This experience is not unique to Google nor is it unique to large companies. It exists at every size of company. It’s an artifact of particular types of executive leadership and certain pathologies that can manifest there. It’s a cultural and political phenomena and can exist in pockets in a company with the entire company mostly not experiencing it or even being aware that it’s there until it’s too late.
If you are or plan to be an executive you can try to avoid it in your org by doing the following:
Ensure that any team or project has clearly defined goals from you and that there is at least one person held accountable for keeping the team in sync with those goals.
If a project is too ambitious for a team and you can’t afford to give that team the necessary resources to meet that ambition you either need to scale back the ambition or you need to cancel/not start the project. going forward anyway will either destroy the people on the team or result in a terrible outcome or product.
Listen and take action when someone comes to you and let’s you know that the project is struggling. Doing nothing is not leadership. It’s cowardice.
I worked in a similar situation. We were assigned a huge project, with individual responsibility for certain components (so if there was a bug in X, I would have to fix it right away, even if it was at night or the weekend). We were often in the office until 2 am for weeks at a time.
Nearly everyone on the team did develop physical or mental health problems. One guy spent a full week in the hospital with various maladies. I took a couple months off to recover.
Anyway, I find this story completely believable, and we all need to be more careful of what projects and people we get entangled with.
I hope the author gets the help they need, but I don’t really see how the blame for their psychological issues should be laid at the feet of their most-recent employer.
In my career I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened. A manager should never have to ask whether they’re a coward, but that happened here.
I dunno, doesn’t sound like they were the only person damaged by the experience.
Eventually my physicians put me on forced medical leave, and they strongly encouraged me to quit…
Seems pretty significant when medical professionals are telling you the cure for your issues is “quit this job”?
Seems pretty significant when medical professionals are telling you the cure for your issues is “quit this job”?
A number of years ago I developed some neurological problems, and stress made it worse. I was told by two different doctors to change or quit my job. I eventually did, and it helped, but the job itself was not the root cause, nor was leaving the sole cure.
I absolutely cannot speak for OP’s situation, but I just want to point out that a doctor informing you to rethink your career doesn’t necessarily imply that the career is at fault. Though, in this case, it seems like it is.
To clarify, I’m using “career change” in a general sense. I would include quitting a job as a career change, as well as leaving one job for another in the same industry/domain. I’m not using it in the “leave software altogether” sense.
I’m trusting the author’s causal assessment here, but employers (especially large businesses with the resources required) can be huge sources of stress and prevent employees from having the time or energy needed to seek treatment for their own needs, so they can both cause issues and worsen existing ones.
It’s not uncommon, for example, for businesses to encourage unpaid out-of-hours work for salaried employees by building a culture that emphasizes personal accountability for project success; this not only increases stress and reduces free time that could otherwise be used to relieve work-related stress, it teaches employees to blame themselves for what could just as easily be systemic failures. Even if an employee resists the social pressure to put in extra hours in such an environment, they’ll still be penalized with (real or imagined) blame from their peers, blame from themselves for “not trying hard enough”, and likely less job safety or fewer benefits.
In particular, there’s relevance from the business’ failure to support effective project management, manage workloads, or generally address problems repeatedly and clearly brought up to them. These kinds of things typically fuel burnout. The author doesn’t go into details enough for an outside observer to make a judgment call one way or the other, but if you trust the author’s account of reality then it seems reasonable to blame the employer for, at the least, negligently fueling these problems through gross mismanagement.
Arguably off-topic, but I think it might squeak by on the grounds that it briefly ties the psychological harm to the quality of a technical standard resulting from the mismanaged business process.
a culture that emphasizes personal accountability for project success; this not only increases stress and reduces free time that could otherwise be used to relieve work-related stress, it teaches employees to blame themselves for what could just as easily be systemic failures.
This is such a common thing. An executive or manager punts on actually organizing the work, whether from incompetence or laziness, and then tries to make the individuals in the system responsible for the failures that occur. It’s hardly new. Deming describes basically this in ‘The New Economics’ (look up the ‘red bead game’).
More cynically, is WebAssembly actuall in Google’s interests? It doesn’t add revenue to Google Cloud. It’s going to make their data collection harder (provide Google analytics libraries for how many languages?). It was clearly a thing that was gaining momentum, so if they were to damage it, they would need to make sure they had a seat at the table and then make sure that the seat was used as ineffectually and disruptively as possible.
More cynically, is WebAssembly actually in Google’s interests?
I think historically the answer would have been yes. Google has at various points been somewhat hamstrung by shipping projects with slow front end JS in them and responded by trying to make browsers themselves faster. e.g. creating V8 and financially contributing to Mozilla.
I couldn’t say if Google now has any incentive to not make JS go fast. I’m not aware of one. I suspect still the opposite. I think they’re also pushing mobile web apps as a way to inconvenience Apple; I think Google currently want people to write portable software using web tech instead of being tempted to write native apps for iOS only.
That said, what’s good for the company is not the principle factor motivating policy decisions. What’s good for specific senior managers inside Google is. Otherwise you wouldn’t see all these damn self combusting promo cycle driven chat apps from Google. A company is not a monolith.
‘The New Economics’
I have this book and will have to re-read at least this bit tomorrow. I have slightly mixed feelings about it, mostly about the writing style.
Making JS fast is one thing. Making a target for many other languages, as opposed to maintaining analytics libraries and other ways of gathering data for one languages?
Your point about the senior managers’ interests driving what’s done is on point, though. Google and Facebook especially are weird because ads fund the company, and the rest is all some kind of loss leader floating around divorced from revenue.
The only thing I’ll comment about Deming is that the chapter on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation should be ignored, as that’s entirely an artifact despite its popularity. The rest of the book has held up pretty well.
Making JS fast is one thing. Making a target for many other languages, as opposed to maintaining analytics libraries and other ways of gathering data for one languages?
