Alphabet is still a great company, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need checks and balances from outside.
Have you ever been in a union workplace?
There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
The bathroom situation stank (pun not intended), but frankly there are other hills to die on.
Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front.
What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of.
Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support).
That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on the floor at all.
One solution would be to just build more sitting toilets instead of the standing ones, as those ones weren't used as much. But on 1 floor there were 2 bathrooms for women and 2 for men, so yes, repurposing some would have helped.
"If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue"
To make this into a gender issue, you have to argue google can't afford toilets
Google tear down meeting rooms to have more space for cranking more people in the same office.
Luckily I was working there in the good old days mostly.
Profits aside, we do not consider stopping cramming people in an office, or hiring in a more agfordable location? What happened to common sence and self respect? This the literally shittiest, most submissive argument I've come across. If it weren't a civilised forum, i would've colled it bootlicking
In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet.
The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch.
Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.
Personally I find it more helpful to adjust my biological clock to avoid doing my business at the same time as everyone else.
why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.
It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.
Didn't Google get busted fixing wages along with other tech companies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
If Google (perish the thought) decided to pull some shady reviewing stunts and make your work life so intolerable that you felt your only option was to force the issue and threaten to resign - being part of a union could have helped with that.
HR is a bunch of people who represent the company's interests in negotiations and transactions. Unions are the same thing for employees.
We've been told, repeatedly, that unions are socialist organisations that want to destroy capitalisim and bankrupt employers. This isn't true.
In my opinion, this is very different from a typical employee "talking bad" about their employer.
"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
It's an extensively sensitive subject and particularly in a field with such vague and 'subject to interpretation' results, the sponsor corp. is going to want to have a look. Considerably more so if the research is about the institution itself.
There was a specific case recently where the researcher criticized Google for something, but Google asked the researcher to include truthful information about the changes the company has already made to the system in question wherein it's been improved etc. This is a perfectly fair request by the sponsor, I think.
It's also naive for us to consider that what people chose to research, how they approach it, the results they are looking for isn't somehow altered by the researchers own biases. In fact, it's hugely arrogant for researchers to believe that they have some special access to the truth in this regard.
I'm not sure what the rest of this comment is alluding to... The posted article from Reuters doesn't mention race and gender, the article implies these researchers focus on AI and ML.
In regards to the "specific case", I would have to guess at what that case might be. Were I to guess, it seems like I'd be guessing wrong as this assertion seems to lack grounding in fact.
Naive or not, peer review is in place and part of it's purpose is to keep the biases of researchers in place. History has proven that this is far from infallible, but it's the process we have today and the process Google agreed to when it hired these researchers.
I cannot entertain the idea that they signed up with Google believing truly they could have full scholastic freedom. I am pretty sure it is even covered in elementary ethics classes that such a scenario is itself questionable.
But if your job is 'AI Research' and you publish a piece about how much electricity Google uses to 'train models' ... well, you can expect scrutiny.
In this case, the researcher was simply asked to hold the paper until more information was included about the fact that Google has actually improved certain paramaters quite a lot since the time the data was referenced in the report.
This is extremely fair from Google.
If the research was purely concerning some AI results, even how they could be unjust - fine. But as soon as your research specifically includes the sponsor, then it's perfectly fair for the sponsor to add more information.
It's not censorship, in that case, it's frankly the opposite.
The 'miscommunication' here is a kind of naive thinking by researchers who probably have never had normal jobs, who have never worn a 'company hat' and may not have any internalized understanding for communications.
For many researchers - money comes from magical taxpayer funds, and the 'Uni Model' is the only model they understand and some might think that's how the world ought to be.
If Google was giving people cancer due to the tar in their products, the researchers were discovering this - and Google was trying to suppress this, then you'd have a serious problem.
This is not Marlborough/Cargill/Exxon, it's Google and it's an entirely different situation.
The 'hammers' used by the social justice fronts from the 1960s just don't work anymore, because we have made progress and nothing is obvious.
To those it pays, yes...