51–60 of 78 posts
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yes but I believe you need a certain amount of karma
And trust me, the down votes tend to be pro-marxist. So that this is getting so much attention speaks volumes about just HOW bad he presented this tale.
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I think that works for any kind of voluntary grouping. When people abuse a cultural conventions and other implicit taboos for personal gain it's really detrimental to the larger group. Now, sure, he might see the larger group as his foe, and so be it, and so it's their privilege to let this kind of person go (and to keep them would undermine group cohesion). It's like someone coming from a culture where people patien…
According to the article, the author was neither hired nor fired by Google. The author worked on campus for a contractor.
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I've often taken a drink or a snack from the office for later in the evening or the next day. Never considered that this might be frowned upon. On the other hand, taking large quantities of items frequently seems like an abuse of a perk.
That's how I understand it. "fill my bag with juices" is not the same as taking a snack for later.
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Yes. I don't know how they organized scanning books, but in a lot of jobs it makes total sense. Do you know how a conveyor belt works, for example? Soccer players earn millions of dollars, but they still can't go to a bathroom break in the middle of a game.
Excellent point. I've had to work in retail. You don't just get to go to the bathroom because someone has to man the front desk. This is a fact of the business. If you don't like it, feel free to go somewhere else. No one is stopping you.
Why would anyone think it's okay to immerse people in some kind of compulsory pavlovian nightmare?
Go somewhere else? Like where? Panhandling in streets? Waiting for cold and disease scrape another life off the sidewalk?
What planet keeps sending us these middle-management assholes who just ache to watch someone wet their pants on the job?
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) > sometimes mining information to leak to organizer friends > After 9–12 hours on campus I would fill my Google-issued bag with Naked juices and to-go containers of food for my roommates So... deliberate violation of the corporate NDA (which is massively disrespectful to the other people who work here) and stealing food from t…
Their rebuke was defensive as expected, but they also pointed out that (at the time) Google is getting rich by stealing everyone else's information and then putting ads around it and reselling it to other people, so taking a few bucks worth of soft drinks from the MK really wasn't much of a problem.
It was a rationalization of course, but it was built on a kernel of truth, and one that the author touches on as well. Which is that culturally at Google, the company felt they held the right to decide the morality of any action in the way that most favored Google. Whether that meant giving away the stories from newspapers by crawling them and summarizing them or by skating on the edges of labor laws to convert something from an expensive automation project to a simpler sweatshop project.
For those who chose to look deeply at the company's actions, I can see how it would be unsettling.
I think the problem with Google is that it advertised (still does?) itself, in a rather believable way, as being be diverse, fun, everyone working together -- developers, janitors and artists all holding hands creating a brigher tomorrow and perhaps fighting against evil. Well it worked for me back then, I really did believe Google was "Don't Be Evil" kind of company and so on, vis-a-vis say Microsoft, or say Walmart…
And for companies, well they are ultimately just groups of people. So the same issue.
Also, open and tolerant doesn't mean unlimited anything goes. This applies even to the parent-child relationship. If you disagree, think about the parents who had to deal with children who steal, use violence and destroy stuff. You ultimately have to draw a line at self preservation! Same thing for a company and culture. You have to preserve the culture, and if that means ejecting people who mean to do it harm, then how is that a horrible thing? The author himself would eject counter-revolutionaries from his revolutionary party, so in principle he agrees with this sentiment.
As for the 'Don't Be Evil' - lots of people at Google still believe in this. The problem is once you go global, life gets very very hard and you are forced to make difficult decisions. And sometimes you get them wrong. And you try again. But to harp on bad decisions is like a husband who won't EVER let his wife forget THAT ONE TIME. That's hardly constructive.
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Or abusing the system to score income on the sale of his house. I nearly snorted at that point.
I think you're misinterpreting this. I think he moved into a unit of a luxury building (that was required to be rented to a low income person) and lived there until the unit was sold.
(Seems like a pretty silly requirement to me. Can't they just use the tax and welfare system to combat inequality in a sane way?)
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) > sometimes mining information to leak to organizer friends > After 9–12 hours on campus I would fill my Google-issued bag with Naked juices and to-go containers of food for my roommates So... deliberate violation of the corporate NDA (which is massively disrespectful to the other people who work here) and stealing food from t…
I can't say I disagree with this analysis but as an ex-googler I once confronted an employee who had just stuffed at least a six pack of red bull into their backpack at the mini kitchen(MK). Their rebuke was defensive as expected, but they also pointed out that (at the time) Google is getting rich by stealing everyone else's information and then putting ads around it and reselling it to other people, so taking a few…
(The argument about stealing becomes more complicated when you have to explain why people are not putting up a robots.txt. You might still be able to make it, though.)
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) > sometimes mining information to leak to organizer friends > After 9–12 hours on campus I would fill my Google-issued bag with Naked juices and to-go containers of food for my roommates So... deliberate violation of the corporate NDA (which is massively disrespectful to the other people who work here) and stealing food from t…
The NDA is inexcusable. The food though...seems like everybody does it.
That's the problem with universal quantifiers, they are so easily disproven.