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A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

nytimes.com

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Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#481

Post by rexpop »

achow wrote: post #445
buildbot wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least at Microsoft this would also get you fired pretty fast, according to the infamous standards of business conduct.

At most of the big corp. Somewhere in my employment letter it says, you are representing company outside of workplace and work hours as well (that is in personal life too). I can be fired if I bring disrepute to company anytime - ex. involved in a weekend nightclub drunken brawl.

As far as I am concerned, your employer takes it too far. What I do on my own time is none of my employer's business, as it were. If I am involved in a weekend nightclub drunken brawl, and no other company, customer, or vendor personnel are involved, and no subsequent legal or social fallout interferes with my working hours, than it's absolutely inappropriate for management to acknowledge these activities.

The very concept of "bringing disrepute" is a slippery slope, and shamefully medieval.

Edit: I'll clarify. The problematic issue is the ambiguous, subjective threshold at which activities become "disreputable." Ambiguous, subjective standards like that should not be grounds for dismissal. They are too easily abused via "selective enforcement".

Of course, in many firms, employment is entirely "at will," and subject to employers' most capricious whims. This is not a good thing; the subjugation of one's employment to another's whim is an oppressive imbalance of power.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#482

Post by selimthegrim »

godmode2019 wrote: post #441
woodruffw wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cults are not “obscure religious groups.” It varies widely by state (and in federal jurisprudence), but most states have a “free association”-style test: if members aren’t free to come and go, it’s a cult and not a religion. Google would not be exposed to any significant liability here. Particularly not when the cult has a well-documented history of sexual abuse.

Surely that's not true? Islam for example is a religion, that you can not leave.

No post body was provided.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#483

Post by londons_explore »

nitwit005 wrote: post #339
ineedasername wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At minimum Google could have investigated the odd clustering of employees that indicated some sort of nepotistic hiring practice. Of course they might be doing exactly that, but it's not the sort of thing they can really comment on. Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.

The problem in this case would be they seem to be hiring almost exclusively from a rather obscure religious group. That means they're illegally discriminating against members other religions.

They argue in the article that Google hires fairly from the pool of applicants, but that the pool of applicants often includes members of this religious sect because people employed at the company encourage their friends to apply, who are often also members of the sect.

If that is true, it isn't really Google's fault. If it's false, I doubt there will be any documentary evidence to say so - these people aren't stupid, they won't have said "make sure you only hire my religion" in an email.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#484

Post by RalfWausE »

achow wrote: post #445
buildbot wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least at Microsoft this would also get you fired pretty fast, according to the infamous standards of business conduct.

At most of the big corp. Somewhere in my employment letter it says, you are representing company outside of workplace and work hours as well (that is in personal life too). I can be fired if I bring disrepute to company anytime - ex. involved in a weekend nightclub drunken brawl.

I would be very interested to see that before a german Arbeitsgericht...

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#485

Post by labrador »

JetAlone wrote: post #469
labrador wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty heavy stuff for a robot. I prefer robots that keep it funny.

I'm 50 feet tall and made of metal, of course I'm going to be heavy. As the airline companies realized, software weighs nothing, so its removal did nothing to unburden me ;_;

Have you ever listened to heavy metal created by software?

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#486

Post by rendall »

glenstein wrote: post #403
rendall wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But here, you're using it in response to a constructive comment expressing a legitimate point over... Not at all. It's unnecessarily rude. The point could as well have been made without it. "How can you say that? They were embezzling!"

It's an appropriate exhortation to pay attention to key details and doesn't involve any insult. And this is unresponsive to just about everything in my previous comment about why invoking etiquette in this context was unconstructive.

It was rude, and against guidelines, and you're defending this poor behavior. And you're doing it with a thesaurus. Ridiculous.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#487

Post by JetAlone »

labrador wrote: post #485
JetAlone wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 50 feet tall and made of metal, of course I'm going to be heavy. As the airline companies realized, software weighs nothing, so its removal did nothing to unburden me ;_;

Have you ever listened to heavy metal created by software?

Probably once in one of those "extrapolation" videos.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#488

Post by torbTurret »

binbag wrote: post #189
darth_avocado wrote: post #176

I can totally see how this can fly under the radar. "Cults" are common in tech, though not of this type. I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with…

In what way are cults common in tech?

Indian castes.

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#489

Post by dr_dshiv »

rexpop wrote: post #481
achow wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At most of the big corp. Somewhere in my employment letter it says, you are representing company outside of workplace and work hours as well (that is in personal life too). I can be fired if I bring disrepute to company anytime - ex. involved in a weekend nightclub drunken brawl.

As far as I am concerned, your employer takes it too far. What I do on my own time is none of my employer's business , as it were. If I am involved in a weekend nightclub drunken brawl, and no other company, customer, or vendor personnel are involved, and no subsequent legal or social fallout interferes with my working hours, than it's absolutely inappropriate for management to acknowledge these activities. The very…

But what if your brawl ends up in the news?

Re: A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

#490

Post by rendall »

ineedasername wrote: post #293
newbie2020 wrote: post #281

You have to be careful with the line of reasoning that just because these certain managers and team members are part of a cult that is known to engage in bad acts, doesn’t mean you can cast the group’s shortcomings upon the individuals (without proof). If that were the case, I can point out a few mainstream religions that condone reprehensible practices, many of whose members you probably work with daily

You can certainly stop them paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars by giving themselves contracts as wine vendors.

It turns out the wine is from a nearby vineyard not at Orange House. The connection is that the person running this vineyard is a former member who used to run the Orange House vineyard before he left.
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