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Comment by quelltext | Hacker News Reader

I'm by no means important in my org but when something appears like a shitty idea I will raise that (like other ICs around me) and more often than not it works out fine. I'll agree to give something a shot but if it doesn't work it doesn't work and my managers so far have all realized that a bit into the trial period.

Reading comments like yours, I guess I should value my work environment more.

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It's not about speaking up on a shitty idea, it's about not playing the game on a tool used to measure employee performance. That's a big difference.

Especially because here we're talking about someone whose performance and contributions were very clear to everyone. Otherwise, he might have been seen like an underperformer by managers.

If you want to see an extrema of people being afraid to speak up, just look at the Gemini image examples in a company that in theory encourages people to speak up. There are always topics that are exceptions.

If you're OOTL on Google Gemini ML-based content creator then https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-image-generation-... is a pretty good summary.

Ostensibly it appeared to be tuned to be racist.

Maybe Google encourages people to speak up but also has a culture of racism?

I think you are very fortunate then. The number of times I have raised concerns and my warnings have been ignored ... Even when I had direct past learning or experience with the thing they want to do, I can no longer change their mind.

The question is really more do they actually act on the feedback on a regular basis?

Yeah, honestly over nearly 20 years of working in this industry, I’m not sure that I’ve ever worked anywhere where there’d be significant management pushback on something like this. Now, granted, I’ve mostly worked in small companies, and one rather selective largish companies; maybe things really are much worse in the truly huge companies.

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