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I work at google and am vaxxed but this pisses me off. I decided that the vaccine was worth the risk and for the best overall but if someone makes a different c

I work at google and am vaxxed but this pisses me off. I decided that the vaccine was worth the risk and for the best overall but if someone makes a different calculus I can understand and respect that. IMHO they gone way outside the reasonable scope of an employer - this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. Unless the employees are only commuting back and forth to work this does fuck all. It's feel good virtue signalling and I can't stomach any more counter productive SJW bullshit. The risk from COVID is not even that high for vaccinated individuals. What low risk bullshit are they going to make rules about next? Don't expect me to smile when you ask me to trade freedom for a bit of false security. Want to change something? Then change societies perspective on the vaccine on your own fucking time. Personally this ranks with their worst decisions and they made some fucking awful decisions over the years. I probably will act as if I don't have the vaccine and let them fire me for it when push comes to shove.

cma 5y ago
> this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. I don't think they should care if it is work from home (except that it potentially raises insurance premiums for everyone if they come down with some kind of chronic stuff from getting covid or being intubated or have to pay out company life insurance policies), but in the office there is is an obvious interest in having people vaccinated, just like college dorm rooms required even before covid.
- oldcigarette 5y ago
  Yeah I totally get that there is an interest - I disagree with whether it's a big enough interest at the employer level to justify a requirement. It feels more like pandering/posturing to me. The trade off isn't something that's easily weighed and I doubt we could ever reach consensus (it's pretty much a classic divisive political issue) but in those cases I err on the side of freedom and am sort of fed up with Americans giving up their freedoms.
b0sk 5y ago
Vaccination is not a "this is a cultural decision at the society level". It has saved millions and millions of lives. Maybe change your employer if you are so pissed at them?
- oldcigarette 5y ago
  Is there a coherent thought here? I don't disagree the vaccine has saved lives or even that you shouldn't get it. I can enjoy my job and what I do and disapprove of decisions made by leadership at the same time. It's easily the best place and people I've ever worked with.
  - _vertigo 5y ago
    You don’t think that it’s the employer’s place to mandate something that makes the work environment at their company considerably safer?
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    It's a very basic responsibility of an employer to try and make their workplace a safe place to work. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.
deanclatworthy 5y ago
There is a counter point to yours, just as valid, where folks don’t want to be around unvaccinated folks. Maybe they have an immunocompromised relative or child at home. Maybe they don’t feel safe with unvaccinated folks around. This is a game of odds. People keep acting like this is binary. You’re statistically more likely to have and spread covid without the vaccine. I would be delighted if my employer enforced this policy but in Finland it’s never going to happen.
- makomk 5y ago
  Honestly, anyone who's genuinely at risk enough that they can't risk being exposed despite being vaccinated - as opposed to the people who were convinced they are because of stupid media culture war bullshit - probably shouldn't be working in an office, because at that point they're going to be at reasonably comparable risk from the common cold. Seriously. The other four endemic human coronaviruses, for example, are very far from a walk in the park for at-risk people that manage to catch them; it's just that most people with working immune systems have some level of immunity that protects them from the worst effects.
  - deanclatworthy 5y ago
    As I mentioned in my comment, many folks have families. We are not dealing with individuals when it comes to a pandemic. We are dealing with contagion amongst bubbles of people. Many people have vulnerable people in their bubbles at home and need to make a living.
    - joshuahughes 5y ago
      But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily. What has changed with covid to create so much additional fear and the subsequent authoritarian responses? Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill. What's changed that now a particular course of action has to be mandated with the threat of job-loss as the alternative? Seems to me that those who are concerned about unfairness for one group are simply transferring that unfairness to another group.
gpvos 5y ago
I'm with you except for the sentence about virtue signalling and SJW's; no need to bring the entire culture war into it. (In fact I'm usually on the side of those you call SJW's.)
- tmn 5y ago
  For whatever reason, that’s generally the dividing line for these alternate realities
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
avh02 5y ago
what i think people forget is that this isn't (IMO) about what the company wants or whatever, it's about the fact that offices are a nasty space where everybody breathes everybody's air - and diseases simply don't give a crap about where that happens. I'm pretty sure if google were an outdoor office complex where everybody sat 10 meters apart from each other they wouldn't give a crap about your vaccination status. If anything, i think it has highlighted things like how cramped public transport, bars, clubs, etc really are and we just never paid it attention. At the end of the day, this is one of the mitigations of a disease's spread and an office is somewhere it can happen. Let me flip it: Remote work ends and you now have to go back in, you're not vaccinated because [whatever reason you want] and you inevitably end up contracting the virus (along with it's risks). (My pessimistic guess is: people then sue the company for unsafe working conditions.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mwint 5y ago
  Being personally educated on the risks to to people in my demographic, I would gladly sign an ironclad “I won’t sue the company if I get covid” contract to work in an office. If that’s the company’s concern, I suspect most people who hasn’t received a vaccine would sign such a contract.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    Will you compensate financially the co-workers you happen to infect and who are vaccinated but for whom the vaccine didn't work (10% or so risk)? It's not about you, nobody's stopping you from playing Russian roulette with your own skull. I personally do not want to be around unvaccinated people any more than I want to be on the same road as a drunk or street racer.
