Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

Was the voiceover being done in a closet in a Google lobby or is there another reason for the depressed monotone? I mean, I understand we're trying to be moody and ominous here, but the voiceover could have been retelling the story of the Human Centipede and I'd have probably fallen asleep (or wanted to shoot myself).

I'm not defending Google, here, because I don't know anything about them beyond what everyone else knows from the outside. However, what do you expect the reaction to be when you are an employ for a company contracted to provide services to a client who grants you certain access and privileges which you then abuse to pursue your own interests and investigations outside of the scope of what you were employed to do?

Hell, at the end of this video, I'm still unclear what point is trying to be conveyed. Is it just "the racial balance of the employees that I saw exiting the building for two days didn't meet some proper balance I had in my head, so I decided to start doing a socio-economic documentary on my employer's dime and after everything went to shit, because of how I was conducting myself, I put together a ten minute video to explain myself to future employers"?

I saw a lot of smiling faces exiting the building and getting into nice cars. I don't see what the big deal is that people who are temporary or part of menial data-entry labor are not part of the greater events and benefits and festivities of the company. I'm sure it's that way at most companies. I'm on the development side of things and I don't get to go to the big sales-team getaways in Cancun or wherever else they go. And I doubt that the janitorial staff and security staff are sharing in the staff-bonus compensation that I am. And none of us are getting the several million dollar company loans to buy our mansion that CEOs have gotten.

Perhaps this will be an unpopular sentiment, but I just got a strong vibe of "this is my chance to be a documentary film-maker".

You missed the point: the guy was fired for recording conversations with other employees. After being given permission from his supervisor to do exactly that. On his lunch break. Wtf is that all about?

You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed.

That is exactly why he was fired. Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy.

No accusations were leveled and, as far as I can tell, at best, Google overreacted. To make an analogy: the guy points out the sky is blue and he's promptly fired. Wtf?

> No accusations were leveled

It doesn't matter. That's exactly what was being implied. Google wants to prevent any legal disputes or inquiries into their operations which can be very costly. The guy is a low-level low-importance asset so they had him terminated. It makes perfect sense.

His importance to the Google machinery is irrelevant. According to the post, he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. At worst he should have been given a warning. I hope, for the sake of consistency, "Carl" was also fired.

> he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so.

Yes they used that as a reason to fire him but that's not why they fired him.

Perhaps things are different in the U.S. but here -- in Australia -- you can only be fired for breach of contract. If that didn't occur, as the blog post seems to suggest, then he was unfairly dismissed.

As dangrossman points out, above, you can be fired for any reason whatsoever, on the spot. I believe the only protections are sex, race, gender, religion, and age. And as for sex, that means you can't be fired for being a male or a female. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, for which you can still be fired in something like two or three dozen states. (Look into the ENDA which has been repeatedly proposed for the past 17 years, but never passed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... ).

And for those things which are protected, there is often little you can do. Prove that they fired you for being too old and not just because you smelled bad or performed poorly at work or pissed the wrong person off.

It therefore isn't really concerning that someone would not want to deal with the hassle of some jackass and would just ask for him to be fired, instead.

> the hassle of some jackass

nice

US seem like horrible country to work in. You are expected to donate unpaid overtime to your company, you can be fired on a whim. What else?

It's easy to get hired because employers aren't afraid that they're wedded to you for life.

And you generally make pretty good money - depending on your job of course.

I think 'job protection' is a bit misguided. What makes more sense to me is 'people protection' - that even if you lose your job, you'll still be able to pay rent, eat, etc... It would make more sense to aim for that goal directly rather than force employers to keep people they don't want.

>>>What else?

You are expected to STFU and be a "team player" despite what trouble the team is cooking up.

Many states allow ridiculous non-compete agreements.

(Fortunately not California, which is one reason so many startups are located here.)

It's a different settlement. You can be fired more easily, but on the other hand it's easier to be an entrepreneur. Also, because it's easier to fire people, it's easier to hire people, because you know if they don't work out you have options. France is an example of a country where it doesn't work like that.

