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> The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors.

The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1] and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].

> Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa.

I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent documentation.

I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn. The learnings / information weren't pull anymore, you had to get it pushed to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the scale at which the company was operating.

Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be secret, got you nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had a special mention of how you needed to improve earn trust and tone down learn and be curious [3], just because...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526



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