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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 17 2021, @11:46PM   Printer-friendly

Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit:

Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were "glitches in wonderland." Then, there was "disillusionment."

Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet's two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also spent 11 of his 14 years at Google drawing comics about employees, quirks, culture, and, eventually, larger societal and ethical issues facing the company and its workers. Some of those topics included Google contracts with government agencies like ICE, making a search engine for China's government that complies with censorship laws, and more.

Chronicling those issues allowed Cornet to reflect on his place at Google, and prompted him to make a change. Cornet recently quit, and has taken a new job (at Twitter, a company with whom he says he has fewer ethical qualms). He is now the latest big tech employee — including employees at Facebook and Amazon — to publicly resign from their positions in protest of the company's overall behavior.

"As the years passed by there were more and more things to have ethical qualms about that the company was doing at a higher level," Cornet said. "I had to look at the bigger picture and think that maybe I would be better elsewhere."

[...] Unfortunately, Cornet found plenty of fodder for less-buoying Goomics. What infuriates him most — and provides frequent inspiration for his comics — is what he views as hypocrisy at the company.

"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."

That extended to both major news items at the executive level, and changes within the company that affected employees. Google made headlines in 2019 for banning political discussion on employee message boards. But Cornet described one of their internal mottos as "bring your whole self to work." He sees a gap between messaging the company uses to attract employees, and the needs of shareholders.


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  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:06AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:06AM (#1157417)

    " What infuriates him most — and provides frequent inspiration for his comics — is what he views as hypocrisy at the company."

    Not as much as the hypocrisy of him bitching about Google, then going to Twitter. He must be a Judeo-Globalist or something, thinking he can pilpul away his bullshit.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:58PM (#1157623)

      I suspected from his name that he was French, but the comics also have a strong influence from Spirou & Fantasio.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:24AM (7 children)

    by looorg (578) on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:24AM (#1157419)

    I read a few of the comics in the start and a few in the end. I don't think they are supposed to be funny for most people, or non-googlers. Cause they are not. Don't expect it to be Dilbert or XKCD levels of fun involved, or even insightful. That said it is more Dilbert then XKCD but it's not generalizable. I would gather that more or less the entire comic is a very insider work and "jokes" for the already initiated (ie google-employees).

    In some regards I think the graph depicting the comics would be funnier. In the early once it's all about how great things are at Google, combined with how people seems to be petty about their snacks, pay and perks. Sprinkled with how shit Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Facebook are. Then as time progress and we come towards the end of the comics it's all about how shit things have become, how the perks have gone away or that things are not like before, while continuing to take stabs at the competition that they have now become just like but still somehow want to feel morally superior towards.

    Ditching Google to join Twitter? Isn't it really just the same shit but a different name on the door? How long until disillusionment sets in again?

    BTW did anyone find a comic, or two, that was actually insightful or even remotely funny?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:05AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:05AM (#1157444)

      Some of them make good points bashing Google, but others are just lefty cringe. My favorite was the one preaching about what Alphabet's $120 billion cash on hand could do. Search & destroy every civilian firearm in the USA!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @03:46AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @03:46AM (#1157462)

        Yeah. Prosecuting a war on that scale would be a LOT more expensive. I shook my head at that one too.

        What, he thought it would just be a matter of logistics with drone-mounted metal detectors with pattern recognition or something like that?

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:55AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:55AM (#1157484)

          It's the cost of rewriting the Bill of Rights, then lobbying the government to hire Google mercenary squads.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:13AM (#1157521)

        If he had been a righty, he would have left Google nailed to a cross years ago.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:52AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:52AM (#1158130)

        what a stupid piece of shit. This fucking whore who works for google and twitter is going to judge my guns? Why is that Bolshevik Jews' bitch even in this country?

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:11AM

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:11AM (#1157445) Journal

      BTW did anyone find a comic, or two, that was actually insightful or even remotely funny?

      I thought this one [goomics.net] was a pretty good representation of software development and tech companies in general. Everything isn't brittle, fragile, and slow because of all this shit we've accumulated, and we can prove that by grafting some more shit on top to make it faster! Work harder, people, you're just doing something wrong and it's not our decisions at fault!

