So, if the author was fired for the reasons they believe, that's pretty bad behavior. But if he had not been fired, what was management supposed to have done about the cult members working for this department?
Yes, the cult's leader sounds like a pretty awful person, but he wasn't working there. What were the cult members doing in their work in the department that was clearly wrong? It's suggested that there was favoritism and unfair promotion going on -- but it's not very well evidenced here. Were they using company money to fund their organization? It's also not clear from the article that the wine outfit is a cult subsidiary.
And if the concern is primarily that the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people, and that something should be done to stop Google from having a clique of staff that are even _affiliated_ with that organization ... well that seems like a really fraught policy. Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they've given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.
Maybe the culture is different in tech. In my game - engineering within the construction industry, failure to disclose a conflict of interest in any kind of procurement over a few $100 is cause for instant dismissal and potentially criminal prosecution if there are kickbacks involved.
So the wine procurement is open and shut corruption in my view. If I was betting on the outcome here, I suspect "Dan" from the article was actually correct in his prediction. Google will just shut the whole unit down. They're already being sued over it and their reputation is being tarnished in the New York Times. It's a no brainer in terms of risk management.
At minimum Google could have investigated the odd clustering of employees that indicated some sort of nepotistic hiring practice. Of course they might be doing exactly that, but it's not the sort of thing they can really comment on.
Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.
The problem in this case would be they seem to be hiring almost exclusively from a rather obscure religious group. That means they're illegally discriminating against members other religions.
Well if you expand that to a more generic "employees shouldn't be involved in hiring people who they know and associate with outside of work" then they'd have to fire half the company.
>the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people
my impression is that all those cults/churches - like for example LDS, scientology, masons, etc. - have favoring of business dealings with fellow members, be it hiring, promotion, supply and service contracts, etc. among the basic tenets of the cult/church.
The amount of nepotism in that group described in article is really nauseating. We had a senior engineer who was a spouse of an exec, and it was already making tremendous obstacles to the work - the managers and the director were tip-toeing around that engineer, it was borderline disgusting. Anyway didn't help - the director and thus the managers under him as well as several top engineers - the whole top of the house of cards of our department :) - were promptly gone the moment the director had disagreement with that engineer. In another team a young hothead guy got in disagreement with another spouse of another exec, and was immediately gone as a result. I can't really imagine how screwed the environment would be in the situation like that Google GDS - probably very suffocating and bordering on mental abuse for anybody who isn't a member of that cult.
The alleged wine-buying is clearly corrupt if true, and in most large organizations it would result in, at least, disciplinary action.
Also, if as alleged, 12 people out of 25 were from some random small town, _any_ random small town, that probably means something is going very wrong in hiring.
The alleged cult is arguably kind of irrelevant; it's the alleged corruption that should raise eyebrows.
The leader of the cult is accused of grooming minors. That means Google is funding the next Jeffrey Esptein.
> Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they've given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.
I’d suggest a question like this:
1) Are you affiliated with an organization that molests children?
I am an Eagle Scout, and proud of that fact. That means that I am affiliated with- and proud of my experience with- an organization that molests children[1]. To my knowledge it never happened in my troop, but it definitely happened, a lot, in the nationwide organization.
I was baptized a Roman Catholic, but left the church long before the Spotlight investigations came out, though that was hardly the first time that the organizations complicity with sexual abuse got attention. The largest Protestant denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, just released a massive report about how they hid and enabled sexual abuse of minors (and grown-ups) for decades[2].
What about the entire Canadian government turning a blind eye to sexual abuse of First Nations children for over a century at the Indian Residential Schools that they paid for[3]?
If you answer that question honestly, I would hazard a guess most people have affiliations with an organization that turned a blind eye to abusive behavior, because that is, unfortunately, incredibly common.
For one thing, if the reason someone was hired is because they're from Oregon House, that likely means they weren't hired because of their profile as a good candidate for Google. That's a fundamental conflict of interest in nepotistic hiring. Google should definitely care about that, even apart from the links between the nepotistic group and criminal activity.
