I'm not too sure. But what sort of evidence did you see coming from the top from the CEO that supports or maybe promotes the thinking that this has in the Google organization?
[00:25:39] Speaker B: It's hard to say what kind of signals are there from the CEO. He seems to be very careful not to say things, as if he even sleeps with an earpiece with a dozen of lawyers in it at any given time, telling him to avoid talking. Generally he is very cautious and so it's hard to understand what he wants the company to do. And that is partially a problem because the CEO is supposed to lead the company to define the vision for the company. And maybe he's great as in his interactions with top level managers, but for the company itself, they could have hired any person to just pose for photo ops. Basically. I can't say that he is ideological or that he's pushing all this stuff. It might as well be a result of the company not having any idea how to act in such circumstances. And they are just trying to, again, be careful and take the current liberal approach in the US that yeah, racism is bad and we should educate ourselves and all white people are bad. And, and I can understand that. But even then it could have been done better. I've seen one director level manager who instead of just propagating all these messages about white people being inherently racist, simply said that, listen, people in the US it is a difficult time because there is racial or related tension and there are certain events that are happening that increase that tension. Please keep that in mind, especially when you're talking to colleagues from the US and be careful about that. And it was a reasonable message. Yeah, there is a problem. Maybe we don't know what exactly to do. Be careful, Think twice when you do something instead of just indiscriminately discriminating white people by calling them racists and such. Unfortunately, the approach by dental management was different. And I don't think that the CEO is pushing this agenda, but he's certainly not preventing it from happening. As I have mentioned again on trigonometry, there was a case where a lot of people inside the company were mobbing and harassing one employee who was unlucky to call the police on a black person who looked like a trespasser back in the US and neither the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, nor the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said anything to stop that harassment from happening to indicate that this behavior is inappropriate. They just both made statements about safety of black employees being important for the company, which is totally true, but it wasn't the topic of the conversation.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: There's a statement in the White Fragility reference and it says, if you disagree that you are a racist, you are a racist. What's your take on that?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: That was me basically paraphrasing it. Honestly, I haven't read the book myself. I've checked few excerpts from it and I checked a few videos by Robin Diangelo from different seminars led by her. And I checked a couple of reviews of the White Fragility book, including the one listed in my document by Sean McWhorter, I believe. And the premise of White Fragility seems to be that white people are racist. And if you Tell them they are racist and they become uncomfortable because of that and start disagreeing with you that they are racists. That is white fragility, which is a sign of them being racist. So you either agree that you are racist or you disagree and that's white fragility and you are racist. There is no exit from that in your opinion.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Taras, how is all of this descriptive words about color and all that, how is that bringing people together in a culture of Google?
[00:30:01] Speaker B: I don't think it's. It's bringing people together specifically because it creates lines that were not there because of people trying not to treat each other by the color of their skin and such. And now all the attention is on race and you have to think about race when you talk to someone or you talk about someone and such and this just divides people. And there might be an argument sure for yet another round of segregation just with different intentions and such, but I haven't heard a good argument for actually solving the problem that is being stated. As in white people are racists and black people suffer because of that. There seemed to be no good way to fix this thing, at least from the point of view of the problem as it is being stated. And as such you can only isolate one group from another in order to avoid any interactions. Generally I believe that whatever racist there is often is a result of people facing things they are not familiar with. Like sure, when people from different country come to you and you are not used to people from other countries, you are cautious about them and others can call that racism. And fair enough, again there is an argument there, but that is getting fixed over time by exposure to people from different cultures, from different countries and such. And these seem to be a natural way to resolve this problem, even if it is there. But it's not like people advocating for these anti racism treatments are trying to solve the problem. It looks like their goals are slightly different.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Mate, you're one employee or ex employee of Google and I'm just wondering, you've been outside of the Google walls for some time now, but are you the only one that felt this way within Google? Was it just you or are there other people that have raising the same questions or maybe just scared to raise the questions?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: There are plenty of people that scared to ask questions there, even if these are questions not about racial ideologies but about other things like diversity and inclusion initiatives. But there are people that are not happy with this. They are not that many, but there are, there are people that were trying to keep their distance from any Politics inside the company, oh, as long as I don't touch this subject, I'm going to be fine and I can just do my job, be a good engineer and such. And even these people started telling me at some point that it was getting too much because first someone was telling me, oh, you should have been very like more careful with your statements. And then the same person tells me, oh, look at the official Google blog. They have just made yet another post about all this nonsense. And another person who was joking about me being not happy with all this state of things all the time and telling me to just stay away and chill out. And that person started telling me at some point that no, it's just getting too much. All these messages from the top management and you don't know what to do with that and there is all this pressure and it's nonsense and just prevents you from doing your engineering job. And after my appearance on trigonometry, some people contacted me Google employees, and they are also not happy and they were glad for someone to speak up. And some people try to raise their concerns, but obviously they are concerned about their future. And if you have a family and you getting fired from Google for asking such questions, it's going to be hard on you because you are responsible for providing to your family.