    - A_non_e-moose 5y ago
      I would agree to that, provided there is evidence to prove that the other person was infected from me and not anyone else and that this specific infection caused them harm. Restitution on dubious causes is not something that would hold in a court, I think.
jeofken 5y ago
If you’re programming, I encourage you to get into self employment. Your customers will care about your output, reliability, and value to them.
- ovi256 5y ago
  If you need to meet customers in person, in their offices, they'll most likely require visitors to be vaccinated against Covid too. So you'd have to meet remotely only, which is a different market (it seems to put you in competition with a jillion people from low cost countries).
fruityrudy 5y ago
> “I decided the risk was worth it” It’s funny though how you say this phrase for a vaccine and not for the hundreds of other riskier situations you face daily. “I drove a car…risk was worth it I decided”. It sounds a bit self-important. Vaccines are just something you do. For me it was not a decision. It’s an interesting exploration in psychology where people oppose something mostly because they are told to do it. Like a teenage rebellion attitude. I get this feeling when I feel like I am being taken advantage of or have been recently. I can imagine it’s tough being a Google employee in the SJW era. There are a thousands ways they tell you you need to change. New language, etc. Constant unrelenting bullshit that you cannot oppose. I think this is a way for people to take back control of something because they feel a loss of control in other areas. Just like brexit, people want to go against things because of the people telling them to do something. Google shouldn’t tell me. The government shouldn’t tell me. SJWs shouldn’t tell me. But sadly I don’t think there is a way around this. But I do think the SJWs and vaccine/mask crusaders make things much worse.
- Fine-Cut4983 5y ago
  Of course you made a decision, unless you are an automaton? (ignoring the question of free will here). If the vaccine killed 90% of those who took it, you would of course take it, because "vaccines are just something you do"? No, you evaluated the risk. And yes, driving a car absolutely is a risk, as is just about everything.
  - fruityrudy 5y ago
    > If the vaccine killed 90% Yes I would take it. Because if there is a vaccine available and recommended to the general population that has 90% kill rate, the thing it’s protecting against would undoubtedly have a higher kill rate then this. End of days scenarios we would be talking about nonetheless.
    - Fine-Cut4983 5y ago
      So you are the type of person who will always do anything the authorities tell you to do. I suppose we are not likely to see eye to eye.
dekhn 5y ago
what's your ldap? I'd like to share it with some of my friends.
UncleMeat 5y ago
I'm also at Google. Every single one of my reports who are intending to return to office have expressed concern and stress over unvaccinated peers in the office. Every single one.
- Bryan22 5y ago
  If this is truly the case, a mandate wouldn't be necessary. Every single one of these people would have been vaccinated already. So why the mandate?
  - thedevilslawyer 5y ago
    Good or bad.. The mandate clearly addresses the concern, correct?
    - Bryan22 5y ago
      Sure. Good or bad, killing everyone on earth addresses the concern of world hunger, correct? Obviously I'm exaggerating for a point here. The point is "Good or Bad" is not immaterial to deciding if a solution should be implemented.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Google has 130,000 employees. I've got ~10 reports and not all of them are coming back to in-person work. If 10% of the company doesn't want to get vaccinated, there is a reasonable chance that none of those people end up on my team. The point is that the presence of unvaccinated people is going to cause stress and problems for other people who are less productive and happy at home and want to return to the office but feel unsafe doing so knowing that they would be sharing space with unvaccinated people.
    - Bryan22 5y ago
      How about "If you aren't vaccinated we're not going to fire you, but you can't work in the office" Everyone wins, no intrusion into people's personal choices about what to put in their bodies.
himinlomax 5y ago
I don't want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. The vaccine, like all others, is not 100% effective. Unvaccinated people pose an avoidable risk to my health. I don't want them around me. I don't want to be forced to be around them. Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don't get the choice to risk mine.
- penultimatebro 5y ago
  Then you’ll be opting to stay home? If everyone in the office is vaccinated you’ll be around only potentially infectious people. >Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don’t get the choice to risk mine. Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptoms, making you less likely to end up hospitalized or die. Even vaccinated you can still get infected, get sick from and spread the virus.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    I said *avoidable* risk. Avoidable is the key. Driving a car has risks, that doesn't excuse idiots driving drunk or racing into my vehicle. Unvaccinated people are literally like drunks. They can be drunk at home, they don't get to be drunk while on the road, and I shouldn't have to stay home so that they can drive dangerously. > Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptom I don't want reduced symptoms, I just don't want your germs. And I wear seat belt or helmet but that doesn't give you a pass to booze up your commute, even though it would reduce the symptoms of rear ending me.
    - penultimatebro 5y ago
      What you said was you don’t want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. So anyone who’s been fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people who are currently infected. The only people to my knowledge who don’t spread are unvaccinated who have been previously infected. Robust natural immunity can be had from previous infection or cross reactive immunity from a previous coronavirus strain. Back to your last point. If you don’t want germs, I’m not sure an office environment is for you. A 100% vaccinated office will still be susceptible to spreading COVID, especially if the Delta variant takes off like it did in the UK and Israel.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
>worth the risk What risk? Using this phrasing means we have already lost.

