The real culprit is Google, no matter what. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5296146 for my take on management's responsibility for what happens in a company.

Does Michael have a beef? Yes he does. Does Michael have a right to express himself, give his opinion publicly? Yes he does. If Google is the subject of his smears, Google only has Google to blame.

Your argument about management is flawed: a company is made up of people, who ALL have to act the way they want employees to act, and expect the same out of each other. Michael absolutely has a right to express himself, and since he was a Google employee, he had the duty at that time to try to make it the best place in the world to work. That he didn't even confront his manager about his real number doesn't speak well to his willingness to try to improve the place. Especially since he had a safety net job offer. What was his risk?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508058

  > Telling Google to "Choke on a fucking taint, Google. Choke. On. A. Taint." [1] is also not nice, in any universe, not even HN.

Neither are _nice_, clearly.

In my first digs at Google I specifically avoided exposing any relationship (it was exposed by an HN commenter, to deflect). All I said was that there was mismanagement at a level approaching the criminal (which is true) and I gave a couple details (accidentally leaking calibration scores-- I thought that had been common knowledge-- and the death of 20% time).

Neither of these are confidential. How a company treats its employees is (with lots of legal precedent) covered under whistleblower protections-- not a trade secret. Therefore, the existence of any employment relationship is irrelevant.

If I leaked a product, I'd be unethical and deserve to be sued. Exposing the existence of calibration scores is fair game.

"Choke on a fucking taint, Google. Choke. On. A. Taint."

It is not okay to say that about your former employer. In any context.

If you think it is okay to say that about your former employer, there's something wrong with you. I certainly would never want to work with you.

Still, you're right in a way. Google is 55,000 people and I have no problem with 54.9+ thousand of them. In fact, that company often makes great products because, in spite of the executive malignancy, they have some top-notch engineering talent under their roof.

I shouldn't have said, "Choke on a taint, Google". I should have said, "Choke on a taint; parasitic, psychopathic, incompetent and entitled executive caste that implemented closed allocation at a once-great company, developed a mean-spirited, Kafkaesque 'calibration score' system worse than Enron's, and has destroyed billions of dollars of value."

Sorry, but the people who played a direct role in the managerial destruction (e.g. calibration scores) of Google are human garbage. They took what used to be a great company and destroyed it, and for no good reason. They deserve much more than I have thrown at them.

It's because it makes YOU look bad.

Can I ask a question? You keep complaining about closed allocation. What EXACTLY would you want them to have, instead? And I don't mean just say "open," say specifically what you mean, how you think it would work in practice. At a company with 55,000 employees.

Also, you're putting way too much emphasis on calibration scores. Companies record what managers think of their employees. How ELSE would you want a company to do it?

After Google, I worked for a company with the most unethical management I've ever encountered. True evil. (Calibration scores are just criminal stupidity; not the same class.) Also, that company is notorious in NYC for having unethical management. Furthermore, I was there for 3 months... after a 6-month period at Google. Now that is a blotch on my CV.

I'm done worrying about cosmetic shit. I already fail on that front. Too much substance, and it's too visible by now.

I also don't buy into the "never make an employer look bad". If you're there for 2+ years, then I agree and would say that the rule applies, even if you were laid off or had a crappy manager at the end, because there's nothing embarrassing about a 2-year stint. If you are at a company for less than 12 months, either you or they like horrible. Make it them by airing enough to prove them the bad guys. (Then you still look bad, but not horrible, because you show it to be their fault.)

Can I ask a question? You keep complaining about closed allocation. What EXACTLY would you want them to have, instead? And I don't mean just say "open," say specifically what you mean, how you think it would work in practice. At a company with 55,000 employees.

Actually, being large makes it much easier to afford open allocation. If you're small, you often have real technical deadlines that put the business at risk, so full-on open allocation isn't always possible.

If you're at Google's size, your moral responsibility to your engineers is open allocation, because you can afford it. It's the 20-person companies that have deadlines and clients that have good reasons not to do full open allocation.

So, that's easy, at least for the engineering organization. That's where you start, and you branch out from there as you build a knowledge base.

Companies record what managers think of their employees. How ELSE would you want a company to do it?

Well... for starters, take that garbage out of the transfer packet.

Does this seem radical? Actually, the law is on my side, here. Until about 1995, most companies didn't have performance reviews in the transfer packet. At all. Those were separate and only came out when someone actually needed to be fired. Enron changed that. It was Enron that made stylish the "innovation" of making performance reviews part of the transfer packet, and Google is carrying the torch.

A manager who interferes with internal mobility is guilty of harassment (plenty of legal precedent here) because internal mobility is considered part of a worker's job performance, and interference with job performance is...? Well, it's one of the most common subcategories of workplace harassment. Ergo, a manager who communicates anything negative about an employee (except a breach of law or professional ethics) is guilty of harassment and can be charged.

That's why the calibration scores and manager-level-only feedback are secret. It's to allow Google (or, more specifically, managers) to break the fucking law.

