Well, I'll be honest - I've stopped wanting to work at Google the day I heard their hiring practice.
Yes, I was the same. About 8 months ago I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life after university, and had briefly considered applying to Google.... for about 3 seconds. Then I saw a vision of a massive pile of CVs with mine lost somewhere in the middle, I read the horror stories on Slashdot, read about their "gruesome" hiring process that hardly anybody passes and just gave up right then.
My general feeling was, well, I'll probably apply and get rejected. And then I'll feel shitty. And I don't have the energy or drive to compete in some kind of rat race.
So gave up right then, and forgot all about it, until a few months later an email from one of the SRE recruiters dropped into my inbox saying hi, can we please call you? I didn't realise at the time that this was the start of the interview process so foolishly scheduled the call for an evening (had to be due to timezone difference) after getting back from the bar a bit drunk. Fortunately I passed the little pop quiz they have at the start (just) and was scheduled in for more interviews.
So I kind of got pushed into it. And you know what? It really wasn't as bad as it's made out to be. It was hard, and there were a lot of interviews, but I wasn't kept waiting and the recruiters/staff were always very helpful and polite. There were no grumpy interviewers. The questions were hard but reasonable. I didn't get all of them right and fumbled a few others, but it didn't matter.
Eventually I got hired, and now I'm learning how to do interviews as well. I'm very happy here so it all worked out OK in the end and I'd encourage anybody to apply. Looking back, I can see that all interviews at any company contain an element of luck and the more interviews you do the more this will have an impact. But the process isn't as dominated by fortune as you might think. Now I can see how it works, I can see why it is the way it is. For instance, interviewers themselves do not decide whether a candidate proceeds. There are many checks and balances (part of the reason why it's slow).
Some people seem to think they can't get hired if they're old or don't have a degree from a top school. Rubbish. I am surrounded by people in their 40s and 50s. When I was accepted I didn't actually have a degree at all, the recruiter didn't know the UK grading system, and didn't seem to care much when I explained it. In the interviews I'm watching, educational qualifications have never come up in discussion or evaluation process. The only thing that matters is your performance when questioned. Final thing - there are no trick questions or "brain teasers" on the SRE (google.com engineering) track. I cannot comment on the way other departments do it, obviously.
Now I just have to hope that I haven't told you anything confidential:p
The idea that there's age discrimination at Google is ridiculous. The department I'm in has a serious lack of 20-somethings, I feel like the baby of the group. Nearly everyone here is married with kids and quite a few either are or are going grey. It varies a lot by department of course but if there is age discrimination here then I'm not seeing it. I don't want anybody to read your post and get put off from applying because they feel they're too old. That's nonsense.
He probably means the group that has an enormous Lego pirate in their offices. It's quite impressive. I have no clue what they actually *do* though:)
Re:That depends on a lot more than you think
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Last I checked, Google is in SF and that's about it.
No, not at all. There are offices all over the world and new ones are being created all the time. For instance I'm moving to Zurich in a few months, which from what I've seen is a wonderful city. Sure, MV is a big office but there are also large offices in other parts of America, Dublin, etc.
Employees are subtly pressured to work far beyond 40 hours a week and thus it's not a good career in my opinion for someone with a family or someone intending to start a family.
Well, I will admit that I'm quite new but if there is such pressure it's somehow passed me by. My manager hasn't mentioned this once, there is no culture of "don't be the first to leave" and I routinely see people leaving even at around half 3, though of course they come in early too. If there is pressure to work long hours it's completely invisible in my department.
If your friend is working insane hours I really doubt that's because he is forced to, more likely, he is making himself do it for personal reasons.
Personally, the main reason I considered Google and not Microsoft is due to the ethical histories of the two companies, but also the fact that MS seems to be stagnant and suffering from directionless management right now. Google is, in contrast, anything but stagnant and bureaucratic.
Their other option was to stop patching the hell out of Firefox and do what every other distro does - get with the program. They chose to rename it entirely which may be in compliance with the artwork parts of the DFSG but is also, to my mind, absurd.
MSN Messenger has exactly the same problem. It seems to be endemic to the big services, I don't know why. The one I noticed it with was Facebook URLs - attempting to send these would result in the message being "unable to be delivered". I don't know if this is some kind of antispam system gone crazy or not, but Microsoft don't compete with Facebook so I guess it must be. Annoying as hell for sure.
