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One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

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Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#21
post #11

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they l…

How is that related to Google's efforts to curb unionization?

Maybe because OP believes that google employees don’t have the right or reason to unionize. Or because they believe employees should not have the power to dictate what projects a company undertakes on ethical grounds. If someone believes they should have such powers then maybe Google is the wrong place for them.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#22
post #11

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they l…

I generally agree.

Just like a cashier at Chick-fil-a doesn’t necessarily condone the company’s religious and political beliefs.

From personal experience, I work for a big tech company which very publicly says it stands for certain things and the CEO recently has been going around saying a lot of political things. It’s unrelated to the job although it feels like an explicit part of the “company culture”. It doesn’t really affect my day to day work but the whole situation just feels weird. I didn’t sign up for a political party or to espose certain beliefs, I signed up to write code build a tech platform.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#23
post #4

Sometimes, people problems can't be solved by technological means. Sometimes you just have to talk to people. A while back I was contemplating introducing a small app for team members to express sentiments (whether they're feeling stressed, satisfied, unappreciated, worried etc), but I eventually decided that nothing beats a private conversation.

The theory behind managers soliciting anonymous comments from workers is that this cuts through preference falsification. Preference falsification is when somebody lies about their beliefs or opinions, often due to perceived social pressure or lack of trust. Preference falsification is a real problem, not just in business settings but throughout the broad domain of human interaction. Unfortunately soliciting anonymou…

I love getting “anonymous” quarterly employee surveys that have a unique ID embedded in the URL. That’s not even trying.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#24
post #19
post #11

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they l…

How do you square that with stuff like whether your company should, for example, support same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare, prayer rooms, etc?

> same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare

Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In Canada we have private insurance for things above and beyond basic health care, but only the government gets to decide who is a partner, dependant, etc...

> prayer rooms

Are they going to build chapels for every religion? Who decides which religions get chapels or prayer rooms? Or does only 1 religion get a prayer room because 2019 politics?

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#25
This was an interesting in-depth article about series of leaks and internal turmoil that Google experienced:

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...

1. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men.

On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral inside Google.

Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document had leaked to Gizmodo.

2. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically.

There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups.

3. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color.

For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them?

4. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#26

> " the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said. [...] The suspensions have been a hot topic of discussion at the company in the last week, stoking anger among some workers and prompting claims that Google is punishing people who have t…

People agree that this is what is happening.

People disagree about whether it was reasonable to expect Google management to be anything like the public image it tried to cultivate.

I, personally, expected this reaction from management and I wouldn't have put my own career at risk. But I also never thought Google was an unconventional company.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#27
post #11

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they l…

> just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they like.

Seems like that has more to do with the things you find weird than some kind of politics.

If you're a"normal" person and like"normal" things you can do just fine with an attitude like that.

Some people are different.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#28
> The documents concerned a mandatory tool that was recently installed on the Google Chrome browser on workers’ computers, the employees said. In October, some Google employees raised concerns that the Chrome extension was an internal surveillance tool designed to monitor their attempts to organize protests. It would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to an employee memo that outlined concerns about the tool

From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#29
At our company if the HR goes through your social media, and finds any evidence you may be socially activist or virtue signaling or otherwise very loudly proclaiming your disapproval of something some entity is doing, you will not be hired. You will not even get a call back. You will be labeled as a potential troublemaker (not in the good way) and be placed on the blacklist.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#30

As an engineer, I revel in avoiding these monolithic supercorps. I don't know why anyone would want to work in centralizing innovation and creativity into the hands of a few greedy people.

The greed as well? Normal jobs aren't paying anything close to 200-300k+ that you'd be pulling at FAANG/HFT.
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