Yes, companies need to fire severe underperformers, unethical people, and law-breakers. That's true. Performance review for mutual benefit also has some value. Creating a system where performance reviews are part of the transfer process is, while not technically outlawed, essentially giving managers the right to break the law.

When I say that closed-allocation management in the Google/Enron-style company is often extortion, I'm not exaggerating. It's technically civil rather than criminal extortion, but now we're getting into details.

I don't believe I know anyone who would see it your way. This is like complaining about your ex-girlfriends on match.com, it's self-defeating in a way that just makes me feel bad for you that you think it will be effective and help you achieve your own goals. It won't. And I honestly think that if you found someone who it DID convince, that they're not a good person to work for, and that will become apparent in time.

Back to my question - You talk a lot for not actually answering my question:

How do you think open allocation would work in practice. Lay it out for me like I'm 5 years old. It would also be to your benefit, if you could point to companies, of roughly equal size, that do it the way you want Google to.

Everyone in a company evaluates actual worker performance. Yes, it's possible to game that system maliciously, and that would probably be harassment. But it's perfectly reasonable to communicate performance evaluations when considering any promotion, increased responsibility, or transfer to another team.

I don't know where people get this idea. There's a lot of story and I haven't told most of it.

My boss promised a 3.4, then gave me something lower (probably 3.0-3.1). When I confronted him, he said it was because Google+ out in California wanted me to suffer for criticizing a product (that later failed, as I predicted). So I asked him to put a note on the HR file noting that the ding was political and not related to performance. I didn't care what the score was (the difference in bonus between 3.0 and 3.4 is minor) but I wanted the record to show what had happened, and an agreement on 3.4+ for the next 4 quarters to compensate for throwing me under the bus. That's all I wanted, and it's a small, reasonable, request. Everyone knows that "performance" reviews are about politics anyway, so I have no qualms about using one as a negotiation token. It's a game, so play it.

In response to my request, he went and revised my calibration score downward. He also made speculations about health problems (I have very-high-functioning hypergraphia, which is often a symptom of something else but in my case it's just standalone hypergraphia) that were irrelevant to work performance-- just to label me. I was in the process of deciding whether (a) to get attorneys on the case-- most attorneys don't want to appeal performance reviews because there's no money in it-- (b) to offer a side bribe to someone with performance DB access, or (c) to just get another job. The winner was (c); (a) and (b) meant $10k+ for something that might not work and would only pay itself off if I were there for 5+ years.

Also, HR investigated and found out there was no ding from California. Completely made up.

So, I dug around and found out that a mysterious departure of someone (a serious CS heavyweight) who had this same manager was a case of outright bullying that had gone on between approximately Oct. 2010 and July 2011. More digging found a pattern; this particular manager had a pattern of lying. In one case, he was actually reported to HR for repeatedly (and probably intentionally, though he denied it) using last-minute 1:1 reschedulings to conflict with someone's therapy. That was before I came to Google. Predictably, HR did nothing that time, too.

This was a manager who had a years-long history of bad behavior, especially toward people with (otherwise manageable) health problems. It wasn't even hard for me to piece together the story, because so many people knew that it was going on. If he didn't see you as vulnerable, he was very affable and supportive, but if he smelled blood, he attacked. He actually admitted, in one proceeding, that he enjoyed "testing" an employee with panic disorder to find triggers. In my case, I'm fairly normal but I do have hypergraphia and can tell a decade-long story (with increasingly high levels of function; from 2002-09 I had a serious trolling problem, now I focus on writing coherent and useful stuff) about that.

I don't blow whistles over small shit. This was a big fucking rat.

When Google stops allowing Evil, I will stop attacking it.

They get the idea that you didn't confront your manager about your real number because:

1) You've repeatedly told us that you don't know what your real number is.

2) Googler123 has made the declarative statement that your manager could have easily shown you the real number in the internal perf tool.

3) You haven't contradicted Googler123 that it's not true.

4) You haven't told us, "I confronted my manager about showing me my real number in the internal perf tool."

From that, we're quite correct in concluding you didn't confront your manager about showing you your real number in the internal perf tool.

I'm sorry you had a lousy manager.

If there's something wrong with your manager, you're supposed to go to HR and you're supposed to go to your boss^2. In any company. It actually sounds like that's what you did, so why are you telling us all that the outcome is guaranteed to be "fired" or "similarly fucked", "In any company." ???

No, in the company I want to work at, if I have a lousy manager, I'm going to talk to HR and my boss^2. That's what I expect from myself, and that's what I expect from you. It even sounds like you did it - so why are you telling us not to?

Google is a company made up of people. Some of them have even bothered to respond to you in this thread. And yet, you're telling them NOT to do what people SHOULD do.

How exactly is ANY company supposed to get better over time, if the employees aren't brave and do what's right, even if it might have consequences for them?

Or should they just quit, and then take every opportunity to smear the company on websites?

