My respect for Google has gone down significantly. I would not work for Facebook and Google even if I was offered a million dollars.

I predict that the Golden years of FB and Google are right now, they will slowly head into a plateau

I never really understood the Google worship. "Don't be evil" was an ingenious PR move which earned them an army of useful idiots willing to defend their every move, but never actually applied internally as far as I could tell. I think the reality was "see how much evil we can get society acclimated to".

As for Facebook, I think anyone who ever had a positive opinion of them should be evaluated by a psychiatrist.

Google is [was?] a geek company. You could get a good pay by being really good at coding. Most companies out there, the only way to get a high compensation is to play Games of Thrones on the management ladder. Actually doing any work is shunned upon.

From my experiences with friends who worked or work at Google, you could fit in just as well by being a mediocre programmer or graphic designer who really enjoyed kool-aid.

The terms "Googley" and "Googler" quickly became the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me thanks to these people.

> Actually doing any work is shunned upon.

You clearly don't understand what a manager does if you believe what they do isn't work.

There are indeed many definitions of work. I'm using "something produced or accomplished by effort, exertion, or exercise of skill", https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work.

But then again, managers are very skilled at power games, and the ultimate sign of power is taking credit for what your subordinates produced.

You're working for a bad manager. I appreciate the management at my company. They keep the lights on and take care of all the stuff I would never want to do and I can concentrate on development.

I know this is gonna be an unpopular opinion:

IMO both of them are already on a plateau. Google keeps abandoning products, Facebook keeps buying promising startups and quietly shuts them down (Google does it too). In Google this mostly happens due to some weird geekdom culture / peer pressure thing (coding hipster-ism?), and in Facebook it's more like "we want to conquer the world".

Both companies' strategies are not sustainable. The world is already catching up and I suspect that now it's time for suing the hell out of everybody who isn't sharing their vision while being even slightly competitive to them (opinion, not a fact, no evidence for that, don't kill me).

One only needs to follow recent HN for news about decentralization efforts and slightly increased amount of articles about self-hosting to understand that a good part of the tech world is getting fed up with Google and Facebook.

Google code can't age gracefully. They constantly replace key infrastructure in their monorepo, so either a project is important enough for engineers to keep it on the upgrade treadmill, or it needs to be shut down before it abruptly fails.

For internal projects that's absolutely the right approach. However, once you go around the net and see how people are laughing at Google for their "bazillion chat apps", then you understand that they use the same approach for their public projects, and that's just being inefficient on their part. And damages their brand and name.

Same, their recruiters email me every couple of months... Yeah no thanks. Id sooner work for MSFT these days. How the times has changed.

> I would not work for Facebook and Google even if I was offered a million dollars.

I would. Where do I sign up?

Back pay would be signicantly higher than $20m.

I don't get this - why would there be back payments? A contract is a contract right? Regardless of what's in other people's contracts... Perhaps it might mean new contracts might have to demand more but I guess on the other hand they could probably squeeze other areas that are overpaid?

Because there might have been a falsehood involved along the lines of, "this is what we normally pay for this kind of work" when that's not true at all.

A contract based on lies is fraud.

The information asymytry here is huge. It's worse than a sleazy car salesman showing a customer a doctored blue-book to inflate the price of an old junker.

Indeed but if google could demonstrate the contract was formed in good faith, as they probably could, then it would not be so.

Nah, if gender-based wage discrimination is 'proven' in court, the people who got shorted are going be awarded some multiple of the amount of wages that can be attributed, according to whatever calculation gets used to determine the existence or non-existence and magnitude of any such discrimination. (Not a lawyer, but I've listened to Lilly Ledbetter give a speech.)

Please tell me that your focus on "contracts" doesn't mean you are a sincere, "omg the right to contracts" libertarian?

> Please tell me that your focus on "contracts" doesn't mean you are a sincere, "omg the right to contracts" libertarian?

Can we please focus on rational arguments instead of insults and ad hominems? This country needs much more rational discussion (like the previous comments) and much less name-calling.

Educated adults should understand: just because it's written in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable. The viewpoint of "contracts uber alles" (which I hope nobody holds as anything other than a tactic to pursue their own self interest) may have cheerleaders, but is just incorrect as far as the legal system goes.

On the meta-discourse level: is it appropriate to make fun of a belief that one honestly believes is Bad if I don't say that person X holds that belief and hence is bad?

