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The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet
Cutting_Crew writes "Gizmodo has called attention to a story that describes the worst job you can get at Google: wading through and blocking objectionable content, which includes watching decapitations and beastiality. A ex-Google-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year-long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet. In the end, he needed therapy, and since he was a contractor, he was let go instead of being hired as a full time employee."
First, Did google not describe to the employees what exactly they would be doing? I know they said, "sensitive content" but that could mean a whole variety of things. Second, there is one thing that we all kid about and talk about and porn is one of them and I am sure that there are solid studies indicating that this does effect people in harsh ways. Its another thing to go venturing off into beheadings, beastiality and the like and not even get any kind of support from a company that has billions of cash. The least they could have done would have been to offer a support program, some take away money when leaving or *gasp* how about a full time position doing something more humane?
I worked for a very large company and analysed data from network packet capture devices that would sift through data and find interesting items. It was quite a head job after awhile. So many people doing dumb things at work and getting caught. Reasonable seeming people looking at fucked up porn (men and women coworkers), people hooking up with random strangers in public restrooms (facilitating this online on their work computers, it happens alot), people having groupsex and viewing the photos at work (via web email), total perverts preying on teenagers (stockholm syndrome in full effect), really anything wrenched or nasty you hear about in the news is like the tip of the iceberg when given a large enough sample size of the general able populous. It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology. I wouldn't ever do that shit again, or anything close to it, but I have respect for people who do.
This is one of those sick-o jobs that messes with your brain so much that it's in your boss's and employer's best legal interest to NOT know what you did.
Can you imagine the lawsuits if Google DID have these guys on the payroll and, 5 years later, ONE of them went nuts-o and harmed another employee, and that employee was NOT aware of the attacker's previous job description? Google might win in the long run but they'd have to fight an uphill battle.
By making sure the person is never on the payroll and relying on the standard practice of only verifying employment dates, job titles/job descriptions, and eligibility for rehire to future employers, they've pretty much immunized themselves if one of there censors goes nuts and kills someone 5 years down the road.
Well, they have, EXCEPT legal theories of liability change over time and those changes have a way of biting you ex-post-facto.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
One year you could be policing the internet for child porn websites, next you could be hoarding it yourself.
Even without a job like this, most adults are only 10-15 years away from total depravity if they start down a path that desensitizes them to evil and keep going in that direction.
Fortunately, even most people who are this far gone still have at least a little moral center left. With desire, work, time, and support from professionals and friends, they can return to a moral standard that most people would call civilized.
I know. I took a turn 10-15 years ago and walked that slow path to moral depravity. A few years ago I looked in the mirror and didn't like what I saw. With a strong desire, divine intervention, love, support, and lots of time I'm well on my way back to where I want to be. I expect to be there in a few more years.
The story makes it sound like Google only uses contractors for this job because they know nobody could hold it down for more than a year. But it sounds more like Google is misusing contractors the way I've seen happen at many high-tech companies. Bad managers don't have it together well enough to come up with a proper plan for expanding their departments, so whenever they have a new project that needs heads they don't have, they hire some contractors. These are always hired under a time limit, to avoid a repeat of the Vizcaino v Microsoft lawsuit.
This ties in with one of my pet peeve with Google: they only seem to hire really brilliant people with great academic credentials who are never expected to bother themselves with scutwork. On the rare occasions when they realize that the scutwork can't be avoided (like manual crap filtering) they hire temps. Thus scutwork either doesn't get done or is done by people who aren't really a part of the employee community, and don't coordinate well with the real employees. That's why so many of their commercial products die on the vine, why so many of their products stay in beta mode for years, and why they have such abysmal documentation and tech support.
They did two things right: they came up with the best search engine ever, and they figured out how to make it generate huge tons of money. This allows the rest of the company to be run wastefully and ineffectively. The shareholders don't care for this, but the voting stock is controlled by a small cadre of insiders.
Do no evil....to the customers....
But lets be fair, this isn't about Google being evil. It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line. Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening. They can send out all the memos and make rules until they are blue in the face, but at some point an employee chooses how to act, and the company can then react.
The real test is how Google reacts at this point. If they were really a 'good' corporation (whatever that really means), they would probably step in and help this guy out, while canning the person who fired him.
It kind of bugs me that people can't seem to differentiate between actions that employees of a corporation take, and actions that the corporation takes. (e.g. Microsoft buys companies. Microsoft employees disregard open XML standards.) This story seems like a perfect example of that.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Perhaps you're right about the sociopath's ability to do the job. Indeed, maybe they'd be more objective about it than a more empathic person.
And I wouldn't worry too much about feeding a crazy imagination. Anybody with access to Google (!) can do that without help.
Huh, we may have stumbled on a way for lifers to earn their upkeep....
The contract with Google forced the guy to stay there for a whole year.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That depends. How would you rank the following (randomly listed) items in regards to your examples?
-Vivisections.
-Amputating the limbs of someone living and conscious without any sort of anesthesia.
-Taking an apple peeler, and slowly peeling off a person's skin / genitals.
-Putting someone in a pair of cement shoes, locking them in a glass container, filling the container up with water, and watching them drown.
-Restraining someone, sticking a tube down their throat into their lungs, and pumping in water. A sort of out-of-water drowning.
I could go on, but I don't want to creep out too many people.
