> Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people
> still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes
> from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and
> drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary
> to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos).
However, I doubt this is only because you irritated senior executives by sending them rambling manifestos about the inherent superiority of your self-designed card game. Although that may have been the origin of your legend, it was not truly cemented until you cross-posted them to a company-wide mailing list and then engaged in a flamewar against all comers.
After your resignation, some of us compared notes on who had received the most disproportionate response to criticism. I was sure that being called a child molester in reply to pointing out your lack of credible accomplishment would win me first, but sadly I did not even place in the top three.
I was an intern during this bullshit. To anyone not "in the know" on this: there's nothing to know. There was a big pointless flame war on an internal listserv at Google over some objections that Michael had to how Google runs certain things. Googlers disagreed. I'll say that I disagreed with Michael, but the people on the other side are almost as responsible for letting themselves be sucked into such a stupid flame war.
There is nothing interesting here. This is a Google soap opera. The rest of HN can comfortably go on with their lives without worrying.
For opinions on the other hand reputation matters a lot. You can't seriously give credibility to somebody with an obvious ax to grind, with an agenda and with a certain history. Even if that opinion seems valid, you may just be suffering from confirmation bias and at the very least you should seek out that confirmation from people you can trust.
There's a lot of good, and there's some bad, to Google. Whenever I post honestly about the place, there are 3 or 4 people who consistently come out for a fight. I don't mind that they exist and do what they do, because it's free entertainment for me, but regarding "people you can trust"... anyone who trusts them over me is too stupid to live. Trust me or trust none of us.
I am not claiming to be unbiased, and my experience at Google is rather limited. (I was there in what I've been told were the worst 6 months for the company's culture.) However, I learned an incredible amount in that time (more than most people learn in 10 years) about what happens to make good companies go bad.
It's amazing to me how, if I write a post that's 90% pro-Google and 10% critical, people who I have never met come out of the woodwork to get their flamewar on. I think they enjoy it. I don't. I'm over that stuff and I find it tedious.
Protip: they're not laughing "with you" when you compare your managers to Osama bin Laden.
Saboteur is a better metaphor for the execs who came up with this shit than terrorist. They are maliciously destroying a company for amusement, but they're doing it from the inside. It's sabotage, not terrorism.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the people who came up with the calibration-score and transfer-block nonsense at Google getting "a boot in [their] ass, it's the American way". Anyone who thinks it's morally acceptable to make political-success reviews part of the transfer packet deserves no less.
It'd be one thing if he never spoke about Google again and people still gave him shit for it, but Michael likes to sneak in bits about his drama into comments that have nothing to do with his drama, as he has done here. I've half suspected for months that Michael is, as he even says here, just trolling Google employees into responding.
Either way, the entire thing just reflects negatively upon him. That's the sort of thing that follows you in a career, and I'd hate to have the tide of a bunch of people turned against me because I made an ass out of myself on a Google mailing list. If I were doing due diligence on hiring him, the Hacker News threads would give me serious pause.
I've read HN comments in the past wherein the point has been made that it reflects negatively on both sides, and I can't see that, particularly hearing the story from Xooglers that I know.
There are a lot of things I admire about Google, and I think highly of most of the engineers. 95% of the engineers I met there I would gladly work with again.
In fact, I would recommend most people I know, if they get a Google offer, to take it. I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen, but if you join Google and end up on a good project that gives you visibility, it's a great place to work. Sure, there are unethical managers, but they aren't all bad. Why shouldn't they give the place a try?
The whistleblowing that I engaged in was in response to (a) incidents of management doing things it knew were counterproductive, to costs in the millions of dollars, just to keep rank, and (b) upper management refusing to discipline people for doing things that were immensely unethical.
What's amazing to me is that people will go to the mat to defend a huge company, when what they're actually doing is defending its rather abysmal management, which wouldn't do a thing for them.
