I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener.
The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stale way that felt like death.
It's disturbing to me how many people here seem to be okay with executives and higher-ups expressing grief over the results of an election, in the office.
I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
If you're emotionally affected by something to the point where you're unable to hide it, then you shouldn't come into work.
Companies are often intensely political; artificially pretending neutrality internally while actively working externally to influence the political landscape to me is more bizarre than being open about politics in the office.
If a corporation actually is solidly neutral and inactive politically in it's external actions, then, sure, the internal environment should reflect that.
> it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
I don't see how that's any less true of a company's external political activism.
If we accept that, should we not also accept religious views in the internal environment? Many religions view unbelievers in a very negative way, and active missionary behavior inside a company would feel very oppressive to those who don't share the same religion as the one being promoted.
Personally I would not work at a place which did so, and would consider reporting it to the anti-discrimination department in my country.
> If we accept that, should we not also accept religious views in the internal environment?
We (in the US), rather emphatically, do.
(There are some protections against religious discrimination in employment that apply to most employers, but those protections do not extend to prohibiting employers from all internal expression of religious views, or even substantive policy based on religious views. And, in fact, writing additional affirmative protection for employers’ internal expressiom of religious views, even to the extent of making that a basis for exempting them from generally-applicable legal requirements, is a popular trend in the US right now.)
'Corporation' isn't exactly a living thing that it will have sentiments of its own. People essentially make up the company, and those people have emotions based on how the profit needle and their stake in it moves.
Most Silicon valley companies depend heavily on immigrant talent and resource pool to keep the perpetual billion dollar start ups coming every year.
If your political sentiments are in deep opposition to what brings in your salary, you already have a very broken view of your life in general. And a company executive expressing any sentiment isn't going matter much, if at all.
That's really something that surprised me a lot after moving to the US. In my culture, politics is very much like religion, it is unthinkable to talk about it openly in a place of work.
When I worked in the South, but in a liberal area, you might talk about it with coworkers you trust, privately, but no one of any authority would get up and say anything.
The 100+ person company I worked at during the last election, there were statements by the senior executives as well as emails. Yes, the office had people openly crying, or absent, and the mood was like a funeral but I also don't think it's the place for especially C-level people to make those type of statements even if 99% of the office felt the same way.
There was also much hubbub around the (one) Women's March, solicitations, emails, etc. I'm happy for the women and men that marched for themselves but I wonder if they might've done some actual justice by asking the higher ups if internally women and men were being treated the same in terms of pay and opportunities, a conversation that I had with more than one female colleague in private.
I think Silicon Valley is particularly egregious because there's an unspoken assumption that everyone is left-leaning. The only outliers are a smattering of libertarians and maybe a few conservatives who keep their mouths shut because they like having friends.
Working in NYC nobody ever mentions politics. I haven't even heard so much as an unkind word about Trump.
With the possible exception of the case of an election of someone who may do direct harm to your business, it's way better to leave politics at the polls.
It's almost impossible to have a company with the scale of Google to have good culture. Good perks and you get spoilt in that aspect for sure, but I doubt culture is an important aspect of any company's hiring practice once you get to Google's scale and needing to hire as many people as possible to grow. Where there's diversity, there's also diverse opinions and political leanings and personalities, which leads to conflict, misunderstanding, people trying to one-up the other, and it all leads to a toxic culture (unless you're the ones coming out on top). But hey, there's always therapy (aka the internal groups) to help you along.
Cultures dies as a company grows to a certain size. Feels like the best way to combat that would be to have teams that are small within the company and operate independently and with autonomy, especially when it comes to hiring. That probably isn't realistic though within a large company. Am keen on what ideas people have or if they've had experience with something that works with regards to retaining a good culture.
I've noticed a TON of conversation on HN lately about how emotional/hysterical anti-Trump people are. Aside from the obvious fallacy (being emotional doesn't make you wrong), I think it's part of the anti-anti-Trump phenomenon: most people can't bring themselves to actually defend Trump but they are so annoyed by liberals that they devote their political energy to mocking and minimizing his critics.
My take: bad things are bad, and other people overstating their badness does not make them good.
No, but overstating their badness is itself bad. That is the issue. I didn't vote for Trump, I don't agree with the vast majority of things he's done, and I will vote for anyone running against him. But the astoundingly lengths of hyperbole people will go to would lead you to believe he is literally a reincarnation of Stalin and that if we don't act now the US will sink into a sea of flames, such as this gem[0] from someone who won't even use their real account, but uses a throwaway: "You might need a little emotional maturity. Crying isn't there[sic] end of the world, an idiot with nukes is."
I don't know how much more hyperbolic you can get than saying Trump is literally going to end the world. There is plenty of real things to criticize him about, you gain nothing by overstating things to the state of idiocy.
The phenomenon you describe is something I see in multiple different political directions depending on the context. It's basically just frustration that the status-quo opinion is held to less rigor. -- I don't mean that the positions are bad, but the way people voice them assume that more and more is solved "offscreen."
Trump might be president, but in the Valley tech bubble, Anti-Trump is status quo. And politics in a bubble isn't like doing math homework, you only have to show how you got your answer if you want to disagree with the "obviously" correct positions.
The anti-Trump rhetoric is stronger than the old anti-Republician rhetoric. So the people annoyed by empty arguments are going to be louder too.
I've worked for big tech corporations a few times before, no matter how much they pay, I can never stay there longer than 6 months. There is so much inefficiency. It's good for 6 months but after that I feel myself getting dumber by the day. Not all corporations are like this but most of them are.
Handing my resignation felt great every time. It's addictive in fact. Just seeing the disappointment in my boss' face and the jealousy in the eyes of my colleagues brings me profound life satisfaction.
I feel that 6 months isn't enough time to conclude much. Also, I don't see how you are able to mature your technical skillset in 6 months because a large portion of maturation in software design is reflecting back on how your deliverable performs in future.
If I ship a product this year, next year I can reflect back on how the requirements change, how I didn't anticipate a customer use case and learn from this for future design.
Delivering some code for 6 months won't get you anywhere past a code monkey in my opinion.
But if the prospective employer saw the kinds of companies I worked for and heard their reviews, they'd be silly not to try to hire me (especially in the current market). Some companies might think it is a red flag but I wouldn't want to work for such a silly companies anyway - These often don't do very well because they prioritise things like employee discipline over raw performance.
When you job hop a lot, you become very adaptable. I can start contributing high quality code after the first week. I can internalise the coding conventions and all the nuances of the code base straight away because I've seen it all and I understand the different team mindsets and dynamics really well.
If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and iterating 2 or 3 times is the part you are completely missing and cannot do in 6 months. This is why I think you need to spend at least a year somewhere to learn much of anything aside from writing code. Learning software design doesn't happen without hands on experience iterating on a major project.
Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through.
Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.
I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.
I disagree, most companies don't really 'grow' like you're suggesting. The odds of joining a company like AirBnB, DropBox, Facebook, etc... While in its early stages approaches 0% - There is a massive amount of luck involved. These kinds of learning opportunities are essentially impossible to come by.
However, if you switch companies often and work for a range of companies at different stages of development, then there is a very good chance that you will have the opportunity to learn about all the different stages of development without putting all your bets on one horse.
99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.
My first job out of university was at IBM. I distinctly remember thinking "this is just like being a part of the Borg" about a month in. You're connected to the hive mind through Sametime (internal IM client). Anything you need is available in w3 (intranet). External ideas or processes are assimilated (rebrand, and usually made worst through IBM-ification). Drones are constantly indoctrinated in how good IBM is and the proud history of the company.
hmm...you certainly burnt lots of bridges. If you did contractor work for those companies that would be fine, but a full-time hire that does this would be a serious red flag.
I'm almost 30, the longest company I worked for was almost 2 years; it was a startup and they're doing very well now - I would have stayed even longer but I wanted to move to Europe. Other than that I never stayed longer than 6 months at a company and I'm really glad because most of these companies were stagnant or failed.
I've quit my job probably about 10 times now. Employers don't care at all how often you change jobs; they all think they're special and so you'll stick around for them... They all think that they're the next unicorn... Funny thing is that if they were actually a unicorn, I would stay.
If my employer is a visionary genius, I make money.
If my employer is a delusional fool, I make money.
6 months is a good amount of time to figure out which one it is.
Man, I wish that were true! I'd love to sit in one place for 2 years. I can't seem to find a job that will last more than 18 months. Some will, but the pay is stagnant and there are no promotions. You must job hop. As one anecdata point, employers all seem to know that diagonal promotions are the standard now and they don't fault you at all. If they did, well then they gave me a red flag, if anything.
It's a good point. The reasoning behind the moves matter. There's a huge difference between switching jobs because a better opportunity is available, and switching jobs frequently for lateral moves.
