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What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

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Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#161

Post by aaronem »

deadmik3 wrote: post #151
aaronem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Heaven forfend staff should behave in a way potentially inimical to the interests of management, instead of the other way around.

Staff works for management. While it's nice to have times where the management "works for" their employees, the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy.

Staff being subordinate to management in an organizational sense is one thing. Staff members being forbidden even to approach anything, which might grow into a discussion of how and where management's interests are actively inimical to their own, is quite another.

You're making the best arguments for unionization I've heard in the tech industry for quite a long time.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#162

Post by codingdave »

mhluongo wrote: post #94
deadmik3 wrote: post #47

Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this? There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WA…

> tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected. What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?

That is probably exactly what she expected. And if this were a small group politely sharing with each, there likely would not be retaliation. But once you make it "a thing", and are impacting the culture of an organization, then you have stepped into politics. The reactions at that point are going to be exaggerated, and not necessarily relevant to the original topic.

I don't like politics, and stories like this are exactly why - things that may be legal and should not be harmful end up turning into something ugly. You have to worry more about who you are pissing off that what you are doing, whether or not their anger is justified or reasonable.

Sadly, for all but very small companies, politics is the reality in the corporate world.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#163

Post by cmiles74 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #138
cmiles74 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really reads like more of the same story, I don't see these two narratives to be in opposition. For sure, one reads pretty angry at Google and the other is clearly pro-Google but the facts are much the same.

Well, no. The ex-employee says management was pissed and hush hush. The reddit comment says management mentioned it openly in one of their scheduled all-hands weekly meeting. Quote: "Friend says the sheet was addressed a company all-hands meeting (it wasn't the focus of the meeting, apparently they have an all-hands every week and it was mentioned. Can that be right tho? Aren't there like tens of thousands of people…

Maybe I'm just too cynical and jaded, but to me it just sounds like damage control from the management side.

Once word got around about this spreadsheet, what else can management do? As management, you let everyone know that you know about it and you backpeddle from your problematic "we will fire you for your involvement" position. Someone from Human Resources affirms what everyone now knows (from doing a quick Google search), that this is not grounds for dismissal but that it makes things hard for management, so on and so forth.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#164

Post by deadmik3 »

smcgivern wrote: post #152
deadmik3 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't retaliate, they just didn't give her the bonuses.

Perhaps you could clarify what you think: > exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company is? From this reply, it appears that you think Google did nothing wrong - regardless of whether she was 'stirring shit up' or not.

I don't think they did do anything wrong against her. She didn't get her peer bonuses for starting this spreadsheet?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#165

Post by dataker »

mhluongo wrote: post #94
deadmik3 wrote: post #47

Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this? There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WA…

> tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected. What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?

I'm not taking Google's position, but couldn't Erica have a hidden agenda on this initiative? Is it only about transparency?

She does seem like a SJW and, if any discrepancies in compensation were found between gender/race/... , Google would be ultimately screwed.

Plus, with such large dataset, one could fallaciously assume differences without considering different countries,positions,...

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#166

Post by veidr »

abrahamepton wrote: post #90
staticelf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad. To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.

I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks. Ha…

Here's my list of things that you mentioned which aren't shitty:

    search

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#167

Post by Steko »

sergiotapia wrote: post #89

Other side of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap... Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.

Linked comment from 'guy on reddit who claims to have a friend at google' doesn't actually dispute substance of @EricaJoy's claims although it thinks it does.

Seeing the upvoted comments here makes me /sigh for HN, a bunch of BS, FUD and victim blaming.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#168

Post by scott_s »

braythwayt wrote: post #142
[deleted] wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Are you suggesting that I am blaming the Google employee in this story? Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m claiming that “She should have expected this” is weak sauce. It’s factually true, but could just as easily be said that entrepreneurs who try but fail could have expected it, or protestors who get beaten and then jailed could have expected it, or people who ask someone out on a date but are turned down…

For the record, I misunderstood your point, too.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#169

Post by artmageddon »

bronxcoder wrote: post #43

I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never…

I had a similar experience when I was at my last job; a woman and I were being hired for two open spots in a development group, and she was being offered $3,000 less than me(not sure why, especially since she had a Master's whereas I just had a bachelor's). I found this out from the recruiter who was trying to place me, as I had tried to negotiate for another $5k over the offer, but they wouldn't budge since the other person was already $3k under me. I had no way of reaching out to her to try to get her to go higher, too :)

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#170

Post by zippy786 »

toyg wrote: post #155
amelius wrote: post #12

Google is a company that wants to have access to all the information in the world. But if somebody rightfully publishes some information that is sensitive to Google, look what happens...

To be fair, Google respects robots.txt (and the atrocious "right to be forgotten"), and they won't stop you from using GMail if you encrypt everything with PGP. Unlike others ( cough -Facebook- cough ), they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want. The classic "if you've done nothing wrong" attitude is more a personal opinion of certain individuals (a certain Eric Schmidt comes t…

> To be fair, Google respects robots.txt

Not all of their crawlers respect robots.txt

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