TRIGGERnometry - Fired Google Insider Speaks Out

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00:00:30.000 Even asking questions about this ideology is potentially harmful.

00:00:35.340 I, at some point, decided to ask a question whether some actions inside of the company

00:00:41.220 complied with a company's policies about discrimination, and I got reported for asking that.

00:00:55.100 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:58.400 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:59.440 I'm Konstantin Kissin.

00:01:00.960 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:06.240 What a brilliant guest we have for you today.

00:01:08.800 He is a former Google engineer who was fired by the company

00:01:12.440 for challenging some of the excesses of the company's diversity agenda.

00:01:16.780 Taras Kobernik, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:19.220 Hello, Konstantin Francis. Happy to be here.

00:01:22.380 You are very kind, brilliant.

00:01:24.840 It was probably an overstatement, but I will try to live to that.

00:01:29.440 Yes, indeed. Well, your story is very interesting, and I'm sure our audience will find it very interesting,

00:01:35.460 given some of the things that you've been through.

00:01:37.460 Before we get into Taras, please tell everybody a little bit about what's your background, who are you, how are you, where you are,

00:01:43.520 what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:48.800 Most of it probably is not related to the story.

00:01:52.540 I'm from Ukraine.

00:01:54.320 I was born there, moved to Switzerland to work with Google at 2016.

00:01:59.680 Worked there for four years as a software engineer.

00:02:03.940 And unfortunately, it came to an end with me trying to point out certain things that

00:02:10.860 were getting far from my perspective at the company and becoming damaging to the company's

00:02:17.020 culture and probably the future.

00:02:19.100 And let's get into that right away.

00:02:21.020 What was it that you were starting to become concerned about? Because having looked through some of the documents involved in your case, I can see that you made repeated attempts in discussions and forums, in conversations internally at Google in response to various memos and diversity initiatives and all of that to challenge some of the things that were happening.

00:02:43.420 and you were told repeatedly that you were making other people unsafe, uncomfortable,

00:02:49.180 you were being insensitive, you were told that by supporting Jordan Peterson's position on pronouns,

00:02:56.380 you were making your fellow employees quote-unquote unsafe, etc.

00:03:01.200 So what was it that was happening and why did you feel the need to speak out against it?

00:03:06.640 It was probably me being new to the Western culture because all my life before that moment,

00:03:12.920 And I spent back in Ukraine, and their approaches there are different.

00:03:18.800 So when I came to Google, I had to adjust to working for a huge company, working in the West, living in a different place.

00:03:26.660 It was my basically first trip outside of ex-Soviet Union.

00:03:31.600 And I also had to adjust to the culture around.

00:03:35.580 And not just to the local culture, but also to the American culture that is prevalent at the company.

00:03:41.340 and i tend to pay attention to what her company tells us during some educational sessions like

00:03:51.020 when the company explains company's policies and so on so when the company tells me that

00:03:58.240 discriminations are not allowed on all these characteristics i tend to trust that and then

00:04:05.840 When I see some actions that do look like discriminations, at least in my book, by definition of treating people differently based on different traits like race and so on, I start asking questions because it's either a violation of policies and might be a problem a long term, or it is the company not being honest and telling you one thing in policies and then acting differently outside of that.

00:04:35.840 And that is a problem because it starts hard to trust the company in such case

00:04:42.140 when you don't know what to expect of the company.

00:04:45.400 And also, you don't know when the company might start holding you responsible.

00:04:50.140 Because on paper, if you comply with what the company does,

00:04:54.760 you start violating one thing or another.

00:04:56.640 And then it's up to the company to decide where to cash that

00:05:00.120 and to hold you responsible for that.

00:05:02.720 And since you cannot properly trust the company, you cannot trust that the company is going to be fair and honest in holding you responsible.

00:05:14.500 So it's useful to try to clarify things.

00:05:17.700 And that's what I've been trying to do.

00:05:18.820 Well, speaking of clarifying things, before Francis jumps in, because I know he has a lot of questions for you, just to clarify for people who may be less familiar with our sort of post-Soviet culture, etc.

00:05:28.980 you're coming from a place where the idea of saying things as they are is encouraged right in

00:05:35.520 when in your uh previous career before you moved to switzerland you probably would have thought

00:05:41.500 well it's my job to listen to what my employer tells me and to respond to that honestly and

00:05:47.120 directly uh about what's happening and you move over you you find yourself at google which says

00:05:52.480 we must not discriminate against people on the basis of their race their sex their gender whatever

00:05:57.380 and you take that at face value and you take that literally

00:06:02.160 and you start going, well, some of the stuff you're saying

00:06:05.700 about white people kind of feels like discrimination to me

00:06:08.900 and if I go along with this, I would now be complicit

00:06:11.860 in the very thing your company says I must not do.

00:06:14.280 Is that a fair summation?

00:06:16.500 Yes.

00:06:17.840 Obviously, you cannot just say anything without consequences

00:06:22.560 back in Ukraine and companies might not be happy

00:06:26.980 with whatever your disagreement is,

00:06:29.380 and you're supposed to comply with policies.

00:06:31.760 But that basically comes first.

00:06:33.420 You're supposed to satisfy the company's requirements

00:06:36.060 like policies or whatever.

00:06:37.640 And that's why policies of Google

00:06:40.180 did look like important to pay attention to.

00:06:44.420 And so let's just flesh out the working environment.

00:06:48.660 What was it like to work at Google, number one?

00:06:51.080 Was it good or was there sort of this culture of fear?

