Good is a US based company and is legally bound to NOT be truthful, just as Verizon, AT&T and other are.
I don't think that's true. I don't think the US government can compel companies to lie. Note that it doesn't appear that Verizon and AT&T lied: they kept quiet for a long time, but when they were eventually asked they admitted to handing over essentially all US call traffic.
It proves what Google and Facebook said all along.
When Google Microsoft and Facebook deny they gave *direct* access to the NSA, they were telling the truth. They gave direct access to the *FBI* who gave direct access to the NSA! See! Not a lie!
That's not what Google said. Google said "First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."
Note that the statement was not limited to NSA spying.
That WP graphic you linked isn't inconsistent with Google's statements, though. The graphic implies, but does not state, that the data for the "tasking" is automatically extracted and returned to the FBI without any involvement by the company. If instead you assume that the tasking merely results in the delivery of a properly-formatted request to the company, then it fits. Google's statement does say that Google provides data to the company after its legal team reviews the request, and the Google Transparency report shows that Google does provide at least some data for 70% of requests. If we assume the legal staff reviews requests, pushing back on overly broad or otherwise inappropriate requests, then directs the collection of the data and sends it to the FBI, that process would match what's described, with the key addition of a human review process.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though I don't know anything about any of this stuff. I do, however, have pretty good reason to believe that Google is being truthful, mostly because Google's statements fit the company's culture and approach, and the theories about direct access or backdoors do not, and because I think this kind of program would be very hard to hide from Googlers... and I think the aforementioned culture would make it impossible to suppress if it were discovered.)
Force anyone supporting such laws to restate them in the form: "I think the government should forcibly remove the following rights I enjoy from because...". No matter what comes after the 'because', that statement should cause revulsion in everyone if the target group is anything other than 'legally convicted criminals who haven't yet paid their debt to society'.
Fixed that for you. The way we mistreat those who were once convicted of something is yet another problem (along with the large numbers of people we convict... including an astonishing number of innocents).
If you want to blame something blame prohibition, as a lot of the beers we have now in the states started out as bathtub beers during prohibition
Cite? I only looked up Coors and Budweiser, but both of them started well before prohibition. What I've read of prohibition and the history of alcohol consumption in the United States is that there was fairly little beer during prohibition. It wasn't worth the risk. Prohibition made distilled spirits popular.
No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.
But... it's not. The GUIs for this work quite well. You can keep trying to prop this strawman up, but he's still made of straw.
Maybe the SEO guy wants to help Google get a higher ranking on Bing, Baidu, etc.? I mean, I just googled "Web Search" on Bing and Google was #7 on the list. That's not good!
Given the fact that pirate sites are often full of malware, that just seems like protecting the users. Plus the average user isn't going to have any idea what do to with a torrent link.
You assert that there are more "if I care to look". I looked, didn't find anything. Do you actually have any other examples, or is this a case of listing the only thing you know of that's remotely relevant and then breezily implying there's a lot more and the only reason I can't find it is because I'm stupid or lazy?
> Cite?
You really have to ask? Maybe the Michelle Obama incident is a good one. Googled modified their system for her, but not for others. What influence do you think she might have had? Hmmm?
Thank you for that counterexample. Google did not modify the search results in that case. It did insert an "ad" above the result apologizing that sometimes search results can be offensive.
So, now that we have one citation countering the original assertion that Google will modify results with the appropriate inducements, do we have anything to support it?
It may depend on the accents and speech patterns of those who call you, but I find that GV transcriptions generally do a reasonable job of giving me the gist of the message. I'd say I have to actually listen to the message maybe 30% of the time, and even then it's usually just to clarify the details.
Oh... I can't believe I wrote all of that without mentioning the offshoring push. That was what finally pushed me out the door, the writing was on the wall that all development was moving overseas -- and not even to India, because India is too expensive! I spent a lot of time working with engineers in Brazil and Romania. Good people, but offshore development is painful -- and IBM's customers will feel that pain, until they abandon IBM.
Whenever I read news about IBM, I'm glad I got out of that place. When I joined the company in the mid-90s, during Gerstner's reign, it was a great place to work, and a very successful company. There were plenty of problems, to be sure, and Gerstner laid off lots of employees, but the company was focused on the future and on building new and successful business. The employees were generally treated quite well, performance was amply rewarded, and education budgets were generous and easily accessible to ensure that technical employees continued developing their skills and the culture was one of mutual support to get things done. For large technology companies, I think the approach to employee continuing skill development is something of a bellwether for the company's future.
