Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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This is pretty damning stuff. Here's the question I have: there are a ton of quotes in here from employees. In what context were these statements made? In depositions? I would guess not. I'd guess they were made in emails, Google docs and presentations that were a result of discovery (or a whistleblower I guess).

If so, I really want to find these people and ask them "what were you thinking?" Any big company has required training on communicating with care. So who are these people who seem to be so careless or oblivious to how those statements might be viewed when exposed? Leadership? Product? Engineering? ICs? Managers?

I'd be interested to know more about the allegation that Google declared itself the winner of an auction even if there were higher bids. If that has any substance, that's... a problem. I really wonder how such a thing could be implemented by engineers without someone raising eyebrows.

Oh and once again can we just kill the meme of Twitter threads? I mean seriously.

When I started a new job, one thing in orientation was "the 'e' in 'e-mail' stands for 'evidence'."

That's a good way of thinking about it. When I was a kid I remember hearing "imagine reading everything you write down to grandma" or "read on the morning news". I try to keep that in mind to this day.

Isn’t that a huge red flag as an employee for that to be in orientation? It would make me want to put everything in writing in case they did sketchy shit.

Yeah I got that feeling as well, but it's not the main reason that is presented in the training.

The main issue is that your words will be taken out of context and used against the company. If you say "we are going to dominate the market" instead of "our product is going to be really well received" that can be used as evidence of anticompetitive behavior. Nevermind the fact that you're an IC and not a lawyer qualified to comment on if you are truly dominating the market.

Ostensibly true but in practice this is a way of lawyers to say - don't put illegal things we do in writing.

Accountability is half the point, actually. For example, if there's a coworker you know promises verbally then later says that never happend or they don't remember, get it in email. Likewise if you want to be sure you're on the record of "I don't agree with this idea."

I'm not the company I work for. If they're doing unethical stuff, fuck them.

Never understood, why others are so keen to protect employer given company will throw under the bus any of us in a blink of an eye.

Tell that to James Robert Liang [1].

This isn't about protecting the company. It's about protecting yourself. You're opening yourself to be a witness in a suit (nobody wants that), thrown to the wolves by the company (who will attempt to portray you as a rogue actor) or criminal prosecution.

Now if the company is doing something unethical and it's why you're leaving, then sure write that down as long as you're not admitting personal culpability of any sort.

Likewise, if you feel like you're being set up to take the fall for something, a paper trail can help you.

But otherwise, if you're in an ethical grey area and decide you want to continue to earn an income to, you know, live then there are such things as "inside thoughts".

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/volkswagen-engineer-sentenced...

Pardon my French, but you're either a coward or bootlicker. There won't be any criminal prosecution for raising legitimate issues internally & putting those in writing, no matter what company lawyers tell you.

And if the most privileged and job-secure people on the planet can't take the risk of undermining their FAANG overlords for the sake of humanity, who will?

History suggests otherwise. The legal protections exist because they've been repeatedly proved necessary.

https://whistleblowersblog.org/opinion/a-history-of-corporat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood

The dropping of higher bids is the biggest revelation here. I would guess that higher bids would be dropped if they didn’t meet a max response time, maybe bids from Google were given a speed advantage to get under this max time.

Maybe inverting binary trees and real intelligence are not related?

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