It seems entirely unambiguous that he's saying "You can get your manager to show you your scores by making enough of a fuss that your manager will do it just to make you STFU".

The manager may have wanted to do that, although that is purely conjectures, but the manager didn't, perhaps because it's against company policy, but also perhaps because his manager didn't want to go all out on Michael, perhaps realizing that the faults in the matter might not have all been on Michael's side.

So, then, I think Googler123 is telling Michael to STFU not by telling him directly, but by putting words in his manager's mouth, which is I think even worse, because not only is this denigrating to Michael, but also to his former manager, who may still be a Google employee.

Makes sense?

Name yourself or stop with the ad hominem attacks. Thanks.

You know nothing about my situation, nor why I left Google. Please stop speculating. Even I never found out what calibration score I got. My manager promised a 3.4, gave something lower (his boss confirmed) and it was being appealed at the time I left. Call it -6.2 for all I care.

I was in the process of internal transfer and it was going alright; however, I got an offer from another company and left. I figured that a clean start would be better than an HR file that, while it wouldn't affect me in the short term, would have long-term implications come promo time and that it'd take months of grueling, bureaucratic effort (some of dubious ethical character) for me to fix.

It was like this: Option A is that I transfer, stay at Google, but may have an early-term smear of my Perf history and might have to cut bribes to people with HR database access in a few years when I rise to a level where even early, cosmetic, irrelevant stuff counts. Option B is that I get another job. Option A is unethical and unlikely to work. Option B is much easier. So I chose B.

Some time after I left, Google did something about a few horrible managers on the issues that I'd raised, but I don't know how much progress they've made and it makes no damn difference to me at this point.

Sorry but that's complete and utter crap.

If you had transferred to another group and consistently performed well no promo committee would have cared about what happened in your first few months. If anything they would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of "well he had a rough first few months, but since then he's been kicking butt. Either his first team was a bad fit, or he learned and grew since then."

Promo committees (and hiring committees for that matter) have to sort through conflicting feedback all of the time. When you're on a promo/hiring committee you are constantly "reading through" the feedback to look for patterns and trends, and trying to build a broader context to help interpret any outliers. A bad patch early on wouldn't have mattered, as long as your trajectory afterwards was positive.

Many (very) senior developers offered to sit down and talk with you privately. I'm sure if you had taken them up on their offers they would have said the same thing. There is nothing that happened in your months here that couldn't have been fixed by transferring to a group that was a better fit and focusing more on producing great software than on posting to the internal mailing lists.

Michael, you're complaining about rude attacks the day after you wrote "Choke on a fucking taint, Google. Choke. On. A. Taint" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508058 ?

Ad hominem attacks usually involve asymmetry of public identity and often place a target between two undesirable options: (a) letting the attacks stand, or (b) further exposing information that's irrelevant to the discussion and possibly compromising, especially with the persistence of the Internet.

I am fine with rudeness. In fact, in many circumstances, I encourage it.

If I said, "Google is a hellhole and you'll hate your life", then I'd be a liar because some people get great managers and the best projects and Google is really awesome for them.

What I do intend to say is that Google's HR infrastructure and upper management (at least on the people-management front) are irresponsibly bad at their jobs. That usually won't affect you if you have a string of good managers. If you land in the wrong spot, though, look out because there won't be any competent to fix the problem.

Google has a lot of ways it could become a great company again (open allocation) but for now, I'm going to come out and continue to say that their upper management (again, at least on people management) is disastrously bad and they are singularly responsible for ruining what used to be and still could be a great company.

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to let these assholes destroy billions of dollars in value and get away with it.

It'd be really nice if HN was not one of those circumstances.

You sound like an HR drone tasked with attacking michael's record with false data. You haven't responded to his claim that his record met expectations. Unless you use a real identity, your claims will have no credibility.

You get out of life what you put into it. Also, at some point, you have to be willing to take the risk that things won't go well. What's the worst thing they can do? Fire you? Michael was already thinking about leaving anyway.

At some level, you just have to ACT like the company you work for is the company you WANT to work for - and if they don't see it the same way, no hard feelings.

If Google was the company he wanted to work for, and he and his manager didn't get along, what SHOULD he do? Stand up for yourself. Don't quit for the sake of your "permanent record." If there's more to it, then that's fine - but if that's your reason for quitting...?

It's a company, and you have a job. If your manager sucks, say something about it. If that doesn't work, vote with your feet.

Talk to boss^2 and HR.

I too have work experience, but perhaps not common sense when it comes to dealing with people, and I never got anything accomplished by talking to boss^2, who as Church noted was more invested in their choice of hiring your boss than in you the underling, and indeed then voted with my feet.

Michael: "If you go to HR, you get fired." "If you go to your boss^2, you are similarly fucked..."

I think that's terrible advice.

I'm sorry you had to vote with your feet, but I'm glad that you did. The only way boss^2 or HR have a chance to learn is if employees do what they're supposed to, and Michael is actively telling people to not do what they're supposed to.