Google doesn’t need to maintain their analytics libraries in many other languages, only to expose APIs callable from those languages. All WebAssembly languages can call / be called by JavaScript.
More generally, Google has been the biggest proponent of web apps instead of web services. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the web was that you’d have services that provided data with rich semantic markup. These could be rendered as web pages but could equally plug into other clients. The problem with this approach is that a client that can parse the structure of the data can choose to render it in a way that simply ignores adverts. If all of your adds are in an <advert provider="google"> block then an ad blocker is a trivial browser extension, as is something that displays ads but restricts them to plain text. Google’s web app push has been a massive effort to convince everyone to obfuscate the contents of their web pages. This has two key advantages for Google:
Writing an ad blocker is hard if ads and contents are both generated from a Turing-complete language using the same output mechanisms.
Parsing such pages for indexing requires more resources (you can’t just parse the semantic markup, you must run the interpreter / JIT in your crawler, which requires orders of magnitude more hardware than simply parsing some semantic mark-up. This significantly increases the barrier to entry for new search engines, protecting Google’s core user-data-harvesting tool.
WebAssembly fits very well into Google’s vision for the web.
I used to work for a price-comparison site, back when those were actual startups. We had one legacy price information page that was Java applet (remember those?) Supposedly the founders were worried about screen scrapers so wanted the entire site rendered with applets to deter them.
Making a target for many other languages, as opposed to maintaining analytics libraries and other ways of gathering data for one languages?
This is something I should have stated explicitly but didn’t think to: I don’t think wasm is actually going to be the future of non-JS languages in the browser. I think they for the next couple decades at least, wasm is going to be used for compute kernels (written in other langs like C++ and Rust) that get called from JS.
I’m taking a bet here that targeting wasm from langs with substantial runtimes will remain unattractive indefinitely due to download weight and parsing time.
about Deming
I honestly think many of the points in that book are great but hoo boy the writing style.
That is exactly what I thought while reading this. I understand that to a lot of people, WebAssembly is very important, and they have a lot of emotions vested into the success. But to the author’s employer, it might not be as important, as it might not directly generate revenue. The author forgets that to the vast, vast majority of people on this earth, having the opportunity to work on such a technology at a company like Google is an unparalleled privilege. Most people on this earth do not have the opportunity to quit their job just because a project is difficult, or because meetings run long or it is hard to find consensus. Managing projects well is incredibly hard. But I am sure that the author was not living on minimum wage, so there surely was compensation for the efforts.
It is sad to hear that the author has medical issues, and I hope those get sorted out. And those kinds of issues do exacerbate stressful jobs. But that is not a good reason for finger pointing. Maybe the position just was not right for the author, maybe there are more exciting projects that are waiting in the future. I certainly hope so. But it is important not to blame one’s issues on others, that is not a good attitude in life.
Using the excuse that because there exist others less fortunate, it’s not worth fighting to make something better is also not a good attitude in life.
Reading between the lines, it feels to me like there was a lot that the author left unsaid, and that’s fine. It takes courage to share a personal story about mental wellbeing, and an itemized list of all the wrongs that took place is not necessary to get the point the author was trying to make across.
My point is that I’d be cautious about making assumptions about the author’s experiences as they didn’t exactly give a lot of detail here.
Using the excuse that because there exist others less fortunate, it’s not worth fighting to make something better is also not a good attitude in life.
This is true. It is worth fighting to make things better
Reading between the lines, it feels to me like there was a lot that the author left unsaid, and that’s fine. It takes courage to share a personal story about mental wellbeing, and an itemized list of all the wrongs that took place is not necessary to get the point the author was trying to make across.
There is a lot of things that go into mental wellbeing. Some things you can control, some things are genetic. I don’t know what the author left out, but I have not yet seen a study showing that stressful office jobs give people brain damage. There might be things the author has not explained, but at the same time that is a very extreme claim. In fact, if that were true, I am sure that the author should receive a lot in compensation.
My point is that I’d be cautious about making assumptions about the author’s experiences as they didn’t exactly give a lot of detail here.
I agree with you, but I also think that if someone makes a very bold claim about an employer, especially about personal injury, that these claims should be substantiated. There is a very big difference between “working there was hard, I quit” and “the employer acted recklessly and caused me personal injury”. And I don’t really know which one the author is saying, because from the description could be interpreted as it just being a difficult project to see through.
In fact, if that were true, I am sure that the author should receive a lot in compensation.
By thinking about it for a few seconds you can realize that this can easily not happen. The OP itself says that they don’t have documented evidence from the time because of all the issues they were going through. And it’s easy to see why: if your mental health is damaged, your brain is not working right, would you be mindful enough to take detailed notes of every incident and keep a trail of evidence for later use in compensation claims? Or are you saying that compensation would be given out no questions asked?
All I’m saying is, there is a very large difference between saying this job was very stressful, I had trouble sleeping and it negatively affected my concentration and memory and saying this job gave me brain damage.Brain damage is relatively well-defined:
The basic definition of brain damage is an injury to the brain caused by various conditions such as head trauma, inadequate oxygen supply, infections, or intracranial hemorrhage. This damage may be associated with a behavioral or functional abnormality.
Additionally, there are ways to test for this, a neurologist can make that determination. I’m not a neurologist. But it would be the first time I heard that brain damage be caused by psychosomatic issues. I believe that the author may have used this term in error. That’s why I said what I said — if you, or anyone, has brain damage as a result of your occupation, that is definitely grounds for compensation. And not a small compensation either, as brain damage is no joke. This is a very different category from mere psychological stress from working for an apparently mismanaged project.
Brain damage is an injury that causes the destruction or deterioration of brain cells.
Anxiety, stress, lack of sleep, and other factors can potentially do that. So I don’t see any incorrect use of the phrase ‘brain damage’ here. And anyway, you missed the point. Saying ‘This patient has brain damage’ is different from saying ‘Working in the WebAssembly team at Google caused this patient’s brain damage’. When you talk about causation and claims of damage and compensation, people tend to demand documentary evidence.
