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What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

wired.com

271–280 of 382 posts

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retaliation is illegal against them, too.

The point is the manager might not have even been implying any retaliation. Can you think of other possible meanings behind the manager's question?

Yeah I didn't even at first take it to mean "the company can retaliate". I assumed the manager was referring to unrest & animosity at people undeservedly making more money than others.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#272

This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -…

Reposting tweets is not valid journalism. For that matter, including tweets from random people in reaction to a news event is also not valid journalism either. I don't care what muffycat1974 on Twitter has to say about the Iran nuclear deal, unless muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.

I reckon John Kerry's anonymous twitter account is Muffycat1974.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#273
post #14
post #6

a thing bothered me yesterday and it's still bothering me today and so now i want to tell a story. One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries on the internal social network instance. A spreadsheet was created. we put our salaries in the sheet, realized that it was created on a public to the world spreadsheet, so I copied it to internal. I then put a form on it and posted the link to the…

Rich people problems! Why is this a thing and why on front page?

> Rich people problems

That could be said about 95% of the content on HN. If you think that's a problem I suggest joining a different community.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#274

This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -…

Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. Erica has explicitly written that she's not interested in speaking to reporters about the story: https://twitter.com/ericajoy/status/622154558140080128

I would think a proper journalist would figure out a way to get the information they need for an objective story, even when faced with an unwilling witness.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#275
post #182
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want Like the time they didn't feel the need to harass everyone into signing up for G+ any time one used an unrelated service?

No, not like that. How did you determine that sharing more than you want was like getting you to sign up for a service?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are genuinely good at what they do don't need to spend extra time doing it - putting in longer hours is a sign that you're not very good at what you do. Either that or you're going 'above and beyond' (gold-plating in project management terms) and doing things that the client hasn't agreed to pay for. That's actually worse - you're giving revenue away.

I have a near endless stream of work to do. I could easily put in 70+ hours a week doing things that need to be done, not struggling and not gold-plating. Where have you worked that does not always have a "next thing to do"?

Where have you worked that does not always have a "next thing to do"?

There's always things you could be doing, but they're often not critical (or even necessary). If someone is staying late to do those things (or doing them during the day and staying late to do the critical stuff) then they deserve no additional recognition. People should go home when the important stuff is done.

If people can't fit all the important work in to their day then they're either not good enough at their job or their manager is giving them too much to do. Either way, there is a problem.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#277
Collecting evidence is the right way to approach situations like this. However, when the position is so politically entrenched, extra care _must_ be taken so that opponents cannot dismiss the data due to poor collection practices.

Unfortunately, that care was not taken in this case, and of course, you see opponents dismissing the data. The worst part is that this effort may actually prevent proper data collection in the future: "remember what happened last time we did that?"

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is about getting to the truth. That involves doing a bit of legwork to assess the veracity of what someone is saying.

Why does this only go in one direction? "Journalists" regularly publish reformatted company press releases, and quote "insiders" without attribution. That's fine because most news narratives support the status quo and those in power. When the (relatively) little guy has something to say, however, we're going to need some hard evidence! Our biases are telling.

>Why does this only go in one direction?

It doesn't.

>Our biases are telling.

Case in point.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#279

This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -…

This comment is derailing. The precise definition of journalism is totally irrelevant. Erica Joy has shared an important story that we should listen to.

Erica Joy is totally free to write what she wrote. Wired should have gone an extra step however.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#280

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 hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue.

If wage disparity follows gender lines then it is a gender issue.

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