Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 600 posts

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#571

Post by pm90 »

dmix wrote: post #570
pm90 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power While that's true, just money and influence aren't sufficient for this. Congress passes laws, but its upto the Executive to interpret it. The lack of breaking up of larger corporations has indeed been due to their significant influence, but I'm interested to see how e.g. a left-learning President like Sanders or Warren would use t…

Have you considered how standard oil is now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. They did break up but we're hardly in a different place in terms of who controls the market and who has most influence on gov policy globally to keep it that way. http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c... Or how Bell is now ATT and plenty of other useless oligopoly companies?

It’s true they currently have enormous power. But consider how the market would look like and how they would behave, if it were still Standard Oil and ATT.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#572

Post by thu2111 »

geofft wrote: post #567
thu2111 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true. Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly. Some tricks I saw used: 1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me tha…

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing a…

Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times. That absolutely has an effect. The hiring process really isn't anywhere close to being accurate enough that firings are irrelevant and of course, people's performance changes over time.

There's no difference between "trying harder to hire a qualified woman" and sexual discrimination during hiring. Just invert it to see: imagine someone found a software company that said it was trying harder to hire men because it preferred them, and so it did things like only advertise its jobs in men's clubs, recruited from events where women were banned, and did things it knew would bias its own interview process against female candidates like assigning incompetent interviewers and then discarding their feedback because it wasn't good enough. Feminists would utterly lose it.

In the end the only reason Google doesn't just outright ban white men from applying for engineering jobs is it's illegal. And even then it seems like this doesn't always stop them!

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#573

Post by verall »

drenvuk wrote: post #505
verall wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes and no response. I don't know why HN wants to hide behind this strawman so bad. Noone is getting fired for posting about geometric shapes, unless you're trying to say something insensitive or disparaging. The line of what is acceptable to stay has changed, but turns out if you wern't being an asshole in the first place, people are very forgiving. Also, Twitter is not an example. People are constantly unforg…

It's not a strawman. Good jokes that haven't been said before are hard to find and many times lie on the edge of what's acceptable and isn't acceptable or is a combination of nearly unrelated ideas delivered through a multitude of different comedic devices. There's a reason that workplace humor is so repetitive and soul deadening.

A part of humor is "reading the room".

I've met genuinely funny, kind people, who are able to make jokes on the line of what is "acceptable", but because they could read the room, they could stay within acceptable and rarely offend people. When they did offend, they were quick to admit their mistake and apologize. Their apologies are genuine, because they believe it's wrong to offend their coworkers trying to be funny.

I've also met people who believe it's their right to make jokes on the line of whatever they think is acceptable, regardless the thoughts of everyone who has to hear them. Some of these guys were really funny. But they did offend some people and were generally not apologetic when called out. A lot of them were assholes. All of them had somebody who thought they were an asshole.

Honestly, I find there's tons of humor at work that goes nowhere near the line. I feel like funny things happen all of the time at my work. If your workplace feels soul-deadening it might be worth applying somewhere else.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#574

Post by throwaway6833 »

laughinghan wrote: post #448
throwaway6833 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway time.. The minefield about trying to predict what's going to be politically correct in the future is so true--you nailed it. You might carefully self-censor your discussions to things that are politically allowed today but everything lives forever, so something you say may fall out of fashion and years from now it could get you in hot HR water. The only solution is to just stick to work topics, really. The…

Genuine question: (you're on a throwaway, what's the harm in answering me, right?) What is there to buy into about pronouns? If my first name is Stan, named after my dad also named Stan, and my middle name is Jason, and my dad abandoned my family when I was young so I prefer people to call me Jason, you'd have no problem calling me Jason and be understanding that calling me Stan is a sore point, right? What if I don'…

Sounds like a genuine question, so I'll give a genuine answer:

I'm a very busy person at work. The amount of daily cognitive load I dedicate to pronouns there is essentially zero because it never comes up. The only time it becomes nonzero is when someone else who thinks it's vitally important brings it up, which is pretty much always memegen or some other internal forum where political advocacy creeps in. If someone were to ever ask me, "Hey, can you call me 'she' instead" I'd have no problem doing so. It's just common courtesy and most of my job at Google involves building and maintaining relationships. But I don't go out of my way to list people's pronouns next to their userids in design docs, or have a section in every presentation on pronouns in order to signal that I'm woke. Just like if someone pointed out that he goes by a middle name, I'd call them that because that's what they prefer, but I'm not going to ask everyone I meet if they go by a middle name or some other name.

