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.