Workers Leaving the Googleplex

1.) Yellow badge worker treatment -- most of the comments here seem to accept his description of their work life (right or wrong) as fact, it is unsubstantiated to me. I see a video of people getting in their cars and going home, that is all. Considering he claims to have never spoken to any of them, except for a brief encounter before security grabbed him, it would seem even he is admitting he does not have first hand knowledge of anything he said. It is an entirely less than complete view (and possibly incorrect description) to which to draw any conclusion.

For that reason most of the discussion seems premature to me. With that said, no luxury transport, no free meals, etc -- does in fact describe the working conditions of 99.9% of Americans. A company treating people normally is not substantially interesting, tho apparently juxtaposition makes it so -- because what is interesting, and has always been interesting about Google, is that they treat their employees extraordinarily well.

2.) Was Google "right" for wanting him off the campus? Sure -- they contracted with his employer to provide some service, not to film an expose about Google itself,made possible only by being on the Google campus with unfettered access to the grounds. I realize he says he did not film it with the idea it would be an expose, but film is shot to be shown, and in his letter he makes it fairly clear what his interest was in filming, the assumptions and/or understanding he had while filming -- which gives a fairly clear picture of why he was filming. And it resulted in just about the kind of film you would expect. That isn't what he was there for. There is nothing that even remotely rises to a whistleblower type defense, as there is nothing remotely illegal about what he claims to be the yellow badge worker treatment. If he had in fact been filming something illegal (or at least in some way out of the norm in a negative fashion, even), my opinion would be more substantially in his favor -- in relation to how egregious the treatment actually was.

Who are the people with yellow badges? The author never found out. And Google does not appear to have made the information public.

As employees Vic Gundotra or Marissa Mayer will be knowing more company secrets than these guys will know in their lifetime. Do they also have a phone number on the back of their badge to call if somebody unknown approaches them? Are they also prevented from talking to other employees so that they don't leak those secrets? Why is Google afraid that only the yellow badges cannot keep the company secrets? What if their supervisor simply tells them that what they are working on is a company secret. Like almost any other employees why Google thinks they can' keep it a secret? Why do they have to impose this almost draconian measure of human segregation only for them?