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A note to our employees

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Re: A note to our employees

#281

Post by zbentley »

cik2e wrote: post #176
philip1209 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork banned meat at company events or on company expense accounts [1]. Would it be that hard to do something similar for alcohol? Then, bringing it back to Google, if people misbehave after having alcohol - then they bought the drinks, and came to a company event while intoxicated. When I was at OpenDNS, @davidu used to say something along the lines of, "When you try to host a big company party with over 100 people…

Absurd. I'd never work at such a company, in part due to the type of people that kind of policy would attract. If this rule was enacted and I was already an employee, I'd spend the money to bring large meat spreads to all of the events.

> I'd never work at such a company, in part due to the type of people that kind of policy would attract.

I think you may be overestimating the volume of job applicants that pay attention to such policies, and/or their qualifications.

I am referring only to the prohibition on expensing certain types of meals, not non-meat food/environments in general.

Re: A note to our employees

#282

Post by mcguire »

savanaly wrote: post #60
philip1209 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just ban alcohol at work? Why can't work be work, and social stuff can happen outside of it? I know it sounds a bit extreme. But, after reading "It doesn't have to be crazy it work," I feel like companies use alcohol to bribe employees to stay at the office after-hours. A midground would be drinking only with sit-down food. Nobody is doing shots while having dinner. Another idea could be making company social…

>Why not just ban alcohol at work? Why can't work be work, and social stuff can happen outside of it? I see this sentiment a lot (especially on HN!) and I share it. I usually skip team dinners when I can. But there's no accounting for taste, and humans in general seem to have a taste for mixing work and "social stuff", so why shouldn't companies encourage it in that capacity?

"I usually skip team dinners when I can."

The other side of that is the question, "How much damage has skipping employer social events done to your career?" You'll probably never know the answer.

Re: A note to our employees

#283

Post by dragonwriter »

Spooky23 wrote: post #234
eridius wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to ban alcohol in order to punish someone for being visibly drunken or pawing at employees.

If you allow drinking at work, what BAC is ok? What exactly is the justification for endorsing drinking at work?

> If you allow drinking at work, what BAC is ok?

Rules don't have to be written around BAC, they can be written around behavior or impairment.

(In fact, while they tend to also have a BAC cutoff for ease of proof, criminal drunk driving laws also are written around impairment, and corporate policy doesn't even have to worry about proof issues in at-will jurisdictions, because there is no proof requirement.)

Re: A note to our employees

#284

Post by rukuu001 »

tptacek wrote: post #201

I don't understand why the "mandatory" training has a penalty for skipping it. If it's mandatory, it's mandatory. This isn't rocket surgery; there are all sorts of mandatory training things big companies do, and they are often actually mandatory. For instance, we've worked with HIPAA-encumbered clients where you'll lose access to their network and applications if you don't complete annual security awareness training.…

Some things are more 'mandatory' than others.

Re: A note to our employees

#285

Post by tptacek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #273
tptacek wrote: post #201

I don't understand why the "mandatory" training has a penalty for skipping it. If it's mandatory, it's mandatory. This isn't rocket surgery; there are all sorts of mandatory training things big companies do, and they are often actually mandatory. For instance, we've worked with HIPAA-encumbered clients where you'll lose access to their network and applications if you don't complete annual security awareness training.…

> I don't understand why the "mandatory" training has a penalty for skipping it. Because penalties for non-compliance are how mandates are enforced; otherwise, they aren't mandates. What you probably don't understand is really why is the penalty not immediate termination, or termination after a certain period of delinquency, not why there is a penalty, and I suspect it actually is the latter, and the downgrade in int…

I think it's pretty clear what I'm asking.

It is not a norm in other companies to penalize people's performance reviews for failing to complete routine training. What is a norm is that your manager at some point simply demands that you stop what you're doing and complete the training. What would happen if you refused? Who knows? I assume you'd get fired for cause, the same way you would if you deliberately disregarded any other directive. Like I said: the most sophisticated training programs I've seen simply cut off people's access until they complete training (and thus, obviously, if you refused to complete the training, you'd be let go.)

The Perf downgrade is high-drama. For one thing: it sets a dollar price you can pay to not comply! For another, it throws the objectivity of performance reviews in question (there are multiple factors that affect your Perf level, not just this one!).

So, obviously, my question is: why does Google have this weird, elaborate, high-drama mechanism when it could instead just do what everyone else does: the CEO tells the VPs that all their reports need to complete training. The VPs make it happen, or are replaced. Recurse.

Re: A note to our employees

#286

Post by icedchai »

roenxi wrote: post #207
zaroth wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to ban anything you want at work. And the people who work there will select for if they want to be a part of it by becoming or remaining employees. (There are, of course, things that are illegal to ban) I personally want to work somewhere who values me as a responsible human being, and expects me to behave like one. The more a workplace feels like they have to micromanage their employees like children, the…

> I personally want to work somewhere who values me as a responsible human being, and expects me to behave like one. Responsible human beings don't drink alcohol in the workplace. If a person is drawing a salary, they should be presenting to work fit & as prepared as possible to do it. There is no good reason for employees to be drinking at or prior to work. Unless, I suppose, there is some well-replicated study show…

What about at lunch? Sometimes, I go out to lunch and want a martini or two...

