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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Good thing I don’t make decisions :)

As someone else who was an SRE at Google years ago, you should indeed be very glad that we made hiring decisions based on merit and not personal politics. The SRE team I joined shortly after the IPO was dominated by libertarians and arch meritocrats who would have considered your attitude a clear firing offence. It was those sort of people who built the company.

But who knows? Maybe we should have done background checks to keep your type out. Certainly, Google has become a shadow of its former self now, filled with employees who seem to be phoning it in and spending all day searching for meaning in hating their own users instead of creating great new products.

Wouldn't have minded tbh, but yeah this is why I will never put myself in a position of making hiring decisions.

I don't like deciding on the fate of others. It's not my place to do that.

I've just seen teams go to shit when you have hateful people join it. So, I'm sharing my observations with that.

We've all seen that, but by far and away the most chaotic people at Google are the ones who think they're "fighting hate". How often do we read about some massive drama caused by activist employees trying to get each other fired over some perceived offense? Seems incredibly common these days. It never happened when I worked there, because we were primarily libertarian laissez-faire user-focused geeks. And yet there was also no problems with "hateful people".

Weird that, no? There was no drama or employee in-fighting, yet also no racism, sexism or homophobia. How ever did we manage that.

I mean when everyone is the same, you're not going to have a lot of discussions about this.

You also end up having awful products :)

Yes. Google's first decade was notorious for their terrible products. That's why nobody used anything made by Google before 2016.

Ye gods. What has become of that once great organization when this is the best response you can come up with?

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