[00:34:25] Speaker C: Our interview will continue after this.
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[00:35:22] Speaker A: In previous conversations we've had Taras, you talked about something called citizenship contributions.
Can you tell us a little bit about that and reason why it's really important for you to share? Because I've done quite a bit of research in preparation for our conversation today and I can't find anything on Google about citizenship contributions. So if you can do that and help us, that'd be awesome.
[00:35:47] Speaker B: First, it's useful to mention what is Software Engineering Ladder? It's an internal document at Google that describes requirements that you as a software engineer have to meet repeatedly because you have to demonstrate meeting them every performance review cycle that happens every half a year. And other job roles, different types of engineers, or not even engineers, they have their own ladder descriptions. And citizenship contribution was changed to this document change that happened I believe end of summer 2019. And it basically stated that in addition to everything else, like all other requirements were kept there, it just added another requirement that in order to satisfy requirements, you as an engineer have to also demonstrate that you are a valuable member of internal Google community. And we were given four examples of what is going to be considered a citizenship contribution. One was performing interviews for people applying for jobs at Google. Like engineering interviews, because these interviews are actually being done by engineers. The second example was performing certain type of code reviews, so called readability reviews that are not about how your code solves problems related to your project, but more about your code being compliant with company wide style of writing code so everyone would have easier time understanding it. The third example was participation in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. And the fourth was giving classes lessons to other employees inside the company. This change was getting marketed internally as an attempt to recognize contributions by people that already do all this stuff. But since all that stuff was not considered to be a part of requirements, people were not getting awarded for that basically. And that could have been fine, but the change was mandatory. You were told that you were supposed to start providing such contributions, providing some proof of such contributions for your performance reviews. And as such, Google is an amazing company in many regards. And being an amazing company, they decided to make amazing things. And I believe have produced an amazing example that can be used in many textbooks under the section of how not to do things. Because if you want just rewards people, but instead you add the requirements to people, it's already a contradiction. Let's simplify a little bit and change the scale. Let's say that we are not talking about the company as a whole, but or not about a company as big as Google, but about some small team. And your team is working on some project for multiple projects. And at some point the management of the team decides that it is worth putting additional effort into yet another thing. Fair enough, it might be useful, it might not, but at least it's a reasonable decision. But usually what you do then you try to figure out who would be the right person or people to work on this new initiative. Whatever. You try to set priorities so others would know how important this new thing is. Like okay, we are working on thing a And when we are done with it, or if there is some pause, then we switch into this thing.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: B.
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Or maybe you allocate different amounts of resources, like okay, four days a week we work on our regular projects and one day a week we work on this new thing that would work. Unfortunately, nothing on that was done. We were just told that we are supposed to provide these contributions. We were not supposed about the amount of these contributions. Like if you do code reviews, how many of these reviews, how difficult these reviews are supposed to be to satisfy these contributions. If you perform interviews, how many interviews would satisfy these requirements and such. We were just given an order to start doing yet another thing in addition to all other things.
