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A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit

• permo-w 4y ago
  this reads like the plot of a Goosebumps novel
  • hoten 4y ago
    I was thinking Hot Fuzz.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    > it's no wonder smaller cults pop up within it. The story is about a cult infiltrating from the outside, not a cult “popping up” from the inside.
    • ravenstine 4y ago
      Why do you think that phrase necessarily refers to creation? There's no reason why an existing entity can't pop up within another.
  • huhwat 4y ago
    Amazon operates this same way. Though I would assume Amazon has at least one cult in it.
• devnull3 4y ago
  Until last year I too use to dream working in Google. But increasingly the attractiveness is decreasing. I cannot put a finger on one specific thing. It has gone too large from a career pov.
  • mcntsh 4y ago
    I used to dream about working at Google until I interviewed with them. I got dragged along for months and largely ignored between interviews. The interviews themselves were impersonal and non interactive. They gave the impression that I should just shut up and write code in front of them and when I asked clarifying questions I barely got anything in response.
    • fatnoah 4y ago
      Wow, this is the complete opposite of my experience interviewing there. The recruiter typically got back to me the same day, or the next day at the latest. My interviews, system design in particular, were very, very, very interactive (and fun!).
      • deleted 4y ago
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    • typon 4y ago
      Had a similar experience. The recruiting part of the process went pretty smoothly, until I got to the onsite. Had 5 on-site interviews (excluding lunch), all exactly the same format: walk in the room where my interviewer is waiting with a question written on the white board, they say "hello" to me and I'm expected to read the question, clarify it a little bit and start coding. Not a single interviewer cared about my past experience or what kind of a person I am. I guess they're relying on the lunch interview for that signal? Anyway I ended up getting rejected and the feedback was that I need to practice my algorithms more. (All the questions were slight variations on popular leetcode questions)
      • skeeter2020 4y ago
        >> and the feedback was that I need to practice my algorithms more. I'm optimistic I will live long enough to see the death of this type of interview. Great gate-keeper question, easy to mark, next to zero signalling value as to ability to problem solve or program. Sigh...
• sentirist 4y ago
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  -
  • TheHypnotist 4y ago
    What? Cults were never covered in any of these cultural discussions.
    • dymk 4y ago
      Yeah this is a sticky issue because it falls under religious freedom. Would you want to be the director at Google sued for firing somebody due to their religion?
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    Why do you think that the supposed woke culture of Google is good?
  • sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    The primary mechanism that is allowing this situation seems to be the split between actual Google employees and contractors. - Less enforcement of hiring standards and methods allowed a cult member in a management role to hire other cult members and arrange them within his organization - These contracted cult members primarily work around other contractors, who can only complain to their contracting agency not Google. - The contracts in place make it nearly impossible for the agencies to put pressure on Google beyond ceasing to do business with them. What woke factor are you seeing here? Google's doing capitalist stuff here not woke stuff, and a cult has found a hole in the structure they can exploit.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• Terry_Roll 4y ago
  Every entity has one or more cults depending on its size, beit university, military, govt's & companies. You cant get away from them unless you live on the moon!
  • emeraldd 4y ago
    At that point it's arguable you have joined a cult of one.
  • mtkhaos 4y ago
    Wish people understandstand how this interplays with politics and national identity. It's an odd feature of humanity and a bug part of why I could never call myself an atheist as that too didn't go far enough with this understanding. Fundamentally religious by default and interesting how that plays in PR and advertisements.
    • Terry_Roll 4y ago
      Its all intertwined, religion, politics, etc etc. Cults, cliques, gangs, its all just a play on words by specialists in words and the nuanced differences whilst having similar properties. Something to keep us busy if other things dont keep us busy.
  • jonhohle 4y ago
    It doesn’t matter if a secular organization has a cult or even social organizations, labor practices need to remain fair regardless of membership. That seems to be the issue with this story as one of the directors in question has already lost lawsuits because of favoring cult members over non. The cult itself seems suspect, but that’s for law enforcement to determine.
  • HKH2 4y ago
    You can't get away from cliques, I guess. I don't think cults are that common.
• sydthrowaway 4y ago
  • rusticpenn 4y ago
    That’s called caste…
    • thaeli 4y ago
      And Google/Alphabet _really_ doesn't like anyone talking about caste. Because then they'd have to acknowledge they have a problem.
      • Workaccount2 4y ago
        Given Google is probably one of the most woke organizations, I find this hilarious.
        • causi 4y ago
          Google, like almost every large organization, is de facto psychopathic. Its values align with "woke" values because its profits do not depend on the favorable opinions and/or work performance of racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or other traditional Western bigots. Its profits do depend on the work performance of casteists, therefore Google will use every means at its disposal to preserve that profit. If tomorrow the Google board of directors and executives found that someone had created an AI that could single-handedly replace every single other Google employee with the caveat that it absolutely hated left-handed people, Google would be posting thoughtful articles about how anyone not right-handed deserved to be rounded up and put in camps.
          • robonerd 4y ago
            > Its values align with "woke" values because its profits do not depend on the favorable opinions and/or work performance of racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or other traditional Western bigots. It's deeper than that. There are genuine economic incentives for corporations to align themselves with progressive values. Racist hiring schemes artificially restrict the labor pool, and would deny them access to many of the best workers. Furthermore, having a diverse workforce reduces the risk of unionization. Amazon specifically is known to track low ethnic and racial diversity as a unionization risk; the other big companies probably do similar. The most obnoxious aspects of corporate "wokeness", the anti-racist training and similar "get lectured by HR" programs, likely serve to decrease the risk of unionization by keeping employees nervous and on their toes around each other. A workplace where everybody is walking on eggshells, treating their coworkers like potential landmines, is not exactly fertile ground for labor organization.
• biztos 4y ago
  I’m from a place pretty near Oregon House and used to drive by it every couple of months. IIRC these people made decent wine, and you could go see their art collection for free, but I never got around to it.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  • bragr 4y ago
    That's pretty standard for cults actually. A big part of having a successful cult is screening out people who aren't susceptible. Having a less extreme outer cult ensures only the most vulnerable are served up to the more extreme stuff. See NXIVM or even Scientology with the split between "normies" out walking around and the Gold Base/Sea Org people.
    • lotto-win 4y ago
      I would love a good documentary about cults in general - in the style of "icarus" - reporter tries and documents it. Such a fascinating topic.
      • deleted 4y ago
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  • deleted 4y ago
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• WangComputers 4y ago
  I'd be more than happy to join a cult and do their bidding if they got me a good job at Google with good long term prospects, it sounds like a fair deal to me. Mr Lloyd would have been much better off working out a deal with the cult rather than suing his employer, perhaps he could have nominally joined them and tithed 10% in exchange for their nepotism; it's certainly what I would have done.
  • huhwat 4y ago
    Did you read the thread where cult members were subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse? Rape and forced abortions?
    • WangComputers 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• sylware 4y ago
• dang 4y ago
  Url changed from https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/1537396946691772416 https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/15373969466917724..., which points to this.