It would probably be more accurate to say that it's a yellow flag, requiring a bit of explanation but not necessarily a bad thing. I find the pattern of switching every 6 months for (presumably) ~10 years to be pretty extreme and difficult to explain, though. Not to mention exhausting! How many job interviews must that have taken?
No kidding! Here I am complaining about 18-24 month moves and the OP was moving in 1/3rd to 1/4th of the time. Whatever uppers he's taking can't be good for you. Either that or he has the best spouse in history.
Still, honestly, it's a yellow flag. If the guy is good, 6 months may be just fine. But it's a cautious interview I'd think.
I've been at this job 2 years, and for 7 years at the job before it. 5-6 years of the previous job were great (promotions, raises, etc). The current job is stagnating; I can't stay here much longer.
Having worked at over a dozen places in my career, I've never encountered a code base that takes longer than three months to master let alone ramp up on. This includes shitty code, overly complex code, and well written code. I'd say the challenge is staying interested and challenged after three months.
The more you change projects, the faster you are able to ramp up to new code bases. It takes me 1 or 2 week to understand the code base well enough so that I can start contributing - This is pretty standard for many contractors like me. Adapting to unfamiliar code bases is a skill on its own.
You don't need to master the whole code base in order to make high quality contributions but you need to be aware of what you don't know and focus your efforts on the parts that you understand really well while learning more about the parts that you don't understand. You can learn as you go throughout for the first 3 months.
If you're already familiar with the framework that the company is using, that's already a big step. Peer review can help as well.
Most good companies have similar coding styles and follow similar practices but they might have different requirements when it comes to testing, security, scalability, Agile/Scrum, etc...
You've said shitty and complex code...how about voluminous code, or old code? The main product that I work on has about 2 million lines of C, C++, and Java code in the core of the system, then about 20 plugins ranging in size from a few thousand lines to a few hundred thousand lines.
We basically hire for sections of the codebase. It's pretty common for developers to discover the existence of an area of code that they haven't had to touch before and were unaware of the existence of even years after starting to work here.
2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!
For reference, the Bible has ~30k verses in it. A verse isn't a line of code, but I'd say mastering the Bible is a good benchmark for equivalent complexity to coding. If anything the Bible is more straightforward than a 2 million line code base.
> 2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!
The people who'd I'd say mastered the core codebase were the people that wrote it. Over the last couple years, they've been laid off one by one, but most of them have been around for 15-18 years already (the prototypes were built around 1998, and I think that the current code descends from stuff written in 1999). I've been around it for about 8 years now, in total. I wrote most of the current build system, a lot of the packaging code, the initial version of two or three of the plugins, and individual features in a few of the others.
The Bible has a distinctly different kind of complexity, though. Social complexity, rather than technical. A line of code has an unambiguous meaning, with other lines of code, the OS, and the underlying hardware providing an unambiguous context. A verse of scripture can have multiple simultaneous meanings, and the context is provided both by surrounding text and by the millennia-old cultures that the verses were written in. I'm not sure how I'd make the comparison.
Why have everyone know all of 2M lines of code? Programming is about abstraction, knowing what a subsystem does, what it's responsible for should be adequate most of the time until you need to fix something inside it.
We aren't doctors, we just need the skills to figure things out and fix them quickly.
The system's more broad than deep, mostly. Lots of functionality covered, but for the most part, the abstractions aren't super-deep.
My point was that someone can ramp up quickly on a portion of the system and have a vague idea of other parts of it, but "mastering" it covers too much code to do it in a reasonable time. Each plugin introduces special cases for the data flow, and the plumbing for that ends up running through the whole system.
I am an MD graduate and from studies in top notch databases I am waiting for a systemic review to show that my fears are true. Healthcare staff from the president to the hard working orderly, they are doing nothing for nosocomial or hospital associated infections. The ER becomes the reason for an admission. An athlete with a concussion does not need to be left lucid because of the diverse nurses are on smoke break 12. Then by force the medical student learned it from the class before. Do the minimal because you are not responsible as a pupil. The boards book after all will be the reason for the coming plastics beach life. Nobody has time to check hygiene or naps. More? The ICU. They changed the waiting room for rich with no idea about fake double blind studies. Guarantee in intensive care, bugs resistant to every antibiotic. I want to fix a block at least.
It’s hard to tell the difference between your narrative and the narrative that you can only be hired at failing companies because they can’t afford someone who will stick around.
To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified.
But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals.
> god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten
This kind of thing breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to
"please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Your interpretation was far from the strongest plausible. As a result, we got a weak and ranty subthread terminating in such hellpoints as "Your America bashing is completely uncalled for". Avoiding that is why we have the guidelines, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them more carefully from now on?
I work at a Silicon Valley company where nobody cried about the election (even if they were upset), and we don't go around acting like jerks towards one another.
You're definitely positing a false dichotomy here and I'm not even sure how you came up with "either people are crying over Trump xor they are assholes to each other every day".
Agreed. This is "feelings over professionalism." If you're so uncontrollably emotional that you can't help but waste company time, take a sick day. But I think the problem is that they're not uncontrollable, rather they're very in control and are enacting a performance for their audience. Thus they need an audience.
As a non-American I'm so glad I don't work in an country where politics seems to create such hysteria in the workplace. I know Trump was a big unexpected shock to many but come on... crying executives, I mean what the hell
Mind you, America is a vast and diverse place; California/Silicon Valley/Google are at an extreme end of the spectrum, and they also get a disproportionate amount of attention. Rest assured, much of America is saner.
I see what you're getting at, but "saner" is biased language.
Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.
It's definitely figurative language and I understand that it's charged, but I don't think it's "biased" in any sense of the term that might illegitimate my opinion. I don't think "uninformed" accurately conveys the phenomena we're seeing in our country, particularly since much similar ignorance flows out of institutions that ostensibly know better--notably the academy and media.
>"As a non-American I'm so glad I don't work in an country where politics seems to create such hysteria in the workplace."
Your America bashing is completely uncalled for and unwarranted.
It's pretty sad that you don't realize that executives getting on stage and crying in front of employees the day after an election is a complete aberration. This was was not and is not commonplace.
I'm an American and I can say without hesitation that in most of the companies I've worked for, executive leadership has been uncomfortably political on both sides of the aisle. Even from the non-partisan side, I worked for a company where the owner decided it was now required that you vote. He didn't care what party you were registered or who you voted for, but if you didn't vote it would be brought up in a review.
And as someone who quite frequently rolls his eyes at the inevitable "As a European.." comments on every American politics or healthcare article posted on HN, I didn't see the GP as America bashing at all.
That's why I've avoided small business like the plague. That's an extreme position -- even political hacks aren't usually that political in their appointed positions!
That's unduly personal, and therefore uncivil, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Unfortunately this kind of thing appears frequently in your comment history. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when commenting here?
I'm confused, my use of possessive pronouns is uncivil? I've read the guidelines, specifically the "In Comments" section. I'm failing to see where my comment runs afoul of the guidelines. It's not snark, its not something you wouldn't say face to face etc. Can you you elaborate?
Not the pronoun itself, of course, but when you use it to make negative insinuations about the person you're talking to, that's unduly personal and crosses into incivility. You did it twice above. Other examples in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472109. Please don't do this.
Stating "I'm so glad I don't work in an country where X", strikes me as a little stronger than a "nod."
More especially so when "X" is a second-hand anecdote and that second-hand anecdote stems from a company that is in no way representative of the average American work place.
>But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals.
The idea that as long as you aren't yelling, swearing, or actively insulting someone you are not treating them poorly is one of the biggest failures of Google (and other Bay Area companies') internal culture.
Verbal abuse is not ok, but even polite disagreement can be a career limiting move in such an environment.
And let me be clear: I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable.
But it's really easy to slip into an echo chamber, especially when a lot of what Bay Area companies work on is qualitative. (E.g. pretty much anything related to UX, policy)
> I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable.
Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
>> I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable.
>Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
Because he's wrong, and not even the sources he himself selected say what he says the say?
Allowing someone to express these misogynistic wrong opinions using company resources during company time creates a hostile work environment and opens Google up to liability.
Mostly because the language he used and the way he tried to promote his viewpoint was construed as hostile by almost every woman working at Google, or at least a significant number of them.
The choice isn't b/w being an echo chamber and expressing views which make coworkers uncomfortable for their gender.
Idk, I didn't see an issue with it. He discussed the issue on an internal forum designed for such discussion using plenty of citations and sociological terminology. The fact that it made some people uncomfortable shouldn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.
> The fact that it made some people uncomfortable shouldn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.
On the contrary, I think that alone is sufficient reason.