Then I believe another reason for it to be wrong was that instead of trying to incentivize things that the company wanted, the company decided to just give an order to everyone to work on something. Let's take interviews for example. It's important for the company for these interviews to happen because the company grows all the time and the company does huge amount of these interviews all the time. So you want engineers to perform these interviews. And there are engineers that are interested in this actually, because it's actually fun. You talk to some new person, you discuss some kind of computer science problem, you see how that person is doing. You may be trying to provide some hints. You train yourself in kind of something related to teaching. You try to provide good experience to the applicant, to the interviewee and such. And some people liked that and wanted to do that, and others don't want that because they are more introverted, don't want talking to people, whatever. Maybe they prefer some other tasks over interviewing. And it would have been fine probably to let people interested in this to do more interviews and to reward them for this. Instead of that, the company just ordered everyone to do something. And if it was, let's say, just about interviews, it would just mean that people that are not good at that and not happy doing these interviews have to do these interviews and probably create worse experience to candidates and overall expanding the pool of interviewers, but decreasing the quality of interviews. The same applies, for example, to classes, because a lot of people teach and had been teaching classes at Google. But with this initiative, I saw people that were not interested in teaching classes starting looking for classes to teach as a way to satisfy such citizenship contribution requirements. And that meant that people that were not interested, that were not great at teaching, were starting teaching and again creating probably not that a great experience to people around. And you can always talk about things like two of These examples, interviews and code reviews are essential for the company. So it's fine for the company to want to do that, but the company never was properly rewarding that. Let's say, let's take an extreme example. I highly doubt that you can get promoted at Google and getting promoted over time is important. You cannot get promoted by just doing interviews like 40 hours a week. No way. You have to demonstrate some other skills, not just other, but you have to do more. You cannot just get good grades and good results and promotions by doing good job. You have to increase the quality of your job, increase the difficulty that you tackle all the time. And as such, basically time spent on interviewing was time taken from your other projects, time that you were giving up. You were giving up on your ability to produce better engineering results and get better grades, let's say.
So the company tells you that both things are important, but you are not to interview too much because it would be not what the company wants. And kind of contradiction in the company statement. Because if the company really values these contributions, they have to be stated like that. And if it doesn't value, then let people not spend time on that because you set in priorities and people see other engineering tasks of higher priorities. So I would say the overall approach to the citizenship contribution change was bad. I haven't seen anyone being actually happy with this, although I have seen many managers justifying this again by the new ability to reward such contributions. But it wasn't again the case. Make it optional and then you can justify this change with that. But as long as these contributions are mandatory, you cannot just say that this is just to reward people that already do that at the very beginning. Someone even wrote a satirical short piece of how all this is going to look in the future. How the company is going to create precise metrics to finally measure all this stuff. And how you picking some litter from the floor and throwing into a trash can would be valued as one mealy interview for purposes of measuring your citizenship contributions and such. And management was actually aware of that. We were given that short piece as a funny thing related to citizenship contributions at some point. But overall nothing changed. The company postponed introduction of these requirements for about a year, I believe, because people were not happy. But now they have. Like, now people really have to produce all that stuff. And you can see that the company has demonstrated first its ability to basically renegotiate your contract without even talking to you. Because they don't change the contract, they change an internal document and you have to comply with it. Because in the contract it says that you have to comply with internal policies and such. And into this internal document they add things that are not directly related to engineering job. You can say that interviews and code reviews are related, but for example diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and given classes on whatever, yoga, growing tomatoes. It's good if you given something on some programming language, but not necessarily you can give on whatever you want. Those are not part of engineering description anywhere as far as I am aware. But at Google you are suddenly facing a case when a company adds non engineering requirements to engineering jobs, doesn't explain how it is supposed to actually work and just tells you that you have to produce all that stuff. So yeah, if I were to make an assumption I would say the whole approach was out there for someone to secure some promotion and because of other incentives that exist in the company, for example, you cannot just get promoted again by doing regular job. You have to demonstrate that you finish some serious projects and such. You have to demonstrate some artifacts and such and that incentivizes sometimes bad behavior. For example, since you are supposed to demonstrate ever increasing like ideally level of performance in the company, you don't want some performance cycles where you demonstrate less results than in the previous cycle. And that makes some people reluctant to take on longer or more riskier projects because if they don't finish in time, you have nothing to demonstrate often for your performance review. And then some people, even if unintentionally start creating some projects not as much for customers to benefit from them, but in order to produce some artifacts for performance reviews. So the next time you see some change in interface on your Android phone or whatever, maybe someone is getting a promotion finally. And that makes me think that maybe all this approach to citizenship contributions disrupting things to a large part of the company, to all software engineers was just an intent by someone to demonstrate big enough impact to the internal culture and to secure some kind of promotion maybe.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: Yeah, there's part of me, Taras, if I'm understanding you correctly that says well it's just a company that's pushing something through the organization which they believe enhances their culture and sort of a culture of giving, you know, other Googlers giving back to the, to other Googlers into the organization. But I guess also understanding what you shared earlier in the conversation today and we've said talk about the anti racist allyship starter pack and that bit about the working on the DEI side and then the potential link to the financial remuneration process, it sort of says to me or raises a red flag in my head that if they're driving a certain potential narrative through the organization, and if your narrative or if your questioning of that narrative is there, then you're not going to go too well with the citizenship contributions, which means that's going to have a financial impact on you and you certainly won't have any opportunity for progression within the business. Is that a fair assumption to make?
