15 ms·

Google under investigation for ‘Thanksgiving Four’ firings, discouraging unions

205 points by SirLJ 7y ago

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Google has already been convicted in a wage fixing scheme with other Silicon Valley firms. They wouldn’t even interview me when I was trying to leave Apple. I made a cool $3k from the settlement. Guys, hey guys, I’m starting to think the “Don’t be evil” thing has always been bullshit, at least when it comes to workers rights.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Yeah a corporation isn't some cooperative integrated intelligence making decisions. Its hundreds of managers all working fairly independently. Hard for it to be anything but a vegetative growth, that locally optimizes for more growth.
  - istjohn 7y ago
    Corporations are typically highly coordinated, hierarchical organizations with a chain of command that leads from the CEO to frontline employees. No, CEO's are not omniscient, but they have significant control over company culture and policy and should bear responsibility for patterns of corporate misbehavior. Corporations are absolutely capable of weighing benefits and risks to itself and outside stakeholders and making and acting on decisions.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      And managers are motivated to locally optimize their part of the whole. CEO can blather on all they want about corporate morals. But if the managers are rewarded on how efficiently they deploy their resources (and they are), then any rational manager will do that. Locally optimize. Just look at what measure the manager's bonus depends upon, and you can substantially predict their behavior. Giant companies are not just a CEO and some managers. There are typically half a dozen layers between the CEO and the footsoldier. And its the middle layer folks that create the true behavior of the beast.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      This is incredibly untrue of Google, and every other organization I've ever worked in (excluding the tiny ones). I can't imagine how you could've come to this conclusion while ever having worked at a corporation (or indeed, any institution above a certain very low floor of employees). Note that this isn't directly relevant to the case under discussion, which was coordinated at the CEO level
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    I can say with confidence that managers at Google are not even fairly independent. Lots of pressure (and toxicity) can float down from higher up in the org chart. My first eng manager at Google was really mistreated by people higher up in the org and as a result didn't have much freedom to make things right for our team (or our project, which generally struggled a lot as a result). This is not extrapolation or speculation: He confirmed it to me. If anything, I think engineers at Google probably have more independence and freedom than managers do, because they're really only accountable for their own work and personal results. Managers have to corral all those independent engineers into a group they can get away with taking responsibility for, and the upper levels of the chain don't always act in a way that acknowledges how hard management can be. The disconnect also means that "best for a manager's career" is not automatically going to be compatible with the career health of their reports. The gap between "labor" and "management" in this scenario is also a great example of why unions for labor are important - it's very difficult to represent the needs of both labor and management collectively, so a good method is for them to each bargain collectively based on their own needs and interests.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Unclear where that's going? Sounds like, managers are responsible for measures (unspecified?) that are not in alignment with direct reports' interests. Sure, agreed. Managers are almost always responsible for some fiscal efficiency measure. Which is why they 'locally optimize'. Right?
      - kevingadd 7y ago
        My argument is that in many cases it's not local optimization at all. It's not optimal for anyone, their freedom is constrained by upper level management (the hierarchy / the corporation / the hivemind) which means neither the managers or their reports have freedom. If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results. Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough. If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation): * Give him a raise so he stays * Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them * Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap * Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution * Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    From: Arnon Geshuri (Google Senior Staffing Strategist) ... On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else. ... From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources) Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences. From Eric Schmidt: Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric From Steve Jobs: :) From Sergei Brin: Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those. Source: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s... Edit: Fixed the Shona Brown email. She's on the board of Atlassian now so I guess avoid those people too.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Yeah at the highest management levels, managers (VPs?) are responsible to CEO direction. But at middle manager levels (hundreds of people, not a handful, in very large companies) they're not directly responsible to the CEO. Nor are they directly responsible to the customer/market. They're in 'middle management limbo' where all they have to work with, is local incentives. Usually financial - optimize the budget for results. Sadly, this usually ends with middle managers trying to maximize their budget and minimize their required output, to increase their chances of success. Which means, the most expensive product possible. That's what I mean by 'locally optimize'.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        That's a much more general point than the specific one at issue, which is the CEOs illegally conspiring to not hire staff from each other and terminating someone who refused to go along with the illegal conspiracy. This wasn't something the managers organically came up with.
- estomagordo 7y ago
  Wait, what, you received a damages payment because a company wouldn't interview you?
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Because a company illegally colluded with their competitors not to interview them. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/apple-google-intel-adobe-to-pay-325-million-to-settle-hiring-lawsuit-idUSBREA4M0MY20140523 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/a...
    - twinge 7y ago