Its hard for me to go into detail about this right now. But as an employee working with other people, one must be aware of the effect one's actions and words have on fellow coworkers. In this case, the correct approach would have been for him to perhaps engage with a smaller group of people, not post a manifesto where it could be accessed by everyone at Google, which is a large number of people. Depending on the feedback, he could have change the wording to be perhaps more appropriate, and engaged in an honest conversation with HR.
There is no evidence that he did any of these things. Again, its common decency to be aware of one's words on fellow coworkers. With social issues, its not just facts, but also how you chose to express those facts that matter.
You could say: but why shouldn't anyone be allowed to express anything? Why place so much burden on someone to express their true thoughts? Its because we choose to live in a society that doesn't censor the views of its members but also places reasonable restrictions on what/how they can be expressed. So its not that his views shouldn't be expressed, but they weren't done appropriately.
Instead of attacking my suggestion as naive, do you have any constructive alternatives?
I am aware of HR's role in the company. Regardless of whos paying them money, there are usually people in HR genuinely interested in making the workplace better. And if not, still better to try that than to write a manifesto and post it for everyone in the company to see.
The way I see it, Damore wanted to be a martyr (realistically, what happened was the most likely outcome and he knew it) in the spirit of "The Life of David Gale" and he got it.
Every big company suffers the echo chamber problem to some extent or the other. And while Google engineers are a diverse lot, most of them (rightfully) consider themselves as some of the smartest people out there, and sometimes can be rather pig headed about looking at issues from a different paradigm. This is especially true on political (rather than scientific) issues.
This isn't evidence against the echo chamber claim. An example of valid evidence might be rational debate about a conservative memo, as opposed to censorship, demonization, slander, etc.
Google has internal Republican and Libertarian newsgroups and has had them for years. Damore's central issues have been debated for a long time on those kinds of lists and never censored.
What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence.
Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
> What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence.
Most of the egregious cases (including the Google Memo) involve liberals who are censored, harassed, or assaulted by progressives for openly inquiring or pointing to inconsistencies in the progressive narrative. Based solely on the frequency of these starkest of cases, I don't know how anyone could reasonably conclude that the evidence is paltry. Everyone should be allowed to ask questions and express (at least moderate) political ideas without fearing for their safety or income. This has nothing to do with privilege, and it shouldn't be a right conferred only to the extreme left.
> Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
Prior to the last few years, I've only ever heard the term applied to conservatives, who ostensibly failed to live up to the formerly-progressive value of open-mindedness. Conservatives have always been taken to task for failing to abide by progressive values (tolerance, free speech, open-mindedness, etc). Now progressives are under the same gun and it's all "poor progressives! why aren't conservatives faulted for failing to live up to progressive values?"; at any rate, the term is still widely (and justifiably) applied to conservatives.
Existence of one echo chamber doesn't disprove existence of another echo chamber.
And considering public did not see those old internal debates (there was not even a quote or reference to them in official statement about the firing), google now looks from the outside like that echo chamber.
Oh I'm not defending him. Some of his points were interesting but he seemed determined to piss everybody off to the point of no return. However that stuff happened after he got himself fired from Google.
My point is that Google is not particularly tolerant of dissent, or at least a specific type of dissent. Even back then (it seems worse now).
Sundar Pichai had to deal with dozens of Google Employees who were away on holiday visiting family who were being blocked by Trump's executive order from returning to the country, like a dual-nationality Canadian/Iranian scientist.
Did it ever occur to you that in a company with a huge immigrant population, or 2nd generation immigrants with family, many of whom were impacted by this wave of xenophobia and nationalism in this last election, that they felt under attack? That people who immigrated here and fell in love with America, suddenly were shocked into reality when they discover that so many of their fellow Americans were easily manipulated by the politics of Steve Bannon into voting for xenophobia and scapegoating?
Damn right people were legitimately upset at the social fabric coming undone.
Then run for office. But it's Google, not Congress, and taking company time (and how many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of productivity?) to whine about the outcome of an election seems at best a horrendous waste of resources, especially when it's likely 80% or more of the room agrees with you or is indifferent.
Since this is a Bay Area Tech Company Bashing Thread, let's throw in a Texas Oil Company perspective, from the Obama era
1. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "working with the Saudis" to "tank oil prices locally."
2. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "forcing premiums up for the contractor's insurance."
3. Complaints about liberals in general for "forcing us to have men in our girls restrooms" despite the fact that this never happened. General complaints about how it'll be impossible to get an oil platform bathroom in line with "retarded liberal standards."
4. Complaints from engineers making 250/k/year untaxed in the UAE about all the "damn Indians" taking jobs from hardworking Americans. General blaming of the Democrats.
5. Directions from management to not submit resumes with "foreign" last names.
6. Refusal on the part of a major EPC engineering manager to hire the perfect candidate for the job because he was Mexican origin (US citizen via green card route), despite the fact that he had unsuccessfully searched for a good candidate for 3 months.
So let's not pretend that politics don't invade business.
Despite the fact that all of these are uncited, how are engineers making $250k/yr untaxed in the UAE? Americans still need to pay income tax on income earned overseas. And if you know someone refused to hire a candidate because of their ethnic background, I'm assuming you blew the whistle and got them fired? The candidate certainly has a case and has a lot of money coming their way.
UAE didn't tax them, and they didn't report their income back home.
If I blew the whistle, there would be no evidence to support my claim, I'd lose my job, my recruitment firm would permanently be blacklisted by the EPC, there would be no repercussions for the EPC manager, and the world would continue along. I did refuse to work the position after that, but it's not like a recruiter is going to "solve racism in Texas." I do that on my own time, outside of work.
EDIT: Yes, hearsay internet stories, just like the OP that started this thread. Grain of salt and all that.
I think the argument being made is that Trump being elected president immediately and negatively affected business; therefor, it was a business decision to acknowledge the negative impacts his presidency had on business.
What if the result of an election hinders their ability to be successful and create a good work place?
I think there is a fair debate to be had about where the line should be drawn, but pretending that politics doesn't exist if you don't talk about it is deluded.
For example, Google employs a good number of immigrants. After the election many of them would have been worried about their future in the country. Wouldn't a good workplace try to address those concerns?
It is still not appropriate to complain (or rather cry...) about in a professional setting, imo. How can you expect to have confidence in an executive when they put on an act like that? Nothing says "I don't know what to do" more.
Yes, you are now facing some additional hardships in your job of creating a good workplace where employees can succeed. Those concerns should be addressed within the scope of what the company can or cannot do.
It seems like priorities would shift into protecting immigrant employees and that's okay - that is a hardship that the position entails and is something that should've been addressed long in advance as immigration reform was and probably always will be a controversial topic in the USA.
But all elections have winners and losers in the business sphere. In prev admins, nuclear power lost, arguably coal lost, telecomms reg. so are saying it's okay to complain loudly (rather than lobby) about the changes in a political manner?
Haha, by pay attention I mean pay attention to what Trump was saying when he was off script at his rallies and such. If you only heard him talk through scripted speeches/prepared debates and soundbites from the media you were getting a very different impression of Trump than how he actually is.
It was pretty clear who we had elected; a narcissistic and selfish dick with no self control who was willing to do anything to make himself look good.
Why not? When the election is making their company have a difficult time becoming a more successful work place? I think it's a company, people can say what they like, if Google doesn't like it as a whole, they can fire said employee.
The purpose is Google's company wide meetings with the executives is not for the Executives to complain, but for the employees to complain and the executives to respond with a plan of action.
In the meeting in question, employees were asking Google how they're going to help stranded employees, how Google is going to protect them, how they can still travel outside the US if their job requires it (e.g. You're a British/Iranian citizen)
Google executives did not get up on stage and given an anti-Trump rant. In fact, as far as I recall, they've never directly insulted Trump the way you can see in major news media, because who wants to make an enemy of the US government and what use would it be to give a political speech? What they did is respond to the concerns of employees, and some of them are immigrants, and got a little choked up with emotion in their voice, because they were shocked too.
My extended family has a lot of first generation immigrants. None of them understand American racism and xenophobia like a native, and they thought it was just focused on Mexicans. The travel bans were the first hammer, the attacks on legal immigration (greencards and bringing family members), Bannon's "There's too many Asian CEOS" hail back to the attitudes of the Chinese exclusion act, and finally Charlottesville, all show the danger of playing around with xenophobia. It doesn't stay contained the way you think, and many educated, elite immigrants were suddenly shocked that they might be affected too.
Nobody is arguing Google's right to express political opinions, but the fact that their culture does so is counterproductive to a meritocratic structure. They seem to be more concerned about virtue signalling than creating an environment that focuses on professional and economic growth.
It's like the culture was shaped by having a "Don't Be Evil" motto or something.