Re: A note to our employees

#287

Post by aasasd »

majewsky wrote: post #268
williamaadams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for Microsoft, and the back of my employee badge says: Our Mission; Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To me, this implies that our engineering organizations, and entire company, need to have an appropriate amount of empathy across a broad spectrum of geographies, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and the like. You only get that by having a diversity of talent, and mo…

> Our Mission; Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Did they think about what they said there before printing? Because there are plenty of organizations which we definitely do not want to achieve more (e.g. drug cartels, nazi parties).

I may disapprove of one's views, but I'll commit my code for their right for better software!

Re: A note to our employees

#288

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #285
dragonwriter wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why the "mandatory" training has a penalty for skipping it. Because penalties for non-compliance are how mandates are enforced; otherwise, they aren't mandates. What you probably don't understand is really why is the penalty not immediate termination, or termination after a certain period of delinquency, not why there is a penalty, and I suspect it actually is the latter, and the downgrade in int…

I think it's pretty clear what I'm asking. It is not a norm in other companies to penalize people's performance reviews for failing to complete routine training. What is a norm is that your manager at some point simply demands that you stop what you're doing and complete the training. What would happen if you refused? Who knows? I assume you'd get fired for cause, the same way you would if you deliberately disregarde…

> It is not a norm in other companies to penalize people's performance reviews for failing to complete routine training

It's a norm pretty much everywhere to penalize people's performance reviews for failure to perform required job tasks on time, I know of no employer that doesn't do that (or, at least, expect supervisor to do it.) It may not be normal to apply a systematic penalty of a preset value to failing this precise failing (from my experience in enterprise environments, the normal consequence for a wide range of required trainings is a nag email from HR or an HR-owned bot to the supervisor and/or employee with escalating urgency,and sometimes escalating up the org chart, until some point where more formal organizational penalties are imposed, which the supervisor may or may not also use as the basis for ad hoc penalties in performance reviews even if formal direct penalties aren't imposed because the delinquency is cleared before that point.)

> For another, it throws the objectivity of performance reviews in question

Having a defined, fixed, concrete Perf penalty for a particular violation does the opposite of calling objectivity of the rating system into question.

Re: A note to our employees

#289

Post by tptacek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #288
tptacek wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear what I'm asking. It is not a norm in other companies to penalize people's performance reviews for failing to complete routine training. What is a norm is that your manager at some point simply demands that you stop what you're doing and complete the training. What would happen if you refused? Who knows? I assume you'd get fired for cause, the same way you would if you deliberately disregarde…

> It is not a norm in other companies to penalize people's performance reviews for failing to complete routine training It's a norm pretty much everywhere to penalize people's performance reviews for failure to perform required job tasks on time, I know of no employer that doesn't do that (or, at least, expect supervisor to do it.) It may not be normal to apply a systematic penalty of a preset value to failing this p…

See, when you read my comments and try to infer what I'm saying, you seem to do a pretty good job of it. So, can I ask, rather than nitpicking (for instance, that termination is itself a form of performance-based penalty), that you simply take whatever inference you've drawn and respond to that?

You've put a whole lot of effort into clarifying what it is I'm asking --- well done! I think you've nailed it! --- but you've come no closer to addressing the question I asked.

Regarding drama: again, given only the level of a peer, you don't know whether that's the product of work they've done, or some weird protest they're making against sexual harassment training. Which brings us back to the simple question I asked: why even allow for those weird protests?

Re: A note to our employees

#290

Post by prepend »

skedaddle wrote: post #272
prepend wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Equity is the goal.” I don’t think this is a good goal. Unless you mean equity of opportunity. Equity of outcome is a ridiculously foolish goal in that outcomes will vary substantially and trying to have equity at the end on arbitrary human factors with easy to measure biases (gender, race, etc). So the goal is not 45/45/10 for gender distribution for all roles. As that is obviously impossible as roles change and th…

Equity and equality are different. Equitable means fair, just, unprejudiced, considerate of all involved, etc. Equality means evenly balanced, identical on both sides, measurably indistinguishable. I think we want an equitable outcome and that most people (regardless of any other opinion) would actually agree that equality of outcome is not necessary.

I appreciate you making the distinction, but I still don’t think outcomes are the place for equity. My gender example still stands using your clarified definition.

Is it fair that now a sub population has different gender distributions? Is it fair that 90% of programmers are male? Etc etc. I think it is counterproductive and too late to making meaningful changes based on outcomes.

Perhaps if you get to a high enough macro, but even then, I see logical weaknessss in opinions comparing income based on gender because outcome does not, necessarily, mean bias. It’s just easier to measure.

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