I'm not sure about being entrepreneur in US. Once I saw blog where someone listed costs of incorporating. Amount you should set aside for health insurance sent chills down my spine.

Also more or less obligatory (if you are sane) usage of legal advice for any contract and such seems like a huge burden usually not present in other countries.

This person was fired for pointing out systematic racism at google.

If it is true that they have a separate building where the 'people of color' work segregated from the others, that is pretty outrageous.

It really does say something about the corporate culture there.

I hope it is investigated more closely by other parties, and that Google can make it better If there is something like this happening.

I think you are misinterpreting the story. They have a separate building where low level data entry people work. The segregation is by work function, not race.

And they don't get free ice cream sandwiches when the ice cream truck pulls up. Is that racism or is it economics?

Scanning books is a manual process that is much like sewing or factory work in the repetitiveness. (Maybe less skilled than sewing).

The "racism" of the situation happened years before anyone walked onto the Google campus. The socio-economic opportunities of things like safety, education, nutrition, books, time, parental involvement all feeds in to the situation where the workers in building 3.14 get one level of education and the engineers get another.

If it were true that they were segregating "people of color" then it absolutely would be outrageous. However, it is absolutely NOT true that they are segregating for reasons of color.

It's a red-herring argument.

What if the 4 to 2:30 schedule is to control traffic flow. Setting a non trivial number of workers to arrive and leave at a certain time means that the twice daily 'mega traffic jam' arriving and leaving doesn't happen.

Which puts everyone at their desks longer. Which saves money.

What if the reason that yellow badged workers aren't allowed to freely wander the rest of the google campus is down to security? Would you want low paid wage workers wandering around amongst your industrial secrets?

In a corporation the size of Google there will be a lot of other low-paid workers, secretaries, post-room, catering, etc.

Are they all yellow badge too?

And do they all steal secrets as you seem to imply every low-paid person is bound to do?

Seriously, just because someone is low paid doesn't mean they're any less trust worthy. That's one fucked up world view you have there. Also it doesn't make much sense as it's the higher paid workers who can do the serious economic damage as they know what's actually valuable.

I'm sorry you took my statement to read that I think they're less trustworthy. I don't in any way shape of form believe that they are less trustworthy than anyone else on campus. However, from a security point of view, if you could successfully eliminate 100% of the risk for a given group of individuals, wouldn't you?

Anyways, I've either misspoke or you've misunderstood.

First up segregation is not the issue here but this guy's choice of words. The real problem here is if Google responds to any of his comments, on paper it really does look like there's a class issue and then the company can potentially find themselves in hot water. I would shut right up in that situation as well.

The way he keeps saying 'people of colour' and talking about different classes doesn't lend to his cause either, nor going right out with a video camera as it really does look like he is filming an expose. If he was smart, he should have replied he was simply curious as to what these guys do and why the rules are different for this particular group. To elaborate any further than that, well, he dug his own pit there.

> If it is true that they have a separate building where the 'people of color' work segregated from the others, that is pretty outrageous.

But it's not true and the allegation is so obviously ridiculous that it marks OP as a moron.

When you say "people of color", does that term include people of Chinese descent? Japanese? Indian? You should find plenty of those in the main building, because those races are reasonably well represented among the class of "people who got a CS degree from Stanford (or similar)". Whereas if you look at any section of the business that doesn't require advanced tech degrees, you'll tend to see a different mix.

> It really does say something about the corporate culture there.

No, it really doesn't.

I'd be very surprised if the the building was filled with only 'people of color' but that's not really the point anyway. If you've bothered to actually do any research, you'll find that tons of 'people of color' who are brilliant engineers, lawyers and execs are everywhere in the company, including the top management. If more people of color apply for jobs that do not require high qualifications then that situation is a reflection of society, not some racist conspiracy a certain class of people.

its ridiculous to even entertain the "seperate building where people of color work". The Googleplex itself is filled with "non-Anglos".

Lets all be honest with what we're talking about, and in America what "people of color" really means (in most cases, and probably this one). It means black people. This guy noticed a lot of black people with yellow badges. The yellow badges had a high percentage of African Americans. Much higher than in the Googleplex proper (which probably tracks much closer to their % of the US population). And they (apparently) get less perks. This pushes all sorts of historical hot buttons in the American psyche.

