I actually agree with you that Google's arrogance does do it harm and will continue to do so in the future. However, it's also the only thing that lets Google continue to focus on users rather than dedicating itself to advertising, its revenue source. Without that arrogance, there would be no Google self-driving cars, Chrome would never have come into existence (to understand that statement you have to know the history of Chrome), etc.
Eventually Google will have to come down to earth. The 30-40% year on year growth will slow, margins will decline, the perks will have to be reined in, etc. I do have confidence that Google will be able to do that fairly smoothly. While the "smartest team ever" is overblown, it certainly is true that Google has a lot of very smart people -- and what's even more impressive to me, remarkably few stupid people. I think the landing will be fairly gentle -- but I also think it's still years away.
I wasn't arguing that Google isn't an advertising company. I was just pointing out that that's not how Google thinks of itself, and the fact that it actually is an advertising company doesn't really drive how Google does business. From a pure business standpoint, that's bad, because companies generally do better when their incentives and approaches to the market are aligned precisely with their actual business. From a "is it reasonable to trust Google" perspective, I think it's good, because it insulates Google's decisionmaking processes from excessive influence by advertisers.
I can't quite tell whether this guff is meant to be serious or not.
If it really is written by a happy Google employee, it does more to make me dislike and mistrust them than any number of anti-Google rants ever could, which in turn leads me to suspect it is some subltle reverse psychology astroturfing.
I'm quite serious about it, and I'm quite happy with my job. What about my comments makes you mistrust "them" (not sure whether you mean Google employees, or Google the company)?
If Google employees were really all about making the world a better place, we'd forgo our nice salaries, expensive offices and all of the well-publicized perks.
Offices? I thought at Google, the employees didn't have offices. You don't work all out in the open? Are the offices private, or multiple people per office?
I was referring to the buildings, which are pretty cool. No, we don't have private offices. On my first day they handed me a very nice pair of headphones and said "Here's your office";-)
I think 1s latency would create a terrible web browsing experience. It would impose an absolute minimum delay of three seconds for going to any new site (DNS lookup, one second, SYN/ACK, one second, request/response, one second), and if the site consists of anything more than a single HTML page (no CSS files, no Javascript files, no images, etc.) then you're going to have additional delays getting all of those. In addition to whatever delays are imposed by bandwidth limitations.
However, I do agree that 300 ms isn't horrible for surfing. Bad, but not horrible. Certainly not what I'd expect on a wired broadband connection, though.
That is a contradiction. Which is it? Customers pay money. That's how it works. Otherwise they are not customers. You have buyers and sellers, products, and end users. You can tell which is which by following the money.
The way Google looks at it is that both the users and the advertisers are customers. Of the two, Google focuses the vast majority of its attention on the users, not the advertisers. The reason is that Google largely views the money as a means to an end. The end is to create cool technology that improves peoples' lives.
Okay, I know you're barfing... but I'm telling you that's what people inside Google really talk about and focus on, at all levels, impossible as it may seem to believe of a for-profit corporation. The advertising, and other (much smaller) revenue streams, are seen as an unfortunately-necessary diversion from the main task, one that is justified in part with the idea that advertising can theoretically provide useful information to users, if it's well-targeted and not annoying.
Granted, there's a little cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint. If Google employees were really all about making the world a better place, we'd forgo our nice salaries, expensive offices and all of the well-publicized perks. But it's a cognitive dissonance that rarely comes to the surface, because so far in the company's history, other than the first big concession to reality when Page and Brin decided they could swallow their pride and sell advertising, the money has pretty much rolled in continuously, in ever-increasing amounts, so no one really feels the conflict between do-gooder intent and the necessity of collecting tens of billions of dollars. I mean, thanks to the AdWords auction, Google doesn't even have to dirty itself setting prices. The advertisers set the prices they pay to Google, and they just keep bidding 'em up.
The result is that the academic, blue-sky, make-the-world-better thinking that Google claims, really is how the company's collective culture "thinks", and the "Don't Be Evil" mantra really is important. The funny thing about this situation is that everyone who is used to the way that normal companies behave looks at this and assumes that it must be fake, because no corporation could really be like that. Therefore, it must not only not be true, but there must clearly be a concerted attempt to hide the truth from the world. All this do-gooderness must be a sham front put up to hide some deep, nefarious plot. So, when Google stumbles and does something that isn't so good for the world, people cry "Ah ha! I knew it! They really are Evil!". And even when Google doesn't stumble, widespread skepticism ensues.
All of this, of course, is really annoying and disheartening to Google insiders who spend their days focused on trying to create the next great improvement in Google's services, or the next great service, or even just improving the user experience of what Google does now. And so there is much unhappiness among Google employees about the way some of the world views their selfless work. Unhappiness which is typically expressed while drinking free barista-prepared lattes after a free gourmet lunch before hitting the free gym and then returning to their cubes in posh offices and working on their expensive computers before going home to estimate their next bonus and tot up the value of their next block of stock to vest.
Yes, Google is a weird place. But, honestly, profits really are a second-order concern, because -- so far -- as long as Google has made users happy, advertisers have been happy to keep throwing money. So advertisers really aren't the focus of the vast majority of Googlers.