As engineers we consider rare edge cases in our designs but typically do not build our solutions around them.

The difference between pronouns and first-names is that nobody is out there searching for instances where I inadvertently called someone by their first name so that they can go into outrage mode, call me out and shame me for it.

When I say some people don't "buy into the whole pronouns thing", I mean they are indifferent to it--they don't think about it every day, they don't consider it some vitally important cause that the company must urgently dedicate resources and collective cognitive load to.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#575

Post by geofft »

thu2111 wrote: post #572
geofft wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing a…

Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times. That absolutely has an effect. The hiring process really isn't anywhere close to being accurate enough that firings are irrelevant and of course, people's performance changes over time. There's no difference between "trying harder to hire a qualified woman" and sexual discrimination during hiring. Just invert it to see: i…

> Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times.

Cool, you should sue. The SJW women are suing alleging Google has been discriminating against them: https://googlegendercase.com/ Are you going to let the SJWs win? It sounds like you have an open-and-shut case, from what you're claiming.

> Feminists would utterly lose it.

Again, that's not what's under dispute. What is being claimed is that Googlers have no reason to doubt that every person there met the hiring bar. Even in your scenario, that would still be true. Even if Google refrained entirely from hiring white men - which, yes, would be illegal - they could still enforce the hiring bar.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#576

Post by tptacek »

thu2111 wrote: post #572
geofft wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing a…

Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times. That absolutely has an effect. The hiring process really isn't anywhere close to being accurate enough that firings are irrelevant and of course, people's performance changes over time. There's no difference between "trying harder to hire a qualified woman" and sexual discrimination during hiring. Just invert it to see: i…

the only reason Google doesn't just outright ban white men from applying for engineering jobs is

Please don't troll on HN.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#577

Post by kortilla »

geofft wrote: post #567
thu2111 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true. Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly. Some tricks I saw used: 1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me tha…

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing a…

> tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives

This is a lie perpetuated by googlers. That’s a false dichotomy. There is no evidence that their process reduces false positives. Pointing to a bunch of false negatives just means they have a process that produces a bunch of false negatives. For how smart googlers are purported to be, you would think they wouldn’t report such an obviously illogical statement.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#578

Post by kortilla »

googlerx wrote: post #457
kortilla wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace. Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Googl…

I'm an engineer at google and this bit about hiring someone because of their genes is false. All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.

Nope, allowing some candidates to retry more because of their genes or straight up skip a failed phone screen is lowering the bar for them. The entire hiring process from recruitment to offer is part of the hiring bar.

Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process.

You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities.

If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts.

> So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.

Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#579

Post by kortilla »

shadowgovt wrote: post #522
username90 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, there is a lot of talk about things but ultimately the strongest political side at Google are still the ones clamoring for meritocracy.

It's less "meritocracy vs. diversity" and more "meritocracy factors in diversity." They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.

Which organization has collapsed that focused only on technical skills?

Re: Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings

#580

Post by amznthrowaway4 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #173
amznthrowaway4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

bitwize said that, after Trump's election, a lot of stuff got labeled "far right" that never was before. You replied that bitwize was supporting white nationalists and repeating a propaganda narrative. Hmm... I'd say you just proved bitwize's point.

It's a fact that we now have white nationalists in the White House.

That's not villainizing, it's just describing a thing as it stands.

Maybe you're right and the Republicans were always white nationalists, but David Duke and his types were sideshows, they weren't making policy in the White House proper.

Post reply on HN