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>>> Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors. > I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available interna

>>> Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors. > I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read. I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand. > So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.

jimbob45 5y ago
>"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top. In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior. Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.
nostrademons 5y ago
Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum. It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.

jimbob45 5y ago

>"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top. In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior. Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.

nostrademons 5y ago

Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum. It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.