I agree brain damage is no joke, but if you look at society it’s very common for certain types of relatively-invisible mental illnesses to be downplayed and treated very lightly, almost as a joke. Especially by people and corporations who would suddenly have to answer for causing these injuries.
Anxiety, stress, lack of sleep and other factors cannot, ever, possibly, cause brain damage. I think you have not completely read that article. It states – as does the definition that I linked:
All traumatic brain injuries are head injuries. But head injury is not necessarily brain injury. There are two types of brain injury: traumatic brain injury and acquired brain injury. Both disrupt the brain’s normal functioning.
Traumatic Brain Injury(TBI) is caused by an external force – such as a blow to the head – that causes the brain to move inside the skull or damages the skull. This in turn damages the brain.
Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) occurs at the cellular level. It is most often associated with pressure on the brain. This could come from a tumor. Or it could result from neurological illness, as in the case of a stroke.
There is no kind of brain injury that is caused by lack of sleep or stress. That is not to say that these things are not also damaging to one’s body and well-being.
Mental illnesses can be very devastating and stressful on the body. But you will not get a brain injury from a mental illness, unless it makes you physically impact your brain (causing traumatic brain injury), ingest something toxic, or have a stroke. It is important to be very careful with language and not confuse terms. The term “brain damage” is colloquially often used to describe things that are most definitely not brain damage, like “reading this gave me brain damage”. I hope you understand what I’m trying to state here. Again, the author has possibly misused the term “brain damage”, or there is some physical trauma that happened that the author has not mentioned in the article.
I hope you understand what I am trying to say here!
Anxiety and stress raise adrenaline levels, which in turn cause short- and long-term changes in brain chemistry. It sounds like you’ve never been burnt out; don’t judge others so harshly.
Anxiety and stress are definitely not healthy for a brain. They accelerate aging processes, which is damaging. But brain damage in a medical context refers to large-scale cell death caused by genetics, trauma, stroke or tumors.
There seems to be a weird definitional slide here from “brain damage” to “traumatic brain injury.” I think we are all agreed that her job did not give her traumatic brain injury, and this is not claimed. But your claim that stress and sleep deprivation cannot cause (acquired) brain injury is wrong. In fact, you will find counterexamples by just googling “sleep deprivation brain damage”.
“Mental illnesses can be … stressful on the body.” The brain is part of the body!
I think you – and most of the other people that have responded to my comment – have not quite understood what I’m saying. The argument here is about the terms being used.
Brain Damage
Brain damage, as defined here, is damage caused to the brain by trauma, tumors, genetics or oxygen loss, such as during a stroke. This leads to potentially large chunks of your brain to die off. This means you can lose entire brain regions, potentially permanently lose some abilities (facial recognition, speech, etc).
The crucial role of sleep is illustrated by studies showing that prolonged sleep deprivation results in the distruption of metabolic processes and eventually death.
When you are forcibly sleep deprived for a long time, such as when you are being tortured, your body can lose the ability to use nutrients and finally you can die. You need to not sleep at all for weeks for this to happen, generally this is not something that happens to people voluntarily, especially not in western countries.
Stress
The cells in your brain only have a finite lifespan. At some point, they die and new ones take their place (apoptosis). Chronic stress and sleep deprivation can speed up this process, accelerating aging.
Crucially, this is not the same as an entire chunk of your brain to die off because of a stroke. This is a very different process. It is not localized, and it doesn’t cause massive cell death. It is more of a slow, gradual process.
Summary
Mental illnesses can be … stressful on the body.” The brain is part of the body!
Yes, for sure. It is just that the term “brain damage” is usually used for a very specific kind of pattern, and not for the kind of chronlc, low-level damage done by stress and such. A doctor will not diagnose you with brain damage after you’ve had a stressful interaction with your coworker. You will be diagnosed with brain damage in the ICU after someone dropped a hammer on your head. Do you get what I’m trying to say?
I get what you are trying to say, I think you are simply mistaken. If your job impairs your cognitive abilities, then it has given you brain damage. Your brain, is damaged. You have been damaged in your brain. The cells and structures in your brain have taken damage. You keep trying to construct this exhaustive list of “things that are brain damage”, and then (in another comment) saying that this is about them not feeling appreciated and valued or sort of vaguely feeling bad, when what they are saying is that working at this job impaired their ability to form thoughts. That is a brain damage thing! The brain is an organ for forming thoughts. If the brain can’t thoughts so good no more, then it has been damaged.
The big picture here is that a stressful job damaged this person’s health. Specifically, their brain’s.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I think you are simply mistaken. We (as a society) have definitions for the terms we use. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_damage:
Neurotrauma, brain damage or brain injury (BI) is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors. In general, brain damage refers to significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage.
This is not “significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage” (for context, trauma here refers to physical trauma, such as an impact to the head, not psychological trauma). What the author describes does not line up with any of the Causes of Brain Damage. It is simply not the right term.
Yes, the author has a brain, and there is self-reported “damage” to it. But just because someone is a man and feels like he polices the neighborhood, does not make me a “police man”. Just because I feel like my brain doesn’t work right after a traumatic job experience does not mean I have brain damage™.
The Wikipedia header is kind of odd. The next sentence after “in general, brain damage is trauma induced” lists non-trauma-induced categories of brain damage. So I don’t know how strong that “in general” is meant to be. At any rate, “in general” is not at odds with the use of the term for non-trauma induced stress/sleep depriv damage.
At any rate, if you click through to Acquired Brain Injury, it says “These impairments result from either traumatic brain injury (e.g. …) or nontraumatic injury … (e.g. listing a bunch of things that are not traumatic.)”
Anyway, the Causes of Brain Damage list is clearly not written to be exhaustive. “any number of conditions, including” etc.