(Also, it's interesting that you separate politics and meritocratic structure. It is by politics that the things that are merit-worthy are decided---you can be the best developer in the world, but if you're developing the wrong thing, you're not adding value).
Most people who dislike Trump don't dislike him because he's Republican, most don't even believe he's a true Republican, or conservative, or evangelical. He was a New York Democrat in the past, supported gun control, abortion, etc, therefore his ideological core is questionable to say the least.
What people dislike, beyond the sheer incompetence and pathological lying and bragging, is a tendency to play to the worst aspects of the crowd, for narcissistic reasons. That is, people are upset because they believe Trump is a person who will stoke up division for no reason other than it gets applause and attention, and often, the "heel" in WWE Wrestling parlance that Trump uses turns out to be the least powerful.
Agreed, my comment was intended to reflect your statement exactly. It's the fact someone so abhorrent with no respect for anything other than himself is in charge.
I agree that executives are people, but we regard lots of normal, human behaviors as "unprofessional", and our standards for professionalism are traditionally higher for higher ranking employees. In particular, I think there's already a lot of negative misinformation circulating about conservatives generally and Trump supporters specifically (mind you, I'm neither), and no one is helped by executives propping up these rumors.
In what way did the executives "prop up rumors"? They were responding to employees and their families who got trapped outside the country by the travel ban executive order. What's rumor about that?
What is considered 'professional' today might not be tomorrow. I for one would welcome more genuine personality in the corporate world and can think of many things I'd like to see become considered acceptable.
Maybe, but that's inconsistent with the demands for greater professionalism and accountability that we've seen our society place on executives and other authority figures in recent years. Notably, any comment that can be remotely perceived as questioning the progressive narrative is equivalent to violence, white supremacy, Nazism, etc. I care less whether we expect greater or lesser professionalism from executives so long as "professionalism" isn't a partisan proxy war.
I remember many executives complaining about Obama being elected. Hell, I remember many telling their employees they had to vote against him otherwise they could "lose their jobs". (In the metaphorical sense, not that the executive would find out who they voted for and fire them).
If this happened, that's bad and it should be stopped, the same as in this election. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a politician to say "politician X supports policy Y which will negatively impact our profit by $Z".
why should they change the brand for your delicate sensibilities?
the whole point of google is that its an incredibly complicated piece of technology simplified into a search bar. a simple, fun brand - makes sense to have a playful work enviornment.
Given that a bunch of current and former Googlers have claimed that employees all the way up to the executive level keep and share lists of people they won't work with, there are alleged witch hunts, and people have made the statement they will quit the company if someone else isn't fired, it's hard to see how Google's culture has grown out of kindergarten.
(Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing, Breitbart[0] interviewed a bunch of current/former Googlers, etc.) [0]Yes, I know Breitbart sucks and is massively biased, though AFAIK, nobody has even suggested those interviews are fictional or even factually inaccurate.
Mostly bullshit in my opinion. I've been at Google since 2009. Never heard of so-called blacklists, but in a company with tens of thousands of employees, you can probably find a few people who hold grudges against other people. What's your point? You don't think at other companies, corporate politics doesn't create animosity of people who don't want to work with others?
I previously worked at IBM and Oracle for years and I can tell you, that kind of behavior is exponentially worse, complete with engineered backstabbing and deliberate sabotage against coworkes. So if that's Kindergarten behavior, Google is college by comparison.
You should read the Breitbart interviews then. There are screenshots of Googlers on internal G+ saying they maintain blacklists of people they won't work with for political reasons, or sometimes, even just because someone spoke up and said "hey, blacklisting your colleagues isn't a good idea".
I'm guessing most are probably women (or close allies) who basically don't want to work with people like Damore.
My kids are half-Chinese. If one of my coworkers said "these half-breed children are polluting our race", I'm pretty sure I'd shy away from working with them. Damore basically implied that Google lowers the bar for female engineers (which it does not), and therefore immediately cast doubt on the quality and merit of his female coworkers.
If I was a woman, I might decide I don't want to work with someone who feels I'm not really supposed to be there.
They were men, actually. Again, rather than speculate, I suggest you get over your fear of Breitbart and just go read the interviews.
Damore didn't say or imply what you're claiming either. I wonder how carefully you read what he wrote, if at all. He talked about interest at the population level. He didn't claim female Googlers weren't as good as male Googlers. That was a strawman thrown about by people who couldn't argue with his actual points and so preferred to argue with something else.
So - lots of assumptions on your part, all wrong. Not the type of data driven analysis I remember Google exalting, back in the day.
They don't lie constantly. Not about that anyway. I used to work at Google. I even recognised the names of some of the people who were quoted in those interviews. Every single detail was exactly as I remembered it.
Lots of denial in this thread about the contents of those interviews, as they're pretty damning. But it's all true ...
That's your take? Using bright-colored paint and giving out candy is how you avoid having everyone be jerks to each other? And at every company that doesn't do that, everyone are jerks to each other I suppose?
And kindergarteners are kind and pleasant while mature people are frustrated, abusive and cruel? (From experience I'd say if mature people are frustrated it's from dealing with the tyrannical outsized self-centeredness of the kindergarteners, but I digress.)
Good guys don't always wear white hats, and there's no reliable correlation between Google-style trappings, and a good place to work. I don't have a citation for you, but I've seen great creativity in grey Dilbert cubicles, and I've seen rank despair in brightly-colored factories of the happy-happy.
A shiny thing could be a nugget of true gold, or it could've been placed there to distract you from the fact that you're standing in a bucket of shit. And to contradict and invalidate your true realization that standing in shit makes you feel shitty. And that -- in and of itself, and totally aside from your co-workers' behavior -- is a subtle way of being a jerk to you.
A workplace should be neutral. Let me put the life there, like paint on a canvas.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Every company has it's unique issues of course, but what is a perfect company? It's pretty painful to hear tales of 'woe is me' and under appreciation when there are people who would sacrifice a lot to get into the position you're are in. Not saying don't critique things you find unpalatable, but at the very least offer up a way you think might be a better path or a 'solution' to the 'problem', don't just complain, and then walk away. If you're not a part of the solution, then you're part of the problem.
What are the things that have actually happened in the last 10 months that justify an executive crying? The country today is 99.9999% the same as far as I can tell. (as long as you ignore twitter).
> and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified.
Its called losing, thats what it feels like, you are missing that there are A LOT of winners.
Your sentiment is reinforced by presidential faux pas but thats a total sideshow to how people are successfully navigating this political environment, using it as a catalyst even for trade and commerce outcomes that will long outlast this administration.
When you treat everything like a zero sum game like this administration does you do create a lot of winners, but you also have to make losers. Turns out it's easier to just take those that already weren't doing well and make them even worse off.
And yes this administration looks to make huge changes that will severely disadvantage the US energy sector for decades while they try to prop up the failing coal industry while trying to kick the ladder out from under energy sources like solar and wind.
The point is that the feelings aren't justified for everyone. So for the parent poster to present that as a canonical reinforcement of how one should feel, or how one's executives should feel, or how all the employees at a multinational company might feel, is completely disingenuous.
As someone who was deeply disturbed by the United States electing a jingoistic, misogynistic racist and abuser, I really appreciated that I got some fucking emotional support from my colleagues.
Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.
I'm friends with someone who's entire department (Disney IT) was laid off in exchange for bringing over H1Bs from India, where the people who had worked there for decades had to train their (much lower salary) replacements in order to get their severance pay.
I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.
> I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.
Yes, and given Trump's demonstrated understanding of nuanced issues, nobody was expecting him to magically come up with a solution that deals with the abuse, without collateral damage.
That is exactly the time when you want your boss to say that yes, they will have your back.
>Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.
Step into the shoes of the person who was demanding a fair market wage until the company used an H1B visa to bring in someone who accepts far worse conditions because the threat of deportation is always present.
This post is being downvoted and I wish it wasn't, because it's a great example of the exact issue at hand.
You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the life you built for yourself.
"No politics" is a fine ideal to aim for, but you can't expect anyone to leave stress like that at the door when they turn up to work.
> think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the life you built for yourself.
Immigration is a political issue that hasn't been properly addressed in decades. H1B visas are good in theory, but companies exploit the system to import cheap foreign labor, hurting American wages and job prospects in the process. Illegal immigrants concentrate to pockets of the country, displacing American workers and lowering wages for those who have been hurt the most by globalization.
Should these political issues be ignored just to avoid hurt feelings? I don't think they should.
I don't think anyone is going to dispute the argument you've laid out there, but if you were to do as I suggested and put yourself in the position where your livelihood, home and life are on the line, would you really sit back and think "well, immigration is a political issue that hasn't been properly addressed in decades. H1B visas are good in theory, but..."