00:06:54.780 uh it's a mixed uh feeling because there are a lot of awesome things at google there are a lot

00:07:03.180 of wonderful uh highly experienced people in their areas uh there are a lot of resources

00:07:10.100 obviously there are a lot of tools that uh probably not all of them are available outside

00:07:15.460 tools that help you to do your job there are a lot of people that really try to make your work

00:07:22.680 pleasant, and to provide you with some additional perks, health, whatever.

00:07:28.420 At the same time, the company is obviously huge, and there are costs that come with that

00:07:35.280 size, so not everything is fast enough, and there are some bureaucratic complications

00:07:40.700 there, and I wouldn't say there is an intentional culture of fear.

00:07:47.440 It's more like a lot of people try to stick to doing their job and try to avoid contradicting the company or superiors because despite the company encouraging you to do the right thing, even at the cost to yourself, or challenge the status quo, which is stated in some companies' documents describing positive traits,

00:08:14.040 It's not always good because if you start disagreeing with your superiors, it might go both ways.

00:08:20.480 And there are also managers there that really try to help you try to figure out what the problem is and how to solve it.

00:08:29.900 But there are a lot of people that basically try to avoid unnecessary responsibility and try to spend time on what they know best.

00:08:40.980 For example, most managers are good at fields they are in, like an engineering manager might be most probably a great engineer, at least a great engineer delivering some products in time.

00:08:56.480 That doesn't make such a person good at interacting with people or figuring out any interpersonal problems or organizational problems.

00:09:06.400 So when such a person becomes a manager, many seem to revert to this mode of thinking, oh, I am a good engineer, I'm going to keep being a good engineer, but just now I have additional team to help me deal with engineering stuff.

00:09:20.560 And that becomes a problem because the company expects certain things to be done in certain ways and expects managers to handle some bureaucracy after the company.

00:09:32.200 And when managers self-eliminate from that, all that burden falls onto teams, and it makes things harder.

00:09:41.800 And as for the ideological stuff, it applies to the extent that the company does something for whatever company reasons are.

00:09:50.000 Not necessarily the company is ideological, but it certainly supports some ideologies and not others.

00:09:57.480 and then it becomes...

00:09:59.740 Taras, could you give an example

00:10:01.280 where you said it supports certain ideologies

00:10:03.940 but not others?

00:10:07.140 Obviously, my document lists some examples of this

00:10:11.480 and it wasn't the first case

00:10:16.400 when I was asking questions

00:10:18.680 but in this case, it was 2020

00:10:21.780 a lot of stuff was happening back in the US

00:10:26.040 racial related stuff and we were getting bombarded by

00:10:30.340 messages from the top management regarding all these

00:10:34.240 ideologies that we have to educate ourselves about racism

00:10:37.680 and about Juneteenth and about slavery and about everything

00:10:42.200 and read books by Robin DiAngelo

00:10:46.100 and others and

00:10:48.300 basically the situation is that you're getting an email from your CEO

00:10:54.480 with such messages than from your senior vice president,

00:10:58.520 your vice president, vice presidents responsible for your office,

00:11:02.300 vice presidents for European region or whatever,

00:11:05.860 and all keep telling you that you are supposed to educate yourself

00:11:08.960 and you are not supposed to be a terrible person,

00:11:11.400 and it's not clear why they are trying to do that

00:11:16.480 and what they are trying to achieve other than just to signal

00:11:19.180 that they support this stuff.

00:11:20.740 And as for not being able to, supporting one ideologist and not others, even asking questions about this ideology is potentially harmful.

00:11:31.880 I, at some point, decided to ask a question whether some actions inside of the company complied with a company's policies about discrimination.

00:11:42.420 And I got reported for asking that for two cases.

00:11:47.740 one, once I

00:11:49.700 asked, I formulated some

00:11:51.640 question and I used words alleged

00:11:53.780 racism because to me it didn't look

00:11:55.740 like racism what people were describing

00:11:57.800 and I got

00:11:59.760 reported for using the word alleged

00:12:01.840 because apparently you are not supposed

00:12:03.800 to doubt that such things

00:12:05.800 are due to racism

00:12:06.620 and second case

00:12:08.720 I was pointing out

00:12:11.020 that one of

00:12:13.000 allyship resources available inside of the company

00:12:15.880 did look like discriminatory

00:12:18.600 And why did you say that?

00:12:21.880 That's the resource that is mentioned in my document.

00:12:25.120 And when there are articles there like white people have no culture or what do we do with white people and so on, they focus on race.

00:12:35.560 They blame people based on race.

00:12:39.260 And to me, it already looks like discrimination.

00:12:42.080 and most importantly, I don't see what good thing this could lead to

00:12:48.100 because I don't see good outcomes of this.

00:12:50.560 So I asked the question whether such a resource was within companies' policies

00:12:56.880 and I was reported for asking this question also

00:13:01.080 Because I was told that pointing out, criticizing or questioning allyship resources draws attention from the anti-racism fight.

00:13:20.320 And so I was intentionally drawing that attention away from important things.

00:13:25.560 i didn't know that at the time i only discovered these things later when i was given a written

00:13:32.880 warning with these statements on it uh i was given it right before getting fired so you're

00:13:39.500 not supposed to doubt that racism is there and you're not supposed to even question whether some

00:13:44.300 resources are within companies policies and then how do you act taras that sounds incredibly sinister

00:13:53.940 So when you got that email from the vice president, the president saying you have to read this book, you have to read that book, did you have to read it or was it advised to read it?

00:14:04.660 It wasn't compulsory. I know that in some teams in the US, people were getting through some learning sessions. And while they were not compulsory, skipping them was not something people felt comfortable with.

00:14:26.340 Because the idea is if you don't participate in this, then you are a terrible person because you don't want to understand how to deal with terrible stuff.

