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Comment by arolihas | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email. The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform. The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday. The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about. What a dystopia, Brazil would have been better off without Google definitely, if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things.

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all the instances they discussed highlight the contrast between what google presented itself as, vs what it actually was. i dont think this person is asking for sympathy, i think they hate google for trying to pretend its anything different than any other big profit seeking enterprise. sounds like you are well on your way to the hostility the author very succinctly describes

And yet, there are much more pernicious elements to dystopia Google has become and ways that it perpetuates them through the efforts of people just like this so that they can literally have a "free lunch". These are the type of complaints that minimize the actual failure of "don't be evil" as implemented by their very efforts. Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.

> Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.

The "minutiae" you so casually refer to are people. The OP understands that:

> The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

Actually, no. Anyone can be "creeped the Fuck out" about anything anywhere. It's their right. That's "just like uh, your opinion, man". One can be annoyed by business processes, vaguely offended by decor, or the stiffness of the uniforms at Dachau, and it's kind of irrelevant.

I'll try to be more clear. This reads like reality TV drama when there are bigger things going on. It misses the dark forest for the brown weeds.

To me the bigger point really IS the corporate dehumanization, but the details (other than the white gringos laughing about layoffs) distract from the deeper issues and sound more like gripes of a coddled coder than real criticism. When an individual is more concerned with their own personal jokes/disses than the work they're doing, you get folks at Enron joking about turning off "GrandMa Millie's" electricity in profitable, but unnecessary rolling blackouts.

They actually sold out.

Thank you :)

The “obnoxiously open about” part of your post says much about you. Your post would have been much better without that part.

Google was “obnoxiously open about” do no evil and the other stuff described in the blog post. It’s natural for people who bought into those lies to react accordingly. Nothing in the blog post suggests a belief that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things.

Yeah it says that I think she sounds obnoxious. Google's PR was also annoying. Considering she calls it a dystopia and her usage of Marxist terms I do think she believes that she has better ideas about how society should work. Saying nothing in the blog could suggest that is absurd.

It's easier to know how things "should not work", and that's a good thing. At least knowing what is not right you're allowed to do a quarter of a step in the right direction. Being an anarchist herself, I don't think she'd know how things should be, only how it should not be.

You didn’t say she sounds obnoxious. You said she is obnoxiously open about her identity. The phrasing you used says much about you.

Nothing in the post suggests that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things. The post suggests that there are things Google didn’t live up to in terms of what it claimed about itself. You should try to analyze things unemotionally. Perhaps then you wouldn’t make such obviously bad conclusions.

Well let me be clear, I think she sounds obnoxious in general too. What does that say about me?

I think pretty much every example given in this story is pretty typical and in line with the expectations a sane person should have when deciding to work at a large corporation. Clearly the author didn't like it, and I think it's fairly obvious that the author thinks Google should have done things differently. If that reads as too emotional on my end for you I am sorry but I can't help but be a human being.

You do have a capacity to misread and draw the wrong conclusion. The emotional part of your original response refers to the “obnoxiously open” about her identity statement and your ending sentence regarding polyamorous anarchists being better about things. Your biases interfered with your interpretation of what she wrote. Your original post would have been much better had you kept these parts out of your response.

All interpretations are biased, thanks for letting me know what you like and dislike about my post.

Yes all interpretations are biased. Not all elucidations expose those biases to the reader. You had the right amount of sarcasm for most of your post but then brought in references to gender identity that were not germain to your points. They were needless digs that detracted from your main points.

Yes, she did bring up the part about being asked for terms her community uses. She came across as irrational in this part. It’s best to just leave it alone or mention how she came across irrational without saying she is “obvious” about her identity. That line took away some of your credibility. At least to me. I could be wrong.

germane

Your comments tell me you're pretty obnoxious in general

Anarchists generally don't want to run things, they usually aim for that thing witj freedom, um, what's it called again... oh yes, democracy.

There's a quote, at least from the movie, where Zuckerberg calls people "dumb fucks." I honestly have to think the same about anyone that seriously bought into a corporation putting "do no evil" in a mission statement.

It is simply not possible to extract billions of dollars unless you have ascended above the idea of not fucking people over.

This is gonna sound like I disagree, but I don't. What is the amount of money that a company, or better yet, a person can earn before the explotive alarm goes off?

I bet if we really start hashing this out the number is real small, but you won't be able to talk about it because it'll make everyone in $750,000 houses feel bad.

