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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> sometimes mining information to leak to organizer friends

> After 9–12 hours on campus I would fill my Google-issued bag with Naked juices and to-go containers of food for my roommates

So... deliberate violation of the corporate NDA (which is massively disrespectful to the other people who work here) and stealing food from the cafes. I'm happy to work at a company that fires people who take something offered in good faith and abuse it. It is a part of our company culture to give people broad freedom to do what they think they should, on the understanding that they will act responsibly and not abuse the privilege.

(I can't comment much on the rest of the article, except to say that I feel a person who has openly admitted their tendency to dishonesty is perhaps not best afforded a high level of trust in the claims that they make)

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I can't say I disagree with this analysis but as an ex-googler I once confronted an employee who had just stuffed at least a six pack of red bull into their backpack at the mini kitchen(MK).

Their rebuke was defensive as expected, but they also pointed out that (at the time) Google is getting rich by stealing everyone else's information and then putting ads around it and reselling it to other people, so taking a few bucks worth of soft drinks from the MK really wasn't much of a problem.

It was a rationalization of course, but it was built on a kernel of truth, and one that the author touches on as well. Which is that culturally at Google, the company felt they held the right to decide the morality of any action in the way that most favored Google. Whether that meant giving away the stories from newspapers by crawling them and summarizing them or by skating on the edges of labor laws to convert something from an expensive automation project to a simpler sweatshop project.

For those who chose to look deeply at the company's actions, I can see how it would be unsettling.

Aren't you forgetting about robots.txt?

(The argument about stealing becomes more complicated when you have to explain why people are not putting up a robots.txt. You might still be able to make it, though.)

Except that IP violation, isn't a form of theft.

Also, Google, and every other search engine, is covered under fair use.

I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.

(Ie I agree with you. My comment was just worded rather narrowly.)

I wasn't, that is a good point. And after Google I helped run a search engine :-) I was not saying that I advocated the person's point of view or even agreed with it, only that I recognized the argument they were making. Which was people "give" services with some expectation of how they are used, and feel abuse when their expectations are interpreted differently.

To use our anonymous employee's perspective, Google was "giving away free drinks to employees." They were an employee, they were taking drinks. At the time the policy was not as explicit as it was after the great MK purge. So they chose to interpret the policy without considering the "intent" (which was drinks when you are at the office). They compared it to newspapers (and to a lesser extent the books project) which at the time were exploiting "fair use" loopholes to drive traffic to Google's sites, where Google placed advertising. Google was sued by a number of different groups over this. As a result advertising is subtle/non-existent on the news.google.com page and somewhat subdued on the books.google.com page.

I agree with Ryan that sites get more out of Google showing results from their pages than they perceive they "lose" by not having people come to their site to read the full story. And while we can argue about magnitude, the reality is that the "web" link on HN stories lets you get the referrer set to Google and that can sometimes jump the paywall of a web site. If such a thing wasn't possible the publisher would argue those people would pay. But as perhaps Forbes has found out, maybe not so much with the ad blocking crowd.

The argument I recognize is that one side might choose to see only that evidence that supports the conclusion they have already arrived at. And the dismissal of contrary evidence is perceived as a lack of integrity.

Oh, definitely. I agree.

Meh, I think that argument (stealing everyone's information) is post-rationalization with a particular preset frame of reference in mind.

So I disagree with the 'kernel of truth'. That isn't the kernel of truth. Google isn't stealing everyone's information (IP laws are weird sometimes, but the bottom line is there isn't a natural monopoly to information like there is to, say, real property), and there is a beneficial exchange. When done right, and adwords is a good example, ads can benefit the user as well.

Internet search engines are beneficial to the user, the site owner, and society as a whole. Adwords are very powerful, and they are underwriting a whole host of really awesome shit, eg: android, chrome, gmail, google photos, tensorflow, and much much more. Overall civilization is benefiting immensely.

Think what would the world be like if Google was run by the kinds of people who ran tobacco and oil companies? The kind of people who have repressed scientific discovery in the name of profits. Google has it's warts, but nothing that evil. I think we are forgetting how shitty people are out there, and we are getting too relative. Google to perfect is a lot closer than Exxon to perfect.

I think that works for any kind of voluntary grouping. When people abuse a cultural conventions and other implicit taboos for personal gain it's really detrimental to the larger group. Now, sure, he might see the larger group as his foe, and so be it, and so it's their privilege to let this kind of person go (and to keep them would undermine group cohesion).

It's like someone coming from a culture where people patiently stand in line and then you have someone from a culture where people are used to jostling for position, it creates friction in a population of people who wait their proper turn. (and vice versa would also be true the former always complaining about people not being orderly)

According to the article, the author was neither hired nor fired by Google. The author worked on campus for a contractor.

That's even worse, he's jeopardizing the perk of contractors being extended that privilege.

Per the article, some contractors were not extended various privileges during the period the author worked on Google's campus. The author's curiosity regarding the differential access to Google facilities, equipment, and food precipitated his termination.

Never the less he jeopardized the status for others who didn't have a say in his unilateral activism.

On the one hand I understand his sense of juvenile fairness, on the other he's jeopardizing the benefits extended to a class of workers who the company is not contractually obligated to provide.

Back a long time ago MS temps sued MS for keeping them as "permanent temps". One of the arguments was MS treated them in many ways as direct employees (meetings, outings, perks, etc.) The result of that is that temps are now treated as temps (curbed perks so as not to blend/blur the distinction). Be careful what you wish for.

No I agree with you. I got about half way through till I realized this is all about a self-entitled prick. He spent the front half of the article talking about himself, then justified it with the fact that Google may hire people to do work. OH MY GOSH CALL THE POLICE!

The NDA is inexcusable. The food though...seems like everybody does it.

I don't think any company would ignore pilfering on a large scale (everybody doing it). Now, large companies might have an office or two which deviate from the norm and may tolerate it a bit, but company-wide, I don't think so.

Yeah, personal morals are silly. Throw Snowden down the well.

I've often taken a drink or a snack from the office for later in the evening or the next day. Never considered that this might be frowned upon. On the other hand, taking large quantities of items frequently seems like an abuse of a perk.

That's how I understand it. "fill my bag with juices" is not the same as taking a snack for later.

I've heard multiple times that taking food home is "ungoogly". I can't remember exactly where, but I think at least once in one of the many training/ethics videos I had to watch.

It's OK to take food onto the bus ride home if you're working, or would have missed dinner because of the long ride. Taking large amounts of food to feed multiple family members on a regular basis is not.

It's well tolerated within bounds. Regularly feeding your roommates seems well outside those bounds.

I would agree with you here, and I think most googlers would too. We trust people to make sensible choices about this, and tend to be quite angry with blatant abuse, because it's abusing the trust as well as the perk.

> The food though...seems like everybody does it.

The people who work here are the sort of people who don't, and that's intentional. Enjoy the things that are provided, but understand the context and intent behind them and don't abuse them. We get to have these things because we collectively take responsibility for not abusing them. That's how you avoid the tragedy of the commons - if everybody abused them then we'd have to stop having them so freely available.

I don't. My coworkers don't. I rarely see people in my building doing that.

That's the problem with universal quantifiers, they are so easily disproven.

I completely disagree. Someone who discloses things of this nature seems even more honest.

In my opinion you seem like a bit of a square. :|

edit: Goobye kharma.

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