      This one about Google's icons [goomics.net] isn't anything new (seen similar jokes elsewhere) but it's interesting to see that people inside the company voiced similar concerns and complaints that were apparently ignored. The one about Google Reader [goomics.net] and this more general one [goomics.net] both have a similar vibe, and are basically more succinct versions of this rant about Google deprecation [medium.com] (with a side remark on Amazon's poor employee treatment). Though if you read through that whole thing, there's one part that says it better than anyone else has:

      Dear RECIPIENT,

      Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.

      We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.

      Please go fuck yourself,

      Google Cloud Platform

      There are probably other decent ones mixed in, but I haven't been through most of them yet. Seems like they have the same problem as xkcd, where sometimes there's a good one but most either make the mistake of describing the joke to you (thus ruining the joke) or thinking they can leave out an attempt at humour because people "in the know" will think it's funny by virtue of the joke pandering to them directly. Xkcd basically made its entire reputation off of the whole "you don't need a punchline if you cater to a niche enough audience because they'll be impressed you referenced them" gimmick and a lot of these have the same feel.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @06:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @06:10AM (#1157509)

      I looked at a couple and they struck me as some entitled guy complaining about his life at a CIA contractor. Yeah, we had plenty to complain about working at IBM back in the day too. But it's only going to resonate with the insiders. Outsiders can just get a small idea of their cock-ups.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:34AM (32 children)

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:34AM (#1157422)

    I keep hitting this over and over throughout my career, which started in the 90s.

    Here's a recent example. The client was a hospital, and the management is extremely toxic and unethical, and will lie and kill patients just to get a little ahead. When I came on the project, I noticed the whole team of ~20 tech people are unhappy and keep bitching about how it's a trainwreck. I thought weird, then was asked to take a couple of shortcuts during Isilon data migrations which had risk of causing outages for parts of the hospital, but would save a couple of days and get a green dot on a dashboard, making the manager look good.

    First time I got it in email form, second time I asked for it in writing over chat. Both times there were outages for about half the day to select hospital systems. In the status reports that went up the chain, the first time they declared glaring success and omitted the fact that a clinic was down for half the day, and we had about 15min of dataloss, due to snaps being 4x an hour. The second time it was blamed on the technical team - on the people who screamed "don't do this - it's likely to cause an outage."

    So the 3rd time the manager asked to run this shortcut procedure, which has now caused multiple outages, which were blamed on the tech team, something changed. They refused to provide it in writing this time. I refused to do the work w/o the request in writing. We parted ways - I don't want a client that's going to blame an outage on me, possibly kill someone, and leave avenues open to get me sued by the patients.

    Now here's the kicker: the reason for each time this was executed, was to save 2-3 days off the migration time. It's a 6 month project. The manager caused 12, yes 12 hospital systems to go down for half the day, to save a week off a 6 month project. Her boss, a director, supported this. HR found nothing wrong with the request being verbal-only.

    Here's how it applies to google. I've had 3 hospitals as customers in my career. At this hospital, we had many meetings, many documents, much training, about how patients come first, and no matter what we, as tech people do, we cannot affect patient care.

    The people who scream loudest to you about something are the ones doing it - it's like a tell. To figure out what scam Donald Dump was up to, all you ever had to do is listen to what he's accusing the libs of. A hospital screams patient care is important? They're willing to kill patients to get a 6 month project done a week early. A company keeps talking about ethics? They're going to involve you in a borderline illegal scam. Then there are companies that are kinda just here, and you do the work, and then the work is done. The ones not screaming about being proud of their ethics are the ones who don't have an issue with ethics.

