261–270 of 293 posts
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Well, I can't quote my copy as I'm under NDA from sharing it, however if you have a copy that you signed then carefully read the section about "equipment that you use to access your google work account".
So you're saying they use the Android app permissions model?
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When it comes to development and security engineering a certain demonstrated base qualification might not be a bad thing. It's pretty unbelieveable how quality is handled in software engineering...
When I think about self driving cars I can't help but think about the Therac-25. Software bugs kill people. Not all software bugs, and not all software, but the lines are getting blurrier. It's not just medical equipment. Phones explode. A connected coffeepot could burn a house down. The Toyota acceleration bug (where cars would accelerate uncontrollably) was preventable if industry standards were followed. These are…
That is a small amount of people though. The vast majority of people are not working on anything at all to do with self driving cars or medical equipment or space X.
Instead, what I care about preventing, and will fight extremely hard to stop, is barriers to entry for the most common software out there.
This most common job being the web developer.
We do. It need Industry standards in order to stop people from making website or apps. If a button doesn't work, in some dumb app, it does not matter. At all.
You might come up with some weird edge case, but we both know that whatever example you come up with is going to be the exception, and not the rule.
The reality is that for the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there, the stakes and consequence of failure are very low.
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An NDA on the contract itself? Sounds shady as hell.
Pretty common in general. I recently saw a lawyer provide a template independent contractor agreement which had such a provision in the boilerplate, entirely unrelated to Google or any other huge company. I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to. (They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any com…
Yep. Basically the same logic as companies with competitive salaries trying to keep wage info quiet, even in the age of Glassdoor. It's not that there's something to hide about the standard version, and it's not that the terms or even text will stay private. But it adds a hurdle to people comparing notes on exactly what they signed, and when somebody does get a special exemption, it stops them putting up a point-by-point guide for everyone else.
> They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any company.
Presumably Google is big enough to have standards and make case-by-case decisions, but it's sort of horrifying how many smaller companies approach contracts as an exercise in seeing what they can get away with. Employment-prohibiting noncompetes and personal-time invention assignment clauses get casually tossed in, then pulled back out after no greater negotiation than bothering to ask.
It's not hard to see why contracts are under NDA when so many companies pretend their ridiculous terms are a standard form that everyone else signed.
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Yeah, this is real. On a throwaway for obvious reasons, but this is from an employment contract I've seen in the past: "I acknowledge that I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in any computer, technology system, email, handheld device, telephone, or documents that are used to conduct the business of the Company. As such, the Company has the right to audit and search all such items and systems, without further…
This all sounds completely normal. Do people actually imagine that the hardware they use at work is somehow theirs, and not their employer's? "Keep a hard boundary between your work and personal systems" has always been the right answer. I am surprised that this does not seem obvious to everyone.
I'm sure the standard usage is only about job-related hardware and accounts, but if my employer's product was my source for personal driving directions, email, and web searches, I'd want a contract that didn't transform those into employment-related activities.
Of course, you want to have a job so you agree to things that are not in your favor LOL.
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(Disclaimer: Googler here) +1. Google gives you a corp phone and computer (even multiple ones, if needed); why the heck you'd want to use your personal devices? Plus using a personal device is strongly discouraged. Also, all the companies I've worked before had similar clauses, and would always push iOS or Android certificates into your phone, so they can remote wipe the device when you leave company. Seems fairly st…
We are not supplied with a corp phone, they're only for people with a 'business need.' Been @ Google 7 years and never had one given to me other than holiday gift phones. Now, some of the nooglers sitting near me seem to think they're entitled to one, so maybe the messaging has changed. but I just looked it up and the language is: "Full-time Googlers with a business need are eligible for one Google-paid mobile phone…
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> the right to surveillance on personal property Wait, what? I don't think I've seen that before, what does this mean exactly?
I work in Google as well, and I simply don't check my personal Gmail from work machines. They can monitor my work laptop as much as they want. This is coming from a firefox-using privacy paranoid Googler. I have no idea what this guy is talking about.
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But that's horrible. I don't want to throw up barriers to entry, in order to keep out new comers. There are many great engineers that I know who would have been barred from the industry, if we had anything at all similar to the barriers to entry in the medical or "real" engineering industries. It is because of this that if there is ever a software union, I am going choose "defect" every single time. I am not going to…
When it comes to development and security engineering a certain demonstrated base qualification might not be a bad thing. It's pretty unbelieveable how quality is handled in software engineering...
Reality is, most customers do not want to pay the price for extra security, other than the CYA (Cover Your Ass) kind and it shows.
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Also for Android users the exact point of work profile is that the surveillance is limited to only the work profile portion of your phone.
You can imagine different tiers of security, where a work profile gives you minimal access to corp while a fully managed setup gives you more substantive access to corp resources and allows a company to enforce more security and visibility into the client device.