What's left up to us to determine (assuming the veracity of the OP) is WHY this is. The most logical reason why is that the yellow badge jobs are low paying jobs, and the company that is contracting for these low paying jobs draws heavily from the African American community in the surrounding areas.

What is possibly interesting in all of this is the original issue of why low paying jobs potentially are filled by a much higher percentage of blacks than high paying jobs, which unfortunately has very little to do with Google, and a lot more to do with educational opportunities and the breakdown of the family structure in some African American communities, imo, which leads to a skewing of the potential job opportunities from urban American African Americans to be lower paying than anyone would like.

In CA you can be fired for no reason or any reason except: Age, Ancestry, Color, Creed, Disability, Genetics, Marital status , Nat’l Origin, Race, Religion, Sex, or Sexual Orientation. Every state has a slightly different subset of these factors. Here is a good summary:

http://www.cga.ct.gov/2003/olrdata/jud/rpt/2003-R-0641.htm

@gradstudent Most employment in the US is at-will; either party can terminate at any time without reason.

It may be technically at-will, but anyone can tell you that you have to be very careful when firing an employee.

Employment may be at will, but the courts are full of lawsuits against employers for wrongful termination/dismissal. If you've ever dealt with a large HR dept you know that one of their main jobs is to prevent lawsuits brought/caused by employees.

"Wrongful termination" is largely a myth. I know a lot of educated professionals who believe they have the right to a "fair" termination, but except for very specific instances, it isn't the case, and these threats go nowhere.

In most cases, unless there is a smoking gun, employers just sidestep the issue by targeting "layoffs", rather firing for cause.

The bigger issue HR deals with is sexual harassment or discrimination cases. And, even nuisance lawsuits can be expensive to deal with, and HR/clerical staff is a lot cheaper than lawyers.

I myself have witnessed the "layoff with a nice severance bonus". It actually seems to work out nicely for both parties.

I had a boss whose philosophy was "Four weeks severance is cheaper than hiring a HR manager", and it did seem to work out pretty well. The company still had to deal with a 'nuisance' lawsuit, but was something totally out of the blue.

You're absolutely correct about sexual harassment. Many years ago I had a temp job filing records in the legal dept. of the American Medical Association. They had a large filing room chock full of settlement documentation against doctors for sexual harassment.

To put it bluntly, he was the employee of a company that Google hired to do some work for them and he was bothering employees and then he become someone else's problem up the chain and it then become his direct employer's problem who value their contract and the employment of their other employees over the personal project and whims of someone who was hired to do some film work and not to conduct an investigation into the socio-economic makeup of the campus.

Now that he's no longer employed, he can go ahead with his pursuit without doing it under the advantage of his employment or his employer and I'm sure that if his insinuations are remotely true, then there are sure to be a bunch of people beating down his door for the opportunity to speak with him about their work at Google, under journalistic protection.

Mentioning the word "race", "class", or "gender" in a tech setting is a big no-no. They're huge hot-button words.

It scares people and they counter-attack reflexively, without deeply considering the arguments. That's been my experience from work, Reddit, and HN, in any case.

Notice that I'm not saying anything about the correctness of any particular position on a specific issue. It's that the specifics are barely able to be discussed because people are already in war mode.

I think you bring up a good point, and its also worth exploring why "race", "class" and "gender" are such hot button issues in tech. These are issues that many other very large companies (ex: I've worked for large financial corps in NYC that have vibrant & entrenched diversity programs) have dealt with in much more constructive ways.

So why do these topics blow up so big amongst the valley crowd?

For one thing, wrongful firing and wrongful failure-to-hire lawsuits are common and painful. No one wants to give the employment trolls more ammunition.

> They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy.

I totally agree with you. Why would any Übermensch in his right mind eat and drink in the same room as a yellow-badged Untermensch? That's heresy.

> You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed.

That was a huge mistake on his part.

> Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit

From whose perspective? What I mean is that it's possible for them to do something that is "absolutely correct" for their own self-preservation / convenience, but that is not correct from an ethical or societal stand-point.

