My Google job was tedious and pointless • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#251

Post by rdiddly » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

That's your take? Using bright-colored paint and giving out candy is how you avoid having everyone be jerks to each other? And at every company that doesn't do that, everyone are jerks to each other I suppose?

And kindergarteners are kind and pleasant while mature people are frustrated, abusive and cruel? (From experience I'd say if mature people are frustrated it's from dealing with the tyrannical outsized self-centeredness of the kindergarteners, but I digress.)

Good guys don't always wear white hats, and there's no reliable correlation between Google-style trappings, and a good place to work. I don't have a citation for you, but I've seen great creativity in grey Dilbert cubicles, and I've seen rank despair in brightly-colored factories of the happy-happy.

A shiny thing could be a nugget of true gold, or it could've been placed there to distract you from the fact that you're standing in a bucket of shit. And to contradict and invalidate your true realization that standing in shit makes you feel shitty. And that -- in and of itself, and totally aside from your co-workers' behavior -- is a subtle way of being a jerk to you.

A workplace should be neutral. Let me put the life there, like paint on a canvas.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#252

Post by rdiddly » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:07 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #163

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…

> 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 wea…

LOL - "hellpoints"

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#253

Post by hw » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:07 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #5

The headline is a bit deceptive given it's written by an internal recruiter; I imagine anyone not working as part of a business' main thrust could find the same problem. That said, it does sound horribly tedious and pointless. Of my two interactions with Google hiring (both failures on my part, both pre-2006), one was enjoyable but messy and the second was brusque and confusing.

I do think that the OP's job as a recruiter could have been better if the culture within his team or the recruiting dept was better. Sure, it's a monotonous job, but im guessing if the team was a small startup located in SF external to Google and they could do things their own way instead of answering to and belonging to a huge HR department with immense pressure to get as many candidates in as possible, and grow their own culture, the job wouldn't feel so tedious and pointless.

Sometimes it's hard to feel like you're doing great things and making a difference when what you do is a drop of water in a great sea that is Google, vs the same drop in a smaller bucket of water.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#254

Post by cromwellian » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:08 PM UTC

peoplewindow wrote: post #133

cromwellian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly bullshit in my opinion. I've been at Google since 2009. Never heard of so-called blacklists, but in a company with tens of thousands of employees, you can probably find a few people who hold grudges against other people. What's your point? You don't think at other companies, corporate politics doesn't create animosity of people who don't want to work with others? I previously worked at IBM and Oracle for years…

You should read the Breitbart interviews then. There are screenshots of Googlers on internal G+ saying they maintain blacklists of people they won't work with for political reasons, or sometimes, even just because someone spoke up and said "hey, blacklisting your colleagues isn't a good idea".

I'm guessing most are probably women (or close allies) who basically don't want to work with people like Damore.

My kids are half-Chinese. If one of my coworkers said "these half-breed children are polluting our race", I'm pretty sure I'd shy away from working with them. Damore basically implied that Google lowers the bar for female engineers (which it does not), and therefore immediately cast doubt on the quality and merit of his female coworkers.

If I was a woman, I might decide I don't want to work with someone who feels I'm not really supposed to be there.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#255

Post by jrs95 » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:08 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #217

jrs95 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and if you took a closer look at the stats you'd see that it's not even true that they're disproportionately responsible for mass shootings or terrorism generally.

The probability of you being killed by a terrorist or a Muslim in the US is tiny compared to your chances of being killed by a native born or white (assuming you're white). The percentages are so small, it makes such an outsized concern obviously racist because from a rational risk assessment point of view, it changes nothing. >So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one…

>The probability of you being killed by a terrorist or a Muslim in the US is tiny compared to your chances of being killed by a native born or white (assuming you're white). The percentages are so small, it makes such an outsized concern obviously racist because from a rational risk assessment point of view, it changes nothing.

It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.

> We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.

While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.

>These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.

For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#256

Post by dudul » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

trgv wrote: post #139

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…

It's disturbing to me how many people here seem to be okay with executives and higher-ups expressing grief over the results of an election, in the office. I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically. If you're emotionally affected by so…

That's really something that surprised me a lot after moving to the US. In my culture, politics is very much like religion, it is unthinkable to talk about it openly in a place of work.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#257

Post by uep » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:13 PM UTC

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…

While it's certainly possible there's some bias going on there, I can confirm that this guy really worked at Google. He contacted me a few months ago about a position, but I decided not to pursue a role there.

Maybe this wouldn't have been published otherwise, but I definitely believe it to be genuine.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#258

Post by zaroth » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #163

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…

> 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 wea…

It seems silly to upvote dang, but, yeah.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#259

Post by waterhouse » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:18 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #163

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…

> 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 wea…

> please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize

Ooh, steelmanning as official policy. Excellent.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#260

Post by forgottenpass » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 7:19 PM UTC

hsod wrote: post #105

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…

I've noticed a TON of conversation on HN lately about how emotional/hysterical anti-Trump people are. Aside from the obvious fallacy (being emotional doesn't make you wrong), I think it's part of the anti-anti-Trump phenomenon: most people can't bring themselves to actually defend Trump but they are so annoyed by liberals that they devote their political energy to mocking and minimizing his critics. My take: bad thin…

The phenomenon you describe is something I see in multiple different political directions depending on the context. It's basically just frustration that the status-quo opinion is held to less rigor. -- I don't mean that the positions are bad, but the way people voice them assume that more and more is solved "offscreen."

Trump might be president, but in the Valley tech bubble, Anti-Trump is status quo. And politics in a bubble isn't like doing math homework, you only have to show how you got your answer if you want to disagree with the "obviously" correct positions.

The anti-Trump rhetoric is stronger than the old anti-Republician rhetoric. So the people annoyed by empty arguments are going to be louder too.