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One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

259 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xhkkffbf 7y ago
I've liked many things about Google over the years and I still admire many parts of their stack. But this crazy internal political culture is bound to end in a big kaboom and it looks like this might be it. Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. Google has skirted this rule for some time but now it's not going to be pretty.
- dustingetz 7y ago
  seems less about Google and more about the balance of power shifting towards tech workers over the tech employer
  - thephyber 7y ago
    It does seem like highly-valued engineering talent can get away with more than other commodity office workers. It also feels like many tech companies actively advertise "to millennials" by advertising that their culture is the kind of place at which "you want to work". When that company/mission starts to lose its polish[1], it becomes harder to recruit for that talent[2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-recruit-since-cambridge-analytica-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-re...
  - underpand 7y ago
    Unfortunately, it's mostly non-eng and colorful SREs who are representing the supposed "tech worker" in these politically charged movements if you cross-reference the names that appear in public articles with LinkedIn profiles.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      What makes those types of people less necessary tech workers than other types of tech workers?
- ahelwer 7y ago
  > Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business This 'rule' is a purely artificial construct encouraged to ensure the common employees keep their heads down and let those in charge continue screwing over them and/or society. The history of organized labor involves no less than straight murder of labor activists by company owners.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Not really, the politics rule is more because in a reasonably diverse workforce will have supporters of all sorts of stupid ideas and it is not fruitful to have people arguing about them on company time. There is a lot of tension in labour relations but no-politics-in-the-workplace philosophies cover a lot more than that.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    There is no good faith argument here that can paint with so broad a brush; organized labor is also not free from extreme acts of violence and extortion.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Yeah, no. I broadly agree with the what many activists at tech companies are supporting, but think that its deliberate attempts to make the workplace more political are unproductive or backfiring. When it gets to the point that a significant percentage of employees are feigning or exaggerating support for political positions to fit in, you have a problem. And the tech companies I've worked at in the SF Bay Area for the last four years have been in that position.
    - rtpg 7y ago
      fighting against the creation of a union is just as a political act as trying to create one (as an example). Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers our emplyoer has" is a political act. Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  > Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. This works until you must, by necessity, either mix work and politics or suffer some indignity. Advocating for parental leave? Politics. Mothers rooms? Politics. Prayer rooms? Politics. Trans inclusive health care? Politics. Domestic partner benefits? Politics. Unfortunately, for many folks politics at work is a reality whether they want them to be or not, just because of who they are.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > Advocating for parental leave? Politics. Mothers rooms? Politics. Prayer rooms? Politics. Trans inclusive health care? Politics. Domestic partner benefits? Politics. Yep all politics. As political issues they should be dealt with in the political arena of whichever branch of government is responsible. If you strongly believe in these rights and priveleges you'd be spending your time advocating for universal access to them. Doing it on a per company basis is ineffective and selfish, there will always be a race to the bottom and it gives your competitors an advantage.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      Companies should only do the minimum required by law? We only win if everyone gets the benefit? I disagree, you are making perfect the enemy of good. The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution".
      - flukus 7y ago
        > Companies should only do the minimum required by law? Whether they should or not is irrelevant, it's what they do. Companies com and go, companies that spend more than they have to tend to go faster, employers change even more frequently. Do you want to put up this fight every time you change employers? Do you want to be stuck at one employer because changing jobs means losing benefits? > We only win if everyone gets the benefit? I don't consider getting these benefits for the privileged few with job mobility to be much of a win. Even for them it's probably not a long term win. > The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution". It's not the only solution just the best solution, more unionization would be another solution that's way better than a piecemeal company by company approach though. The government solution also offers up some much better alternatives in cases like healthcare.
- thephyber 7y ago
  > Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. I don't know anything about what's happening at Google, but this either involves some talented mental gymnastics or it's obviously false. Places of business have politics. Always have, always will. Internal politics and very frequently most companies involve themselves in local/state/national/international politics. - Joining a chamber of commerce or a trade organization is participating in politics. - Having a PR campaign or a lobbyist which affects public attitudes or legislation is politics. - Sponsored an ice rink in the middle of small town Texas[1] (hint: it's a symbol that the company, even though it is based in South Korea, depends very much on the good will of jurors and judges in that smallish town). What's happening at multiple tech giants is that traditionally the sway in company-politics remains within the board and a few key org units (PR, governmental outreach, legal, etc). The differentiators now are: - high quality talent is scarce (hence all of the famous Yahoo/Google/Facebook/etc perks for engineers), - the transparency of associations[2][3], - the political climate of associations (eg. [4][5]), and - boycotts (of many forms) can hurt the bottom dollar[6]. Sometimes it has the opposite effect[7]. Let's not pretend like Google is unique nor that businesses have a strict "Chinese Wall" between politics and business. As Mitt Romney said, "Businesses are people", and politics exists because people are people. [1] https://ipcloseup.com/2015/02/25/for-samsung-charity-begins-at-home-marshall-texas/ https://ipcloseup.com/2015/02/25/for-samsung-charity-begins-... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/facebook-employees-reportedly-outraged-at-exec-at-kavanaugh-hearing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/facebook-employees-reportedl... [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... [4] https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/harvard-professor-ron-sullivan-weinstein-video/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/harvard-professor-ron-sull... [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charlottesville-white-nationalist-demonstrator-fired-from-libertarian-hot-dog-shop/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl... [6] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-bill-oreilly-advertiser-boycott-127520/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/insi... [7] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/nike-reports-double-digit-profit-growth-after-colin-kaepernick-controversy https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/nike-reports-dou...
