191–200 of 309 posts
Every large company has these trainings. I personally have worked at multiple companies with very similar trainings. With thousands of employees, a company can’t take the risk that some random college hire mouths off over Slack on something they don’t know anything about and it shows up in discovery for something in the future and is used as evidence of planned malfeasance on the part of the company. I know we don’t…
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> They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours .
This policy makes very little sense. Does Google IT also purge every message he responded to from all corporate managed mailboxes?
This is such an uncharitable interpretation of the training materials. The material there is not saying "if you want to speak about things that raise antitrust concerns, use this coded language", it's saying "don't do these things, and just focus on building a good product". Like, the thing here that really boggles my mind: if the training materials had said literally the exact opposite of what they do: "crush the co…
When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.
Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is not the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.
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I agree that others do the same, but the observation that vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning. If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it they also can't recognize it when it happens.
Trust me, every Google exec thinks hard about crushing competition. They just don't put it in writing.
They kind of agree Google is the search/Android company, and FB is the social network company, and that way they can both sell ads.
Even Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok, FBs main competitors, were never “crushed.” There was never a full out assault on them.
FBs attitude seemed to be to watch them, learn from them, and adopt their best practices.
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How people think about things and what people put in legally discoverable media like email are worlds apart. As a basic aspect of corporate survival, it's important to keep that in mind. The overarching concept is "don't make it hard for the company to do business." The point of those trainings is that the words to avoid have legally-defined meanings that may or may not be what the Googler intended, but are likely to…
Doesn't negate my point in the least. The fact alone that there exists such an extensive training specifically about monopoly-related stuff hints that there is extensive monopolistic behavior liability for which only hinges on whether it's acknowledged as such in the internal communication. Also, it adds a whole new (new?) meaning to any press release or a blog post from Google using any of the terms from the right c…
But they do, and the good ones are really good at it.
Any competent company is going to train its people with some sort of variation on a course named "The Ten Dumbest Things You Can Write In An Email So Don't".
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Am I supposed to come away thinking they're both reasonable interpretations which accurately critique the main argument in this article? Because that's what I came away with. (At the moment, the other to comment is about how focusing on positive goals is a good business strategy, not just light-stepping on legal egg shells.)
I pasted the current top comment for you since you seem to be having trouble finding it or reading it: >When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was ver…
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Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.
I almost never get useful results out of a web search, nowadays, unless the query is very specific (like looking up a website I forgot the domain of). This is not particular to google search, which in fact I don't use anymore. Trying to find information given only fuzzy details almost never produce relevant links; anything remotely commercial, like trying to find a product reviews, film to watch, a store nearby, etc.…
This I find impossible to believe. So you basically don't get any useful results for 80-90% of your searches? I wish you could give some examples.
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The reason Googlers get really ticked off about leaks is that they ruined the very candid and open internal culture we used to have. In the 10 years I've been there I've seen us go from TGIF sessions where Larry and Sergey and Eric openly discussed things that every other employer I'd had before would have kept quiet ... to the situation now which is a lot less like that. And it has a lot to do with leaks from those…
On the contrary, the leaker is sharing with the public, often things people deserve to know. It's the height of selfishness to be upset that Larry and Sergey stopped telling you about their dirty laundry, because the public was finding out.
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I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but I would definitely be pissed at them. There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's presenting it their way. Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someo…
If you are an engineer working on the software, the announcement really has little interest. You just want it to be wide and sure not being done in a way that put a bad light on your product. This kind of things happened in my case, and I was more happy to see the interest of the potential users than knowing who disclosed it as it would not be me anyway in all cases. It might not be true in a small company/team/produ…
You're being super presumptuous by saying engineers shouldn't care about the PR around the feature they worked on, even if someone else is running the PR
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Once upon a time US regulators recognized that limited competition and market dominance can be a problem all by themselves, for their chilling effect on innovation. Unfortunately under Reagan the DOJ changed their policy and started arguing that concrete consumer harm has to be demonstrated for a business to be subject to antitrust. That’s a much higher bar. Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco m…
Helpfully this is exactly the sort of argument I'm complaining about. The basic form is "the regulators did this", its "hard to show concrete harm" but therefore "we should go after any company that is dominant in any market". If we skip to the handwave, what is and how solid is the evidence that the regulator's actions were sensible? Targeting the most competent company for harassment is, on the face of it, a bad st…
Copyright and patent law would be the closest thing, but Google's core business isn't selling licensing agreements. They owned the search market way before Android was even a public project, much less the open-core monstrosity it is today. Google got to where it is because it legitimately hunted the rest of it's competitors into extinction, not because it got better at throwing red tape at them.