I know everyone loves the "running out of oil" story, but if that were true then why is oil barely above $60 when we have 2 huge suppliers threatening to cut back production, and North Korean bomb tests?
What should it be, in your opinion? A few years ago oil was selling for $20/barrel. The prices are extremely volatile right now, which is what you'd expect when supply/demand are right.
It's worth noting that the people who write The Oil Drum are not newbies to this field. They are perfectly aware of the tar sands and IEA/EIA projections, but they all have problems that have been extensively analysed in the past.
I'm NOT an expert but if I recall correctly, the Canadian tar sands require huge amounts of natural gas which is becoming hard to find. They also emit vast quantities of CO2 that would put Canada in violation of its Kyoto commitments - which when they signed the treaty became international law. There are consequences for breaking them.
The main problem I see with this is that historically improvements in oil technologies have affected the rate of extraction but not the amount we can extract in a specific field. Particular fields may become workable as technologies improve but these haven't led to any particularly large new fields that I remember. The big wins have been things like water/gas injection.
OpenOffice is pretty insular, it wouldn't surprise me if they just never bothered looking what distros do. It's also the case that OO is sort of an entirely engineer-led project.... they don't have much of a brand and probably wouldn't care much about protecting it even if they did. As to why it's a stupid idea, well as I said many serious security problems have been fixed (or pre-emptively prevented) by architectural changes that can't be backported. So older versions + patches aren't really more secure or even more stable. They're just old.
This is really ridiculous--brandnames and logos are separated ALL the time.
Erm, no they aren't. Many, many companies use logos that are simultaneously their brand names.
No other F/OSS software package seems to have an insurmountable problem with this. They don't even have major problems with Gentoo & the strange CFLAGS or compiler arguments that some users of that distro use.
That is completely wrong. Many projects have big issues with "questionable downstream modifications". I spent several years intermittently tracking down bugs that turned out to be due to broken patches applied to a project I worked on by distributions. This was incredibly frustrating because such "bugs" were not truly bugs at all yet they had a terrible impact on the brand of that project. Invariably, upon encountering a problem users would go upstream and say "This program sucks". It got to the stage where several distros were blacklisted in the minds of the guys doing tech support and anybody using it from such a distro would be told to rebuild from source.
The difference between that project and Firefox is that the Firefox guys are much bigger and have a much stronger brand, along with the legal/financial resources to handle this stuff. But don't think these problems are somehow unique to Mozilla.
It is more than "annoying." It is dangerous. Distros should NOT have to wait for approval for patching security bugs. This isn't just theoretical--Debian does backport fixes to versions of Firefox that Mozilla stopped maintaining. While there is some time between releases, the package repositories get updated all the time.
Which is of course a stupid idea. I've been keeping an eye on the Mozilla codebase and development for many years now, pretty much ever since it was first open sourced. There have been quite a few major security problems - especially recently - that were solved by doing major changes to the internal architecture. This is not the sort of thing you can trivially backport, and if you tried to do so you'd probably just introduce new bugs anyway (unless you are a Gecko guru, of which there are very few).
A far more sane security policy is to work with upstream to fix bugs then ensure you are always using the latest version of what's available. But this is not "the Debian way" so they won't ever do this, instead, they'll continue to let users run old and known to be architecturally-insecure versions of Firefox all the while telling people that they're actually doing a great job. A shame.
Firefox is free, however it's trademark protected and that means you can't both hack it to pieces and use the Firefox name+brand. That's entirely reasonable - if I took Debian, changed things randomly that broke it in obscure ways then shipped it as Debian using the Debian logo of course they'd be pissed off too.
And for those who are wondering, yes, this is exactly what happened. The tensions between the Mozilla team and Debian have been around for ages, this is not news, but it got a lot worse lately. Firefox is getting larger and the quality of the brand matters a lot more, meanwhile, the Debian guys were taking Firefox and making massive changes to it. For instance I've seen persistent reports from many different people that the Ubuntu Firefox is much slower than the official build. The last time I came across this issue, it was because Debian had completely forked the XULRunner platform - some guy felt it was "too Windows-like" and that "the UNIX way was superior". So, day was night and night was day and the XUL platform Mozilla wanted to push was already incompatible and forked. The developers who had designed this platform were understandably angry and now Debian has got what it deserves.
Anyway, none of this really matters. Debian is non-existant on the desktop and has an atrocious brand. Meanwhile Firefox has a very strong brand. One of the reasons Fedora et al ship Firefox and not the GNOMEified Epiphany equivalent is because customers know the Firefox name and want it, and don't know the Epiphany name. On the desktop Debian vs Firefox is no contest.
