00:02:21.020What 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.
00:02:43.420and you were told repeatedly that you were making other people unsafe, uncomfortable,
00:02:49.180you were being insensitive, you were told that by supporting Jordan Peterson's position on pronouns,
00:02:56.380you were making your fellow employees quote-unquote unsafe, etc.
00:03:01.200So what was it that was happening and why did you feel the need to speak out against it?
00:03:06.640It was probably me being new to the Western culture because all my life before that moment,
00:03:12.920And I spent back in Ukraine, and their approaches there are different.
00:03:18.800So when I came to Google, I had to adjust to working for a huge company, working in the West, living in a different place.
00:03:26.660It was my basically first trip outside of ex-Soviet Union.
00:03:31.600And I also had to adjust to the culture around.
00:03:35.580And not just to the local culture, but also to the American culture that is prevalent at the company.
00:03:41.340and i tend to pay attention to what her company tells us during some educational sessions like
00:03:51.020when the company explains company's policies and so on so when the company tells me that
00:03:58.240discriminations are not allowed on all these characteristics i tend to trust that and then
00:04:05.840When 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.
00:04:35.840And that is a problem because it starts hard to trust the company in such case
00:04:42.140when you don't know what to expect of the company.
00:04:45.400And also, you don't know when the company might start holding you responsible.
00:04:50.140Because on paper, if you comply with what the company does,
00:04:54.760you start violating one thing or another.
00:04:56.640And then it's up to the company to decide where to cash that
00:05:02.720And since you cannot properly trust the company, you cannot trust that the company is going to be fair and honest in holding you responsible.
00:05:14.500So it's useful to try to clarify things.
00:05:17.700And that's what I've been trying to do.
00:05:18.820Well, 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.
00:05:28.980you're coming from a place where the idea of saying things as they are is encouraged right in
00:05:35.520when in your uh previous career before you moved to switzerland you probably would have thought
00:05:41.500well it's my job to listen to what my employer tells me and to respond to that honestly and
00:05:47.120directly uh about what's happening and you move over you you find yourself at google which says
00:05:52.480we must not discriminate against people on the basis of their race their sex their gender whatever
00:05:57.380and you take that at face value and you take that literally
00:06:02.160and you start going, well, some of the stuff you're saying
00:06:05.700about white people kind of feels like discrimination to me
00:06:08.900and if I go along with this, I would now be complicit
00:06:11.860in the very thing your company says I must not do.
00:06:40.180did look like important to pay attention to.
00:06:44.420And so let's just flesh out the working environment.
00:06:48.660What was it like to work at Google, number one?
00:06:51.080Was it good or was there sort of this culture of fear?
00:06:54.780uh it's a mixed uh feeling because there are a lot of awesome things at google there are a lot
00:07:03.180of wonderful uh highly experienced people in their areas uh there are a lot of resources
00:07:10.100obviously there are a lot of tools that uh probably not all of them are available outside
00:07:15.460tools that help you to do your job there are a lot of people that really try to make your work
00:07:22.680pleasant, and to provide you with some additional perks, health, whatever.
00:07:28.420At the same time, the company is obviously huge, and there are costs that come with that
00:07:35.280size, so not everything is fast enough, and there are some bureaucratic complications
00:07:40.700there, and I wouldn't say there is an intentional culture of fear.
00:07:47.440It'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,
00:08:14.040It's not always good because if you start disagreeing with your superiors, it might go both ways.
00:08:20.480And there are also managers there that really try to help you try to figure out what the problem is and how to solve it.
00:08:29.900But there are a lot of people that basically try to avoid unnecessary responsibility and try to spend time on what they know best.
00:08:40.980For 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.
00:08:56.480That doesn't make such a person good at interacting with people or figuring out any interpersonal problems or organizational problems.
00:09:06.400So 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.
00:09:20.560And 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.
00:09:32.200And when managers self-eliminate from that, all that burden falls onto teams, and it makes things harder.
00:09:41.800And as for the ideological stuff, it applies to the extent that the company does something for whatever company reasons are.