      Interviews were allowed, but recruiters weren't allowed to make the initial contact with employees.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        Given the high level attention involved - direct emails between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt - I'd fully expect that policy to bleed over into "don't interview/hire" to avoid any appearance of having recruited them.
  - burkaman 7y ago
    In a class action lawsuit, where the company was accused of conspiring with several other companies to keep wages artificially low.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    I received damages because I was employed by one of the companies found guilty in the conspiracy. The settlement was so low that the judge threw it out initially. The fact that they didn’t interview me is just the real outcome of their policy. They called me, unprompted, about 2 months after I left Apple.
  - estomagordo 7y ago
    Thanks, all, for clarifying. Still not sure I think it sounds entirely reasonable. But makes a lot more sense to me now. (Am not American).
- billman 7y ago
  I have always thought of corporations as a system that reacts to the forces working upon and within it.
  - cartoonworld 7y ago
    They sure are, I call those forces "Greenbacks".
    - billman 7y ago
      true dat
- Pigo 7y ago
  >a cool $3K I'm sorry you didn't get more from the settlement, but at least you were able to write something on here that made me laugh.
- strathmeyer 7y ago
  I interviewed at Google. They didn't want to hire me, but called me back every year for five years to ask what I was up to until I asked them to stop. That's not normal. I even remember when Google started hiring in the early aughts. Instead of asking for resumes from you directly, they asked you to submit the resumes of any smart people you know. That's not normal.
  - beckler 7y ago
    Asking for other peoples resumes is becoming the new normal for some recruiters. I view it as desperation more than anything else.
    - Pmop 7y ago
      Also, by sending other peoples resumes, aren't you doing the job the recruiter is being paid to (or at least part of it)?
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    When I was in undergrad, a Google recruiter found my resume and contacted me about an internship. Google decided I didn't have enough background and they wouldn't even offer me a phone interview - meaning they made the decision purely on that same resume. Fair enough, they probably sent it to an engineer who disagreed. But two days later, another recruiter with no knowledge of the first messaged me about my "very interesting resume". I still hear from their recruiters at semi-random, each saying they're my "new point of contact at Google". Sometimes there's nothing for a year, then I'll get two "new points of contact' within one week. Recruiting is always a mess, but it's a bit surprising to see an in-house team get up to the same antics I expect from third party services. The most recent approach was the most persuasive, though: Dear [appplicant], I'm writing to because I saw your resume and I think you could be a great fit for Google. I'm particularly interested in your work with [background], which I think prepares you very well for [position].
  - tnecniv 7y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if they stole this from academic hiring. It's well known that, when professors go up for tenure at Harvard, their recommenders are required to list other people they think Harvard might want to consider hiring for the spot.
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  Did you have to interact with a lawyer? There've been a few times where I think it would have been to my advantage to talk to a lawyer about corporate wrongdoings, but I've never known how to go about it, and have zero experience dealing with them.
- Pmop 7y ago
  Wow. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that their engagement in the "make software development more accessible" thing is actually intended to increase supply, and then decrease wages accordingly.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  What does this have to do with OP's article? These non-poaching agreements (Wall Street has them also) are not related to Union law. I doubt it's even the same people in the company that write these two different policies.
  - blueboo 7y ago
    It shows a guy who confused correlation for causation got laid off at Apple.
raxxorrax 7y ago
They will probably get an extremely high and disproportionate severance package as is American tradition. But nobody even similar will ever get hired again. Instead Google probably will just pay consultants on how to keep employees in line without them noticing. Perhaps internal data sharing will also be restricted more.
mrobot 7y ago
We need a tech worker's union. And technology around communication and setting up strikes etc.
- murph-almighty 7y ago
  I've thought about this a bit. I don't think we'd get much public sympathy from a working conditions standpoint- generally if you're working for the right place you can arguably make more money than most of your non-engineer peers (look at a percentile breakdown of your annual income if you don't believe me). I think the way a union like this could succeed is by fighting Big Brother-esque projects and refusing to work on initiatives such as Project Butterfly. Sell it as "we refuse to work on technology that will objectively make you (the layman's) life worse". Once we hit a critical mass we'd have a much bigger say over what projects do and don't get built, and anyone who scabs is arguably on the wrong side of the moral coin or "enabling Big Brother/technocratic billionaires". This isn't to say that tech workers should be the ultimate moral arbiter, but having a non-financially driven check would at least help.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    I think I agree on the public sympathy point, but if anything I think tech workers should assume they will never have public support. Bargaining collectively is the only way that the average tech worker will be able to take steps that might make the public feel as if they can trust us to be on their side. Given what many of our employers do (collectively, as a company) it's hard to expect the average member of the public to look at that and assume tech workers are fighting the good fight.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      I think it's entirely plausible for a tech worker's union to build public support around any number of popular causes, e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kevmo 7y ago
They'll get hit with some small monetary penalty. Nothing is going to change until we replace our anti-worker government with pro-worker government.
- elicash 7y ago
  I hope this doesn't stay downvoted, because it best reflects the sad state of labor law. The MOST they'd get is back-pay if Google loses. But truthfully, most people have to find another job when they lose their job, so that new paycheck is deducted from their "damages" and you subtract what they earned while fired from their backpay. GENERALLY-speaking, there would not be punitive damages. That's why there's usually no disincentive to not just fire the worker who is organizing. The potential payout is tiny to the company.