Of course you wouldn't! It's silly to expect or demand that of a person. Especially in the 24 hours since their life was turned upside down.
Except, that's the point - people are overly emotional. All this waking up the next morning and the world is different is such a stretch. Nothing has changed.
I'm going to guess you aren't in the US on a visa.
"Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying?
Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt threats to immigrants and the lives they live in the US. The fact that your entire future becomes incredibly uncertain within the space of 24 hours is absolutely something to get emotional about. To pretend otherwise is silly.
As is the idea that turning up to the office without being overtly emotional would somehow mean you're absolutely fine. That stress is going to come out one way or another, personally I think that expressing it (yes, including crying!) is a lot better than the alternatives.
Actually I am in the US, on a visa - albeit I'm Canadian and have a good country to fall back on. Regardless of the president I feel vulnerable on a visa.
I empathize with those on DACA or other immigrant situations; however on average I would argue reporting of the issues, the emotions, and reactions are over the top.
The news cycle every two weeks is - "immigrants getting kicked out, DACA is over" - three days later "president goes back on his word w/ EO" or "congress not in sync with president; won't change legislation." (not literally, but you get the point).
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
> Otherwise, please cite a video/audio source of him actually saying he wants to kick out all the legal immigrants.
I am no Trump fan, but you have failed to do this. Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
The OP edited their post to add that line after I replied, so I wasn't actually responding to it.
> Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
Is it really that different? If a legally immigrated muslim left the country they would not be allowed back in again. Call me old fashioned, but I feel like a legal immigrant should be allowed to travel.
Maybe for you, but for a large portion of America it was definitely like waking up in a new world. Its easy to call people overly emotional when you aren't living in a world where the President of the United States was elected by stoking the hate and fear that a large portion of your fellow citizens have against your race/religion/culture/etc...
I'll be the first to celebrate when Trump leaves office, but all of this "he ran on hate/etc" is at best dramatically overstated and at worst completely fraudulent. There's lots of valid criticism for Trump and his supporters; no need to make things up.
No one is making anything up. No, Trump does not come out and say that he hates Muslims, Blacks, etc. But you are either not paying attention or purposefully remaining ignorant if you believe that Trump does not exploit the racism and hate that a large portion of Americans have.
Maybe I haven't been paying attention. I hear a lot of talk about Trump and supporters being white supremacists, but when I ask his accusers, they aren't able to articulate very significant evidence at all. Most such conversations end with implications that I'm a racist for lacking the astute progressive hearing required to perceive Trump's dog whistles. The irony that dog whistles are (by definition) intended to be perceptible only to actual racists is apparently lost on many progressives.
Except is has, and continues to change. These changes are affect real people, people in my family, in profoundly negative ways. That you choose to ignore others doesn't mean nothing has changed. Only that you are ignorant of what is happening.
Except that there was, in Bannon's famous "there are too many Asian CEOs" radio interview with Trump, they floated the idea of cutbacks on legal immigration, some of which would impact current immigrants seeking to bring over family members.
Moreover, if you were a legal immigrant on an H1-B, and you happened to have dual nationality with one of the "bad" countries on Trump's list, you quickly found out that you could no longer risk travel outside the country. A large number of Canadian-Iranian/British-Iranian immigrants found they were suddenly capable of being banned.
Acting like the election campaign was no cause for concern is completely ignoring the obvious warning signs, like "We need a TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MUSLIMS ENTERING THE COUNTRY".
If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
> If Jewish immigrants had been engaging in the amount of terrorism we've seen in Europe recently...yes, I would be just as flippant.
Do you think that white people in America engage in too much mass shooting, and consequently should have additional regulations applied to them regarding gun ownership?
No, and if you took a closer look at the stats you'd see that it's not even true that they're disproportionately responsible for mass shootings or terrorism generally.
The probability of you being killed by a terrorist or a Muslim in the US is tiny compared to your chances of being killed by a native born or white (assuming you're white). The percentages are so small, it makes such an outsized concern obviously racist because from a rational risk assessment point of view, it changes nothing.
>So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
Immigration and terrorism are not the largest issues facing this country, yet they completely dominated the election.
>The probability of you being killed by a terrorist or a Muslim in the US is tiny compared to your chances of being killed by a native born or white (assuming you're white). The percentages are so small, it makes such an outsized concern obviously racist because from a rational risk assessment point of view, it changes nothing.
It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.
> We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
>These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
>It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.
You can't compare Europe's problems with assimilating immigrants to ours. But if you keep alienating immigrants, you will make them feel like outsiders, and then you will face more of the kinds of problems Europe has.
>While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
When the Chinese came to America, they worked jobs people here didn't want, including taking over cotton picking in the South after slavery was banned, and running stores that catered to African Americans under Jim Crow. They did dangerous work on the railroads that white Americans didn't want to do.
You're running a slippery slope argument that justifies a harsh stance now when none is justified. "They could start raping our women if we let a lot more in" We've seen this played out time and time again.
At the same time conservative politics plays the dog whistle game with immigration, claiming immigrants are putting them out of work, they're also opposing efforts to make native born Americans more competitive, like expanded educational opportunity, access to daycare, and other investments in human capital.
Why was "chained immigration" no problem when it was Western Europeans, but all of a sudden, it's a problem if you have yellow or brown skin? And given the immense amount of value that generations of immigrants have brought to this country, why should I fear "chained immigration"?
>For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
Well, it's bad to be against it when you have fallacious reasons, by ballooning up the dangers of it and buying into nationalist fervor. There's a reason why the middle class got stagnated over the last 40 years, and it has nothing to do with immigration. The same thing happened in Japan which has some of the most protectionist immigration policies you can think of.
People got used to the low hanging fruit of easy GDP growth that can from a rapid switchover from agricultural to industrial society, and now with growth tapering off to ~2% GDP all over the developed world, everyone is looking for something to blame, and dark political forces all over are trying to blame immigrants. Here it's the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Asians. In Britain, it was the Polish. In Germany, it was the Jews (and not the harsh penalties imposed by WWI on Germany).
Find someone to blame, usually a foreigner.
In the meantime, we aren't making the investments we need in infrastructure, in education, in health, in early childhood -- because those require sacrifice.
Instead, take the easy route: sacrifice these other people.
How dare he want an immigration policy that benefits American workers before corporations and foreign workers! It's so immoral that I'm literally shaking!
The fixation on crying in this thread is fascinating.
If you feel like crying, but hold back, does that feeling just immediately disappear and you get on with your day? Of course not. You just bury the stress, and sooner or later it bubbles back up again in weird and unpredictable ways. Is crying at work more or less professional than having a panic attack at work and ending up hospitalised?
Crying is just an expression of stress. If your actual statement is that people shouldn't be stressed about non-work issues at work, then good luck, that's not how human beings are engineered.
Take a day off if you're so emotionally affected by something that you're unable to stop crying. Or work from home.
Anything else is likely to be disruptive to your coworkers.
I have a lot of empathy for people experiencing emotional distress, whatever the reason. I would never complain about them and would do my best to offer sympathy when appropriate. But I really shouldn't be put in that position at work, and if I was emotionally disturbed I would not come into work so as to avoid putting my coworkers in that position.
I think this is all doubly true if we're talking about the results of an election. Some of your coworkers may be happy for the same reason you're upset.
Exactly. I'll happily stop worrying about politics when politics stops worrying about me. Unsurprisingly, people who feel like Trump is the solution to their 'country being taken away from them' are telling the rest of us to suck it up and stuff it, and to stop bringing politics into everything.
I mean, shit, if they took that advice, he never would have been elected.
But deporting Muslims? He definitely didn't campaign on that. And that he targeted LGBT people is a real stretch. Even Obama was more anti-LGBT in 2008.
Yes. Remember when he was saying he was going to ban all Muslims? And remember the Muslim ban that prevented lawful residents from coming back into the country?
You may not want to believe it, but it is true. Lots of groups of marginalized people felt targeted by Trump and his supporters. And Trump has not done a thing to assuage those fears.
It wasn't "ban all Muslims" it was "ban all Muslims from entering", which is a pretty important distinction & not anywhere near as severe as deportation. The travel ban was really stupid in my opinion -- but I don't dislike it is as much as I dislike the notion that having any policy about who can or can't come here is immoral.
If it "didn't matter" then there wouldn't be such a massive difference in the opinions of Muslims and non-Muslims about secular topics. Islam in particular is also more like religious and political ideology intertwined, and the political aspect of it does not mix well with Western culture or values. I'm not just making this up either, there are a variety of polls from allegedly "moderate" Muslim countries as well as within European countries that show disturbingly high levels of support for terrorism, honor killings, oppression of women, killing of apostates, etc.