00:14:37.020 Luckily, in Europe, it's different. 0.99

00:14:40.700 We didn't have even optional trainings, but we were getting a lot of these emails from all the management encouraging us to read all that stuff.

00:14:52.980 It's interesting that it seems to me like a lot of people might look at your situation and go, well, why would you be discussing politics at work?

00:15:01.760 And, you know, if an employee in a company that sells coffee or whatever came in and started spouting off about BLM, you can see why their manager would be like, come on, mate, just make the coffees, calm down.

00:15:14.480 But in your case, it seems like the company brought the politics in and you were then simply responding based on your literal interpretation, possibly, if I may say so, as a fellow post-Soviet person, because you kind of took it at face value.

00:15:30.660 And, well, these are the requirements of my job.

00:15:32.820 I have to take this information in, process it and respond accordingly.

00:15:36.680 And then having politicized your role and everyone else's role in the company, the company then essentially prompted people to be talking about this political stuff.

00:15:46.620 But there was only one particular vision that you were supposed to have.

00:15:52.700 Yes, kind of like that.

00:15:57.260 There are multiple things here.

00:15:59.500 So the company tells us all the time that we are supposed to pay attention to bad things happening around us

00:16:12.440 We are going through trainings that tell us that we have to pay attention and report violations and so on

00:16:20.120 And then when it looks like there are some violations, it becomes a problem

00:16:25.500 it's actually

00:16:28.280 even more complicated

00:16:30.620 when there is all this pressure

00:16:32.480 because the company doesn't always explain

00:16:34.780 to you what exactly the company

00:16:36.760 wants

00:16:37.160 it's slightly a step to the side

00:16:40.340 but I had a situation once

00:16:42.480 when I got reported

00:16:44.080 for one discussion

00:16:45.800 and my manager

00:16:48.520 had a meeting with me and told me

00:16:50.420 that

00:16:50.740 I was not to cross

00:16:54.460 the line and it wasn't clear what that line was in that specific situation that he was referring to

00:17:01.500 so i asked for a clarification uh could you please tell me what that line is so i would avoid

00:17:07.340 crossing it the manager takes uh a break um as far as intent meets some uh hrs then comes back

00:17:16.300 and tells me and i quote pretty closely that a decision has been made not to clarify to you

00:17:22.200 where the line is because doing that would enable you to go straight to that line without crossing

00:17:29.440 it and it's not that's uh something that the company wants so it was intentional uh obscurity

00:17:36.800 of uh policies and uh in such cases how do you act if you don't know what constitutes a violation

00:17:43.800 of a policy because then whatever you do might be a violation and you might be held responsible

00:17:48.740 So it's understandable that it's useful for the company to push all this responsibility onto everyone around, be it employees, be it customers, because you are customers of YouTube, because you have to comply with YouTube's policies. 0.94

00:18:06.180 Don't we just fucking know it, Taras? 0.95

00:18:09.880 We do. Taras, let me ask you something. 0.99

00:18:12.840 look, obviously your story, and we'll get into some of the consequences for you,

00:18:18.140 is deeply painful, I imagine, and difficult, and a lot of people will care about it. But also,

00:18:24.140 I think a question a lot of people will have is how this affects them, right? Because if you have

00:18:30.420 a company that, you know, whether you believe it's ideologically driven or not, it certainly

00:18:36.120 seems like a particular ideological slant exists within some of the policies. Do you believe that

00:18:43.120 that is reflected in the product, in the Google algorithms, in the YouTube, in all of that stuff?

00:18:51.040 Is there any element where that starts to bleed through? I haven't seen examples of that affecting

00:19:00.800 our project but i was just a part of some project and not others generally i would avoid making

00:19:08.100 statements like yes it does affect products though we can see that google maps has for example

00:19:14.920 released half a year ago a new feature where businesses can mark themselves as owned by black

00:19:21.540 people or by women or something like that and this is basically coming from this idea of we having to

00:19:29.080 provide additional possibilities to minorities and so on, which results basically in a feature

00:19:35.520 that incentivizes people to discriminate each other basically on grounds of race, gender,

00:19:43.420 and so on.

00:19:44.520 But in general, the thing is, for example, with Google search that I was a part of, like

00:19:50.220 a bigger ecosystem of Google search, when you make any changes to search, you're supposed

00:19:55.400 to figure out whether this is a good change or not.

00:20:00.080 And it's hard to do that in a big system.

00:20:02.840 Same goes for machine learning systems, AI, and so on.

00:20:07.960 And this is often done by having some references,

00:20:13.560 let's say search queries, and you have a huge amount of them.

00:20:17.460 And then you check whether changes in outcomes of search

00:20:22.960 are beneficial or not as a result of you tweaking something.

00:20:29.320 And there are people that create such references

00:20:33.620 and there are people that grade whatever deviations

00:20:37.620 from known search results.

00:20:41.260 And then these people make decisions

00:20:43.700 whether some examples are good or not,

00:20:46.260 whether some search results are good matches

00:20:49.820 for search queries and so on.

00:20:51.560 And when such people are subjects to all this environment where you have to support or at least not to challenge certain ideology, when they know that even questioning whether something is good or not might result in a problem for them,

00:21:10.560 They might be quite careful with making their decisions about such references, and they might just avoid any basically tests for software that might challenge this narrative.

00:21:28.620 So while people might not be actively ideological, they might just take decisions not to evaluate quality of some aspects of products in order to avoid problems with ideological stuff.

