Surveillance, interrogation and threats: Behind the Nest witch-hunt Managers at Google-owned Nest threatened their employees, asked co-workers to report on each other, carried out unlawful surveillance of phones and laptops, and unlawfully interrogated staff. That's according to the complaint filed by a former employee at the smart thermostat company with the National Labor Relations Board ( …
If the claims are true, I would hope that he gets more than just his job back. If that's all he wants, he's so screwed. They will make his life hell until he quits. I've seen it done too often.
The surveillance one is the only thing the NLRB may blow off since monitoring internet usage from company owned equipment is normal.
Monitoring for what?
That is the issue. Monitoring the communications for criminal activity - sure legal. Monitoring to ensure company confidentiality - legal if done right. Monitoring communications to your union representative, legal representative or elected legislative representative. I do not think so. Each of these is protected by a specific statute in every developed country on Earth.
The issue is - Googliness. Normal methodology is "record everything, open it up only when a formal procedure is lodged via HR with due cause and due process". This being Google, I suspect the monitoring system is fully automated and operates without a due cause. While this is done everywhere (a few years back I had my arm twisted in a UK company to hand over CCTV records of employees to verify timesheets without HR involved), it is not legal.
First there was social media - "here have this, share everything"
Then people started sharing that other people don't like, other people such as governments and more recently companies.
Are we heading for a time when we'll just get a notification: "You do not have the requisite number of cute cat pictures on your facebook, you are clearly a terrorist and a swat team is on it's way"?
Google collects everything about you so maybe you want to know about about Google.
It's an amazing place to be - excellent free food everywhere, bikes, pools, parties, and discounted everything. It's socially close to a Utopia. Now about the job part - It's one of the worst places to work. Google has many tens of thousands of employees so the odds are against you having anything interesting to do. It's average pay, expectations of long hours, on-call rotation, and endless bureaucracy. Those who can't code will try to look useful by trash-talking everyone else's project. Your boring project, which is probably just moving protobufs around in a horribly crippled Go/C++/Java that builds like you're on an ancient mainframe, is going to get blocked by people pretending like they're saving the company from your extra whitespace. Then reviewers will argue among themselves - Your change is too big, your change is too small, undo what the other reviewer told you to do. Time for more meetings. Build system is slow. Custom IDE is crashing again... Maybe you get 300 lines of code checked in after a week of work. Your suggestions to improve team productivity are met with a lecture of Google's sacred ways.
Google employees fall into pretty much three categories. First are blissfully ignorant masses that were pulled from graduation before experiencing the real world. They translate protobufs, hunt for bugs, and sleep in their cars until they burn out. Second are frustrated and angry employees waiting for more of their stock options to Nest, I mean vest, before leaving. Their day is one hour of productivity and another 9 hours of passionate hatred. Third is a handful of visionaries who have been given special bureaucratic exemptions to get work done. None of these three categories are very productive. That's why you need over many tens of thousands of people to accomplish anything.
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