I did part time telecommuting for a few years. It saved my an hour a day in commute time and reduce my gas purchases by half. There is one downside to telecommuting that wasn't mention in the article. At times, it can be difficult to separate work and personal time. If the work is engaging, it is easy to lose track of time and work many more hours. When working on tasks that are boring and monotonous, it can become impossible to focus. It is much easier to get into work mode when the environment changes.
Different people are different; I don't think one size fits all. For me, I found it much easier to balance work and home life while telecommuting, because of the flexibility it gave me -- not to mention the hours saved in commute time. I telecommuted nearly full time for 10 years, and then a year ago got a new job that requires me to be in the office most of the time, and it's been hard adjusting. I appreciated the ability to easily leave "work" for an hour or two to go to a kid's school production, or to go out for a run, or whatever. I shifted some of my "work" time late into the evening when my family was in bed. All in all, I really preferred it. I love my new job, but I'd love it even more if I could work from home.
I found that it is useful to maintain some separation, though, even when working from home, mainly so that your family can distinguish between your work and non-work time. I did it by designating my home office as my workspace. My kids knew that when Dad was in his office, he was working and not to be disturbed if possible. Though my wife never did grasp the concept, somehow...
That doesn't mean I only worked in my office. Geek that I am, I packed my laptop everywhere, and I didn't see anything wrong with answering a few e-mails while watching a movie with the kids or something. On the other hand, I also didn't see anything wrong with ignoring the e-mail when it wasn't convenient.
Company culture (this was at IBM) had quickly developed some rules of etiquette that really helped. For example, one rule is that you don't call anyone on the phone without first instant messaging them to ask if you can call. So when people aren't working, they shut off their IM client, and that's a signal to everyone else that they aren't to be bothered. Some other rules were that e-mail was not used when quick replies were expected and that background noise (kids, dogs, whatever) was normal and not unprofessional during conference calls.
One thing that really makes a huge difference in your ability to successfully telecommute is the number of your colleagues who telecommute. At IBM it quickly became everyone, so it worked very well. At Google, where I am now, most everyone is in the office and while we have great tools for remote communication (Google+ Hangouts, basically, integrated into calendaring and with high-end audio/video equipment in the conference rooms), if you're not around for the water cooler conversation you miss a lot, and it would be hard to be productive.
Re:I like both forms, but printed is still best
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The eBook Backlash
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The first and most obvious is durability. If it gets wet, you just dry it out. It doesn't mind being tossed on a shelf or a desk (even violently). It's ok with being caught out in the rain if an unexpected downpour comes up.
Durability really isn't an issue. I keep a large plastic baggie tucked in the pocket on my Galaxy Tab's cover. In wet environments, I just drop it in the baggie... and I can even keep reading! No worries about water spots on the pages. It's also been tossed on shelves and desks, dropped, etc. With a basic cover, there's not much risk of anything short of driving a truck over it.
Also, all of my non-DRM'd ebooks are backed up to multiple locations. Whatever the durability of the reader, the durability of the actual ebook is unparalleled.
The second is portability. Books don't mind being crushed in a backpack. They can be used in almost ANY lighting conditions equally well. They can be safely mailed or lent to friends without worrying about whether they're going to "break" it.
My tablet doesn't mind being crushed in a backpack. It can be used in any lighting condition, including full darkness, without need for a separate lamp or light (I do most of my reading in bed at night, and even a little book like annoys my wife, but the slight glow of dim white text on a black background on my tablet doesn't bother her at all). It works fine in full daylight, too, though I find it helps to change it to black text on a white background. Most of the eBooks I buy are from Baen, who doens't do DRM, so I can actually e-mail them a copy of a book -- in multiple formats so they can use whatever sort of reading device they want. Or they can print it on paper if they like.
Also, eBooks have huge portability advantages over paper books. I carry a whole library on my tablet; hundreds of books. Even better, I have all of the same books on my phone so my entire library fits in my pocket, and is basically always with me.
There's an additional benefit with Amazon Kindle books and Google Books, too -- both readers sync my reading location to the cloud, so I can read for a while on my tablet at home, then if I have a little time to kill while waiting in line at the grocery store or something I can whip out my phone and pick up right where I left off on the tablet. When I get home, I pick up the tablet and continue on. (I really need to find an epub reader that syncs to DropBox or something so the same will work with my Baen books. It'll come.)
The third is loanability. It's easy to borrow or loan a book. You just hand it to the person, and hope they bring it back. DRM one-reader systems? Not so much.
Yeah. DRM sucks. A big reason I prefer Baen. Given that the music industry finally had to give up on DRM, I'm hopeful that the book industry will get there as well.
My remaining reasons are intangibles, like the pleasure of perusing shelves fully of books to see what someone likes to read, to find something you want to borrow, to have that visceral knowledge that "this is a person who likes to read and educate themselves" when you walk into a room and see boxes or shelves full of books.
You can still see that about other people and their shelves of books. Your decision about whether or not to go electronic doesn't affect them, after all. If your concern is that they can't see your shelves, well, yeah, that's a problem. Build a web site of all the books you read or something.
Perhaps the most important feature of a printed book is the fact that I OWN it.
