5 ms·

I've spent most entire career at relatively small companies (25-100 employees). I've never seen these types of issues (I can't say they've never happened, I'm

• kyrra 7y ago
  Google has ~100,000 employees at this point. This is the story of a single manager within the company. When you have that many people at the company, there are going to be people that make bad choices, and then the story will fall under the umbrella of "Google" and make the news. If this was a single small 25-100 person company, it would (likely) not get any notice.
  • hcnews 7y ago
    How do you know if there are 1 or 100 or 1000s of such cases without actual data? Companies should be forced to reveal number of cases per year per geography. That'll allow me to make an informed choice when joining a company. Also, its not clear to me why "HR will always help the company" has to be the status quo. This is an area where I would like the laws/judicial system to improve things.
    • itchyouch 7y ago
      Not to argue against regulations that force revealing of data, but in my experience, whenever places are forced to "document" issues, the culture shifts to only document the egregious while anything else that can be swept under does get swept away as to not inflate the statistics. I wonder if there is a strategy that encourages openness, yet doesn't have the immediate impact of moving all the conversations behind closed doors in a buddy-buddy system.
  • teraflop 7y ago
    > This is the story of a single manager within the company. No, it's a story of at least two different managers, and an HR department that supported them.
  • Raphmedia 7y ago
    The same story from a smaller company would be just as appalling. You should rejoice that Google is big enough that we take notice of this behavior and can then discuss of the issue as a society. To dismiss this issue because it happened at a big company would be a mistake.
• deleted 7y ago
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• ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  My personal opinion is that fundamentally, upper management (but people, in general) will make decisions that positively impact the people they see and work with. In a small company (like where I work) where the CEO knows the bottom tier employees by name, they are going to have a very hard time making decisions that harm those people. In a large company, upper management works with middle managers, and therefore, will optimize decisions that work well for those people, and as they do not know people on the bottom tier, have little emotional ties to decisions that will harm them.
  • clairity 7y ago
    yes, exactly. the whole point of layers of management is to insulate upper managers from the decisions they make, particularly those that slight the customer or the front-line worker. a more generous phrasing would be that insolation allows managers to take emotions out of a situation to make the most rational decisions for the business (and its shareholders). in any case, direct relationships are a big deal for social creatures like humans, from how you treat people to who gets the benefit of the doubt to who gets the juiciest resources, like the best jobs. we employ the ideal of the meritocracy as the polar counterweight to that tendency, to varying success.
    • musingsole 7y ago
      > that isolation allows managers to take emotions out of a situation to make the most rational decisions for the business I know you're playing devil's advocate, but to be on the side of angels: that isolation doesn't promote more rational decisions, only decisions absent a perspective of the company. To the extent that low-level employees don't have valuable information for the business' success, the isolation does promote more rational thinking (where that extent is most often 0). I've never seen a situation where low-level employee wisdom was rightly quashed by boardroom decisions.
    • darkerside 7y ago
      I think that's a side effect, not the primary reason for introducing layers of management. The real reason is, you just can't scale am organization without it. Managers are there for enforcing accountability. If directors have few enough reports to enforce accountability on their own, there is no need for a manager.
• CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  It happened to me at Tudor Investment in NYC, which only has about 200 employees. I tried to quit when my daughter was born as I had found a better job anyways. If I didn't stay an extra 3 months, my manager threatened to fire me 'with cause' so they could enforce my non-compete without paying me in New York. So there I was working through some of the most incompetent shit from my dismal colleagues while my wife was trying to take care of our newborn baby while she couldn't walk due to delivery complications. A week before I was supposed to go he mailed me a 25 item list of tasks to do before he would 'allow' me to quit, so I terminated my employment. After which, they claimed my non-compete was in force without pay. Don't ever work for those fucking vultures at Tudor Investment.
  • TAForObvReasons 7y ago
    Never tested but I've heard from colleagues that noncompetes without payments at the base salary level are not considered "reasonable" and would be not be enforceable in New York state. Of course that's the whole schtick with hedge funds and the like, keep the base salary lower and pay bonuses.
    • CoolGuySteve 7y ago
      If you're terminated 'for cause', they are supposedly enforceable without pay in New York. Then you have to argue that their 'cause' was invalid, which takes time and lawyers.
      • nitrogen 7y ago
        Can one still be fired after already having quit (I suppose that might vary from state to state)?
        • CoolGuySteve 7y ago
          No but that didn't stop their idiot HR lady from trying.
