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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

#61
post #48

> 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…

Installing an extension to monitor employee use of a company computer is legal and generally accepted behavior. If the Google calendar is for a personal gmail account, then accessing the calendar details server side is a huge privacy breach.

> If the Google calendar is for a personal gmail account, then accessing the calendar details server side is a huge privacy breach.

Surely, Googlers have separate work and personal Google accounts, and only the former would be used with the Google corporate calendar? Article says that one of the things which triggers a report is booking more than 10 meeting rooms for a single meeting – surely, a Googler's personal account would lack permission to book meeting rooms in their corporate offices, and only their work account would have permission to do that?

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

#62
post #3

I've liked many things about Google over the years and I still admire many parts of their stack. But this crazy internal political culture is bound to end in a big kaboom and it looks like this might be it. Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. Google has skirted this rule for some time but now it's not going to be pretty.

seems less about Google and more about the balance of power shifting towards tech workers over the tech employer

It does seem like highly-valued engineering talent can get away with more than other commodity office workers.

It also feels like many tech companies actively advertise "to millennials" by advertising that their culture is the kind of place at which "you want to work". When that company/mission starts to lose its polish[1], it becomes harder to recruit for that talent[2].

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

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-re...

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

#63

> 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…

Ten rooms or a hundred attendees seems like the kind of event that shouldn't be any kind of problem if it were flagged; presumably that's some kind of company sanctioned event.

If it's not, what in the flipping hell are you doing using company property and resources to organize it? I understand that people mix their personal and corporate identities together shamelessly, but that just seems like shockingly poor opsec.

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

#65
post #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.

Which company? Let us know so we can avoid it.

"We"

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a good way to cope with confusing events, to assume that other people are just being totally unreasonable?

> I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, _OR_ they're just being totally unreasonable.. I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the o…

The first possibility, that of inaccurate reporting, is always likely. If that turns out not to be the case, the next most likely possibility is probably not that these brilliant people who are paid extravagantly to create and maintain a wide array of popular products and services are "totally unreasonable". I would suggest that they might have a different cultural understanding of workplace privacy norms. Their different understanding might be "wrong" in a universal sense, but it isn't for that reason unreasonable.

For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness; more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic, however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with more openness.

Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is. Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you. Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)

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

#67
post #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.

Sounds like a recipe for an aggressively mediocre company.

Relevant EconTalk podcast episode[1] about companies with "loose cultures" and others with "tight cultures". Some people and some industries tend to lean towards a "loose" or "tight" culture and it's interesting to hear about M&As where one type swallows the other and the inevitable indigestion happens.

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. I read your comment simply as a statement of fact, not a preference for/against that policy.

[1] https://www.econtalk.org/michele-gelfand-on-rule-makers-rule...

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

#68
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pray…

The reference may be to the fact that Amazon (for example) provided only space for Muslims to have prayer rooms, but no one else.

I wonder if there is any of the kind of phenomenon I used to observe in my blue-collar days - smokers could take 10-15 minutes off every hour to go to the smoking area and light up, so non-smokers got irritated and started going along too for their "second-hand smoke" breaks...

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

#69
post #45
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In the US this is governed by a patchwork of federal, state and local laws as well as employer policies.

Sounds efficient.

Efficiency is the last thing any subject wants from the Law.

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

#70
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.

This was literally a selling point at Google:

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin ... had designed their company's famously open culture to facilitate free thinking. Employees were “obligated to dissent” if they saw something they disagreed with, and they were encouraged to “bring their whole selves” to work rather than check their politics and personal lives at the door.[1]

Lots of companies have figured out that "having a worthwhile mission", in addition to just a paycheck, is one way to distinguish themselves from other potential employers.

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

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