Again, DRM sucks. To me it's the biggest argument against eBooks. For reference books, a lesser argument is that I find that while ebooks are more searchable, paper books are more "flippable".
Ouch, yeah, businesses can also be significantly damaged if employees use their equipment for illegal purposes. I never met a CIO that brought this up as a major concern, though.
My current employer (Google) allows me to do whatever I like with my company computers (laptop and desktop) as long as I don't circumvent the security policies. Oh, and they also don't promise to help me recover any personal data if something happens to the machine and tech support needs to work on it. Of course, the drive is a 128 GB SSD so there isn't room for very much on it anyway. I have a 1 TB external drive for most of my stuff because there's just not much room on the internal drive.
Only if you're signed in and making it easier for Google to track what you're searching for.
You can also use https even if you're not logged in. And if you are logged in and don't want your searches tracked, you can turn off search history. Personally, I like search history on. It makes repeated searches easier and I think it improves my search results, too.
The other posters have covered well the fact that you really shouldn't try to work around the employer's policies. Getting caught is likely, and almost certainly grounds for termination. Don't go there.
That said, you should find out what the employer's policies actually are, rather than just assuming they're going to be insane. I've had a company-issued laptop since the mid-90s, with several different employers, and none of them have done what you describe. Moreover, I've also spent years consulting with dozens of companies about their IT security policies, including management of laptop use, and none of them have approached it the way you describe, either.
Most employers care about (in decreasing order of importance):
1. The security of their data. There are lots of good reasons for this, obviously. This includes things like full-disk encryption to ensure that if the laptop is lost the data it might carry is not revealed, and mal-ware prevention in order to prevent mal-ware from revealing important data.
2. The security of their network. Since you'll bring the laptop into the office and connect it to the network, employers don't want the laptop to be a vector for malware or targeted attacks.
3. Preventing HR problems. Stuff like porn on screens in the office can create sexual harassment lawsuits. This is the primary reason for anti-porn rules.
4. Productivity. Misuse of company equipment on company time means (arguably) that productive work that should be done isn't. This is another reason for anti-porn and anti-surfing rules.
Different companies take different approaches to managing these risks. A common, if very authoritarian, approach to limiting malware, for example, is to allow only software which is specifically approved by IT to be installed on the machine. Keylogging doesn't really accomplish any of the above, however, and I've never seen any company who does it, with the exception of one company that installs a browser plugin which watches for users typing their corporate password into non-company web sites.
If you're using the laptop at home, on your own time, I don't think most employers will care if you surf a little, check your personal e-mail, watch Netflix, etc. They may or may not care if you surf porn. I think most would rather not know. Outside of that, if it doesn't require changing the security configuration of the laptop, doesn't require installing software and doesn't interfere with productive work, I doubt they're going to care.
Check out the policy carefully, ask questions to make sure you understand it, and then comply with it. But I would be surprised if the policy truly is as draconian as you say.
You fill out the ballot, put your ballot in the anonymity envelope, put that in the envelope with your name on it, sign the outer ballot, and send it off in the mail.
What I was saying is that the mantra that everyone keeps referring to when talking about Google ("Do No Evil"), is meaningless.
Technically, it's "Don't Be Evil."
They are just another corporation looking towards the next quarterly earnings report and beholden to their investors. Period.
Actually, Google is quite different in a couple of ways. One huge one is that the company is really not very beholden to its investors. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, between them, have more votes than all of the rest of the shareholders combined. During the IPO they gave their stock 10 votes per share, and the common stock only one vote per share. Given that both of them have more money than anyone could spend, I think that really reduces the focus on stock price.
Another is that in the Founders' Letter during the IPO, which as I understand it is a legally-binding document that sets out how the company is to be run and what goals it will pursue, Page and Brin specified that Google is not and will not be a quarterly-focused company.
How different does that make the company, really? I don't know. But I can say that from the inside it looks very different from the other corporations I've worked for.
I would bet that "Do No Evil" is meaningless inside the company.
In my experience as a Google employee, that's not true. In terms of terminology, the phrase "Don't be evil" doesn't get used much... instead it's usually phrased as "Be Googley" or "That's the Googley way to do it", or similar. "Googley" is an adjective that has a lot of meanings, but respect for others, including others' privacy, is a big part of it. When decisions are being made, having someone say that an idea is not Googley is a near-fatal blow. Unless the proponents of the idea can explain why it is Googley (non-evil), or can fix it so that it's Googley, it's going to fail -- and "But it will make us a lot of money" is not a valid counterargument.
The one exception, I think, is ideas that have the potential to be evil. Those are okay, as long as care is taken to ensure that Google will not, in fact, use them in evil ways. Thus, it's not considered evil to compile a big patent warchest, because Google intends to use the patents only in defensive ways. The fact that a future Google, with a different policy, could act differently is not considered an argument that compiling a big patent warchest is non-Googley. Similarly, collecting lots of information about people who haven't opted out isn't evil because Google doesn't intend to use the information in evil ways. On the other hand, collecting information about people who have said they don't want to be tracked is non-Googley.
So, I'd say while "Don't Be Evil" may not be interpreted as stringently as some might like, it's far from meaningless.
