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You missed the point: the guy was fired for recording conversations with other employees. After being given permission from his supervisor to do exactly that. O

You missed the point: the guy was fired for recording conversations with other employees. After being given permission from his supervisor to do exactly that. On his lunch break. Wtf is that all about?

tkahn6 16y ago
You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed. That is exactly why he was fired. Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy.
- gradstudent 16y ago
  No accusations were leveled and, as far as I can tell, at best, Google overreacted. To make an analogy: the guy points out the sky is blue and he's promptly fired. Wtf?
  - tkahn6 16y ago
    > No accusations were leveled It doesn't matter. That's exactly what was being implied. Google wants to prevent any legal disputes or inquiries into their operations which can be very costly. The guy is a low-level low-importance asset so they had him terminated. It makes perfect sense.
    - gradstudent 16y ago
      His importance to the Google machinery is irrelevant. According to the post, he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. At worst he should have been given a warning. I hope, for the sake of consistency, "Carl" was also fired.
      - tkahn6 16y ago
        > he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. Yes they used that as a reason to fire him but that's not why they fired him.
        gradstudent 16y ago
        Perhaps things are different in the U.S. but here -- in Australia -- you can only be fired for breach of contract. If that didn't occur, as the blog post seems to suggest, then he was unfairly dismissed.
        pstack 16y ago
        As dangrossman points out, above, you can be fired for any reason whatsoever, on the spot. I believe the only protections are sex, race, gender, religion, and age. And as for sex, that means you can't be fired for being a male or a female. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, for which you can still be fired in something like two or three dozen states. (Look into the ENDA which has been repeatedly proposed for the past 17 years, but never passed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... ). And for those things which are protected, there is often little you can do. Prove that they fired you for being too old and not just because you smelled bad or performed poorly at work or pissed the wrong person off. It therefore isn't really concerning that someone would not want to deal with the hassle of some jackass and would just ask for him to be fired, instead.
        doe88 16y ago
        > the hassle of some jackass nice
        scotty79 16y ago
        US seem like horrible country to work in. You are expected to donate unpaid overtime to your company, you can be fired on a whim. What else?
  - pstack 16y ago
    To put it bluntly, he was the employee of a company that Google hired to do some work for them and he was bothering employees and then he become someone else's problem up the chain and it then become his direct employer's problem who value their contract and the employment of their other employees over the personal project and whims of someone who was hired to do some film work and not to conduct an investigation into the socio-economic makeup of the campus. Now that he's no longer employed, he can go ahead with his pursuit without doing it under the advantage of his employment or his employer and I'm sure that if his insinuations are remotely true, then there are sure to be a bunch of people beating down his door for the opportunity to speak with him about their work at Google, under journalistic protection.
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    Mentioning the word "race", "class", or "gender" in a tech setting is a big no-no. They're huge hot-button words. It scares people and they counter-attack reflexively, without deeply considering the arguments. That's been my experience from work, Reddit, and HN, in any case. Notice that I'm not saying anything about the correctness of any particular position on a specific issue. It's that the specifics are barely able to be discussed because people are already in war mode.
    - hieronymusN 16y ago
      I think you bring up a good point, and its also worth exploring why "race", "class" and "gender" are such hot button issues in tech. These are issues that many other very large companies (ex: I've worked for large financial corps in NYC that have vibrant & entrenched diversity programs) have dealt with in much more constructive ways. So why do these topics blow up so big amongst the valley crowd?
      - dspeyer 16y ago
        For one thing, wrongful firing and wrongful failure-to-hire lawsuits are common and painful. No one wants to give the employment trolls more ammunition.
- paganel 16y ago
  > They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy. I totally agree with you. Why would any Übermensch in his right mind eat and drink in the same room as a yellow-badged Untermensch? That's heresy.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  > You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed. That was a huge mistake on his part. > Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit From whose perspective? What I mean is that it's possible for them to do something that is "absolutely correct" for their own self-preservation / convenience, but that is not correct from an ethical or societal stand-point. I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. It just seems that you're angry that the OP wanted to investigate race / class issues.