[1] I think it's probably less than fully appropriate. Person X might hold that belief (whether or not you say they do) and, if they do, then the mockery will be hurtful. It costs you nothing to politely explain, sans ridicule, why an idea is wrong rather than taking on an unnecessary risk of hurting someone's feelings.

Still, people should be less sensitive on the internet.

[2] Most educated adults, including me, are not lawyers and so do not know precisely when a contract is or is not enforceable, because the legal system is complex and arcane. This is distasteful to many because anyone who takes himself as an authority on what is just/unjust/moral/immoral is naturally liable to feel they should therefore be an authority on what is legal/illegal (since legality is intended to codify justice and morality or something like that). I suspect that many contracts-uber-alles-like sentiments (some of which I have entertained myself from time to time) stem from this unconscious yearning to know a priori what is legal or enforceable.

  In such cases, the sentiment is not rational, nor is it a tactic for the pursuit of self interest.

I find your opening statement quite insulting and condescending.

I'm sorry. My intent is not to insult, but to express a thought that only recently occurred to me: democratic societies need a basic legal "literacy" class in the education of every citizen as much as people who may need to save money for retirement or borrow for a home purchase need basic financial "literacy" classes.

In my public schooling, I had two year-long classes about the structure and function of the United States government. One was in middle school and one was in high school; I was not required to take any course on the subject as part of undergrad. Neither course taught me much more about courts than that the Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal and interprets the Constitutionality of laws.

Courts are complicated and laws and regulations are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but there are some fundamental, low-level principles that apply to proceedings across most (possibly all?) courts in the US. An educated citizenry in the US would, ideally, have at least some exposure to these fundamentals; these basic principles (which would include at least a little on contracts) are too important for the vast majority of the population (i.e. almost all non-lawyers) to not understand.

I told a lawyer friend about this idea and she strongly agreed. She said that her sister had taken an undergrad class which roughly fit my description-- "pre-pre-law" was how she described it. Her sister's evaluation of the course was that it's description of legal principles and their operation in courts helped explain a lot of the mechanics of how government, private institutions, and society function.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I now understand what you meant "Educated adults should understand" - as in, the educational systems should make way for this, rather than a swipe at my education or status as an adult ... such is the Internet. I'm quite well educated in the ways of the law however, to the point that I understand how flimsy it can be in certain areas, and your central thesis is far from having closed endpoints. In any case, I apologise in kind for what may have been a bit of a hissy-fit.

I think it's ok to infer someone holds and opinion (i.e. is libertarian, Stalinist, some other annoying internet political opinion) and to check out of the conversation if they do.

> you are a sincere, "omg the right to contracts" libertarian?

No .. I just understand that's how most Western legal jurisdictions work.

Hadn't considered the compensation claim aspect but surely it could be argued it's just an emergent pattern - not as a result of any policy decision?

Would be a very interesting test-case ...

So IANAL but "an emergent pattern" (which doesn't sound as bad as, e.g., internal memos to the effect of "let's pay the gurls less hahaha") may be more than enough for the government to categorize Google's behavior as gender-based wage discrimination.

If/when the government does that, I think 2 things happen:

1. the government announces some punitive action against Google; things they must do, things they must pay, etc;

2. the probability of every Jane, Jill, and Hillary who worked for Google winning a wage discrimination case skyrockets, at least some workers file such cases or enter negotiations to settle such discrimination.

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 means (pardon my rough summarization) that a worker can sue over discriminatory pay even if the discrimination / 'lost' wages occurred a while ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_o...

That's why I think it could be an interesting case ... if the data showed this to be the case I don't think it would be an open and shut case for those bringing complaint. If google were shown to not have taken steps to balance things then maybe. But on the other hand then if google demonstrated that they had and this pattern emerged anyway what then? I guess this is the kind of discussion google would want to avoid anyway but whatever the outcome could set an important legal precedent.

US workers generally don't work on "contracts", that's more of a European phrase. I'm guessing OP probably works in a European environment which probably has different rules around this.

You're correct!

But I was given to thinking property law and contract law were the fundaments of US law too?

Yes, but for example, in the U.S. you can get a lot more damages for certain legal concepts which I don't think are present or as well recognized in many European countries. For example, there's the idea of "pain and suffering." So if you're physically harmed by someone, you can claim costs for your hospital stay, damage to your property, missed work, etc, but you can also get an additional sum because of the "pain and suffering" you had to endure.

Oh you mean "damages"? Yes we have that too.