- luxuryballs 7y ago
  Why should they get a penalty at all? We want things like freedom of speech but not freedom of who we allow inside our private lives?
  - shantly 7y ago
    ... uh, what?
BickNowstrom 7y ago
That's two cases where politicians jumped the gun to make something that isn't decided yet a decisive campaign issue: - Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims - The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged “anti-union” actions. What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified? Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point out they were the first when it turns out any other way...
- kevingadd 7y ago
  The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender. They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH and his wife struggled at length to even get an explanation for the problem or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care whether it turns out to be about gender, because the end result of that system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a racist: It just means you have to fix it. Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves that way in public and selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I know who I'm going to suspect.
  - 7y ago
sigzero 7y ago
I don't see Google losing.
whb07 7y ago
It is astonishing the continuous attempts by the highest paid workers, in one of the most well-known companies in the world, to keep trying to bring down the "system". The only thing i can think of is "bite the hand that feeds you". Do the extremely "woke" crowd working in such high tech companies know what could happen to their salaries and perks if they are to be part of a highly regulated industry, or they haven't thought about the second/third order effects yet? Do these supporters know that they can go work at other places that don't pay $200k+, so that they too can go live like the regular people? I'm pretty sure that there are N number of refugee camps that could use a basic application built to keep track of refugees. But of course, that doesn't come with 3 chef prepared meals per day and dry cleaning in house.
- unionize 7y ago
  Oh, the delicious irony! Did you know that not 100 years ago, workers were murdered for going on strike for things like work weeks lower than 60-80 hours? Companies had their own police forces, and they paid you in company scrip. A lot of blood was shed so you could be tone-deaf and ignorant of the labor movement in the United States, all from a comfy office chair and with plenty of time left over to see your family at the end of the day. If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. I don’t want to argue the morality of it, but it happens over and over again. Amazon workers are having the same fights their great grandparents did (fighting for the right not to get killed at work, the right to a decent wage, the right to a goddamn bathroom break that doesn’t get you fired). Tech workers aren’t immune either. Sure, we’re more mobile than most, but that’s still not great leverage. Your employer has more power over you than you do over them. Without a union, this is always true. If you’re fine being potentially fucked that way, that’s your prerogative.
  - whb07 7y ago
    The issue is I don’t believe you’ve ever worked in such places. I also know such “evil places” aren’t good at what they do, hence the weird tactics and shitty management you’re hyperbolizing.
  - thu2111 7y ago
seibelj 7y ago
I’m pretty sure a union shop vote of software engineers would be defeated 80/20 but it would be fun to see someone at google try. These organizers live in fantasy land!
- advisedwang 7y ago
  That's true, although I suspect if Google keeps firing people on trumped-up accusations whenever they criticize management, more people may feel they want an organization set up to defend them.
  - xibalba 7y ago
    > trumped-up accusations So are you alleging that this... > We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and work... ...is trumped-up? I have not seen any articles which dispute that these fired employees were basically tracking other employees work activities.
- drewrv 7y ago
  Then why would management try to crush any organizing activity? Couldn't Sundar just say, "Interesting idea, let's take a vote"
  - zbyte64 7y ago
    But that would be more akin to free speech and the marketplace of ideas. If the internet has taught me anything, when you're on the clock the employer/baron owns your speech.
baud147258 7y ago
Interesting how the article gloss over the fact that, according to Google, the four fired employees were actually stalking other Google employees to check if they were working on projects they didn’t like – namely, an in-development cloud services for US border cops. Now that the politics are getting involved, it will get worse before it gets any better.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  Watch HN gloss over it too. No one discusses this.
- advisedwang 7y ago
  I think you forgot to say "According to Google". Of course Google says they did nothing wrong.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    True. I added that to my comment, thank you.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  As more and more teenagers flood Reddit, more and more young adults flood HN. ...and so the cycle of quality boom-bust of the threads continues and we see more knee-jerk emotional content like this. Where is everyone going next so I can stay ahead of the game?
  - fred_is_fred 7y ago
    I've read your comment several time and have yet to make actual sense of this. Is your assertion that the parent comment is bad because it's made by a "young adult"?
    - koheripbal 7y ago
      Somewhat. My assertion is that HN quality has dropped significantly in the last year. This post is an advocacy post - it lacks objectivity and rigor. My additional assertion is that this is happening more on HN because the demographic of HN is changing to a younger crowd - and my final theory is that that is happening because more young adults are coming here in an effort to escape the further demographic changes on Reddit.
m0zg 7y ago
Now that Sundar "McKinsey" Pichai runs the whole thing, you can expect much more of this, irrespective of the outcome of this investigation. In fact, it looks like you can expect more of this at all top tech firms. Just the other day Bezos came out with his "screw the activist employees" thing. Nadella (and MS in general) never really had any sympathy for activist employees in the first place (although they're going full bore on "diversity", openly and unabashedly discriminating against men in their hiring). I also never head any stories of glorious activism from Netflix. That leaves Facebook. I'm pretty sure Zuck is tired of this bullshit as well.