Seriously though, it's hard to have it any other way when this issue has been moralized as much as it has. A nation has a fundamental right to control it's borders and determine who does and doesn't get citizenship etc. It is not a human right to have access to the United States.
I witnessed first hand an entire mobile engineering department at a major US company dissolved. Managers, QA, software engineers, a total of 20 hardworking, dependable people, were shown the door in favor of Chinese contractors who would do their job for a quarter of the price.
Empathy, it seems, is often a cherry picked virtue.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who sees their country selling out to the highest bidder. Can you not understand their fear?
The headline is a bit deceptive given it's written by an internal recruiter; I imagine anyone not working as part of a business' main thrust could find the same problem. That said, it does sound horribly tedious and pointless. Of my two interactions with Google hiring (both failures on my part, both pre-2006), one was enjoyable but messy and the second was brusque and confusing.
This was my reaction too. Mike Rowe would probably look dimly upon the author's complaints. Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them.
But, it's tough to have that conversation from the position of privilege one sits in when one gets paid even more to do an interesting job, because of the scarcity of people capable of performing in that role. Presumably the kid understands this harsh reality, and the complaint is more reflective of a general disillusionment that the situation is as it is, rather than an aversion to the particularities of this role at Google.
> Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them.
What I got was that the requirement for overt enthusiasm over a mundane job became too much. I don't think Mike Row would see it the same way if a sewage technician was forced to pretend their job was "making a better world one bowel movement at a time" or face being ostracized.
I did not get the sense that the author was ostracized. Rather, they were put off by other people's enthusiasm. "Am I the only one here who can see this job is crap?" I can totally understand that feeling being crazy-making, but it's different than being ostracized.
I do think that the OP's job as a recruiter could have been better if the culture within his team or the recruiting dept was better. Sure, it's a monotonous job, but im guessing if the team was a small startup located in SF external to Google and they could do things their own way instead of answering to and belonging to a huge HR department with immense pressure to get as many candidates in as possible, and grow their own culture, the job wouldn't feel so tedious and pointless.
Sometimes it's hard to feel like you're doing great things and making a difference when what you do is a drop of water in a great sea that is Google, vs the same drop in a smaller bucket of water.
While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It strikes me as a possible next iteration of native advertising. This is not an attack on WP -- just something I thought might be worth discussing. The tech giants are becoming increasingly more powerful and this could be a new frontier to assert that power.
While it's certainly possible there's some bias going on there, I can confirm that this guy really worked at Google. He contacted me a few months ago about a position, but I decided not to pursue a role there.
Maybe this wouldn't have been published otherwise, but I definitely believe it to be genuine.
It does seem an odd choice to publish. Sourcers (that's what Google calls people like that regardless of what his job title was) have existed for a long time there. I was recruited to Google by someone just like that. And yes it's clearly a very boring job: they're basically human search engines.
Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he was mistreated or anything.
To be clear, Washington Post is not owned by Amazon. It's owned by Jeff Bezos. To accuse one of the nation's most respected papers of sacrificing its 139 year reputation over an opinion piece about working in Google HR is kind of farcical.
I've been interviewing with Google, and by my count I've interacted with about 5 different recruiters for two roles. It's strange how specialized they are, and the communication overhead seems high.
> Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions.
If it's any consolation, gmail's reply suggestions were frequently sufficient on the candidate's side.
If the recruiter is given specific hiring criteria that are hard but not impossible to satisfy, I could imagine looking for people who fit those requirements and persuading them to sign up would be a satisfying job of search, selection and salesmanship.
But that's not what these Google recruiters are doing. They are trying to find any vaguely qualified people they can who are willing to dive head-first into the meat-grinder that is the Google interview process. And their job is mostly futile because that process will ultimately reject 90-95% of the candidates.
It's kind of weird they need recruiters at all. There is no more famous tech company than Google. You'd think they would get enough applicants just through their main website.
Well, the author says all he has to do is type 2 letters to send invites and rejection, maybe with a few words to make it look personal. The process is streamlined, that doesn't make it more interesting.
As an ex-recruiter, here's what my dream job would have been like:
1. No arbitrary process numbers. Job and cost numbers fine, but "10 calls a day" "5 BD calls a day" "20 resume sends a week" is stupid - would rather have a manager helping me make strategic decisions, using my time intelligently.
2. Automated bullshit. No more downloading resumes to upload to our system. We either pay linkedin and use that exclusively, or outsource somebody to fill out our own CRM (actually good CRM that has functional searching, not that Bullhorn bullshit that barely worked).
That's all it would take. If a recruiter annoys you, it's probably because you're Candidate Call #9 of the day and she has to get to 10 or she'll lose her job.
I see this as a problem with HR and recruiting in general, not a Google problem.
The only reason this is news at all is because Google is in the title. Replace that with any other company name and it just describes another position that could either be automated or outsourced.
To be fair to Google (can’t believe I said that), sounds about as painful as similar role at another large company would probably be. Most expect their employees to drink some Kool-Aid (one of the side benefits to being a contractor/mercenary is being able to exist somewhat outside that world).
I have family that works at Google and I remember a group of their friends reporting they very much preferred the switch to consultant for Google rather than Google employee. They wanted to be outside the internal political bubble. From what I recall the distaste surrounded a lot of the performance review song and dance and promotional squabbles.
Most of the responsibility, minus the technical interview, seems like it could be done by an AI sometime in the future anyway. No more complaints afterwards!
I found Google's dev interview to be especially difficult, I personally hate doing hours of whiteboard coding (sorry, I tend to code on computers instead, silly me) ... So I wasn't hired, but those who worked as devs there told me that's a blessing because after all the rigorous interviewing bluster they'll assign devs to remedial code refactoring anyway. I'm not a rockstar coder above doing the housekeeping work but doesn't sound fun either. Why hire top coders then assign them intern busy work? I wonder if the strategy was to just drain the local talent pool of top coders so competitors had less of a candidate pool. Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?
FWIW, interns on the team I interned on had the chance to work on experimental, new features that required little to no refactoring. Maintaining existing code was done by developers who knew the code well and were capable of making measured engineering decisions.
Just yesterday I had an interview with a Facebook recruiter and afterwards all I could think about was that the recruiter's entire job could have been replaced by an AI. And not one of the smart, modern, cutting edge Siri types of AIs, either. The entire process could have been just as easily accomplished by a robocaller bot that's been around for decades.
The interview process was a few generic, form-filled emails to schedule the interview time. Then during the interview call the interviewer read off a few pre-determined questions that were read directly from a questionnaire, and the interviewer recorded my answers. They didn't ask any follow-ups, only asked what was on the questionnaire. When we were done, I tried to ask them questions about the position and they told me "I can't answer those questions for you because I'm just a recruiter and I don't know details about the specific position. Hold onto those until you talk to the next person."
He might as well have just put on a robotic tone and said "My responses are limited. Please wait to talk to a real person if you have other questions."
It could have been automated, but having the human make the call leads to a slightly decreased level of people madly trying to google up answers to 'what is the expected exit code for a program that had no errors?' so that the next phase of the process is not a complete waste of time for all parties involved. The recruiters are just trying to see if there is any chance that you might actually have the skill set claimed on your CV; if you can't answer their simple questions then your resume is complete BS and they will move on, but after asking the same questions over and over and over the recruiting team also knows the response of someone for whom the questions are insultingly easy and can move those candidates to the front of the queue for the next stage.
Yea, that's all well and good and I used to do recruiting for my old company where that was the case, except that wasn't even what was happening here. The Facebook recruiter himself told me that he was simply recording my answers down to be reviewed by someone else. He didn't seem to know what a "good" answer was versus a "bad" answer, and he didn't care. The questions he asked weren't about nor related to my resume, they were just generic "tell me about a time when you worked on a team with other people" type questions, and the recruiter wasn't really more than a notetaker for my responses.
I get that having a "human element" makes the process seem slightly more personal, and I would hate to be a part of a recruiting process that literally is just robots, but in the case where your job can literally be completely replaced by nothing more than an online HTML form or a robocall, what are you even doing?
Actually, I'm wondering if an AI could be better at predicting the success of a given candidate given enough data (resume, online presence, portfolio, DNA sample, etc.) than "traditional" whiteboard interviews (which have a huge false negative problem).
I've been coding for 20 years but some random fresh face out of university goes into HR and looks over my CV and decides whether I'm suitable for an employer or not. Neverlmind that they can barely tell the difference between Java and Javascript. I mean what the fuck, you've got a university diploma, which I don't even have, and THAT's your job? What a waste.
>Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions. All we have to do is press two keys (mine are semicolon followed by the letter “C”). There’s also space for fill-in-the-blanks: one for the candidate’s name (“Hey Mark”) and another at the end for the day of the week (“Enjoy your Thursday!”), so the message is personal.
