Almost 100k Google employees are about to get a hard-fought $20 | Hacker News Reader

Almost 100k Google employees are about to get a hard-fought $20

sfgate.com

51 pointssowbug17 comments

The interesting ramifications from this are going to be at Apple. Their corporate secrecy is well known in the industry - employees aren't even supposed to tell outsiders what department they work in, never mind small potatoes like Google employees agreed to that they're getting $20 for.

Full disclosure, am googler, opinions are my own, etc etc

From the article it sounds like it's actually $42-$79 that most of us didn't have to fight particularly hard for

Congrats! looks like you hit the jackpot

That's almost a 0.01% annual bonus!

I think it's closer to 1%. If the average Googler drinks 500 lattes per year on campus, this seems to enable about 5 more off campus.

Unless you're Google SVP+, nobody will think you're speaking for Google...

Or even speaking on behalf of a significant part of Google employees. The hubris of HN Googlers is astounding, sometimes.

They're trying to avoid repurcussions from saying something their employer doesn't endorse

No reasonable person would think that Google, the company, would endorse a message like this:

> it's actually $42-$79 that most of us didn't have to fight particularly hard for

Mostly just trying to avoid an awkward gotcha moment where someone digs through my comment history, finds a reference to my employer, and accuses me of some sort of shilling.

I've seen it happen to other people and IMO it's better to go with the lame disclaimer.

There's quite a bit of news stories that start of with "Googlers <verb> ..." which is based on the comments of a couple employees.

Better to just play it safe.

> Full disclosure, am googler, opinions are my own, etc etc

> From the article it sounds like it's actually $42-$79 that most of us didn't have to fight particularly hard for

Lots of litigation most of us aren't even aware of. Early this year, I came across a Google class-action relating to "the inclusion of Google search queries in referrer headers":

https://www.refererheadersettlement.com/

I normally would have closed the tab but this time... why not.

"In the end, Google will pay out only $27 million, a drop in the bucket for such a titanic company."

The article compares that payout against the $20,000 million Alphabet profited just last quarter, a significant difference considering that the lawsuit took ~28 quarters to generate this outcome.

Does anyone think the confidentiality clauses were pivotal in generating that scale of profit? Would Google or Alphabet be significantly poorer if their employees had been suddenly unburdened of the confidentiality clauses back in 2016?

Put another way, is it possible these actions led to a >$27m increase in profits? That's a 0.1% increase for that quarter, so maybe not so far fetched. If so then it was financially advantageous to break the law.

20$, and more freedom? Unless they settled for keeping the illegal contracts for a free lunch.

The real cost to Google is not the payout, but the lawyer fees over 7 years.

This is a PAGA lawsuit. Person filing it will get quite rich.

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