Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 600 posts

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#281

Post by Aeolun »

sailfast wrote: post #273
burtonator wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewed at Etsy about a year or two ago and the interviewer was asking me about politically charged topics. How I would handle workplace gender complaints. How they should handle racial diversity in the work place, etc. It was really clear I was giving wrong answers. I told them flat out that I think people should be judged by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin and that the company should…

I assume this was for a supervisory position or an HR position? These aren’t really politically charged questions but rather questions about how to manage people and the issues that come with people. While the cause of the complaint may be politically charged, how one would handle the situation should be pretty by the book.

Even if the book is wrong?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#282

Post by rachelbythebay »

bowmessage wrote: post #238
fooker wrote: post #202

RIP I'm one of those people who go work at Google once every few years. The transformation of culture from about 2013 onwards has been somewhat sad to experience. Interestingly, most people who have been continuously employed there have not felt the very slight gradient. However, the changes in culture, freedom, food quality, etc are fairly obvious when one returns after ..say.. 18 months. Here are some semi-concrete…

Point taken, but how is badging for meals a ‘facepalm’? Re: decorations, https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/04/google-seattle-hall... ?

This, from 2009? "Badging today will allocate funds for your meal tomorrow". And I wrote about it eight years ago.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/17/badging/

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#283

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #24
kccqzy wrote: post #7

This reminds me of this sentence from a Wired article[0] in August: > TGIF's transformation from candid conversation to press conference was pretty much complete. As a Googler I'm totally not surprised this is happening. The writing has been on the wall for a very long time. [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...

Unfortunately that's what happens when the discussions get leaked. It's hard to be candid and open if what you say might end up distorted in the media and without you having an ability to defend yourself.

[deleted]

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#284

Post by Aeolun »

summerlight wrote: post #209
lucasmullens wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but somehow it managed to work pretty well as a 50,000 person company. I'm not exactly sure why this number was the tipping point.

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1195130656042496007 I don't think the number is a major factor but the media environment getting hostile against the tech sector in general. Sundar also mentioned about "a coordinated effort to share our conversations", which aligns with my observation.

Theoretically that would be fine if you weren’t discussing skeevy things.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#285

Post by joshuamorton »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #282
bowmessage wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, but how is badging for meals a ‘facepalm’? Re: decorations, https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/04/google-seattle-hall... ?

This, from 2009? "Badging today will allocate funds for your meal tomorrow". And I wrote about it eight years ago. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/17/badging/

I'm still unclear on what the badge for meal thing was, but apparently its come and gone before. It was apparently a thing in 09, went away, came back sometime in like 2013 or 14, went away again, and is now again a requirement (and has been since sometime in 2018). It didn't spell any particular doom either of the other times, and other than some dubious tax related stuff, i'm not sure what the impact is/will be. Seems like it will take more years to find out.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#286

Post by jtolmar »

pmoriarty wrote: post #10

Are all-hands meetings actually ever useful to anyone or ever more than merely internal PR?

TGIF used to have a number of highly technical and informative main presentations. There was a great one by the self-driving cars team where they showed some of their tools and explained some of their challenges (great anecdote about why one iteration of the cars was afraid of fixie bicycles). And it wasn't just software - Patrick Pichette did really informative breakdowns of the quarterly earnings results, and the legal team sometimes went into surprising depth on major cases.

These were rarely directly useful, but the practice reinforced a sense of curiosity and mutual respect.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#287

Post by ggm »

aprdm wrote: post #260
geofft wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire. What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement con…

I read the "how Google works " book and I can't help but question myself if they built what they built despite of the culture. The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture. If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't. Google feels sometimes very much…

Is there a variant of Godwin's law/meme that all conversations on HN about politics degenerate to hitting each other over neoliberal economics, the CoC and men's rights?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#288

Post by zaroth »

zarkov99 wrote: post #243
Sebguer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're saying his 'whole self' was 'women are inherently inferior to me' than I'd say it worked out as it should have.

Can you link to where he said that as specifically as possible? I have read his paper and it doesn't say that.

Is it simpler but less civil to just to call out an entirely false representation of Damore’s position, than to entertain it asking for evidence?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#289

Post by busterarm »

thundergolfer wrote: post #181
busterarm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Kickstarter, who is dealing with an internal unionization fight that's pitting the employees against each other.

Isn’t it pitting some employees against management? I’ve seen the articles discussing dismissals of prominent members of the union fight, but haven’t seen anything about employees fighting each other because of the unionisation.

The pro-union group within the roughly 110 person company doesn't have enough employee support required to establish collective bargaining. The pro-union group does not want unionization to go to vote because of this, so instead they've chosen the tactic of creating bad PR for the company management and the demand that company management accept unionization without employee vote. Employees who are both pro and against unionization have concerns about how the union organizers have acted and that it may be detrimental to the long term health of the company.

About 20% of the company publicly, openly supports unionization but 2 people got fired. From the rest, almost 100% of them have received a raise or a promotion during the same period.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#290

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

joshuamorton wrote: post #259
manigandham wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm discussing. This isn't a workplace, it's a public internet forum. Nobody is prevented from participating here by my posts. You're free to discuss whatever you want as well. Replying to your edit => A workplace is different than the state. You do not have complete freedom within a corporation, and expression is very different from beliefs. Nobody cares about your beliefs, but your expression will be limited to…

You didn't actually address my question, and I made no mention of the state. I'm going to quote you again: you claimed that > When you protest against it publicly in the workplace and shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you, then we have a problem. I'm asking if you think that's generally true. For example, if you actually believe this, you would presumably make no attempt to silence me if…

> the second is just an excuse to let your values implicitly bias the local Overton window without acknowledging that

I can't speak for the original commenter, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that. Banning politics is a difficult and inevitably biased rule. But the alternative seems to be that politics invades every minute of everyone's life, and that's completely intolerable unless you're fortunate enough to precisely align with your local mainstream.

Post reply on HN