Keep in mind, though, that I speak from my perspective as a one-year employee, who's mainly only seen how my little corner of the company works. The culture appears to be pretty consistent company-wide, however, and there's a strong focus on "indoctrinating" all new employees. The very first training session I had, on my very first day of employment, was all about Google culture and what it means to be Googley. I really think it's taken seriously.
and opt in format so that no one but Google and myself sees this data
Per their privacy policy, Google does not share your data with anyone else without your permission, with two exceptions:
1. Google will comply with the law. For example, if Google is served with a search warrant for your data, they'll hand it over.
2. For "external processing". What the privacy policy says is "We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures."
Actually there's a third exception if you're using a Google Apps account, which is that your domain admin may have access to stuff. As an admin for a Google Apps domain, I don't see that I have any special access to information about the accounts in my domain, but maybe there's something I'm not seeing. Well, I guess I could change their passwords and log in as them.
all the data they collect is made available to me and I can be selective in what I allow shown to the public
See the Google privacy dashboard to see what information Google has collected on you (google.com/privacy/tools). Google's privacy policy says they don't show any of your data to the public.
when I do opt in I can then be assured that only information I deem acceptable is presented to advertizes and whomever else pays for data like this
Google doesn't sell your data.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but the above is my own, personal understanding of the privacy policy, gained from reading it myself. I could be completely wrong. Read it yourself to be sure what it says -- it's not long and it's written in plain English.)
Google is a global private company. The simple fact that Google is "forced" to obey the laws of China if it wishes to operate there is actually a perfect example of Schmidt's point. Currently China has power over Google
Google ceased complying with Chinese demands that Google censor searches for China in 2010.
Facebook's "Restricted" list does the same thing. Facebook adopted most of the good ideas G+ had within a few months of it going public.
With a little less flexibility. On Google+ you can also set that "how much" slider to "not very much", so you'll still see some content from those people, and it'll be the most re-shared and commented-on stuff. So you'll only see the stuff those "uninteresting" people post which others do find interesting, which may help you pretend to be paying attention, without actually having to pay attention:-)
I think the "how much" slider needs to be a bit more fine-grained, though. I'd like a setting between "none" and "not very much". And perhaps rather than adjusting it with a slider, it would be nicer to just be able to click on the posts and say "less of this" or "more of that".
Google should advertise that if you switch to G+, your grandmother, talkative aunt, and your mother probably wont find you again for at least another year or two.
Heh. Even better, when your grandmother, talkative aunt and mother do find Google+, you can add them to your "ignore" circle, which is one on which you've set the "how much to show" slider to "show nothing". Then they'll get a nice message saying that you've circled them but you'll never see any of their posts unless you specifically go look. Oh, and they'll never see your non-public posts, either.
I agree that given conflicting requests, the best thing to do is to respect the most conservative. Even better would be to find some way to highlight to the user that Google's +1 button isn't going to work properly on various sites because of the Safari privacy setting so the user understands the nature of their choice and can make an appropriate decision.
I think this situation was the result of a decision to follow the lead of Facebook, which is clearly not what Google should be doing, but it's somewhat understandable because respecting the privacy decision means that on many sites for users of Safari the Facebook "Like" button works while the Google+ "+1" button does not. Anyway, I agree that the choice was wrong, but I can understand the competitive motivation, and it's hard to classify really as "privacy invasion", even though it technically is overriding of a user's privacy selection.
The "+1" button actually could be made to work even with the privacy setting in place, but it will require sites that host the button to implement some server-side code, so the Javascript can send requests to the hosting site, which will then forward the requests back to Google. But that's a sufficiently-large burden that few sites will be willing to do it. They're willing to host "+1" buttons because it adds some value to their users and costs them nothing more than adding a small snippet of HTML. But they're not going to be willing to modify their server-side code.
I knew what you were referring to... my suspicion is that you don't.
Were you logged into a Google account? Because if you weren't, then Google didn't do anything.
If you were, then Google worked around the Safari restriction to show you what you had asked to be shown. The degree of "invasion of privacy" is really debatable here. You had basically expressed two opposing requests, one to Safari and one to Google. Google fulfilled your request to Google in spite of the fact that you'd given opposite information to Safari. And what Google actually did was to (a) enable "+1" button to work and (b) personalize the ads shown to you.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Google has now stopped this practice -- but Facebook continues. Not that being better than Facebook on privacy is anything to be proud of, but it does show that Google tries to do the right thing. Facebook had long made a practice of working around these sorts of browser privacy settings in order to make the ubiquitous "Like" buttons work. I'm sure some Google engineers figured that wasn't unreasonable so that the "+1" buttons could work, and also figured that nobody must mind because no one had ever called Facebook on it. When called on it, Google stopped, though.
In any case, I agree with the AC at the top of this thread... if this is the extent of Google's "pattern of privacy abuse", someone's FUD machine has been extraordinarily effective.
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I didn't say you couldn't use it. Just that it would be horrible. I count workarounds like the ones you describe as "horrible".
I actually agree with you that Google's arrogance does do it harm and will continue to do so in the future. However, it's also the only thing that lets Google continue to focus on users rather than dedicating itself to advertising, its revenue source. Without that arrogance, there would be no Google self-driving cars, Chrome would never have come into existence (to understand that statement you have to know the history of Chrome), etc.