It's one of the reasons I'm loathe to look for another "job" and instead pitch my services on HN or wherever. I cannot abide another job that pays well but makes it impossible to get a good night's sleep, regularly.

>The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about

>if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things

This comment comes off as highly reactionary.

Using "reactionary" as a boo light is not a substantive comment. If you think he's wrong, argue why rather than just going "ew, right wing".

> if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things

The straw man is obvious. There was no coherent argument to be made against a constructed absurdity.

She says she is a polyamorous anarchist...

That she is one, is fact. That she claimed she or people like her should be running things, is an imagined strawman.

Not really. She clearly thought that Google was doing things wrong and that her suggestions to make them better and correct them weren’t sufficiently heard.

Yeah, because Google at that time claimed to be the sort of company that would listen to complaints. Being upset with a company for not following their own publicly stated policies, e.g. the bait and switch of "20% time" plus "we're assigning you at least 40 hours work per week" is entirely reasonable and not an implied "and I should be running things".

Some people are able to point out problems without saying "and I am the solution".

Others are not capable of seeing a problem pointed out without assuming the speaker is holding themselves up as a paragon of what ought be.

Literally everyone can complain about problems. You can see in the post she has different ideas of how things should be done, how she should be working on different things, how she should be allowed to go to Japan, how they shouldn't use air purifiers, how people should act when a layoff is about to happen, how temp workers should be treated and on and on. I'm not even saying all of these ideas she had are all wrong or bad. But she clearly has solutions and a vision of how Google should operate.

It's only a "boo light" if you think that it's a bad thing.

Do you think that being reactionary is a bad thing?

The GP obviously used reactionary as a negative term to dismiss their arguments, and this line of thinking does not answer the arguments.

What arguments did they even make? All they did was make a snarky comment against the "vibe" of the article. That's why I called it "reactionary"

Was it against the vibe or against almost every anecdote she shared that isn’t really dystopic at all?

>If you think he's wrong, argue why rather than just going "ew, right wing".

I'd rather save my energy. Not every comment you see online is deserving of respect or a thoughtful response. It's clear they weren't willing to actually engage with the article and provide a meaningful comment, and I pointed that out before disengaging.

> It's clear they weren't willing to actually engage with the article and provide a meaningful comment, and I pointed that out before disengaging.

Irony is a lost artform.

Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things!

I believe what he likely meant (though not what he said), was that radical transparency shouldn’t be taken as a license to be an asshole.

I say that as a manager of narcissistic assholes who are always “brutally honest” and feel that their honesty excuses their brutality.

You can't have radical transparency without a blameless culture. Calling someone out in the open is in bad taste anywhere. It's also common sense. As Omar says, "If you come at the king, you best not miss." It's possible that the author really did just write an innocuous post criticizing recruiting practices, but I don't see why their the manager would single out the boss if that were the case.

The negative thing being described was the inability of 95% of the engineers to use the 20% time which was being described by the company as a general perk.

"The company is deceiving people and should reconsider messaging to reflect reality" is not a personal attack; even in a "blameless" culture, you are expected to note that the causal chain includes "Dave hit the wrong button, which should not have happened because we should have safeguards on the button and reviews to make sure we have safeguards on all the expensive/dangerous buttons." Sorry, Dave.

20% time was always for the high performers who can do 100% of their work in 80% of the time.

That's what she portrayed it as, but it doesn't pass the smell test. Why would a manager be yelled at for company wide statistics? This and all the other aggressive framing suggests to me that she's not a reliable narrator. If everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it’s time to check your shoes.

> Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email.

The horror of finding out that my employer lies to me and invades my basic human right to privacy, because they know they can only get what they want from me by manipulating me.

> The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform.

The tragedy of pointing out, that apparently only some deverse clean water, while others don't, and having it fall on deaf ears.

> The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday.

The inhumanity of devaluing people based on their misfortune in life, that didn't enable them to jump into a well paying tech job.

> The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about.

The absolute gall of my employer to berate me about my pride, my _identity_ they find so obnoxious, only to take advantage of it once it serves their purpose.

The water purifier thing was CARTOONISHLY evil, like you took it from the fucking Fallout Universe!!!!

> The horror of finding out that my employer lies to me and invades my basic human right to privacy

It’s a pretty well known fact that work communication isn’t private, for auditing purposes, business continuity etc. You can always use your personal email instead.

Be kind. Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

found one

you read the whole thing taking notes and ignored the main theme? that's some bootlicking good dedication. I'm impressed.

I didn't need to take notes. I didn't need to ignore the theme

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