  - glenra 16y ago
    OP sounded like a muckraking moron, a wanna-be Michael Moore. If you go around interviewing people with an agenda and you get to re-cut the footage however you like, it's possible to get it to seem to support whatever conclusion you want it to - that's why they wanted the tape back. If this guy wants to make a video "as a personal project" to "deal with race and class issues", whatever that means, he should do this entirely on his own, not as a part time project while employed at Google using any Google resources. It's clear from his tone that OP has a point of view he wants to push - he wants to feel aggrieved at oppression, whether or not there is any. Given that OP was dumb enough to do things the way he did it's not clear he's smart enough to understand that he's being a moron. In this litigious culture, firing OP was a good idea and explaining to OP why he was being a moron wasn't necessarily a good idea. Besides, "some folks, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em."
- DannoHung 16y ago
  Well now that we know about it, they just pulled a Barbara Streisand. You can be god damned sure someone's going to go sticking their nose into it now.
- throwaway1818 16y ago
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pstack 16y ago
That is incorrect. He was not given permission by his supervisor to record conversations with other employees. He only asked for permission to videotape yellow-badges leaving the building. Nothing more. Unless someone wants to show me where I am missing a statement, I don't see any point at which he even claims that he was given permission to film and interview employees - much less about the issues he has taken it upon himself to "investigate". That it was done on his own lunch break and supposedly using his own tape doesn't seem very relevant. My free time is my own, but my company wouldn't appreciate it if I was using my lunch time to bother my employer or one of their clients. From the video/transcript: "Eventually I asked a superior on my team if I could borrow a camera to go out in the parking lot and videotape the yellow-badged workers leaving the 3.1459~ factory." If he had asked permission to take a camera out and videotape interviews with people leaving the building so he could investigate the socio-economic aspects of Google employment of Google's ScanOps team, I think it is safe to say that his employer would have told him to STFU and get back to his actual work and there would have been no problems. He took advantage of the situation to push an issue his employers were not aware that he was pursuing which then put them and all of their other employees and their contract with Google in a tenuous position. Not necessarily because "ooh no, he's going to find out we have lots of people of a certain race working in that building", but most likely because they hired some guys to get a job done and not be a thorn in someone's side.
- gradstudent 16y ago
  You're splitting hairs. He was given permission to film the yellow badge people. On his lunch break. Using Google equipment. The latter two are the reasons given for his termination and not, as you imply, because he was "bothering people" or not doing "actual work". The whole affair seems to me a severe overreaction considering they could have just sat the guy down and talked the issue through.
  - davidw 16y ago
    Yeah, I came away with a couple things: His tone and mentality feel a bit confrontational (and we're only hearing his perspective), and mentioning the skin color of various people involved seems anachronistic, but... ... at a smaller company, maybe the boss would have just sat down and had a talk with him "look, these people get good wages, and we're keeping the jobs in the US" or whatever. It doesn't sound like it was handled in a very "human" way, where someone directly above him who knows him was given the authority to straighten things out and make sure no further problems occurred. Legal...security... all starts to sound like "lowest common denominator", and a good reason to work at a startup or small business rather than a large corporation. (Edit: not that legal, security, etc... are not needed or don't do useful things... it's just inevitably a bit bureaucratic)
patio11 16y ago
He recorded on videotape something uncomfortable, true, and potentially explosive about a multinational advertising firm, which was in a position to cause them bad PR, which is the only thing that could conceivably threaten their billions in revenue and 30% margins. The only reason this is even in the general ballpark of surprising is that this particular multinational advertising firm has exceptionally good PR, and people want to believe that it would never do this. I mean, they've repeated "We're the good guys" tens of thousands of times, surely it must be true, right? It's a wonderful company. They make cool products. If you get in their way, they will bury you.