Eventually Google will have to come down to earth. The 30-40% year on year growth will slow, margins will decline, the perks will have to be reined in, etc. I do have confidence that Google will be able to do that fairly smoothly. While the "smartest team ever" is overblown, it certainly is true that Google has a lot of very smart people -- and what's even more impressive to me, remarkably few stupid people. I think the landing will be fairly gentle -- but I also think it's still years away.
I wasn't arguing that Google isn't an advertising company. I was just pointing out that that's not how Google thinks of itself, and the fact that it actually is an advertising company doesn't really drive how Google does business. From a pure business standpoint, that's bad, because companies generally do better when their incentives and approaches to the market are aligned precisely with their actual business. From a "is it reasonable to trust Google" perspective, I think it's good, because it insulates Google's decisionmaking processes from excessive influence by advertisers.
I can't quite tell whether this guff is meant to be serious or not.
If it really is written by a happy Google employee, it does more to make me dislike and mistrust them than any number of anti-Google rants ever could, which in turn leads me to suspect it is some subltle reverse psychology astroturfing.
I'm quite serious about it, and I'm quite happy with my job. What about my comments makes you mistrust "them" (not sure whether you mean Google employees, or Google the company)?
Offices? I thought at Google, the employees didn't have offices. You don't work all out in the open? Are the offices private, or multiple people per office?
I was referring to the buildings, which are pretty cool. No, we don't have private offices. On my first day they handed me a very nice pair of headphones and said "Here's your office" ;-)
But how about the higher management ? Their goal is to make money for the shareholders, no more, no less.
http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-letter.html
frankly for web browsing even a second is usable
I think 1s latency would create a terrible web browsing experience. It would impose an absolute minimum delay of three seconds for going to any new site (DNS lookup, one second, SYN/ACK, one second, request/response, one second), and if the site consists of anything more than a single HTML page (no CSS files, no Javascript files, no images, etc.) then you're going to have additional delays getting all of those. In addition to whatever delays are imposed by bandwidth limitations.
However, I do agree that 300 ms isn't horrible for surfing. Bad, but not horrible. Certainly not what I'd expect on a wired broadband connection, though.
That is a contradiction. Which is it? Customers pay money. That's how it works. Otherwise they are not customers. You have buyers and sellers, products, and end users. You can tell which is which by following the money.
The way Google looks at it is that both the users and the advertisers are customers. Of the two, Google focuses the vast majority of its attention on the users, not the advertisers. The reason is that Google largely views the money as a means to an end. The end is to create cool technology that improves peoples' lives.
Okay, I know you're barfing... but I'm telling you that's what people inside Google really talk about and focus on, at all levels, impossible as it may seem to believe of a for-profit corporation. The advertising, and other (much smaller) revenue streams, are seen as an unfortunately-necessary diversion from the main task, one that is justified in part with the idea that advertising can theoretically provide useful information to users, if it's well-targeted and not annoying.
Granted, there's a little cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint. If Google employees were really all about making the world a better place, we'd forgo our nice salaries, expensive offices and all of the well-publicized perks. But it's a cognitive dissonance that rarely comes to the surface, because so far in the company's history, other than the first big concession to reality when Page and Brin decided they could swallow their pride and sell advertising, the money has pretty much rolled in continuously, in ever-increasing amounts, so no one really feels the conflict between do-gooder intent and the necessity of collecting tens of billions of dollars. I mean, thanks to the AdWords auction, Google doesn't even have to dirty itself setting prices. The advertisers set the prices they pay to Google, and they just keep bidding 'em up.
The result is that the academic, blue-sky, make-the-world-better thinking that Google claims, really is how the company's collective culture "thinks", and the "Don't Be Evil" mantra really is important. The funny thing about this situation is that everyone who is used to the way that normal companies behave looks at this and assumes that it must be fake, because no corporation could really be like that. Therefore, it must not only not be true, but there must clearly be a concerted attempt to hide the truth from the world. All this do-gooderness must be a sham front put up to hide some deep, nefarious plot. So, when Google stumbles and does something that isn't so good for the world, people cry "Ah ha! I knew it! They really are Evil!". And even when Google doesn't stumble, widespread skepticism ensues.
All of this, of course, is really annoying and disheartening to Google insiders who spend their days focused on trying to create the next great improvement in Google's services, or the next great service, or even just improving the user experience of what Google does now. And so there is much unhappiness among Google employees about the way some of the world views their selfless work. Unhappiness which is typically expressed while drinking free barista-prepared lattes after a free gourmet lunch before hitting the free gym and then returning to their cubes in posh offices and working on their expensive computers before going home to estimate their next bonus and tot up the value of their next block of stock to vest.
Yes, Google is a weird place. But, honestly, profits really are a second-order concern, because -- so far -- as long as Google has made users happy, advertisers have been happy to keep throwing money. So advertisers really aren't the focus of the vast majority of Googlers.
I did part time telecommuting for a few years. It saved my an hour a day in commute time and reduce my gas purchases by half. There is one downside to telecommuting that wasn't mention in the article. At times, it can be difficult to separate work and personal time. If the work is engaging, it is easy to lose track of time and work many more hours. When working on tasks that are boring and monotonous, it can become impossible to focus. It is much easier to get into work mode when the environment changes.
