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My Google job was tedious and pointless

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Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#341

Post by miketery »

steve_musk wrote: post #95
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.

Maybe for you, but for a large portion of America it was definitely like waking up in a new world. Its easy to call people overly emotional when you aren't living in a world where the President of the United States was elected by stoking the hate and fear that a large portion of your fellow citizens have against your race/religion/culture/etc...

I live in the US. This is my point the sentiment is over blown.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#342

Post by peoplewindow »

cromwellian wrote: post #254
peoplewindow wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

They were men, actually. Again, rather than speculate, I suggest you get over your fear of Breitbart and just go read the interviews.

Damore didn't say or imply what you're claiming either. I wonder how carefully you read what he wrote, if at all. He talked about interest at the population level. He didn't claim female Googlers weren't as good as male Googlers. That was a strawman thrown about by people who couldn't argue with his actual points and so preferred to argue with something else.

So - lots of assumptions on your part, all wrong. Not the type of data driven analysis I remember Google exalting, back in the day.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#343

Post by farax91 »

s3nnyy wrote: post #280
chrisper wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back to Europe and live in Switzerland now. Much happier here than there.

Why are you happier in Switzerland?

For one, he's not worried about getting shot and smelling urine and feces on the way to work.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#344

Post by _Tev »

cromwellian wrote: post #247
weberc2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't evidence against the echo chamber claim. An example of valid evidence might be rational debate about a conservative memo, as opposed to censorship, demonization, slander, etc.

Google has internal Republican and Libertarian newsgroups and has had them for years. Damore's central issues have been debated for a long time on those kinds of lists and never censored. What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence. Why is it that when a ma…

Existence of one echo chamber doesn't disprove existence of another echo chamber.

And considering public did not see those old internal debates (there was not even a quote or reference to them in official statement about the firing), google now looks from the outside like that echo chamber.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#345

Post by fixermark »

logfromblammo wrote: post #338
fixermark wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the point where you said "and likely alpha This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the…

So merely saying "Communism" is sufficient to make it political? In terms of fairness, my opinion is that alpha less than 2 puts too much wealth in the hands of the rich, hurting the baseline quality of life, and alpha greater than 5 probably doesn't concentrate enough capital to support innovation, competition, moonshots, and luxuries. I was defining an objectively measurable middle ground between two economic antip…

Politics with concrete numerically-quantifiable values is much better politics.

But you can't replace the politics with the math, as the exercise of deciding the alpha value in the Pareto distribution demonstrates. The numbers don't tell us what people will value; that's where the politics comes in. It's the art of figuring out human values and coming to terms to try to satisfy as many as possible.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#346

Post by logfromblammo »

fixermark wrote: post #345
logfromblammo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So merely saying "Communism" is sufficient to make it political? In terms of fairness, my opinion is that alpha less than 2 puts too much wealth in the hands of the rich, hurting the baseline quality of life, and alpha greater than 5 probably doesn't concentrate enough capital to support innovation, competition, moonshots, and luxuries. I was defining an objectively measurable middle ground between two economic antip…

Politics with concrete numerically-quantifiable values is much better politics. But you can't replace the politics with the math, as the exercise of deciding the alpha value in the Pareto distribution demonstrates. The numbers don't tell us what people will value; that's where the politics comes in. It's the art of figuring out human values and coming to terms to try to satisfy as many as possible.

In theory, the optimal alpha could be determined experimentally. It would be an expensive experiment, though.

For now, we just have anecdotal historical examples, like the Soviets, and the European monarchies, and the ruins of ancient empires, and the banana republics, and the resource-curse countries.

We have already determined that the extremes at either end are bad. Concentrate the wealth too much, and you get slavery or serfdom, and stagnate. Distribute it too much, and you get socialism or communism, and stagnate. Follow some happy medium somewhere between them, and your economy grows.

In the absence of an experiment that would require extensive political maneuvering to even begin to conduct, we substitute less extensive political maneuvering in order to make some reasonable assumptions. It is better than just allowing the person that derails the discussion with the loudest distraction to win.

Besides that, experiments undertaken to determine the optimally fair distribution of wealth are as likely to be used to craft an illusion of fairness as they are to create a real environment of fairness, so even if we knew, we wouldn't necessarily be able to do.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#347

Post by whatyoucantsay »

belorn wrote: post #315
dragonwriter wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that stuff has any place at work. Companies are often intensely political; artificially pretending neutrality internally while actively working externally to influence the political landscape to me is more bizarre than being open about politics in the office. If a corporation actually is solidly neutral and inactive politically in it's external actions, then, sure, the internal environment should refl…

If we accept that, should we not also accept religious views in the internal environment? Many religions view unbelievers in a very negative way, and active missionary behavior inside a company would feel very oppressive to those who don't share the same religion as the one being promoted. Personally I would not work at a place which did so, and would consider reporting it to the anti-discrimination department in my…

Any company whose management leads employees in prayers or urges them to follow a religious doctrine has no place in the civilised world.

Accommodating employees and their religious practices is another matter, within reasonable limits.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#348

Post by jondubois »

notyourwork wrote: post #339
jondubois wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the prospective employer saw the kinds of companies I worked for and heard their reviews, they'd be silly not to try to hire me (especially in the current market). Some companies might think it is a red flag but I wouldn't want to work for such a silly companies anyway - These often don't do very well because they prioritise things like employee discipline over raw performance. When you job hop a lot, you beco…

If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and iterating 2 or 3 times is the part you are completely missing and cannot do in 6 months. This is why I think you need to spend at least a year somewhere to learn much of anything aside from writing code. Learning software design doesn't happen without hands on expe…

I disagree, most companies don't really 'grow' like you're suggesting. The odds of joining a company like AirBnB, DropBox, Facebook, etc... While in its early stages approaches 0% - There is a massive amount of luck involved. These kinds of learning opportunities are essentially impossible to come by. However, if you switch companies often and work for a range of companies at different stages of development, then there is a very good chance that you will have the opportunity to learn about all the different stages of development without putting all your bets on one horse.

99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.

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