261–270 of 645 posts
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That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.
Yep. Another perk is that Google always seems to lease the best/coolest office real estate anywhere. Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.
Tell me more about this.
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thank you for mentioning this. i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died. the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game. i loved watching how Google woul…
This isn't just google, it's every company with contractors and employees. Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
Real IBMers got all kinds of stuff. We had to pay full price for the GR meal.
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> Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent. Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny benefits?
Again, to repeat: the desire in the suit (to prevent employers from inappropriately using temporary labor) was valid. The EFFECT of the suit is exactly the opposite: it's forced employers to performatively discriminate against temps in every way they can find as a way to prevent the kind of finding that hurt MSFT. Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor labor laws, but this decision broke things.
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They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.
Google didn't invent shit, the following people did. None are still with Google. * Ashish Vaswani - Founder, Stealth Startup * Noam Shazeer - Founder, Character.AI * Niki Parmar - Founder, Stealth Startup * Jakob Uszkoreit - Founder, Inceptive * Llion Jones - Founder, Sakana AI * Aidan Gomez - Founder, cohere * Lukasz Kaiser - OpenAI * Illia Polosukhin - Founder, NEAR
What I learned getting acquired by Google is that if your company is below a certain size, everyone will need to do a technical interview to be hired and leveled. They tell your management to lie to you, and tell you its just a meet and greet, with questions about projects you worked on, general background stuff etc. But its actually a full on surprise technical interview. (NOTE: This was true in the early-ish 2010s,…
>Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad school. So just like when changing jobs?
The "red badge" thing was very real. It was really weird having TVCs on your team. You'd all work hard together to launch a thing, and then everybody except the red badge would get a celebratory team tchotchke or a team lunch or something. If you asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee." There'd be all-hands meetin…
>TVC Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.
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thank you for mentioning this. i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died. the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game. i loved watching how Google woul…
>it's a caste system One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.
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> One required by federal policy. Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees. It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.
If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink. Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new in…
The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees.
The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer.
This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.