I can totally see how this can fly under the radar. "Cults" are common in tech, though not of this type.
I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with one person getting hired in a high enough position where their hiring decisions are not scrutinized.
It's hard to hire. I can imagine that "someone in a high enough position" could have a pretty good competitive advantage being able to hire employees of known and consistent competence without having to slog through resumes and interviews. Once there were a few of this group already working, it would also be easier to close hires with the social pressure. I can imagine that higher ups might be inclined to look the other way about how the individual in question was able to hire so effectively, if anyone could even articulate a compelling argument against it.
The medium article omits it, but the per the NY Times all the employees were actually hired by a contractor:
> He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.
Cliques (which is what you’re referring to) in tech and corporate environment in general are common and not necessarily a bad thing. For example, a lot of early google engineers came from dec (sanjay, jeff) and ucsb where urs was a professor as well as stanford (both founders and first employee). Seems like it worked out well for them. It only becomes toxic if they develop a hive mind and start to actively bash/drive away “outsiders”
I believe the parent is referring more to referral/promo networks.
For a positive example, I knew one of my senior managers basically brought 15 people from his previous company, to the point where a comfortable majority of people under him were from the company.
This can be nefarious when the network arises from abusive or unhealthy environments.
I'm curious about the definition as well. "Cult" generally has a very specific set of behaviors associated with it as a term, where the GP could easily be describing a close-knit, large friend group.
As a former Oregon House resident, astonished to see it on the front page of HN.
It's interesting to see the same strategy implemented at Google, apparently, that they reportedly used to get members employed by Yuba county. There was a minor scandal, an investigation leading to a bunch of firings, years ago. Allegedly members were using their ties to get the county to look the other way at countless unpermitted structures. I understand that blew over in time, after which there was apparently a rehiring of some of those that were fired. (Some of this is just things I heard when I worked at the grocery store/gas station/video rental, which was and I believe still is the center of commerce in the area.) At that time it seemed like the fellowship made up about half the town population.
Anyways, for years they were trying to build a large colosseum and that must have been much harder to hide than the countless little shacks without addresses that they put members in, up driveways that wended and climbed past the main, addressed house. I think the colosseum led to the county's investigation. I'm not sure if they're still building it...
The New York Times article [1] largely adds support to the author’s claims.
It also provided some interesting background on how this level of nepotism might have come about:
> Ms. Jones, Mr. Lloyd’s [The author] lawyer, argued that Google’s relationship with ASG [contracting agency] allowed members of the Fellowship to join the company without being properly vetted. “This is one of the methods the Fellowship used in the Kelly case,” she said. “They can get through the door without the normal scrutiny.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this is a common occurrence across tech. Coming from the Midwest, the West Coast seems full of cults. Talking to people, it doesn’t take long to find someone who was raised in a cult, or has family members in a cult.
The Midwest is full of tiny communities that would look like cults to someone who hasn't lived here- Amish, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses and more.
A big part of the difference is that- aside from Jehovah's Witnesses, they tend to not be active in proselytizing, and members tend to stay within the groups for longer- their activities rarely make hollywood-style media news because they're not particularly interesting compared to what we more typically think of as cults (i.e. the doomsday cult" in the article).
Oh yeah the Midwest is full of cults. There are a ton of radical and fundamentalist Christian offshoots. The only difference between many religions and cults is time.
West Coast cults have their own particular flavor though, like the Fellowship of Friends.
I'm from the midwest of the us, have lived roughly 18 years in california, never met any cult person, except for opt-in cults like crossfit and other macho communities which are seemingly creepily (laughably) similar. "spiritual gangster" shirts i've seen many times, which i can't tell the humor level of.
> it doesn’t take long to find someone who was raised in a cult, or has family members in a cult.
