The Most Primitive Form of Communication

The all-hands — the most primitive company communication I’d seen, and the one I learned most from. TGIF, Dory, and why it’s hard to copy.

One of the scenes that jarred me most when I joined Google was the set of events called all-hands. Of all the ways a company shares its work, or shows it off, this is about as primitive as it gets — gather everyone into one room and call it communication. I take it for granted now, but at the time it genuinely surprised me. A few memories around it.

TGIF, TGIAF

Thank God It’s Friday / Thank God It’s Almost Friday.

Google’s flagship all-hands — the name already familiar from the restaurant chain. Both founders and the CEO attended and ran it almost every week, and I remember it with the energy of a standing variety show. Because it was confidential, there are few photos of it out in the world, but the format ran nearly the same each week: roughly a third on the company’s big issues, a third on a rotating org presenting some new topic, and whatever time was left for Q&A.

When the rotation came around to your org, it set off a full-scale alarm, in several senses. Do we show a demo here, or a good stat? I remember a demo my boss was fond of that we rehearsed all week.

There were snacks, beer, even wine, and sometimes it ran as a social TGIF with no particular agenda. Originally it was Friday; then it moved to Thursday on Pacific time, out of consideration for global employees — hence TGI Almost Friday. As the company grew too large — the headaches of confidential-versus-leak, among others — it shifted around 2019, near the start of the pandemic, into a monthly business update. Still, it ran for close to twenty years; I watched it for more than ten after joining, which seems remarkable to me.

As one program in noogler onboarding — Google’s term for a new hire — you go to your first TGIAF at Charlie’s Café, the original cafeteria on campus, sit there wearing a hat, and stand to be welcomed. Your name goes out on screens to every office worldwide, everyone applauds, and Sergey — Sergey Brin, one of the two founders — would say every week, OK, let’s get back to work then. Before live sign-language interpretation and live captioning came in for real, the stenographers’ dazzling English typing left a lasting impression.

Dory

Outside, it was called Google Moderator; inside, we called it Dory. From the look of it, the same idea is offered to the outside world now at dory.app — same thing. Each time an event was announced, a Dory link came with it, pre-submitted questions collected there, and the questions sorted themselves by thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Sometimes answers got posted in advance.

It doubles as the agenda you’d normally hand out before a meeting, and the main speakers work straight off it, with no separate moderator. Questions come in from the open mic too, but Dory tends to gather the high-quality, serious ones. The power of crowdsourcing. The presenters do their best to answer, and sometimes follow up diligently — but when the clock runs out they cut it off cleanly, and the questions that didn’t gather enough upvotes get buried.

Having grown up in a culture where eagerly asking questions is unfamiliar, and with my short English on top of that, it felt foreign to me for a long time. I tried to imitate it back in Korea with Google Docs or chat messages — no chance. These days the scrolling chat of a YouTube livestream is a little more familiar; people will clap and cheer along, but I suspect that’s about as far as it goes.

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I’d venture that Dory is the single most important tool for making an all-hands a time that means something to the people in it. Which is maybe why the occasional self-interested please give our team some praise message shows up — only to meet the punishment of the crowd.

All-hands of Many Kinds

Beyond TGIF and TGIAF, there were special showcases like Android launches, company-wide OKR events — objectives and key results, the goal-setting ritual — and leadership responses whenever something serious happened, inside the company or out. Moderately serious matters went out as an all-company email; when there was more that needed talking through, an all-hands happened.

Even when the target wasn’t the whole company — TGIF was open to every employee, though attendance was never mandatory — similar things played out at the org level. Search team all-hands were frequent, and within that, each director and VP held one at least once a quarter. The deeper the org, the more the content overlapped.

Reorgs, business shutdowns — those happened often, too often, and so I don’t have any particularly fond memories of the all-hands that got scheduled out of nowhere. Those sometimes came with limits on who could attend, and there were events I never got to see.

In one very good year, a TGIF ended with year-end bonuses handed out in envelopes. I happened to be visiting US headquarters from Korea at the time, so on the off chance, I held up my badge — you are not eligible. Mortifying. Larry — Larry Page, the other founder — looked over with a smile: where are you from? Sigh.

And in Korea, in the AI Era

It’s an event that puts a lien on everyone’s time at once, so you’d think its importance would sit in the top tier — which is maybe exactly why it’s so hard to find it run, outside Google, as well as Google ran it. Every company and org has its own circumstances; I’ll close with a few personal observations.

• The boss and the senior people are busy with the work that has to happen outside the company.
• It slides easily into the boss’s morning-assembly homily — the work harder lecture familiar to anyone who sat through school opening and closing assemblies in Korea.
• No questions makes it slide there faster.
• There’s nothing, particularly, to share (?).

Inside Google, I learned a great deal from work that had nothing to do with my own team, and internal open events and materials like the all-hands were a big part of that. There seem to be a lot of reasons it doesn’t work as well on the outside.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/174