• secondcoming 4y ago
  It's not illegal to be in a cult. Maybe it's left out for legal reasons, but there's no suggestion in the article that they did bad anything at all to the author. Maybe he was afraid of the whiteness of it, or the allegedly rampant gay sex.
  • asimpletune 4y ago
    Well he was ignored for promotion
    • secondcoming 4y ago
      By his friend who wasn't in the cult. Maybe I read it wrong?
      • colpabar 4y ago
        from the medium article linked in other comments: > Then, without warning or reason, I was fired. The person who actually gave me the decision didn’t know why they were doing it. They said they had no involvement in the decision. They asked me if I knew why I was being fired. I said “I assume you would know, right?” They didn’t. (A funny detail: The raise for that promotion I was given was processed after I was fired, so I received two last checks at the higher rate. Fired and promoted at the same time.) > Even though Dan was not in my chain of supervisors, I’m convinced he helped to orchestrate my termination. I believe he saw me as an existential threat, to him, his colleagues and their jobs. The purported reasoning for my termination was an email I had sent requesting the retention of an editor, which was a completely normal business issue. In retrospect, it looks like Dan was looking for pretext to shuffle me off for some time before that. edit: i might as well just link it here too https://medium.com/@kwilliamlloyd/the-cult-in-google-3c1a910214d1 https://medium.com/@kwilliamlloyd/the-cult-in-google-3c1a910...
    • colpabar 4y ago
      The whole reason he filed the lawsuit, and thus why we are reading about this, is because he was fired and he feels it was because he tried to speak out about the cult. Did anyone in this thread read any of it lol
• dang 4y ago
  We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/1537396946691772416 https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/15373969466917724..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Commenters: please don't post shallow/unsubstantive/flamey things to this thread—or any HN thread, but this one seems to have been unusually triggery. Probably the submitted title "Cults at Google" contributed to that.
  • ginko 4y ago
    Changing the URL to a paywalled article no one can read isn't very helpful though.
    • xhkkffbf 4y ago
      Not to be picky, but everyone can read the article. They just have to pay. We have to support journalism some how.
      • _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
        Or, rather: https://web.archive.org/web/20220616142933/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220616142933/https://www.nytim...
      • noasaservice 4y ago
        For the rest of us who don't want to "sign up online and forced to call to cancel": I present Firefox plugin "Bypass Paywalls Clean". Used in conjunction with "Ublock Origin" and you'll have the easiest and best use of the web to date.
      • prirun 4y ago
        I read it with NoScript blocking Javascript.
      • 4y ago
• thrownawayalre 4y ago
  It is Google so it gets that much publicity which is good for that particular case because it will be investigated and sorted out. Sexual abuse and discrimination enablers will be investigated. Good. Too bad for the other large size company where similar things happen which won't get similar publicity and won't ever be investigated. Not working at GOOG, but I don't get the hate in the comments or the idea that it is a google thing. The tough interviews that everyone is very critical about are actually a good edge against that sort of system (recruiting members of your cult). Too bad the process/interviews aren't that hard for contractors?
  • frob 4y ago
    Which other large size company? It sounds like you're referencing an event or issue at of of the other FAAGS--would you care to enlighten us?
    • throwawayiionqz 4y ago
      Cisco vs California is one example with discrimination (no sexual abuse enabling here, though). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083
  • FiloSottile 4y ago
    The original link presented a detailed argument for what is Google specific about this, namely that it was enabled by the two tier workforce system. https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/1537396946691772416 https://twitter.com/alphabetworkers/status/15373969466917724...
    • prirun 4y ago
      From the Twitter link: "I was a TVC — which stands for “temps, vendors, and contractors,” a designation within Google for workers who aren’t full-time employees and are hired by third parties companies, not by Google itself. We do the same work as full-time Google employees — I worked right alongside them — but we don’t have the same corporate benefits." This is another way to screw workers, allowing large companies to hire "employees" without having to pay benefits or FICA taxes. If Google managers are directing and controlling these contractors as if they were actual Google employees, doesn't this violate IRS rules on independent contractors? For example, if I hire a company to do my video productions, that's fine. But if that company's employees all are required to work in my building, and I supply the desk, chair, computer, and have a employee/manager who directs their daily actions, they are not functioning as independent contractors according to IRS guidelines. In that case, the contractors might be able to sue Google for benefits and past taxes they've had to pay that Google employees don't have to pay.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• etskinner 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/9wQxA https://archive.ph/9wQxA
• dymk 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/9wQxA https://archive.ph/9wQxA
• lisper 4y ago
  This is just one example of a much bigger issue, which is religious institutions quietly taking over secular businesses without anyone realizing it. It is so pervasive and so stealthy that it is hard to even talk about it without sounding like a crackpot. It has become a little more evident recently with the emergence of evangelical Christian activism in politics, but it runs much, much deeper than that. The LDS Church, for example (a.k.a. Mormons) has vast business holdings, all of which funnel tax-free money back to the Church. Downtown Menlo Park is largely owned by the Presbyterian Church. I could go on and on. All of this is driven by the fact that churches are not taxed in the U.S. They are legal tax havens, and they are very much used as such by oligarchs of all stripes.
  • bena 4y ago
    Weren't the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) up until recently owned by the LDS?
    • robonerd 4y ago
      No, the LDS never owned BSA. However they were the largest sponsor of BSA for about a century, until a few years ago.
      • bena 4y ago
        Ah. I knew they were integrated somehow.
        • tptacek 4y ago
          They're not integrated. BSA where I grew up, on the South Side of Chicago, was (for instance) extremely Catholic. "Duty to God" is (or was?) a tenet of the organization, dating back to its founding. In the formative years of the BSA, that wasn't strange at all; what would have been unusual would have been members that weren't in some way affiliated with a religion. In fact, Boy Scouts is how I first learned about a bunch of religions --- Hinduism and Islam, in particular --- because they had different religious badges.
• IYasha 4y ago
  Is this another case of "corporate religion"? It's not new, I've seen studies of cases a few years ago. Terrifying to know some managers are adopting it and people get dragged into it. I understand individuality, free will and consciousness are not exactly valued in the brave new world paradigm, but I'd rather stay clear from such places.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    No, it's an example of a group of people doing a "party machine" kind of thing where they hire their connections, and their connections support them.
  • lupire 4y ago
    As the article explains, no. This is an external group that got a foothold and nepotistically hired more from its ranks and made purchases from its businesses.
    • IYasha 4y ago
      Thanks, I thought it was a subscription-only article, couldn't open it.
• chicob 4y ago
  “We have longstanding employee and supplier policies in place to prevent discrimination and conflicts of interest, and we take those seriously.” Isn't adding a superfluous "and we take those seriously" the rhetorical equivalent of pouting? Every time I read this - after an account suspension, for example - the impression I get is that no, they don't really take those things seriously. They're just improvising or leaving it for the algorithm.
  • ALittleLight 4y ago
    I just switched to hackernews from a Gmail conversation I was having with Google customer support. The chain started when a Google person sent me a follow-up from a chat conversation where the Google support person refused to help me. The follow-up mail said a reply "will come directly to me". I replied and a second emailer replied back to me to "thank you for your understanding". I replied again and yet another Google support person replied to me saying that because I was "logged out" my ticket was now closed and that they were glad they could help. Reading your comment I feel there is just a commitment to shallow lies from Google across the board. For example, why would the first emailer even tell me replies went directly to her? It obviously wasn't true. Why would three or four Google people email me, do absolutely nothing, and then close the ticket? Why not just say "We aren't helping" or just ignore my request?