When Gerstner stepped down and Palmisano took over, however, the company began a long, gradual slide. It became cost-obsessed and quarterly earnings-focused. Some belt-tightening was appropriate during the dotcom bust, but that actually didn't hit IBM very hard. The problem was that Palmisano's leadership team had no idea how to create new business, the IBM services group that Gerstner started and used to revitalize the company was reaching a kind of natural saturation point, so Palmisano started slashing costs to prop up profit growth as revenue growth got harder to find. Even worse, the cost pressure began to change the culture of the company, creating more internal competition which began to turn ugly.
By the time I left in 2011, IBM had become a fairly unpleasant place to work. Global Services was the worst, for example utilization targets were routinely set so high that it was impossible to take vacation time without working overtime in order to make up for it, and cost controls had squeezed out all career development funding unless you could hide it in customer contracts. Software Group was struggling and had shifted more to focus on sales rather than development. IBM has always been primarily a sales company, backed by engineering, but shifting the balance too far towards sales is a way to boost short-term profits at the expense of long-term success. I personally got caught in that shift; my job was transformed underneath me from an architecture and development role to a technical sales support role. I even hear from my friends in R&D that they were also getting squeezed hard, with increasing pressure to abandon work on any ideas that couldn't be productized within a few months.
When I heard that Ginni Rometty was taking over for Palmisano last year I just shook my head. Rometty was a driving force in squeezing services employees with ever-increasing utilization targets and ever-tightening cost structures. IMO, IBM needs another visionary like Gerstner, not another jumped-up middle manager like Palmisano, but that's what they got in Rometty. She's a smart, talented, aggressive jumped-up middle manager, but still not what IBM needs, IMO.
I'm glad I left. I really should have done it a few years before I did.
On the other hand, I seriously doubt this was the first/only time this has **EVER** happened, so my conclusion is that google has no process for this which is a sure sign of a company being simply too big to bother.
Either that or it was an anomaly. Stuff happens... regardless of the size of the company. In fact, things like that tend to get fixed quickly and effectively at Google, more so than any company I've worked for, big or small. In general you have a problem, you file a ticket, and your problem gets fixed -- usually with surprising speed, often in minutes. Google is a big company, but it has an extensive support staff whose job is to ensure that engineers aren't distracted by trivialities.
Not so much. Maybe a few years ago, but not any more. There's a pretty good mix, now. I'm 43 and most of the engineers I work with are in their 30s, with a fair number of 40-somethings and a smattering of 50- and 60- year-olds, as well as a contingent of youngsters not long out of school.
Google also has the advantage that they're considered a hot place to work, so they probably get a lot of very good applicants.
A lot of applicants, period... some good, most not. Google interviews a lot of people for every one hired.
The work atmosphere you describe sounds good. It's always pleasure to work with good people, as you can learn more and it keeps you on your toes.
Indeed it is. When people ask me about working at Google they always want to hear about all the perks, and those are nice, but what makes it really fun and gratifying is the people.
If the first position is a "temp->perm" or other contract situation, then it's a much more understandable switch. But for a permanent position, it's awkward if it shows up on your resume.
Meh.
Perhaps if it happens multiple times, or in cases where there isn't a clear reason why you'd make that jump. If it had happened like that to me, I wouldn't have worried at all about jumping after a short period of time. And if someone had questioned me about it later, I'd have said "Dude... Google!", and unless the company I bailed on was of similar stature (and if that was the case I wouldn't have done it) I'd expect future interviewers to say "Yeah, makes sense."
Plus, if it's only a few weeks, you can always just leave the intermediate employer off your resume. It's not like that brief stint could actually add any value, even if it doesn't do any harm. And even if you end up with a small gap, the fact that the company after the gap was Google should eliminate any thoughts that you might be less valuable because you were briefly out of work.
If managers aren't really managing projects and only making sure devs are happy, then they aren't really managers. At best they are gofers.
I can see you've never worked for a really good manager, managing a really good team. A good manager who knows how to keep the road clear of obstacles is worth his or her weight in gold.