205 points by SirLJ 7y ago

Google has already been convicted in a wage fixing scheme with other Silicon Valley firms. They wouldn’t even interview me when I was trying to leave Apple. I made a cool $3k from the settlement. Guys, hey guys, I’m starting to think the “Don’t be evil” thing has always been bullshit, at least when it comes to workers rights.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Yeah a corporation isn't some cooperative integrated intelligence making decisions. Its hundreds of managers all working fairly independently. Hard for it to be anything but a vegetative growth, that locally optimizes for more growth.
- istjohn 7y ago
  Corporations are typically highly coordinated, hierarchical organizations with a chain of command that leads from the CEO to frontline employees. No, CEO's are not omniscient, but they have significant control over company culture and policy and should bear responsibility for patterns of corporate misbehavior. Corporations are absolutely capable of weighing benefits and risks to itself and outside stakeholders and making and acting on decisions.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    And managers are motivated to locally optimize their part of the whole. CEO can blather on all they want about corporate morals. But if the managers are rewarded on how efficiently they deploy their resources (and they are), then any rational manager will do that. Locally optimize. Just look at what measure the manager's bonus depends upon, and you can substantially predict their behavior. Giant companies are not just a CEO and some managers. There are typically half a dozen layers between the CEO and the footsoldier. And its the middle layer folks that create the true behavior of the beast.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    This is incredibly untrue of Google, and every other organization I've ever worked in (excluding the tiny ones). I can't imagine how you could've come to this conclusion while ever having worked at a corporation (or indeed, any institution above a certain very low floor of employees). Note that this isn't directly relevant to the case under discussion, which was coordinated at the CEO level
- kevingadd 7y ago
  I can say with confidence that managers at Google are not even fairly independent. Lots of pressure (and toxicity) can float down from higher up in the org chart. My first eng manager at Google was really mistreated by people higher up in the org and as a result didn't have much freedom to make things right for our team (or our project, which generally struggled a lot as a result). This is not extrapolation or speculation: He confirmed it to me. If anything, I think engineers at Google probably have more independence and freedom than managers do, because they're really only accountable for their own work and personal results. Managers have to corral all those independent engineers into a group they can get away with taking responsibility for, and the upper levels of the chain don't always act in a way that acknowledges how hard management can be. The disconnect also means that "best for a manager's career" is not automatically going to be compatible with the career health of their reports. The gap between "labor" and "management" in this scenario is also a great example of why unions for labor are important - it's very difficult to represent the needs of both labor and management collectively, so a good method is for them to each bargain collectively based on their own needs and interests.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Unclear where that's going? Sounds like, managers are responsible for measures (unspecified?) that are not in alignment with direct reports' interests. Sure, agreed. Managers are almost always responsible for some fiscal efficiency measure. Which is why they 'locally optimize'. Right?
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      My argument is that in many cases it's not local optimization at all. It's not optimal for anyone, their freedom is constrained by upper level management (the hierarchy / the corporation / the hivemind) which means neither the managers or their reports have freedom. If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results. Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough. If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation): * Give him a raise so he stays * Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them * Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap * Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution * Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  From: Arnon Geshuri (Google Senior Staffing Strategist) ... On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else. ... From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources) Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences. From Eric Schmidt: Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric From Steve Jobs: :) From Sergei Brin: Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those. Source: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s... Edit: Fixed the Shona Brown email. She's on the board of Atlassian now so I guess avoid those people too.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Yeah at the highest management levels, managers (VPs?) are responsible to CEO direction. But at middle manager levels (hundreds of people, not a handful, in very large companies) they're not directly responsible to the CEO. Nor are they directly responsible to the customer/market. They're in 'middle management limbo' where all they have to work with, is local incentives. Usually financial - optimize the budget for results. Sadly, this usually ends with middle managers trying to maximize their budget and minimize their required output, to increase their chances of success. Which means, the most expensive product possible. That's what I mean by 'locally optimize'.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      That's a much more general point than the specific one at issue, which is the CEOs illegally conspiring to not hire staff from each other and terminating someone who refused to go along with the illegal conspiracy. This wasn't something the managers organically came up with.