It’s also possible to suffer from mini-strokes due to the factors discussed above.
In any case, I feel like you’re missing the forest for the trees. Sure, it’s important to be correct with wording. But is that more important than the bigger picture here, that a stressful job damaged this person’s health?
the bigger picture here, that a stressful job damaged this person’s health
Yes, that is true, and it is a shame. I really wish that the process around WASM be less hostile, and that this person not be impacted negatively, even if stressful and hard projects are an unfortunate reality for many people.
I feel like you’re missing the forest for the trees.
I think that you might be missing the forest for the trees – I’m not saying that this person was not negatively impacted, I am merely stating that it is (probably, unless there is evidence otherwise) to characterize this impact as “brain damage”, because from a medical standpoint, that term has a more narrow definition that damage due to stress does not fulfill.
I looked through a lot of studies to try and find a review that was both broad and to the point.
Now, you are definitely mixing a lot of terms here… but I hope that if you read the research, you can be convinced, at the very least, that stress hurts brains (and I hope that reading the article and getting caught in this comment storm doesn’t hurt yours).
Current experimental evidence suggests that sleep deprivation promotes oxidative stress. Furthermore, most of this experimental evidence was obtained from different animal species, mainly rats and mice, using diverse sleep deprivation methods.
Recent studies have demonstrated that reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the resulting oxidative stress play a pivotal role in apoptosis. Antioxidants and thiol reductants, such as N-acetylcysteine, and overexpression of manganese superoxide (MnSOD) can block or delay apoptosis.
Uncontrollable stress has been recognized to influence the hippocampus at various levels of analysis. Behaviorally, human and animal studies have found that stress generally impairs various hippocampal-dependent memory tasks. Neurally, animal studies have revealed that stress alters ensuing synaptic plasticity and firing properties of hippocampal neurons. Structurally, human and animal studies have shown that stress changes neuronal morphology, suppresses neuronal proliferation, and reduces hippocampal volume
I do not disagree with this. I think that anyone would be able to agree that stress is bad for the brain, possibly by increasing apoptosis (accelerating ageing), decreasing the availability of nutrients. My only argument is that the term brain damage is quite narrowly defined (for example here) as (large-scale) damage to the brain caused by genetics, trauma, oxygen starvation or a tumor, and it can fall into one of two categories: traumatic brain injuries and acquired brain injuries. If you search for “brain damage” on pubmed, you will find the term being used like this:
You will not find studies or medical diagnoses of “brain damage due to stress”. I hope that you can agree that using the term brain damage in a context such as the author’s, without evidence of traumatic injury or a stroke, is wrong. This does not take away the fact that the author has allegedly experienced a lot of stress at their previous employer, one of the largest and high-paying tech companies, and that this experience has caused the author personal issues.
On an unrelated note: what is extremely fascinating to me is that some chemicals such as methamphetamine (at low concentrations) or minocycline are neuroprotective being able to lessen brain damage for example due to stroke. But obviously, at larger concentrations the opposite is the case.
Your’re splitting a hair which should not be split.
There is nothing more fun than a civil debate. I would argue that any hair deserves being split. Worst case, you learn something new, or form a new opinion.
What’s so wrong about saying a bad work environment can cause brain damage?
Nothing is wrong with that, if the work environment involves heavy things, poisonous things, or the like. This is why OSHA compliance is so essential in protecting people’s livelihoods. I just firmly believe, and I think that the literature agrees with me on this, that “brain damage” as a medical definition refers to large-scale cell death due to trauma or stroke, and not chronic low-level damage caused by stress. The language we choose to use is extremely important, it is the only facility we have to exchange information. Language is not useful if it is imprecise or even wrong.
How about this one then?
Let’s take a look what we got here. I’m only taking a look at the abstract, for now.
Stress is a risk factor for a variety of illnesses, involving the same hormones that ensure survival during a period of stress. Although there is a considerable ambiguity in the definition of stress, a useful operational definition is: “anything that induces increased secretion of glucocorticoids”.
Right, stress causes elevated levels of glucocorticoids, such as cortisol.
The brain is a major target for glucocorticoids. Whereas the precise mechanism of glucocorticoid-induced brain damage is not yet understood, treatment strategies aimed at regulating abnormal levels of glucocorticoids, are worth examining.
Glucocorticoids are useful in regulating processes in the body, but they can also do damage. I had never heard of the term glucocorticoid-induced brain damage, and searching for it in the literature only yields this exact article, so I considered this a dead end. However, in doing some more research, I did find two articles that somewhat support your hypothesis:
Cognitive impairment is a normal process of aging. The most common type of cognitive impairment among the elderly population is mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is the intermediate stage between normal brain function and full dementia.[1] MCI and dementia are related to the hippocampus region of the brain and have been associated with elevated cortisol levels.[2]
Cortisol regulates metabolism, blood glucose levels, immune responses, anti-inflammatory actions, blood pressure, and emotion regulation. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid hormone that is synthesized and secreted by the cortex of adrenal glands. The hypothalamus releases a corticotrophin-releasing hormone and arginine vasopressin into hypothalamic-pituitary portal capillaries, which stimulates adrenocorticotropic hormone secretion, thus regulating the production of cortisol. Basal cortisol elevation causes damage to the hippocampus and impairs hippocampus-dependent learning and memory. Chronic high cortisol causes functional atrophy of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the frontal lobe in the brain.
We might be able to find a few mentions of brain damage outside of the typical context (as caused by traumatic injury, stroke, etc) in the literature, but at least we can agree that the term brain damage is quite unusual in the context of stress, can we not? Out of the 188,764 articles known by pubmed, only 18,981 mention “stress”, and of those the almost all are referring to “oxidative stress” (such as that experienced by cells during a stroke). I have yet to find a single study or article that directly states brain damage as being a result of chronic stress, in the same way that there are hundreds of thousands of studies showing brain damage from traumatic injuries to the brain.