cma 5y ago

> this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. I don't think they should care if it is work from home (except that it potentially raises insurance premiums for everyone if they come down with some kind of chronic stuff from getting covid or being intubated or have to pay out company life insurance policies), but in the office there is is an obvious interest in having people vaccinated, just like college dorm rooms required even before covid.

oldcigarette 5y ago
Yeah I totally get that there is an interest - I disagree with whether it's a big enough interest at the employer level to justify a requirement. It feels more like pandering/posturing to me. The trade off isn't something that's easily weighed and I doubt we could ever reach consensus (it's pretty much a classic divisive political issue) but in those cases I err on the side of freedom and am sort of fed up with Americans giving up their freedoms.

b0sk 5y ago

Vaccination is not a "this is a cultural decision at the society level". It has saved millions and millions of lives. Maybe change your employer if you are so pissed at them?

oldcigarette 5y ago
Is there a coherent thought here? I don't disagree the vaccine has saved lives or even that you shouldn't get it. I can enjoy my job and what I do and disapprove of decisions made by leadership at the same time. It's easily the best place and people I've ever worked with.
- _vertigo 5y ago
  You don’t think that it’s the employer’s place to mandate something that makes the work environment at their company considerably safer?
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  It's a very basic responsibility of an employer to try and make their workplace a safe place to work. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.

deanclatworthy 5y ago

There is a counter point to yours, just as valid, where folks don’t want to be around unvaccinated folks. Maybe they have an immunocompromised relative or child at home. Maybe they don’t feel safe with unvaccinated folks around. This is a game of odds. People keep acting like this is binary. You’re statistically more likely to have and spread covid without the vaccine. I would be delighted if my employer enforced this policy but in Finland it’s never going to happen.