Different people are different; I don't think one size fits all. For me, I found it much easier to balance work and home life while telecommuting, because of the flexibility it gave me -- not to mention the hours saved in commute time. I telecommuted nearly full time for 10 years, and then a year ago got a new job that requires me to be in the office most of the time, and it's been hard adjusting. I appreciated the ability to easily leave "work" for an hour or two to go to a kid's school production, or to go out for a run, or whatever. I shifted some of my "work" time late into the evening when my family was in bed. All in all, I really preferred it. I love my new job, but I'd love it even more if I could work from home.
I found that it is useful to maintain some separation, though, even when working from home, mainly so that your family can distinguish between your work and non-work time. I did it by designating my home office as my workspace. My kids knew that when Dad was in his office, he was working and not to be disturbed if possible. Though my wife never did grasp the concept, somehow...
That doesn't mean I only worked in my office. Geek that I am, I packed my laptop everywhere, and I didn't see anything wrong with answering a few e-mails while watching a movie with the kids or something. On the other hand, I also didn't see anything wrong with ignoring the e-mail when it wasn't convenient.
Company culture (this was at IBM) had quickly developed some rules of etiquette that really helped. For example, one rule is that you don't call anyone on the phone without first instant messaging them to ask if you can call. So when people aren't working, they shut off their IM client, and that's a signal to everyone else that they aren't to be bothered. Some other rules were that e-mail was not used when quick replies were expected and that background noise (kids, dogs, whatever) was normal and not unprofessional during conference calls.
One thing that really makes a huge difference in your ability to successfully telecommute is the number of your colleagues who telecommute. At IBM it quickly became everyone, so it worked very well. At Google, where I am now, most everyone is in the office and while we have great tools for remote communication (Google+ Hangouts, basically, integrated into calendaring and with high-end audio/video equipment in the conference rooms), if you're not around for the water cooler conversation you miss a lot, and it would be hard to be productive.
The first and most obvious is durability. If it gets wet, you just dry it out. It doesn't mind being tossed on a shelf or a desk (even violently). It's ok with being caught out in the rain if an unexpected downpour comes up.
Durability really isn't an issue. I keep a large plastic baggie tucked in the pocket on my Galaxy Tab's cover. In wet environments, I just drop it in the baggie... and I can even keep reading! No worries about water spots on the pages. It's also been tossed on shelves and desks, dropped, etc. With a basic cover, there's not much risk of anything short of driving a truck over it.
Also, all of my non-DRM'd ebooks are backed up to multiple locations. Whatever the durability of the reader, the durability of the actual ebook is unparalleled.
The second is portability. Books don't mind being crushed in a backpack. They can be used in almost ANY lighting conditions equally well. They can be safely mailed or lent to friends without worrying about whether they're going to "break" it.
My tablet doesn't mind being crushed in a backpack. It can be used in any lighting condition, including full darkness, without need for a separate lamp or light (I do most of my reading in bed at night, and even a little book like annoys my wife, but the slight glow of dim white text on a black background on my tablet doesn't bother her at all). It works fine in full daylight, too, though I find it helps to change it to black text on a white background. Most of the eBooks I buy are from Baen, who doens't do DRM, so I can actually e-mail them a copy of a book -- in multiple formats so they can use whatever sort of reading device they want. Or they can print it on paper if they like.
Also, eBooks have huge portability advantages over paper books. I carry a whole library on my tablet; hundreds of books. Even better, I have all of the same books on my phone so my entire library fits in my pocket, and is basically always with me.
There's an additional benefit with Amazon Kindle books and Google Books, too -- both readers sync my reading location to the cloud, so I can read for a while on my tablet at home, then if I have a little time to kill while waiting in line at the grocery store or something I can whip out my phone and pick up right where I left off on the tablet. When I get home, I pick up the tablet and continue on. (I really need to find an epub reader that syncs to DropBox or something so the same will work with my Baen books. It'll come.)
The third is loanability. It's easy to borrow or loan a book. You just hand it to the person, and hope they bring it back. DRM one-reader systems? Not so much.
Yeah. DRM sucks. A big reason I prefer Baen. Given that the music industry finally had to give up on DRM, I'm hopeful that the book industry will get there as well.
My remaining reasons are intangibles, like the pleasure of perusing shelves fully of books to see what someone likes to read, to find something you want to borrow, to have that visceral knowledge that "this is a person who likes to read and educate themselves" when you walk into a room and see boxes or shelves full of books.
You can still see that about other people and their shelves of books. Your decision about whether or not to go electronic doesn't affect them, after all. If your concern is that they can't see your shelves, well, yeah, that's a problem. Build a web site of all the books you read or something.
Perhaps the most important feature of a printed book is the fact that I OWN it.
Again, DRM sucks. To me it's the biggest argument against eBooks. For reference books, a lesser argument is that I find that while ebooks are more searchable, paper books are more "flippable".
I'm reporting you to HR for discussing internal Google policies on Slashdot.
Feel free! I don't believe I've said anything out of turn here.
Ouch, yeah, businesses can also be significantly damaged if employees use their equipment for illegal purposes. I never met a CIO that brought this up as a major concern, though.