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  > Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. "Evolution has"? Are you invoking evo-psych to say politics and business don't mix. It's really quite amazing how the dominant corporate ideology has become so invisible that people think that by going to work and doing whatever your boss says to do is somehow devoid of political involvement. Pretending "business" has nothing to do with politics is absurd. You can only believe it if you think corporate capitalism is apolitical.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. You mean, the power of the ruling class has created the rules that ruled class doesn't mix challenging their masters in with their service that is required for their survival. Because politics and business are deeply mixed when you look at the ruling (capitalist) class, your “evolution” rule doesn't apply there. And politics that involve bootlicking for their particular masters is also rewarded in the working class, your “evolution” rule.dorsnt apply there, either. It's only politics that challenges one’s capitalist masters (usually embodied in a corporate employer) that is discouraged.
hliyan 7y ago
Sometimes, people problems can't be solved by technological means. Sometimes you just have to talk to people. A while back I was contemplating introducing a small app for team members to express sentiments (whether they're feeling stressed, satisfied, unappreciated, worried etc), but I eventually decided that nothing beats a private conversation.
- catalogia 7y ago
  The theory behind managers soliciting anonymous comments from workers is that this cuts through preference falsification. Preference falsification is when somebody lies about their beliefs or opinions, often due to perceived social pressure or lack of trust. Preference falsification is a real problem, not just in business settings but throughout the broad domain of human interaction. Unfortunately soliciting anonymous comments is often ineffective at combating preference falsification because when a boss tells their workers that comments are anonymous, the workers simply don't believe it (and often they're right not to.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
  - lobotryas 7y ago
    I love getting “anonymous” quarterly employee surveys that have a unique ID embedded in the URL. That’s not even trying.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      The anonymous ID is fine, and not the way you’re going to be outed. They aren’t lying to you. A manager of a handful of employees generally knows what their employees sound like, what issues are important to them, and knows which ones tend to go against the grain.
    - Thorrez 7y ago
      They generally want some way to make sure the same person isn't filling out the survey multiple times.
  - 7y ago
tehjoker 7y ago
"The tracking had made the staff of those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said." ...said the largest worldwide private spy agency the world has ever known.
- intrnttrll 7y ago
  They can't stand a little taste of their own medicine.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  Maybe this will wake some people up. Up to now their mantra was "we're not doing anything illegal." Yes, it might not be illegal (at least not yet), but you're acting against the wishes and interests of your users, and you can clearly notice it when the same machine is used against you.
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  "unsafe" is clearly hyperbolic here, their physical safety isn't threatened. Their "safe place" AKA ideologic echo chamber? Sure.
  - toraobo 7y ago
    > A Google spokeswoman said the company is investigating the employees who were placed on leave. One of them had searched for and shared confidential documents outside the scope of their job, while the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said. This sounds like actual harassment of individual employees who happen to work in a department that is seen as "the enemy".
catalogia 7y ago
> " the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said. [...] The suspensions have been a hot topic of discussion at the company in the last week, stoking anger among some workers and prompting claims that Google is punishing people who have taken a stand against management" To what extent do the involved parties agree on the facts as presented in this article? It seems incredible that any Google employees would be upset that somebody was fired for what amounts to stalking other employees. I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, or they're just being totally unreasonable..
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Is that a good way to cope with confusing events, to assume that other people are just being totally unreasonable?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    > I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, _OR_ they're just being totally unreasonable.. I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the other side believes the facts of the case are.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      The first possibility, that of inaccurate reporting, is always likely. If that turns out not to be the case, the next most likely possibility is probably not that these brilliant people who are paid extravagantly to create and maintain a wide array of popular products and services are "totally unreasonable". I would suggest that they might have a different cultural understanding of workplace privacy norms. Their different understanding might be "wrong" in a universal sense, but it isn't for that reason unreasonable. For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness; more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic, however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with more openness. Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is. Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you. Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)
spaceribs 7y ago
As an engineer, I revel in avoiding these monolithic supercorps. I don't know why anyone would want to work in centralizing innovation and creativity into the hands of a few greedy people.
- Swizec 7y ago
  It pays really well.
- pheug 7y ago
  The greed as well? Normal jobs aren't paying anything close to 200-300k+ that you'd be pulling at FAANG/HFT.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    $200k-$300k is now the 1-3 years out of new grad pay scale for those companies for what it’s worth.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates. Please stop peddling that as a negative trait.
    - omginternets 7y ago
      >There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about doing so despite negative ethical ramifications. This is (arguably) greedy behavior.
- cheeze 7y ago