Let me say it like this: Google is a fine company in most ways. It has built some excellent products, and the internal engineering tools are great. There's an incredible amount of talent. However, becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers who think constructs like "calibration scores" are a good idea is not a good business move.
If anyone is a friend of Google, it's me, because I've drawn light upon the managerial bloodsuckers that have been working to destroy the place.
What's that mean? They'll fly planes in to buildings? Strap bombs to themselves and blow up their buses?
> I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen
It sounds like you discovered office politics. It doesn't sound particularly unique to Google.
Despite claiming that it has a "peer review" performance system, Google has secret "calibration scores" which are set unilaterally by the manager and regularly destroy people's careers. (That they exist is not secret, but the specific numbers given are hidden.) There's a known problem with managers using low scores (but positive verbal reviews) to keep their reports captive but unable to transfer. I managed to find mine out, and it was substantially below the (completely respectable) 3.4 that I was promised, but that's another story.
Whoever came up with that idea (a parallel performance review that can silently ruin your career) was either deeply stupid or thoroughly evil. Google claims to hire only smart people, which leaves... evil.
A decent company will know that this is an opportunity for corruption and take performance reviews out of the transfer packet.
Sigh. Adding inflammatory rhetoric like this really doesn't help in painting you as a reliable commenter, either.
Yes, I do believe that "calibration scores" were injected into Google out of a malicious schadenfreude. These people were not trying to do good for their company. They were trying to hurt Google for their own amusement.
When a company has a reputation of a cultural leader as Google did throughout the 2000s, there are people out there who want nothing more than to "hack" it and make it destroy itself.
You make one point: the people who destroyed Google's culture are not terrorists. That was a clumsy metaphor. Rather, they're saboteurs who are destroying the company for their own amusement, as I clarified in my comment below.
I didn't know which side of this argument to give credence to, but that quote just helped me make up my mind.
Context, for the uninitiated (grab a beer before searching): "site:news.ycombinator.com michaelochurch google"
"Speaking personally, on every day that I'm blocked, I add college traditions that never existed, transpose digits of population figures or world records, and create articles on bullshit "folklore" that is often absurd; this is what Wikipedia will have to put up with if I am to be blocked from it. About 1 in 3 of my vandalisms survives for a year, and several have been reproduced on other articles."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mike_Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_so...
etc. It's a gift that keeps on giving.
If not, then you don't know what you're talking about.
Step 1: Make up stories about your enemy that nobody on the forum can verify. (Be it that your manager is a terrorist or that the Wikipedia admin who banned you is a child rapist.)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Post again with an even more grandiose tale.
Why are you wasting your time on HN when you could be writing screenplays instead?
The "terrorist" thing is getting taken way out of its original context. I was not comparing Google's problem executives to terrorists. I was saying that they enjoy destruction and take inspiration from it. I could have replaced "terrorist attacks" with "gruesome accidents". They're saboteurs, not terrorists.
It's a really useful tool that works much better than skyping. I've had heaps friends join Google+ purely to be part of a video chat session we have to catchup.
But there really is a heap of potential here. I'm part of a language-learning study Google+ group that hosts weekly chat sessions. Unfortunately for us, the room is limited to 10 people (and two spots are taken up by the moderators), so most people would miss out.
I wish the group was able to create as many hangout sessions as needed, place a single moderator + native speakers into each session. Would be a seriously killer app among language-learners...
Maybe I should have a look at the API or something :P
Very much so. My brother and I live in different countries in Europe and the other day, we were able to have a video conversation (through a Google Hangout) with both our phones over cellular network (I was taking a walk in a park).
I'm a tech person but even I was floored this was even possible.
It is. The only thing missing is the hordes of people I could connect to. It's a lonely place to hang out at Google+ and I check my streams less often than I would want to.
The best thing is that they might just be able to keep it in life-support for ages because it's hooked to other Google services. What that means, effectively, is waiting for Facebook to make a major screw up and drive a hefty flock of users to the next popular alternative—Google+.
On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.
This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions.
Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.