00:21:45.680 But the reason I ask you is I'll give you an example and maybe you can explain to me what's

00:21:50.060 going on. Obviously, YouTube is also owned by Google. And there's a right wing American talk

00:21:56.900 show host, a very famous Tucker Carlson, whose show you've been on. And I have noticed that if

00:22:01.880 you, you know, whether I'm doing stuff for research or whatever, when I put Tucker Carlson in,

00:22:05.780 the first or second video on the YouTube search is almost always someone on CNN

00:22:12.400 making fun of or debunking or mocking Tucker Carlson,

00:22:17.600 which seems quite unusual.

00:22:19.040 Like if you were to search for trigonometry,

00:22:21.580 it'd be very odd to me that the first search results

00:22:24.980 wouldn't be from trigonometry.

00:22:27.440 There would be somebody making fun of trigonometry.

00:22:30.080 Not that anyone would do that, of course.

00:22:32.940 Well, you do, you make good fun of it yourself

00:22:36.440 when you get to that.

00:22:38.360 Yeah.

00:22:38.760 As for search results on YouTube and so on,

00:22:41.800 It's actually a difficult question.

00:22:44.240 It's pretty easy to see it as a result of ideologies and some malice,

00:22:50.600 but it's not necessarily that, because all these algorithms,

00:22:55.180 they have to deal with so huge amounts of information

00:22:59.680 that you cannot potentially test everything.

00:23:04.660 And you cannot always, it's basically impossible to have some decision-making system

00:23:10.600 that would be 100 percent correct uh so uh you always try trying to make improvements uh

00:23:20.120 and your improvements most probably result in some um detrimental effects to some other parts like

00:23:29.080 let's say that you would try to make sure that tucker carlson gets proper search results and

00:23:35.080 and then you make some changes to the algorithm.

00:23:38.000 And then whatever, CNN, Deutsche Welle, BBC would start getting slightly worse search results.

00:23:44.460 And then it's up to you to decide whether overall increase in quality is good enough

00:23:49.280 to justify that slight drop in some areas or not.

00:23:53.740 And you cannot get to 100% correctness.

00:23:57.200 So it might be possible to look at specific results and try to figure out what's happening there.

00:24:04.380 But I wouldn't say that it is the company's malice

00:24:09.440 or whatever that is responsible for such results.

00:24:12.060 I find that very upsetting, Taras.

00:24:14.260 I thought that YouTube were against us.

00:24:16.500 That's made me angry.

00:24:18.100 But look, Taras, why? 0.64

00:24:19.960 I still can't get my head around this.

00:24:21.900 Why is it that these big juggernaut,

00:24:24.840 multinational corporations making billions,

00:24:27.940 why do they get involved in this stuff?

00:24:29.980 If it's going to cause anger,

00:24:31.380 if it's going to cause devicelessness within their own ranks

00:24:34.180 and ultimately lower productivity?

00:24:37.380 I hope that you would be able to tell me

00:24:40.060 you've had so many wonderful guests on your show

00:24:43.120 and much more suited to explore reasons behind such changes.

00:24:50.460 I really don't know why the company supports it.

00:24:52.900 I haven't seen some evidence of the management being ideological.

00:25:01.380 But I don't know what they say in private.

00:25:04.880 And when they talk in public, it's not clear whether they support this

00:25:10.560 because they really think this is a good ideology

00:25:13.880 or because they are trying to get some benefits for the company

00:25:18.500 by supporting this ideology

00:25:19.740 or simply because they are afraid to touch some topics.

00:25:23.980 For example, there was a situation in the beginning of summer 2019.

00:25:34.460 There was one company's employee, a manager from YouTube in Los Angeles, who did notice some random black person trying to bypass some security measures on an apartment building of that Google's employee.

00:25:52.520 And so that employee did confront that black person.

00:25:57.860 The situation escalated and ended up with the employee calling the police and being filmed on camera.

00:26:07.420 And that ended up on public news as a white YouTube executive calling the police on a black man or something like that.

00:26:17.020 And there was a lot of unhappiness inside of the company.

00:26:20.080 people were claiming

00:26:23.080 they were unsafe

00:26:24.280 working with this employee

00:26:26.200 there was a meeting

00:26:28.780 between so-called

00:26:30.860 blacks at YouTube and affinity group

00:26:32.780 in YouTube for as far as I understand

00:26:35.060 black employees and their allies

00:26:37.300 they had according to

00:26:39.200 the internal messaging boards

00:26:40.580 a meeting with the CEO of YouTube

00:26:43.000 Susan Budzicki

00:26:44.220 and after that

00:26:46.580 and they as far as I understand

00:26:48.360 were trying to express their unhappiness with the situation.

00:26:52.980 And Susan has decided to address this during a company-wide meeting, so-called TJF.

00:26:59.700 We still had them back then.

00:27:01.460 Later, the company canceled most of them.

00:27:05.820 So Susan was aware of the situation.

00:27:08.920 She was addressing it on her own initiative.

00:27:12.320 She was able to prepare.

00:27:14.020 She obviously thought that the topic was important enough

00:27:17.860 because she walked in the middle of regular presentations.

00:27:21.320 Usually it doesn't happen.

00:27:23.820 She decided not to wait for the standard questions and answers session at the end

00:27:30.700 and decided to address the situation in the middle of that meeting.

00:27:35.180 And she said that basically the company, I'm trying to be close,

00:27:40.340 that the company valued black employees a lot

00:27:44.300 and that the safety of the black employees

00:27:46.880 was paramount to the company and so on.

00:27:49.940 Nobody was challenging that position.

00:27:54.640 So it wasn't clear why she was stating that.

00:27:57.380 And she said absolutely nothing about

00:28:00.880 whether it was fine to call the police

00:28:05.480 in that situation for the employee or not.