  Money, "Impact", resources. This is a very HN comment, but I'm not sure how you can't see why someone would want to work for bigcorp...
chance_state 7y ago
>In the past, one of the employees said, employees could review internal documents for virtually any project underway within the company. In recent years, however, more projects have become closed off and accessible only to smaller groups on a “need-to-know” basis, the employee said. >Earlier this year, following a series of leaks to the media, Google executives tightened their grip. They shut down thousands of contractors’ access to company documents, citing security concerns. Google’s senior managers, meanwhile, warned employees not to access or share certain documents. Can someone explain what the controversy is here? It reads like two people exfiltrated documents and shared them with the media to further their political (?) ends, after being part of a larger group that was warned not to do so.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  It's Google so people post negative things here without reading the article.
- josefx 7y ago
  > Can someone explain what the controversy is here? Google had some rather controversial projects that officially got shutdown over employees being rightfully concerned. An example would be the highly censored Chinese dragonfly search engine. Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable.
  - chii 7y ago
    > Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable. it's daft, but upper management/owners can choose to do the most profitable project, and the employee's choices are to quit or comply (or give reasons why the project is not profitable, and offer an alternative). An employee cannot really complain/shutdown the project on moral/political-ideology grounds, at the cost of shareholder profit, while they themselves suffer no ill consequence (since they get paid a salary regardless).
seibelj 7y ago
How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they like.
- bleuedejapan 7y ago
  How is that related to Google's efforts to curb unionization?
  - lobotryas 7y ago
    Maybe because OP believes that google employees don’t have the right or reason to unionize. Or because they believe employees should not have the power to dictate what projects a company undertakes on ethical grounds. If someone believes they should have such powers then maybe Google is the wrong place for them.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  How do you square that with stuff like whether your company should, for example, support same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare, prayer rooms, etc?
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    > same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In Canada we have private insurance for things above and beyond basic health care, but only the government gets to decide who is a partner, dependant, etc... > prayer rooms Are they going to build chapels for every religion? Who decides which religions get chapels or prayer rooms? Or does only 1 religion get a prayer room because 2019 politics?
    - RobertRoberts 7y ago
lobotryas 7y ago
After what happened to Damore I am happy to hear that Google’s “activism” culture is finally getting pushback because they became bold enough to attack the company’s financial interests.
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  Executes realized that the "mob" is coming after them, not only their business, but after them on a personal stand point, and they would be right, so they are attempting to crackdown on it before a full on rebellion. It was "OK" when activism was directed at the competition or randos on social media or GitHub or "conservatives", and they encouraged it, not realizing these activists were extremists or had ties to ideologues. But one can be certain "Google 2020" will look more like "IBM 2010" than "Google 2010". This will be US election year soon, it's going to get nasty on all fronts.
Simulacra 7y ago
The farm is starting to get riled up.
Briel 7y ago
This was an interesting in-depth article about series of leaks and internal turmoil that Google experienced: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery... 1. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men. On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral inside Google. Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document had leaked to Gizmodo. 2. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically. There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups. 3. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color. For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them? 4. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google.
- xenyal 7y ago
  This sounds downright terrifying.
skissane 7y ago
> The documents concerned a mandatory tool that was recently installed on the Google Chrome browser on workers’ computers, the employees said. In October, some Google employees raised concerns that the Chrome extension was an internal surveillance tool designed to monitor their attempts to organize protests. It would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to an employee memo that outlined concerns about the tool From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)
- swiley 7y ago
  The monitors probably (correctly) aren’t authorized to use the API.
  - bonesss 7y ago
    The API is made to make automation around calendaring tasks easy. You can pull up appointments, see who booked them, and manage their state. (https://developers.google.com/calendar/overview https://developers.google.com/calendar/overview) Tracking activity in activity planning software isn't quite as nefarious as looking at peoples emails. Pulling up the meeting bookers boss and sending an email to them & legal is pretty bog standard integration work. As stated, I can't see any requirement for a client-side footprint...
- ajross 7y ago
  An extension is the kind of random IT junk companies push all the time. Pushing surveillance into the server side of a core product is rather more heavy an operation.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    But Google's core business is surveillance. Implementing it server-side could make it available as a GSuite feature. Bonus points for passing it through an opaque ML step for plausible deniability. "The 'culture fit' 'algorithm' determined that you hurt team cohesion".
xwdv 7y ago
At our company if the HR goes through your social media, and finds any evidence you may be socially activist or virtue signaling or otherwise very loudly proclaiming your disapproval of something some entity is doing, you will not be hired. You will not even get a call back. You will be labeled as a potential troublemaker (not in the good way) and be placed on the blacklist.
- purplezooey 7y ago
  Very not cool
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  And what if you do not give HR access to your social media?
  - xwdv 7y ago
    Let’s just say you can’t stop someone with administrative privileges.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Administrative privileges .... to what? There's no single social media administrative privilege across platforms that I'm aware of.
      - pheug 7y ago
        On company issued hardware it's a fair assumption to make that they log everything you do and MITM your HTTPS requests.
      - beerandt 7y ago
        I think the implication is that the employer is one of the platforms.
  - javagram 7y ago