    • afandian 4y ago
      Isn’t it just as likely that the software developers disempower the support staff as much as they do users? Maybe the agent did think that the reply would reach them, and the algorithm was being AB tested.
    • chicob 4y ago
      There is nothing more annoying than a Customer Support Chinese Room of Kafka, where tickets are transferred around only to take us back to square one each time. And if plausible deniability from senior management would just add insult to injury, plausibly, claiming that things are taken seriously when things are obviously being neglected is just gaslighting.
  • deleted 4y ago
• derevaunseraun 4y ago
  From the podcast: "He was the golden chain to heaven. The only way to get to heaven was to allow him sexual activity with me." ... What makes people join these groups to begin with?? Why do they believe such obvious lies?
  • Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
    Lack of self esteem, family pressures, cultural "norms", a desire for belonging etc. etc. It's the exploitation that's as old as time itself.
  • robonerd 4y ago
    Cults like this generally target and recruit damaged or otherwise vulnerable people. Also, they generally keep the crazy dialed down to a minimum in the beginning, then slow boil people over the course of several years. It often starts with "love bombing"; the cult heaps positive attention and praise on somebody who is unaccustomed to receiving anything like that.
    • vizzier 4y ago
      Though a bit tongue in cheek this classic video covers the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBK5aKOr2Fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBK5aKOr2Fw
      • birksherty 4y ago
        This is brilliant. I thought I can't be manipulated easily. But after watching the video, I think I could have joined such a cult at some point. It basically boils down to giving love and attention to people who didn't get any and made to feel like a looser in their life before, specially by parents.
      • derevaunseraun 4y ago
        this video is a work of art
      • daveslash 4y ago
• InefficientRed 4y ago
  Setting aside the issue of cults, recruiting from church networks is fairly common. It's not surprising and often not nefarious. After all, a church is just another social setting. People also recruit from other non-professional networks -- adult sports leagues, hobbies, alumni networks, family friends, and so on. Churches are just another social group. I am, however, surprised more companies don't have explicit HR conflict of interest clauses regarding religious entities. Not whole religions, but specific congregations/parishes/etc. Allowing these social networks as unchecked recruiting channels without some sort of control seems like asking for discrimination suits, even when the subject is a traditional religious organization rather than a cult. I think about religion the same way I think about family. There's nothing wrong with referring your cousin or fellow congregant for a position, but a judicious company should probably flag the conflict of interest in the actual hiring process and perhaps also in management relationships. Otherwise you can end up with centers of influence in the company revolving around an external religious social network, which is a huge risk for the company. (Alumni networks have the same issue in terms of institutional political dysfunction, but with the important difference that a company cannot be sued for preferring Stanford grads in promotions.)
  • rossdavidh 4y ago
    I think the biggest obstacle is probably that flagging it requires asking for information on it. There's a lot of icky history about quotas to prevent there being "too many" Jews in a particular organization, for example. If you ask what a prospective hire's religion/congregation/parish/etc. is, you may say it's to prevent a conflict of interest, but it looks bad, and probably invites as much legal trouble as not monitoring it, if not more.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    It is one thing if someone brings in a guy they know from their soccer team to interview, another if 90% of the people in a department turn out to be playing on it.
    • InefficientRed 4y ago
      Yeah, bot would raise my alarm bells. But a very important difference from the co.'s perspective is that discriminating against non-soccer-players isn't illegal...
• kadayadi 4y ago
  • dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for religious flamewar, which is not allowed here. (No, that's not because we're on one side or the other of any particular flamewar. The entire category is hellish and off topic.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• kbarmettler 4y ago
  As a former Oregon House resident, astonished to see it on the front page of HN. It's interesting to see the same strategy implemented at Google, apparently, that they reportedly used to get members employed by Yuba county. There was a minor scandal, an investigation leading to a bunch of firings, years ago. Allegedly members were using their ties to get the county to look the other way at countless unpermitted structures. I understand that blew over in time, after which there was apparently a rehiring of some of those that were fired. (Some of this is just things I heard when I worked at the grocery store/gas station/video rental, which was and I believe still is the center of commerce in the area.) At that time it seemed like the fellowship made up about half the town population. Anyways, for years they were trying to build a large colosseum and that must have been much harder to hide than the countless little shacks without addresses that they put members in, up driveways that wended and climbed past the main, addressed house. I think the colosseum led to the county's investigation. I'm not sure if they're still building it...
  • ims 4y ago
    Fascinating. Have you written about your experience there?
    • tomcam 4y ago
      Yeah, I want to be there for the podcast/article/blog too…
• javier_e06 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• eggsbenedict 4y ago
  Interesting story. From the headline, I thought this was going to be a culture-war type of article. I wasn't expecting evidence of a real cult.
  • MiddleEndian 4y ago
    My thought was it was gonna be about how their corporate-speak was cult-like with terms like "Googley" and "Googler" and "Noogler" but I figured that wouldn't really be worth an article.
  • woah 4y ago
    I thought it was going to be about Landmark Forum
• throwaway86530 4y ago
  The author delayed his attempt to do something about the cult and got fired because he planned to do so. It would have been better to be fired after raising concerns to the HR. This would have been both more ethical and would also give a more solid ground for the trial, so that's a bit sad. Yet, that's so much better than the tons of people who knew and did nothing. Good luck to him!
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    There is also the little tidbit about him joining the Alphabet Union recently..... Surely not related and they could not have fired him for joining a union right.... right?! As far as I know however that would also be highly illegal - interesting story to follow for sure
    • astrange 4y ago
      It's not a real union and he wasn't an employee.
      • seoaeu 4y ago
        Real enough that it’s illegal to fire someone for joining
        • Melatonic 4y ago
          Yea I would imagine that must have factored in. Not at all saying that they should have of course - the opposite - but it seems odd they did not also mention that a bit more.....
        • smsm42 4y ago
          If you can prove the firing reason was this. Which would be rather hard to establish unless he somehow gets his hands on some email from the top management saying "that bastard joined a union?! Fire him on the spot!". I estimate chances of that as fairly low.
• kradeelav 4y ago
  Not going as far to say "anyone currently at Google is morally compromised" - but anyone who knows about this, and stays is ... not somebody who I'd want to associate with. Or hire for that matter.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    If I only worked at companies that weren't "basically evil", I would have to work for myself - and I'm sure if I looked hard enough (and definitely if someone else did), I wouldn't even be able to do that.
    • kradeelav 4y ago
      YMMV, but there seems to me a difference between "generic corporate sleaze" and "sex trafficking doom cult literally within the system".
      • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        YMMV, but when you have 100k+ employees - you're gonna have more than "generic corporate sleaze" somewhere in the system.
        • bowsamic 4y ago
          Not every company then eh?
          • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
            Big companies aren't inherently evil. Because they're big, the probability that big actors sneek in is higher.