00:28:07.680 So with people claiming being unsafe and asking several questions on that Q&A session about consequences to that employee, whether the company would take some action against that employee, Susan never addressed that.

00:28:25.840 And then the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, also said a few words, but he basically repeated the same sentiment and also avoided addressing the question of a mob of black employees and their allies basically harassing that white employee for calling the police on a suspected trespasser.

00:28:49.260 uh that employee was uh wasn't fired as far as i understand but uh the company that claims

00:28:59.880 that discrimination is bad and that the company that even mentioned on my uh on the statement

00:29:06.220 about me for uh tucker carlson show that i was apparently a bad person for singling out

00:29:12.580 some person i have no idea what that is about uh the company was obviously fine with all this

00:29:18.140 mob singling out

00:29:20.220 that employee and going after that

00:29:22.180 employee. I don't know

00:29:24.200 why the company reacted that way

00:29:25.880 my best guess is that

00:29:28.460 despite

00:29:29.740 being aware of the

00:29:32.160 situation and having time to prepare

00:29:33.980 the management had no idea how to address

00:29:36.360 it because

00:29:37.980 over time it's not like

00:29:40.200 the management has been

00:29:41.340 displaying great problem solving skills

00:29:44.220 to the rest of the company so that

00:29:46.040 could have been just a result of the management being afraid of doing anything.

00:29:51.760 And Taras, so you see this happening in the company. You see the way that the political

00:29:57.280 climate is going. Do you not worry about yourself and doing the actions that you have then done?

00:30:07.100 Because you must have been worried. You must have known where this was going to end up.

00:30:10.480 I wasn't worrying that much for myself, though it was obviously affecting me when I was being referred to as a terrible person because of being white, basically.

00:30:25.160 But what was worrying me even more is that the company didn't look capable of addressing such situations and being clear with its employees or with customers.

00:30:37.960 And that says something about companies' ability to address other challenges.

00:30:43.680 And when so much in your life depends on how good your employer is, good in the sense of business sense, whether you have future there and so on.

00:30:53.160 And then you see such actions that make you think that the company is not capable of addressing actual problems.

00:31:02.440 That was troublesome. But in general, about the situation, yes, I don't see how this can proceed without ending with one out of two outcomes.

00:31:19.840 Either people accept all this state of things and just submit to it, and I won't be able to do that myself, and I wouldn't wish that on my friends.

00:31:32.440 or there is going to be real conflict and potential misery down the road and whatever

00:31:40.100 the outcome of that conflict i'm not looking forward to that so yes i uh i felt uh it was

00:31:48.820 necessary to try to fix the problem the idea basically is that you uh love it fix it or leave

00:31:54.440 it. I saw it as a problem. I saw it as affecting, let's say, my reputation. Because when I joined

00:32:02.740 Google, my reputation started contributing to Google's, although it was a very small contribution.

00:32:10.200 But Google's reputation started affecting me. And if the company you work for starts doing

00:32:15.780 bad things uh and you uh say nothing like i would feel myself responsible or at least

00:32:23.480 it would be possible for people to blame me for such things so i had to do something i wasn't

00:32:31.220 able to love uh the situation i wasn't ready to leave uh and i tried to fix it that's why i've

00:32:38.220 been asking questions internally i that's why i wrote this document and i actually wrote this

00:32:43.460 document after a conversation in our team because uh it wasn't just me being unhappy but other people

00:32:50.480 as well though most of people are not uh as uh able to talk about this stuff because they worry

00:32:59.560 about their families and so on i was in slightly better position unfortunately don't have a family

00:33:05.060 but that does make things a bit easier for me uh so uh in the end of that conversation my manager

00:33:12.580 asked me about my specific concerns

00:33:15.560 and told me that these concerns would be

00:33:18.380 sent somewhere upstairs or whatever.

00:33:21.880 And I decided to write a document

00:33:23.180 because it's hard to just keep telling stuff

00:33:27.880 to people in such a big company

00:33:29.980 because everyone has their own problems to work on,

00:33:33.740 different time zones and whatever.

00:33:35.700 So when you try to address something,

00:33:37.520 it's much better to write a document

00:33:39.000 and then share the document

00:33:40.080 so people can read it at their spare time.

00:33:42.580 I wrote the document, I shared it with the manager, so he would be able to use it.

00:33:48.440 And I also shared it with our team because of that conversation and with some other people I've been having.

00:33:54.920 I had similar conversations with.

00:34:00.120 And that's when problems started because apparently the company wasn't happy with that.

00:34:04.920 And for people who haven't read the document, what was the gist?

00:34:09.520 What was the overall message that you said?

00:34:12.580 So I saw these ideologies getting too far and becoming contradictory with a company's own policies and damaging long term to the culture and to the reputation of the company.

00:34:26.260 And I also saw it as a problem that it was hard for people to point that out because I knew plenty of people that were not happy with this, but that were afraid of speaking up.

00:34:39.220 And that was also something that I mentioned in my document.

00:34:44.760 Actually, after I started getting pressured by my manager, I contacted one of higher managers, director level, with something like 50, 80 people reporting to him.

00:34:56.660 And I asked for advice there because I wasn't getting any good advice from my manager.

00:35:03.640 Okay, maybe my document is awful, but let me know how I can express these thoughts in an appropriate manner.

00:35:10.920 And I never got that response.

00:35:12.880 And I asked that question again during the meeting with HR when I was getting fired.

00:35:18.880 And I also didn't get any explanation how I can express these things in a way that would be considered possible.

00:35:27.200 The company tells you all the time that you are free to discuss whatever you want.