[00:49:48] Speaker B: You don't have to do all these four things at once. You have to demonstrate just some kind of citizenship contributions. And some people try to escape this by getting into interviews or code reviews and such, and those are engineering related things. But you cannot always do that because when you join the company you are not familiar enough with internal culture of writing code and you actually have to go through sometimes quite lengthy process of getting experience and getting approvals for you to be able to perform such kinds of reviews yourself. And sometimes you can do that in few months, but in other cases depends on language that you use, like programming language. It might take a year or even more. And during this time these code reviews are out of question for you. And also you cannot start interviewing people immediately after joining the company, because at least when I joined in 2016 and I wanted to do interviews, education classes that you had to take in order to start interviewing were only available for people with more than six months of experience at the company, I believe, maybe even year, I'm not exactly sure, but six months for sure. And that also means that when you join the company, interviews are not an option for you. So you have to choose between giving classes and participating in these DEI initiatives. And I've heard rumors that this DEI participation was actually the original idea behind citizenship contributions. I don't know whether it's true, I cannot claim that it was so, but it might be a possibility. And at least BI initiatives are linked to the current US ideologies and them being a part of all these contributions without getting balanced by something else on ideological side looks like leaning into one specific direction.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: I just want to go back a little bit and Google, given the behemoth that it is, and the fact that it just touches so many places in the world, really and so many people in your insider knowledge, how worried concerned are you? And should we be potentially around the fact that some of this stuff that may be happening within Google, wrongly or rightly, but it has a real chance to change so many people's mindset or to push certain forms of information, given that Google has the platform and the whole method of the Google search platform is to push certain information into people's eyeballs so they can read it and find it. How concerned should we be about some of these things and some of your perception or some of your views that you've shared today?
[00:52:59] Speaker B: I think that most of the people at Google are not trying to push such ideologies. They try to do a good engineering job and many products might be just fine. Unfortunately, there is constant pressure from the leadership and HRS and such with regard to all this stuff, diversity and inclusion, racial stuff and such. And since I was getting reprimanded several times for just asking different questions and got fired for raising my concerns, I can imagine that other people might not risk pushing back against all this stuff. And as a result, it creates two things. First of all, when you cannot detect a problem, you don't have a chance to fix a problem.