tkahn6 16y ago

You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed. That is exactly why he was fired. Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy.

gradstudent 16y ago
No accusations were leveled and, as far as I can tell, at best, Google overreacted. To make an analogy: the guy points out the sky is blue and he's promptly fired. Wtf?
- tkahn6 16y ago
  > No accusations were leveled It doesn't matter. That's exactly what was being implied. Google wants to prevent any legal disputes or inquiries into their operations which can be very costly. The guy is a low-level low-importance asset so they had him terminated. It makes perfect sense.
  - gradstudent 16y ago
    His importance to the Google machinery is irrelevant. According to the post, he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. At worst he should have been given a warning. I hope, for the sake of consistency, "Carl" was also fired.
    - tkahn6 16y ago
      > he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. Yes they used that as a reason to fire him but that's not why they fired him.
      - gradstudent 16y ago
        Perhaps things are different in the U.S. but here -- in Australia -- you can only be fired for breach of contract. If that didn't occur, as the blog post seems to suggest, then he was unfairly dismissed.
        pstack 16y ago
        As dangrossman points out, above, you can be fired for any reason whatsoever, on the spot. I believe the only protections are sex, race, gender, religion, and age. And as for sex, that means you can't be fired for being a male or a female. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, for which you can still be fired in something like two or three dozen states. (Look into the ENDA which has been repeatedly proposed for the past 17 years, but never passed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... ). And for those things which are protected, there is often little you can do. Prove that they fired you for being too old and not just because you smelled bad or performed poorly at work or pissed the wrong person off. It therefore isn't really concerning that someone would not want to deal with the hassle of some jackass and would just ask for him to be fired, instead.
        doe88 16y ago
        > the hassle of some jackass nice
        scotty79 16y ago
        US seem like horrible country to work in. You are expected to donate unpaid overtime to your company, you can be fired on a whim. What else?
- pstack 16y ago
  To put it bluntly, he was the employee of a company that Google hired to do some work for them and he was bothering employees and then he become someone else's problem up the chain and it then become his direct employer's problem who value their contract and the employment of their other employees over the personal project and whims of someone who was hired to do some film work and not to conduct an investigation into the socio-economic makeup of the campus. Now that he's no longer employed, he can go ahead with his pursuit without doing it under the advantage of his employment or his employer and I'm sure that if his insinuations are remotely true, then there are sure to be a bunch of people beating down his door for the opportunity to speak with him about their work at Google, under journalistic protection.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  Mentioning the word "race", "class", or "gender" in a tech setting is a big no-no. They're huge hot-button words. It scares people and they counter-attack reflexively, without deeply considering the arguments. That's been my experience from work, Reddit, and HN, in any case. Notice that I'm not saying anything about the correctness of any particular position on a specific issue. It's that the specifics are barely able to be discussed because people are already in war mode.
  - hieronymusN 16y ago
    I think you bring up a good point, and its also worth exploring why "race", "class" and "gender" are such hot button issues in tech. These are issues that many other very large companies (ex: I've worked for large financial corps in NYC that have vibrant & entrenched diversity programs) have dealt with in much more constructive ways. So why do these topics blow up so big amongst the valley crowd?
    - dspeyer 16y ago
      For one thing, wrongful firing and wrongful failure-to-hire lawsuits are common and painful. No one wants to give the employment trolls more ammunition.
paganel 16y ago
> They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy. I totally agree with you. Why would any Übermensch in his right mind eat and drink in the same room as a yellow-badged Untermensch? That's heresy.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
JabavuAdams 16y ago
> You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed. That was a huge mistake on his part. > Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit From whose perspective? What I mean is that it's possible for them to do something that is "absolutely correct" for their own self-preservation / convenience, but that is not correct from an ethical or societal stand-point. I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. It just seems that you're angry that the OP wanted to investigate race / class issues.
- glenra 16y ago
  OP sounded like a muckraking moron, a wanna-be Michael Moore. If you go around interviewing people with an agenda and you get to re-cut the footage however you like, it's possible to get it to seem to support whatever conclusion you want it to - that's why they wanted the tape back. If this guy wants to make a video "as a personal project" to "deal with race and class issues", whatever that means, he should do this entirely on his own, not as a part time project while employed at Google using any Google resources. It's clear from his tone that OP has a point of view he wants to push - he wants to feel aggrieved at oppression, whether or not there is any. Given that OP was dumb enough to do things the way he did it's not clear he's smart enough to understand that he's being a moron. In this litigious culture, firing OP was a good idea and explaining to OP why he was being a moron wasn't necessarily a good idea. Besides, "some folks, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em."
DannoHung 16y ago
Well now that we know about it, they just pulled a Barbara Streisand. You can be god damned sure someone's going to go sticking their nose into it now.
throwaway1818 16y ago
test
- throwaway1818 16y ago
  test 2
  - throwaway1818 16y ago
    test 4
- throwaway1818 16y ago
  test 3
  - throwaway1818 16y ago
    test 5

