Google Culture
Fascinating that the Googlers & x-Googlers appear to be silent. Oh well. This is going to be long enough that there is no point in trying to be AC. I was there 2015-6.
Google culture encourages staff to "bring your whole self". And stay all day. Free three meals a day if you like, showers, gyms, and more. (One guy lived out of his car for two years until management found out.) This is particularly attractive to green grads who don't have a strong view of life after college. (And are not in a relationship outside work.) It also deliberately smears the line between work and not-work. In such an environment, "professionalism" can have implications that are very different from most places.
For example, consider Google's internal Imgur/Memegen. While I was there, the decision was made to officially support it. At least two FTOs. Few companies would allow such a thing. But there, it became one of the best sources of internal news in the company. To the point that at least one team copped to reading it to help debug an outage. So are these memes "official communications"? If so, when did it start?
When I started, there was an aggressive (how much depended on where) culture of enforcing screen locking by inventive embarrassment (posting embarrassing memes was fair game). Apparently, some thin-skinned director got busted this way at some point, and demanded an end to the practice. Shortly, a document came out proscribing what was allowed & not. It was decidedly NSFW for many places. (A fact which was the source of several highly popular memes.)
When you have a culture which is (officially) consciously relaxed, you're going to have people regularly needing to be herded back inside the smeared lines. This looks like one of those events.
Of course, the entire thing gets really messy when you take a consciously relaxed culture & start demanding adherence to the liberal pieties. But that's a different post.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