estomagordo 7y ago
Wait, what, you received a damages payment because a company wouldn't interview you?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Because a company illegally colluded with their competitors not to interview them. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/apple-google-intel-adobe-to-pay-325-million-to-settle-hiring-lawsuit-idUSBREA4M0MY20140523 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/a...
  - twinge 7y ago
    Interviews were allowed, but recruiters weren't allowed to make the initial contact with employees.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Given the high level attention involved - direct emails between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt - I'd fully expect that policy to bleed over into "don't interview/hire" to avoid any appearance of having recruited them.
- burkaman 7y ago
  In a class action lawsuit, where the company was accused of conspiring with several other companies to keep wages artificially low.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  I received damages because I was employed by one of the companies found guilty in the conspiracy. The settlement was so low that the judge threw it out initially. The fact that they didn’t interview me is just the real outcome of their policy. They called me, unprompted, about 2 months after I left Apple.
- estomagordo 7y ago
  Thanks, all, for clarifying. Still not sure I think it sounds entirely reasonable. But makes a lot more sense to me now. (Am not American).
billman 7y ago
I have always thought of corporations as a system that reacts to the forces working upon and within it.
- cartoonworld 7y ago
  They sure are, I call those forces "Greenbacks".
  - billman 7y ago
    true dat
Pigo 7y ago
>a cool $3K I'm sorry you didn't get more from the settlement, but at least you were able to write something on here that made me laugh.
strathmeyer 7y ago
I interviewed at Google. They didn't want to hire me, but called me back every year for five years to ask what I was up to until I asked them to stop. That's not normal. I even remember when Google started hiring in the early aughts. Instead of asking for resumes from you directly, they asked you to submit the resumes of any smart people you know. That's not normal.
- beckler 7y ago
  Asking for other peoples resumes is becoming the new normal for some recruiters. I view it as desperation more than anything else.
  - Pmop 7y ago
    Also, by sending other peoples resumes, aren't you doing the job the recruiter is being paid to (or at least part of it)?
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  When I was in undergrad, a Google recruiter found my resume and contacted me about an internship. Google decided I didn't have enough background and they wouldn't even offer me a phone interview - meaning they made the decision purely on that same resume. Fair enough, they probably sent it to an engineer who disagreed. But two days later, another recruiter with no knowledge of the first messaged me about my "very interesting resume". I still hear from their recruiters at semi-random, each saying they're my "new point of contact at Google". Sometimes there's nothing for a year, then I'll get two "new points of contact' within one week. Recruiting is always a mess, but it's a bit surprising to see an in-house team get up to the same antics I expect from third party services. The most recent approach was the most persuasive, though: Dear [appplicant], I'm writing to because I saw your resume and I think you could be a great fit for Google. I'm particularly interested in your work with [background], which I think prepares you very well for [position].
- tnecniv 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they stole this from academic hiring. It's well known that, when professors go up for tenure at Harvard, their recommenders are required to list other people they think Harvard might want to consider hiring for the spot.
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Did you have to interact with a lawyer? There've been a few times where I think it would have been to my advantage to talk to a lawyer about corporate wrongdoings, but I've never known how to go about it, and have zero experience dealing with them.
Pmop 7y ago
Wow. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that their engagement in the "make software development more accessible" thing is actually intended to increase supply, and then decrease wages accordingly.
koheripbal 7y ago
What does this have to do with OP's article? These non-poaching agreements (Wall Street has them also) are not related to Union law. I doubt it's even the same people in the company that write these two different policies.
- blueboo 7y ago
  It shows a guy who confused correlation for causation got laid off at Apple.