Also, project management is different from people management... and both are different from product management.
A product manager's job is to make sure that the team is building the right thing. They spend a lot of their time on user studies, market surveys, competitive analyses, business plans, etc. They also often manage the UX (user experience) team -- the UI designers and human-factors people.
A project manager's job is to make sure that the thing is getting built, and to coordinate project status with all of the other parts of the company. They spend their time on planning and scheduling, and tracking... and especially on identifying potential bottlenecks and risks.
An engineering manager's job is to make sure that the engineers have the right tools, skills and support, and that they're happy with what they're working on, feeling challenged but not overwhelmed, progressing in their careers, and to deal with any personal (or personnel) issues that come up as well as to interface with higher management to clear any obstacles from the team's path.
An HR manager's job is to handle sensitive and problematic issues which require more training. Unless something is wrong, one HR manager can serve hundreds of employees.
While I'm at it, a tech lead's job is to make sure that the project is being built right -- architecture, code quality, etc. -- and to help solve the hard technical problems, and an executive's job is to set the vision and to be a decisionmaker.
In smaller companies, some of these roles get combined in the same person, but at a company like Google they're pretty well-defined and separated roles, and the managers Bock was referring to are the direct people managers... what I called "engineering managers" because that's the sort I'm familiar with. At Google, product and project managers tend to be businessy types, though with some grounding in engineering, while engineering managers, executives and (obviously) tech leads are engineers, except that managers and execs don't typically do much engineering any more. Engineering managers in particular, though, have to have been outstanding engineers and have to stay quite competent, else they can't effectively understand the perspectives of the engineers they serve.
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Good is a US based company and is legally bound to NOT be truthful, just as Verizon, AT&T and other are.
I don't think that's true. I don't think the US government can compel companies to lie. Note that it doesn't appear that Verizon and AT&T lied: they kept quiet for a long time, but when they were eventually asked they admitted to handing over essentially all US call traffic.
Have you missed the Washington Post PRISM 2 leaks just released?: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/inner-workings-of-a-top-secret-spy-program/282/
It proves what Google and Facebook said all along.
When Google Microsoft and Facebook deny they gave *direct* access to the NSA, they were telling the truth. They gave direct access to the *FBI* who gave direct access to the NSA! See! Not a lie!
That's not what Google said. Google said "First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."
Note that the statement was not limited to NSA spying.
That WP graphic you linked isn't inconsistent with Google's statements, though. The graphic implies, but does not state, that the data for the "tasking" is automatically extracted and returned to the FBI without any involvement by the company. If instead you assume that the tasking merely results in the delivery of a properly-formatted request to the company, then it fits. Google's statement does say that Google provides data to the company after its legal team reviews the request, and the Google Transparency report shows that Google does provide at least some data for 70% of requests. If we assume the legal staff reviews requests, pushing back on overly broad or otherwise inappropriate requests, then directs the collection of the data and sends it to the FBI, that process would match what's described, with the key addition of a human review process.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though I don't know anything about any of this stuff. I do, however, have pretty good reason to believe that Google is being truthful, mostly because Google's statements fit the company's culture and approach, and the theories about direct access or backdoors do not, and because I think this kind of program would be very hard to hide from Googlers... and I think the aforementioned culture would make it impossible to suppress if it were discovered.)
Force anyone supporting such laws to restate them in the form: "I think the government should forcibly remove the following rights I enjoy from because...". No matter what comes after the 'because', that statement should cause revulsion in everyone if the target group is anything other than 'legally convicted criminals who haven't yet paid their debt to society'.
Fixed that for you. The way we mistreat those who were once convicted of something is yet another problem (along with the large numbers of people we convict... including an astonishing number of innocents).
If you want to blame something blame prohibition, as a lot of the beers we have now in the states started out as bathtub beers during prohibition
Cite? I only looked up Coors and Budweiser, but both of them started well before prohibition. What I've read of prohibition and the history of alcohol consumption in the United States is that there was fairly little beer during prohibition. It wasn't worth the risk. Prohibition made distilled spirits popular.
Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu?
Yep. It's worked flawlessly for me many times.
Lol, God help the person who needs help from other search engines to discover the existence of Google.
I'm disappointed that no one responded to my use of "google" as a verb when describing searching on Bing to find Google.
