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Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google
- nickdothutton 1y ago> It did not even occur to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the actual point was to get rich. I feel that as a GenX'er I should now dispense some wisdom to Millenials and Zoomers about life, but I just don't have the energy. Read Gaetano Mosca.
- usrnm 1y agoMillenials are not young anymore, haven't been for some time. We know.
- officeplant 1y ago>Millennials are not young anymore As a middle of the pack Millennial (late 30s) Its wild to think I'm older than my Dad was when he introduced me to Slashdot as a young teen.
- swivelmaster 1y agoNow that’s a cool dad!
- mrweasel 1y agoSome of us are in our 40s. We know how shit works. Almost everyone can fall into the trap of telling yourself that "it's not that bad", "this is how it's suppose to work" or "If it was that bad it would be illegal/have been shutdown", only to later get wiser and see it scam, fraud or just the darker side of how some companies operate.
- rdlw 1y agoThank you o wise one, may you rest and gather enough mana to dispense your wisdom next time you comment.
- udev4096 1y ago> What is crypto mining if not a textbook Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did lots of killing and razing and destroying? Are you serious? You complain about the 2008 crisis and capitalism and yet completely neglect the true purpose of crypto? No wonder you drank the Google kool-aid
- waterlaw 1y agoWhat's the true purpose of crypto? It can be used to escape the banking system?
- roenxi 1y agoAsset that can't be involuntarily taken away or printed by a government.
- ecshafer 1y agoIt seems like Crypto can be taken away by the government. If the government orders you to give up your crypto they will just throw you in a cell until you comply. Or as it happening more and more often, a guy with a wrench persuades you to give it up.
- axus 1y agoOnly if you are "legible" to them.
- koolala 1y agoIt blew my mind they did that with Gold in the US. It's really scary what were are capable of.
- zzo38computer 1y agoMaybe barter should be better, then.
- roenxi 1y ago
- ZephyrBlu 1y ago> Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things. Lmao. This level of cognitive dissonance is always incredible to me.
- constantcrying 1y agoAs the author himself points out, nobody but him believed the corporate nonsense. This isn't cognitive dissonance, this is "You actually really believe these things?"
- voidUpdate 1y ago*herself
- roenxi 1y agoThat isn't cognitive dissonance - it is doublespeak. Cognitive dissonance is when someone's mind unexpectedly encounters an internal contradiction and goes haywire trying to match assumptions up. Old mate manager doesn't have any internal mental contradictions. They are explaining that the words have one meaning in the dictionary and another meaning when used together in the workplace. Well understood thing that happens everywhere.
- Zardoz84 1y agoLike the old Simpsons episode : Marge, there is the truth and the truth pd: I watched it in Spanish, so perhaps it is different in English.
- dublinben 1y agoComing from their manager, I suspect it could have also been meant as: "Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things."
- BowBun 1y agoVery well-written. My main takeaway and constant reminder is that our privilege, no matter the size, usually comes at someone's expense.
- oulipo 1y agoExactly, and it's funny because here everytime we discuss the impact of AI on vulnerable population, be it for taking jobs / increasing CO2 consumption / destabilizing politics, there's always a rich white guy with his cushy programmer job saying "but I don't understand, to me all this AI stuff is nice, I can work even more comfortably"...
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoI don't think I have ever seen someone on HN dismiss concerns about AI's impact on other people by saying it's good for them personally. I think you have a stereotype of a white guy with a cushy programmer job in your head, and you hear him saying this when other people of various races say other things.
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- wizardforhire 1y agoOh my friend, you are visiting a different hn than a lot of us. I nearly got in a flame war yesterday with a noob and had to step back because of the density, caught my self being bated by a potential troll. Their argument was exactly what you’re claiming to have not seen. To be fair I never stereotyped them even in my mind. But the audacity and dismissal of others was very bating. I did my best but still a very poor job of arguing and had to step away.
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- reaperducer 1y ago
- jes5199 1y ago> Like most employees I blamed myself for not working hard enough to get good compensation ohh. I feel like I understanding something about my peers now that I had not caught onto before
- dunkelheit 1y agoI just love how John Patience became Джона Пейшенса, like it is some exotic slavic woman's name.
- selimthegrim 1y agoWait until you hear how USSR VLKSM used to denounce the “KLESh” in posters.
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- Aeroi 1y agohmm, disagree with many of the takes in here, although some sentences of insight and truth.
- fsflover 1y agoCan you elaborate?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sa-code 1y ago> You cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and how they deserve it actually. I wonder why we don't see more software engineering co ops?
