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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."
This guy gets paid to do what 4chaners happily do for free and he complains about needing therapy. .. On the other hand, I smell a crowd source opportunity.
Bestiality not beastiality.
I've never done the job, but I can assure you that goatse is the very least of the what the internet has to offer in terms of disturbing images. Honestly, from what I hear about these jobs, the only people who can last long term and probably psychopathic to some degree or another: i.e. they have little to no empathy for others.
An unnamed police department in the United States had a policy for child pornography investigators:
* You could only do it for a few months then it was someone else's turn
* You had mandatory psychological help
Oh, and you had to be trained ahead of time.
Wow, I figure if anybody had to do that for a year, they should be given a pension, a quiet place to get away from things, and a LOT of therapy.
I can't imagine being the poor bastard that has to look at the worst stuff on the internet. I've glimpsed enough to know that I wouldn't want to see any more of it. I'm frequently appalled at some of the things people choose to see.
I think even the law enforcement guys can get fucked up from this, and they understand the need for support systems. Your first job our of school? That would ruin you forever.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Since Google doesn't do bad things, it was obviously his fault.
#DeleteChrome
I'd like to see that job posting...
Wanted: Individual to wade through the most depraved and terrible consequences of human imaginations known to man.
Requirements: Must be completely emotionless and unsympathetic to the human condition. Robots are preferred but not required. A J.D., M.B.A. or experience in government is also a plus.
Compensation: Competitive
A weak mind? I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bet after watching this stuff for long enough it's going to have an effect on anybody but a sociopath. Then too, but they'd probably enjoy it.
Soldiers and police offices get PTSD. The cops who work on child porn and the like get worn down. Heck, I bet people who work in ERs get a little twigged on this stuff.
You immerse anybody in this stuff day in and day out, and I think it's safe to assume there's going to be some lasting trauma.
And I have to assume that anybody who would volunteer for this and thrive on it ... well, you need to keep an eye on them because they're probably dangerous.
Anybody who thinks simply being tough-minded (as opposed to being highly twisted) is all that it would take to "man up" and get past this is likely full of crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Uh, perhaps not using google would get you around 'googles' blocks?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html
The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.
Spare a thought for all those poor people at Comedy Central who have to watch Fox News all day in search of comedy material for Jon Stewart.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
That might be true with a psychopath but a sociopath (which is what the OP probably meant) would be quite capable of watching the videos and understanding how other people would react even if they don't react themselves. Sociopaths in general learn during their childhood to mimic empathy to fit in. The classic example is Ted Bundy, a perfectly (in public) outgoing and social individual who knew how to mimic empathy but in private was cutting people up to see what their insides looked like.
It is appearing to me more and more, as I learn about the "tagging" practices and stories like this, as though Google is illegally employing people as "contractors" when they are really just low-level employees.
This has been a long-time problem with large corporations. IBM was famously caught at doing that, and so was Microsoft.
The IRS has pretty clear guidelines about who is a "contractor" versus who is an "employee".
It appears pretty clear to me that Google is illegally calling employees "contractors" so they can be denied perks and benefits. Just like IBM was, and just like Microsoft was.
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?
The risk is not employee on employee violence, it is risk of suicide.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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!
The shrinks call it "the Just World" hypothesis.
When told a story about how something bad happened to a little child -- loss of a cookie, for example -- children in studies begin to imagine something similar happening to them. This causes mental discomfort, and they begin to look for ways this would NOT have happened to them. In the vast majority of cases, the children decide the cookie was lost because the victim either did something wrong or was something wrong (a bad child), so since the tested child is not bad and does not intend to do something wrong, then nothing bad will ever happen to them. The world is good, and only good things will happen to good children.
If you know a kid, try it yourself. Keep the story small -- lost a cookie, lost a toy -- so you don't traumatize the kid. :-) You'll be amazed at the lengths the kid goes to to insulate himself from the possibility.
You see this manifest in a million different ways in the adult world. Only bad girls get raped. Welfare cases are taking all our money. All car crashes were caused by stupid people. Unfortunate people are just "unlucky," and my luck is good.
Nurb432 doesn't like the thought that his job could use him up, break him, and then just throw him away. He tells himself stories about why this won't happen to him. He's not weak-minded. He's not weak. He's in demand. He manages his career wisely. He's the ant surrounded by grasshoppers. He's the Little Red Hen, and he'll laugh come winter.
Hint that Winter is Coming for all of us, and he won't thank you.
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."
Preference given to former US Congressmen or Senators. Seniority status a plus.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'd think pediatric surgeons would be good candidates for such a job. They have empathy, but they have seen all that crap up-close, for the most part. Beaten kids, raped kids, systematically malnourished and otherwise neglected and abused kids, kids with amputations from farm machinery, etc. A friend of mine has been at it for almost two decades and she still cries every now and then, but not always at work. She cries when she sees perfectly normal, healthy kids. She is not psychopathic by any stretch of imagination. It's a job. Humans are the cruelest of the animals. Get over it or go crazy, your pick. Getting over it is not psychopathic, neither is it lacking empathy. Empathy doesn't mean you have to lose your wits every time you see abuse...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Just from my experience, i'm computer forensic investigator but not for police. However, i work with many ex cops and state police.
Few days once in a blue moon fine. But hypothetically the state police have had a bunch of these cases that I'm aware of. When I'm doing my thing if I run across CP i have to stop my investigation and turn it over to state police immediately. Am i'm not just talking about the CP you can Hash value out(known CP DL'd or w/e). Talking in my 5 years here, we've had 4 dealing with actual like abuse, personal pictures. And i don't deal with anything closely related to CP.
I'm sorry just even thinking about that/picturing it is horrifying to me anyways. If i had to see images all the time on that subject. Forget that.
Actually, as a necessary survival skill, the societally-functional psychopath/sociopath learns better than most people exactly what empathic reaction can be expected from a given situation. He wouldn't *feel* upset by the video but he'd understand on an intellectual level that watching baby animals being harmed upsets other people.
The big problem with assigning the job to a psychopath is that once you get past the gut check, true depravity tends to be creative and interesting. You really don't want to show a psychopath creative and interesting things that you'd prefer he not do.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
They don't have to conceal their enjoyment. They just have to flag the "good" stuff.
What?
The contract with Google forced the guy to stay there for a whole year.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
My sister worked for the eBay thought police for several years. Mostly it was offensive images that people replaced on their web site in place of an existing image that someone else linked into an auction page so that they victim had to pay the bandwidth costs for the picture of the picnic table (or whatever), rather than the seller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
Apple employees who work with customer data in Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime, Logic Studio, and Aperture, as well as some other packages get to sign agreements about exposure to offensive material.
Adobe has similar agreements for employees who might be doing work on Photoshop for customer data.
If you're actually in the industry that generates the images in the first place, there are similar agreements.
I was at a startup that did web site reverse proxy caches for a while, and had a similar agreement; you can guess at the sites where you'd want the ability to carry heavy load on a landing page.
It can get far, far worse than that.
If you can look at that sort of image and compartmentalize it as "just work," a "bunch of pixels on the screen," something is very wrong with you.
Anyone not like you must be defective! You didn't cry enough when you saw that image, you sociopath!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Few people's backgrounds can immune you from everything you find.
After our spam filter stopped an important message, we took turns sorting emails for a few months until we got the filter tuned.
Trust me, it's not just kids/animals/fetish stuff. I went home many days feeling very disturbed. It bothers me to this day to remember, and I'm not at all a prude/religious person.
Trust me, there are things you just don't want to know about.
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."
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
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