No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.
But... it's not. The GUIs for this work quite well. You can keep trying to prop this strawman up, but he's still made of straw.
Maybe the SEO guy wants to help Google get a higher ranking on Bing, Baidu, etc.? I mean, I just googled "Web Search" on Bing and Google was #7 on the list. That's not good!
Here's one: Google To Start Punishing Pirate Sites In Search Results
There's more if you care to look.
Given the fact that pirate sites are often full of malware, that just seems like protecting the users. Plus the average user isn't going to have any idea what do to with a torrent link.
You assert that there are more "if I care to look". I looked, didn't find anything. Do you actually have any other examples, or is this a case of listing the only thing you know of that's remotely relevant and then breezily implying there's a lot more and the only reason I can't find it is because I'm stupid or lazy?
> Cite?
You really have to ask? Maybe the Michelle Obama incident is a good one. Googled modified their system for her, but not for others. What influence do you think she might have had? Hmmm?
Thank you for that counterexample. Google did not modify the search results in that case. It did insert an "ad" above the result apologizing that sometimes search results can be offensive.
Here's a citation for you: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/25/google.michelle.obama.controversy-2/
So, now that we have one citation countering the original assertion that Google will modify results with the appropriate inducements, do we have anything to support it?
Google is more then happy to shape search results to meet various institution's preferences if you ask the right way.
Cite?
I'm interested in the particular model.
Link?
It may depend on the accents and speech patterns of those who call you, but I find that GV transcriptions generally do a reasonable job of giving me the gist of the message. I'd say I have to actually listen to the message maybe 30% of the time, and even then it's usually just to clarify the details.
Best explanation I've seen of Software Group's current business model.
Oh... I can't believe I wrote all of that without mentioning the offshoring push. That was what finally pushed me out the door, the writing was on the wall that all development was moving overseas -- and not even to India, because India is too expensive! I spent a lot of time working with engineers in Brazil and Romania. Good people, but offshore development is painful -- and IBM's customers will feel that pain, until they abandon IBM.
Whenever I read news about IBM, I'm glad I got out of that place. When I joined the company in the mid-90s, during Gerstner's reign, it was a great place to work, and a very successful company. There were plenty of problems, to be sure, and Gerstner laid off lots of employees, but the company was focused on the future and on building new and successful business. The employees were generally treated quite well, performance was amply rewarded, and education budgets were generous and easily accessible to ensure that technical employees continued developing their skills and the culture was one of mutual support to get things done. For large technology companies, I think the approach to employee continuing skill development is something of a bellwether for the company's future.
When Gerstner stepped down and Palmisano took over, however, the company began a long, gradual slide. It became cost-obsessed and quarterly earnings-focused. Some belt-tightening was appropriate during the dotcom bust, but that actually didn't hit IBM very hard. The problem was that Palmisano's leadership team had no idea how to create new business, the IBM services group that Gerstner started and used to revitalize the company was reaching a kind of natural saturation point, so Palmisano started slashing costs to prop up profit growth as revenue growth got harder to find. Even worse, the cost pressure began to change the culture of the company, creating more internal competition which began to turn ugly.
By the time I left in 2011, IBM had become a fairly unpleasant place to work. Global Services was the worst, for example utilization targets were routinely set so high that it was impossible to take vacation time without working overtime in order to make up for it, and cost controls had squeezed out all career development funding unless you could hide it in customer contracts. Software Group was struggling and had shifted more to focus on sales rather than development. IBM has always been primarily a sales company, backed by engineering, but shifting the balance too far towards sales is a way to boost short-term profits at the expense of long-term success. I personally got caught in that shift; my job was transformed underneath me from an architecture and development role to a technical sales support role. I even hear from my friends in R&D that they were also getting squeezed hard, with increasing pressure to abandon work on any ideas that couldn't be productized within a few months.
When I heard that Ginni Rometty was taking over for Palmisano last year I just shook my head. Rometty was a driving force in squeezing services employees with ever-increasing utilization targets and ever-tightening cost structures. IMO, IBM needs another visionary like Gerstner, not another jumped-up middle manager like Palmisano, but that's what they got in Rometty. She's a smart, talented, aggressive jumped-up middle manager, but still not what IBM needs, IMO.