- pclmulqdq 1y agoBecause people don't like risk and if they can make a boat load of money without risk they would rather do that than make 10 boat loads of money with risk.
- fennecbutt 1y agoEh it's because wealth accumulation has meant that those with money have too much money to fail, so to speak. Able to skirt legal boundaries and often push the cost onto the taxpayer.
- rjbwork 1y agoA combination of a persistent strain of rugged individualist libertarian attitudes and ego. Everyone thinking we're better than everyone else and if only we could be in charge everything would be better than if those other idiots were prevents the kind of solidarity needed to do co-ops or professional associations or partnerships like lawyers.
- cj 1y agoCode doesn’t make engineers money. Selling the code does. Engineers typically aren’t very good sales people.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoWhy not have a marketer at the co-op?
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- arolihas 1y agoOh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email. The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform. The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday. The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about. What a dystopia, Brazil would have been better off without Google definitely, if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things.
- the_cat_kittles 1y agoall the instances they discussed highlight the contrast between what google presented itself as, vs what it actually was. i dont think this person is asking for sympathy, i think they hate google for trying to pretend its anything different than any other big profit seeking enterprise. sounds like you are well on your way to the hostility the author very succinctly describes
- kurthr 1y agoAnd yet, there are much more pernicious elements to dystopia Google has become and ways that it perpetuates them through the efforts of people just like this so that they can literally have a "free lunch". These are the type of complaints that minimize the actual failure of "don't be evil" as implemented by their very efforts. Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- calcifer 1y ago> Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize. The "minutiae" you so casually refer to are people. The OP understands that: > The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.
- constantcrying 1y agoWhat a terribly written article. I do not understand at all why you wouldn't start out by saying that you worked in Brazil for Google, instead the reader has to discover that half way in, suggesting you were in Phoenix was a really nice move to make sure that essential detail was hard to extract. There was "tea" promised but the story is literally "I was an obvious nuisance because I was the only one who believed corporate propaganda and got fired for it", how absolutely uninteresting and I do not understand why it would take this amount of space to write down.
- monooso 1y agoI experienced no such confusion.
- arolihas 1y agoDidn't even get fired for it, they were laid off because of 2008!
- constantcrying 1y agoYes, although being on the "annoyed me" list of the boss likely played part in whom to fire.
- arolihas 1y agoThey shut down the boss's office in Arizona too
- rdlw 1y agoIt does start out by saying they worked in Brazil for Google. > The fact that Google fired me... Normally you have to work somewhere to get fired. I suppose that's an assumption I made upon reading that part. > let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007… This article is set in Brazil, in 2007. Did you skip the introduction and then complain about the lack of an introduction?
- blindriver 1y ago
- jeffbee 1y agoMan, "bring your whole self to work" was well intentioned but ultimately a mistake. Just bring the part that knows how to program computers, and leave whatever part this is turned off from 9-5.
- constantcrying 1y agoObviously. And I do believe the same type of person who wants to "bring your whole self to work" also is the most disgusted by seeing it implemented. If there had been a culture of professionalism you obviously do not ask some random other employees about gay slang. Ultimately work is a give and take. And it gets easier when it is clearly defined what is given and what is taken. That is what "professionalism" in a work environment is about. Pretending that work is some great family adventure can only lead to terrible results when conflict inevitably arises.
- cobertos 1y agoWhat kind of life is that? To be a sterile, subservient entity for the majority of your existence. Being authentic in the working world helps in so many ways. And it works when your goals and the goals of the company align. The advice to just shut up and code leads to no good outcomes for anyone.
- jeffbee 1y agoGood ways to bring your unique perspective to a professional context: intervening to avoid making some users feel offended or excluded, before a project ships to those users. Bad ways: just yammering about how you are poly, bi, trans, and a revolutionary anarchist while we are trying to finalize OKRs for the quarter.
- JackFr 1y agoYour authenticity is not everyone’s authenticity.
- cobertos 1y agoAnd the opposite is true. There's a balance. For some that authenticity really works for them at work (those with a general curiosity, an interest in how groups interact and work, who are workaholics) and it aligns. For others it does not and is unfortunate in its requirement of more energy to suppress and lack of natural culture-fit.
- lanyard-textile 1y agoMy manager at Google wanted me to change my personal “about me” snippet in the introductory email he was about to send out: It needed some information about where I previously worked (which I intentionally left out — who cares?? I’m here now!) I never really thought much of it at the time. Internalized that as “oh, I misunderstood the purpose of the email.” But it tracks with elements of OP’s story; the exposition of your identity is curated.