00:35:33.660 And then there is a small print caveat that communications have to be respectful and so on.

00:35:42.160 And then it's up to the company to decide what is considered to be disrespectful.

00:35:47.440 And the company doesn't actually tell you what is your mistake and how to fix it.

00:35:54.940 Again, probably because whatever the company says, it is afraid that it might be used against it somewhere later.

00:36:02.840 So it's more beneficial for the company to avoid providing you with enough information.

00:36:08.920 So I contacted that director level manager and I asked him for help.

00:36:15.180 And the answer was, do what your manager tells you.

00:36:17.940 And also, you're wrong that you think that it's not safe to talk about these matters inside of the company.

00:36:26.860 That's most probably because you've never engaged with all these wonderful allyship resources our company provides.

00:36:35.160 And then I was encouraged to join some allyship group and to learn about racism and so on.

00:36:40.640 And I don't know what was more disturbing there, whether an engineer and a high manager with a lot of people depending on him not understanding this environment that the company creates and problems that come with it,

00:36:58.220 or understanding it and consciously stepping away

00:37:04.560 to avoid making things complicated for himself

00:37:09.380 and letting subordinates basically to deal with all this on their own.

00:37:15.680 Taurus, was there any point where you were working for Google

00:37:19.180 when this reminds me of the Soviet Union?

00:37:22.180 oh uh okay uh if i would say that i wouldn't be uh totally correct because uh i was lucky uh

00:37:35.260 to be about 13 when the soviet union collapsed uh luckily it collapsed before i did uh so uh i

00:37:44.180 I was only able to judge about the Soviet Union based on conversations with parents, friends of the family, reading books, movies, and so on.

00:37:56.760 So it's not like my personal experience with the Soviet Union, with a lot of stuff. 0.82

00:38:01.900 But a lot of nonsense that happens, not just with Google, but it looks like in corporate world, in politics, it's just ridiculous.

00:38:10.640 It's all the statements about supporting some ideologies and having to be the beacon of lights or whatever.

00:38:22.660 All that stuff was happening in the Soviet Union with actual results not being that great and so on, as far as I understand.

00:38:31.060 So, yeah, there are better people to make such a comparison.

00:38:35.360 But I guess some people, after getting fed all that nonsense in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union times in countries controlled by the Soviet Union, like Poland and others, maybe they're a little better, maybe not better equipped, but maybe they have a little less patience to all this nonsense than others that are not familiar with this.

00:39:02.100 Yeah, well, that makes sense to me, Taras. And obviously, you then get fired for refusing to not share that document. So your manager said to you, there is no problem discussing this issue, or rather this director manager, there's no problem talking about this stuff at Google, go ahead. I mean, go and read all the right literature, of course, but there's no problem.

00:39:25.600 you can say what you want and so you said what you want and then they tried to get you to unsay it

00:39:32.180 and when you refused they fired you is that correct uh yes i don't know why the company

00:39:39.060 didn't order me to delete the document maybe again it was trying to um save to maintain some

00:39:46.920 perception that things are allowed at the company so you don't have to delete the document i was

00:39:51.760 told that you just have to make the document not accessible by other people which results in the

00:39:58.940 same and which sounds as a nonsense and I've been asking my manager repeatedly like what is wrong

00:40:06.360 with my document and if I am so dumb that I am unable to express my thoughts in a good way could

00:40:13.280 you please tell me how I can do that my manager wasn't capable to do that I wouldn't get into

00:40:19.720 details of that because again that's just decisions and qualities of one person that

00:40:26.220 might not be indicative of the company in general but it wasn't the first time when I got in this

00:40:33.680 situation we allow you to talk about things but you have to talk about them in a way we see

00:40:39.400 appropriate and we won't tell you what the appropriate is it wasn't the first time when

00:40:44.700 I was asking HRs about ways to talk about things without getting reported.

00:40:51.140 You already mentioned the case about Jordan Peterson's pronouns, and it was actually

00:40:58.860 ridiculous because it was a conversation where someone asked a question, something like,

00:41:04.500 if only I knew why people act the way they do. 0.96

00:41:08.040 And that could have been a sarcastic remark, but I decided to try to respond to it.

00:41:13.080 And it's not like I knew a lot about psychology. Maybe nowadays I would have recommended lectures by Robert Sapolsky from Stanford, but back then I was going through university lectures by Jordan Peterson, The Maps of Meaning.

00:41:29.600 And despite me not following all conclusions by Dr. Peterson, I was fascinated by how he was getting to some interesting ideas based on whatever sources he was using.

00:41:48.860 And it was useful for me to a certain extent, so I decided to recommend these lectures.

00:41:53.920 By that time, I had already heard about such things as microaggressions and trigger warnings, so I decided to do my best to provide a trigger warning.

00:42:07.160 So I mentioned that Jordan Peterson was considered by some people controversial because of his stance on the compelled speech, which resulted in all this controversy around transgender pronouns.

00:42:21.100 but from my point of view

00:42:24.620 it was due to representation of his stance

00:42:27.260 and that was basically my comment

00:42:28.860 almost immediately someone commented that

00:42:32.240 how dare you to mention Jordan Peterson

00:42:34.180 because I have a sibling who is trans

00:42:37.880 and this is so painful

00:42:39.320 and now you are mentioning this terrible person

00:42:41.600 and then I got reported for

00:42:44.760 for supporting Jordan Peterson's stance

00:42:50.380 on transgender pronouns, which wasn't, I believe, the point of my comment.

00:42:56.940 So you can get in such strange situations as well.

00:43:00.580 So basically, you mentioned someone who some people don't like,

00:43:04.340 and that becomes you making people unsafe now.