makomk 5y ago
Honestly, anyone who's genuinely at risk enough that they can't risk being exposed despite being vaccinated - as opposed to the people who were convinced they are because of stupid media culture war bullshit - probably shouldn't be working in an office, because at that point they're going to be at reasonably comparable risk from the common cold. Seriously. The other four endemic human coronaviruses, for example, are very far from a walk in the park for at-risk people that manage to catch them; it's just that most people with working immune systems have some level of immunity that protects them from the worst effects.
- deanclatworthy 5y ago
  As I mentioned in my comment, many folks have families. We are not dealing with individuals when it comes to a pandemic. We are dealing with contagion amongst bubbles of people. Many people have vulnerable people in their bubbles at home and need to make a living.
  - joshuahughes 5y ago
    But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily. What has changed with covid to create so much additional fear and the subsequent authoritarian responses? Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill. What's changed that now a particular course of action has to be mandated with the threat of job-loss as the alternative? Seems to me that those who are concerned about unfairness for one group are simply transferring that unfairness to another group.

gpvos 5y ago

I'm with you except for the sentence about virtue signalling and SJW's; no need to bring the entire culture war into it. (In fact I'm usually on the side of those you call SJW's.)

tmn 5y ago
For whatever reason, that’s generally the dividing line for these alternate realities
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

avh02 5y ago

what i think people forget is that this isn't (IMO) about what the company wants or whatever, it's about the fact that offices are a nasty space where everybody breathes everybody's air - and diseases simply don't give a crap about where that happens. I'm pretty sure if google were an outdoor office complex where everybody sat 10 meters apart from each other they wouldn't give a crap about your vaccination status. If anything, i think it has highlighted things like how cramped public transport, bars, clubs, etc really are and we just never paid it attention. At the end of the day, this is one of the mitigations of a disease's spread and an office is somewhere it can happen. Let me flip it: Remote work ends and you now have to go back in, you're not vaccinated because [whatever reason you want] and you inevitably end up contracting the virus (along with it's risks). (My pessimistic guess is: people then sue the company for unsafe working conditions.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mwint 5y ago
Being personally educated on the risks to to people in my demographic, I would gladly sign an ironclad “I won’t sue the company if I get covid” contract to work in an office. If that’s the company’s concern, I suspect most people who hasn’t received a vaccine would sign such a contract.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  Will you compensate financially the co-workers you happen to infect and who are vaccinated but for whom the vaccine didn't work (10% or so risk)? It's not about you, nobody's stopping you from playing Russian roulette with your own skull. I personally do not want to be around unvaccinated people any more than I want to be on the same road as a drunk or street racer.
  - A_non_e-moose 5y ago
    I would agree to that, provided there is evidence to prove that the other person was infected from me and not anyone else and that this specific infection caused them harm. Restitution on dubious causes is not something that would hold in a court, I think.

jeofken 5y ago

If you’re programming, I encourage you to get into self employment. Your customers will care about your output, reliability, and value to them.

ovi256 5y ago
If you need to meet customers in person, in their offices, they'll most likely require visitors to be vaccinated against Covid too. So you'd have to meet remotely only, which is a different market (it seems to put you in competition with a jillion people from low cost countries).

fruityrudy 5y ago

> “I decided the risk was worth it” It’s funny though how you say this phrase for a vaccine and not for the hundreds of other riskier situations you face daily. “I drove a car…risk was worth it I decided”. It sounds a bit self-important. Vaccines are just something you do. For me it was not a decision. It’s an interesting exploration in psychology where people oppose something mostly because they are told to do it. Like a teenage rebellion attitude. I get this feeling when I feel like I am being taken advantage of or have been recently. I can imagine it’s tough being a Google employee in the SJW era. There are a thousands ways they tell you you need to change. New language, etc. Constant unrelenting bullshit that you cannot oppose. I think this is a way for people to take back control of something because they feel a loss of control in other areas. Just like brexit, people want to go against things because of the people telling them to do something. Google shouldn’t tell me. The government shouldn’t tell me. SJWs shouldn’t tell me. But sadly I don’t think there is a way around this. But I do think the SJWs and vaccine/mask crusaders make things much worse.