I'm gonna make an assumption that you have a much more liberal definition of 'cult' than most of us are thinking of - I've lived and worked my entire life on the west coast, the last 2 decades in Northern California, and I don't think I've ever met someone raised in a cult.
When thinking about other regions, you’re probably discounting churches that turn to just one or a few charismatic pastors to help them understand Christian faith and history.
These are ultimately as idiosyncratic and subject to community abuse as the 20th century belief communities that syncretize “Eastern” faiths, materialist philosophies, and various other post-globalization sources.
They may look different to you because the front-door teachings superficially make more sense in one than the other from your perspective, but they’re operationally pretty similar.
Having mostly worked for west coast companies, I'd be pretty surprised if this was common.
Granted, I was raised mormon, which is like a half-cult, but within tech companies themselves I haven't really seen any of this behavior. Perhaps it's more common in other departments (I'm a SWE), I dunno.
Coming from born in the bay area and fairly deep roots on the west coast.
The post war boom years are a fertile time for cults in California. You had a lot of people who were isolated from their previous communities that were often easy marks for grifter run cults of all sorts. And not just California. But probably less visible in the Midwest with a less dynamic and conservative population.
Also: My definition of a cult is the question what happens when you try to leave?
You have to be careful with the line of reasoning that just because these certain managers and team members are part of a cult that is known to engage in bad acts, doesn’t mean you can cast the group’s shortcomings upon the individuals (without proof). If that were the case, I can point out a few mainstream religions that condone reprehensible practices, many of whose members you probably work with daily
It turns out the wine is from a nearby vineyard not at Orange House. The connection is that the person running this vineyard is a former member who used to run the Orange House vineyard before he left.
Readit News
Yes, the cult's leader sounds like a pretty awful person, but he wasn't working there. What were the cult members doing in their work in the department that was clearly wrong? It's suggested that there was favoritism and unfair promotion going on -- but it's not very well evidenced here. Were they using company money to fund their organization? It's also not clear from the article that the wine outfit is a cult subsidiary.
And if the concern is primarily that the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people, and that something should be done to stop Google from having a clique of staff that are even _affiliated_ with that organization ... well that seems like a really fraught policy. Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they've given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.
So the wine procurement is open and shut corruption in my view. If I was betting on the outcome here, I suspect "Dan" from the article was actually correct in his prediction. Google will just shut the whole unit down. They're already being sued over it and their reputation is being tarnished in the New York Times. It's a no brainer in terms of risk management.
Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.
It may be difficult to distinguish between these two hiring patterns without asking the sorts of questions that are illegal for employers to ask.
> I found support groups where ex-members talk about their time in the group, including discussions of sexual abuse and grooming.
> Members have described him grooming and sexually assaulting male followers, including minors
reminds me of when rand paul asked about an oil spill, “when did they ever say they weren’t going to pay for it?”
what did OJ do in his work at the NFL that was wrong? he didn’t murder anyone while he was at work, so i don’t see the problem.
my impression is that all those cults/churches - like for example LDS, scientology, masons, etc. - have favoring of business dealings with fellow members, be it hiring, promotion, supply and service contracts, etc. among the basic tenets of the cult/church.
The amount of nepotism in that group described in article is really nauseating. We had a senior engineer who was a spouse of an exec, and it was already making tremendous obstacles to the work - the managers and the director were tip-toeing around that engineer, it was borderline disgusting. Anyway didn't help - the director and thus the managers under him as well as several top engineers - the whole top of the house of cards of our department :) - were promptly gone the moment the director had disagreement with that engineer. In another team a young hothead guy got in disagreement with another spouse of another exec, and was immediately gone as a result. I can't really imagine how screwed the environment would be in the situation like that Google GDS - probably very suffocating and bordering on mental abuse for anybody who isn't a member of that cult.
Also, if as alleged, 12 people out of 25 were from some random small town, _any_ random small town, that probably means something is going very wrong in hiring.
