461–470 of 600 posts
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If badging in for a free meal (which is "required", but not enforced) is one of your top complaints, this comment will only reinforce how ridiculously entitled some tech workers have become. Not sure what office you work or worked in, but where I'm at they regularly go over the top with decorations during celebrations. It's pretty awesome.
None of these on their own are huge complaints or issues. They just add up.
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> 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.
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…
We were once an engineering and product team that used Google's unique reach, resources, infrastructure, and technology to create tools and services purely for good. We reunited survivors of disasters, helped them find shelter, alerted people to keep them safe, built technology to help MSF fight Ebola, and predicted flu epidemics. We worked to lift the most vulnerable among us. Teams all over the company and around the world helped us do things only Google could.
That Google.org no longer exists. The "Google.org" label has been reassigned to Google's donation programs. Google donates money to many meaningful efforts, and that's great; but anyone can donate money. Google used to donate money and build things for good, and it does the latter no more.
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> 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.
Depends on what you mean by average. When I talked to google I was looking at L5 for just over 300k with stock and bonus. In Evil Inc I was making well over over 500k all cash for the same job description.
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Do you remember other "uncomfortable" or probing questions that were asked? Just out of curiosity. I work for a company that holds similar "town halls" where employees are able to ask anonymous questions of management and they can get pretty brutal sometimes ("why is turnover so high?", "why is upper management's compensation so much higher than others?", etc).
My work has this too and it gets a little embarrassing when people reveal they fundamentally misunderstand the relationship they have with their employer.
Due to the great PR that an employer create via their branding (for HR and recruiting).
It is wise to always remember that if you earn a wage/salary, the relationship between an employer and employee is going to remain as such - the business's interests supersedes your own.
I would like to see a future world where there is no such employer/employee relationship, because everyone works for themselves (but also cannot hire anyone).
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None of these on their own are huge complaints or issues. They just add up.
How is badging for food even a small issue?
How about your government?
How about your insurance company?
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…
The dismantling of Google.org in 2015. We were once an engineering and product team that used Google's unique reach, resources, infrastructure, and technology to create tools and services purely for good. We reunited survivors of disasters, helped them find shelter, alerted people to keep them safe, built technology to help MSF fight Ebola, and predicted flu epidemics. We worked to lift the most vulnerable among us.…
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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?
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How is badging for food even a small issue?
Would you want your employer to know about your exact food habits for years of your life? How about your government? How about your insurance company?
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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?
If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise. Your level of technological sophistication will max out at “can make a thatch hut and gather pineapples.”
Arguably, the differentiating factor between humans and animals is our ability to organize on large scales. Monkeys and killer whales can coordinate behavior in groups of sometimes up to 50 or maybe 100 individuals. However, humans can coordinate behavior across millions of people. Building a modern automobile, a computer chip, or the social security system requires coordination across so many individuals, no one person can fully and deeply understand the entire system.
The ability of humans to believe information that they do not fully know is true, is probably one of the defining traits of humanity.