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Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

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Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#541

Post by rexpop »

seraphsf wrote: post #402
rexpop wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a distasteful sentiment. Management is punishing workers with their silence, and their lack of transparency, and you have the gall to suggest these workers deserve it? That they brought it upon themselves? It's our right to speak up about our experiences, even if that means "leaking" our bosses words. In a sense, it's our duty–Google's actions impact us all, and we're owed transparency with which management's no…

I mean this respectfully - why are you owed transparency? Google is a company, not a collective. Companies typically have various controlled ways of disseminating information, both internally and externally. Internal transparency (at a company of Google’s size) effectively means public transparency... ie all of the inner workings are known to everyone. I’m not aware of any for-profit organization that can function ef…

I am not owed transparency. I am making a threat. If Google does not become more transparent–allowing me to make better-informed decisions to protect myself from their policies–I will fight them until it does.

I am subjected to negative externalities of Google's Surveillance Capitalist practices. I consider their business practices to be abusive, coercive, manipulative, and exploitative. I resent them.

I recognize that I, as an individual, have very little leverage over firms such as Google. I am not, however, an original thinker: if I am pushed to this perspective by forms in the zeitgeist, I am not alone.

> I’m not aware of any for-profit organization that can function effectively that way.

Neither, frankly, am I. Even those firms which claim to be "radically transparent" are, in my esteem, doing so largely as a PR front. If "the client owns the interface," then transparency should be implemented not a curated blog posts, but as something akin to FOIA requests. I should like to see enormous innovation in terms of corporate transparency in my lifetime, or else I–and many others–will be defecting from our collusion with such firms.

If you find my perspective difficult to sympathize with, perhaps I have done a poor job of communicating it. Hopefully, you will recognize it as codified by better writers:

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195941-the-age-of-surv... 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-f... 3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41963432-ghost-work 4. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#542

Post by rexpop »

dmix wrote: post #480
rexpop wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Distorted by the media? That's the point of "leaks": to make transparent leaderships' opinions verbatim. The firms that control our lives should not be allowed to confer behind closed doors.

The media constantly misconstrues or completely invents whole stories based on small pieces of information that are presented without context. I don’t see how that is helpful to society. I’m not against whistleblowing but I completely understand why someone would choose not to engage in that, since they are basically volunteering information knowing it may very well be taken very seriously when it was done throw away…

Don't throw the baby of internal memos out with the bathwater of biased commentary on them.

It sounds like you're against whistleblowing.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#543

Post by mehrdada »

seraphsf wrote: post #396
OneMoreGoogler wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 16 years I've worked at only four companies, but one of them was Google, and it was honestly my least favorite. Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less c…

I won’t ask what company you’re at, but have you noticed a correlation between size of company and your happiness? Is this new Valhalla a significant smaller organization than Google?

Sounds like Netflix and I think you’re on point that the model might be great but won’t scale to anything resembling google size

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#544

Post by thu2111 »

zestyping wrote: post #463
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…

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.…

That was the same Google.org that had weird problems with its leader interfering in middle eastern politics, to the extent it became practically an extension of the White House?

I remember google.org - seen from the perspective of an engineer in a far away land it was frankly just kind of weird/creepy/slightly sinister. Yeah the flu epidemic predictor thing was kinda cool, except I never heard anything about it since and I'm not sure it's ever actually been useful for much.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#545

Post by somatic »

buzzkillington wrote: post #427
somatic wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at. Where do I sign up? (Edit: this is a serious question.) (Second edit: Mencius.)

You need to know a guy, I met mine when I was running a 3d printing course for an astronomy group of all things.

Get in touch?

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Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#546

Post by thu2111 »

laughinghan wrote: post #432
throwGuardian wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe chronic bouts of performative outrage leads to anything creative, inside or out of the workplace. If one's "whole self" cannot meaningfully function without getting constantly triggered, the problem is with the normalization of such "whole self" concepts

Performative outrage? Constantly triggered? Are we talking about the same company? Paying someone $90 million to leave after allegedly assaulting someone [0] isn't something that happens "constantly", and seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have strong opinions about. And there's nothing "performative" about successfully rolling back mandatory arbitration [1], which studies have found is stacked in favor of emplo…

Rubin was accused by, if I recall correctly, a woman he'd been in a relationship with and then dumped? He denied her accusations and as it was all behind closed doors there's no way to ever resolve it. That shouldn't be in the public realm at all, let alone people having strong opinions about it!

Honestly if Google really kicked him out because of an unsubstantiable claim by some woman with an axe to grind, or some private sexual perversions .... after all he did for Google? $90M is probably too little for what they gave him. That's like, less than a year's CEO salary.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#547

Post by thu2111 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #418
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is historically revisionist. Google was a money-making behemoth with its tentacles in many areas of innovation before it became the politicized entity we know it to be today. Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area. Githu…

> This is historically revisionist. Google was a money-making behemoth with its tentacles in many areas of innovation before it became the politicized entity we know it to be today. This is also historically revisionist. Google's been super political since forever, it just wasn't in the news for it.

Really?

Googler 2006-2014. I can't say I remember much politics during that time. The closest it got was Eric Schmidt having close relationships with Washington. That and the China thing but even there, Google was in China with a censored search engine up until they went and hacked the firm. I don't remember much discussion of the fact that we had a Chinese version of the search engine.

What are you thinking of?

I look at it like this. My friends who still work there complain about stupid idpol all the time now. I never heard complaints like that when I was there.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#548

Post by thu2111 »

googlerx wrote: post #457
kortilla wrote: post #362

Earlier 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. 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.

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true.

Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly.

Some tricks I saw used:

1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this.

2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway.

3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it.

In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves.

But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees.

By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#549

Post by username90 »

ltrcola wrote: post #530
username90 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would someone bring it up at every meeting? That's a pretty big straw man argument. I'm sure there are outliers that do that, but they are rare. On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do. In that case, the belief that "gay rights are political" that some folks have are creating a toxic environment.

> Why would someone bring it up at every meeting? That's a pretty big straw man argument. I'm sure there are outliers that do that, but they are rare.

Note that I said that someone who constantly argue against gay rights is toxic, I have met people like that (not specifically gay, but about immigrants for example) and being around them is not fun.

> On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do.

In that case it is no longer political and they can complain that people targeted them for being gay.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#550

Post by WAHa_06x36 »

drenvuk wrote: post #505
verall wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes and no response. I don't know why HN wants to hide behind this strawman so bad. Noone is getting fired for posting about geometric shapes, unless you're trying to say something insensitive or disparaging. The line of what is acceptable to stay has changed, but turns out if you wern't being an asshole in the first place, people are very forgiving. Also, Twitter is not an example. People are constantly unforg…

It's not a strawman. Good jokes that haven't been said before are hard to find and many times lie on the edge of what's acceptable and isn't acceptable or is a combination of nearly unrelated ideas delivered through a multitude of different comedic devices. There's a reason that workplace humor is so repetitive and soul deadening.

None of that is actually true.
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