Fine-Cut4983 5y ago
Of course you made a decision, unless you are an automaton? (ignoring the question of free will here). If the vaccine killed 90% of those who took it, you would of course take it, because "vaccines are just something you do"? No, you evaluated the risk. And yes, driving a car absolutely is a risk, as is just about everything.
- fruityrudy 5y ago
  > If the vaccine killed 90% Yes I would take it. Because if there is a vaccine available and recommended to the general population that has 90% kill rate, the thing it’s protecting against would undoubtedly have a higher kill rate then this. End of days scenarios we would be talking about nonetheless.
  - Fine-Cut4983 5y ago
    So you are the type of person who will always do anything the authorities tell you to do. I suppose we are not likely to see eye to eye.

dekhn 5y ago

what's your ldap? I'd like to share it with some of my friends.

UncleMeat 5y ago

I'm also at Google. Every single one of my reports who are intending to return to office have expressed concern and stress over unvaccinated peers in the office. Every single one.

Bryan22 5y ago
If this is truly the case, a mandate wouldn't be necessary. Every single one of these people would have been vaccinated already. So why the mandate?
- thedevilslawyer 5y ago
  Good or bad.. The mandate clearly addresses the concern, correct?
  - Bryan22 5y ago
    Sure. Good or bad, killing everyone on earth addresses the concern of world hunger, correct? Obviously I'm exaggerating for a point here. The point is "Good or Bad" is not immaterial to deciding if a solution should be implemented.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Google has 130,000 employees. I've got ~10 reports and not all of them are coming back to in-person work. If 10% of the company doesn't want to get vaccinated, there is a reasonable chance that none of those people end up on my team. The point is that the presence of unvaccinated people is going to cause stress and problems for other people who are less productive and happy at home and want to return to the office but feel unsafe doing so knowing that they would be sharing space with unvaccinated people.
  - Bryan22 5y ago
    How about "If you aren't vaccinated we're not going to fire you, but you can't work in the office" Everyone wins, no intrusion into people's personal choices about what to put in their bodies.

himinlomax 5y ago

I don't want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. The vaccine, like all others, is not 100% effective. Unvaccinated people pose an avoidable risk to my health. I don't want them around me. I don't want to be forced to be around them. Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don't get the choice to risk mine.

penultimatebro 5y ago
Then you’ll be opting to stay home? If everyone in the office is vaccinated you’ll be around only potentially infectious people. >Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don’t get the choice to risk mine. Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptoms, making you less likely to end up hospitalized or die. Even vaccinated you can still get infected, get sick from and spread the virus.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  I said *avoidable* risk. Avoidable is the key. Driving a car has risks, that doesn't excuse idiots driving drunk or racing into my vehicle. Unvaccinated people are literally like drunks. They can be drunk at home, they don't get to be drunk while on the road, and I shouldn't have to stay home so that they can drive dangerously. > Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptom I don't want reduced symptoms, I just don't want your germs. And I wear seat belt or helmet but that doesn't give you a pass to booze up your commute, even though it would reduce the symptoms of rear ending me.
  - penultimatebro 5y ago
    What you said was you don’t want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. So anyone who’s been fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people who are currently infected. The only people to my knowledge who don’t spread are unvaccinated who have been previously infected. Robust natural immunity can be had from previous infection or cross reactive immunity from a previous coronavirus strain. Back to your last point. If you don’t want germs, I’m not sure an office environment is for you. A 100% vaccinated office will still be susceptible to spreading COVID, especially if the Delta variant takes off like it did in the UK and Israel.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

>worth the risk What risk? Using this phrasing means we have already lost.