00:43:09.180 Yes, and around that time, I also heard about some attempts to invite people

00:43:15.680 like dr peterson to give a talk uh at some google office google has uh has been uh inviting different

00:43:25.040 people and there are uh there is a channel called toxic google or something like that on youtube

00:43:30.480 where you can uh watch all this and there are people like john please for example uh and uh

00:43:36.560 some of these talks are fun to watch uh but uh people were not getting approvals for uh inviting

00:43:43.840 Jordan Peterson. And at the same time, Robin DiAngelo, the author of the White Fragility book,

00:43:50.400 was giving a talk at one of the offices. It was actually my first topic that I got engaged in,

00:43:58.120 because I had no idea how the concept of white fragility might not be a violation of companies' 0.85

00:44:04.060 policies about racial discrimination. So, Taras, you're looking at the journey that you've had,

00:44:11.440 You look at everything that's happened.

00:44:13.820 Do you regret speaking out?

00:44:17.580 I regret losing my Google salary

00:44:21.020 and putting my Swiss visa in danger

00:44:26.440 because it's hard to stay here

00:44:28.420 if I don't have a good job

00:44:29.980 and not that easy always to find a suitable job.

00:44:35.060 I don't regret speaking up.

00:44:37.140 I probably would have regretted if I stayed silent.

00:44:39.680 And basically, it was quite uncomfortable for me, and it was not, I would say, it was detrimental for my state.

00:44:53.380 In addition to all the pressure that there is there engineering-wise regarding your work,

00:45:01.720 there was this pressure with ideologies I wasn't able to support and pressure with all this nonsense.

00:45:09.680 And with the company not being able to formulate things, and the company basically acting hypocritically and putting all the blame onto you, providing you information in order to be able to navigate all these complexities, it was making things harder.

00:45:28.800 Actually, I was already thinking about leaving Google at some point, even before that.

00:45:35.080 But I was still not ready to do that.

00:45:39.200 But this pressure actually drives some people away from the company.

00:45:43.400 I know people that do leave company because of all this nonsense, because of all this pressure.

00:45:50.100 And what has been the impact on your life?

00:45:52.300 You mentioned losing your salary and your job.

00:45:54.440 You are still looking for a job now.

00:45:57.060 Google haven't exactly, I mean, you can see why after all of the complaints that they had about you,

00:46:03.080 they wouldn't give you a good reference.

00:46:05.120 But you still haven't found another job, and it's been a year, right?

00:46:10.620 It's not like I've been looking for a new job all the time.

00:46:13.700 I really needed some break after Google.

00:46:16.640 And after some time, I really felt way better than I felt while working for the company.

00:46:24.000 yes, it's a bit hard

00:46:27.560 for various reasons for me to find

00:46:29.780 something here

00:46:30.520 and

00:46:32.500 regarding the reference, sure

00:46:35.580 I totally agree that

00:46:37.140 first of all, I agree that a company

00:46:39.940 should be able to

00:46:41.180 get rid of an employee that

00:46:43.800 for some reason is not good for the company

00:46:45.820 otherwise it just wouldn't make any

00:46:47.980 sense from

00:46:48.720 business reasons

00:46:51.760 whatever. What I

00:46:53.620 I don't agree is the way it went because basically the company was putting on to me the blame for situations created by the company for whatever contradictions been there.

00:47:11.180 And then instead of just telling me, look, I know that you don't support these ideologies, we do.

00:47:20.320 It's not going to work for us.

00:47:22.220 let's figure out how to part our ways i would have understood that i would have understood if the

00:47:27.160 company just told us that yeah we're going to discriminate people based on race because we

00:47:31.700 think it's better for us uh at least uh there wouldn't be wouldn't have been this contradiction

00:47:37.780 for me uh like different messages from the company uh i was uh expecting a slightly different outcome

00:47:45.520 but the company actually acted quite unfriendly

00:47:49.520 both through all this process and afterwards.

00:47:53.000 You mentioned the reference,

00:47:55.640 and again, I agree that how can someone who gets fired

00:48:01.440 get a good reference letter?

00:48:04.100 But there are actually some regulations

00:48:06.860 regarding that here in Switzerland.

00:48:09.600 Basically, reference letters are supposed to be written

00:48:13.160 in such a way to help the former employee to find a new job.

00:48:18.040 You are not supposed to blackmouth that employee,

00:48:21.120 and you are supposed to only mention negative stuff

00:48:24.680 if that was directly related to your job.

00:48:27.980 Like if I was a driver and I was drinking alcohol during my work hours,

00:48:32.860 that would have been on a reference letter.

00:48:35.160 That, of course, makes reference letters a bit less useful

00:48:39.200 because you cannot properly explain why have you decided to fire someone.

00:48:44.760 But some people even getting fired for underperformance

00:48:49.460 and getting fired after the company having bad perception

00:48:54.740 are still getting great reference letters as far as I know.

00:48:59.620 In my case, the company has decided to provide me with a bad one

00:49:04.540 that was also contradicting my previous performance reviews.

00:49:09.200 and was basically questioning both my personal skills.

00:49:12.960 The reference letter tells something like that I was so disrespectful

00:49:17.140 with my fellow employees, fellow colleagues, that the company had to intervene.

00:49:24.040 And when I was trying to negotiate with the company about that,

00:49:28.380 the company told me, so what that you can bring,

00:49:31.100 and again, I'm quoting pretty closely,

00:49:33.880 so what that you can bring 10 colleagues that would testify that you were a wonderful colleague?

00:49:38.680 We're going to bring testaments from five people that were offended by whatever you posted on internal message boards.