    If you’re already keeping your social media protected/private, that seems like a pretty good sign that you’re not a political troublemaker or activist. Private social media accounts don’t have virality or reach. I keep my own twitter and facebook private because I have no interest in accidentally igniting a feeding frenzy if I post something wrong on social media. But it’s equally true that if I wanted to make a fuss about something at my employer or elsewhere, my posts will go nowhere since only a small number of people can see or access them.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Welcome to Bluechipworld, Google. Microsoft has been here for some time. Apple is still trying to get comfortable, but has picked out a favorite chaise lounge. Facebook should be showing up, any day, now.
kjgkjhfkjf 7y ago
Although it's generally quite hard to get fired from Google, leakers have always been dealt with severely. Google once upon a time fired a member of the original Macintosh team for leaking information about the Christmas bonus. My guess is that the increased closing off of various documents is to do with the increased amount of confidential partner-related information as Google scales its cloud business. But, as is often the case with Google, much of the disillusionment here seems to be due to unrealistic expectations and nostalgia. There have always been secretive projects at Google. Chrome was super-secret; you needed special authorization to get into the Google+ area; you needed special authorization to get into areas where new Android hardware was being worked with; you needed special authorization to get into the X area; etc.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Iv 7y ago
  > unrealistic expectations Basically thinking "Don't do evil" and being a profitable competitive corporation are compatible.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
    We will never know if it's just wishful thinking or not as Google chose the dark path and basically everybody hates them as much as FB. People still use their products as the're forced to, but are switching at the earliest occasion. So I don't know what the final result would be in the long run.
  - Nokinside 7y ago
    There is nothing evil in keeping company secrets secret.
    - dmos62 7y ago
      You're plain wrong. It always depends on the secret. Secret acts are just acts that some people don't know about. The debatable thing is if there are secrets that are not evil, which is difficult to answer.
sys_64738 7y ago
Is "Do No Evil" still a Google trademark? Seems like they've not used it for a long time so perhaps the TM expired.
- mason55 7y ago
  No, they dropped it a few years ago
  - V-eHGsd_ 7y ago
    it was don't be evil and no they didn't drop it. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ it's at the bottom.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      They moved it to the basement with Milton.
      - sys_64738 7y ago
        Bobs?
chkaloon 7y ago
Interesting the arms race in the incognito browser wars. One day I can read Bloomberg for free incognito, the next day they detect it. Then a Chrome update and the cycle repeats. Firefox seems to be a little behind in the fight. I do pay for sites I read on a regular basis. Can't justify a subscription for a once a month read, however. Maybe we need 99 cents per article model, kind of like buying songs on the old iTunes.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/vSZr8 http://archive.is/vSZr8
rounce 7y ago
Why 'staffer' instead of 'employee'?
sjg007 7y ago
From the outside, it sounds like Google is imploding...
s3r3nity 7y ago
Is it "tensions" if 1 or 2 out of 100's of 1000's of employees get fired?
teddyh 7y ago
It baffles me why anyone with any expectations of privacy would even work at Google in the first place. “Privacy for me, but not for thee”?
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights. Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear). This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost. James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own. Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with. Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds. Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren't hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it's not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.
- soup10 7y ago
  Every big firm brainwashes their employees to make a unified tribe and align interests with their business. It's fucked up but not against the law.
  - mlrtime 7y ago
    It's called company culture
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with. I've never worked for Google so I have no basis for comparison but it's very common across white collar jobs for employees social circles to very closely if not entirely overlap with work. Unless you participated in extracurricular activities that weren't school sponsored, you probably never learned to make friends outside of school. Work, like school, is how you develop your social circle. The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably in part due to the rise of teleworking. No longer do people grab a drink after work.
cryptica 7y ago
>> The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe It's very strange how often this idea of 'feeling unsafe' is coming up in the media now. It seems that either: - People have become more fragile/sensitive; or - People have become more aggressive. I think it may be both. I think corporations create extremely unnatural, oppressive and coercive environments which makes people more outwardly sensitive but inwardly more aggressive.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  A third possibility is that this has always existed and you weren't aware of it before.
  - dfalfndfk 7y ago
    As seen with the #MeToo movement among others -- there have been people, there are people, and there will be people whose voices are silenced. Not always explicitly.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It isn't corporate but whole societal really. Just look at the decades of "crime and punishment" DA campaigning and it certainly existed before then with literal lynch mobs and used to justify genocide. It is an emotional lever which has always been exploited essentially even if they called it something different.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  it's just a fashionable rhetorical lever
  - cryptica 7y ago
    I guess also employees are more likely to use 'feeling unsafe' as an excuse to get more control within the company. So for example, if you want to get someone fired in order to take their position, and that person is already in a difficult position for whatever reason, you can just say "That person makes me feel unsafe" as a way to break the camel's back and finally get your promotion.
buboard 7y ago
The Google news section sounds a lot like White House news lately.
yannis7 7y ago
and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei?
- ur-whale 7y ago
  > and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei? They're long gone, enjoying their billions, and left poor Sundar holding the bag like a deer in the headlights.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
auiya 7y ago
Tech worker unions are something that's probably been a long time coming. Rather than commit subversive outbursts putting your job in jeopardy, organize. You'll be much more effective in large numbers.
myga 7y ago
Good. Crush activists, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women.
- dang 7y ago
  Creating accounts to break the site guidelines will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

