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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

#101

Post by blondin »

seibelj wrote: 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…

really haven't been following but just curious if these people weren't happy why didn't they leave and go after the company instead of their peers?

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

#102

Post by catalogia »

jessaustin wrote: post #66
catalogia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 diff…

> "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 that's an accurate characterization of what the employee doing the calendar tracking was doing, then I agree that it was reasonable in the context of Google employment. However that would mean the article is very misleading as I suspected. The article says the subjects of the tracking felt unsafe, which says to me the tracked employees weren't sympathetic to the cause and believed motive for the tracking to be intimidation or harassment.

I have never and would never work for google so I can't say for sure, but I doubt openness as espoused by the company ever meant using openness to intimidate or harass others. IF that is what the employee in question was in fact doing, then it seems plainly unreasonable to me that anybody would defend it. I find it hard to believe such behavior was ever part of [official] company culture.

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

#103

Post by mav3rick »

bsder wrote: post #100
spaceribs wrote: post #7

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.

Because they want a nice paycheck and to go home at 5:00PM.

You have no idea how hard people work here. Some of the smartest and diligent people work here. It's a big company so your friends maybe doing 9 to 5. But HN will never mention all the people who put in the hard yards at Google.

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

#104

Post by discordance »

hindsightbias wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: 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 can’t imagine having the energy to think about all these things outside of my day job. These people must have an incredible amount of time on their hands. And yet, Google is still evil.

Friends who work at Google have told me they often spend hours a day reading and responding to internal threads about politics, investments, philosophy etc.

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

#105

Post by mav3rick »

chance_state wrote: post #10

>In the past, one of the employees said, employees could review internal documents for virtually any project underway within the company. In recent years, however, more projects have become closed off and accessible only to smaller groups on a “need-to-know” basis, the employee said. >Earlier this year, following a series of leaks to the media, Google executives tightened their grip. They shut down thousands of contr…

It's Google so people post negative things here without reading the article.

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

#106

Post by perl4ever »

V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #80
mason55 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they dropped it a few years ago

it was don't be evil and no they didn't drop it. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ it's at the bottom.

They moved it to the basement with Milton.

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

#107

Post by lawnchair_larry »

lobotryas wrote: post #23
catalogia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The anonymous ID is fine, and not the way you’re going to be outed. They aren’t lying to you.

A manager of a handful of employees generally knows what their employees sound like, what issues are important to them, and knows which ones tend to go against the grain.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

robbya wrote: post #48
skissane wrote: post #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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jessaustin wrote: post #66
catalogia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 diff…

It’s totally reasonable, almost a guarantee, that they were in fact stalking their perceived enemies. The fact that they are highly paid Googlers makes this more likely, not less. I don’t want to drop names, but multiple people have been fired for openly targeting others at Google on ideological grounds. There are definitely some vindictive nutjobs there.

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

#110

Post by akhilcacharya »

pheug wrote: post #30
spaceribs wrote: post #7

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.

$200k-$300k is now the 1-3 years out of new grad pay scale for those companies for what it’s worth.
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