Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Google job was tedious and pointless

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 348 posts

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#161

Post by pizza234 »

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…

> Someone who lacks the skills to be a SWE

Not everybody wants to be a SWE.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#162

Post by bogomipz »

pm90 wrote: post #125
bogomipz wrote: post #91

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." Your America bashing is completely uncalled for and unwarranted. It's pretty sad that you don't realize that executives getting on stage and crying in front of employees the day after an election is a complete aberration. This was was not and is not commonplace.

This is most certainly not American bashing, only a nod to the extent that political partisanship has infiltrated American culture.

Stating "I'm so glad I don't work in an country where X", strikes me as a little stronger than a "nod."

More especially so when "X" is a second-hand anecdote and that second-hand anecdote stems from a company that is in no way representative of the average American work place.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#163

Post by dang »

cromwellian wrote: post #16
ogre_magi wrote: post #12

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

> god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten

This kind of thing breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to "please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Your interpretation was far from the strongest plausible. As a result, we got a weak and ranty subthread terminating in such hellpoints as "Your America bashing is completely uncalled for". Avoiding that is why we have the guidelines, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them more carefully from now on?

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#164

Post by pc86 »

emsy wrote: post #129
cromwellian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

You're sarcasm is not exactly benign either.

Your

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#165

Post by mo3s »

aresant wrote: post #40

While the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation. The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience. I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and i…

I think this guy sounds like an over-entitled sheltered snowflake. If you have the sense to get into Google, then it follows you have the sense to go and get a job anywhere else on the planet. Who cares if Google didn't work out? There is no dearth of interesting work going on in the world today. Go find it.

That said everytime I watch Sunder Pichai doing his pseudo Steve Jobs routine I get a headache at how superficial and unimaginative Google is. I am not at all surprised at the shallow culture.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#166

Post by AckSyn »

bmomb wrote: post #152
cc81 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A fair distribution of resources and opportunities.

This is one of those idealist dreamer type mindsets and bears no basis in reality. I can't for the life of me understand how anyone could believe in it having been educated in basic economics and politics.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#167

Post by jstewartmobile »

drharby wrote: post #60
Kyragem wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cant tell if sarcasm

Kyragem is channeling Ken M

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#168

Post by bllguo »

aresant wrote: post #40

While the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation. The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience. I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and i…

Don't know about "poignant" - this reads like "I chose the wrong career and it's Google's fault" - but 100% yes, this is one of the biggest societal issues we face.

The author may have realized a bit late that he doesn't enjoy HR, but he still deserves a chance to pivot. That's getting harder in our economic system and with automation and outsourcing.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#169

Post by pm90 »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #93
greggarious wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals. The idea that as long as you aren't yelling, swearing, or actively insulting someone you are not treating them poorly is on…

> I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable. Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?

Mostly because the language he used and the way he tried to promote his viewpoint was construed as hostile by almost every woman working at Google, or at least a significant number of them.

The choice isn't b/w being an echo chamber and expressing views which make coworkers uncomfortable for their gender.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#170

Post by katastic »

untog wrote: post #90
miketery wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, that's the point - people are overly emotional. All this waking up the next morning and the world is different is such a stretch. Nothing has changed.

I'm going to guess you aren't in the US on a visa. "Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying? Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt…

>immigrants

You missed the "::cough:: illegal ::cough::"

Otherwise, please cite a video/audio source of him actually saying he wants to kick out all the legal immigrants.

Post reply on HN