00:09:50.000Not necessarily the company is ideological, but it certainly supports some ideologies and not others.
00:11:20.740And as for not being able to, supporting one ideologist and not others, even asking questions about this ideology is potentially harmful.
00:11:31.880I, at some point, decided to ask a question whether some actions inside of the company complied with a company's policies about discrimination.
00:11:42.420And I got reported for asking that for two cases.
00:12:39.260And to me, it already looks like discrimination.
00:12:42.080and most importantly, I don't see what good thing this could lead to
00:12:48.100because I don't see good outcomes of this.
00:12:50.560So I asked the question whether such a resource was within companies' policies
00:12:56.880and I was reported for asking this question also
00:13:01.080Because I was told that pointing out, criticizing or questioning allyship resources draws attention from the anti-racism fight.
00:13:20.320And so I was intentionally drawing that attention away from important things.
00:13:25.560i didn't know that at the time i only discovered these things later when i was given a written
00:13:32.880warning with these statements on it uh i was given it right before getting fired so you're
00:13:39.500not supposed to doubt that racism is there and you're not supposed to even question whether some
00:13:44.300resources are within companies policies and then how do you act taras that sounds incredibly sinister
00:13:53.940So 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?
00:14:04.660It 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.
00:14:26.340Because 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.
00:14:40.700We 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.
00:14:52.980It'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?
00:15:01.760And, 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.
00:15:14.480But 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.
00:15:30.660And, well, these are the requirements of my job.
00:15:32.820I have to take this information in, process it and respond accordingly.
00:15:36.680And 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.
00:15:46.620But there was only one particular vision that you were supposed to have.
00:16:54.460the line and it wasn't clear what that line was in that specific situation that he was referring to
00:17:01.500so i asked for a clarification uh could you please tell me what that line is so i would avoid
00:17:07.340crossing it the manager takes uh a break um as far as intent meets some uh hrs then comes back
00:17:16.300and tells me and i quote pretty closely that a decision has been made not to clarify to you
00:17:22.200where the line is because doing that would enable you to go straight to that line without crossing
00:17:29.440it and it's not that's uh something that the company wants so it was intentional uh obscurity
00:17:36.800of uh policies and uh in such cases how do you act if you don't know what constitutes a violation
00:17:43.800of a policy because then whatever you do might be a violation and you might be held responsible
00:17:48.740So 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.
00:20:51.560And 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,
00:21:10.560They 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.
00:21:28.620So 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.
00:21:45.680But the reason I ask you is I'll give you an example and maybe you can explain to me what's
00:21:50.060going on. Obviously, YouTube is also owned by Google. And there's a right wing American talk
00:21:56.900show host, a very famous Tucker Carlson, whose show you've been on. And I have noticed that if
00:22:01.880you, you know, whether I'm doing stuff for research or whatever, when I put Tucker Carlson in,
00:22:05.780the first or second video on the YouTube search is almost always someone on CNN
00:22:12.400making fun of or debunking or mocking Tucker Carlson,
00:25:19.740or simply because they are afraid to touch some topics.
00:25:23.980For example, there was a situation in the beginning of summer 2019.
00:25:34.460There 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.
00:25:52.520And so that employee did confront that black person.
00:25:57.860The situation escalated and ended up with the employee calling the police and being filmed on camera.
00:26:07.420And that ended up on public news as a white YouTube executive calling the police on a black man or something like that.
00:26:17.020And there was a lot of unhappiness inside of the company.
00:28:00.880whether it was fine to call the police
00:28:05.480in that situation for the employee or not.
00:28:07.680So 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.
00:28:25.840And 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.
00:28:49.260uh that employee was uh wasn't fired as far as i understand but uh the company that claims
00:28:59.880that discrimination is bad and that the company that even mentioned on my uh on the statement
00:29:06.220about me for uh tucker carlson show that i was apparently a bad person for singling out
00:29:12.580some person i have no idea what that is about uh the company was obviously fine with all this
00:29:46.040could have been just a result of the management being afraid of doing anything.