Well, if anybody asks meI will tell them that too much stress at work causes brain damage… and now I can even point to some exact papers!
I agree that it’s a little hyperbolic, but it’s not that hyperbolic. If we were talking about drug use everyone would kind of nod and say, ‘yeah, brain damage’ even if the effects were tertiary and the drug use was infrequent.
But stress at work! Ohohoho, that’s just life my friend! Which really does not need to be the way of the world… OP was right to get out, especially once they started exhibiting symptoms suspiciously like the ones cited in that last paper (you know, the sorts of symptoms you get when your brain is suffering from some damage).
If someone tells me that they got brain damage from stress at work, I will laugh, tell them to read the Wikipedia article article and then move on. But that is okay, we can agree to disagree. I understand that there are multiple possible definitions for the term brain damage.
If we were talking about drug use everyone would kind of nod and say, ‘yeah, brain damage’ even if the effects were tertiary and the drug use was infrequent.
In my defense, people often use terms incorrectly.
OP was right to get out
I agree. Brain damage or not, Google employee or not, if you are suffering at work you should not stay there. We all have very basic needs, and one of them is being valued and being happy to work.
Yea but this is an obnoxious, disrespectful, and disingenuous way to conduct an argument. I haven’t read any studies proving anything about this subject one way or another. Because I am not a mental health researcher. So it’s easy for me to make that claim, and present the claim as something that matters, when really it’s a pointless claim that truly does not matter at all.
Arguing from an anecdotal position based on your own experience, yet demanding the opposing side provide peer-reviewed studies to contradict your anecdotal experience, places a disproportionate burden on them to conduct their argument. And whether intentional or not, it strongly implies that you have little to no respect for their experiences or judgement. That you will only care about their words if someone else says them.
This experience is not unique to Google nor is it unique to large companies. It exists at every size of company. It’s an artifact of particular types of executive leadership and certain pathologies that can manifest there. It’s a cultural and political phenomena and can exist in pockets in a company with the entire company mostly not experiencing it or even being aware that it’s there until it’s too late.
If you are or plan to be an executive you can try to avoid it in your org by doing the following:
Ensure that any team or project has clearly defined goals from you and that there is at least one person held accountable for keeping the team in sync with those goals.
If a project is too ambitious for a team and you can’t afford to give that team the necessary resources to meet that ambition you either need to scale back the ambition or you need to cancel/not start the project. going forward anyway will either destroy the people on the team or result in a terrible outcome or product.
Listen and take action when someone comes to you and let’s you know that the project is struggling. Doing nothing is not leadership. It’s cowardice.
I worked in a similar situation. We were assigned a huge project, with individual responsibility for certain components (so if there was a bug in X, I would have to fix it right away, even if it was at night or the weekend). We were often in the office until 2 am for weeks at a time.
Nearly everyone on the team did develop physical or mental health problems. One guy spent a full week in the hospital with various maladies. I took a couple months off to recover.
Anyway, I find this story completely believable, and we all need to be more careful of what projects and people we get entangled with.
Thank you for sharing.
I hope the author gets the help they need, but I don’t really see how the blame for their psychological issues should be laid at the feet of their most-recent employer.
I dunno, doesn’t sound like they were the only person damaged by the experience.
Seems pretty significant when medical professionals are telling you the cure for your issues is “quit this job”?
A number of years ago I developed some neurological problems, and stress made it worse. I was told by two different doctors to change or quit my job. I eventually did, and it helped, but the job itself was not the root cause, nor was leaving the sole cure.
I absolutely cannot speak for OP’s situation, but I just want to point out that a doctor informing you to rethink your career doesn’t necessarily imply that the career is at fault. Though, in this case, it seems like it is.
It doesn’t seem like the OP’s doctors told them to change careers though, just quit that job.
To clarify, I’m using “career change” in a general sense. I would include quitting a job as a career change, as well as leaving one job for another in the same industry/domain. I’m not using it in the “leave software altogether” sense.
I’m trusting the author’s causal assessment here, but employers (especially large businesses with the resources required) can be huge sources of stress and prevent employees from having the time or energy needed to seek treatment for their own needs, so they can both cause issues and worsen existing ones.
It’s not uncommon, for example, for businesses to encourage unpaid out-of-hours work for salaried employees by building a culture that emphasizes personal accountability for project success; this not only increases stress and reduces free time that could otherwise be used to relieve work-related stress, it teaches employees to blame themselves for what could just as easily be systemic failures. Even if an employee resists the social pressure to put in extra hours in such an environment, they’ll still be penalized with (real or imagined) blame from their peers, blame from themselves for “not trying hard enough”, and likely less job safety or fewer benefits.
In particular, there’s relevance from the business’ failure to support effective project management, manage workloads, or generally address problems repeatedly and clearly brought up to them. These kinds of things typically fuel burnout. The author doesn’t go into details enough for an outside observer to make a judgment call one way or the other, but if you trust the author’s account of reality then it seems reasonable to blame the employer for, at the least, negligently fueling these problems through gross mismanagement.
Arguably off-topic, but I think it might squeak by on the grounds that it briefly ties the psychological harm to the quality of a technical standard resulting from the mismanaged business process.
This is such a common thing. An executive or manager punts on actually organizing the work, whether from incompetence or laziness, and then tries to make the individuals in the system responsible for the failures that occur. It’s hardly new. Deming describes basically this in ‘The New Economics’ (look up the ‘red bead game’).
More cynically, is WebAssembly actuall in Google’s interests? It doesn’t add revenue to Google Cloud. It’s going to make their data collection harder (provide Google analytics libraries for how many languages?). It was clearly a thing that was gaining momentum, so if they were to damage it, they would need to make sure they had a seat at the table and then make sure that the seat was used as ineffectually and disruptively as possible.
