So, the executives stopped attending and then the employers stopped attending as well. what a shocking correlation.
s/employers/employees/ ?
yes
Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
451–460 of 600 posts
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is currently fighting unionization efforts. That's not leftist.
Yes. I think Google (and others) are selectively leftist. Sort of like Bill Gates on taxing billionaires. If they lean left, they get love from the media. But when it's really, really against their self-interest they'll resist and show their true colors. It's just corporate hypocrisy. I hope it ends and corporations go back to being apolitical.
I think it's beyond Left and Right. Google, like most companies and individuals, is self interested. When something benefits Google, they'll pursue it, regardless of where it falls on the ideological spectrum.
Unions? That's bad for business owners, so Google is against. Diversity? That increases the number of workers you can have, so Google is in favor of it. Immigration? Google's in favor, for the same reason. More taxes on tech companies? Google's against, etc.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
Names says nothing about a person while he/she describes an aspect of you. A person who wants to use the wrong pronoun is like a fat person wanting people to call them thin. Of course calling fat people fat is not very nice, the same can be said about missgendering people, but it is very hard to call fat people thin so you try to avoid the subject.
So if you look like and behave like a man then people will call you a man, if you look like and behave like a woman then people will call you a woman. Of course there are cases where the person looks like and behaves like the other gender but some assholes still calls them by their old pronoun, but in most cases I see someone who is obviously male wanting to be called female or vice versa. In those cases it hurts a bit because it goes against the meaning of the words, and given how our language is structured it is very hard to avoid the subject like most people do with other attributes.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#454I 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 think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did this so that they could get the benefits of creativity, which inherently requires emotional engagement, which requires that you not repress your emotions. (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about po…
> It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.
I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yes Google did make search and mobile more accessible while helping itself to a big pile of money. Stop pretending that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. Hate to break it to you but Google is just like any other business.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did this so that they could get the benefits of creativity, which inherently requires emotional engagement, which requires that you not repress your emotions. (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about po…
> It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former. I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any…
It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? For example, it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future.
The same applies everywhere, and going by the book is always the least creative thing you can do. Of course often going by the book is the best solution you have, but it is hard to argue that it doesn't reduce creativity in the workplace.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace. We are talking of the company that was advocating do not evil. This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?
> You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace. Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Googl…
I'm an engineer at google and this bit about hiring someone because of their genes is false.
All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#458I 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…
Well, that's the price of expecting people to spend their whole life at work. If everybody knocks off at 5 and goes home, they can keep their politics at home. Google feeds 3 meals a day, and if you eat dinner at work, you're expected to return to work afterwards. They have lockers and showers at work. They'd have adult dorms if they could.
Well, that's simply not how it works. Sure, pretty much everyone has lunch in the cafes. Breakfast is popular too but you can get it until 9:30 or 10:00, so you don't even have to show up early. Dinner attendance is significantly lower, and pretty much everyone I know who regularly has dinner at work goes home right afterwards.
Personally I probably manage to get breakfast once a week on average and stay late enough for dinner 2 or 3 times a year.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#459Nobody actively courted activists. It's more just than tech startups generally skew younger and newer generations want their companies to reflect their own values. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And these companies are not in complete chaos. In fact apart from the James Damore incident there hasn't been any significant change in the company cultures.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548240.
Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
#460First. 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…
> Today you post a memegen where you state that triangles are better than squares, tomorrow you get fired because squares have become the symbol of some protected class.
This is not how anything works.
What actually happens is, today you post something insensitive and disparaging because you can get away with it as a "joke", tomorrow, people will actually stand up for themselves and tell you it's not ok to say that, and it never was, and you were too much of an asshole to even consider that that might be the case.