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Comments like this make me wonder if people really expect engineers to be fired because of an outage? I do not work at Google, but none of my workplaces would

Comments like this make me wonder if people really expect engineers to be fired because of an outage? I do not work at Google, but none of my workplaces would fire engineers because of a failure. Mistakes happen. As long as they are not repeated, everything is good. If your company fires people in situations like this, run away and never look back.

ddalex 5y ago
Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of it, the opposite thing happens after a major incident - a systemic failure should be identified, people are being hired to fix it :)
- xcambar 5y ago
  > Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything with regards to the company's PR? Is there an actual risk in the US? Have there been trials or anything that push people to add such statements?
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Rumor mill journalists will mine social media and forum comments and write entire articles about "so and so FAANG employee gives hint at future merger" when some dev comments how much they've enjoyed using some library recently.
  - b0afc375b5 5y ago
    It's in the spirit of full disclosure, which some, including me, appreciate.
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
    I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attention from people, but this works for me better than disclaimers on all my posts.
    - riffic 5y ago
      if they wanted to control this so bad they'd provision you a managed account like how email addresses are managed.
    - secondaryacct 5y ago
      Yet all these googlers breached it immediately in the first sentence by naming their company...
      - xcambar 5y ago
        Sarcastically, "I'm a googler, opinions my own" reads a lot like "I'm a googler, just so you know". I didn't want to emphasize on that on the first comment yet to be honest, I find it pedantic because it's pointless, legally speaking.
  - ddalex 5y ago
    Can't speak for other companies, but this is covered in basic training at Google - if you're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, you must make it clear when your writings may be mistaken or constructed to represent the company. Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For example, on the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage. I'm not aware of any actual risks in the US, but then again I'm not in the US. For me this seems a minor point, and I actually enjoy separating my public persona from the company for which I work, being it Google or a small startup.
    - xcambar 5y ago
      Would you say: "I live in [city], opinions are my own", or "I am married to [person], opinions are my own"? If no, why are you doing this for the company you're trading skills and time against money?
    - DnDGrognard 5y ago
      It's the same at all large companies - its CYA boiler plate. Though I almost got to be the official spokesperson for British Telecom responding on the alt.2600 news group about the the Met police VMB hack - press office was cool but the internal security was not.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      > On the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage. To be fair, I think the media would have done that even with a "speaking only for myself" disclaimer.
    - secondaryacct 5y ago
      Every company says that, the obvious solution is to never name it when you speak. Why do these people need to say "Im a googler" and then immediately "but forget it, I speak on my own"... obviously there s value in the fact they re at Google and it will color their discourse which is already probably forbidden. Dont name your company if you intend to speak for yourself.
  - null_object 5y ago
    > Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? This isn’t just ‘big tech’ - I work at a relatively small tech company, but I’d never want anything I say about the company to be mistaken as some sort of ‘official statement’ especially if it related to an incident that possibly had a financial impact on external parties, and could conceivably be misused in that context in the future. I go as far as never writing private emails from my work mail for the same sort of reasons - although that is from a possibly over-abundance of caution.
  - gsich 5y ago
    Especially when it's not an opinion.
    - samhw 5y ago
      In fairness, 'opinion' is a horrendously vague and ill-defined word. It does double duty as (i) 'normative value' and (ii) 'personal understanding of the descriptive facts', which two senses are constantly confused - for example right here. That's why we constantly get "it's just my opinion" used in reference to type-ii opinions (personal understanding of descriptive fact), when it's only really appropriate to type-i opinions (normative value). Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF.
      - not1ofU 5y ago
        "Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF"... um whats IMPUOTDF? I did try to google it, but only this post was found.
        samhw 5y ago
        Sorry, I was joking: 'in my personal understanding of the descriptive facts', referring back to that second definition of 'opinion' earlier in the comment.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    Part of it is because the company asks us to. Part of it is because I think it's reasonable to tell people your biases, and it can avoid the situation where substantive conversation gets derailed by "gotchas". If I make a comment about how I think Google Meet has the best noise cancellation of any video chat software, even though I don't work on Meet or anything adjacent to it, it's still a bad look if someone can dig through my comment history and pull out a previous comment about how I work for Google.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    It s because they only hire idiots at Google. Im from a big company, I just dont name it and assume humans understand my opinions are my own :D
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    They want to mention their employer to gain authority in the discussion, but since mentioning their employer is a legal/PR risk, they need to follow it up with a disclaimer (this only partially mitigates the risk, but it’s worth it to get the brag in).
- samhw 5y ago
  Yeah, this 'blameless' ethos has definitely trickled down from FAANG to decently-sized decently-reputed places I've worked at - and certainly to #EngTwitter. I think it's a bit over-applied in some cases. Does it not commit you to the theorem that every process can be made so perfect as to be completely invulnerable to one human being making a mistake? (At least, in the form exemplified by the common tweets to the effect that "your processes are to blame for $incident, not your interns/engineers/etc".) Even if you required two-person auth for every single thing, two people will make a mistake now and then, and in reality - due to our being social animals - the two probabilities are not truly independent. I just don't see how this is feasible in reality. A more realistic principle feels like: "people will infrequently make mistakes, and that's of course natural and human and forgiveable, but far fewer incidents should be vulnerable to human error than currently are".
  - assbuttbuttass 5y ago
    I of course agree that mistakes are inevitable. That being said, the point of blameless culture is not to make a process invulnerable to mistakes. Instead during a post-mortem, we look at how to prevent that particular incident from happening again.
fragmede 5y ago
You're totally right and the SRE book by Google goes over this - the company's culture does not allow firing people for outages. If you're somewhere this still happens, run away (or you'd better be getting paid more than top-end ICs at Google.