I hunt, fish and have been on scene for a few automobile accidents. I've seen what happens when a guy falls from 15 stories onto cement in a construction accident. I've gutted and eaten my share of game. I've familiar with the story of Timothy Treadwell. I know what bears can do to a skeleton, and I can imagine pretty well what that camp looked like. I've seen fire photos.
It's grisly, but it doesn't stay with me because -- and I know I'm venturing into the domain of poets here -- it wasn't Evil. I didn't hate the deer. No one pushed the construction worker. His coworkers mourned for him, and it seemed sad, but proper. Carnivorous predation -- including my own -- and accidents don't "haunt" me. They seem "natural," as poor as that word choice is. I've experienced accidents -- some that put me in a hospital bed with stitches -- but they didn't --- I don't know -- "stain my soul." How's that for florid prose?
I wish I had never seen the Daniel Pearl video. Not that I wish I could have remained ignorant, but I wish I lived in a world where it just didn't happen. That video stuck with me. That video bothered me. I've met grizzled old firemen who were disfigured in a fire while they saved lives. I've shaken the hands of the men, and the burn scars shine like God's own merit badges.
I've seen photos of women disfigured by jealous men. Context seems to be everything. Just looking at the photos of those poor girls twists my guts into a knot. Maybe it's because I'm a parent, but those kiddie porn photos the cops published where all the people were removed and only the background shown make me wish God had personally appointed me to Go Smite Someone. I know the rage is just a cover for the anguish those photos of Best Western hotel rooms cause me.
If I had to spend a year, eight hours a day, looking at the worst the world had to show me, I'd need a padded cell at the end of it, and I'm a man with some scars and some grey in his hair. Shame on Google for doing this to some kid fresh out of school and then flushing him like toilet paper at the end of it. When you're the Boss, you're responsible for your people, and anyone who could do this is a reprehensible human being.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Finally! All those hours wasted on cracked.com pay off now:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18385_7-bullshit-police-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to-movies.html
the Insanity Defense is attempted in less than one percent of all legal cases, which essentially means that more people have tried to pin their crimes on aliens or their evil twin rather than their own basket case, shoelace-eating lunacy.
Of that tiny fraction where the lawyer was even willing to try it, the defense is successful less than 25 percent of the time. Three states in the US don't even allow insanity as a defense.
Then, in that tiny, tiny fraction of cases where the guy "got off" because he convinced the court he was insane, he doesn't get to just go home. You get sent to a mental institution where you don't have a set sentence at all--they keep you as long as they see fit, which may be forever. You're there until "deemed safe to return to society", which according to the American Psychiatric Association is usually twice as long as the jail sentence would have been.
It's fun to dream of comparable actions against "insane" corporations though. I'm sure a lot of slashdoters can draw parallels between their workplace and a lunatic asylum anyway.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
And this is why it makes me laugh when people say: "I'd never filter my kids internet access.", or "schools and libraries should be unfiltered"
Some people are more sick than you can imagine. You don't want to expose your kids to to the worst of humanity.
I used to be a content moderator and then a trainer for content moderators, and I can tell you that it's slightly different. Child pornography investigators will spend a lot of time over a small amount of images, all of which are horrific. Content moderation is all about getting through a large amount of material quickly, most of which will turn out to be false positives.
Two months isn't an option. It takes a month to get up to an acceptable speed, and about three months to really hit your stride. You have to moderate quickly - the article suggests 15k images per day, which is two seconds per image over an 8 hour shift. That would be about a second on each innocent image, and maybe 8-10 seconds on those that are borderline or need responding to.
The job isn't for everyone. It will change how you look at life and people around you, because you're essentially training yourself to see the worst in every image. Over a third of people quit shortly after being hired because they genuinely cant deal with doing it every day, and that's fine. But it doesn't have to fuck you up long term.
What google did wrong here was letting him work alone: The way to get through a job like this is to be in a room with other people doing exactly the same thing as you. Asking for advice, pointing things out, joking about the images...sharing helps you distance yourself from it.
In the first dot-com boom, I worked on a large groups application, kind of like what Google Groups is now. We had ~3m users, uploading thousands of images per day. For the first 6 months or so, it was the developers who had to do the moderation. We saw a lot of stuff that we could (and, frankly, had to) laugh about - anatomically impressive feats of stretching, comically ludicrous insertions, etc - but then there was the other stuff, the ones that you just couldn't laugh off. Stuff being done to others who clearly weren't old enough to consent. Some of the things I saw cannot be unseen or forgotten, however much I've wanted to in the ten years or so since.
After a while it does get you down. The very ordinariness of the backdrops was what got to me. People's ironing boards in the background. Their work uniforms hanging on the back of the door. You realise that this kind of shit is not done by crazed inbreds in the mountains or by foaming-at-the-mouth psychos, but by everyday people like the ones you sit next to on the bus or who smile at you as you buy a coffee from them every day. And that really got to me. I started looking at people and society very differently, and feeling constantly angry or sad.
In the end we hired a team of dedicated moderators, who had an enforced 1-to-1 counselling session every week. We also started working with law enforcement and people in suits whose cards just listed their job as 'the home office', and every now and again we'd get an email from the higher-ups telling us that our evidence had been crucial in securing a conviction in some case that had been in the news recently. And that helped.
There are far worse things on the internet than Goatse or tub girl, and a depressingly large number of people who produce them, consume them, and share them with others. Anyone who does that job for a sustained period has not only my sympathies, but my thanks
http://instantbadger.blogspot.com