I think historically the answer would have been yes. Google has at various points been somewhat hamstrung by shipping projects with slow front end JS in them and responded by trying to make browsers themselves faster. e.g. creating V8 and financially contributing to Mozilla.
I couldn’t say if Google now has any incentive to not make JS go fast. I’m not aware of one. I suspect still the opposite. I think they’re also pushing mobile web apps as a way to inconvenience Apple; I think Google currently want people to write portable software using web tech instead of being tempted to write native apps for iOS only.
That said, what’s good for the company is not the principle factor motivating policy decisions. What’s good for specific senior managers inside Google is. Otherwise you wouldn’t see all these damn self combusting promo cycle driven chat apps from Google. A company is not a monolith.
I have this book and will have to re-read at least this bit tomorrow. I have slightly mixed feelings about it, mostly about the writing style.
Making JS fast is one thing. Making a target for many other languages, as opposed to maintaining analytics libraries and other ways of gathering data for one languages?
Your point about the senior managers’ interests driving what’s done is on point, though. Google and Facebook especially are weird because ads fund the company, and the rest is all some kind of loss leader floating around divorced from revenue.
The only thing I’ll comment about Deming is that the chapter on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation should be ignored, as that’s entirely an artifact despite its popularity. The rest of the book has held up pretty well.
Google doesn’t need to maintain their analytics libraries in many other languages, only to expose APIs callable from those languages. All WebAssembly languages can call / be called by JavaScript.
More generally, Google has been the biggest proponent of web apps instead of web services. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the web was that you’d have services that provided data with rich semantic markup. These could be rendered as web pages but could equally plug into other clients. The problem with this approach is that a client that can parse the structure of the data can choose to render it in a way that simply ignores adverts. If all of your adds are in an
<advert provider="google">block then an ad blocker is a trivial browser extension, as is something that displays ads but restricts them to plain text. Google’s web app push has been a massive effort to convince everyone to obfuscate the contents of their web pages. This has two key advantages for Google:WebAssembly fits very well into Google’s vision for the web.
I used to work for a price-comparison site, back when those were actual startups. We had one legacy price information page that was Java applet (remember those?) Supposedly the founders were worried about screen scrapers so wanted the entire site rendered with applets to deter them.
This makes more sense than my initial thoughts. Thanks.
This is something I should have stated explicitly but didn’t think to: I don’t think wasm is actually going to be the future of non-JS languages in the browser. I think they for the next couple decades at least, wasm is going to be used for compute kernels (written in other langs like C++ and Rust) that get called from JS.
I’m taking a bet here that targeting wasm from langs with substantial runtimes will remain unattractive indefinitely due to download weight and parsing time.
I honestly think many of the points in that book are great but hoo boy the writing style.
That is exactly what I thought while reading this. I understand that to a lot of people, WebAssembly is very important, and they have a lot of emotions vested into the success. But to the author’s employer, it might not be as important, as it might not directly generate revenue. The author forgets that to the vast, vast majority of people on this earth, having the opportunity to work on such a technology at a company like Google is an unparalleled privilege. Most people on this earth do not have the opportunity to quit their job just because a project is difficult, or because meetings run long or it is hard to find consensus. Managing projects well is incredibly hard. But I am sure that the author was not living on minimum wage, so there surely was compensation for the efforts.
It is sad to hear that the author has medical issues, and I hope those get sorted out. And those kinds of issues do exacerbate stressful jobs. But that is not a good reason for finger pointing. Maybe the position just was not right for the author, maybe there are more exciting projects that are waiting in the future. I certainly hope so. But it is important not to blame one’s issues on others, that is not a good attitude in life.
Using the excuse that because there exist others less fortunate, it’s not worth fighting to make something better is also not a good attitude in life.
Reading between the lines, it feels to me like there was a lot that the author left unsaid, and that’s fine. It takes courage to share a personal story about mental wellbeing, and an itemized list of all the wrongs that took place is not necessary to get the point the author was trying to make across.
My point is that I’d be cautious about making assumptions about the author’s experiences as they didn’t exactly give a lot of detail here.
This is true. It is worth fighting to make things better
There is a lot of things that go into mental wellbeing. Some things you can control, some things are genetic. I don’t know what the author left out, but I have not yet seen a study showing that stressful office jobs give people brain damage. There might be things the author has not explained, but at the same time that is a very extreme claim. In fact, if that were true, I am sure that the author should receive a lot in compensation.
I agree with you, but I also think that if someone makes a very bold claim about an employer, especially about personal injury, that these claims should be substantiated. There is a very big difference between “working there was hard, I quit” and “the employer acted recklessly and caused me personal injury”. And I don’t really know which one the author is saying, because from the description could be interpreted as it just being a difficult project to see through.
By thinking about it for a few seconds you can realize that this can easily not happen. The OP itself says that they don’t have documented evidence from the time because of all the issues they were going through. And it’s easy to see why: if your mental health is damaged, your brain is not working right, would you be mindful enough to take detailed notes of every incident and keep a trail of evidence for later use in compensation claims? Or are you saying that compensation would be given out no questions asked?
All I’m saying is, there is a very large difference between saying this job was very stressful, I had trouble sleeping and it negatively affected my concentration and memory and saying this job gave me brain damage. Brain damage is relatively well-defined:
Additionally, there are ways to test for this, a neurologist can make that determination. I’m not a neurologist. But it would be the first time I heard that brain damage be caused by psychosomatic issues. I believe that the author may have used this term in error. That’s why I said what I said — if you, or anyone, has brain damage as a result of your occupation, that is definitely grounds for compensation. And not a small compensation either, as brain damage is no joke. This is a very different category from mere psychological stress from working for an apparently mismanaged project.
Via https://www.webmd.com/brain/brain-damage-symptoms-causes-treatments
Anxiety, stress, lack of sleep, and other factors can potentially do that. So I don’t see any incorrect use of the phrase ‘brain damage’ here. And anyway, you missed the point. Saying ‘This patient has brain damage’ is different from saying ‘Working in the WebAssembly team at Google caused this patient’s brain damage’. When you talk about causation and claims of damage and compensation, people tend to demand documentary evidence.