259 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I've liked many things about Google over the years and I still admire many parts of their stack. But this crazy internal political culture is bound to end in a big kaboom and it looks like this might be it. Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. Google has skirted this rule for some time but now it's not going to be pretty.

dustingetz 7y ago
seems less about Google and more about the balance of power shifting towards tech workers over the tech employer
- thephyber 7y ago
  It does seem like highly-valued engineering talent can get away with more than other commodity office workers. It also feels like many tech companies actively advertise "to millennials" by advertising that their culture is the kind of place at which "you want to work". When that company/mission starts to lose its polish[1], it becomes harder to recruit for that talent[2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-recruit-since-cambridge-analytica-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-re...
- underpand 7y ago
  Unfortunately, it's mostly non-eng and colorful SREs who are representing the supposed "tech worker" in these politically charged movements if you cross-reference the names that appear in public articles with LinkedIn profiles.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    What makes those types of people less necessary tech workers than other types of tech workers?
ahelwer 7y ago
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business This 'rule' is a purely artificial construct encouraged to ensure the common employees keep their heads down and let those in charge continue screwing over them and/or society. The history of organized labor involves no less than straight murder of labor activists by company owners.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Not really, the politics rule is more because in a reasonably diverse workforce will have supporters of all sorts of stupid ideas and it is not fruitful to have people arguing about them on company time. There is a lot of tension in labour relations but no-politics-in-the-workplace philosophies cover a lot more than that.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  There is no good faith argument here that can paint with so broad a brush; organized labor is also not free from extreme acts of violence and extortion.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Yeah, no. I broadly agree with the what many activists at tech companies are supporting, but think that its deliberate attempts to make the workplace more political are unproductive or backfiring. When it gets to the point that a significant percentage of employees are feigning or exaggerating support for political positions to fit in, you have a problem. And the tech companies I've worked at in the SF Bay Area for the last four years have been in that position.
  - rtpg 7y ago
    fighting against the creation of a union is just as a political act as trying to create one (as an example). Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers our emplyoer has" is a political act. Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.
Pfhreak 7y ago
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. This works until you must, by necessity, either mix work and politics or suffer some indignity. Advocating for parental leave? Politics. Mothers rooms? Politics. Prayer rooms? Politics. Trans inclusive health care? Politics. Domestic partner benefits? Politics. Unfortunately, for many folks politics at work is a reality whether they want them to be or not, just because of who they are.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Advocating for parental leave? Politics. Mothers rooms? Politics. Prayer rooms? Politics. Trans inclusive health care? Politics. Domestic partner benefits? Politics. Yep all politics. As political issues they should be dealt with in the political arena of whichever branch of government is responsible. If you strongly believe in these rights and priveleges you'd be spending your time advocating for universal access to them. Doing it on a per company basis is ineffective and selfish, there will always be a race to the bottom and it gives your competitors an advantage.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Companies should only do the minimum required by law? We only win if everyone gets the benefit? I disagree, you are making perfect the enemy of good. The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution".
    - flukus 7y ago
      > Companies should only do the minimum required by law? Whether they should or not is irrelevant, it's what they do. Companies com and go, companies that spend more than they have to tend to go faster, employers change even more frequently. Do you want to put up this fight every time you change employers? Do you want to be stuck at one employer because changing jobs means losing benefits? > We only win if everyone gets the benefit? I don't consider getting these benefits for the privileged few with job mobility to be much of a win. Even for them it's probably not a long term win. > The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution". It's not the only solution just the best solution, more unionization would be another solution that's way better than a piecemeal company by company approach though. The government solution also offers up some much better alternatives in cases like healthcare.
thephyber 7y ago
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. I don't know anything about what's happening at Google, but this either involves some talented mental gymnastics or it's obviously false. Places of business have politics. Always have, always will. Internal politics and very frequently most companies involve themselves in local/state/national/international politics. - Joining a chamber of commerce or a trade organization is participating in politics. - Having a PR campaign or a lobbyist which affects public attitudes or legislation is politics. - Sponsored an ice rink in the middle of small town Texas[1] (hint: it's a symbol that the company, even though it is based in South Korea, depends very much on the good will of jurors and judges in that smallish town). What's happening at multiple tech giants is that traditionally the sway in company-politics remains within the board and a few key org units (PR, governmental outreach, legal, etc). The differentiators now are: - high quality talent is scarce (hence all of the famous Yahoo/Google/Facebook/etc perks for engineers), - the transparency of associations[2][3], - the political climate of associations (eg. [4][5]), and - boycotts (of many forms) can hurt the bottom dollar[6]. Sometimes it has the opposite effect[7]. Let's not pretend like Google is unique nor that businesses have a strict "Chinese Wall" between politics and business. As Mitt Romney said, "Businesses are people", and politics exists because people are people. [1] https://ipcloseup.com/2015/02/25/for-samsung-charity-begins-at-home-marshall-texas/ https://ipcloseup.com/2015/02/25/for-samsung-charity-begins-... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/facebook-employees-reportedly-outraged-at-exec-at-kavanaugh-hearing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/facebook-employees-reportedl... [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... [4] https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/harvard-professor-ron-sullivan-weinstein-video/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/harvard-professor-ron-sull... [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charlottesville-white-nationalist-demonstrator-fired-from-libertarian-hot-dog-shop/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl... [6] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-bill-oreilly-advertiser-boycott-127520/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/insi... [7] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/nike-reports-double-digit-profit-growth-after-colin-kaepernick-controversy https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/nike-reports-dou...
thundergolfer 7y ago
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. "Evolution has"? Are you invoking evo-psych to say politics and business don't mix. It's really quite amazing how the dominant corporate ideology has become so invisible that people think that by going to work and doing whatever your boss says to do is somehow devoid of political involvement. Pretending "business" has nothing to do with politics is absurd. You can only believe it if you think corporate capitalism is apolitical.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. You mean, the power of the ruling class has created the rules that ruled class doesn't mix challenging their masters in with their service that is required for their survival. Because politics and business are deeply mixed when you look at the ruling (capitalist) class, your “evolution” rule doesn't apply there. And politics that involve bootlicking for their particular masters is also rewarded in the working class, your “evolution” rule.dorsnt apply there, either. It's only politics that challenges one’s capitalist masters (usually embodied in a corporate employer) that is discouraged.

