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My Google job was tedious and pointless

washingtonpost.com

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Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#151

Post by pizza234 »

Kyragem wrote: post #45
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the single example that you reach for when describing google as an amazing place to work is "beercart Friday?"

Yes the bar at Google is very high and after busting my ass all week solving ridiculously hard problems having someone drop a cold beer and nachos on my desk on a Friday afternoon shows that Google takes employee satisfaction very seriously

I'm not sure about your exact experience (it looks like you're young), but that's quite common, at least in relatively young companies.

Nachos and beer, or food in general, doesn't show anything special, since the cost to the company is negligible (compare it to your salary). One could even argue the opposite - that such conditions are part of a precise PR strategy targeted towards a certain demographic.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#152

Post by bmomb »

cc81 wrote: post #138
dcow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people seem more interested in bickering about politics than addressing the root of the problem.

What is the root of the problem?

A fair distribution of resources and opportunities. I believe that if we do not address this problems soon enough we will be (soon) living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#153

Post by Apocryphon »

asdfaefasdf wrote: post #119
Apocryphon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably create a positive company culture with a cheerful atmosphere without primary school aesthetics.

I'm genuinely amazed that some people can have such strong feelings about something so trivial as what color a bikeshed is.

I'm genuinely amazed that you divined strong feelings from my neutrally flat statement.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#154

Post by cromwellian »

jrs95 wrote: post #103
untog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is being downvoted and I wish it wasn't, because it's a great example of the exact issue at hand. You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the li…

Except there was absolutely no talk during the campaign or after the election about cancelling H1B visas...

Except that there was, in Bannon's famous "there are too many Asian CEOs" radio interview with Trump, they floated the idea of cutbacks on legal immigration, some of which would impact current immigrants seeking to bring over family members.

Moreover, if you were a legal immigrant on an H1-B, and you happened to have dual nationality with one of the "bad" countries on Trump's list, you quickly found out that you could no longer risk travel outside the country. A large number of Canadian-Iranian/British-Iranian immigrants found they were suddenly capable of being banned.

Acting like the election campaign was no cause for concern is completely ignoring the obvious warning signs, like "We need a TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MUSLIMS ENTERING THE COUNTRY".

If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#155

Post by bllguo »

s73ver_ wrote: post #75
cromwellian wrote: post #31

Recruiting is outsourced at many companies. I'm not sure why this person thought it would be a hugely interesting job. Perhaps if they were an engineering major and were working on ways to automate recruiting searches, or improve the false positive/false negative rates, it would have been interesting, but it doesn't sound like this person was hired for anything but to man the phones. From that standpoint, it seems li…

This narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end. It's nothing but elitism, and adding the "#firstworldproblems" doesn't do anything to help your cause.

Non-engineers deserve fulfilling work as well, but their skillset - and hence their ability to find such work - is being automated away.

In this specific case - was it even possible to find fulfilling work in HR in the first place? It's hard to sympathize with the author holding Google to an impossible standard.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#156

Post by peoplewindow »

dkobran wrote: post #62

While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It s…

It does seem an odd choice to publish. Sourcers (that's what Google calls people like that regardless of what his job title was) have existed for a long time there. I was recruited to Google by someone just like that. And yes it's clearly a very boring job: they're basically human search engines.

Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he was mistreated or anything.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#157

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

weberc2 wrote: post #94
EasyTiger_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-American I'm so glad I don't work in an country where politics seems to create such hysteria in the workplace. I know Trump was a big unexpected shock to many but come on... crying executives, I mean what the hell

Mind you, America is a vast and diverse place; California/Silicon Valley/Google are at an extreme end of the spectrum, and they also get a disproportionate amount of attention. Rest assured, much of America is saner.

I see what you're getting at, but "saner" is biased language.

Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#158

Post by dcow »

cc81 wrote: post #138
dcow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people seem more interested in bickering about politics than addressing the root of the problem.

What is the root of the problem?

Jobs that once existed no longer exist because they've either been automated or outsourced.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#160

Post by peoplewindow »

waisbrot wrote: post #39
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that a bunch of current and former Googlers have claimed that employees all the way up to the executive level keep and share lists of people they won't work with, there are alleged witch hunts, and people have made the statement they will quit the company if someone else isn't fired, it's hard to see how Google's culture has grown out of kindergarten. (Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing,…

Why should anyone have to tell you that a Breitbart story is untrue when you already know that they lie constantly?

They don't lie constantly. Not about that anyway. I used to work at Google. I even recognised the names of some of the people who were quoted in those interviews. Every single detail was exactly as I remembered it.

Lots of denial in this thread about the contents of those interviews, as they're pretty damning. But it's all true ...

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