Er, wait, DCI have gone from making dumb home movies to fraud?? Can you actually prove the company has been involved in money laundering, fraud and electioneering? Because if you can it seems to me you should be doing something about it rather than posting it to Slashdot...
Isn't it true that you have no idea what you'll be programming in the future.
No, it's not true. 10 years ago most desktop software was written in C++ and Java - a hugely simplified form of it - was the next big thing. Fast forward 10 years and most desktop software is written in C++. Most new languages and tools are pretty similar to old ones. Radically different toolsets like pure functional languages have never taken off, and show no signs of doing so. The best programmers are still the ones with the most experience, not the ones who know the most pure maths.
I always thought the point of all the math was to provide a solid background to support you in whatever you do.
The point of all the math is to make the subject sufficiently academic that it is acceptable to universities, who are scared by anything vocational.
The skills that everyday programmers need to do everyday jobs are more around understanding the tools they'll be working with - how a computer actually works, what version control is, how to architect software to be modular, what regular expressions are, how to work with debuggers etc. These are the skills that university graduates routinely lack, and routinely get nailed in job interviews by.
Bits of the math are useful - being able to work in base 2 and base 16 for instance, or having a basic understanding of time/space complexity. Unfortunately most courses focus on big O notation to a ridiculous extent, meaning that it's not uncommon to see "data structure abuse", where some extremely fancy and theoretically fast algorithm is used, but due to some awkward practical factor like poor locality or excessive memory usage ends up being slow.
Hey, that's pretty cool, thanks:) One thing that did surprise me is that the instruction after a branch is always executed. What's up with that? Does that mean in practice after a branch there is always a no-op?
They were probably checking that you can read C, and maybe something else (eg understanding the stack). Sysadmins are often expected to know some programming, it's not all that uncommon.
Unfortunately, the comparison with Google is poor. Google requires that you have a Masters Degree (PhDs are preferrable) before they even give you their test.
What?
I don't know what "test" you are talking about, but no qualifications whatsoever are required to do certain types of engineering at Google. Specifically look at what they call "Google.com Engineering" or "Site Reliability Engineering". This is not some trivial job; they require very broad and deep knowledge across operating system design, programming, networking, systems administration, and so on and the interview process is notoriously thorough. The job is basically running the server grid. A degree certainly isn't frowned upon but they didn't require one from me, that's for sure!
Certain jobs at Google do require degrees for sure, and some of the research jobs basically require a PhD. But that's not true of the whole company.
You'll never even know why they didn't get back to you, despite a promise to start an interview process after the test.
Again, huh? I have a friend who is also Masters-less yet they got back to him with feedback pretty much straight away.
That's just journalism though isn't it. Read any western news report on anything technical/computer related anytime soon and the factual mistakes just jump out at you.
Yes, I can see that this sort of thing goes on in the US. I am, after all, from the UK, and view such things with a mixture of horror and pity.
Er, why? I'm from the UK too and under no illusions that we are some paragon of virtue when it comes to free flows of information. Shall I quote from a story recently published in the Telegraph?
Managers from [Dounreay nuclear power plant] assured him that the event was a one-off. But since then, 66 more particles have been found. The latest comes from rods that Dounreay's workers call "bone seekers". They pose a danger to anyone who comes in contact with them.
Mr Minter has carried out his own investigations and says he has uncovered numerous cases of incompetence and errors, including serious accidents covered up by the Official Secrets Act.
In other words, the fuckups of the nuclear industry were being suppressed by the government as nuclear power and energy generation is a political hot potato right now.
Want another example?
This [act] makes it a criminal offence to directly or indirectly incite or encourage others to commit acts of terrorism. This will include the glorification of terrorism, where this may be understood as encouraging the emulation of terrorism.
Now, I guess you could argue there's a world of difference between this and making it illegal to "endanger China's national security" or "violate China's religious policies or preach evil cults or superstition" or "incite hatred and discrimination", but I'm not seeing it. Seems like a minor difference in wording to me.
Don't get me wrong. I think what the XNA is doing is a very bad thing indeed, but then, I am not going to claim we have some moral high ground here. Let's just recognise that it's wrong whoever does it and get off our high horse about it.
