391–400 of 772 posts
True story, a person I know who was offered a job at Google got the employment agreement (prior to arriving which was pretty standard at the time) and read that bit about "allowing Google to protect it's IP by installing a rootkit" and they red lined it to change it "May only access Google related information and no personal information." When they showed up HR started with "But that isn't how we use it, we would nev…
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Yes, you have a right to participate in unionization and politics. But you don't have a right to alter company software to spread your political message. There's a big difference between holding a "Vote X" sign on a street corner on your own time, and using your position as a developer to put up "Vote X" signs on your company's website.
There is also a big difference in saying "Vote for X" vs. "You are allowed to vote."
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Oh I "understood" it, California is a "Right to Work" state and signing the agreement was clearly a requirement of working and by not signing the unchanged agreement, it was a voluntary action of elimination etc etc. So Google was well within their rights to rescind their job offer as they did. That said, it was at a time where Google was complaining bitterly about how hard it was to hire engineers, and their much va…
> If the HR rep was speaking truthfully, then I would have expected to Google legal to just adopt the updated text in this agreement and all future agreements. It literally got tweaked at least once a year so the problem of "multiple agreements" wasn't really a problem. I'm definitely not defending the actions of Google here but I do understand them - it's quite likely this HR rep couldn't legally agree to this contr…
If you make a system where people are unable to behave reasonably, you still get to be responsible for their behavior.
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In the context of starting a job at Google, I highly doubt you sign your employment contracts the day you show up for work. Typically employment contracts are signed and settled well before you enter the building as an employee. I would be surprised if the OP’s anecdote regarding the Googler pulled on the 1st day is in line with reality. Edit: apparently I’m wrong, the downvotes were deserved! I run hiring at my comp…
I was hired right out of school by Google in 2007. I was absolutely presented with various contract documents on day 1 to sign. In fact, I was not even given paper copies of them; I was supposed to click my agreement in an intranet signing tool. (I couldn't say what fraction of my employment paperwork was handled in this way, but things like IP assignment were definitely included.)
I don't recall if I tried to figure out whether the strongly connected component that comprised the handbook was the same as "all pages on the wiki", but I was a little distressed at the time (this being one of my first jobs) that I was being asked to sign my name on something that I couldn't realistically read.
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Substituting your equivalence: > She used an internal security tool to push the law Even for messages I agreed with, I would still find this a questionable activity and disruptive as an employee.
You find it questionable and disruptive that someone would encourage people to know and enforce the law? How very peculiar. Seems like if that's the status quo, it should be disrupted.
"Oh, I'm just informing people of their constitutional rights? What's the problem? I thought this was 'merica"
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This is just name calling and blaming the victim, which is almost every employee of every tech job in the world, while celebrating the power of the employer. Insisting that a contract be negotiable when it comes to complete and total spying on you, in the context of an article where the employer is illegally spying on you, is not the trait of a bad employee
Kathryn Spiers did a man-in-the-middle attack on company property, like how some ISPs used to insert their own popups into HTML crossing their wires. Google tracked Spiers down and fired her for it, 100% justified. Separately, Google's hiring of a union-busting firm is fair game for disagreement, absolutely. Also, I don't consider an employer having total visibility into its devices to be a power-trip. The onus is on…
That's fair, and I agree with that (as long as it's company-owned hardware and not personal hardware under a BYOD program). But I personally do not want to (and currently do not) work for a company that trusts me so little that it needs to spy on every activity I do on the hardware they give me to do my job.
I get that some people are fine with that, and that's ok, but I'm not, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
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Unions are democratic organisations, the whole point of them is for workers to gain power together. You’ll only get tabs enforced if the majority of workers agree that’s a useful rule to have.
This just reiterates what the parent comment said. In this case up to 49% of all workers who did not want to use tabs will be forced to.
True story, a person I know who was offered a job at Google got the employment agreement (prior to arriving which was pretty standard at the time) and read that bit about "allowing Google to protect it's IP by installing a rootkit" and they red lined it to change it "May only access Google related information and no personal information." When they showed up HR started with "But that isn't how we use it, we would nev…
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> The days where "being in IT" made you a rockstar that could command a premium in individual negotiations are, best I can tell, way in the past. Are you kidding? Salaries have never been higher in tech. Senior engineers make more than $400k (sometimes way more) at Google and other large companies. It is likely that engineers at FAANG companies would make less money if they join a union, because the union would level…
Here's a refutation: Microsoft spends $250k/employee/year on stock dividends and buybacks. That's quite a large slice of the pie the union could negotiate for.
Those buybacks increase the stock price, and employees are compensated in stock, so stock buybacks benefit employees already.
I find it hard to believe that the company would just give that money as salary instead -- and even if they did, that would mean that employees of some companies are paid way, way more than employees at other companies. That is exactly the situation we have today, without unions! So again, why do employees at large companies need unions, considering they are already paid more than everyone else?
Incidentally, I get stock compensation at my job and getting cash instead would have been worse. The stock I was granted has increased in value. Cash is just cash, and loses value to inflation. I would rather have salary plus RSUs than just a large salary. I don't know if a union would see the value in that.
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Some details of an offer & acceptance of employment are trivial and not worth spoiling good will. Me: "Hey manager, can I make an expense report for this work phone?" No matter the response, I'm ok with it, because I make Google money, and that's policy. I should work towards becoming management if I want that to change. But I probably have better things to do than such a trivial disagreement. I wish corporations wer…
I think I'd agree that it is a weird spoiling of goodwill, but would put this one entirely as Google's fault. Requesting a minor change to a contract the first time you see it is the expected behavior, not an outlier. That's the entire point of contracts, in order to come to a meeting of the minds. This is the equivalent of haggling at a flea market, and being thrown out as a result.