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    Not sure how black and white you'd have to see the world to immediately lump 150k Alphabet employees into the evil bucket due to a dozen people whom most of those employees never knew about or met.
• dexwiz 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this is a common occurrence across tech. Coming from the Midwest, the West Coast seems full of cults. Talking to people, it doesn’t take long to find someone who was raised in a cult, or has family members in a cult.
  • jjtheblunt 4y ago
    I'm from the midwest of the us, have lived roughly 18 years in california, never met any cult person, except for opt-in cults like crossfit and other macho communities which are seemingly creepily (laughably) similar. "spiritual gangster" shirts i've seen many times, which i can't tell the humor level of.
  • zdragnar 4y ago
    The Midwest is full of tiny communities that would look like cults to someone who hasn't lived here- Amish, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses and more. A big part of the difference is that- aside from Jehovah's Witnesses, they tend to not be active in proselytizing, and members tend to stay within the groups for longer- their activities rarely make hollywood-style media news because they're not particularly interesting compared to what we more typically think of as cults (i.e. the doomsday cult" in the article).
    • dexwiz 4y ago
      Oh yeah the Midwest is full of cults. There are a ton of radical and fundamentalist Christian offshoots. The only difference between many religions and cults is time. West Coast cults have their own particular flavor though, like the Fellowship of Friends.
      • csisnett 4y ago
        So if every religion is a cult then why many mainstream denominations are easy to leave? You're making it harder for people to actually share how to escape an actual cult by calling every religion a cult
      • 4y ago
• akomtu 4y ago
  Suing a cult with hundreds of members is a dumb idea: they'll turn vindictive and will go after you. Instead, you appear mildly suppotive and friendly to them, gather information, give them publicity via media outlets, and give anonymous tips to FBI.
  • nocturnial 4y ago
    I hope nobody takes your idea seriously. Most people aren't super-spies who can go undercover and save society from a cult. Just go to law enforcement, report it and listen to what they have to say.
    • monkeybutton 4y ago
      There once was a professor doing research on cults who sent out his grad students to secretly embed themselves in various cults and report on them. Not all of them came back.. And now we get learn about why that was a bad idea in the ethics portion of psychology classes! Yay!
      • burrows 4y ago
        How are you defining “bad idea”? Professor sent out the grad students. Some of them didn’t come back (died?). Those are all the facts. Any pontificating about whether it is Good or Bad is just nonsense.
      • djcannabiz 4y ago
        Do you know when/where this happened? Im not doubting you Im just very curious.
        • monkeybutton 4y ago
          The US and any time before the 2000s. Sorry I can't be of more help than that. It was only a brief but very memorable mention in a lecture many years ago. I did just try searching for it online but there is a ton of cult related content online. More than I ever imagined. Also it's not like the researchers were exposed and murdered dramatically, rather that some just ended up joining and staying with the cults.
• re 4y ago
  The referenced NYTimes article about the author's lawsuit: https://archive.ph/0dwuK https://archive.ph/0dwuK
• dubswithus 4y ago
  Imagine working so hard to work at Google and then… > Members are typically required to give 10 percent of their monthly earnings to the organization. > one member described being fined $1,500 for having sex with a woman when they weren’t married.
  • itronitron 4y ago
    fined $1500 or 'charged' $1500?
    • swatcoder 4y ago
      If you submitted some personal authority and you transgress that authority, and you can remedy that transgression with a payment, fine is a suitable word. I see what you’re getting at, but the word isn’t really out of place there.
• scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
  So this is a video production department, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. The aesthetic of the modern corporate/tech video is cultish in character and it would make sense that these people know how to do this. And then it’s also interesting because one could assume that these people could do so because the actual engineers in Alphabet probably aren’t all that focused or interacting with this video team more than necessary. And they don’t know much about video production anyways, not enough to scrutinize hiring decisions. This sounds like something that will take a little more organized effort to stamp out, probably internal investigation, evidence gathering etc. But if this guy figured it out, they didn’t cover their tracks very well anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • AceJohnny2 4y ago
    > they didn’t cover their tracks very well anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I mean they actually told him where they were from (geographically, if not organizationally), so clearly they didn't consider it something that needed to be secret. Which is interesting, because it gives us insight into their way of thinking [1]. They clearly don't consider themselves to be in any way toxic like the author thinks they are. Cults are interesting: they provide a sense of belonging and accomplishment to their members, in exchange for something (time, money/tithe, ...). In that respect, they're just another point on the spectrum of human social groups. Including some corporations. Frankly, I (and clearly other commenters here) have difficulty finding a clear ontological distinction between such a cult and, well, the Google corporation itself. [1] I'm already Othering them, which I'm sure they'd be surprised about
    • swatcoder 4y ago
      The satanic and brainwashing/deprogramming scares of the 80’s changed the way a lot of people use the word, but for the preceding several millennia cult simply suggested: A membership community with secrets and opportunities reserved for members. There are millions of these around us, and we’re all probably members of several. It seems to be pretty normal throughout history. We just don’t acknowledge it as such because the word was only fairly recently stigmatized.
• notacoward 4y ago
  Then there's this bit toward the end. > I had recently joined the Alphabet Workers Union, the union of now almost 1,000 workers across all Alphabet companies Doesn't that seem way more likely to explain the sudden firing?
  • flakiness 4y ago
    It was after the termination, if I read it correctly.
    • notacoward 4y ago
      Not clear. Author says "recently" but that also applies to the firing. AIUI somebody wouldn't even be eligible to join an Alphabet-employee union while not working at Alphabet.
      • iamevn 4y ago
        I was my understanding that one of the Alphabet Workers Union bigger goals is to improve conditions for TVCs (temps, vendors, contractors) across the company.
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    I don’t think you want the explanation for a termination to be “because they joined a union”.
    • notacoward 4y ago
      Of course you don't. It's blindingly obvious that they'd never say that. Instead they'd make up another excuse, or say nothing ... which they did. The facts fit the theory, which is not the same as proof but that shallow dismissal sure isn't disproof.
• TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  Do they work for Google or are they some contracted firm? I can't imagine the cult was able to spread within Google itself.
• darth_avocado 4y ago
  I can totally see how this can fly under the radar. "Cults" are common in tech, though not of this type. I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with one person getting hired in a high enough position where their hiring decisions are not scrutinized.
  • binbag 4y ago
    In what way are cults common in tech?
    • torbTurret 4y ago
      Indian castes.
    • MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Startups. Full of idols :-P
    • troutwine 4y ago
      I'm curious about the definition as well. "Cult" generally has a very specific set of behaviors associated with it as a term, where the GP could easily be describing a close-knit, large friend group.
    • txru 4y ago
      I believe the parent is referring more to referral/promo networks. For a positive example, I knew one of my senior managers basically brought 15 people from his previous company, to the point where a comfortable majority of people under him were from the company. This can be nefarious when the network arises from abusive or unhealthy environments.