hliyan 7y ago

Sometimes, people problems can't be solved by technological means. Sometimes you just have to talk to people. A while back I was contemplating introducing a small app for team members to express sentiments (whether they're feeling stressed, satisfied, unappreciated, worried etc), but I eventually decided that nothing beats a private conversation.

catalogia 7y ago
The theory behind managers soliciting anonymous comments from workers is that this cuts through preference falsification. Preference falsification is when somebody lies about their beliefs or opinions, often due to perceived social pressure or lack of trust. Preference falsification is a real problem, not just in business settings but throughout the broad domain of human interaction. Unfortunately soliciting anonymous comments is often ineffective at combating preference falsification because when a boss tells their workers that comments are anonymous, the workers simply don't believe it (and often they're right not to.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
- lobotryas 7y ago
  I love getting “anonymous” quarterly employee surveys that have a unique ID embedded in the URL. That’s not even trying.
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    The anonymous ID is fine, and not the way you’re going to be outed. They aren’t lying to you. A manager of a handful of employees generally knows what their employees sound like, what issues are important to them, and knows which ones tend to go against the grain.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    They generally want some way to make sure the same person isn't filling out the survey multiple times.
- 7y ago

tehjoker 7y ago

"The tracking had made the staff of those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said." ...said the largest worldwide private spy agency the world has ever known.

intrnttrll 7y ago
They can't stand a little taste of their own medicine.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
Maybe this will wake some people up. Up to now their mantra was "we're not doing anything illegal." Yes, it might not be illegal (at least not yet), but you're acting against the wishes and interests of your users, and you can clearly notice it when the same machine is used against you.
throw_m239339 7y ago
"unsafe" is clearly hyperbolic here, their physical safety isn't threatened. Their "safe place" AKA ideologic echo chamber? Sure.
- toraobo 7y ago
  > A Google spokeswoman said the company is investigating the employees who were placed on leave. One of them had searched for and shared confidential documents outside the scope of their job, while the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said. This sounds like actual harassment of individual employees who happen to work in a department that is seen as "the enemy".

catalogia 7y ago

> " the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said. [...] The suspensions have been a hot topic of discussion at the company in the last week, stoking anger among some workers and prompting claims that Google is punishing people who have taken a stand against management" To what extent do the involved parties agree on the facts as presented in this article? It seems incredible that any Google employees would be upset that somebody was fired for what amounts to stalking other employees. I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, or they're just being totally unreasonable..

jessaustin 7y ago
Is that a good way to cope with confusing events, to assume that other people are just being totally unreasonable?
- catalogia 7y ago
  > I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, _OR_ they're just being totally unreasonable.. I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the other side believes the facts of the case are.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    The first possibility, that of inaccurate reporting, is always likely. If that turns out not to be the case, the next most likely possibility is probably not that these brilliant people who are paid extravagantly to create and maintain a wide array of popular products and services are "totally unreasonable". I would suggest that they might have a different cultural understanding of workplace privacy norms. Their different understanding might be "wrong" in a universal sense, but it isn't for that reason unreasonable. For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness; more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic, however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with more openness. Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is. Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you. Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)

spaceribs 7y ago

As an engineer, I revel in avoiding these monolithic supercorps. I don't know why anyone would want to work in centralizing innovation and creativity into the hands of a few greedy people.

Swizec 7y ago
It pays really well.
pheug 7y ago
The greed as well? Normal jobs aren't paying anything close to 200-300k+ that you'd be pulling at FAANG/HFT.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  $200k-$300k is now the 1-3 years out of new grad pay scale for those companies for what it’s worth.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mav3rick 7y ago
  There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates. Please stop peddling that as a negative trait.
  - omginternets 7y ago
    >There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about doing so despite negative ethical ramifications. This is (arguably) greedy behavior.
cheeze 7y ago
Money, "Impact", resources. This is a very HN comment, but I'm not sure how you can't see why someone would want to work for bigcorp...

