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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked there 4 months last year, this is pretty accurate. I had a more negative experience because I got consigned to an obvious tarbaby team that was bleeding an engineer a month, but this seems more like the norm...

And yes, Google makes claim to everything you write while you're there unless they explicitly agree otherwise. They have set up a committee for making those decisions. This is probably a good thing IMO.

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Were you in Platforms or Cluster Management by any chance?

My misadventure with Google seems to have occurred because I was a mensch to my former employer and stayed a couple months longer to finish my project after Google recruited me out of the blue like gangbusters.

During this time several really intriguing projects in Google expressed interest in me but immediately lost said interest when I told them how long it would be between their phone call and my arrival at Google.

So when I got there, after having quit my former employer, I arrived unallocated and got thrown into the blind allocation pool. There were seemingly 3 choices for me but 2 of them were effectively withdrawn for different reasons almost immediately (and it was pretty bizarre the way this played out IMO). This left me with one choice - to work on a team that made zero use of any of the skills that attracted Google to me in the first place (and I got the standard silly speech about Google wanting generalists). But having quit my job for this I accepted and decided to dive in and give it my best. It didn't work out in a big way - it was a crappy project and I was blocked from transferring out and even taken aside and scolded for discretely talking to other teams.

Fortunately, I've been at enough dysfunctional startups to have become adept at the diving catch (I just never in a million years thought something like this would happen at Google). So after 4 months of this nonsense, and talking to some friends who had gone through similar experiences there in the past wherein it took them 2-3 years to climb out of the crater it made in their career, I left for greener pastures, taking a very slight cut in pay to go back to doing what I do best (which is insane because IMO Google really needs people who do what I do well but I digress).

> scolded for discretely talking to other teams.

discreetly

tpyo...

I don't know what you meant by tarbaby but that's a pretty offensive term. HN is not the place for that kind of speech.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I gather he meant the colloquial meaning in most places of the world which is something to the tune of "Something best avoided rather than confronted.". I believe it originates from a story or fable as such.

However I assume you meant he was using it in the more offensive slang usage for african-american. Chances are he might not even know it has the connotation as it's pretty specific to America.

Here is your story or fable as such:

(2004 retelling) http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/brer_rabbit_mee...

(1886 version) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Uncle_Remus:_His_Songs_and_His...

Nobody uses "tar baby" as a slur in America. It's like "niggardly" - ignorant people use an incorrect interpretation to try to shut down people they don't like.

That said, you'd have to be crazy to use "niggardly" now after the reaction it got whoever that was. If you use words that most of your audience doesn't know, what does it say about you? :)

I'm an American who grew up in the deep South. I've been exposed to just about every racially derogatory term you can think of, in every direction, and I've never heard "tarbaby" used as anything but "a trap to avoid."

I'm all for keeping the discourse civil, but the term was clearly used in a nonracial fashion. Please don't destroy perfectly useful words in an attempt to act offended on someone else's behalf.

I don't know what you meant by tarbaby

If you don't know what a word means, the first step is to check the dictionary! "tar baby: a difficult problem that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it".

Do not do an image search for "meconium".

If you do, however, you might get new insight into the term "tar baby" and why it has that definition.

I didn't know what varelse meant by tarbaby. Try googling "tarbaby team" and seeing what comes up.

That being said, I'm clearly in the wrong, sorry for having been a dick. I know the phrase tarbaby, I'd just never heard of a "tarbaby team" before and was thrown off.

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