      • mtlguitarist 4y ago
        Is this really a positive thing? It creates in-groups and decreases diversity. Sure, it makes hiring easier but this is exactly how you end up with old boys clubs.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• abirch 4y ago
  Here's the gift link to the referenced NYTimes Article https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DLDm8ciPgYCIiG_EPKarskaNw00DCWAdFMNLsoW-dyz_caOEIoRROpr52Ig9EeLi4p74KvW2d8l7T8YYcFyx64JG-oNLU4g7SloxONNDX3Wvba1yUnd1569Jc1c0Wt3SYM2vzHG-VqitZ5jfcjB5p-TWpWdzDK66ezc2h2MdWHbBjd7wkkCaoOCXyIw4nqu_9Xex5SCFnGUHp7_W44jdhfM9odN6z5RAUyLIu82f5CTzw1c_r6QsE5VIPWlL51sLDSqRPqy8K-xvQ-Fqg8r6pV3as5AVxCZ_IifY3WD6yB&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellows...
  • indigodaddy 4y ago
    What is “gift” link? It still makes me sign in to try to read it..
    • abirch 4y ago
      There should be a parameter in the back of the link that lets see this article for free, e.g., unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DLDm8ciPgYCIiG_EPKarskaNw00DCWAdFMNLsoW-dyz_caOEIoRROpr52Ig9EeLi4p74KvW2d8l7T8YYcFyx64JG-oNLU4g7SloxONNDX3Wvba1yUnd1569Jc1c0Wt3SYM2vzHG-VqitZ5jfcjB5p-TWpWdzDK66ezc2h2MdWHbBjd7wkkCaoOCXyIw4nqu_9Xex5SCFnGUHp7_W44jdhfM9odN6z5RAUyLIu82f5CTzw1c_r6QsE5VIPWlL51sLDSqRPqy8K-xvQ-Fqg8r6pV3as5AVxCZ_IifY3WD6yB&smid=url-share
      • user_7832 4y ago
        If you don't mind my asking, how did you get the gift code? Can any subscriber get it, or do you need special privileges?
        • yellow_postit 4y ago
          Gift articles got rolled out in ‘21: https://open.nytimes.com/a-new-way-to-share-new-york-times-stories-3e66e8d7e620 https://open.nytimes.com/a-new-way-to-share-new-york-times-s...
• alanlammiman 4y ago
  Well, if belonging to apocalyptic organized religions with tithing and well-documented cases of abuse is an issue, you've got a lot of people to fire... As long as the wine wasn't overpriced and they weren't personally abusing anyone, not much to see here.
• anonGone73 4y ago
  The Fourth Way, Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky are worth looking into. The fallacies of man corrupt, especially when dogma serves one master.
  • mythrwy 4y ago
    Some of it is interesting. The idea that humans are (in general) machines and all our reactions are stimuli/response. With occasional glimpses of real consciousness that have potential to be developed. That is interesting to me anyway. However, a lot of it appears hooey. The numerology type stuff for instance.
  • JetAlone 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way_enneagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way_enneagram Huh, that's where the enneagram, which I am aware is currently popular in many western progressive Christian circles, comes to our culture through... More interestingly, I have probably at some point read a book or an excerpt that this man, with a background in fourth way before a conversion to Orthodoxy, translated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Amis#Mount_Athos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Amis#Mount_Athos And Robin Amis claimed the Enneagram comes from Mount Athos...? I didn't expect that claim. EDIT: This is a deeper rabbit hole than I thought. Gurdjieff also reportedly had an impact on Timothy Leary (prominent early psilocybin researcher) and Alan Watts (a former teacher of Fr. Seraphim Rose), among dozens of others... The occult/new thought movements of the 1800s and 1900s is an absolute cat's cradle of interesting ideas mixed in with cartoonish chicanery and sheer lunacy. I can't afford to simply ignore it because people who went through that pipeline were fed directly into influential roles in translation and instruction in the english speaking Orthodox world, which I dwell in. Just how many similar connections am I going to discover in the next year? ...To some extent this could just be an example of the whole "6 degrees of separation" thing. That, and St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean neophyte and there's other examples out there. Maybe there's something about former seekers of the occult that naturally leads them to places of influence if they end up in the church...
• rendall 4y ago
  Not really sure what the big deal is. Did the cult hurt this fellow? Abuse him? Discriminate against him? Mob him? No. The article really just talks about his own disapproval of the cult. It wasn't his business what these people got up to, frankly.
  • cool_dude85 4y ago
    What happens when it's time to decide who gets to be a full time Googley Googler and who doesn't? This guy is competing against a bunch of people in a literal cult, what are his odds like? Isn't that harm enough?
    • amscanne 4y ago
      Is hiring discrimination alleged to have happened? IIRC, the only decision that is noted in the blog post is the promotion of Dan (who is not in the cult), and the mysterious termination (for which we have no context or details, and the author feels it was orchestrated by the aforementioned Dan). While I'm sure there's lots of be concerned about with respect to the cult, I'm not sure it's Google's business to ask about and evaluate religious affiliations when hiring (I'm fairly certain this would be illegal?). There are plenty of ways that you can get a shop of closely related people that are more innocuous than hiring discrimination; for example, suppose the cult members worked together as a freelance group that Google used, and they decided to offer them jobs in order to bootstrap GDC. This exact situation would happen if Google acquires a company from a place with a relatively homogenous ethnic or religious makeup -- it is unfair to immediately assume that this is a result of a discriminatory hiring practice. (It's also possible that there are questionable decisions, but I think it depends a lot on the specifics.)
      • rendall 4y ago
        I'm not really a fan of religions or cults, but part of my dislike is the fervent disapproving and interfering with people's lives. Which is exactly what this fellow seemed to be doing. The cult members seemed to be minding their own business and being generally pretty useful and nice. I wonder if his behavior could even have put Google at risk of a religious discrimination case.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I think a key point maybe getting missed here is that cults do not want their members to leave. In Digital Vegan I wrote a short chapter about cults in tech, or rather the "cults of tech". Facebook is one (for the users not employees). Emotional blackmail and tricks are used to keep people from leaving. Here it seems withdrawing membership is a threat to enforce behaviours, as in many secret/privileged societies, hence, as I said in a comment above, this is a clique within Google (of cult members - and probably participants in all sorts of other unsavoury and disgraceful stuff) Edit: to distinguish membership of Google from membership of the "Fellowship" cult)
  • threads2 4y ago
    Interesting. At first I thought this was a pedantic distinction but now I'm getting it: Cliques are exclusive and dispassionate - your will keeps you in a clique. Cults are inclusive and coercive, their will keeps you in the cult. Are there any books one can read about this distinction? Seems like you could arrive at some pretty interesting conclusions if you talk this out.
    • nonrandomstring 4y ago
      FWIW these [1,2,3] articles summarise some of the key markers I was interested in while specifically researching Facebook. [1] https://www.alternet.org/2014/12/8-ways-facebook-cult-just-scientology/ https://www.alternet.org/2014/12/8-ways-facebook-cult-just-s... [2] https://senseimarketing.com/is-facebook-a-modern-day-cult/ https://senseimarketing.com/is-facebook-a-modern-day-cult/ [3] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/facebook-culture-cult-like-former-employees-report.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/facebook-culture-cult-like-...
