[joshuamorton]

Historically, google has been open internally but closed externally. I as an employee could expect transparency from leadership about a lot of things. If something was interesting you could expect detailed, technical answers. This is no longer the case if the thing is controversial (but for many non-controversial things, there's a lot of transparency still).

One way of putting it might be that historically, employees had enough informayto generally keep the company in check. I'm not convinced that's the case anymore, and I can't blame the leadership when their attempts to be transparent result in live leaks to the nyt.

[Lkjhmnbv]

Ok so you weren't saying you were learning things about your company in the NYT, you're saying you are reading things you knew about your company in the NYT?

Do I have that correct?

[joshuamorton]

(note that I'm not the ggp).

I don't think that's quite it. Let me simplify and suggest that, broadly speaking, there were three classes of information: need to know, confidential, and public. Public is obvious, need to know is also fairly self explanatory, and confidential information would be that which is broadly available to those who wish to know within the company, but shouldn't be shared externally.

Leaks shift the confidential stuff toward need to know. So upcoming product launches are need to know, and I end up learning about new things when they're announced on a blog instead of internally ahead of time (this is for both controversial and uncontroversial things, like "here's what we're announcing next week")

But the more annoying and perhaps damaging part is that when controversy is raised, leadership can't respond to it with nuanced, confidential answers. Everything has to be in pr speak because it will get leaked, so the response is made with that in mind, or worse the response is directly to the press instead of to employees because a concern was raised via the press.

It's a bit of a viscious cycle. But to directly respond, it's both. It's seeing things I already knew that probably shouldn't be public, and learning things that I'd previously have learned from a meeting on the internet and knowing that as a result, I have less of the story than I would have before.

[Lkjhmnbv]

I mean I understand what you're saying, I just find it a bit... disappointing? That you'd accept PR speak to be used at all.

Honesty should be the rule, and any PR speak, by anyone, should be denounced.

I do see your point, I'm just disappointed that the company doesn't feel like it can tell you the truth because the truth hurts.

[joshuamorton]

By PR speak really what I mean is "an answer for people who don't have enough context for a deep answer". Or iow, an answer which abstracts something away.

I have the context to peel back the abstraction. Someone external doesn't. That's not going to change. So PR answers have to exist. It's not that the truth hurts (there's lots of stuff that isn't bad but that is easy to misunderstand, or that people have missing context on: see the chrome login controversy which was from a team who I personally deeply trust to make good decisions for privacy and security, but who many people took to be an anti-privacy measure).

The context for a nuanced answer often relies on understanding organizational structure or history that often can't or shouldn't be public and even if it could be, most people won't care. You won't care. You say you will, but you're not going to spend the days or weeks to really understand all the context.

So no, the truth doesn't always hurt, pr speak is still sometimes necessary, but giving the pr answers to people who have the context to understand everything is really annoying to those people.

And yes this is me not so subtly saying that there's often context to decisions that you don't have. There are often perfectly valid reasons for not making that context public (Insofar as making things public will cause harm to end users). The classic example of this is making the exact algorithms for search quality evaluation public.

Never answering these questions makes Google look bad: conspiracies about favoring or disfavoring certain results develop. But the actual answer can be highly complex, and the only people who are going to care about more than a minute portion of the system ("why my site went down two spots") are those who want to find a avenues for abuse (dark seo).

(Probably worth stressing that these are my personal opinions and I have no real insider knowledge of search or anything I mention here).

So I think your disappointment is misplaced, ironically because you lack the context to understand some of these decisions.

[Lkjhmnbv]

So your argument is I'm too simple to understand nuance, so you have to speak to me with lies and half truths so I understand.

This answer is incredibly condescending.

[joshuamorton]

No, and I'd appreciate if you make an effort to actually understand what I'm saying instead of repeatedly reaching for negative interpretations

It has nothing to do with your intelligence and everything with information you have access to. Often understanding the real answer requires information you don't have and can't be given. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

But you aren't going to get that information, and it's not because it's bad, it's because it cant be given to anyone. So you can't have the full explanation either.