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New Book Paints Different Picture of Workplace Behavior At Google and Facebook
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), Adam Fisher paints quite a different picture of life at now-workforce behavior preachers Google and Facebook, revealing that the tech giants' formative days were filled with the kind of antics that run afoul of HR protocols. Google was not a normal place, begins an excerpt in Vanity Fair that includes some juicy quotes attributed to Google executive chef Charlie Ayers about Google's founders ("Sergey's the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.") And in Sex, Beer, and Coding, Wired runs an excerpt about Facebook's wild early days, which even extended to the artwork gracing its office ("The office was on the second floor, so as you walk in you immediately have to walk up some stairs, and on the big 10-foot-high wall facing you is just this huge buxom woman with enormous breasts wearing this Mad Max-style costume riding a bulldog. It's the most intimidating, totally inappropriate thing. [...] That set a tone for us. A huge-breasted warrior woman riding a bulldog is the first thing you see as you come in the office, so like, get ready for that!" So, what changed? "When Sheryl Sandberg joined the company is when I saw a vast shift in everything in the company," said Ayers about Google. Sandberg later became Facebook's grown-up face.
Someone will pay for this. My tacos make me horny. I want to be horny. Give me tacos!
But unlike the other book, he will actually have time to write this one. "Unfaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
on ads.
Placing ads and ensuring as many users get to see the ads.
Working with ad customers to find out what they need to know about consumers.
Microphones to allow consumers to ask questions....
Not detecting the NSA and GCHQ deep in networks? Who else followed the NSA and GCHQ in?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
a fun and successful company was built by masculine white males and it was doing great until "the adults" came in and now everything has gone to shit.
... about a Picasso/Graffiti original depicting a busty comic girl and a cartoon dog, then you should probably leave.
To me the binge drinking contests would've been more off-putting.
I bet dollars to donuts that the stuff that brought Google or Facebook ahead wasn't built by the people who would do binge drinking contests at work. This nonsense is usually done by marketing or community management.
The stuff that brings these companies ahead are built by people who come in, solve the problem, collect their salary and then leave again.
Acting like an asshole is usually done by, well, assholes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
boring
If you want exciting, no place better ever than Trump's White House!
when women join a company, everything goes to shit?
Sheryl Bergberg with her bergface. Matzoh ball berg face.
"Ugly bitch represents the face of modern technology"
90% of what is now classified as 'sexually inappropriate' behavior is normal evolutionarily derived behavior. And the vast majority of mentally normal people would ultimately be happier living away from the convents decreed by nuns or their modern day equivalents, women's studies professors.
- There were no web analytics
- Web browser standards did not include DRM
- Front page of Google loaded from anywhere, without Javascript
- without Javascript
- without Javascript
And what about GoDaddy, Carl Jr and Jack in a box? At least facebook and google dont have near naked women selling products, of course they do sell your private data
In the very 90s I worked for a few different tech or engineering / services companies and at more than one I learned that the early days of the company were full of similar stories.
I think it had more to do with the nature of an early tech startup combined people with a white collar office setting and sometimes long hours that allowed for social mixing, goofing off, encounters the left people saying 'check the sofa for stains', etc. Add in some corporate success in lines of business that weren't 'mature' to the point of being cut and dry and it was easy to blur the lines, especially with younger people who were not married / didn't have families (though that didn't stop some).
That's a terrible example of a nobody who never built a notable SV company.
This is a much a better example
Steve "Abdulfattah Jandali" Jobs, telling reporter he doesn't know any Lisa. Who's Lisa?
Steve Abdulfattah Jabs looking like a 70s porn star
Reasonable people are against random groping.
"Before the Feminists Arrived"
By comparison, these companies were founded by kids. What exactly did experienced professionals expect?
Those who were not around for the dot-bomb history lesson now know that Entertainment 720 was more documentary than satire.
From the summary's FIRST line:
"Adam Fisher paints quite a different picture of life at now-workforce behavior preachers Google and Facebook,"
WTF? Oh wait... this is Slashdot.
... about a Picasso/Graffiti original depicting a busty comic girl and a cartoon dog, then you should probably leave.
Why? Why should someone have to leave because someone else at the company wants to behave like an unsupervised teenager on a bender? How about just taking down a picture that any sensible adult will see the problem with? Seriously, you don't get why having such a picture posted prominently is unprofessional when it has NOTHING to do with the actual business of the company? Pro tip: If your business isn't art or fashion, then pictures of busty women posted prominently is almost certainly going to be perceived badly by self respecting professional women as well as men with a sense of decency and respect for women. I have a daughter and a wife and they shouldn't have to put up with crap like that at work. A business isn't supposed to operate like a fraternity house.