raxxorrax 7y ago

They will probably get an extremely high and disproportionate severance package as is American tradition. But nobody even similar will ever get hired again. Instead Google probably will just pay consultants on how to keep employees in line without them noticing. Perhaps internal data sharing will also be restricted more.

mrobot 7y ago

We need a tech worker's union. And technology around communication and setting up strikes etc.

murph-almighty 7y ago
I've thought about this a bit. I don't think we'd get much public sympathy from a working conditions standpoint- generally if you're working for the right place you can arguably make more money than most of your non-engineer peers (look at a percentile breakdown of your annual income if you don't believe me). I think the way a union like this could succeed is by fighting Big Brother-esque projects and refusing to work on initiatives such as Project Butterfly. Sell it as "we refuse to work on technology that will objectively make you (the layman's) life worse". Once we hit a critical mass we'd have a much bigger say over what projects do and don't get built, and anyone who scabs is arguably on the wrong side of the moral coin or "enabling Big Brother/technocratic billionaires". This isn't to say that tech workers should be the ultimate moral arbiter, but having a non-financially driven check would at least help.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  I think I agree on the public sympathy point, but if anything I think tech workers should assume they will never have public support. Bargaining collectively is the only way that the average tech worker will be able to take steps that might make the public feel as if they can trust us to be on their side. Given what many of our employers do (collectively, as a company) it's hard to expect the average member of the public to look at that and assume tech workers are fighting the good fight.
  - Frondo 7y ago
    I think it's entirely plausible for a tech worker's union to build public support around any number of popular causes, e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kevmo 7y ago

They'll get hit with some small monetary penalty. Nothing is going to change until we replace our anti-worker government with pro-worker government.

elicash 7y ago
I hope this doesn't stay downvoted, because it best reflects the sad state of labor law. The MOST they'd get is back-pay if Google loses. But truthfully, most people have to find another job when they lose their job, so that new paycheck is deducted from their "damages" and you subtract what they earned while fired from their backpay. GENERALLY-speaking, there would not be punitive damages. That's why there's usually no disincentive to not just fire the worker who is organizing. The potential payout is tiny to the company.
luxuryballs 7y ago
Why should they get a penalty at all? We want things like freedom of speech but not freedom of who we allow inside our private lives?
- shantly 7y ago
  ... uh, what?