  • 7y ago
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  I can voice the same. One company I started to work for stated a zero tolerance policy towards x,y,z. For me, that means even if I'm not guilty of x,y,z the accusation is enough to get me fired. I've seen enough investigations done to know that companies don't care if people are wrongly fired. They have enough valid reasons to let people go that they can always claim it was really one of those, even if it was not.
• wil421 7y ago
  I’ve spent my entire career at Fortune 250 companies. Never seen or heard of something like this personally. Neither has my wife who works in sales (high turnover) and is currently pregnant.
• rdtsc 7y ago
  Working in a big-ish company many thousands of employees and this stuff just isn't there. You sign in, do you work, design cool stuff, test it, ship it, maybe have nice off-topic discussions about emerging technologies, or share a recipe with a one or two coworkers. Then 5pm hits, go home and enjoy all that other stuff like politics, hobbies, meetups, family time etc. It's really pretty simple. I don't understand why Google and others can't be that way. It seems to me they've cultivated this stereotypical / superficial "share everything, we are one big family!" culture. And people, I am guessing mostly younger ones, really buy into it and take it at face value, then get disappointed with things go south. The idea of an almost free-for-all internal discussion board sounds wrong and almost evil to me. It's a bit like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign - "Yes, please tell us what you disagree with so we can blacklist you easier". Out of all the executives, I can't believe nobody saw the potential issues from it? (That is why I inserted "evil" adjective there, and of course it's a jab their motto).
• mieseratte 7y ago
  Spent my entire career in <100 companies, I've worked with one pregnant woman in that time. She had a complicated pregnancy and was hassled almost exactly as in TFA, the head of HR allegedly played the "Well I've had two kids without needing extra leave" card. Was definitely dumbfounded when I heard that one, but then I realize I've run into programmers with a "Well I learned [esoteric thing], why hasn't he?" Sad that people lack that level of empathy and introspection, we're all different in different ways. Your easy thing is someone's Mt. Everest.
• lrem 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Google, but this kind of stories reach me mostly via memes. Google has about 100k employees and this kind of shite seems to happen a couple times a year. Let's assume once a month. This gives an incidence rate of 0.000012 per person per year. Meaning that at 100 employees, plugging into [1], after a 100 year career in a place as bad as Google you would have a 10% chance of that happening at your company. Assuming only 1% of what happened is known, you would get a 36% chance. [1]: https://planetcalc.com/5390/ https://planetcalc.com/5390/
  • lazyasciiart 7y ago
    What's the incidence rate per pregnancy?
    • lrem 7y ago
      That is a very good question. At some point the board disclosed the maternity benefits rate, I'll see if I can find it. But my guess would be on the "it's fine" side, this is the only one of the dozens of scandals I remember that involved a discriminated pregnant woman.
      • lrem 7y ago
        My search-fu failed me here, no data has been found.
        • lazyasciiart 7y ago
          Handwaving all of this for fun: 1/3 of employees are women, and let's say they are all millennials for ease of calculation. In 2016 there were about 2 million births among 40 millions millennial women, so 5% were pregnant. I'm going to arbitrarily halve that for Google employees, because educational achievement/income both correlate with lower birth rates. 2.5% of 1/3 approximately says 1% of Google employees are pregnant each year, or 1000 people. So out of 3000 pregnancies in the last few years, you've heard of this incident, so that's 1% of the 100 incidents, or 1/30 pregnant women at Google experiencing discrimination. Sounds pretty high - if you were in a "new mothers" group at Google with 100 women who'd recently been pregnant, three of them would have stories like this.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I've spent my entire career at the big tech company named in this article, and I've also never seen anything like this happen to anyone I worked with. The closest I got was hearing about such an incident second-hand (a friend in another org had a spouse in a third org who was witness to an incident). Smaller companies, from what I've heard, have tons of office politics problems. You hear about it less because most small companies have no national importance, and thus do not excite the press the way a large company would. I would almost be willing to guarantee you that an incident of gender or sex discrimination has happened at one of the companies you've worked at, at least supposing you've been working more than a year or two. Just because you didn't hear about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. These things are generally kept pretty quiet -- splashing them across the headlines is the exception, not the norm.
• samrosea 7y ago
  lol yeah sure that's why youve never applied to FAANG
• zadkey 7y ago
  I wouldn't say for sure that smaller companies have less politics. Some smaller companies are fine. But the ones that aren't very profitable and are older, or are a child company of a parent company, no guarantees. But I have seen the bad kind. You think you are in a work-hard play-hard environment and it turns out it is really a "good old boys" setup. I've seen people play football outside for over an hour some days, but then someone else gets fired for pulling out a bed and resting for 15 minutes during their lunch break. And yes there was a bed in the closet at the office.