I bet dollars to donuts that the stuff that brought Google or Facebook ahead wasn't built by the people who would do binge drinking contests at work.
Yes it was. Companies aren't built by engineers alone no matter how much we might wish it to be so nor are engineers above such behavior. 20 seconds on google can find you innumerable examples. Many of these companies were built by young 20-somethings with limited guidance on professional behavior and they behaved like young 20-somethings often do - which is to say like an unsupervised child. There is a reason these company almost always have to bring in an experienced professional to be "the adult in the room".
This nonsense is usually done by marketing or community management.
I'm sure you wish that were actually true. Back here in the real world, engineers party and are often sexist pigs just as often as those in any other profession. Being a talented engineer or any other type of profession is not incompatible with been a juvenile asshat and if you've been around for more than a minute you'll have met quite a few of them.
The stuff that brings these companies ahead are built by people who come in, solve the problem, collect their salary and then leave again.
I think you don't have a lot of experience with real world staffing or you could not possibly believe this. Talk to any HR professional and you'll quickly find out that talent for solving engineering problems has poor correlation with decent behavior. The tone for how a company behaves is set at the top and if the top management is permissive with sketchy behavior then that is what you are going to get. See Uber if you need an example. People can get a lot of quality work done and still find time to be an asshat.
I'd also wager that the people who really built those companies and continue to drive them are a) mostly male, b) mostly white, and c) couldn't give much of a shit about a picture of a big titted chick riding a bulldog (or heavens, they might actually like it).
Probably true. Doesn't mean it is right or that it should be condoned. It also probably means that those companies have some messed up cultural problems that they are still dealing with to this day because being talented does not also mean you aren't an asshat. Ask Harvey Weinstein.
I've found that SJW claims about a company's diversity "needs" rarely have any intersection with recognizing the company's previous success track. If it's success has truly come from hiring 51% women or x% transgender, they'd already be doing it and wouldn't have to keep being told.
You are effectively arguing that people won't be racists or sexists when money is on the table and that is demonstrably not true. Color me unimpressed with your reasoning. Our country has centuries of racial and gender bias which we are still dealing with and which denies opportunities daily to deserving people.
The reason diversity matters is that talented people don't come in a particular gender or skin color. If you are actually hiring the best people, chances are that your company is going to look pretty diverse. But people routinely do not hire the best people - they hire the people they are most comfortable with and who by and large look the most like themselves. When all these people are white, male, and privileged then this tends to become a problem for society as well as for that company.
I remember one project I worked on for a big well-known airline where we worked really hard and played very hard, and that included getting into all in bar brawls, usually with brokers :).
Everyone in the company was shagging each other, at all levels, including upper management.
We did finish the project only a bit late and only 200% over budget, but there was a lot of scope creep....
That was the 90s when everyone smoked, drank, and cocaine wasn't for poor people.
not to be pedantic, but redundant with redundancy much?
Startups are the kind of place where social liberals thrive. They're really good at generating new ideas, are open to trying new things, and generally aren't good at managing products for the long term.
Big companies run on conservatives. They have processes in place, they get stuff done slowly and surely, and not much new happens. Increasingly, these places are dominated in HR by the neomarxists who are particularly concerned with tribal -dentity thinking.
If you've ever wondered why startups tend to produce new products and then get acquired by big companies that don't, this is the basic explanation. Both types are necessary for the long-term, and it's important that people with the right personality structure wind up in the right work structure as well. Neither type of person will feel comfortable in the opposite work environment.
Really, this is the sort of thing that high schools ought to be measuring, testing, and recommending. And no, we are not talking about politics here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And now with the new HR policies, everyone gets castrated after the pee test.
They had to fit the rigorous "sensitivity training" in there somewhere. Then everything went to shit.
Bulldogs are fucking ugly and that painting is even uglier.
#DeleteFacebook
Was it like that in the beginning, the 80s/90s? Nope.
It's only of recent times, mainly wall street VCs hiring inexperienced college kids to run billion $ businesses.
Of course it would be a frat house. That all college kids know since there's more emphasis in college life nowadays compated to the days of Hewitt, Berns Lee and Cerf.
Amen to it all. Not going to name names, but I've ran into this kind of behavior amoungst those who should have known better.
The funny thing about this whole issue is how much of it would go away if telecommuting was more popular. What are they all going to do? Ogle the dog?
During the 1980s, I remember reading an article in InfoWorld (a magazine about IT for the enterprise - a magazine aimed at managers) in which Steve Jobs describes his first experience with acid.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
... rich, entitled frat bros? Get outta town! Who's gonna believe that?
I thought Sillycon Valley 'leaders' were all woke to #metoo? Are you saying it's all just virtue signalling? Lies?
My heroes have been shattered. Oh, the horrors.