And how do you know when these things start getting too far and really start hurting something? If people that ask questions and descend are getting reprimanded and as such the company is just basically breaking internal feedback mechanisms to detect problems and fix them. And that goes against principles that Google has in relation to hardware and software, let's say, and I think they are good approaches. For example, Google approaches both software and hardware as if it's going to inevitably fail sooner or later whatever you do. So instead of just designing super reliable servers, as far as I'm aware, Google had started back in the day with data centers consisting with some junk computers. And if some computer was stopping working, that computer was just getting thrown away and getting replaced by something else. And in order for that to work, Google designed a system to manage all that stuff to detect failures and to start new servers as necessary. For example, if you decide that you want three copies of your server, like web server, whatever, running in that data center and and the system managing data center detects that one of hardware servers running, your program dies. It just decides makes a decision and starts a copy of your program on server that is healthy. And as such failures happen, but they get mitigated pretty fast. Similar with software, you design software and you expect parts of your system to fail, systems that you depend on to fail. And you have to think how would your program work if that specific subsystem becomes unavailable for whatever reason? And maybe you provide some messages to customers that the functionality is degraded temporarily, or maybe you just start trying to use that subsystem and save yourself some effort, but you make sure that the rest of your system works as much as possible. And the whole idea is that you design everything to detect any failures and to mitigate consequences of these failures, you decide backup mechanisms and such. But when it comes to managing people or to managing the company as a whole, the company seems to have a different approach. That things just supposed to work, as I have mentioned with managers, doesn't look like the company has a good way to detect when managers are bad. There are some mechanisms, but the companies seem to rely on but they don't seem to be good enough from perspective of employees. And if you start asking questions, the company might decide, oh, but we have such a great system for managing things and you are asking questions is probably you are not seeing something and you are getting dismissed. So the company has two different approaches to hardware and software and to managing things in the company. And the second thing that starts with all this pressure from HRS and top management. Let's say that engineers that work on a product are not ideological, but you have to somehow evaluate quality of your product. And for example, when you work on search, you evaluate quality of search by taking a sample of a huge amount of search queries. And when you make some change and you run these queries through the system and you record answers of that system and then you make some change to the system and you don't know whether it's a good change or not because the system is so complex that you cannot predict all possible outcomes. And then you run all the same queries again and you compare results to previously recorded ones and you check different differences and you decide this difference is good, this difference is bad, and then you make a decision on your change as a whole. Now when you have to grade these changes, when the topic is not friendly to these current ideologies, do you try to protect quality of the system as you can see it, or do you just accept that if you start asking questions you're going to get into trouble? And maybe people would just start deciding, okay, it is not worth it, I will just accept that this change is neutral or whatever, we won't care about this. Maybe that's what happened to Ranking on YouTube for Tucker Carlson, as I was asked on trigonometry, that's a possibility. One off. It is certainly necessary to investigate when things start getting badly for high visibility resources. But it might just be a result of.
So it might be just a mistake of some algorithm, but it might be a result of people not catching this because they think, okay, this is Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson seems to be not compliant with current ideologies. So we would like to stay away from that topic. And we won't even evaluate Changes to Tucker Carlson for example, or whatever. And as such over time because of you have no breaks, you have no ability to detect problem, you have no ability to correct it. So over time your system starts creeping in the direction of reducing quality, changing results for things that you are not interested in. And that is probably a real issue as I see it.
[00:59:53] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And in Australia specifically the government is making some moves to bring in world first laws around sort of social media companies and these big tech companies. But look, I don't know the details and it's really fascinating to listen to what you're saying and the possibilities that are there. I guess it's a watch this space, isn't it? But with your move from Google and being sacked from Google, my understanding is you found it very, very difficult to find another role. And as we said at the top of the show, you're lucky enough to have found one now and hopefully start in the new year. But what you've sort of felt and indicated on other shows that Google hasn't made it easy for you. Can you just elaborate on that for us so we understand what's happened?
