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Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

cnbc.com

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Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#441

Post by mav3rick »

buzzkillington wrote: post #422
rainyMammoth wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical corporate politics. Sorry but I cannot stand that level of internal koolaid. I guess you also think that Google got the "smartest" people? There are literally thousands of companies working on problems way more interesting and with more stakes and upsides for…

> It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money. Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China. The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which…

Pay is well above average. Regardless of what HN spews, Google foundationally made search and mobile more accessible around the world. I don't know what "great" company you work for but it's hard to top that for impact.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#442

Post by username90 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17
malvosenior wrote: post #5

I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…

> I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists You say that like it's a given truth - do you have anything to back up that assertion? FWIW, I don't recall Google courting "activists", though they obviously did court people who were highly invested in their education and careers, and of course there is probably a non-0 correlation with those types of people and "activists". I also would…

> I also wouldn't describe Google as "pro-politics".

Google let employees spend company time and resources to do left-wing activism, how is that not "pro-politics"? The things you see coming from Google the past few years are the death throes of these rules being removed and Google becoming a conventional company where you have to work when you are on company time.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#443

Post by LoSboccacc »

Spooky23 wrote: post #350
ekianjo wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of people surrounded by 10% ? The word "surrounded" seems inappropriate.

Maybe a better word could have been chosen. But in perspective, almost every team on average has at least one person with an alcohol problem of some sort.

and then there's Ireland.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#444

Post by laughinghan »

umeshunni wrote: post #272
VikingCoder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and they hired someone who worked on Family Separation: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/miles-taylor-fa... Wouldn't that kind of negate your point?

When you have to quote Buzzfeed as your source, you're doing it wrong. Here's the person in question - they're a white house staffer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miles-t-65707671/

The family separation policy came from the White House, so that doesn't contradict your parent.

Buzzfeed News, unlike Buzzfeed, is generally considered credible and has won multiple journalism awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#445

Post by lazyasciiart »

baddox wrote: post #439
lazyasciiart wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.

Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?

Literally nobody has time for that. Take a question like “Will this tool meet requirement x?” - you want every person on the team to verify that for themselves?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#446

Post by username90 »

ltrcola wrote: post #59
notadoc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someones job function at work is to perform their job duties. Unless someone works directly in politics, then politics do not belong in the workplace. There are plenty of other impolite subjects that are inappropriate to discuss at work too.

Companies themselves are inherently political though, just by existing. They exist in the context of society and are made possible by the legal structures created by politics. And they generally advocate for themselves within the political system (a good example is lobbying). So there are certainly limits in the workplace and there is a line to toe for toleration and polite conversation, but saying "politics do not b…

My coworker is free to march against gay rights on his free time, but if he brings it up every meeting as a topic we can't ignore then I'd call the workplace toxic and quit. The same goes for any other political topic people feel strongly for.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#447

Post by jtolmar »

sneak wrote: post #426
jtolmar wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having left more recently (mid 2019) - TGIF had been increasingly sporadically scheduled from 2016 onwards, to the point that many of us had thought it was cancelled a few times between then and now. In my local office, snacks got rescheduled and shuffled around to be further away from where the live stream happened and sometimes start at the same time as the broadcast. The writing was on the wall for a long time. A…

I get the impression (as a total outsider) that Google went from being a cohesive "us" that had clear inside/outside communication, to a collection of disparate groups (code monkeys/execs, for lack of a better term, as well as others) that do not feel aligned/allegiance to each other. Is that in any way accurate? That the internal unity got balkanized (primarily by senior management)?

Management above the director level was always invisible, but it went from invisible and assumed benevolent to invisible and assumed hostile (spurred by concrete actions). I don't think they were considered part of an "us" at any stage. Despite all the people ranting about political culture on Hacker News, my experience among leaf level employees was one of growing solidarity, and that sense of "us" increasingly being extended to temps, vendors, and contractors.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#448

Post by laughinghan »

throwaway6833 wrote: post #415
hgytr wrote: post #305

First. Thanks to HN for not demanding phone numbers: anonymity allows to say things that cannot be said. Second. Many googlers read HN. In some sense, HN is the extension of the internal forums. CNBC made a good summary and I can comment on each bullet point. Larry and Brin probably stopped attending because nothing important is said on TGIFs. More people -> more leaks -> less interesting information -> less attenden…

Throwaway time.. The minefield about trying to predict what's going to be politically correct in the future is so true--you nailed it. You might carefully self-censor your discussions to things that are politically allowed today but everything lives forever, so something you say may fall out of fashion and years from now it could get you in hot HR water. The only solution is to just stick to work topics, really. The…

Genuine question: (you're on a throwaway, what's the harm in answering me, right?)

What is there to buy into about pronouns? If my first name is Stan, named after my dad also named Stan, and my middle name is Jason, and my dad abandoned my family when I was young so I prefer people to call me Jason, you'd have no problem calling me Jason and be understanding that calling me Stan is a sore point, right?

What if I don't want to explain my personal issues with my father and childhood family situation to coworkers? If I just say that I really strongly prefer Jason and that it genuinely upsets me if you call me Stan, would you demand an explanation?

So if I claim, without explaining, that I strongly dislike being addressed as "she" and strongly prefer "he", isn't that the same amount of work? What is there to buy into, an explanation about personal struggles with gender dysphoria? That seems like a pretty personal thing to expect from a coworker, does it not?

What am I missing?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#449

Post by username90 »

catalogia wrote: post #262
zarkov99 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can't be the whole story. Google is not the only provider of high status jobs for nerds. Why aren't Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook also rife with this sort of activism?

It also doesn't account for the behavior of similarly privileged non-nerds. Swap out "technical education" in that comment with any other form of specialized training that leads to high salaries. How does the specialization of computer science educations compare to the specialization of neurosurgery educations? The notion that engineers are shitty people because they weren't made to take enough liberal arts classes f…

> And I'd say the number one problem with this industry, and the root of its increasingly poor reputation among the general public, is a lack ethics.

Correction: The number one problem with every industry is lack of ethics. The root of its increasingly poor reputation is that the richest companies in the world will always face extra scrutiny. Few people cared for them 10 years ago when they were small fries and conventional companies topped the charts, but today when the majority of the 10 most valuable companies are tech companies the world will naturally start focusing on them more so than any other industry.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#450

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #439
lazyasciiart wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.

Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?

[deleted]
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