This step should have been 100% automated and I don't understand why it wasn't. As a recruiter this shit was my least favorite part of the job. The next step - the candidate calls - was my favorite part.
Yep. Any time I see a recruiter try to automate initial contact using a tool like Jobdiva or some such, it's an instant disqualification. Most of the time it's just plain shotgunned out and I never hear anything beyond the initial email. I had one recruiter, after doing that, call me and inquire -- I told him no, and explained to him that I don't do business with those who willingly use spamming tools.
I get why it's frustrating, but one way or the other the job has to get filled. When I was a recruiter I'd blast out emails as well, but only to candidates I actually thought were qualified.
Knowing that of 20 people the recruiter knows that are a good fit, only 2 might be available, what would your preferred method be of them going about their job?
Don't use a blast. It lacks the personalization. If it looks like a form letter, I assume you did keyword matching (which is the case 90+% of the time) and you're just playing a recruiter game of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Be upfront and honest is another one. I see lots of recruiters try and be sneaky and play phishing games. There's a reason why my current employer isn't listed by name on my resume. Plenty of times recruiters have contacted me, promising a job, but it's only to grill me about my current position to find other people there they can hit up, or contacts within HR, etc. Or it's just a plain ol' resume-sending event and they want nothing more than me to bulk up their database.
With that upfront and honesty in place, be willing to provide key information to the candidate upon initial contact -- it'll save you and them a lot of time. I want, as a minimum (and usually no more), the client, the location (may need specifics depending upon the city, for example "Dallas" isn't very descriptive as Dallas is huge), and the employment type/term.
Telling people why you think they are qualified might help, at least they will know it's not some random e-mail blast sent to the whole address book. Telling why you think your job is going to be better than their current job is the best though. Also, while trying to answer that question, you may find out that there is no point in e-mailing them in the first place.
But it sounds like the "personal touch" was done the same way for every email, and therefore was such that it could have been automated. Not very "personal" of a personal touch...
I'm not sure it's exactly breaking news that the most entry-level basic role in a department is boring and repetitive. The only reason this article is even getting run is because it has "Google" in the headline.
As someone who has worked at a large corp. for a bunch of years I can say the job you have may feel awful but you're at a company where you can network with people who do anything you are curious about.
The same could be said to the person writing this article. You work at Google.. your recruiting job might be awful but get your earbuds out during lunch and see if you might work at another team internally that is more in line with what you wanted to do.
Recruiting is outsourced at many companies. I'm not sure why this person thought it would be a hugely interesting job. Perhaps if they were an engineering major and were working on ways to automate recruiting searches, or improve the false positive/false negative rates, it would have been interesting, but it doesn't sound like this person was hired for anything but to man the phones.
From that standpoint, it seems like #firstworldproblems. Someone who lacks the skills to be a SWE gets hired at one of the most prestigious companies, most likely has awesome benefits and a comfortable job, but boring and unfulfilling. Contrast that with the millions of people in who work for far less salary and benefits, in low end service sector jobs, and it just seems tone deaf to me.
I understand the feelings of not having a good fit for your work and wanting to do other things, but there's a huge difference between "I need a change cause I find what I'm doing boring, even if the pay and benefits is good" and "This is the WORST! Clearly, I was owed an interesting job at a candy unicorn factory, and since I didn't get the toys I thought I would, I'm suffering worse than a Soviet gulag here."
This narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end. It's nothing but elitism, and adding the "#firstworldproblems" doesn't do anything to help your cause.
Non-engineers deserve fulfilling work as well, but their skillset - and hence their ability to find such work - is being automated away.
In this specific case - was it even possible to find fulfilling work in HR in the first place? It's hard to sympathize with the author holding Google to an impossible standard.
>>This narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end.
You are largely limited by what scope your professions ecosystem has to offer. If you are an accountant, the last time you have learned anything exciting or read something serious about your area of academic training is way back in college. Beyond this your job essentially is a ritual, much of which is automated incrementally every few months.
Programmers are in many ways lucky, that we are in an ecosystem that offers chances for continuous learning, making incremental steps in success and failures, and by the sheer volume of it offering a degree of success. All rapidly growing fields are that way. At one point it was Electronics, and before that and for a few centuries it was mechanical engineering. Tomorrow it might be something else, the trick is to know in time and move on.
You will be surprised that even professions like Medicine get very boring, monotonous and don't pay well over time. I know a doctor among my extended family, who was a very brilliant dynamic man, also very creative. But over years has seems to seen enormous erosion in overall perception in life. It gets very hard to keep your spark alive if for several hours per day in your life you have to be in an ecosystem that tries to purge it.
Neither, I wasn't saying what people deserve, only that so many in this country suffer in far worse jobs, and don't get editorials in the Washington Post about it. My mother worked for decades as a Cashier at Safeway, and before that, as a telephone operator connecting calls at AT&T. Her actual talent: singing, she wanted to be a singer.
By comparison, this HR job was orders of magnitude better. My mom didn't have healthcare provided by her job when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, she had almost no vacation, we lived paycheck to paycheck.
There's no voice given to these people, the truly suffering masses, in the news media. Instead, we hear the suffering of the upper middle class, who has a cushy deskjob, free gourmet food, massages, vacations, bonuses, stock, but finds their job boring. Why are we reading this story in the Washington Post and not the story of the person working 60 hours a week and living at the poverty line?
It's a question of priorities for me, not who deserves what. Every human deserves a fulfilling life, but in the grand scheme of things, the suffering visited on the author of that editorial is one of angst, not basic survival, and he's being given a microphone for grievances of being pampered with benefits.
If a trust fund baby complained he's bored with life because he still has to show up for boring meetings with his trustees, I'm sure we can find some sympathy for his ennui, but first I have to work my way through all the headlines of Puerto Ricans suffering, or those who make my iPhone.
It's impossible for every job task that needs to be done to always be interesting and fulfilling, even engineering jobs. Sometimes there's dirty work that had to be done that just sucks, and someone has to be paid to do it. My point is, if I advertise a job to clean toilets, don't show up and complain that cleaning toilets is boring. I know its boring, but I have to paid someone to do it, or buy self-cleaning Japanese toilets. I've had coding jobs before that were metaphorical equivalent of toilet cleaning, and I hated them, but sometimes you need to make rent. I did the work, hated it, and then went on to other more interesting things (founded a startup). I didn't bother submitting an editorial to a newspaper on the experience. It just seems self indulgent to me.
I didn't mean it in the sense "he is inferior to SWEs", I mean it from the sense that Google is a tech company, and at tech companies, the interesting jobs where new product development happens generally goes to engineers, PMs, product and UI designers.
It would be no different than if I went to work at a Hospital, I'd end up in claims processing or administration probably, and someone could say "he's not a doctor or nurse or medically trained, so of course, he's pushing paper"
To some extent, it's up to you to make your job interesting and fulfilling. If this guy spent 2 years doing HR and it was a grind, then he knew all the pain points and probably how to improve the workflow. Why didn't he take the initiative, get some coworkers together, and try to design a better system rather than wear earplugs eating alone in the cafe?
Google expects and depends on people to take initiative. If my project is not interesting, either I find another team that has a more interesting project, or I invent a project for myself and shop it to cosigners. I'm not supposed to sit here stewing in unhappiness for years waiting for my manager to say "oh, I noticed you aren't being fulfilled. Here's a new project to fulfill you."
It's not that only SWEs matter. Most startups have a technical founder and a non-technical founder. Non-technical skills often matter more than technical ones.
So that's where those calls come from. I used to get cold calls from Google recruiters who seemed clueless. I finally told them to put me on their do-not-call list.
Maybe this person can try working a factory line and see how empowering other jobs can be.
But Ok, I'll buy the author's point that the job sucked. What's the news here? The cynic in me says this is Bezos using WaPo as proxy for the Amazon/Google fight.
I understand the pain of this person, but this has literally nothing to do with Google, and everything to do with: Recruitment Sucks.
It's a fucking annoying, mind boggling job. If you're external, there's a couple highs when you negotiate a salary or are selling a candidate on a position or in a business development meeting with some bigshot at an engineering firm. But mostly, it's calling 10 candidates a day (at least) even if you have nothing to pitch, because you're fishing for information but really because your boss told you you have to make 10 candidate calls a day or you're fired.
It's 5 business development calls a day, even if there really isn't anybody new to talk to, and if you already contacted you entire network that month, because... reasons? Because your boss said so. Hit your numbers, 5am hit the phones! Coffee is for closers ABC ALWAYS BE CLOSING
"I gotta stay late and make these calls," he says as he sucks the recruitment/sales koolaid, despite knowing that extra calls will literally lead to no extra money for himself or the company.
