5 ms·

well now, that is a truly unpleasant level of self-righteousness and resentment.

michaelochurch 13y ago
My manager at Google had a 5-year-long history of using fake performance problems to tease out peoples' health issues, and then using that information to fuck with them. (For one case, there's a year-long record of meetings moved to conflict with therapy sessions.) HR did absolutely nothing about him because he had a reputation for "delivering" in spite of his known sadistic behavior. (I spent months investigating this shit, and went places I didn't belong.) Oh, and Google is one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project. It finally ended up being up to me to expose that manager (which I did after finding my next job) and when I did, I experienced some extremely unprofessional attacks. Someone (possibly my ex-manager) found out where my next job was and called in a hit. Given that, I'm justified in enjoying Google's stumbles.
- metaphorm 13y ago
  just move on. I'm sorry you were treated badly by your manager. taking it out with public tantrums doesn't make you look like the good guy though.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    If this were just about me being unlucky, I'd be able to do that. The problem is that these things are common. They happen all the time, and they keep happening to people all over the place, and nothing is done to these fuckers. That's what makes me fucking angry. The guy pulled that shit for years and HR not only did nothing, but repeatedly kept people from moving away from him. Same story, five fucking years, over and over, and they did nothing. One bad manager is just life. A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - varelse 13y ago
      I had a bad manager at google too thanks to the wonders of blind allocation. And I have vented about that experience several times on here. It was cathartic, and now it's out of me. But the price of doing so is that I'll probably never be able to get a job there again. Still, there are far worse things that can happen in life. So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys? It's magical what they'll do to themselves in the long run - it just takes time. I already saw one round of comeuppances after the dotcom boom. It really works because eventually they cross the wrong person at the right time and the universe balances the equation all on its own.
      - michaelochurch 13y ago
        So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys? The problem is that the career system (especially in software, which has this hypocritical sense of itself as a meritocracy) is the most elaborate system of victim-shaming ever devised. I'm almost 30 and my IQ is over 150. I should be an EIR or doing cutting-edge machine learning work, and I'm not, because I was robbed by those fuckers. Yes, they'll get their comeuppances. I'm sure they'll fall into the wrong fight. But I suffer every day from what those pieces of shit stole from me. I'm years behind where a person at my level of talent should be. Some of it is my fault, some of it is not, but the rest of the world sees it as 100% a reflection on me. Work is the only society in which being robbed is treated as 100% the victim's fault. If your boss steals from you by giving you shitty work experience and then ruining your career, you are the subhuman piece of shit that deserves to die, not him.
        cosisin 13y ago
        A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil. "Don't Be Evil" is such a conflated concept at Google. It sounds that you were fooled by it. Get real. Google's primary goal is to benefit itself. Good news [for users] is that benefiting the user is usually what benefits Google the most. Righting wrongs in HR issues that would expose Google as an employer to potential lawsuit liabilities and negative PR is not. Don't be so fucking idealistic. Does shit happens deliberately? No, it's just the law of large numbers at Google's size today. However, covering up the shit is sometimes rational and evolutionary. How many start-ups die because they don't deal with HR issues the "right" way? You were unlucky, but you also lack the tact to deal with your situation. Your years of experience and your 150 IQ didn't help, so what makes you think you would fare better as an EIR?
- EvanKelly 13y ago
  Can you clarify what "called in a hit" means? I'm not exactly in the tech community, so I'm hoping it means something different than my understanding.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    It means "tried to fuck up my next job". Working for Google was, by far, the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. No question about that.
- illuminate 13y ago
  "one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project" Ah yes, putting the employee on "probation" and awaiting any reason to let them go.

My manager at Google had a 5-year-long history of using fake performance problems to tease out peoples' health issues, and then using that information to fuck with them. (For one case, there's a year-long record of meetings moved to conflict with therapy sessions.) HR did absolutely nothing about him because he had a reputation for "delivering" in spite of his known sadistic behavior. (I spent months investigating this shit, and went places I didn't belong.) Oh, and Google is one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project. It finally ended up being up to me to expose that manager (which I did after finding my next job) and when I did, I experienced some extremely unprofessional attacks. Someone (possibly my ex-manager) found out where my next job was and called in a hit. Given that, I'm justified in enjoying Google's stumbles.

metaphorm 13y ago
just move on. I'm sorry you were treated badly by your manager. taking it out with public tantrums doesn't make you look like the good guy though.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  If this were just about me being unlucky, I'd be able to do that. The problem is that these things are common. They happen all the time, and they keep happening to people all over the place, and nothing is done to these fuckers. That's what makes me fucking angry. The guy pulled that shit for years and HR not only did nothing, but repeatedly kept people from moving away from him. Same story, five fucking years, over and over, and they did nothing. One bad manager is just life. A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - varelse 13y ago
    I had a bad manager at google too thanks to the wonders of blind allocation. And I have vented about that experience several times on here. It was cathartic, and now it's out of me. But the price of doing so is that I'll probably never be able to get a job there again. Still, there are far worse things that can happen in life. So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys? It's magical what they'll do to themselves in the long run - it just takes time. I already saw one round of comeuppances after the dotcom boom. It really works because eventually they cross the wrong person at the right time and the universe balances the equation all on its own.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys? The problem is that the career system (especially in software, which has this hypocritical sense of itself as a meritocracy) is the most elaborate system of victim-shaming ever devised. I'm almost 30 and my IQ is over 150. I should be an EIR or doing cutting-edge machine learning work, and I'm not, because I was robbed by those fuckers. Yes, they'll get their comeuppances. I'm sure they'll fall into the wrong fight. But I suffer every day from what those pieces of shit stole from me. I'm years behind where a person at my level of talent should be. Some of it is my fault, some of it is not, but the rest of the world sees it as 100% a reflection on me. Work is the only society in which being robbed is treated as 100% the victim's fault. If your boss steals from you by giving you shitty work experience and then ruining your career, you are the subhuman piece of shit that deserves to die, not him.
      - cosisin 13y ago
        A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil. "Don't Be Evil" is such a conflated concept at Google. It sounds that you were fooled by it. Get real. Google's primary goal is to benefit itself. Good news [for users] is that benefiting the user is usually what benefits Google the most. Righting wrongs in HR issues that would expose Google as an employer to potential lawsuit liabilities and negative PR is not. Don't be so fucking idealistic. Does shit happens deliberately? No, it's just the law of large numbers at Google's size today. However, covering up the shit is sometimes rational and evolutionary. How many start-ups die because they don't deal with HR issues the "right" way? You were unlucky, but you also lack the tact to deal with your situation. Your years of experience and your 150 IQ didn't help, so what makes you think you would fare better as an EIR?
EvanKelly 13y ago
Can you clarify what "called in a hit" means? I'm not exactly in the tech community, so I'm hoping it means something different than my understanding.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  It means "tried to fuck up my next job". Working for Google was, by far, the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. No question about that.
illuminate 13y ago
"one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project" Ah yes, putting the employee on "probation" and awaiting any reason to let them go.