I agree brain damage is no joke, but if you look at society it’s very common for certain types of relatively-invisible mental illnesses to be downplayed and treated very lightly, almost as a joke. Especially by people and corporations who would suddenly have to answer for causing these injuries.
Anxiety, stress, lack of sleep and other factors cannot, ever, possibly, cause brain damage. I think you have not completely read that article. It states – as does the definition that I linked:
There is no kind of brain injury that is caused by lack of sleep or stress. That is not to say that these things are not also damaging to one’s body and well-being.
Mental illnesses can be very devastating and stressful on the body. But you will not get a brain injury from a mental illness, unless it makes you physically impact your brain (causing traumatic brain injury), ingest something toxic, or have a stroke. It is important to be very careful with language and not confuse terms. The term “brain damage” is colloquially often used to describe things that are most definitely not brain damage, like “reading this gave me brain damage”. I hope you understand what I’m trying to state here. Again, the author has possibly misused the term “brain damage”, or there is some physical trauma that happened that the author has not mentioned in the article.
I hope you understand what I am trying to say here!
Anxiety and stress raise adrenaline levels, which in turn cause short- and long-term changes in brain chemistry. It sounds like you’ve never been burnt out; don’t judge others so harshly.
Anxiety and stress are definitely not healthy for a brain. They accelerate aging processes, which is damaging. But brain damage in a medical context refers to large-scale cell death caused by genetics, trauma, stroke or tumors.
There seems to be a weird definitional slide here from “brain damage” to “traumatic brain injury.” I think we are all agreed that her job did not give her traumatic brain injury, and this is not claimed. But your claim that stress and sleep deprivation cannot cause (acquired) brain injury is wrong. In fact, you will find counterexamples by just googling “sleep deprivation brain damage”.
“Mental illnesses can be … stressful on the body.” The brain is part of the body!
I think you – and most of the other people that have responded to my comment – have not quite understood what I’m saying. The argument here is about the terms being used.
Brain DamageBrain damage, as defined here, is damage caused to the brain by trauma, tumors, genetics or oxygen loss, such as during a stroke. This leads to potentially large chunks of your brain to die off. This means you can lose entire brain regions, potentially permanently lose some abilities (facial recognition, speech, etc).
Sleep DeprivationSee Fundamental Neuroscience, page 961:
When you are forcibly sleep deprived for a long time, such as when you are being tortured, your body can lose the ability to use nutrients and finally you can die. You need to not sleep at all for weeks for this to happen, generally this is not something that happens to people voluntarily, especially not in western countries.
StressThe cells in your brain only have a finite lifespan. At some point, they die and new ones take their place (apoptosis). Chronic stress and sleep deprivation can speed up this process, accelerating aging.
Crucially, this is not the same as an entire chunk of your brain to die off because of a stroke. This is a very different process. It is not localized, and it doesn’t cause massive cell death. It is more of a slow, gradual process.
SummaryYes, for sure. It is just that the term “brain damage” is usually used for a very specific kind of pattern, and not for the kind of chronlc, low-level damage done by stress and such. A doctor will not diagnose you with brain damage after you’ve had a stressful interaction with your coworker. You will be diagnosed with brain damage in the ICU after someone dropped a hammer on your head. Do you get what I’m trying to say?
I get what you are trying to say, I think you are simply mistaken. If your job impairs your cognitive abilities, then it has given you brain damage. Your brain, is damaged. You have been damaged in your brain. The cells and structures in your brain have taken damage. You keep trying to construct this exhaustive list of “things that are brain damage”, and then (in another comment) saying that this is about them not feeling appreciated and valued or sort of vaguely feeling bad, when what they are saying is that working at this job impaired their ability to form thoughts. That is a brain damage thing! The brain is an organ for forming thoughts. If the brain can’t thoughts so good no more, then it has been damaged.
The big picture here is that a stressful job damaged this person’s health. Specifically, their brain’s.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I think you are simply mistaken. We (as a society) have definitions for the terms we use. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_damage:
This is not “significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage” (for context, trauma here refers to physical trauma, such as an impact to the head, not psychological trauma). What the author describes does not line up with any of the Causes of Brain Damage. It is simply not the right term.
Yes, the author has a brain, and there is self-reported “damage” to it. But just because someone is a man and feels like he polices the neighborhood, does not make me a “police man”. Just because I feel like my brain doesn’t work right after a traumatic job experience does not mean I have brain damage™.
The Wikipedia header is kind of odd. The next sentence after “in general, brain damage is trauma induced” lists non-trauma-induced categories of brain damage. So I don’t know how strong that “in general” is meant to be. At any rate, “in general” is not at odds with the use of the term for non-trauma induced stress/sleep depriv damage.
At any rate, if you click through to Acquired Brain Injury, it says “These impairments result from either traumatic brain injury (e.g. …) or nontraumatic injury … (e.g. listing a bunch of things that are not traumatic.)”
Anyway, the Causes of Brain Damage list is clearly not written to be exhaustive. “any number of conditions, including” etc.
There is some evidence that lack of sleep may kill brain cells: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-26630647
It’s also possible to suffer from mini-strokes due to the factors discussed above.
In any case, I feel like you’re missing the forest for the trees. Sure, it’s important to be correct with wording. But is that more important than the bigger picture here, that a stressful job damaged this person’s health?
Yes, that is true, and it is a shame. I really wish that the process around WASM be less hostile, and that this person not be impacted negatively, even if stressful and hard projects are an unfortunate reality for many people.
I think that you might be missing the forest for the trees – I’m not saying that this person was not negatively impacted, I am merely stating that it is (probably, unless there is evidence otherwise) to characterize this impact as “brain damage”, because from a medical standpoint, that term has a more narrow definition that damage due to stress does not fulfill.