BickNowstrom 7y ago

That's two cases where politicians jumped the gun to make something that isn't decided yet a decisive campaign issue: - Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims - The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged “anti-union” actions. What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified? Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point out they were the first when it turns out any other way...

kevingadd 7y ago
The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender. They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH and his wife struggled at length to even get an explanation for the problem or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care whether it turns out to be about gender, because the end result of that system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a racist: It just means you have to fix it. Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves that way in public and selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I know who I'm going to suspect.
- 7y ago

sigzero 7y ago

I don't see Google losing.

whb07 7y ago

It is astonishing the continuous attempts by the highest paid workers, in one of the most well-known companies in the world, to keep trying to bring down the "system". The only thing i can think of is "bite the hand that feeds you". Do the extremely "woke" crowd working in such high tech companies know what could happen to their salaries and perks if they are to be part of a highly regulated industry, or they haven't thought about the second/third order effects yet? Do these supporters know that they can go work at other places that don't pay $200k+, so that they too can go live like the regular people? I'm pretty sure that there are N number of refugee camps that could use a basic application built to keep track of refugees. But of course, that doesn't come with 3 chef prepared meals per day and dry cleaning in house.

unionize 7y ago
Oh, the delicious irony! Did you know that not 100 years ago, workers were murdered for going on strike for things like work weeks lower than 60-80 hours? Companies had their own police forces, and they paid you in company scrip. A lot of blood was shed so you could be tone-deaf and ignorant of the labor movement in the United States, all from a comfy office chair and with plenty of time left over to see your family at the end of the day. If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. I don’t want to argue the morality of it, but it happens over and over again. Amazon workers are having the same fights their great grandparents did (fighting for the right not to get killed at work, the right to a decent wage, the right to a goddamn bathroom break that doesn’t get you fired). Tech workers aren’t immune either. Sure, we’re more mobile than most, but that’s still not great leverage. Your employer has more power over you than you do over them. Without a union, this is always true. If you’re fine being potentially fucked that way, that’s your prerogative.
- whb07 7y ago
  The issue is I don’t believe you’ve ever worked in such places. I also know such “evil places” aren’t good at what they do, hence the weird tactics and shitty management you’re hyperbolizing.
- thu2111 7y ago

seibelj 7y ago

I’m pretty sure a union shop vote of software engineers would be defeated 80/20 but it would be fun to see someone at google try. These organizers live in fantasy land!

advisedwang 7y ago
That's true, although I suspect if Google keeps firing people on trumped-up accusations whenever they criticize management, more people may feel they want an organization set up to defend them.
- xibalba 7y ago
  > trumped-up accusations So are you alleging that this... > We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and work... ...is trumped-up? I have not seen any articles which dispute that these fired employees were basically tracking other employees work activities.
drewrv 7y ago
Then why would management try to crush any organizing activity? Couldn't Sundar just say, "Interesting idea, let's take a vote"
- zbyte64 7y ago
  But that would be more akin to free speech and the marketplace of ideas. If the internet has taught me anything, when you're on the clock the employer/baron owns your speech.

baud147258 7y ago

Interesting how the article gloss over the fact that, according to Google, the four fired employees were actually stalking other Google employees to check if they were working on projects they didn’t like – namely, an in-development cloud services for US border cops. Now that the politics are getting involved, it will get worse before it gets any better.

mav3rick 7y ago
Watch HN gloss over it too. No one discusses this.
advisedwang 7y ago
I think you forgot to say "According to Google". Of course Google says they did nothing wrong.
- baud147258 7y ago
  True. I added that to my comment, thank you.
koheripbal 7y ago
As more and more teenagers flood Reddit, more and more young adults flood HN. ...and so the cycle of quality boom-bust of the threads continues and we see more knee-jerk emotional content like this. Where is everyone going next so I can stay ahead of the game?
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  I've read your comment several time and have yet to make actual sense of this. Is your assertion that the parent comment is bad because it's made by a "young adult"?
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    Somewhat. My assertion is that HN quality has dropped significantly in the last year. This post is an advocacy post - it lacks objectivity and rigor. My additional assertion is that this is happening more on HN because the demographic of HN is changing to a younger crowd - and my final theory is that that is happening because more young adults are coming here in an effort to escape the further demographic changes on Reddit.

m0zg 7y ago

Now that Sundar "McKinsey" Pichai runs the whole thing, you can expect much more of this, irrespective of the outcome of this investigation. In fact, it looks like you can expect more of this at all top tech firms. Just the other day Bezos came out with his "screw the activist employees" thing. Nadella (and MS in general) never really had any sympathy for activist employees in the first place (although they're going full bore on "diversity", openly and unabashedly discriminating against men in their hiring). I also never head any stories of glorious activism from Netflix. That leaves Facebook. I'm pretty sure Zuck is tired of this bullshit as well.