[01:00:44] Speaker B: I don't know whether it was an intentional attempt to make things harder for me or it was just yet another inefficiency by the bureaucracy. But here in Switzerland and as far as I understand in Germany, Austria, it's a cultural thing. You are supposed to have references from your previous employers and I was told that some companies, I was told by recruiters working on different projects that some companies don't even consider your application if you don't have a reference letter. It might have contributed to my difficulties. Certainly it wasn't the only one because there are other reasons as well. For example, my German is far from being fluent and it's important to have good German for many projects here. And then some companies just been afraid to talk to ex employees by Google because Google at least in Switzerland pays nicely. I would say as far as I'm aware Google pays much better than it pays in London and probably in other places. Switzerland seems to be an anomaly in that regard. I don't know exactly why, but people coming from Google they often expect Google level salaries and they cannot often find them around. And some companies just don't want even bother with talking to people because it would be a waste of time because they wouldn't be able to afford such salary. And then there were other reasons as well. But one of the things was this reference letter that first Google waited for half a year to provide me with one though an employer is obliged by law, as far as understanding, to provide one to a former employee. And I only got mine when I pushed towards court with lawyers. Basically we had to go to a judge. And then a few days before the court meeting with Google representatives, I was getting sent suddenly the reference letter. Oh, we finally did it, despite several previous requests to provide me with one. But even then, that reference letter was written in such a way that I probably wouldn't hire myself because it was questioning my social skills, my interactions with employees, my engineering skills and such. And that was another problem, I would say, from Swiss perspective, because here these reference letter are regulated by law and companies have to write them in such a way for these letters to be helpful for the employee to find a new job. You are prohibited from writing anything negative there unless that negative stuff is related directly to your job. Like if I was a driver and I was drinking alcohol during working hours or silent, that would be on the reference letter. Otherwise it's supposed to be at least neutral. And as a result the whole company tries to compete with each other how to write bad things without writing bad things. So if you get a neutral reference letter, it's considered to be negative and if you get mediocre, maybe it's neutral. So there are complications there. But Google did provide me with a letter too late and with a letter that was clearly negative. And as such it contributed to me having difficulty with finding a new job. Unfortunately, we even tried to negotiate it with Google and Google agreed to rewrite it and provide me with a decent letter. And just as a comparison, it's possible to find on the web a story by another employee actually from the same project as my last project was, who got fired, I believe in something like 2016 or something and got fired for underperforming. Basically that person burned out. And that person says that despite of that and despite the company seeing, considering that thinking that the engineer had been trying to game the system to keep, basically getting salary without actually improving results and such, just waiting for unfortunate outcomes. Still, that engineer, despite all that, got a stellar reference letter. And that's what I've heard from other people, that even if you're getting fired, you are getting a good reference letter from Google because the company just doesn't want any legal issues. It's just cheaper for them to write you a good letter and let you go. But in my case it was negative and we tried to negotiate a better letter and the company even agreed to that, that but then renegotiated it suddenly and added privacy requirements. Like basically they wanted me to sign non disclosure agreement if I wanted to get the new reference letter and such. And since I wasn't able to trust the company and it did look shady, I decided not to sign that agreement and such. I didn't get of a better reference letter.
[01:06:22] Speaker A: Taras, what gave you the courage to speak up? You've put yourself out on a limb here and again you seem to have suffered, whether that's directly or indirectly as a result of Google. Again, you're not sure, maybe there's some just pure coincidences, who knows. But what gave you the courage to speak up?
[01:06:42] Speaker B: Maybe I'm just not smart enough to avoid the trouble.
Generally there are multiple elements there. You can think of activists, whatever, like what's the difference between me speaking up against something and some radical left activists also speaking against something and trying to shut something down. And I don't have an answer to that question. Like I cannot say why and if I am better than those activists, let's say, and if they can speak up why it is so surprising that I can speak up. But there are some things that were making this easier for me. First of all, I unfortunately don't have family, so the risk to me was smaller. I was just risking my future, not future of my family. Second, as I have mentioned since I had been getting reported for different messages internally and because of some other things unrelated to ideologies, you asked me at the beginning whether the company was considering me a good engineer or not and such and I unfortunately missed that part. And yeah, from the company's perspective I hadn't been the best engineer and that is the topic of whole additional conversation. But again, getting a good manager as a lottery. And for example I started with a manager who reported me for underperformance because I decided to write a bunch of so called design documents, documents outlining some problem that you see, some idea how to solve it, and arguments why your solution is better than alternatives. Let's say my manager claimed that those documents were useless and as such were just a waste of my working time. And he claimed that I had wasted at least a week of my time on writing them and as such I was not doing my engineering job and it's hard to argue about usefulness of those ideas. But it was pretty easy for me to prove writing these documents first in half of that time and second mostly in my spare time because everything is written in Google Docs.