pstack 16y ago

That is incorrect. He was not given permission by his supervisor to record conversations with other employees. He only asked for permission to videotape yellow-badges leaving the building. Nothing more. Unless someone wants to show me where I am missing a statement, I don't see any point at which he even claims that he was given permission to film and interview employees - much less about the issues he has taken it upon himself to "investigate". That it was done on his own lunch break and supposedly using his own tape doesn't seem very relevant. My free time is my own, but my company wouldn't appreciate it if I was using my lunch time to bother my employer or one of their clients. From the video/transcript: "Eventually I asked a superior on my team if I could borrow a camera to go out in the parking lot and videotape the yellow-badged workers leaving the 3.1459~ factory." If he had asked permission to take a camera out and videotape interviews with people leaving the building so he could investigate the socio-economic aspects of Google employment of Google's ScanOps team, I think it is safe to say that his employer would have told him to STFU and get back to his actual work and there would have been no problems. He took advantage of the situation to push an issue his employers were not aware that he was pursuing which then put them and all of their other employees and their contract with Google in a tenuous position. Not necessarily because "ooh no, he's going to find out we have lots of people of a certain race working in that building", but most likely because they hired some guys to get a job done and not be a thorn in someone's side.

gradstudent 16y ago
You're splitting hairs. He was given permission to film the yellow badge people. On his lunch break. Using Google equipment. The latter two are the reasons given for his termination and not, as you imply, because he was "bothering people" or not doing "actual work". The whole affair seems to me a severe overreaction considering they could have just sat the guy down and talked the issue through.
- davidw 16y ago
  Yeah, I came away with a couple things: His tone and mentality feel a bit confrontational (and we're only hearing his perspective), and mentioning the skin color of various people involved seems anachronistic, but... ... at a smaller company, maybe the boss would have just sat down and had a talk with him "look, these people get good wages, and we're keeping the jobs in the US" or whatever. It doesn't sound like it was handled in a very "human" way, where someone directly above him who knows him was given the authority to straighten things out and make sure no further problems occurred. Legal...security... all starts to sound like "lowest common denominator", and a good reason to work at a startup or small business rather than a large corporation. (Edit: not that legal, security, etc... are not needed or don't do useful things... it's just inevitably a bit bureaucratic)

patio11 16y ago

He recorded on videotape something uncomfortable, true, and potentially explosive about a multinational advertising firm, which was in a position to cause them bad PR, which is the only thing that could conceivably threaten their billions in revenue and 30% margins. The only reason this is even in the general ballpark of surprising is that this particular multinational advertising firm has exceptionally good PR, and people want to believe that it would never do this. I mean, they've repeated "We're the good guys" tens of thousands of times, surely it must be true, right? It's a wonderful company. They make cool products. If you get in their way, they will bury you.