I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. It just seems that you're angry that the OP wanted to investigate race / class issues.

OP sounded like a muckraking moron, a wanna-be Michael Moore. If you go around interviewing people with an agenda and you get to re-cut the footage however you like, it's possible to get it to seem to support whatever conclusion you want it to - that's why they wanted the tape back. If this guy wants to make a video "as a personal project" to "deal with race and class issues", whatever that means, he should do this entirely on his own, not as a part time project while employed at Google using any Google resources.

It's clear from his tone that OP has a point of view he wants to push - he wants to feel aggrieved at oppression, whether or not there is any. Given that OP was dumb enough to do things the way he did it's not clear he's smart enough to understand that he's being a moron. In this litigious culture, firing OP was a good idea and explaining to OP why he was being a moron wasn't necessarily a good idea. Besides, "some folks, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em."

Well now that we know about it, they just pulled a Barbara Streisand. You can be god damned sure someone's going to go sticking their nose into it now.

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That is incorrect. He was not given permission by his supervisor to record conversations with other employees.

He only asked for permission to videotape yellow-badges leaving the building. Nothing more. Unless someone wants to show me where I am missing a statement, I don't see any point at which he even claims that he was given permission to film and interview employees - much less about the issues he has taken it upon himself to "investigate".

That it was done on his own lunch break and supposedly using his own tape doesn't seem very relevant. My free time is my own, but my company wouldn't appreciate it if I was using my lunch time to bother my employer or one of their clients.

From the video/transcript: "Eventually I asked a superior on my team if I could borrow a camera to go out in the parking lot and videotape the yellow-badged workers leaving the 3.1459~ factory."

If he had asked permission to take a camera out and videotape interviews with people leaving the building so he could investigate the socio-economic aspects of Google employment of Google's ScanOps team, I think it is safe to say that his employer would have told him to STFU and get back to his actual work and there would have been no problems. He took advantage of the situation to push an issue his employers were not aware that he was pursuing which then put them and all of their other employees and their contract with Google in a tenuous position. Not necessarily because "ooh no, he's going to find out we have lots of people of a certain race working in that building", but most likely because they hired some guys to get a job done and not be a thorn in someone's side.

You're splitting hairs. He was given permission to film the yellow badge people. On his lunch break. Using Google equipment. The latter two are the reasons given for his termination and not, as you imply, because he was "bothering people" or not doing "actual work".

The whole affair seems to me a severe overreaction considering they could have just sat the guy down and talked the issue through.

Yeah, I came away with a couple things:

His tone and mentality feel a bit confrontational (and we're only hearing his perspective), and mentioning the skin color of various people involved seems anachronistic, but...

... at a smaller company, maybe the boss would have just sat down and had a talk with him "look, these people get good wages, and we're keeping the jobs in the US" or whatever. It doesn't sound like it was handled in a very "human" way, where someone directly above him who knows him was given the authority to straighten things out and make sure no further problems occurred.

Legal...security... all starts to sound like "lowest common denominator", and a good reason to work at a startup or small business rather than a large corporation.

(Edit: not that legal, security, etc... are not needed or don't do useful things... it's just inevitably a bit bureaucratic)

>>>His tone and mentality feel a bit confrontational

Likely that way now because he was fired. If it's true he was going to quit soon, and had he done this all the day before he was leaving to feed his curiosity, maybe the tone would be different?

Surely the context of the filming is important though. If he had gone into the bathroom and was filming people using the toilet then it wouldn't be enough that "He was given permission to film the yellow badge people. On his lunch break. Using Google equipment."

He recorded on videotape something uncomfortable, true, and potentially explosive about a multinational advertising firm, which was in a position to cause them bad PR, which is the only thing that could conceivably threaten their billions in revenue and 30% margins.

The only reason this is even in the general ballpark of surprising is that this particular multinational advertising firm has exceptionally good PR, and people want to believe that it would never do this. I mean, they've repeated "We're the good guys" tens of thousands of times, surely it must be true, right?

It's a wonderful company. They make cool products. If you get in their way, they will bury you.

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