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Comment by SCAQTony | Hacker News Reader

Her premise smells fishy:

“one Sunday” at her previous company, she and some coworkers “were bored” and decided to put their salaries in a spreadsheet. As it spread through the company, thousands of employees added their salaries and it allegedly revealed “not great things regarding pay. ...”

I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. If the salaries are accurate within that spreadsheet then I suspect something more sinister took place such as a blatant theft from HR.

Friendships are lost over the subject of pay and I doubt that Google would be unaware of a spreadsheet such as hers circulating throughout the company reaching thousands of people without Google figuring it out. (I am also surprised still still has a job after bragging about this.)

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Interesting things spread incredibly quickly through Google. I know of some petitions that had 1000+ signatures within a few hours after being posted. Everybody is on email constantly, and there are numerous other backchannels that can reach the whole company within a day.

Confirming this.

Believe it or not, it's illegal for companies in the US to prevent employees from discussing their salaries.

True statements you'll never hear from HR...

Some states are "at will" meaning they can fire you with no cause.

"No cause" does not mean "any cause". They can't fire you in retaliation. They can't fire you for being male/female. They can't fire you for being black/white/brown/pink/etc.

How do you distinguish "illegal reasons" from "bullshit reasons"? Genuinely curious.

IF you send an email and ask "Why was I fired"

If they reply "Because you are brown"

Instant lawsuit, lots of money.

If they reply "For bad work perf", and it was really for poor work perf, they are fine.

If they reply "For bad work perf", and it really was because you were brown, and you prove it, lawsuit. It is obviously hard to prove. One way may be to show "Look I had 12 performance reviews, on all 12 I got perfect. In fact I did better on my perf reviews than people who are green, so obviously there is a bias for green people and against brown people.

Which as you see, the entire argument hinges around the exact reason you are fired. This is why when people are fired, it is safer from a legal standpoint to not give a reason. Even though that kind of sucks for self development. If you really were fired for being a jerk to coworkers... it may be nice to know that, so you can work on it at your next job.

So "no cause" works out to "any cause, as long as you say no cause and didn't leave obvious signs to the contrary"

Yes, I believe so. "The standard line for an "at will" firing goes like this: "We no longer need your services at this time."

Yup. It's also why references have gone from "so and so was an excellent/average/terrible worker" to "So and so worked here from xx/yy/zzzz to xx/yy/zzzz".

The ones that there are laws against are illegal. The rest are on the not bullshit to bullshit spectrum.

The best current method is to file a lawsuit.

Usually, the answer is that companies would rather offer severance or settle than go into discovery if they fire someone for legal, bullshit reasons.

Companies don't want their reasons for firing people in the public. If they said they fired her for performance, she could subpoena not only her own performance history (Google has secret "calibration scores" that are not shared with the employee) but the ratings of others in the company and any HR actions taken toward them-- in order to find out if people were evaluated consistently.

No company wants its HR data in discovery, because almost every company has dirt. They'll usually settle.

Preventing discussion may be illegal. Yet:

- It is not required for a company to facilitate it.

- It is not a priori allowed to use company resources to discuss your salary.

- As a company you do not have to reward that unprofessional and irresponsible behavior.

What this Google employee did was obviously toxic for the culture. As a manager, deciding who gets the raise and who doesn't is already a hard decision (as Ben Horowitz says: Both actions will make some people feel left out), without your employees trying to undermine that.

I do not think this had anything to do with her being a female. If a male had set up an internal mailing list questionnaire he would have probably found himself in the exact same situation (people higher up do not like it when you are a trouble maker). How she leaves it ambiguous and yet hints at pay inequality for women at Google is lacking class and tact.

Google wants more equality. All things equal they hire minorities. If HR analysts find statistically significant inequality I doubt they would ignore that.

You don't use internal mailing lists to promote your religion, just like you should not use internal mailing lists to promote thorny political/social issues.

Did you actually read the tweets? According to her, people above her at Google knew about it, but they couldn't really do much about it.

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