  • Viliam1234 4y ago
    > cults do not want their members to leave It doesn't necessarily work this way. For example, some cults get rid of members after they stop being useful (able to pay money or work for the cult). If you get burned out or seriously sick, if you get unemployed, and if you already donated all your savings to the cult... then you become a burden. The group will kick you out under some pretext, e.g. accuse you of being an unrepentant sinner. Sometimes the members are psychologically unable to leave. Imagine being in a cult since early childhood (your parents joined the cult), having all your family in the cult, not having any friends outside the cult (because you are forbidden from associating with non-members). Imagine knowing that if you leave the cult for any reason, everyone you know will be forbidden to talk to you. In such case, kicking you out is a serious threat. Also, if the cult believes that members get to heaven and non-members get to hell, and you believe it too, then you are also afraid to be kicked out. You can keep threatening people, if you know there is a 99% chance they will get scared and obey. (I am not saying that this applies to the group described in the article. Just objecting against the general idea that if a group threatens to kick someone out, it is not a cult.)
• jancsika 4y ago
  Just to clarify-- this article is about a modern religious cult. Modern religious cults are groups that use a whole host of well-known manipulative techniques to trap victims in insular groups which are then difficult to escape after the fact. Leaders of those groups directly abuse those victims physically and/or emotionally (and often drain their bank accounts as well). This isn't, "My parents are worried about my work/life imbalance." This is, "My parents are evil and only the leader can keep me from straying again." While it's mildly interesting that "cult" has a namespace clash with "clique" as well as whatever paranoia 80s moms had about D&D, those things aren't what this article is describing. If you have trouble discerning the difference, please go watch one of the myriad documentaries on Scientology. Edit: clarification
  • aerovistae 4y ago
    I'm not sure what this comment was meant to clarify - the article already made this clear. If anything, your comment's reference to parents adds confusion rather than clarification.
    • jancsika 4y ago
      There are commenters below going on about tech cliques and the 80s D&D scare. This ain't that.
      • wardedVibe 4y ago
        Almost like they didn't read the article... They're very clear about the allegations
        • jancsika 4y ago
          Frankly, I don't understand rule that prohibits barking at commenters who clearly didn't read the article. That's what I'm routing around here, and as a side-effect I'm annoying at least one bona fide reader.
          • 4y ago
• throwaway29303 4y ago
  I had recently joined the Alphabet Workers Union, the union of now almost 1,000 workers across all Alphabet companies, including Google. I told them my story and they advised that I get a lawyer. Wait, Unions in the USA don't have a legal office to help workers with this kind of legal problems? Or is this specific to AWU?
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    Specific to AWU, I'd imagine - as it's not a "real union"
    • zaphar 4y ago
      They are a real union. They just don't have a union contract with Google so it's a real union without teeth.
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        It is not recognized or registered with the NLRB, they don't merely not have a contract - they do not have the legal right to negotiate a contract either.
        • zaphar 4y ago
          The technical term is a "minority union" all unions start as minority unions. It's the first part of a union's lifecycle. To register with the NRLB they need to reach a certain percentage of employees. 30% I believe is the correct number at which elections can be held. After a successful election then the NLRB can certify your Union as a collective bargaining representative. Collective bargaining is an NRLB process so you are right that until they reach the correct benchmark of members, hold an election, and get registered they can't participate in collective bargaining. Minority Unions are still unions though. They are just new ones that have just started their lifecycle. They are a union but one without teeth.
          • 4y ago
• smartician 4y ago
  So he thinks one of the Googlers he worked with convinced his employer to fire him, and now he's suing Google? Shouldn't he be suing his employer?
  • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Well, he's suing both, but if a Google employee ordered his employer to fire him in a retaliatory manner, I imagine Google should also be a defendant.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Came here thinking tfa was about protocol buffers.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• labrador 4y ago
  This doesn't sound far fetched to me at all because I still remember Marshall Applewhite and his techie cult pictured dead from suicide in bunk beds wearing uniforms and Nike shoes If fact, it seems long overdue for another and I'm surprised the pace of these hasn't picked up. That's good news for the day.
  • JetAlone 4y ago
    In the parts of the world that were prone to this, we're too atomized, lonely. We've also been more educated through documentaries to be wary of cult compounds. People are very cynical of spiritual belief and skeptical of the intentions of a hierarch. Forming an in-person cult is also harder now because people are more diverse and you have to account for many backgrounds. It's easier to scoop up on trends from a general population that is dominated by one demographic. I'm of the persuasion to think that our society has allowed for the permeation of an invisible communion; the loneliness death-cult of the self. There are not mass suicide events, but individual devotional ritual endings to life. The drug overdoser, the lone gunman, the suicide. Instead of communal attendance, adherents live largely as anchorites and communicate their discontent to their peers by digital epistle. This prepares them for their time. The ultimate virtue in that system is control enough over one's life to choose how to end it, be it via "revenge" or self-destruction.
    • labrador 4y ago
      Pretty heavy stuff for a robot. I prefer robots that keep it funny.
      • JetAlone 4y ago
        I'm 50 feet tall and made of metal, of course I'm going to be heavy. As the airline companies realized, software weighs nothing, so its removal did nothing to unburden me ;_;
        • labrador 4y ago
          Have you ever listened to heavy metal created by software?
• t_mann 4y ago
  Interesting that they didn't seem to try to conceal their association much at all. They all said they were from this place firmly associated with this group, even though they probably weren't even 'from' there in the typical sense of the word (grown up and raised there).
• abeppu 4y ago
  So, if the author was fired for the reasons they believe, that's pretty bad behavior. But if he had not been fired, what was management supposed to have done about the cult members working for this department? Yes, the cult's leader sounds like a pretty awful person, but he wasn't working there. What were the cult members doing in their work in the department that was clearly wrong? It's suggested that there was favoritism and unfair promotion going on -- but it's not very well evidenced here. Were they using company money to fund their organization? It's also not clear from the article that the wine outfit is a cult subsidiary. And if the concern is primarily that the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people, and that something should be done to stop Google from having a clique of staff that are even _affiliated_ with that organization ... well that seems like a really fraught policy. Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they've given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    At minimum Google could have investigated the odd clustering of employees that indicated some sort of nepotistic hiring practice. Of course they might be doing exactly that, but it's not the sort of thing they can really comment on. Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.
    • newbie2020 4y ago
      That is what DEI boards are for. Stamping out these natural clusters that form via social networks
      • troon-lover 4y ago
      • raxxorraxor 4y ago
        DEI has its own cult leaders that set definitions many people would not agree with but tend to become mandatory dogma. Example is sexism, racism and topics relating to gender. It is just as ideological, maybe it has another algebraic sign but the animosity is easy to see. Problem with DEI is that it has official support contrary to this cult, which shouldn't have leadership positions as well of course.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowship_of_Friends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowship_of_Friends https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellows... https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/sex-rituals-and-fine-wines-inside-alleged-cali-cult-the-fellowship-of-friends/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/sex-rituals-and-fine-wines-ins... https://www.culteducation.com/group/927-fellowship-of-friends.html https://www.culteducation.com/group/927-fellowship-of-friend... https://robertearlburton.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-fellowship-of-friends-compound-at.html https://robertearlburton.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-fellowship... https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,3315 https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,3315 It makes sense that these are the type of people Google is forced to hire, or motivated to hire, what with the company's track record of ridiculously expensive unethical behaviour and all the over-the-top harassment claims. Consider also the most recent embarassment with the AI researcher who believed a computer performing pattern matching had feelings and sensations. It seems he is also apparently involved with some bizarre quasi-religious group, calling himself a preacher.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• dqpb 4y ago
  Wow. Google is even more of a shit show than I realized.