chance_state 7y ago

>In the past, one of the employees said, employees could review internal documents for virtually any project underway within the company. In recent years, however, more projects have become closed off and accessible only to smaller groups on a “need-to-know” basis, the employee said. >Earlier this year, following a series of leaks to the media, Google executives tightened their grip. They shut down thousands of contractors’ access to company documents, citing security concerns. Google’s senior managers, meanwhile, warned employees not to access or share certain documents. Can someone explain what the controversy is here? It reads like two people exfiltrated documents and shared them with the media to further their political (?) ends, after being part of a larger group that was warned not to do so.

mav3rick 7y ago
It's Google so people post negative things here without reading the article.
josefx 7y ago
> Can someone explain what the controversy is here? Google had some rather controversial projects that officially got shutdown over employees being rightfully concerned. An example would be the highly censored Chinese dragonfly search engine. Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable.
- chii 7y ago
  > Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable. it's daft, but upper management/owners can choose to do the most profitable project, and the employee's choices are to quit or comply (or give reasons why the project is not profitable, and offer an alternative). An employee cannot really complain/shutdown the project on moral/political-ideology grounds, at the cost of shareholder profit, while they themselves suffer no ill consequence (since they get paid a salary regardless).

seibelj 7y ago

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they like.

bleuedejapan 7y ago
How is that related to Google's efforts to curb unionization?
- lobotryas 7y ago
  Maybe because OP believes that google employees don’t have the right or reason to unionize. Or because they believe employees should not have the power to dictate what projects a company undertakes on ethical grounds. If someone believes they should have such powers then maybe Google is the wrong place for them.
Pfhreak 7y ago
How do you square that with stuff like whether your company should, for example, support same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare, prayer rooms, etc?
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  > same sex partner benefits, trans inclusive healthcare Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In Canada we have private insurance for things above and beyond basic health care, but only the government gets to decide who is a partner, dependant, etc... > prayer rooms Are they going to build chapels for every religion? Who decides which religions get chapels or prayer rooms? Or does only 1 religion get a prayer room because 2019 politics?
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago

lobotryas 7y ago

After what happened to Damore I am happy to hear that Google’s “activism” culture is finally getting pushback because they became bold enough to attack the company’s financial interests.

throw_m239339 7y ago
Executes realized that the "mob" is coming after them, not only their business, but after them on a personal stand point, and they would be right, so they are attempting to crackdown on it before a full on rebellion. It was "OK" when activism was directed at the competition or randos on social media or GitHub or "conservatives", and they encouraged it, not realizing these activists were extremists or had ties to ideologues. But one can be certain "Google 2020" will look more like "IBM 2010" than "Google 2010". This will be US election year soon, it's going to get nasty on all fronts.

Simulacra 7y ago

The farm is starting to get riled up.

Briel 7y ago

This was an interesting in-depth article about series of leaks and internal turmoil that Google experienced: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery... 1. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men. On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral inside Google. Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document had leaked to Gizmodo. 2. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically. There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups. 3. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color. For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them? 4. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google.

xenyal 7y ago
This sounds downright terrifying.

skissane 7y ago

> The documents concerned a mandatory tool that was recently installed on the Google Chrome browser on workers’ computers, the employees said. In October, some Google employees raised concerns that the Chrome extension was an internal surveillance tool designed to monitor their attempts to organize protests. It would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to an employee memo that outlined concerns about the tool From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)

swiley 7y ago
The monitors probably (correctly) aren’t authorized to use the API.
- bonesss 7y ago
  The API is made to make automation around calendaring tasks easy. You can pull up appointments, see who booked them, and manage their state. (https://developers.google.com/calendar/overview https://developers.google.com/calendar/overview) Tracking activity in activity planning software isn't quite as nefarious as looking at peoples emails. Pulling up the meeting bookers boss and sending an email to them & legal is pretty bog standard integration work. As stated, I can't see any requirement for a client-side footprint...
ajross 7y ago
An extension is the kind of random IT junk companies push all the time. Pushing surveillance into the server side of a core product is rather more heavy an operation.
- mindslight 7y ago
  But Google's core business is surveillance. Implementing it server-side could make it available as a GSuite feature. Bonus points for passing it through an opaque ML step for plausible deniability. "The 'culture fit' 'algorithm' determined that you hurt team cohesion".

xwdv 7y ago

At our company if the HR goes through your social media, and finds any evidence you may be socially activist or virtue signaling or otherwise very loudly proclaiming your disapproval of something some entity is doing, you will not be hired. You will not even get a call back. You will be labeled as a potential troublemaker (not in the good way) and be placed on the blacklist.

purplezooey 7y ago
Very not cool
inferiorhuman 7y ago
And what if you do not give HR access to your social media?
- xwdv 7y ago
  Let’s just say you can’t stop someone with administrative privileges.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Administrative privileges .... to what? There's no single social media administrative privilege across platforms that I'm aware of.
    - pheug 7y ago
      On company issued hardware it's a fair assumption to make that they log everything you do and MITM your HTTPS requests.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      I think the implication is that the employer is one of the platforms.
- javagram 7y ago
  If you’re already keeping your social media protected/private, that seems like a pretty good sign that you’re not a political troublemaker or activist. Private social media accounts don’t have virality or reach. I keep my own twitter and facebook private because I have no interest in accidentally igniting a feeding frenzy if I post something wrong on social media. But it’s equally true that if I wanted to make a fuss about something at my employer or elsewhere, my posts will go nowhere since only a small number of people can see or access them.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Welcome to Bluechipworld, Google. Microsoft has been here for some time. Apple is still trying to get comfortable, but has picked out a favorite chaise lounge. Facebook should be showing up, any day, now.