00:29:51.760And Taras, so you see this happening in the company. You see the way that the political
00:29:57.280climate is going. Do you not worry about yourself and doing the actions that you have then done?
00:30:07.100Because you must have been worried. You must have known where this was going to end up.
00:30:10.480I 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.
00:30:25.160But 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.
00:30:37.960And that says something about companies' ability to address other challenges.
00:30:43.680And 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.
00:30:53.160And then you see such actions that make you think that the company is not capable of addressing actual problems.
00:31:02.440That 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.
00:31:19.840Either 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.
00:31:32.440or there is going to be real conflict and potential misery down the road and whatever
00:31:40.100the outcome of that conflict i'm not looking forward to that so yes i uh i felt uh it was
00:31:48.820necessary to try to fix the problem the idea basically is that you uh love it fix it or leave
00:31:54.440it. I saw it as a problem. I saw it as affecting, let's say, my reputation. Because when I joined
00:32:02.740Google, my reputation started contributing to Google's, although it was a very small contribution.
00:32:10.200But Google's reputation started affecting me. And if the company you work for starts doing
00:32:15.780bad things uh and you uh say nothing like i would feel myself responsible or at least
00:32:23.480it would be possible for people to blame me for such things so i had to do something i wasn't
00:32:31.220able to love uh the situation i wasn't ready to leave uh and i tried to fix it that's why i've
00:32:38.220been asking questions internally i that's why i wrote this document and i actually wrote this
00:32:43.460document after a conversation in our team because uh it wasn't just me being unhappy but other people
00:32:50.480as well though most of people are not uh as uh able to talk about this stuff because they worry
00:32:59.560about their families and so on i was in slightly better position unfortunately don't have a family
00:33:05.060but that does make things a bit easier for me uh so uh in the end of that conversation my manager
00:34:00.120And that's when problems started because apparently the company wasn't happy with that.
00:34:04.920And for people who haven't read the document, what was the gist?
00:34:09.520What was the overall message that you said?
00:34:12.580So 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.
00:34:26.260And 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.
00:34:39.220And that was also something that I mentioned in my document.
00:34:44.760Actually, 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.
00:34:56.660And I asked for advice there because I wasn't getting any good advice from my manager.
00:35:03.640Okay, maybe my document is awful, but let me know how I can express these thoughts in an appropriate manner.
00:35:12.880And I asked that question again during the meeting with HR when I was getting fired.
00:35:18.880And I also didn't get any explanation how I can express these things in a way that would be considered possible.
00:35:27.200The company tells you all the time that you are free to discuss whatever you want.
00:35:33.660And then there is a small print caveat that communications have to be respectful and so on.
00:35:42.160And then it's up to the company to decide what is considered to be disrespectful.
00:35:47.440And the company doesn't actually tell you what is your mistake and how to fix it.
00:35:54.940Again, probably because whatever the company says, it is afraid that it might be used against it somewhere later.
00:36:02.840So it's more beneficial for the company to avoid providing you with enough information.
00:36:08.920So I contacted that director level manager and I asked him for help.
00:36:15.180And the answer was, do what your manager tells you.
00:36:17.940And also, you're wrong that you think that it's not safe to talk about these matters inside of the company.
00:36:26.860That's most probably because you've never engaged with all these wonderful allyship resources our company provides.
00:36:35.160And then I was encouraged to join some allyship group and to learn about racism and so on.
00:36:40.640And 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,
00:36:58.220or understanding it and consciously stepping away
00:37:04.560to avoid making things complicated for himself
00:37:09.380and letting subordinates basically to deal with all this on their own.
00:37:15.680Taurus, was there any point where you were working for Google
00:37:19.180when this reminds me of the Soviet Union?
00:37:22.180oh uh okay uh if i would say that i wouldn't be uh totally correct because uh i was lucky uh
00:37:35.260to be about 13 when the soviet union collapsed uh luckily it collapsed before i did uh so uh i
00:37:44.180I was only able to judge about the Soviet Union based on conversations with parents, friends of the family, reading books, movies, and so on.
00:37:56.760So it's not like my personal experience with the Soviet Union, with a lot of stuff.
