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Comment by tcdent | Hacker News Reader

I can understand encouraging casual relationships with your coworkers, but tracking and giving seminars on improving them goes too far. I'll take my $2000 now, please.

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I thought he meant it was more meta than that, in that rather than sitting everyone down and explaining how to be friends, he'd get the managers in and help them create an environment in which it happens naturally.

That might justify the seminars, but tracking personal relationships still goes too far.

It's one thing when people do that voluntarily on various "social" websites, but being asked to do that at work is a whole different story.

In a small company (a startup for example) the boss will know who knows who. To make that kind of information available to the CEO in a big company seems pretty harmless.

While reading the article I read that part not like they were tracking the relationships but rather using the form as a survey to get a feel of how good different departments got along and knew each other. Basically, I felt like they were keeping the whole thing anonymous.

If they're not, in that case, yes, it is very creepy. But I really doubt it.

The article went from heartwarming to creepy at that point. I know they probably mean well, but that's pretty big-brotherish.

I'm not so sure. You can anonymise the data and it wouldn't effect the intended result. The whole premise is to track relationships between _departments_ so the actual identities in question matter less. You just want to try to prevent a "them" and "us" culture.

To provide a software analogy you want the platform group to be friends with the application group and enjoy working together. I've experienced a split myself where one team would just blame the other team for the problems in the final solution and it isn't productive.

My point is just that it seems creepy. No matter what protections and anonymizing is going on, the described implementation would elicit a very negative emotional response from me.

It's not actually as creepy as it sounds. It's almost like a game, and employees would try hard to score well on it.

I agree with MicahWedemeyer -- it's creepy. I went from being very impressed by Hsieh's article to being completely creeped out in the last two paragraphs (and being glad that I'm not his employee). I fully understand the desire to have employees interacting across departments, but this IMHO this is a terrible way to try to acheive that.

Do you work there? I'd be very curious to hear from someone on the inside, as it could be that my impression is way off.

Meeting people isn't always easy. I think that events and social experiments like this can encourage interaction in a new/fun way. At the very least people at the office will be talking about it, which will likely lead to new fruitful interactions.

Certainly it's not more creepy than FB

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