My current employer (Google) allows me to do whatever I like with my company computers (laptop and desktop) as long as I don't circumvent the security policies. Oh, and they also don't promise to help me recover any personal data if something happens to the machine and tech support needs to work on it. Of course, the drive is a 128 GB SSD so there isn't room for very much on it anyway. I have a 1 TB external drive for most of my stuff because there's just not much room on the internal drive.
> Even Google web searches are https.
Only if you're signed in and making it easier for Google to track what you're searching for.
You can also use https even if you're not logged in. And if you are logged in and don't want your searches tracked, you can turn off search history. Personally, I like search history on. It makes repeated searches easier and I think it improves my search results, too.
It's going to be hard (impossible)? for the "friend" to qualify for "common carrier" status
Particularly since even ISPs don't qualify for common carrier status.
No kidding. All bank sites use https, along with any shopping sites payment pages, paypal, Amazon, Wal-mart, etc...
Even Google web searches are https. I'd like to see HTTP deprecated in favor of HTTPS. There's no reason not to encrypt everything.
The other posters have covered well the fact that you really shouldn't try to work around the employer's policies. Getting caught is likely, and almost certainly grounds for termination. Don't go there.
That said, you should find out what the employer's policies actually are, rather than just assuming they're going to be insane. I've had a company-issued laptop since the mid-90s, with several different employers, and none of them have done what you describe. Moreover, I've also spent years consulting with dozens of companies about their IT security policies, including management of laptop use, and none of them have approached it the way you describe, either.
Most employers care about (in decreasing order of importance):
1. The security of their data. There are lots of good reasons for this, obviously. This includes things like full-disk encryption to ensure that if the laptop is lost the data it might carry is not revealed, and mal-ware prevention in order to prevent mal-ware from revealing important data.
2. The security of their network. Since you'll bring the laptop into the office and connect it to the network, employers don't want the laptop to be a vector for malware or targeted attacks.
3. Preventing HR problems. Stuff like porn on screens in the office can create sexual harassment lawsuits. This is the primary reason for anti-porn rules.
4. Productivity. Misuse of company equipment on company time means (arguably) that productive work that should be done isn't. This is another reason for anti-porn and anti-surfing rules.
Different companies take different approaches to managing these risks. A common, if very authoritarian, approach to limiting malware, for example, is to allow only software which is specifically approved by IT to be installed on the machine. Keylogging doesn't really accomplish any of the above, however, and I've never seen any company who does it, with the exception of one company that installs a browser plugin which watches for users typing their corporate password into non-company web sites.
If you're using the laptop at home, on your own time, I don't think most employers will care if you surf a little, check your personal e-mail, watch Netflix, etc. They may or may not care if you surf porn. I think most would rather not know. Outside of that, if it doesn't require changing the security configuration of the laptop, doesn't require installing software and doesn't interfere with productive work, I doubt they're going to care.
Check out the policy carefully, ask questions to make sure you understand it, and then comply with it. But I would be surprised if the policy truly is as draconian as you say.
In the past, upgrades usually brought at least some benefits. There'd be useful new features
The reason 3.6 can't render some web sites is because it doesn't have the new features.
You fill out the ballot, put your ballot in the anonymity envelope, put that in the envelope with your name on it, sign the outer ballot, and send it off in the mail.
What's the purpose of the signature?
What I was saying is that the mantra that everyone keeps referring to when talking about Google ("Do No Evil"), is meaningless.
Technically, it's "Don't Be Evil."
They are just another corporation looking towards the next quarterly earnings report and beholden to their investors. Period.
Actually, Google is quite different in a couple of ways. One huge one is that the company is really not very beholden to its investors. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, between them, have more votes than all of the rest of the shareholders combined. During the IPO they gave their stock 10 votes per share, and the common stock only one vote per share. Given that both of them have more money than anyone could spend, I think that really reduces the focus on stock price.
Another is that in the Founders' Letter during the IPO, which as I understand it is a legally-binding document that sets out how the company is to be run and what goals it will pursue, Page and Brin specified that Google is not and will not be a quarterly-focused company.
How different does that make the company, really? I don't know. But I can say that from the inside it looks very different from the other corporations I've worked for.
I would bet that "Do No Evil" is meaningless inside the company.
In my experience as a Google employee, that's not true. In terms of terminology, the phrase "Don't be evil" doesn't get used much... instead it's usually phrased as "Be Googley" or "That's the Googley way to do it", or similar. "Googley" is an adjective that has a lot of meanings, but respect for others, including others' privacy, is a big part of it. When decisions are being made, having someone say that an idea is not Googley is a near-fatal blow. Unless the proponents of the idea can explain why it is Googley (non-evil), or can fix it so that it's Googley, it's going to fail -- and "But it will make us a lot of money" is not a valid counterargument.
The one exception, I think, is ideas that have the potential to be evil. Those are okay, as long as care is taken to ensure that Google will not, in fact, use them in evil ways. Thus, it's not considered evil to compile a big patent warchest, because Google intends to use the patents only in defensive ways. The fact that a future Google, with a different policy, could act differently is not considered an argument that compiling a big patent warchest is non-Googley. Similarly, collecting lots of information about people who haven't opted out isn't evil because Google doesn't intend to use the information in evil ways. On the other hand, collecting information about people who have said they don't want to be tracked is non-Googley.