What if I'm invested in Google and I hear that they decided not to expand into cultivating opium poppies in Afghanistan? How much money am I losing by their decision not to produce heroin? Can I sue?
Cultivating opium poppies is illegal and so no, you cannot sue and should not expect public corporations to do that.
There is no requirement that a public corporation must do anything it can to maximize its profit.
Yes there is. Check the corporation acts in your country (some of it is case law).
I cringe every time I see this argument used here.
Me too, but it's not because the argument is wrong, it's because it's right. That said, just because the law is fucked up at present doesn't mean it cannot be changed. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any political parties today that have reform of corporation law as part of their manifesto.
Anything else isn't logical. If you say "no information" then you could argue that if a child asks its mother some question to which she isn't 100% sure of the answer, eg "why is the sky blue", she should just say "Sorry, I cannot tell you that" instead of doing her best job and possibly giving the child a garbled impression. That's a good way to get a retarded child; with bad information they may get curious and go research the topic, and get more accurate information. With no information at all they don't have anywhere to start.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was the same. About 8 months ago I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life after university, and had briefly considered applying to Google .... for about 3 seconds. Then I saw a vision of a massive pile of CVs with mine lost somewhere in the middle, I read the horror stories on Slashdot, read about their "gruesome" hiring process that hardly anybody passes and just gave up right then.
My general feeling was, well, I'll probably apply and get rejected. And then I'll feel shitty. And I don't have the energy or drive to compete in some kind of rat race.
So gave up right then, and forgot all about it, until a few months later an email from one of the SRE recruiters dropped into my inbox saying hi, can we please call you? I didn't realise at the time that this was the start of the interview process so foolishly scheduled the call for an evening (had to be due to timezone difference) after getting back from the bar a bit drunk. Fortunately I passed the little pop quiz they have at the start (just) and was scheduled in for more interviews.
So I kind of got pushed into it. And you know what? It really wasn't as bad as it's made out to be. It was hard, and there were a lot of interviews, but I wasn't kept waiting and the recruiters/staff were always very helpful and polite. There were no grumpy interviewers. The questions were hard but reasonable. I didn't get all of them right and fumbled a few others, but it didn't matter.
Eventually I got hired, and now I'm learning how to do interviews as well. I'm very happy here so it all worked out OK in the end and I'd encourage anybody to apply. Looking back, I can see that all interviews at any company contain an element of luck and the more interviews you do the more this will have an impact. But the process isn't as dominated by fortune as you might think. Now I can see how it works, I can see why it is the way it is. For instance, interviewers themselves do not decide whether a candidate proceeds. There are many checks and balances (part of the reason why it's slow).
Some people seem to think they can't get hired if they're old or don't have a degree from a top school. Rubbish. I am surrounded by people in their 40s and 50s. When I was accepted I didn't actually have a degree at all, the recruiter didn't know the UK grading system, and didn't seem to care much when I explained it. In the interviews I'm watching, educational qualifications have never come up in discussion or evaluation process. The only thing that matters is your performance when questioned. Final thing - there are no trick questions or "brain teasers" on the SRE (google.com engineering) track. I cannot comment on the way other departments do it, obviously.
Now I just have to hope that I haven't told you anything confidential :p
Er, what?
The idea that there's age discrimination at Google is ridiculous. The department I'm in has a serious lack of 20-somethings, I feel like the baby of the group. Nearly everyone here is married with kids and quite a few either are or are going grey. It varies a lot by department of course but if there is age discrimination here then I'm not seeing it. I don't want anybody to read your post and get put off from applying because they feel they're too old. That's nonsense.
He probably means the group that has an enormous Lego pirate in their offices. It's quite impressive. I have no clue what they actually *do* though :)
No, not at all. There are offices all over the world and new ones are being created all the time. For instance I'm moving to Zurich in a few months, which from what I've seen is a wonderful city. Sure, MV is a big office but there are also large offices in other parts of America, Dublin, etc.
Well, I will admit that I'm quite new but if there is such pressure it's somehow passed me by. My manager hasn't mentioned this once, there is no culture of "don't be the first to leave" and I routinely see people leaving even at around half 3, though of course they come in early too. If there is pressure to work long hours it's completely invisible in my department.
If your friend is working insane hours I really doubt that's because he is forced to, more likely, he is making himself do it for personal reasons.
Personally, the main reason I considered Google and not Microsoft is due to the ethical histories of the two companies, but also the fact that MS seems to be stagnant and suffering from directionless management right now. Google is, in contrast, anything but stagnant and bureaucratic.
