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Google Fires Blogger?
Thomas Hawk writes "CNET is reporting that Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company. CNET reports that it is not clear if he resigned or was fired but references a post at Google Blogoscoped where it was suggested that he may have been fired over his blog Ninetyninezeros. Given Google's push into the blogging space with their recent acquisition of Blogger it might be interesting to see how this shakes out."
Oh, the drama!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
How about a link to the actual blog? It's still up...
I agree. I read all the links and transcripts. I couldn't point to any thing the should have resulted in a firing.
Thank god it isn't even certain that Google fired him for this reason... fud fud fud
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
Why? What does that have to do with anything?
Man criticises employer in public.
... why, exactly?
Employer fires man.
This is fascinating
Don't piss off your employer or when it's time for people to go you're the first one. I worked with a woman who was quite vocal at work about how she hated her job and she was looking for another and blah blah blah.
I was only there 6 months when the layoffs came up and she got the slip and I didn't. She flew off the handle that I should have went before she did. She didn't appreciate it when I mentioned she probably shouldn't have been so vocal about how she didn't like her job.
hi everyone, sorry my site has been down for the past day or so. i goofed and put some stuff up on my blog that's not supposed to be there. nothing serious and they didn't ask me to take anything down (even the stuff where i'm critical about the company). i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things. the quickest way for me to fix the situation at the time was to take it all down. now i'm back up. just so you know, google was pretty cool about all this. thanks for and sorry for the frenzy of speculation.
It's obvious that Google had been aware of this guy's blog and while they didn't ask him to take anything down and they didn't ask him to stop he should have seen the writing on the wall and kept it down. He had a choice and he decided to bring it back up, but I am not about to speculate what would have happened if he hadn't.
Keep your opinions about work to yourself. If you don't like your job don't work there anymore. If you can't find a new job keep your mouth shut (to the Internet as well especially when you work for a firm full of Internet connected people that run THE search engine) until you do.
Just do your job and go home. Personally, I don't want to hear about anyone's work life outside of work and I certainly wouldn't want to describe mine to anyone else in my free time. Free time is exactly that. Time away from work!
...of the professional world (damn these short comment titles!) is that you become a representative (somewhat) even on your own time. That means you respect the company's privacy and keep internal matters internal.
It's kind of like a family member airing all you dirty laundry. Do they have a right to be upset about your idiosynchrosies? Maybe, probably. Should they be telling the whole world about it? No... I think loyalty should be a driving factor here.
That said, I would have hoped that Google would be more lenient than this (assuming he was fired). But now they have public investors to think of, and they have to act more like a corporation than perhaps they have in the past. Sometimes that means tough love for employees who forget their first task is to make money for the company.
...like the people who post comments on slashdot from work, with an intent to be Funny ;)
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I tend to agree, though apparently this guy a) had more than 400 complaints from within the company to Google's HR department asking that he be removed, and b) was obviously a complete idiot in the things he posted about in his blog.
Just because we all have the ability to post anything we want anywhere we want doesn't mean we should. You're free to say whatever you want in the United States but a company is not obligated to keep you under hire if you become a disruptive influence or publicly reveal trade secrets. It has nothing to do with whether he signed an NDA or not; it comes down to common sense.
I don't know exactly why he was fired but it should not be a surprise to anybody, including him. And I don't think this is a free speech issue; this is more of a lesson in learning when and where it is and isn't appropriate to say certain things, which is something that has been lost on the internet generation. Nobody can put you in jail for complaining about your company, but your company is not obliged to keep paying you for the privilege.
Apparently this wasn't an issue of someone talking about their life at google, or their day-to-day tirals and tribulations on the job. This was someone releasing sensitive NDA information onto the net. While I don't like NDAs as much as the next guy its a pretty obvious breach of contract and an OK reason for firing. For everyone getting ready to start hating the last giant non-evil corp left, you're going to have to wait a few more weeks.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've got some Karma to burn so I'm going to say this anyway.
For all the muppets who will respond about Google being a "bad" company, and how they were "good". FIRING PEOPLE HAPPENS, and sometimes ITS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. If one person is dragging down the morale of everyone else, should that be allowed to continue ? If one person is damaging the companies reputation, should that be allowed to continue ?
Firing people is something that happens. And it doesn't make companies "bad" or "good". In fact companies ARE NEVER bad or good its the PEOPLE in them that make bad or good decisions. Reference Microsoft, it was the will of a group of people to act as a monopoly and abuse that position.
For anyone who thinks about "Good" and "Bad" in a George Bush style way when looking at any part of the world, whether business or politics. GET OUTSIDE and see the shades, subscribe to the economist, read the Wall Street Journal, become a member of Green Peace and Amnesty International, but don't wear Rose Tinted specs and moan because ONE person got fired.
Google has ALWAYS been protective, and ALWAYS done some "odd" things. There is no tipping point of bad to good, the world is not as simple as "Whitehouse Politics 101".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Given Google's push into the blogging space with their recent acquisition of Blogger it might be interesting to see how this shakes out.
They bought Pyra in 2003. It's now 2005. This guy worked there for one month. I think your sense of perspective is a little out of whack.