Google Docs have timestamps you can check when things were getting edited there and I knew that I wrote These documents on a weekend and one evening, and I took something like maybe four hours of work time. So I was hoping that it was going to be a proof of me exceeding expectations because I wrote these documents faster than my manager assumed, and also that I would be cleared of this underperforming perception because I was using my spare time. And I did provide that evidence to my manager, to the manager, of my manager, to our HR representative, and nobody did anything. And later I was told, well, maybe you didn't write the documents in during your working hours, but you had certainly thought about writing them in your working hours. So the accusation stands. And how do you defend against that you've been thinking something wrong? How do you prove that it wasn't the case? As such, I got in trouble there and it later harmed my future prospects at Google. And together all these things were contributing to me not having future and even, who knows, getting fired at some point or another. So I decided the risk to me, like the additional risk wasn't already that great. So I was speaking up. As for speaking up in general, I believe it just mostly because of some books you read as a child or whatever, depending what kind of heroes you read about. If you read about some people spending their lives on Twitter and complaining about stuff, you probably actually differently.
[01:10:51] Speaker A: As they say, Taras, not all heroes wear capes. Right now with this whole situation, what would you have liked to have happened? So if you were still a Google employee, and I imagine if some of this sort of thinking and some of these scenarios didn't play out the way it's had, when you've written the document and you've had conversations with your manager, what would you have liked that to have looked like as opposed to what's actually happened?
[01:11:20] Speaker B: Ideally, I was hoping for reduction of this pressure and what looked as racial discrimination. I was totally up to trying to figure out actual problems and solutions to them, including potential problems with racism or whatever, but that's unfortunately a problem with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy isn't good at solving problems or even detecting what the problem is, but it's good at giving orders. And that was the attempt by the company to influence the situation. Instead of figuring out problems and good solutions, they were just giving directives for people to educate themselves. I don't think that some huge changes could have happened. I was just hoping that my concerns would be a signal to the management for something not being right. Usually when you hear that something might be wrong, you don't just jump on the first mention unless the evidence is pretty clear. But it's useful to keep something in mind in case you start seeing the same issue again and again in other places. And it has to start.
So I was just hoping to create some form of understanding of things getting too far and the management detecting it over time and then somehow changing the atmosphere in the company. But it was too much hoping. I still hope. But you can also ask why what I was expecting with going public with this and the answer there is slightly different. Because I have still friends at Google and I believe that Google at least was an amazing company at some point and still has a lot of amazing potential. And I don't want people that are there to suffer through all this nonsense. And in order for that to change, something has to be done. Some kind of incentive has to be created for the company to change its ways. I haven't seen any such incentive coming from the top management. I haven't seen much of this incentive coming from employees because those that disagree pretend that they are fine with everything. When James Damore got fired, I was among other people, very hopeful that him going to court would incentivize the company to change something internally. That unfortunately never happened. But I was hoping for Damor back then to do something basically for me without even knowing about my existence. And after I got fired, I got in a position where I had some slight chance to improve things for people still there.
[01:14:15] Speaker A: I do want to make it very, very clear to people listening and watching that all of this stuff that I've read, the documents you've put together, all of the stuff that I've watched over time in preparation for this interview, that at no stage have I seen you having written something or verbalized something that is actually rejecting some of these thoughts that back to anti racist allyship or all of these sort of flavors that are coming through from your perspective in your experiences. I haven't heard you rejecting those or seen you write any rejection. All you've really been asking from what I've seen is just for some clarification. And to this date I don't think you've received any form of clarification or had any respect from a former employee about some of the questions you've asked. Is that right?
[01:15:11] Speaker B: As far as I know, yes. Obviously the company is reluctant to provide any clarifications because whatever the company says, the company might become liable.
So not saying anything is just a safe way. But the company still takes actions. And I was getting reprimanded again for even asking questions, not even for criticizing, but asking whether something was within policies and such and that is already an action by the company, but something that the companies fine taking. But the company doesn't want to talk about these things, doesn't want to explain its decisions. I don't think the company is that capable because again the bureaucracy is good at threatening people and at creating some paperwork. The bureaucracy is not that great at explaining things. I haven't seen that many people in positions to make these decisions capable of having an honest discussion and on top of that being courageous enough to have discussions in the current climate when any conversation might be against you and certainly not unfortunately the top management.