Their other option was to stop patching the hell out of Firefox and do what every other distro does - get with the program. They chose to rename it entirely which may be in compliance with the artwork parts of the DFSG but is also, to my mind, absurd.
MSN Messenger has exactly the same problem. It seems to be endemic to the big services, I don't know why. The one I noticed it with was Facebook URLs - attempting to send these would result in the message being "unable to be delivered". I don't know if this is some kind of antispam system gone crazy or not, but Microsoft don't compete with Facebook so I guess it must be. Annoying as hell for sure.
What should it be, in your opinion? A few years ago oil was selling for $20/barrel. The prices are extremely volatile right now, which is what you'd expect when supply/demand are right.
It's worth noting that the people who write The Oil Drum are not newbies to this field. They are perfectly aware of the tar sands and IEA/EIA projections, but they all have problems that have been extensively analysed in the past.
I'm NOT an expert but if I recall correctly, the Canadian tar sands require huge amounts of natural gas which is becoming hard to find. They also emit vast quantities of CO2 that would put Canada in violation of its Kyoto commitments - which when they signed the treaty became international law. There are consequences for breaking them.
The main problem I see with this is that historically improvements in oil technologies have affected the rate of extraction but not the amount we can extract in a specific field. Particular fields may become workable as technologies improve but these haven't led to any particularly large new fields that I remember. The big wins have been things like water/gas injection.
OpenOffice is pretty insular, it wouldn't surprise me if they just never bothered looking what distros do. It's also the case that OO is sort of an entirely engineer-led project .... they don't have much of a brand and probably wouldn't care much about protecting it even if they did. As to why it's a stupid idea, well as I said many serious security problems have been fixed (or pre-emptively prevented) by architectural changes that can't be backported. So older versions + patches aren't really more secure or even more stable. They're just old.
Erm, no they aren't. Many, many companies use logos that are simultaneously their brand names.
That is completely wrong. Many projects have big issues with "questionable downstream modifications". I spent several years intermittently tracking down bugs that turned out to be due to broken patches applied to a project I worked on by distributions. This was incredibly frustrating because such "bugs" were not truly bugs at all yet they had a terrible impact on the brand of that project. Invariably, upon encountering a problem users would go upstream and say "This program sucks". It got to the stage where several distros were blacklisted in the minds of the guys doing tech support and anybody using it from such a distro would be told to rebuild from source.
The difference between that project and Firefox is that the Firefox guys are much bigger and have a much stronger brand, along with the legal/financial resources to handle this stuff. But don't think these problems are somehow unique to Mozilla.
Which is of course a stupid idea. I've been keeping an eye on the Mozilla codebase and development for many years now, pretty much ever since it was first open sourced. There have been quite a few major security problems - especially recently - that were solved by doing major changes to the internal architecture. This is not the sort of thing you can trivially backport, and if you tried to do so you'd probably just introduce new bugs anyway (unless you are a Gecko guru, of which there are very few).
A far more sane security policy is to work with upstream to fix bugs then ensure you are always using the latest version of what's available. But this is not "the Debian way" so they won't ever do this, instead, they'll continue to let users run old and known to be architecturally-insecure versions of Firefox all the while telling people that they're actually doing a great job. A shame.
Firefox is free, however it's trademark protected and that means you can't both hack it to pieces and use the Firefox name+brand. That's entirely reasonable - if I took Debian, changed things randomly that broke it in obscure ways then shipped it as Debian using the Debian logo of course they'd be pissed off too.
And for those who are wondering, yes, this is exactly what happened. The tensions between the Mozilla team and Debian have been around for ages, this is not news, but it got a lot worse lately. Firefox is getting larger and the quality of the brand matters a lot more, meanwhile, the Debian guys were taking Firefox and making massive changes to it. For instance I've seen persistent reports from many different people that the Ubuntu Firefox is much slower than the official build. The last time I came across this issue, it was because Debian had completely forked the XULRunner platform - some guy felt it was "too Windows-like" and that "the UNIX way was superior". So, day was night and night was day and the XUL platform Mozilla wanted to push was already incompatible and forked. The developers who had designed this platform were understandably angry and now Debian has got what it deserves.
Anyway, none of this really matters. Debian is non-existant on the desktop and has an atrocious brand. Meanwhile Firefox has a very strong brand. One of the reasons Fedora et al ship Firefox and not the GNOMEified Epiphany equivalent is because customers know the Firefox name and want it, and don't know the Epiphany name. On the desktop Debian vs Firefox is no contest.