kjgkjhfkjf 7y ago

Although it's generally quite hard to get fired from Google, leakers have always been dealt with severely. Google once upon a time fired a member of the original Macintosh team for leaking information about the Christmas bonus. My guess is that the increased closing off of various documents is to do with the increased amount of confidential partner-related information as Google scales its cloud business. But, as is often the case with Google, much of the disillusionment here seems to be due to unrealistic expectations and nostalgia. There have always been secretive projects at Google. Chrome was super-secret; you needed special authorization to get into the Google+ area; you needed special authorization to get into areas where new Android hardware was being worked with; you needed special authorization to get into the X area; etc.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Iv 7y ago
> unrealistic expectations Basically thinking "Don't do evil" and being a profitable competitive corporation are compatible.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  We will never know if it's just wishful thinking or not as Google chose the dark path and basically everybody hates them as much as FB. People still use their products as the're forced to, but are switching at the earliest occasion. So I don't know what the final result would be in the long run.
- Nokinside 7y ago
  There is nothing evil in keeping company secrets secret.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    You're plain wrong. It always depends on the secret. Secret acts are just acts that some people don't know about. The debatable thing is if there are secrets that are not evil, which is difficult to answer.

sys_64738 7y ago

Is "Do No Evil" still a Google trademark? Seems like they've not used it for a long time so perhaps the TM expired.

mason55 7y ago
No, they dropped it a few years ago
- V-eHGsd_ 7y ago
  it was don't be evil and no they didn't drop it. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ it's at the bottom.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    They moved it to the basement with Milton.
    - sys_64738 7y ago
      Bobs?

chkaloon 7y ago

Interesting the arms race in the incognito browser wars. One day I can read Bloomberg for free incognito, the next day they detect it. Then a Chrome update and the cycle repeats. Firefox seems to be a little behind in the fight. I do pay for sites I read on a regular basis. Can't justify a subscription for a once a month read, however. Maybe we need 99 cents per article model, kind of like buying songs on the old iTunes.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/vSZr8 http://archive.is/vSZr8

rounce 7y ago

Why 'staffer' instead of 'employee'?

sjg007 7y ago

From the outside, it sounds like Google is imploding...

s3r3nity 7y ago

Is it "tensions" if 1 or 2 out of 100's of 1000's of employees get fired?

teddyh 7y ago

It baffles me why anyone with any expectations of privacy would even work at Google in the first place. “Privacy for me, but not for thee”?

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights. Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear). This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost. James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own. Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with. Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds. Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren't hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it's not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.

soup10 7y ago
Every big firm brainwashes their employees to make a unified tribe and align interests with their business. It's fucked up but not against the law.
- mlrtime 7y ago
  It's called company culture
cptskippy 7y ago
> Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with. I've never worked for Google so I have no basis for comparison but it's very common across white collar jobs for employees social circles to very closely if not entirely overlap with work. Unless you participated in extracurricular activities that weren't school sponsored, you probably never learned to make friends outside of school. Work, like school, is how you develop your social circle. The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably in part due to the rise of teleworking. No longer do people grab a drink after work.

cryptica 7y ago

>> The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe It's very strange how often this idea of 'feeling unsafe' is coming up in the media now. It seems that either: - People have become more fragile/sensitive; or - People have become more aggressive. I think it may be both. I think corporations create extremely unnatural, oppressive and coercive environments which makes people more outwardly sensitive but inwardly more aggressive.

jacques_chester 7y ago
A third possibility is that this has always existed and you weren't aware of it before.
- dfalfndfk 7y ago
  As seen with the #MeToo movement among others -- there have been people, there are people, and there will be people whose voices are silenced. Not always explicitly.
Nasrudith 7y ago
It isn't corporate but whole societal really. Just look at the decades of "crime and punishment" DA campaigning and it certainly existed before then with literal lynch mobs and used to justify genocide. It is an emotional lever which has always been exploited essentially even if they called it something different.
nyolfen 7y ago
it's just a fashionable rhetorical lever
- cryptica 7y ago
  I guess also employees are more likely to use 'feeling unsafe' as an excuse to get more control within the company. So for example, if you want to get someone fired in order to take their position, and that person is already in a difficult position for whatever reason, you can just say "That person makes me feel unsafe" as a way to break the camel's back and finally get your promotion.

buboard 7y ago

The Google news section sounds a lot like White House news lately.

yannis7 7y ago

and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei?

ur-whale 7y ago
> and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei? They're long gone, enjoying their billions, and left poor Sundar holding the bag like a deer in the headlights.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

auiya 7y ago

Tech worker unions are something that's probably been a long time coming. Rather than commit subversive outbursts putting your job in jeopardy, organize. You'll be much more effective in large numbers.

myga 7y ago

Good. Crush activists, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women.

dang 7y ago
Creating accounts to break the site guidelines will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html