all the instances they discussed highlight the contrast between what google presented itself as, vs what it actually was. i dont think this person is asking for sympathy, i think they hate google for trying to pretend its anything different than any other big profit seeking enterprise. sounds like you are well on your way to the hostility the author very succinctly describes
And yet, there are much more pernicious elements to dystopia Google has become and ways that it perpetuates them through the efforts of people just like this so that they can literally have a "free lunch". These are the type of complaints that minimize the actual failure of "don't be evil" as implemented by their very efforts. Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.
Actually, no. Anyone can be "creeped the Fuck out" about anything anywhere. It's their right. That's "just like uh, your opinion, man". One can be annoyed by business processes, vaguely offended by decor, or the stiffness of the uniforms at Dachau, and it's kind of irrelevant.
I'll try to be more clear. This reads like reality TV drama when there are bigger things going on. It misses the dark forest for the brown weeds.
To me the bigger point really IS the corporate dehumanization, but the details (other than the white gringos laughing about layoffs) distract from the deeper issues and sound more like gripes of a coddled coder than real criticism. When an individual is more concerned with their own personal jokes/disses than the work they're doing, you get folks at Enron joking about turning off "GrandMa Millie's" electricity in profitable, but unnecessary rolling blackouts.
The “obnoxiously open about” part of your post says much about you. Your post would have been much better without that part.
Google was “obnoxiously open about” do no evil and the other stuff described in the blog post. It’s natural for people who bought into those lies to react accordingly. Nothing in the blog post suggests a belief that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things.
Yeah it says that I think she sounds obnoxious. Google's PR was also annoying. Considering she calls it a dystopia and her usage of Marxist terms I do think she believes that she has better ideas about how society should work. Saying nothing in the blog could suggest that is absurd.
It's easier to know how things "should not work", and that's a good thing. At least knowing what is not right you're allowed to do a quarter of a step in the right direction. Being an anarchist herself, I don't think she'd know how things should be, only how it should not be.
You didn’t say she sounds obnoxious. You said she is obnoxiously open about her identity. The phrasing you used says much about you.
Nothing in the post suggests that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things. The post suggests that there are things Google didn’t live up to in terms of what it claimed about itself. You should try to analyze things unemotionally. Perhaps then you wouldn’t make such obviously bad conclusions.
Well let me be clear, I think she sounds obnoxious in general too. What does that say about me?
I think pretty much every example given in this story is pretty typical and in line with the expectations a sane person should have when deciding to work at a large corporation. Clearly the author didn't like it, and I think it's fairly obvious that the author thinks Google should have done things differently. If that reads as too emotional on my end for you I am sorry but I can't help but be a human being.
You do have a capacity to misread and draw the wrong conclusion. The emotional part of your original response refers to the “obnoxiously open” about her identity statement and your ending sentence regarding polyamorous anarchists being better about things. Your biases interfered with your interpretation of what she wrote. Your original post would have been much better had you kept these parts out of your response.
Yes all interpretations are biased. Not all elucidations expose those biases to the reader. You had the right amount of sarcasm for most of your post but then brought in references to gender identity that were not germain to your points. They were needless digs that detracted from your main points.
Yes, she did bring up the part about being asked for terms her community uses. She came across as irrational in this part. It’s best to just leave it alone or mention how she came across irrational without saying she is “obvious” about her identity. That line took away some of your credibility. At least to me. I could be wrong.
There's a quote, at least from the movie, where Zuckerberg calls people "dumb fucks." I honestly have to think the same about anyone that seriously bought into a corporation putting "do no evil" in a mission statement.
It is simply not possible to extract billions of dollars unless you have ascended above the idea of not fucking people over.
This is gonna sound like I disagree, but I don't. What is the amount of money that a company, or better yet, a person can earn before the explotive alarm goes off?
I bet if we really start hashing this out the number is real small, but you won't be able to talk about it because it'll make everyone in $750,000 houses feel bad.
It's one of the reasons I'm loathe to look for another "job" and instead pitch my services on HN or wherever. I cannot abide another job that pays well but makes it impossible to get a good night's sleep, regularly.
hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess
True. Taking a helicopter is way more impressive. The Everest was climbed in 1953 and the first helicopter to go there was in 2005. It is way harder thing to do.
No, in your analogy building a helicopter capable of going there is impressive. (Though I dispute the idea that it’s more impressive simply because helicopters were invented more recently than mountain climbing.) In any case, riding in a helicopter remains passive and in no sense impressive.
"People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?"
this is a really stupid point, even for paul grahm. no one looks back at 1982 as the good old days, and the gini coefficient can be low without enriching oil barrons, and to see this is true, remind yourself that other countries exist.
can you please listen to yourself? this is babys first day managing software dev level observation. "there will never be a serious business that does those things" ok, i guess well ignore the entire industry then
But the industry DOES all of those things. That is what people are stupidly complaining about. People aren't complaining about meetings or job interviews or being expected to turn up at the office because of the theoretical possibility they will happen but because they do actually happen.