Er, wait, DCI have gone from making dumb home movies to fraud?? Can you actually prove the company has been involved in money laundering, fraud and electioneering? Because if you can it seems to me you should be doing something about it rather than posting it to Slashdot ...
No, it's not true. 10 years ago most desktop software was written in C++ and Java - a hugely simplified form of it - was the next big thing. Fast forward 10 years and most desktop software is written in C++. Most new languages and tools are pretty similar to old ones. Radically different toolsets like pure functional languages have never taken off, and show no signs of doing so. The best programmers are still the ones with the most experience, not the ones who know the most pure maths.
The point of all the math is to make the subject sufficiently academic that it is acceptable to universities, who are scared by anything vocational.
The skills that everyday programmers need to do everyday jobs are more around understanding the tools they'll be working with - how a computer actually works, what version control is, how to architect software to be modular, what regular expressions are, how to work with debuggers etc. These are the skills that university graduates routinely lack, and routinely get nailed in job interviews by.
Bits of the math are useful - being able to work in base 2 and base 16 for instance, or having a basic understanding of time/space complexity. Unfortunately most courses focus on big O notation to a ridiculous extent, meaning that it's not uncommon to see "data structure abuse", where some extremely fancy and theoretically fast algorithm is used, but due to some awkward practical factor like poor locality or excessive memory usage ends up being slow.
Hey, that's pretty cool, thanks :) One thing that did surprise me is that the instruction after a branch is always executed. What's up with that? Does that mean in practice after a branch there is always a no-op?
They were probably checking that you can read C, and maybe something else (eg understanding the stack). Sysadmins are often expected to know some programming, it's not all that uncommon.
What?
I don't know what "test" you are talking about, but no qualifications whatsoever are required to do certain types of engineering at Google. Specifically look at what they call "Google.com Engineering" or "Site Reliability Engineering". This is not some trivial job; they require very broad and deep knowledge across operating system design, programming, networking, systems administration, and so on and the interview process is notoriously thorough. The job is basically running the server grid. A degree certainly isn't frowned upon but they didn't require one from me, that's for sure!
Certain jobs at Google do require degrees for sure, and some of the research jobs basically require a PhD. But that's not true of the whole company.
Again, huh? I have a friend who is also Masters-less yet they got back to him with feedback pretty much straight away.
Well, I checked the Greens manifesto and didn't see any mention of reforming corporation law ....
That's just journalism though isn't it. Read any western news report on anything technical/computer related anytime soon and the factual mistakes just jump out at you.
Er, why? I'm from the UK too and under no illusions that we are some paragon of virtue when it comes to free flows of information. Shall I quote from a story recently published in the Telegraph?
In other words, the fuckups of the nuclear industry were being suppressed by the government as nuclear power and energy generation is a political hot potato right now.
Want another example?
From the Terrorism Act 2006.
Now, I guess you could argue there's a world of difference between this and making it illegal to "endanger China's national security" or "violate China's religious policies or preach evil cults or superstition" or "incite hatred and discrimination", but I'm not seeing it. Seems like a minor difference in wording to me.
Don't get me wrong. I think what the XNA is doing is a very bad thing indeed, but then, I am not going to claim we have some moral high ground here. Let's just recognise that it's wrong whoever does it and get off our high horse about it.
Are you saying they think Baidu doesn't censor results? That sounds crazy to me, surely they can't be that naive?
A better comparison is the image search done in Chinese itself: China, US.
I believe US law requires companies to float once they reach a certain size.
Cultivating opium poppies is illegal and so no, you cannot sue and should not expect public corporations to do that.
Yes there is. Check the corporation acts in your country (some of it is case law).
Me too, but it's not because the argument is wrong, it's because it's right. That said, just because the law is fucked up at present doesn't mean it cannot be changed. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any political parties today that have reform of corporation law as part of their manifesto.
Bad information is better.
Anything else isn't logical. If you say "no information" then you could argue that if a child asks its mother some question to which she isn't 100% sure of the answer, eg "why is the sky blue", she should just say "Sorry, I cannot tell you that" instead of doing her best job and possibly giving the child a garbled impression. That's a good way to get a retarded child; with bad information they may get curious and go research the topic, and get more accurate information. With no information at all they don't have anywhere to start.