So I'm not surprised that there was no clarification. I hope that eventually the company has to say something but for now all I can do is try to draw some attention to all this stuff to the company being hypocritical, to the company issuing false statements to the Tucker Carlson for example and on Sundar Pichai's on the Google blog by Sundar Pichai after firing James Damore and such. And I just hope that at some point either the company realizes that something is wrong and decides to change something, even just to protect itself, or maybe some people decide that it is not as dangerous to speak up at least a little. Obviously me getting fired was a big demonstration of even if unintentional, that you are not supposed to talk about this stuff. But maybe if people would start asking questions even a little, it's going to get to some kind of critical mass at some point and would change things because otherwise how would things change?
[01:17:35] Speaker A: Taras irrespective of what people think about some of the things you shared today, they can agree or disagree. You are a courageous leader. There's no doubt at all in my mind. What is it that has had the greatest impact on your leadership journey through your life?
[01:17:50] Speaker B: Other than books that I had read when I was a kid and yeah I did read a lot of adventurous books and such. If you talking about leadership as in management and whatever the way people often use the term leadership, even if when they refer to people just in position where leadership is expected, not to people that actually have leadership skills, I would say that Google was very useful because I've both witnessed possibility of what could be and the idea of some good goal of where management could lead because my experience in Ukraine was quite different there managers usually just act as conduits for orders from the top managers and there is no such thing as mentorship or personal growth or whatever. You're just supposed to comply with orders and do your job. And at Google I witnessed an attempt to actually make people grow over time and try to do good things, at least on paper. And I have also witnessed huge amount of things going wrong there, negative examples of what to try to avoid. And that was I would say very useful, even if not that healthy. I would say all these things could be learned in a better way, but it was certainly a useful experience.
[01:19:17] Speaker A: Taras, thank you for sharing that mate. And just in wrapping this conversation up, I once again want to say a massive thank you to you. But in my experiences of the conversations we've had and the interviews I've watched of you and and you are very articulate but very humble in the way that you approach these things. Maybe some could say that you have a right to have some bitterness about. I've never seen that in you, even in your answer, just there respecting your time at Google and lots of good stuff that you got from that experience. Maybe some other things that maybe weren't fantastic experience but they can make you a stronger person and a better leader moving forward. So I sincerely hope that we don't get deranked through this conversation. It's really just about opening up a conversation. You've been very professional in your dealings and the way you've articulated yourself today and I really appreciate you in sharing this information and opening the conversation around these things. It's an important conversation mate. So thank you once again appreciate your time, good luck with the new job and thank you very much for being a guest on the Culture of Things podcast.
[01:20:23] Speaker B: Thank you for the kind words. It was my pleasure. Was nice talking to you.
[01:20:37] Speaker A: Do you agree or disagree with Taras views? If you agree or disagree, both are the problem. Too many of us take a view based on limited information or information that supports our narrative. Taras mentioned it during the interview. He doesn't expect people to agree with him or not. What he wants is for people to check out more sources of information and make up their own mind. In the four page document Taras wrote titled Questions about Google's Anti Racism Actions, he mentions the company is either unable or unwilling to have internal conversations on difficult topics. How can we work through differences and seek to understand if we can't talk about it? These are my three key takeaways from my conversation with Taras. My first key takeaway there's no perfect culture. Much has been written about Google's great culture. There'll be many employees who agree with that and there'll be many that don't. Each individual's experience will be different. What we must always strive for is to create an environment where all employees feel safe to have a genuine conversation. Creating this won't create the perfect culture, but it'd be pretty damn good. My second key takeaway Leaders want to be challenged. They know the best outcomes are achieved by people challenging each other. Challenging ideas, perspectives, opinions, solutions, questioning the status quo. In my opinion, this is what Taris was doing challenging ideas, not following the herd. If you don't want to be challenged, you shouldn't be leading. My third key takeaway Leaders learn from their experiences. Whether the experience is good or bad, it's always a learning opportunity. In all of the conversations I've had with Taras and watching his media appearances, I never heard him speak badly of Google or the experience he had. Despite the challenges, he considered it a learning experience.
So, in summary, my three key takeaways there's no perfect culture. Leaders want to be challenged, and leaders learn from their experiences. If you want to talk culture, leadership or teamwork, or have any questions or feedback about the episode, you can leave me a comment on the socials or leave me a voice message@thecultureofthings.com thanks for joining me. And remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.