So, I'd say while "Don't Be Evil" may not be interpreted as stringently as some might like, it's far from meaningless.
Keep in mind, though, that I speak from my perspective as a one-year employee, who's mainly only seen how my little corner of the company works. The culture appears to be pretty consistent company-wide, however, and there's a strong focus on "indoctrinating" all new employees. The very first training session I had, on my very first day of employment, was all about Google culture and what it means to be Googley. I really think it's taken seriously.
and opt in format so that no one but Google and myself sees this data
Per their privacy policy, Google does not share your data with anyone else without your permission, with two exceptions:
1. Google will comply with the law. For example, if Google is served with a search warrant for your data, they'll hand it over.
2. For "external processing". What the privacy policy says is "We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures."
Actually there's a third exception if you're using a Google Apps account, which is that your domain admin may have access to stuff. As an admin for a Google Apps domain, I don't see that I have any special access to information about the accounts in my domain, but maybe there's something I'm not seeing. Well, I guess I could change their passwords and log in as them.
all the data they collect is made available to me and I can be selective in what I allow shown to the public
See the Google privacy dashboard to see what information Google has collected on you (google.com/privacy/tools). Google's privacy policy says they don't show any of your data to the public.
when I do opt in I can then be assured that only information I deem acceptable is presented to advertizes and whomever else pays for data like this
Google doesn't sell your data.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but the above is my own, personal understanding of the privacy policy, gained from reading it myself. I could be completely wrong. Read it yourself to be sure what it says -- it's not long and it's written in plain English.)
Google is a global private company. The simple fact that Google is "forced" to obey the laws of China if it wishes to operate there is actually a perfect example of Schmidt's point. Currently China has power over Google
Google ceased complying with Chinese demands that Google censor searches for China in 2010.
Facebook's "Restricted" list does the same thing. Facebook adopted most of the good ideas G+ had within a few months of it going public.
With a little less flexibility. On Google+ you can also set that "how much" slider to "not very much", so you'll still see some content from those people, and it'll be the most re-shared and commented-on stuff. So you'll only see the stuff those "uninteresting" people post which others do find interesting, which may help you pretend to be paying attention, without actually having to pay attention :-)
I think the "how much" slider needs to be a bit more fine-grained, though. I'd like a setting between "none" and "not very much". And perhaps rather than adjusting it with a slider, it would be nicer to just be able to click on the posts and say "less of this" or "more of that".
Google should advertise that if you switch to G+, your grandmother, talkative aunt, and your mother probably wont find you again for at least another year or two.
Heh. Even better, when your grandmother, talkative aunt and mother do find Google+, you can add them to your "ignore" circle, which is one on which you've set the "how much to show" slider to "show nothing". Then they'll get a nice message saying that you've circled them but you'll never see any of their posts unless you specifically go look. Oh, and they'll never see your non-public posts, either.
I agree that given conflicting requests, the best thing to do is to respect the most conservative. Even better would be to find some way to highlight to the user that Google's +1 button isn't going to work properly on various sites because of the Safari privacy setting so the user understands the nature of their choice and can make an appropriate decision.
I think this situation was the result of a decision to follow the lead of Facebook, which is clearly not what Google should be doing, but it's somewhat understandable because respecting the privacy decision means that on many sites for users of Safari the Facebook "Like" button works while the Google+ "+1" button does not. Anyway, I agree that the choice was wrong, but I can understand the competitive motivation, and it's hard to classify really as "privacy invasion", even though it technically is overriding of a user's privacy selection.
The "+1" button actually could be made to work even with the privacy setting in place, but it will require sites that host the button to implement some server-side code, so the Javascript can send requests to the hosting site, which will then forward the requests back to Google. But that's a sufficiently-large burden that few sites will be willing to do it. They're willing to host "+1" buttons because it adds some value to their users and costs them nothing more than adding a small snippet of HTML. But they're not going to be willing to modify their server-side code.
lmgtfy http://bit.ly/AwgQMK
I knew what you were referring to... my suspicion is that you don't.
Were you logged into a Google account? Because if you weren't, then Google didn't do anything.
If you were, then Google worked around the Safari restriction to show you what you had asked to be shown. The degree of "invasion of privacy" is really debatable here. You had basically expressed two opposing requests, one to Safari and one to Google. Google fulfilled your request to Google in spite of the fact that you'd given opposite information to Safari. And what Google actually did was to (a) enable "+1" button to work and (b) personalize the ads shown to you.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Google has now stopped this practice -- but Facebook continues. Not that being better than Facebook on privacy is anything to be proud of, but it does show that Google tries to do the right thing. Facebook had long made a practice of working around these sorts of browser privacy settings in order to make the ubiquitous "Like" buttons work. I'm sure some Google engineers figured that wasn't unreasonable so that the "+1" buttons could work, and also figured that nobody must mind because no one had ever called Facebook on it. When called on it, Google stopped, though.
In any case, I agree with the AC at the top of this thread... if this is the extent of Google's "pattern of privacy abuse", someone's FUD machine has been extraordinarily effective.