The alleged cult is arguably kind of irrelevant; it's the alleged corruption that should raise eyebrows.
> Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they've given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.
I’d suggest a question like this:
1) Are you affiliated with an organization that molests children?
I was baptized a Roman Catholic, but left the church long before the Spotlight investigations came out, though that was hardly the first time that the organizations complicity with sexual abuse got attention. The largest Protestant denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, just released a massive report about how they hid and enabled sexual abuse of minors (and grown-ups) for decades[2].
What about the entire Canadian government turning a blind eye to sexual abuse of First Nations children for over a century at the Indian Residential Schools that they paid for[3]?
If you answer that question honestly, I would hazard a guess most people have affiliations with an organization that turned a blind eye to abusive behavior, because that is, unfortunately, incredibly common.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_sex_abus... [2]: https://www.vox.com/culture/23131530/southern-baptist-conven... [3]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/why-so-many-sexual-pred...
Dead Comment
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I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with one person getting hired in a high enough position where their hiring decisions are not scrutinized.
> He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.
For a positive example, I knew one of my senior managers basically brought 15 people from his previous company, to the point where a comfortable majority of people under him were from the company.
This can be nefarious when the network arises from abusive or unhealthy environments.
It's interesting to see the same strategy implemented at Google, apparently, that they reportedly used to get members employed by Yuba county. There was a minor scandal, an investigation leading to a bunch of firings, years ago. Allegedly members were using their ties to get the county to look the other way at countless unpermitted structures. I understand that blew over in time, after which there was apparently a rehiring of some of those that were fired. (Some of this is just things I heard when I worked at the grocery store/gas station/video rental, which was and I believe still is the center of commerce in the area.) At that time it seemed like the fellowship made up about half the town population.
Anyways, for years they were trying to build a large colosseum and that must have been much harder to hide than the countless little shacks without addresses that they put members in, up driveways that wended and climbed past the main, addressed house. I think the colosseum led to the county's investigation. I'm not sure if they're still building it...
It also provided some interesting background on how this level of nepotism might have come about:
> Ms. Jones, Mr. Lloyd’s [The author] lawyer, argued that Google’s relationship with ASG [contracting agency] allowed members of the Fellowship to join the company without being properly vetted. “This is one of the methods the Fellowship used in the Kelly case,” she said. “They can get through the door without the normal scrutiny.”
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellows...
(Since the NYT article is the OP above, I add this to avoid confusion.)
A big part of the difference is that- aside from Jehovah's Witnesses, they tend to not be active in proselytizing, and members tend to stay within the groups for longer- their activities rarely make hollywood-style media news because they're not particularly interesting compared to what we more typically think of as cults (i.e. the doomsday cult" in the article).
West Coast cults have their own particular flavor though, like the Fellowship of Friends.
From [1]:
Members are expected to participate regularly in evangelizing work ...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses_practi...
I'm gonna make an assumption that you have a much more liberal definition of 'cult' than most of us are thinking of - I've lived and worked my entire life on the west coast, the last 2 decades in Northern California, and I don't think I've ever met someone raised in a cult.
These are ultimately as idiosyncratic and subject to community abuse as the 20th century belief communities that syncretize “Eastern” faiths, materialist philosophies, and various other post-globalization sources.
They may look different to you because the front-door teachings superficially make more sense in one than the other from your perspective, but they’re operationally pretty similar.
Granted, I was raised mormon, which is like a half-cult, but within tech companies themselves I haven't really seen any of this behavior. Perhaps it's more common in other departments (I'm a SWE), I dunno.
The post war boom years are a fertile time for cults in California. You had a lot of people who were isolated from their previous communities that were often easy marks for grifter run cults of all sorts. And not just California. But probably less visible in the Midwest with a less dynamic and conservative population.
Also: My definition of a cult is the question what happens when you try to leave?
https://twitter.com/ViolenceWorks/status/1537524983961767936