5 ms·

We already know that ,,self regulation'' doesn't work. It made sense to me that when I was working at Google I didn't talk bad about the company that I was gett

We already know that ,,self regulation'' doesn't work. It made sense to me that when I was working at Google I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from. Alphabet is still a great company, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need checks and balances from outside.

dls2016 6y ago
> I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from Have you ever been in a union workplace?
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Have you ever been in a union workplace? why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Maybe then he would not have to tow every pr line in fear of being dismissed
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      Heaven help him, though, if he says anything critical of the union. Tire slashing and other forms of intimidation routinely made newspaper headlines in UAW territory in the era before the Big 3 automakers collapsed. At least dismissal doesn't involve people following you to your home. It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.
      - dls2016 6y ago
        What other balance to corporate power do workers have?
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Unions are for more than just getting higher pay. If Google (perish the thought) decided to pull some shady reviewing stunts and make your work life so intolerable that you felt your only option was to force the issue and threaten to resign - being part of a union could have helped with that. HR is a bunch of people who represent the company's interests in negotiations and transactions. Unions are the same thing for employees. We've been told, repeatedly, that unions are socialist organisations that want to destroy capitalisim and bankrupt employers. This isn't true.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.
  - dls2016 6y ago
    > why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? Didn't Google get busted fixing wages along with other tech companies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- xiphias2 6y ago
  No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
  - mosselman 6y ago
    Forcing men to poop standing up is probably some productivity hack.
  - purple-again 6y ago
    My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front. What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of. Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support). That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
    - extropy 6y ago
      I will bait too, as someone who has stood in line for male toilets in a Google office. In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet. The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch. Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.
sgregnt 6y ago
Can you elaborate? Who are "we", does this refer to some scientific community studying these things?
cmiles74 6y ago
In my opinion, this is different: Google is hiring research scientists and telling them that Google would like to pay for their research. When hired, Googled told these people that they would be free to conduct research in their field without this kind of censorship. Now they are being censored, this is a new policy. In my opinion, this is very different from a typical employee "talking bad" about their employer. "Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
- jariel 6y ago
  Any researcher who thought they could publish research about 'race and gender' and not have it reviewed by a corporate sponsor is incredibly naive. It's an extensively sensitive subject and particularly in a field with such vague and 'subject to interpretation' results, the sponsor corp. is going to want to have a look. Considerably more so if the research is about the institution itself. There was a specific case recently where the researcher criticized Google for something, but Google asked the researcher to include truthful information about the changes the company has already made to the system in question wherein it's been improved etc. This is a perfectly fair request by the sponsor, I think. It's also naive for us to consider that what people chose to research, how they approach it, the results they are looking for isn't somehow altered by the researchers own biases. In fact, it's hugely arrogant for researchers to believe that they have some special access to the truth in this regard.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    Perhaps researchers who accepted these positions with Google were naive. That is certainly possible but it can't be argued: Google hired these people under the pretense of letting them do their research free of censorship and, now that they work for Google, this censorship is being imposed. I'm not sure what the rest of this comment is alluding to... The posted article from Reuters doesn't mention race and gender, the article implies these researchers focus on AI and ML. In regards to the "specific case", I would have to guess at what that case might be. Were I to guess, it seems like I'd be guessing wrong as this assertion seems to lack grounding in fact. Naive or not, peer review is in place and part of it's purpose is to keep the biases of researchers in place. History has proven that this is far from infallible, but it's the process we have today and the process Google agreed to when it hired these researchers.
Bakary 6y ago
>Alphabet is still a great company To those it pays, yes...

dls2016 6y ago

> I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from Have you ever been in a union workplace?

throw_m239339 6y ago
> Have you ever been in a union workplace? why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Maybe then he would not have to tow every pr line in fear of being dismissed
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Heaven help him, though, if he says anything critical of the union. Tire slashing and other forms of intimidation routinely made newspaper headlines in UAW territory in the era before the Big 3 automakers collapsed. At least dismissal doesn't involve people following you to your home. It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.
    - dls2016 6y ago
      What other balance to corporate power do workers have?
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Unions are for more than just getting higher pay. If Google (perish the thought) decided to pull some shady reviewing stunts and make your work life so intolerable that you felt your only option was to force the issue and threaten to resign - being part of a union could have helped with that. HR is a bunch of people who represent the company's interests in negotiations and transactions. Unions are the same thing for employees. We've been told, repeatedly, that unions are socialist organisations that want to destroy capitalisim and bankrupt employers. This isn't true.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.
- dls2016 6y ago
  > why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? Didn't Google get busted fixing wages along with other tech companies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
xiphias2 6y ago
No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
- mosselman 6y ago
  Forcing men to poop standing up is probably some productivity hack.
- purple-again 6y ago
  My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front. What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of. Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support). That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
  - extropy 6y ago
    I will bait too, as someone who has stood in line for male toilets in a Google office. In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet. The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch. Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.

sgregnt 6y ago

Can you elaborate? Who are "we", does this refer to some scientific community studying these things?

cmiles74 6y ago

In my opinion, this is different: Google is hiring research scientists and telling them that Google would like to pay for their research. When hired, Googled told these people that they would be free to conduct research in their field without this kind of censorship. Now they are being censored, this is a new policy. In my opinion, this is very different from a typical employee "talking bad" about their employer. "Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."

jariel 6y ago
Any researcher who thought they could publish research about 'race and gender' and not have it reviewed by a corporate sponsor is incredibly naive. It's an extensively sensitive subject and particularly in a field with such vague and 'subject to interpretation' results, the sponsor corp. is going to want to have a look. Considerably more so if the research is about the institution itself. There was a specific case recently where the researcher criticized Google for something, but Google asked the researcher to include truthful information about the changes the company has already made to the system in question wherein it's been improved etc. This is a perfectly fair request by the sponsor, I think. It's also naive for us to consider that what people chose to research, how they approach it, the results they are looking for isn't somehow altered by the researchers own biases. In fact, it's hugely arrogant for researchers to believe that they have some special access to the truth in this regard.
- cmiles74 6y ago
  Perhaps researchers who accepted these positions with Google were naive. That is certainly possible but it can't be argued: Google hired these people under the pretense of letting them do their research free of censorship and, now that they work for Google, this censorship is being imposed. I'm not sure what the rest of this comment is alluding to... The posted article from Reuters doesn't mention race and gender, the article implies these researchers focus on AI and ML. In regards to the "specific case", I would have to guess at what that case might be. Were I to guess, it seems like I'd be guessing wrong as this assertion seems to lack grounding in fact. Naive or not, peer review is in place and part of it's purpose is to keep the biases of researchers in place. History has proven that this is far from infallible, but it's the process we have today and the process Google agreed to when it hired these researchers.

Bakary 6y ago

>Alphabet is still a great company To those it pays, yes...