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Google staff walk out over women's treatment

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#161

Post by vonmoltke »

lukev wrote: post #81
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salient difference is that outages are measurable. In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between differen…

And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote. I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today. Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually…

> Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.

Those numbers are specifically for rape, not sexual misconduct. I would hope that the false accusation rate for violent felonies is pretty low. Assuming this is still the case with lesser charges or non-criminal behavior is disingenuous.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#162

Post by graeme »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #92
hueving wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?

In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.

What happens in a few years when the best engineers start leaving because they can negotiate higher pay elsewhere? If they start to get a reputation as merely good, but not the best, not where the exciting work happens?

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#163

Post by amiga-workbench »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #96
amiga-workbench wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.

Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?

I do, some people can do the same job for decades and somehow never improve their skills or personally develop.

I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly.

I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

claydavisss wrote: post #157
DanBC wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse. A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime. You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we…

> Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.

> Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California.

They aren't covered by special, workplace-specific laws; there are, however generally-applicable civil laws that apply to them.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#166

Post by gedy »

majewsky wrote: post #129
slivym wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments abo…

It's odd how on one hand, the consensus here is that the quality of the work environment is very important to the productivity and the wellbeing of employees. And on the other hand, people argue that this type of misconduct should not be punished unless it's literally illegal.

I think a lot of the hesitation is people fear kangaroo courts and termination without due process due to false accusations or exaggerations. Much as the extra legal stuff that goes on in college.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#167

Post by Justsignedup »

anon1252 wrote: post #28
slivym wrote: post #5

All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.

> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.

forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.

I don't understand how this is even acceptable.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#168

Post by geofft »

StudentStuff wrote: post #125

There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.

I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately.

> Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.

> Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.

> H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#169

Post by vonmoltke »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #92
hueving wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?

In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.

> Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry

As evidenced by the lowball they just tossed me.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#170

Post by [deleted] »

anon1252 wrote: post #28
slivym wrote: post #5

All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.

> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.

[deleted]
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