00:38:01.900But a lot of nonsense that happens, not just with Google, but it looks like in corporate world, in politics, it's just ridiculous.
00:38:10.640It's all the statements about supporting some ideologies and having to be the beacon of lights or whatever.
00:38:22.660All that stuff was happening in the Soviet Union with actual results not being that great and so on, as far as I understand.
00:38:31.060So, yeah, there are better people to make such a comparison.
00:38:35.360But 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.
00:39:02.100Yeah, 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.
00:39:25.600you can say what you want and so you said what you want and then they tried to get you to unsay it
00:39:32.180and when you refused they fired you is that correct uh yes i don't know why the company
00:39:39.060didn't order me to delete the document maybe again it was trying to um save to maintain some
00:39:46.920perception that things are allowed at the company so you don't have to delete the document i was
00:39:51.760told that you just have to make the document not accessible by other people which results in the
00:39:58.940same and which sounds as a nonsense and I've been asking my manager repeatedly like what is wrong
00:40:06.360with my document and if I am so dumb that I am unable to express my thoughts in a good way could
00:40:13.280you please tell me how I can do that my manager wasn't capable to do that I wouldn't get into
00:40:19.720details of that because again that's just decisions and qualities of one person that
00:40:26.220might not be indicative of the company in general but it wasn't the first time when I got in this
00:40:33.680situation we allow you to talk about things but you have to talk about them in a way we see
00:40:39.400appropriate and we won't tell you what the appropriate is it wasn't the first time when
00:40:44.700I was asking HRs about ways to talk about things without getting reported.
00:40:51.140You already mentioned the case about Jordan Peterson's pronouns, and it was actually
00:40:58.860ridiculous because it was a conversation where someone asked a question, something like,
00:41:04.500if only I knew why people act the way they do.
00:41:08.040And that could have been a sarcastic remark, but I decided to try to respond to it.
00:41:13.080And 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.
00:41:29.600And 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.
00:41:48.860And it was useful for me to a certain extent, so I decided to recommend these lectures.
00:41:53.920By 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.
00:42:07.160So 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.
00:44:37.140I probably would have regretted if I stayed silent.
00:44:39.680And basically, it was quite uncomfortable for me, and it was not, I would say, it was detrimental for my state.
00:44:53.380In addition to all the pressure that there is there engineering-wise regarding your work,
00:45:01.720there was this pressure with ideologies I wasn't able to support and pressure with all this nonsense.
00:45:09.680And 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.
00:45:28.800Actually, I was already thinking about leaving Google at some point, even before that.
00:46:53.620I 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.
00:47:11.180And then instead of just telling me, look, I know that you don't support these ideologies, we do.
00:49:33.880so what that you can bring 10 colleagues that would testify that you were a wonderful colleague?
00:49:38.680We're going to bring testaments from five people that were offended by whatever you posted on internal message boards.
00:49:45.860And then it's going to be up to some judge to decide who is more right.
00:49:51.240Overall, 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.
00:50:01.960The company wasn't even trying to talk to me.
00:50:06.680So it was basically stolen for a lot of time, not replying, which is not that great.
00:50:12.560And talking about you as customers of clients of YouTube, that's basically one of the standard approaches of designing interfaces,
00:50:25.140be 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.
00:50:35.460I'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?
00:50:54.100Are you getting enough information to prevent such things from happening in the future?
00:50:58.480And do you understand why exactly that happened?
00:51:01.300Because if it doesn't, it's the same problem.
00:51:03.320The company is putting all this responsibility onto you.
00:51:06.940The company is not being friendly and not trying to be fair.
00:51:11.960And the company has this so-called culture of three respects.
00:51:15.720Respect each other, respect the customer, and respect the opportunity.
00:51:21.240It was getting installed somewhere two years ago, maybe.
00:51:26.240And I'm not prepared to talk about opportunities,
00:51:29.060but at least with regard to respecting each other and customers,
00:51:32.240I 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.
00:51:45.480And it basically puts responsibility onto you in order to avoid responsibilities itself.