"I make 25 candidate calls a day because you never know what juicy tidbits of information a candidate might have," she says despite the fact that we all in the city know the same story - the oil and gas market is dead, everybody's losing their job, and any new project already has 5,000 applicants before the recruiters can touch "9" to dial out.
Browsing linkedin - copy paste name into the name field of Bullhorn, then email, hmm do they have a resume? Download, upload to Bullhorn. Skip the "create candidate from resume" option because it sucks. Do this 20 times a day - "we need to build out our system with good candidates so we're ready when a position opens," despite the fact that linkedin and oilandgasjobsearch.com search function are 10x better than Bullhorn's so I'll just be using that anyway.
God, sorry, rant, but this kid joined a job where you feel useless, where you know you'll be automated away, where you barely understand the field you're working in ("oh you're static tank mech E uh this position is looking for rotating"), where that super weird American/British "sales" culture has totally infiltrated and everyone gets their rocks off to Wolf of Wallstreet and glengarry glen ross.
So, long story short, I was in this kid's shoes a little over 2 years ago, and I fucked off to San Francisco, went to a bootcamp, now I'm frontend and it rates among the top 3 decisions I have ever made in my life, and I'm sure that so far it's the most significant and far-reaching decision in terms of longterm happiness.
In the bootcamp, I saw 2 projects come out from 3-month-trained frontend devs automate a large portion of my recruitment job. It's going.
It doesn’t say anything about what it is to actually work at Google. Maybe rephrase to working in HR sucks. I doubt this person even worked at MTV. I worked at Google and it is an amazing place to work at (beercart Friday!) the only reason I left is because living in the Bay Area sucks.
Yes the bar at Google is very high and after busting my ass all week solving ridiculously hard problems having someone drop a cold beer and nachos on my desk on a Friday afternoon shows that Google takes employee satisfaction very seriously
I'm not sure about your exact experience (it looks like you're young), but that's quite common, at least in relatively young companies.
Nachos and beer, or food in general, doesn't show anything special, since the cost to the company is negligible (compare it to your salary).
One could even argue the opposite - that such conditions are part of a precise PR strategy targeted towards a certain demographic.
Where'd you move to? I'm at the "trying out South Bay" stage, next I'm going to try downtown SF but after that I'm curious where people generally go. I was considering Vietnam and doing the remote work thing.
While the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation.
The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience.
I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and is of value unto itself in the workforce.
But - as evidenced by his systematic experience of key-pressing - his position @ Google is a stop gap, in the same way that the humans in Uber's vehicles are a tolerated inconvenience.
This while the people the company ACTUALLY values, at present, are the engineers - tasked with devising new ways to automate, regulate, and systematically eliminate human fallibility from the equation.
Solving the problem of what to do with the millions of us that take steps to educate ourselves, want to contribute, but realize that we're a poor facsimile of the machine that will eventually eliminate our jobs, is the central question of our generation.
Don't know about "poignant" - this reads like "I chose the wrong career and it's Google's fault" - but 100% yes, this is one of the biggest societal issues we face.
The author may have realized a bit late that he doesn't enjoy HR, but he still deserves a chance to pivot. That's getting harder in our economic system and with automation and outsourcing.
I remember looking at Hacker News in 1895 and remember the fear of automation was just as noteworthy then. Weird how increasing automation over the past 200 years has led to record low poverty and a higher standard sign living that would have unimaginable.
Once we resolve the issue of people being automated out of their careers then of course automation will be a net positive on society. You don't have to tell me - I work in machine learning and data. These are basically growing pains that require a societal paradigm shift.
A fair distribution of resources and opportunities. I believe that if we do not address this problems soon enough we will be (soon) living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
A Pareto distribution with alpha >= 2 (and likely alpha < 5, because that's starting to look too much like Communism) and x_m >= the cost of basic necessities for one person--including shelter, water, food, sanitation, medical care, education, and their share of upkeep for the transportation and communications networks.
No one suffers from lack of vital resources. Yet it is still possible to get rich via a combination of luck, skill, and tenacity. Seems fair to me.
Of course, this leads to bickering about how to calculate the numbers, so....
At the point where you said "and likely alpha < 5, because that's starting to look too much like Communism", we're back on politics.
This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the human from the equation if you're solving human problems.
So merely saying "Communism" is sufficient to make it political? In terms of fairness, my opinion is that alpha less than 2 puts too much wealth in the hands of the rich, hurting the baseline quality of life, and alpha greater than 5 probably doesn't concentrate enough capital to support innovation, competition, moonshots, and luxuries.
I was defining an objectively measurable middle ground between two economic antipodes that have each had extensive political backing now or in the past. This contrasts with those who decry any movement in the direction of redistribution to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Communism, and any movement in the direction of concentration to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Capitalism.
When you define numeric values, it becomes harder to hijack the discussion by throwing around loaded words and charged phrases.
Politics with concrete numerically-quantifiable values is much better politics.
But you can't replace the politics with the math, as the exercise of deciding the alpha value in the Pareto distribution demonstrates. The numbers don't tell us what people will value; that's where the politics comes in. It's the art of figuring out human values and coming to terms to try to satisfy as many as possible.
In theory, the optimal alpha could be determined experimentally. It would be an expensive experiment, though.
For now, we just have anecdotal historical examples, like the Soviets, and the European monarchies, and the ruins of ancient empires, and the banana republics, and the resource-curse countries.
We have already determined that the extremes at either end are bad. Concentrate the wealth too much, and you get slavery or serfdom, and stagnate. Distribute it too much, and you get socialism or communism, and stagnate. Follow some happy medium somewhere between them, and your economy grows.
In the absence of an experiment that would require extensive political maneuvering to even begin to conduct, we substitute less extensive political maneuvering in order to make some reasonable assumptions. It is better than just allowing the person that derails the discussion with the loudest distraction to win.
Besides that, experiments undertaken to determine the optimally fair distribution of wealth are as likely to be used to craft an illusion of fairness as they are to create a real environment of fairness, so even if we knew, we wouldn't necessarily be able to do.
I think this guy sounds like an over-entitled sheltered snowflake. If you have the sense to get into Google, then it follows you have the sense to go and get a job anywhere else on the planet. Who cares if Google didn't work out? There is no dearth of interesting work going on in the world today. Go find it.
That said everytime I watch Sunder Pichai doing his pseudo Steve Jobs routine I get a headache at how superficial and unimaginative Google is. I am not at all surprised at the shallow culture.
Is working HR interesting at any company though? There's really nothing of substance in this rant at all; I'm curious why the wapo thought this was fit for publication.
>Yet Google’s low-level HR employees are barraged by higher-ups about Passion! and how we are Changing People’s Lives!
Does anyone seriously listen to that kind of talk? It's a job - in this case helping to sell advertising - why try to pretend it's some kind of religious calling? Why do so many companies insist on spewing that claptrap?
Can't believe the author can write this article and not see the glaring problems. This is a narrow minded article that speaks to one person not fitting in, not a widespread problem like he tries to make it seem. If you wear ear plugs at lunch something is obviously not clicking. It sounds much more like the author isn't a fit for the company.. there is no mention of having friends or anyone positivity about the job.
that's exactly right! I tell my younger mentees that you can work for companies that are doing cutting edge stuff, but watch what you are actually doing and contributing to that. Are you growing and being challenged as a productive individual. At best one would have to be content playing an indirect role that aides the development of cutting edge research or whatever. I guess the fallacy for the author was assuming a few degrees of indirection in a supporting role was going to be life changing and doing things that mattered. I like seeing his honesty in reporting that things from him vantage point from all the action was in the end not all that meaningful for him.
That's essentially what they're doing! They've got an automated form. The recruiter's job is to screen linkedin profiles for qualified candidates; The tedious bit of the mail (two keypresses and typing their name) is just gravy.
Just as this HR underling's life is a soulless tedium of selecting stock phrases, that video was chosen automatically (which is to say, even less soullessly) by a context matching algorithm.
Now if you think that a narrative is being pushed here then I have a Rorschach test I'd like you to take.
Or maybe it's fucking stupid to have an automatic system picking related videos and inserting them in posts in a way that makes them look like they're the main video of the post.
My fiance is a recruiter at Google, and while she still has issues with work or has a complaint every now and then, she embraces her job and is a top performer. She finds pride in finding people that normally wouldn't think they could get a job at Google, and push them through process, and once they get hired she takes satisfaction that yes, she in fact did help change their life and or career.
Anyone can make the claim that there job sucks, or the company they work for tries to brainwash them, or maybe they feel overqualified for what they are doing. If you have an issue with your job you change it. I applaud the author for making the change, but I find it terribly unprofessional and kind of childish that he would rant about his previous employer when they didnt do anything wrong to him...
The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stale way that felt like death.