    "Do No Evil." That's all you ever needed to know about Google. People who don't plan on doing evil - it's not even on their mind and you'll never hear from them about it. People who from day1 plan on doing bad shit are the ones who need to put it in their slogan. If you walked into a coffee shop and there was a sign "we do not have sex with children here" - you'd probably walk right back out.

    people's republic of china. the democratic republics of congo and north korea. the United states of america. NAtionalsoZIalismus. an orange pedo hunting down child abuse in government.

    covid is a hoax is the best example of this. it was killing more people in densely populated areas, which are all blue. so the gop did everything to get as many killed as they could, to finally get that popular vote for thi first time since 1988. they realized how terribly deadly the virus was, so they announced it was not a serious problem.

    of course, because of the shoesize iq, that backfired, and now the republicans are having their population reduced, because they won't wear masks or get vaccinated, but that' just what makes clowns clowns. point is - if a politician is screaming the virus is "nothing," it's serious. if they're screaming "save democracy" - they're trying to throw away your vote and be king. if a manager is screaming "ethics," they will kill their mother and steal your paycheck just to get ahead.

    the hospital was of course reported by me to osha.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:05AM (#1157434)

      +1

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:06AM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:06AM (#1157435)

      without agreeing or disagreeing with this rant, hospital management is generally complete clusterfuck - probably the worst kind of clients.

      • (Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:24AM (1 child)

        by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:24AM (#1157437)

        Only have experience with 3, only one was bad like this. At one the management was bad, as in didn't know how to manage - they'd move people around departments, for example moving an applications guy to networking and expecting them to admin the WAN after 2 weeks of training. But only one that was willing to till patients.

        Given that, hospitals, from a vendor point of view, are actually great. They buy solid proven top-tier tech, and that stuff results in less support cases escalated to presales, a higher margin for me, and a predictable purchasing cycle. Of course, I only did the gig so my wife and I could get the vaccine early and start living a normal life again. Once I got what I wanted, I wasn't going to put up with an dram of bs.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:56AM (4 children)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:56AM (#1157442) Journal

        You're not kidding. I'm actually interviewing for other jobs after having seen some truly nightmarish and evil management and HR decisions at the hospital I'm at now--and it's not even one of the big ones! I may very well go back to outpatient and just accept lower pay for a work environment that does make my conscience scream so hard and a job so easy I could do it in my sleep.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:31AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:31AM (#1157447)
          Unfortunately, the more responsibility is involved in a business, the more bs. You will find more bs in a hospital than, say, a donut shop or a lawn mowing business, because the stakes are so much higher.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:14AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:14AM (#1158131)

            oh yeah right. it's because they're just trying to do god's work. kind of like the catholic priests, huh?

            No, the reason it's so fucked up is because there's a lot of money involved and once people get paid way more than they are worth they start thinking it's because they are so fucking smart.

            no, you're just a dumb whore who did what they were told their whole life, could memorize your drug supplier's sales pitch or how to studiously not prevent diseases that are easily preventable, cut out any body part that causes trouble after years of abuse/neglect or poison people to death while making them rack up enormous debt to steal their life savings. You have no fucking integrity and you are not an authority figure, you dirty skanks.

        • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @06:57AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @06:57AM (#1157516)

          Azuma, you can remove the glass shards from my shattering ring-piece after I try to push a lightbulb in there - again - any time.

          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:27PM

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:27PM (#1157670) Journal

            Given that you constantly talk out your ass, I'd recommend shoving a bunch more light bulbs up there and then doing a hip-drop onto a concrete sidewalk from 2 stories up. It's a matter of public health (other peoples'). Make sure they're CFLs too; the libs don't want you to know that mercury cures Covid.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:45AM (1 child)

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:45AM (#1157451) Journal

      The people who scream loudest to you about something are the ones doing it - it's like a tell.

      There's a term for it: projection [wikipedia.org]. People tend to assume everyone thinks like them, so the shitty things they do, did, or would do are obviously the shitty things everyone else thinks is acceptable. Some people feel guilty about those thoughts and go to extreme lengths to convince everyone it's other people not them, while others feel no such thing but assume everyone else is the same way and thus need to defend against it.

      You see it a lot with people in certain types of work that tend to self-select for certain unfavourable behaviours. For example, people that are successful in sales and business tend to be slimy motherfuckers that would backstab a family member for a profit, assume everyone else is the same way, and conduct business accordingly while desperately attempting to paint themselves as different. They'll use any excuse to not pay someone what's owed, so they assume everyone else will do the same and it turns into a twisted game of trying to fuck over the other person, all while pretending they're the upstanding good guy being wronged.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:30PM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:30PM (#1157671) Journal

        That's what the P in GOP stands for and has done since, oh, probably Reagan if not Nixon.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @03:16AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @03:16AM (#1157453)

      See, you can actually manage to not be a dickhead. There, a mod up from me for this one.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Retian on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:34AM (4 children)

        by Retian (4977) on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:34AM (#1157474)

        I came here to comment something along those lines. It's disappointing to see him shitpost so often knowing he's capable of so much more.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:54AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:54AM (#1157483)

          It's an interesting story, but given his posting history I'd take it with a rather large grain of salt.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:05AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:05AM (#1157518)

            Yes, every other post is total garbage made up stories.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @12:14AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @12:14AM (#1157739)

            A good story teller, tho'.

        • (Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:47AM

          by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:47AM (#1157523)
          He does this once in a while so he can keep shitposting at +2.
          --
          🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:00AM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:00AM (#1157466)

      Depending on the migration involved, Isilon should be completely rock-solid. I'm assuming here that you're talking about migrating data from one cluster to another, and the shortcut involved not following every step in the process.

      They teach that stuff for a reason.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:02AM (5 children)

        by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:02AM (#1157487)

        What exactly is it that they teach? A job teaches you that not every migration is going to be straight synciq that you'll batch w/ superna.

        we had 2 source isilons, AD permissions for NTFS were a mess, with recursion in the groups and people who left, they needed to change the folder structure and the DFS conventions, and break out individual shares into several. we also wanted to decomm some subfolders in shares that haven't been used in a few years. This means a lot of scripts, and the migration had to use robocopy and rsync.

        The shortcut involved, if you're interested, is pulling the plug on live systems, then figuring out what crashed. Normally, I'd run insightiq and isi openfiles for a while, then isi smb sessions, and figure out what app or user used what folder, then shut that shit down and kick those users off before taking the source share down and doing a final sync.

        This takes time to track down and collect data to do the failover gracefully. It saves a couple of days to just kill any open files at the time of failover and see who complains when their application crashes.

        No, I'm not kidding. And this is at a hospital, where an application crashing might be showing someone's xray during a surgery. Again, I am not kidding. There's a reason I reported them to osha, and asked to put the request in writing (which they refused to do).

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:58AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:58AM (#1157506)

          OSHA? I'd also have reported them to the FDA, and the AMA as well, and also quietly pass the word that I know something to a few important malpractice attorneys. Scream tests are OK when you're running a match-3 mobile game. They're not OK when you're dealing with a 24/7 survival-critical system.

          And they teach, depending on the course you're taking, quite a lot about the process including running stuff like InsightIQ to track down usage before cutting things over. They have, or used to have advanced admin courses that spent all kinds of time on this stuff, although they may have broken it out into domain-specific courses by now. Their internal training for their troubleshooters is even more detailed.

          But nowhere at all is a scream test the plan.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @10:18AM (1 child)

            by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @10:18AM (#1157530)

            Yes, OSHA. Yes, I talked to several attorneys first. Why just OSHA, and why is the reality more like "there's nothing you can do here?" Because "24/7 survival-critical system" is not provably true. What you have is hundreds of applications and thousands of users, and you don't really know wtf is running on that NAS. What you can do is look at the IP or service account that's using a file, and track it back to the application or user. You don't know what systems are critical or not, and that's the risk, and why I refused to do it w/o it in writing. Yes, what they did, which is normal for this place apparently, is not ok, at all. All you can really do is leave, and five of us did leave. I didn't leave because of ethics - I just won't be exposed to liability, because the management has already lied about the facts of the previous outages, and them not putting it in writing the 3rd time means they're going to lie again and blame it on the tech staff, and don't want to risk them getting sued, arrested, or the fallout. Thing is, they're just going to keep bringing new people in until they find their chump. You, as a person, can't change that. All you can do is file the osha report, and maybe after a hundred reports from different people, they'll close down the hospital and it'll open up under a different name.

            >depending on the course you're taking
            I teach them, I don't take them. I've been doing this for 22 years, and was EMC-badged for half of that, including presenting at EMCworld in 2002 and again a few years later. I am the vendor, although at VARs these days.

            >Their internal training for their troubleshooters
            that's me. mainly I focus on the symmetrix, nas is secondary.

            You don't need courses for this. to find files that were accessed you just run something like "find /ifs -atime" or mtime, or whatever you're interested in, then find the shares to decomm. insightiq is useful for share reporting, but it doesn't go every subdirectory deep. What I ended up doing was enable auditing, spinning up a CEPA, and hooking up the isi to their Varonis server. after a filewalk, you got all you need - which also helped identify where their AD groups and roles were screwed up.

            There's nothing advanced here that needs training or troubleshooting courses. the isi is a bsd box, you can run whatever zsh scripts you want to figure out whatever you need on the cli, and those scripts are just a couple of long lines. The reason this takes a couple of days is you have 100mil files. you do an openfiles list, you do a connections list, run it in a loop for a few days, and you got all the info. of course, doing that, as well as running a find on /ifs takes over your l3 cache, so you either have to do metadata only SSD on a hybrid array (performance hit for writes), or take over the l3 cache (performance hit for reads). In a mixed environment you can't really do that, so you have to run it off-peak, and nice the PID of your script to lower priority, as well as put in sleep cycles in each loop so it doesn't kick all apps out of the l3.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:36PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:36PM (#1157616)

              We probably know each other. I taught too.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:20PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:20PM (#1157549)

          And this is at a hospital, where an application crashing might be showing someone's xray during a surgery.

          Yes, but these systems should already not crash since network could be interrupted even if you don't do anything.

          • (Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:17PM

            by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:17PM (#1157563)

            Umm, no, that's not how that works, at all, anywhere, for anything besides the home laptop you're on. A network could be interrupted, but the compute is a 3x active/active cluster that's connected to several networks, and the array is 3x 6+2 RAIN clusters, you can have several networks, storage nodes, or compute nodes fail, and it stays up. And if over 2 array nodes, or 2 compute nodes, or 2 networks fail, then you're down. Most critical applications are over engineered below the application layer.

            Why you ask? Because there are too many edge cases, and too much unexpected behavior and too many layers. You don't want that in a medical application. Something goes wrong, it is much safer to completely bounce it than trying to gracefully handle an error. It's better to be offline than to show or calculate the wrong thing.

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:46AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:46AM (#1157501)

      if the vaccines are so safe, why did the manufacturers demand (and get) total legal immunity from any legal liability?

      money talks and bullshit walks.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:07AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:07AM (#1157519)

        Because Joe Biden want to eat babies and institute a radical feminist agenda - happy now?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:42AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:42AM (#1158138)

          He's a race traitor of the highest order, and complete tool of the International TalmudicJew.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @01:15AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @01:15AM (#1157753)

        OK, I'm assuming that you're asking a genuine question, and I'll try to give you a meaningful response.

        Let's say you're in the ... oh, I don't know. Let's say the wine business. You make big ol' barrels of wine, day in and day out, turning grapes into pain-go-bye-bye-juice. But there's a process; you don't just stomp them into barrels and then pour and serve a year later. No, you check your contaminants, you clean your equipment, you use proven yeast, you get the result lab-tested, all that good stuff.

        That's our steady state. You're a wine maker.

        Then one fine day a harried-looking guy comes from the government saying that they need boatloads of mead to quell a viking invasion, and they need it yesterday, so pleasepleasePLEASE make a fuckton of mead, and they'll buy it all, guaranteed.

        Viking invasion? That sounds serious! You're down to help, but there's a little hitch: you haven't done mead before. You can do a wicked chenin blanc, but mead is a little outside your experience, you'll need to (at least) run a test batch, and check that things will work properly. In fact, you may need to check whether there are any special flavour elements these viking badasses will need to really quell their appetite for slaughter, not to mention rape and slave-taking.

        The government guy says No time for that! Do it! Do all the things, just please do it now! They'll give it a quick taste to check and then serve!

        You say OK, but if you're in such a hurry, and people start feasting with it and getting sick, you'd be on the hook. That's part of this whole winery thing, and you don't want to poison people. You understand viking raids are pretty bad, so maybe this is worth the risk, but before you put so much as an ounce of honey in a barrel you want indemnity because ... well, risk.

        The government dude says sure. If that's what it'll take, you got it. Immunity. We all trust that we're all working in good faith to fix a huge problem, so you're doing your best.

        You make the mead, the vikings are pacified, but a few people get sick or die in vehicle accidents. Outrage! How dare you! You exploitative monster! How could you demand immunity? You knew it was poison! How ... how DARE you?

        ... and here we are.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @06:58AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @06:58AM (#1157803)

          How ... how DARE you?

          St Greta... is that you?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @12:16PM (#1157547)

      My company talks about how they will support any charity that does no violence and definitely be apolitical. If any charity is political or involved in violence, they will not support it. On the main page, they boast how they are doing business with military.

      Like the pedophiles in the church - it's all about the children. Yes, just opposite of what they preach.

      Hypocrites. Hate them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:10PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:10PM (#1157560)

      This is the problem with modern management, a pin headed obsession with nonsensical metrics, sterile dashboards, and gibberish "AI". No contact at all with the end users or business groups. Their resumes will read "brought in a project early and under budget, saving company a bajillionty dollars", with no mention of the people they killed.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:46PM

        by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:46PM (#1157568)

        I have an easier explanation. It's just a dumb powertrip. They stall projects any time they want as long as they want, just to make a point. When I pushed back and said "I need it in writing," this manager cancelled the next two batches of migrations, delayed the project by about 3 weeks, and reported it as "we're having personnel issues causing the delay."

        lower and middle management, or low level directors, are fragile snowflakes. They try to run things like they're in charge of 16yo pot smoking walmart cashiers. But this doesn't stop at middle management. Just look at the orange clown when he was in office. Or the president of Brazil, who would go on live TV and rebut troll posts on his twitter.

        The reason most management is bad is the same reason all the cops are bad. What person with actual skills would take that job? Oh, we'd take the CTO job. But not the middle management job you need to get to that c-level.

        The dashboards and "metrics" and servicenow - the reason they make it all about that, is that it's all they can do. When I was 16, I had a job at bed bath and beyond, for weed money. I was always a couple of minutes late. But I did good honest manual labor. I got fired of course, by the manager who did nothing but talk about nothing. I need to restock the shelves bitch, why is there an hour-long pre-work meeting daily about how I need to stock the shelves? Well, being 2 minutes late to that meeting made me a bad worker. All the manager can do is come in exactly on time, so she makes that the most important metric.

        All the manager at the hospital can do is create a process where to provision a disk to a server (5 minutes of work) takes a ticket with a task, subtasks for the OS guys and the storage guys, and a time entry for the 5 minutes of work, referencing those tickets. So the 5min task for 2 people takes half an hour of servicenow for two people. But she's good at that "process" and holds an hour-long meeting, at 8am, daily, about the process, and shows us all here graphs. We spent 10 hours provisioning storage this week, let's get that down to 8 next week and improve "process." Strangely, we spent 15 more hours on the process around those 10 hours.

        There are exceptions of course. I've had several bosses who were absolutely amazing. Unsurprisingly, none of them lasted long. Management used to be people who climbed up the ladder, did the work themselves, and then managed people who do the work. Now, the most toxic dumb assholes who can't pull learning an actual skill go directly for the MBA. I truly believe that's the issue.

        My wife has an MBA. She didn't go into management, she instead started teaching cantonese, mandarin, and japanese to little kids with rich parents. Of course, the pandemic killed that and she's now an assistant manager. I'm 99% sure she's going to quit or get fired before the summer is over.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:13AM (2 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:13AM (#1157520)

    I've seen a few people like him in the various companies I worked for. Overwhelmingly, those people put a lot of emphasis on their originality in the company. But the one thing that stood out is that they didn't work very well or very hard. Not saying that's the case with this guy particularly - I supposed if he managed to hold a job at the big G for a decade and a half, he must at least have been passable enough - but in my experience if I was Google, I wouldn't cry over his resignation.

    Also, the respect I had for him when I read he left Google over ethical qualms evaporated the next minute when he stated he had fewer qualms working for Twitter. His joining Twitter makes the ethics bit seem like an excuse to leave Google on his own terms quite frankly.

    • (Score: 2) by dwilson on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:31PM

      by dwilson (2599) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:31PM (#1157613) Journal

      Also, the respect I had for him when I read he left Google over ethical qualms evaporated the next minute when he stated he had fewer qualms working for Twitter. His joining Twitter makes the ethics bit seem like an excuse to leave Google on his own terms quite frankly.

      I didn't read it that way at all. Standing outside both companies with no personal knowledge of their inner-workings, I read it more as "As bad as we all 'know' Twitter to be, Google, in a sneaky, behind the scenes sort of way, is evidently much worse than we ever imagined".

      When you see something that's such an obvious anomaly and doesn't 'click' with your view of the world (someone leaving a 'bad' company citing ethical concerns, to join a 'known-bad' company that obviously has ethical concerns), you just have to pause and ask yourself, "What do I think I know that just ain't so?"

      --
      - D
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:11PM (#1157627)

      Also, the respect I had for him when I read he left Google over ethical qualms evaporated the next minute when he stated he had fewer qualms working for Twitter. His joining Twitter makes the ethics bit seem like an excuse to leave Google on his own terms quite frankly.

      Eh, I don't really care about this individual's ethics stance since I never had put him on a pedestal to begin with. Fact is, he worked for Google for 15 years as a serf, and he got another serf's job at Twatter. That's a long time for being at one company in the Bay Area. Wonder if he experienced the pre-IPO Google culture. Betting that most of his gen-Z colleagues would have thought of him as a crotchety old man if they didn't know he drew comics.

      I don't know what Twatter culture is like, but continuing this comic there may get the people in the military uniforms to order him to stop or face the sack.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @09:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @09:48AM (#1157526)

    Martyb's childish stick drawings of what really goes on at SoylentNews HQ.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Socrastotle on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:27PM (1 child)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:27PM (#1157566) Journal

    "That extended to both major news items at the executive level, and changes within the company that affected employees. Google made headlines in 2019 for banning political discussion on employee message boards. But Cornet described one of their internal mottos as "bring your whole self to work." He sees a gap between messaging the company uses to attract employees, and the needs of shareholders."

    It's somewhat tiresome seeing rhetoric like this which generally implies all bad decisions are caused by some outsiders of companies driven only by profit, enrichment, and so on. In some cases that is certainly true, but in many it is not. And this is one of those cases.

    Google has tiered stock. The stock people buy on the market has 1/10th the voting power of the primarily insider owned class B stock. As a result of this arrangement, Page owns 25.9% [businessinsider.com] of the voting power at Google, and Brin owns 25.1%. With a majority of voting power, the desires and interests of outside shareholders are irrelevant. Google (and Alphabet) is, for all intents and purposes, a private company owned by Brin and Page.

    The same is also true of companies like Facebook except there Zuckerberg alone controls a majority share. That made the whole 'shareholder vote to oust Zuckerberg as chairman' was mostly just a largescale demonstration of ignorance and absurdity. Literally 100% of shareholders could vote to oust Zuckerberg, and he could laugh it off.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @03:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @03:38PM (#1158287)

      good comment, thanks

  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:33PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:33PM (#1157673) Journal

    Management is nature's way of turning good coffee into bad decisions. We need a B Ark like yesterday.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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