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Comment by anothercomment | Hacker News Reader

I would guess most subscribers simply like gossip and watching train wrecks.

It's like old days of Gawker.com. You could rationalize that you were doing a true public service by participating in the "name and shame" game. Or you could just be there to take pleasure in other people's misery.

Also, look at 'name and shame' subreddits like the SRS communities. Those places are toxic. While I think that there's some value to be had in viewing other people's missteps and learning how to improve based upon them (a favorite quote of mine, "the best way to cure your bad habits is to see them in others"). However, a wide scale list like this one does not seem to me to be good.

For example, the reason aviation gets safer and safer is because every time there's a mistake it's documented, studied, and then if corrections need to be made, they are made. What's not helpful is some open forum where people just make anonymized complaints that some airline has bad pilots or crappy planes. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but I think there's something there...

There's no naming and shaming in "Yes, at Google". From the article: "Usually, the people in the complaints are not named."

Not sure that helps much. At worst, people will start guessing and perhaps suspect the wrong people. And many people can probably identified from the context. Furthermore, there can be no defense against the accusations.

Empirically, this does not happen. It's a company of like 70,000 employees. You're not going to be able to guess the people involved when the company is that size. Maybe if it was a company on the order of 100s of people you'd be able to.

This is a hypothetical worry that doesn't seem to play out in practice.

Disagree. It's super easy to narrow it down to a handful of people and make assumptions about who it was.

Especially since it sounds like the stories are personal, you can just figure what team the victim is on and narrow down the list of possible offenders to a few. Usually there are details: senior/junior, married/unmarried, old/young, manager, direct report, colleagues, etc, etc.

You can figure it out... Not in all cases, but most of the time I'm sure it's easy to figure out...

> Disagree. It's super easy to narrow it down to a handful of people and make assumptions about who it was.

I have to ask, are you saying this because have you read the stories and been able to narrow down who it was? Or are you just assuming? The stories are extremely vague, and they're curated by someone who removes unnecessary detail from the stories to make sure they stay anonymized.

Here's the type of story you might see in the mailing list (this is a fictitious example along the lines of what actually shows up) "I had a meeting with a male team mate and a male employee from another group. The employee from the other group would only address my male colleague despite me being the lead of the project."

That's what most of the stories are like, with few identifying details, and just a few sentences at most describing the situation. The stories are intentionally obfuscated and brief. If this was a real incident, I'd have no idea if someone from my team was involved, or if it was my manager, or any other person I worked with. The people involved will be able to figure it out if they're reading, but in the overwhelming majority of cases there'd be no way of knowing.

The only time I've every seen someone figure out who was being mentioned was when they outed themself.

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