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- fsflover 1y ago> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware This is not true. Free software is not.
- krapp 1y agoIt can be. Ubuntu is spyware according to RMS[0]. [0]https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do
- fsflover 1y agoOf course, it can be, but it's so easy to fix by forking that it doesn't matter, unlike with non-free software. AFAIK Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu is not spyware. Also, Ubuntu is not free software. Only some parts of it are free.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- moritonal 1y agoJust a small caveat, that article was from 2012 (13 years ago). Things may have changed for the better or worse since then.
- axus 1y agoMmm. Every time I download an ISO image or clone a Git repository, there is a record
- fsflover 1y agoSo you are talking about the software running on the server.
- JohnFen 1y ago> Free software is not. A lot of free software is.
- bluedevilzn 1y ago> And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy. With no exciting research positions nor self-managed time nor compensation, what was the advantage over a high-paying job at Microsoft or IBM? When did Google pay less than Microsoft/IBM?
- esprehn 1y agoI think the author is taking about Brazil? It wasn't clear to me until later in the article.
- rdlw 1y agoThe two-paragraph introduction explicitly places this article in Brazil in 2007
- blindriver 1y agoThis entire blog post is so poorly written that I was confused as well. They mention Brazil, but they also mention Arizona. And for some reason the person who asked them about gay lingo wasn't Brazilian so were they in the US? It was a very tough read.
- rdlw 1y ago> Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again This part is talking about VISITING ARIZONA. As in, they are not from nor do they live in Arizona. > One day one of the AdSense people asked me for a little meeting. They sat right by my desk, all sleek and confident, and said that they had heard I was a Gaygler™ and were wondering if I could help with one of their clients. “Can you tell me some words that the Brazilian gay community uses? like slang, popular media you like, names of parties, that kind of thing?” Nowhere does it say that they're not Brazilian. Is this because they asked for Brazilian gay slang specifically? I assume they just wanted to be specific, to get terms used in Brazil. If I ask someone to name some Canadian foods, that doesn't mean I'm not Canadian. I'm not in love with this article or anything but I am baffled by the number of people on this website, who I assume have rudimentary reading comprehension, getting confused by the fact that a different location is mentioned, even though the article opens by specifying exactly where and when it's set.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- matthewaveryusa 1y agoPeter Thiel said it better: https://youtu.be/gQPlhycLmMk?t=415 https://youtu.be/gQPlhycLmMk?t=415
- tomrod 1y ago> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's “organising the information of the world” turned out to be indexing which Gaza families to bomb, children and all; “making money in the free market to invest in social change” was about bankrolling literal, textbook fascism. Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again, and my kids will never know a world that's not like this; but for me I saw this world being forged up close and personal, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie. This hits home.
- mm263 1y agoSeems overly dramatic
- JohnMakin 1y agoFrom a place of privilege, it might seem so!
- JKCalhoun 1y agoSure, to make a point though.
- ranyume 1y agoDark times when people can become "overly dramatic" for things that are essential. A relaxation, and forgotten fundamental rights. "It is what it is"
- latinotrw 1y ago[flagged]
- lern_too_spel 1y agoThey're Brazilian, so while people might not talk to them in Spanish, I'm sure people talk to them in Portuguese. They probably used the term Latinx because they are both Latin and trans, which Latin alone doesn't convey. People complaining about words that other people use to describe themselves is a strange recent phenomenon. Just a few years ago, it was accepted that not everyone has to follow your religion.
- pnathan 1y agoI was a teen in the 90s, in my circles it was Understood that the data was not private. Some of this in any case sounds like the usual "did not grow up in white collar society, got white collar job, got in trouble for violating white collar norms" that class-changers go through. Lots of !!fun!!. I too get troubled when the operations staff get "invisible'd" - they are members of society too and should be treated with dignity. But in a tolerably decent situation, they are recognized and respected in their field as well. Even if its the evening shift to do the janitorial work. There's nothing _immoral_ about having a party and hiring some people to clean up. It's treating them as _lower_ than you that is the failure. Anyway. There's an - as far as I know - as yet unwritten story around those of us who came from non-white collar backgrounds and found this new world confusing.