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My quality social news site.com.
Nonsense. That should have happened when they DCMA'd someone for offering RSS feeds of google news. Google is like Apple, whatever they do slashdot will love them.
I am trolling
Google may have had no chance but to fire this guy. The SEC is very strict about any kind of financial information employees share. Even a vague summary of an internal financial presentation posted to a blog could mean trouble. Any appearance of Google trying to talk up its stock through underhanded means would be investigated.
A googol is ten to the one hundredth power, written as a one followed by one hundred zeros.
Ninety nine zeros, the name of the blog, is a googol minus one.
And now we have Google, minus one. One named "Mark".
Maybe it's just because I'm a former math geek, but I just love the way this worked out...
Perhaps they fired him because of poor writing skills. I didn't see a sinlge capital letter on the whole page.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Never use the services of the largest text searching company you work for, to bad mouth it.
You assume that Google did not have a clearly state blog policy.
I start by assuming that since he got fired so quickly, without much messing around, that Google had a clear policy, he violated it, and he was terminated.
wouldn't that be 99 nines?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If I had gotten a job at google, I would have been a lot more careful.
This guy first ditches microsoft, because they don't want to code with extreme programming methods (laughs), and then gets himself fired from Google. I'm sorry, but what a dumbass. He doesn't know how lucky he is..
Will code a sig generator for food
Wow - your HR department is pretty quick.
No way! The guy posted *FINANCIAL* information about a *PUBLICLY TRADED* company using inside information. There are very strict SEC rules about that stuff. Google had no choice but to fire the guy. This episode will not affect Slashdot's respect for Google at all.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004157.ht
It would by highly unlikely that he was not, considering the timing.
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
On the one hand every company has those silly rules, that almost all of us are violating right now, to not use company assets for private use while at work or at any other time. Clear enough.
Now companies, and Delta and Northwest are famous for this, are telling their employees that using their own machines in their own homes to discuss, even in passing anything having to do with said company, even to other employees of the same company is not only a fire-able offense but is criminal.
It seems though that companies at most need to apply legal standards of libel and slander in whatever country they are operating. If it doesn't break those laws then it shouldn't be actionable. Of course many of us live in a RIGHT TO WORK state which says a person can be fired for any reason at any time so maybe the whole point is moot.
In either case I recommend that all employees refuse the company softball game, comunity service gathering, Christmas party, blood drive or solicitation from the United Way. You can never be to sure that through some accident not even of your own doing the sacred holy company's image won't be tarnished in some way. Better to leave all that stuff to someone else.
And if someone asks you for a job or personal reference refuse that too. In fact, run all those queries through your corporate HR and/or legal department just to be sure.
You company is not your friend.
"freedom of speech" means the guy won't go to JAIL for it. It doesn't mean his employer can't do anything to him. He could claim flinging poo on cars in the Google parking lot was an act of "speech" according to today's warped interpretation of the first ammendment, but that wouldn't mean that Google couldn't *fire* him for it. His saying something in a blog just won't get him put in *jail*, per the first ammendment.
I think I figured out exactly why he got fired.
On January 28th (the day he got fired) Mark Jen apparently ran an Adwords Campaign pointing to his blog.
Besides the obvious problem of him promoting a story about life at Google, regular people cannot run an ad with the word GOOGLE in it.
Keep in mind that he worked in the adsense divison. He may have overrode this requirement. Instant termination. What was he thinking?
No, some things are evil, regardless of perspective. Now, one's perspective might not let them see that an action is evil, but that doesn't mean that the action is not evil. Stalin thought what he was doing was good. From his perspective, it was good, but that doesn't mean that it was. There are some absolutes in this world.
A company that really is only interested in the bottom line and advancing their plans, regardless of what else is happening and who they might hurt, is evil.
with that said, firing this guy doesn't make google evil. From what I can gather, he was a dumbass who was possibly violating an NDA (and whether you like them or not, if you sign one, you need to respect the terms), was a source of conflict internally, and may have said things that the SEC wouldn't have liked.
my pet machine
If I do then I'll be picking up my P45!
.45 by Kahr Arms. (scroll down to see the pistol) Comments like that can definitely lead to termination of employment.
Hopefully you don't mean the new
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
also don't forget that now Google is a public company they could be liable to their shareholders if it appeared the guy's comments could affect the stock price and they did not fire him (hows that for a run on sentence?).
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
The new blogs is missing the critical pieces. Fortunately, the contents of the previous blog are cached here.
Here are some relevant paragraphs:
January 24, 2005
uh oh, what happened to my bank account?
By markjen
so i happened to look over my finances this past weekend and i realized something: i'm broke. which is odd, because i had a bunch of liquid capital in my checking account last time i checked, and now all of a sudden i have nothing.
i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck (which i haven't received yet). finally, add in the fact that i had to put down two months rent as a deposit for my new lease, and i'm flat broke.
on the plus side, this first paycheck is going to be huge... (which unfortunately means i'll probably end up getting taxed huge on it. doh!)
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.
next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.
lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things acc
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