• newbie2020 4y ago
  You have to be careful with the line of reasoning that just because these certain managers and team members are part of a cult that is known to engage in bad acts, doesn’t mean you can cast the group’s shortcomings upon the individuals (without proof). If that were the case, I can point out a few mainstream religions that condone reprehensible practices, many of whose members you probably work with daily
  • whoopdeepoo 4y ago
    At what point can you hold people accountable for the actions of the groups they voluntarily associate with?
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      When they're part of those actions, like giving themselves a contract for the wine they make.
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    You can certainly stop them paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars by giving themselves contracts as wine vendors.
    • rendall 4y ago
      It turns out the wine is from a nearby vineyard not at Orange House. The connection is that the person running this vineyard is a former member who used to run the Orange House vineyard before he left.
      • GauntletWizard 4y ago
        The allegation that the person is a "Former Member" is a valid point to contest. Announcing leaving the cult after a scandal is a good sign, moving to a new winery nearby is pretty neutral, still receiving hundreds of thousands in orders from the cult members is a bad sign. On the balance, probably not enough to convict in a court of law, more than enough for Google to take their own investigation before deciding if they see it as self-dealing.
• walkhour 4y ago
  Favoritism is rampant in some teams at Google, but it's harder to detect when you are not hiring your fellow cult friends. Unconscious bias hiring training is there for a reason, but there are many situations when the bias is conscious. But it's clear that some directors/managers have overly favoured their race/caste/people from their hometown/area.
• awsrocks 4y ago
• mythrwy 4y ago
  The favoritism or vendor corruption is a problem. A problem that's Google's problem if it exists and Google should address if it chooses (probably a good idea but their call). The sex trafficking charges (or whatever) are a legal problem which government authorities should address (if they exist). Otherwise, if people want to belong to fringe religious or pseudo religious organizations (aka "cults") that's their business no? That someone doesn't like the "cult" or considers it harmful has no bearing on if members should be removed from employment. Which (not a lawyer) I doubt is even legal in the US because I believe religious affiliation is protected.
• blip54321 4y ago
  Just to clarify: Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. Google cannot take action against religions (even cults) it disagrees with (even for valid reasons for disagreeing with them), unless it gets over a very high bar of impacting business behavior. The other path leads to far worse outcomes. Morally, we cannot judge what happened here without hearing from both sides. But if action is to be taken, it should be taken by a prosecutor, not an employer.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    I would say that this is evidence of discrimination on the basis of religion.
  • medler 4y ago
    Google cannot favor people in hiring just because they are members of some religious group. Self-dealing in, say, wine contracts, is against Google policy and likely illegal as well
  • baryphonic 4y ago
    He alleges a few specific problems: nepotism, self-dealing and retaliation. Those are things that Google should take seriously, particularly the self-dealing with selling wine (which seems like money laundering).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • soraminazuki 4y ago
    > Google cannot take action against religions (even cults) it disagrees with "Disagreement" is quite an euphemistic way of describing the situation. The said cult has documented history of sexual abuse.
    • maccolgan 4y ago
      I don't think Google has standing to prosecute sexual abuse. Isn't that the DA's job?
• mise_en_place 4y ago
  There are a lot of cults in tech I would say, some more powerful than others. Early in my career I was invited to one by a friend under the pretense of a dinner with tech people. His sister was heavily involved in it. Surprisingly, I saw one of my senior colleagues who would later become my manager. The whole mood was…off in the house of one of the cult members. The leader was your stereotypical elder Australian dude that may or may not be a literal Satanist. They specifically send out very young girls to entice you, one of them would constantly put her hand on my leg after having just met me. She couldn’t have been older than 16 but claimed she was a freshman in college. Whole thing made me uncomfortable plus the forced positivity and artificial grins, I politely thanked them for dinner and bolted out of there. As long as you don’t interact with them negatively you should be fine. If you should become one of the “goyim” to these groups then they will make your life miserable, and can even influence your career negatively for many years to come. Many of them are also involved in occult practices that are horrifying. They use children as a medium for occult rituals, but really it’s an excuse to sexually abuse and molest said children. It’s sickening but not much can be done to stop them.
• vhiremath4 4y ago
  > One of the things they became known for was placing bookmarks in metaphysical bookstores — some members have described looking for guidance in a book, coming across a Fellowship of Friends bookmark, and joining the group as a result. Not gonna lie, this is a pretty clever recruiting technique.
  • datavirtue 4y ago
    Agreed. That's how I'm going to start my cult when I'm out of fucks.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      Good pay, money for nothing, chicks for free, tax advantages… I’m in too!
  • granshaw 4y ago
    My thoughts exactly. Say what you will about cults, but they often have very clever and effective “marketing” tactics - lots that startups could learn from, as long as you don’t do anything unethical
• heoah 4y ago
  90% of this article goes into explaining that there exists within google a certain group of people with a certain set of beliefs and practices which does not align with that of the author. ok, i don't see how that is relevant. the next 10% goes into alleging that he was discriminated by this set of people. 0% goes into explaining the details of how this discrimination took place.
• throwaway879080 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• blobbers 4y ago
  Any googlers have any insight into this? Or other GDS members?
• DidISayTooMuch 4y ago
  Hmm. I think this guy is just looking for a payday. He was a contractor, not a full time employee.
• smsm42 4y ago
  Not the main topic of the article but I was surprised the author is unemployed after 15 months. Is it that hard to find any job as a video producer? There must be some other companies doing the same as Google... I have no idea what that job market looks like, just sounded surprising to me.
  • notacoward 4y ago
    Nice attempt at character assassination. Here's a more likely explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment)
    • smsm42 4y ago
      How that's "assassination"? I asked a simple question, because I had no idea how the market for video producers looks like - I never worked as one. Maybe you're looking a bit too hard for a reason to be offended and outraged? Not everybody is out to get you.
• matthewsmith2 4y ago
  The moral nihilism in this comment section beggars belief.
• kache_ 4y ago
  hearsay
• webel0 4y ago
  The New York Times article [1] largely adds support to the author’s claims. It also provided some interesting background on how this level of nepotism might have come about: > Ms. Jones, Mr. Lloyd’s [The author] lawyer, argued that Google’s relationship with ASG [contracting agency] allowed members of the Fellowship to join the company without being properly vetted. “This is one of the methods the Fellowship used in the Kelly case,” she said. “They can get through the door without the normal scrutiny.” [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellows...
  • dang 4y ago
    This comment was posted about https://medium.com/@kwilliamlloyd/the-cult-in-google-3c1a910214d1 https://medium.com/@kwilliamlloyd/the-cult-in-google-3c1a910..., in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769484, which we merged hither. (Since the NYT article is the OP above, I add this to avoid confusion.)