ddalex 5y ago

Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of it, the opposite thing happens after a major incident - a systemic failure should be identified, people are being hired to fix it :)

xcambar 5y ago
> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything with regards to the company's PR? Is there an actual risk in the US? Have there been trials or anything that push people to add such statements?
- com2kid 5y ago
  > It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Rumor mill journalists will mine social media and forum comments and write entire articles about "so and so FAANG employee gives hint at future merger" when some dev comments how much they've enjoyed using some library recently.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  It's in the spirit of full disclosure, which some, including me, appreciate.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attention from people, but this works for me better than disclaimers on all my posts.
  - riffic 5y ago
    if they wanted to control this so bad they'd provision you a managed account like how email addresses are managed.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    Yet all these googlers breached it immediately in the first sentence by naming their company...
    - xcambar 5y ago
      Sarcastically, "I'm a googler, opinions my own" reads a lot like "I'm a googler, just so you know". I didn't want to emphasize on that on the first comment yet to be honest, I find it pedantic because it's pointless, legally speaking.
- ddalex 5y ago
  Can't speak for other companies, but this is covered in basic training at Google - if you're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, you must make it clear when your writings may be mistaken or constructed to represent the company. Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For example, on the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage. I'm not aware of any actual risks in the US, but then again I'm not in the US. For me this seems a minor point, and I actually enjoy separating my public persona from the company for which I work, being it Google or a small startup.
  - xcambar 5y ago
    Would you say: "I live in [city], opinions are my own", or "I am married to [person], opinions are my own"? If no, why are you doing this for the company you're trading skills and time against money?
  - DnDGrognard 5y ago
    It's the same at all large companies - its CYA boiler plate. Though I almost got to be the official spokesperson for British Telecom responding on the alt.2600 news group about the the Met police VMB hack - press office was cool but the internal security was not.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    > On the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage. To be fair, I think the media would have done that even with a "speaking only for myself" disclaimer.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    Every company says that, the obvious solution is to never name it when you speak. Why do these people need to say "Im a googler" and then immediately "but forget it, I speak on my own"... obviously there s value in the fact they re at Google and it will color their discourse which is already probably forbidden. Dont name your company if you intend to speak for yourself.
- null_object 5y ago
  > Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? This isn’t just ‘big tech’ - I work at a relatively small tech company, but I’d never want anything I say about the company to be mistaken as some sort of ‘official statement’ especially if it related to an incident that possibly had a financial impact on external parties, and could conceivably be misused in that context in the future. I go as far as never writing private emails from my work mail for the same sort of reasons - although that is from a possibly over-abundance of caution.
- gsich 5y ago
  Especially when it's not an opinion.
  - samhw 5y ago
    In fairness, 'opinion' is a horrendously vague and ill-defined word. It does double duty as (i) 'normative value' and (ii) 'personal understanding of the descriptive facts', which two senses are constantly confused - for example right here. That's why we constantly get "it's just my opinion" used in reference to type-ii opinions (personal understanding of descriptive fact), when it's only really appropriate to type-i opinions (normative value). Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF.
    - not1ofU 5y ago
      "Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF"... um whats IMPUOTDF? I did try to google it, but only this post was found.
      - samhw 5y ago
        Sorry, I was joking: 'in my personal understanding of the descriptive facts', referring back to that second definition of 'opinion' earlier in the comment.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Part of it is because the company asks us to. Part of it is because I think it's reasonable to tell people your biases, and it can avoid the situation where substantive conversation gets derailed by "gotchas". If I make a comment about how I think Google Meet has the best noise cancellation of any video chat software, even though I don't work on Meet or anything adjacent to it, it's still a bad look if someone can dig through my comment history and pull out a previous comment about how I work for Google.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  It s because they only hire idiots at Google. Im from a big company, I just dont name it and assume humans understand my opinions are my own :D
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  They want to mention their employer to gain authority in the discussion, but since mentioning their employer is a legal/PR risk, they need to follow it up with a disclaimer (this only partially mitigates the risk, but it’s worth it to get the brag in).
samhw 5y ago
Yeah, this 'blameless' ethos has definitely trickled down from FAANG to decently-sized decently-reputed places I've worked at - and certainly to #EngTwitter. I think it's a bit over-applied in some cases. Does it not commit you to the theorem that every process can be made so perfect as to be completely invulnerable to one human being making a mistake? (At least, in the form exemplified by the common tweets to the effect that "your processes are to blame for $incident, not your interns/engineers/etc".) Even if you required two-person auth for every single thing, two people will make a mistake now and then, and in reality - due to our being social animals - the two probabilities are not truly independent. I just don't see how this is feasible in reality. A more realistic principle feels like: "people will infrequently make mistakes, and that's of course natural and human and forgiveable, but far fewer incidents should be vulnerable to human error than currently are".
- assbuttbuttass 5y ago
  I of course agree that mistakes are inevitable. That being said, the point of blameless culture is not to make a process invulnerable to mistakes. Instead during a post-mortem, we look at how to prevent that particular incident from happening again.

fragmede 5y ago

You're totally right and the SRE book by Google goes over this - the company's culture does not allow firing people for outages. If you're somewhere this still happens, run away (or you'd better be getting paid more than top-end ICs at Google.