- ryandrake 1y agoAs another poster[1] put it, it's important to remember that these white collar people's privilege often comes at the expense of others, and to not treat them like they are furniture in the background--they are people and deserve to be recognized and treated as people. And this is true all the way up to the top! For each of the many rungs on the socio-economic totem pole, there are many people on that rung who treat everyone on rungs below them as if they're invisible robotic servants. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44201256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44201256
- JohnMakin 1y ago> Google back then prided itself on broadcasting its Best Place To Work award, won year after year after year. Younger people will have trouble picturing this, but Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps; It's crazy to think about now. Google's image was a big driver in my choice to go back to school and start a tech career, my end and pretty much only goal was to work at google. I made it through several rounds of interviews and got rejected pretty late. It hurt really bad at that time, but looking back now, I think it was one of the best things that could have happened to me.
- kens 1y agoI was curious about Google's current Best Place to Work rating. Forbes puts Alphabet at #2, but there are competing lists and Google is #6 on some others. https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/ https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/
- webdoodle 1y agoI never sold out. When I sold off the last of my web sites and domains (mostly ad driven), I only sold the web sites, and not the code that ran them. I had built a very complicated spider that scraped all the main social media sites looking for my articles, that would suggest places they weren't found that might do well. I never built an auto submit bot, but could have easily. I submitted them manually to each site, so as not to break there TOS. I'd then track the newly submitted articles and see how they would spread on social media. I built a basic visualization tool that allowed 'seeing' the way information flows in an intuitive way. What I learned about memetics and the way information flows was incalculable, and I realized it was like holding a weapon of mass destruction. The last thing I wanted to do was allow others to understand how it worked, or how to build one. I essentially burnt what I built because I didn't want it to fall in the wrong hands. Could someone build it themselves? Probably, but I put 15 years of my life into building it, and I did so when the Internet was still useful. I only put enough of my thought process about the system online to allude to the fact that I had built it, not enough for someone to reconstruct it. When I sold the last of the sites, I took the code offline and unplugged the hard drive and hid it. It's been almost 6 years since then and the only companies to come close are wasting there time with LLM. I do not think the current iteration of A.I. is even close thankfully, but at some point someone is going to crack it, probably even better than I did (I had a limited budget, slow internet, and was working mostly by myself).
- normie3000 1y agoI love this so mysterious.
- meindnoch 1y agoCan't tell if schizo or not.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago> Google, if you remember, was the Best Place To Work. It was very important that every promising young engineer thought of Google as the dream job where everyone is happy. Unhappiness isn't allowed. My manager was severely scolded by his manager for having dissatisfaction (gasp) within his team. Gotta love the pure distilled dystopia concentrate here, complete with totalitarianism vibes!
- QuercusMax 1y agoThe dictbot story's interpretation of why TVCs (that's what they were called when I was at Google; never heard "temps, part-timers, and contractors") need to be treated like second-class citizens is incorrect. It's not because they wanted Engineers to feel like golden gods to build their egos - it's because they don't want the TVCs to be treated as employees under employment law. There was a guy who worked in the kitchens who got added to access the music room storage closet in PDX so he could keep his guitar there, and we were told he had to be removed since he was a TVC. That closet is apparently "FTEs and interns only", because if we treat our kitchen staff too well they might have to be given the same benefits as the rest of us. It used to be possible for somebody to work their way up from the mailroom to the executive suite. This path has been deliberately destroyed because the owning class wants to divide employees into different classes. No war but class war.
- neves 1y agoThe article is better than I expected. I'm about of the same age of the author and Brazilian, and I can relate to the feeling that Internet companies would improve the world My only nitpick it to charge Google of the invisibility of maids and servants in Brazil. Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world and this is part of the country culture. Google is not guilty here. At least we are improving. Nobody with a brain still think that techno companies and billionaires are anything more than comic book super villains.
- m0llusk 1y agoStarted off naive and then transitioned to considering Google to be representative of all Capitalist enterprises. Progress?
- awbvious 1y agoI feel sad for you that are actually humans and are saying negative things against this extremely well written post. Perhaps you are doing it out of cognitive dissonance that you could be a baddie too. Perhaps you have lost the ability to read long form, it's certainly not encouraged any more. Perhaps doing it because you are being paid to shill a narrative (I still feel bad for you). And for those of you that are bots saying these things, I probably feel bad for the ones who programmed you. And I feel bad for us all that it is now almost impossible to know who is human, what is paid for, and what is real discourse. I do not think the original post was propaganda. I think this was just someone who cares and wrote something because she wanted people to care. I applaud the author. I feel good knowing that something like this got written and read and shared. Could it be that I am wrong in my assessment that this is excellently written and negative assessments are unfounded? I could be, but I wanted to add my assessment to the fray. I identify as human and not paid to write this comment, btw.