• lnxg33k1 4y ago
  I am not sure what to take about this post other than either I’m unable to understand the culture in which the fact happened or the guy is an idiot with capitalised letters and space, but I always joked with coworkers when I joined a company when I was introduced to the team to whom you were supposed to report illegal things you saw within the company, and we would think who is so naive to report the company to the company, here we go… guys to other people who might be listening, illegal things are to be reported to police
  • jhardy54 4y ago
    What a sentence. Could you rephrase? I’m confused at what you’re trying to say.
    • lnxg33k1 4y ago
      Don’t report crimes in a company to a company, report crimes in a company to police
• illusivesaint 4y ago
  The leniency in opinion this thread has on cults is concerning.
  • Matticus_Rex 4y ago
    Eh, I don't know. I'm friends with several people who grew up in this cult, two of whom are still peripheral to it because their families are still involved. The cult definitely has a lot of weird and sketchy takes. And the leader definitely has a lot of sketchy stuff (particularly in the past) around younger male members, though there seems to be an attitude around it among the Fellowship people that the allegations aren't black and white -- these people aren't thinking of what has happened as sex trafficking or grooming. For my friends who are still peripheral? Their experience is primarily of a loving community (with some definite weird crap and skeletons in the closet). They're well-educated and fairly skilled in their fields, and while they have some strange (primarily Buddhist and Sufi-inspired, plus some more niche California-original stuff) beliefs, they don't push those beliefs on people. They do understand that Fellowship is a cult, though as far as cults go it's on the less-nuts end, and they have a murky relationship with that fact. Lots of people who live in the Fellowship community in Oregon House aren't actually members, as well -- this particular cult doesn't try to separate its followers from the world. So when I read this, the hiring stuff looks sketchy, but it's not uncommon at all. The wine procurement, as others have noted, appears not to be clear-cut as the winery is owned by a former member of the cult, and not the cult itself or current members -- it should be looked-into but may be above board. The firing? It should be investigated, sure, but he (as a contractor) was stirring up trouble in a team because a lot of team members were either members or peripheral to (and in my experience, the latter tends to be more common for tech people) the Fellowship community in Oregon House where the cult leader has pretty likely done some very bad stuff. But have the people on that team participated in the bad stuff? The author assumes it, but I don't think that's a good default assumption. I'd assume basically all of these people were raised in the community, and that many or most are not actively involved in the cult itself, because that seems to be the standard story there. I'm not saying Fellowship isn't sketchy, or that the allegations shouldn't be investigated. I just think there's a wide spectrum of cults (including some that self-describe as cults and are totally voluntary and don't brainwash -- if you meet enough people in the Bay Area you'll eventually stumble on some), and that this one is closer to the level of sketch you'd expect in a small-town evangelical church with some skeletons than something like Jim Jones, etc.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  I said mulled wine, Jenkins, you fool, not cult wine. MULLED
• dontbenebby 4y ago
  I thought this was going to be dated years ago, last I ran into this shit it was the summer after Snowden. Google folks can be hella elitist, but at least at IBM they wait til they leave the company to join cults :-) >...she quit her job at IBM to become, in her words, a "full time pop star and cult leader." She's released several homemade, cybertwee-aesthetic music videos, which criticize consumerism and promote spiritual and feminist ideals. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezpben/i-was-brainwashed-by-a-feminist-digital-cult-leader https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezpben/i-was-brainwashed-by-... And the Googlers I knew who were into woo woo usually got it out of their system before they hit the business world then rapidly ditched the affiliation when people... Googled their group. (Lookin' at you Deep Lab -- never got an explanation why Jacob Appelbum[1] would be listed as a member of a "feminist collective"[2] years after multiple credible reports of reprehensible behavior. >A number of other persons are affiliated with and/or worked to contribute to and support the Deep Lab... Jacob Appelbaum (independent security researcher) (My gut take is he extorted folks who did... modeling or whatever for far too long given the supposedly libertarian leanings, left or right, of tech bros like myself) And Oregon... of course these Googlers are in Oregon, a land famous for cults - most students of morbid reality know that one of the worst bioattacks in the USA was perpetrated by a cult trying to sicken enough people to seize control of the county at the ballet box in rural Oregon[3] >In 1984, 751 people suffered food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, US due to the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Rajneesh (later known as Osho) led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. The incident was the first and is the single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of_sexual_misconduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20191026165234/https://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/project/deep-lab-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20191026165234/https://studiofor... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta...
  • muricula 4y ago
    Oregon House is actually in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_House,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_House,_California It's a confusing name.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• chrismcb 4y ago
  Let me get this straight. This guy's coworkers may or may not have been in a cult. So what? They didn't seem to bother him at work and as far as I can tell it didn't affect his job. But he wanted to turn them in anyways? If they were doing something illegal, tell the police. If they were doing something unethical at work, inform hr. Otherwise keep your nose out of it
  • vt85 4y ago
  • ugh123 4y ago
    Favoritism and enriching themselves with supplying wine to Google for their events. RTFA
    • rendall 4y ago
      > Favoritism... Hiring for the team done by an outside organization, the same that hired Kevin Lloyd. > ...and enriching themselves The winery, Grant Marie, is not owned by the Fellowship. As stated in the article.
• LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  "Even in Google’s freewheeling office culture, which encourages employees to speak their own minds" James Damore was fired for speaking his mind, he performed logical analysis, not hate speech and was fired.
  • akhmatova 4y ago
    Not for "speaking his mind" but doing so via an interstaff memo, which is intrinsically not suited to such purposes (and which doesn't really have anything to do with free speech, as such). Logically minded as you are, you understand this distinction, yes?
    • raxxorraxor 4y ago
      I agree with that but then Google employees are not encouraged to speak their mind if these technicalities result in disciplinary action. It was not a good idea to release it this way for that matter. Because it is not a channel to speak your mind. Google should make that clear in that case and it probably did not. I would suggest the same logical agreement with differentiation here although that is a bit childish.
• rendall 4y ago
  > [Google] frequently served wine from Grant Marie, a winery in Oregon House run by a Fellowship member who previously managed the Fellowship’s winery > In 2015, after [the Fellowship's] chief winemaker left the organization, its winery ceased production. So Grace Marie is not a Fellowship winery after all, and it is run by a former member. Hard to make the case this is "self dealing" when the cult does not benefit financially from the procurement. > ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team If true, then it's hard to make the case that the Fellowship engaged in nepotism. > The Fellowship came under fire in 1984... In 1996, another former member filed a suit... Both suits were settled out of court. The newest of these allegations is 25 years old, and nothing was established. Given that there are perfectly benign explanations for Kevin Lloyd's direct observations (nepotism, wine), and no direct evidence for sex trafficking, we're left with nothing substantial. Lloyd's accusations seem rather like "connect the dots" conspiratorial thinking. If we assume that the cult is a quirky but relatively benign and harmless group, the "retaliation" against Lloyd can then be explained by legitimate firing for harassment and religious discrimination.
• latchkey 4y ago
  I feel like nobody here remembers Novell.