Hello, you might enjoy this study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4561403/
I looked through a lot of studies to try and find a review that was both broad and to the point.
Now, you are definitely mixing a lot of terms here… but I hope that if you read the research, you can be convinced, at the very least, that stress hurts brains (and I hope that reading the article and getting caught in this comment storm doesn’t hurt yours).
Sleep Deprivation and Oxidative Stress in Animal Models: A Systematic Review tells us that sleep deprivation can be shown to increase oxidative stress:
Although, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998234/ disagrees with this. Furthermore, it is known that oxidative stress promotes apoptosis, see Oxidative stress and apoptosis :
The article that you linked Stress effects on the hippocampus: a critical review mentions that stress has an impact on the development of the brain and on it’s workings:
I do not disagree with this. I think that anyone would be able to agree that stress is bad for the brain, possibly by increasing apoptosis (accelerating ageing), decreasing the availability of nutrients. My only argument is that the term brain damage is quite narrowly defined (for example here) as (large-scale) damage to the brain caused by genetics, trauma, oxygen starvation or a tumor, and it can fall into one of two categories: traumatic brain injuries and acquired brain injuries. If you search for “brain damage” on pubmed, you will find the term being used like this:
You will not find studies or medical diagnoses of “brain damage due to stress”. I hope that you can agree that using the term brain damage in a context such as the author’s, without evidence of traumatic injury or a stroke, is wrong. This does not take away the fact that the author has allegedly experienced a lot of stress at their previous employer, one of the largest and high-paying tech companies, and that this experience has caused the author personal issues.
On an unrelated note: what is extremely fascinating to me is that some chemicals such as methamphetamine (at low concentrations) or minocycline are neuroprotective being able to lessen brain damage for example due to stroke. But obviously, at larger concentrations the opposite is the case.
How about this one then? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197458003000484
We can keep going, it is not difficult to find these… Your’re splitting a hair which should not be split.
What’s so wrong about saying a bad work environment can cause brain damage?
There is nothing more fun than a civil debate. I would argue that any hair deserves being split. Worst case, you learn something new, or form a new opinion.
Nothing is wrong with that, if the work environment involves heavy things, poisonous things, or the like. This is why OSHA compliance is so essential in protecting people’s livelihoods. I just firmly believe, and I think that the literature agrees with me on this, that “brain damage” as a medical definition refers to large-scale cell death due to trauma or stroke, and not chronic low-level damage caused by stress. The language we choose to use is extremely important, it is the only facility we have to exchange information. Language is not useful if it is imprecise or even wrong.
Let’s take a look what we got here. I’m only taking a look at the abstract, for now.
Right, stress causes elevated levels of glucocorticoids, such as cortisol.
Glucocorticoids are useful in regulating processes in the body, but they can also do damage. I had never heard of the term glucocorticoid-induced brain damage, and searching for it in the literature only yields this exact article, so I considered this a dead end. However, in doing some more research, I did find two articles that somewhat support your hypothesis:
In Effects of brain activity, morning salivary cortisol, and emotion regulation on cognitive impairment in elderly people, it is mentioned that high cortisol levels are associated with hippocampus damage, supporting your hypothesis, but it only refers to elderly patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI):
Additionally, Effects of stress hormones on the brain and cognition: Evidence from normal to pathological aging mentions that chronic stress is a contributor to memory performance decline.
We might be able to find a few mentions of brain damage outside of the typical context (as caused by traumatic injury, stroke, etc) in the literature, but at least we can agree that the term brain damage is quite unusual in the context of stress, can we not? Out of the 188,764 articles known by pubmed, only 18,981 mention “stress”, and of those the almost all are referring to “oxidative stress” (such as that experienced by cells during a stroke). I have yet to find a single study or article that directly states brain damage as being a result of chronic stress, in the same way that there are hundreds of thousands of studies showing brain damage from traumatic injuries to the brain.
Well, if anybody asks me I will tell them that too much stress at work causes brain damage… and now I can even point to some exact papers!
I agree that it’s a little hyperbolic, but it’s not that hyperbolic. If we were talking about drug use everyone would kind of nod and say, ‘yeah, brain damage’ even if the effects were tertiary and the drug use was infrequent.
But stress at work! Ohohoho, that’s just life my friend! Which really does not need to be the way of the world… OP was right to get out, especially once they started exhibiting symptoms suspiciously like the ones cited in that last paper (you know, the sorts of symptoms you get when your brain is suffering from some damage).
If someone tells me that they got brain damage from stress at work, I will laugh, tell them to read the Wikipedia article article and then move on. But that is okay, we can agree to disagree. I understand that there are multiple possible definitions for the term brain damage.
In my defense, people often use terms incorrectly.
I agree. Brain damage or not, Google employee or not, if you are suffering at work you should not stay there. We all have very basic needs, and one of them is being valued and being happy to work.
Anyways, I hope you have a good weekend!
This is a bizarre and somewhat awful thread. Please could you not post things like this in future?
I disagree. The post seemed polite, constructive, and led to (IMO) a good conversation (including some corrections to the claims in the post).
Parent left a clear method for you to disprove them by providing a counter-example.
If you can point to some peer-reviewed research on the topic, by all means do so.
Yea but this is an obnoxious, disrespectful, and disingenuous way to conduct an argument. I haven’t read any studies proving anything about this subject one way or another. Because I am not a mental health researcher. So it’s easy for me to make that claim, and present the claim as something that matters, when really it’s a pointless claim that truly does not matter at all.
Arguing from an anecdotal position based on your own experience, yet demanding the opposing side provide peer-reviewed studies to contradict your anecdotal experience, places a disproportionate burden on them to conduct their argument. And whether intentional or not, it strongly implies that you have little to no respect for their experiences or judgement. That you will only care about their words if someone else says them.