00:49:45.860 And then it's going to be up to some judge to decide who is more right.

00:49:51.240 Overall, it has resulted in me losing a lot of time trying to negotiate for a better reference letter and a lot of money spent on lawyers.

00:50:01.960 The company wasn't even trying to talk to me.

00:50:06.680 So it was basically stolen for a lot of time, not replying, which is not that great.

00:50:12.560 And talking about you as customers of clients of YouTube, that's basically one of the standard approaches of designing interfaces,

00:50:25.140 be it like graphical interface of a program or a process through which people have to go in order to contact the company and to get some support or whatever.

00:50:35.460 I've never been posting anything on YouTube, you know better, but are you getting good enough explanations from YouTube when some of your videos gets unlisted or demonetized, or whether some of the comments on your videos are getting deleted?

00:50:54.100 Are you getting enough information to prevent such things from happening in the future?

00:50:58.480 And do you understand why exactly that happened?

00:51:01.300 Because if it doesn't, it's the same problem.

00:51:03.320 The company is putting all this responsibility onto you.

00:51:06.940 The company is not being friendly and not trying to be fair.

00:51:11.960 And the company has this so-called culture of three respects.

00:51:15.720 Respect each other, respect the customer, and respect the opportunity.

00:51:21.240 It was getting installed somewhere two years ago, maybe.

00:51:26.240 And I'm not prepared to talk about opportunities,

00:51:29.060 but at least with regard to respecting each other and customers,

00:51:32.240 I would say that the company does a terrible job because by not providing you with proper information so you would be able to interact with the company, it makes your lives easier.

00:51:45.480 And it basically puts responsibility onto you in order to avoid responsibilities itself.

00:51:51.520 And this is not a good partnership.

00:51:54.280 And the same happens with internal communications when you don't understand what's happening and all these situations at the company.

00:52:01.760 So respecting each other also doesn't work that greatly inside of the company.

00:52:08.060 That makes sense. Taras, we wish you all the best with finding new employment.

00:52:11.840 And now that you feel better about everything, thank you for coming to speak to us.

00:52:15.500 We've got a few questions for our local supporters.

00:52:18.760 We've also got a final question.

00:52:20.760 Is there any way people can get in touch with you if they want to or find you online or anything like that?

00:52:27.720 They can probably find me on LinkedIn

00:52:29.580 or on my ProtonMail account,

00:52:32.020 taras.kobernik at protonmail.com.

00:52:35.940 Fantastic.

00:52:36.480 Thanks very much.

00:52:37.060 Well, we've got one more question

00:52:38.240 in the main interview for you.

00:52:39.420 Which is, what's the one thing

00:52:41.000 we're not talking about,

00:52:42.420 but we really should be?

00:52:44.980 If only I knew what you've been talking about

00:52:47.340 because I didn't have as much time

00:52:48.920 to watch all your wonderful podcasts.

00:52:52.440 But I'm curious whether

00:52:54.580 how we can improve

00:52:57.380 overall education system

00:52:59.260 I know that you've discussed

00:53:01.300 it briefly with

00:53:02.880 Drs. Heather Hines and

00:53:05.000 Bert Weinstein during your recent

00:53:06.580 podcast, live stream

00:53:08.560 but there you were

00:53:11.220 addressing it from the point of view of

00:53:13.340 changing

00:53:15.400 maybe creating new institutions

00:53:17.180 instead of the existing universities

00:53:19.100 and so on. I wonder

00:53:20.940 about accessibility

00:53:23.140 of good mentorship to people

00:53:25.080 because sometimes it's nice

00:53:28.340 if you know what questions to ask.

00:53:30.520 Then you can go to sites like Quora or whatever

00:53:33.140 and try to find some answers

00:53:34.400 or Google for something.

00:53:36.080 Sometimes you don't even know

00:53:37.140 what questions to ask.

00:53:38.520 And good mentorship is important.

00:53:40.340 Unfortunately, not everyone can get one.

00:53:43.760 Usually it's parents and your teachers

00:53:46.120 that are supposed to help you,

00:53:47.980 but not everyone can help you.

00:53:49.660 For example, my parents were never able

00:53:52.120 to advise me on creating my own

00:53:54.280 business or investing things. Those

00:53:56.160 were not things in the Soviet Union

00:53:57.860 and so in other

00:54:00.240 countries as well.

00:54:02.200 So I think

00:54:04.060 there is a lot of value in

00:54:06.140 good mentorship. I don't know how to make

00:54:08.140 it accessible.

00:54:09.940 And maybe we can

00:54:12.240 create something that

00:54:14.100 is not perfect, but the next

00:54:16.260 best thing. We have

00:54:17.800 all these wonderful online

00:54:20.020 courses available from

00:54:21.700 leading universities and they were of great help for me for example because without them I wouldn't

00:54:29.340 have been able to get to even to google or near close so maybe there is some way to have some

00:54:38.640 educational institutions that are not about having awesome scientists on staff and instead of

00:54:47.800 leveraging these educational courses from online platforms and instead focusing on providing good

00:54:55.360 mentorship or whatever and francis would be able to tell more about this with your background

00:55:01.100 in education i don't have that experience but would be nice to discuss that no it's it's something

00:55:08.280 that would be very very interesting to discuss taras thank you so much for coming on thank you

00:55:12.960 It's been a pleasure for us, so thank you.

00:55:16.400 And thank you for watching, guys, at home.

00:55:18.600 And if you've enjoyed the show, please remember that Wednesdays and Sundays,

00:55:22.640 7 p.m. British time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time,

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TRIGGERnometry - October 14, 2021

Fired Google Insider Speaks Out

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript