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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:58AM (2 children)
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)
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
We probably know each other. I taught too.