I'm glad I left. I really should have done it a few years before I did.
Did you miss the "use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish"?
On the other hand, I seriously doubt this was the first/only time this has **EVER** happened, so my conclusion is that google has no process for this which is a sure sign of a company being simply too big to bother.
Either that or it was an anomaly. Stuff happens... regardless of the size of the company. In fact, things like that tend to get fixed quickly and effectively at Google, more so than any company I've worked for, big or small. In general you have a problem, you file a ticket, and your problem gets fixed -- usually with surprising speed, often in minutes. Google is a big company, but it has an extensive support staff whose job is to ensure that engineers aren't distracted by trivialities.
Settings/Accounts/Google/Google+/Camera & Photos/Auto-Backup ... just set it to "Off".
Which is the default, actually. If it's been uploading everything, it's because you explicitly told it to.
Google employees are on average quite young
Not so much. Maybe a few years ago, but not any more. There's a pretty good mix, now. I'm 43 and most of the engineers I work with are in their 30s, with a fair number of 40-somethings and a smattering of 50- and 60- year-olds, as well as a contingent of youngsters not long out of school.
Google also has the advantage that they're considered a hot place to work, so they probably get a lot of very good applicants.
A lot of applicants, period... some good, most not. Google interviews a lot of people for every one hired.
The work atmosphere you describe sounds good. It's always pleasure to work with good people, as you can learn more and it keeps you on your toes.
Indeed it is. When people ask me about working at Google they always want to hear about all the perks, and those are nice, but what makes it really fun and gratifying is the people.
You kindof just proved his point right there...
How so?
If the first position is a "temp->perm" or other contract situation, then it's a much more understandable switch. But for a permanent position, it's awkward if it shows up on your resume.
Meh.
Perhaps if it happens multiple times, or in cases where there isn't a clear reason why you'd make that jump. If it had happened like that to me, I wouldn't have worried at all about jumping after a short period of time. And if someone had questioned me about it later, I'd have said "Dude... Google!", and unless the company I bailed on was of similar stature (and if that was the case I wouldn't have done it) I'd expect future interviewers to say "Yeah, makes sense."
Plus, if it's only a few weeks, you can always just leave the intermediate employer off your resume. It's not like that brief stint could actually add any value, even if it doesn't do any harm. And even if you end up with a small gap, the fact that the company after the gap was Google should eliminate any thoughts that you might be less valuable because you were briefly out of work.
If managers aren't really managing projects and only making sure devs are happy, then they aren't really managers. At best they are gofers.
I can see you've never worked for a really good manager, managing a really good team. A good manager who knows how to keep the road clear of obstacles is worth his or her weight in gold.
Also, project management is different from people management... and both are different from product management.
A product manager's job is to make sure that the team is building the right thing. They spend a lot of their time on user studies, market surveys, competitive analyses, business plans, etc. They also often manage the UX (user experience) team -- the UI designers and human-factors people.
A project manager's job is to make sure that the thing is getting built, and to coordinate project status with all of the other parts of the company. They spend their time on planning and scheduling, and tracking... and especially on identifying potential bottlenecks and risks.
An engineering manager's job is to make sure that the engineers have the right tools, skills and support, and that they're happy with what they're working on, feeling challenged but not overwhelmed, progressing in their careers, and to deal with any personal (or personnel) issues that come up as well as to interface with higher management to clear any obstacles from the team's path.
An HR manager's job is to handle sensitive and problematic issues which require more training. Unless something is wrong, one HR manager can serve hundreds of employees.
While I'm at it, a tech lead's job is to make sure that the project is being built right -- architecture, code quality, etc. -- and to help solve the hard technical problems, and an executive's job is to set the vision and to be a decisionmaker.
In smaller companies, some of these roles get combined in the same person, but at a company like Google they're pretty well-defined and separated roles, and the managers Bock was referring to are the direct people managers... what I called "engineering managers" because that's the sort I'm familiar with. At Google, product and project managers tend to be businessy types, though with some grounding in engineering, while engineering managers, executives and (obviously) tech leads are engineers, except that managers and execs don't typically do much engineering any more. Engineering managers in particular, though, have to have been outstanding engineers and have to stay quite competent, else they can't effectively understand the perspectives of the engineers they serve.