
Google employee collapsed on the job; coworkers say corp. culture is to blame - SeanBoocock
https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/02/a-google-x-employee-collapsed-on-the-job-and-coworkers-say-corporate-culture-is-to-blame/
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walrus01
If you have a sufficiently large number of employees (in the tens of
thousands), basic laws of statistics say that eventually you will see nearly
all of the types of medical emergencies that are experienced by people going
about their ordinary day to day lives everywhere. Heart attacks, strokes,
grand mal seizures, etc. It's unfortunate and sad but I don't think trying to
equate "Google = Bad Thing that Stresses Employees Until they Break" is fair.

In fact I bet if you had access to the aggregated private medical data of
10,000 google employees and compared it to 10,000 randomly chosen people from
the population at large, the google people experience less medical
emergencies. To put it crassly, because they have higher salaries and better
access to preventative medical care than 10,000 randomly chosen American
citizens from all socioeconomic classes.

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Veratyr
This is true but in this case the health issue doesn't appear to be an
instance of something statistically normal just popping up for a work-
unrelated reason. It seems very clear that the manager acting on Google's
behalf directly impacted the health of the employee in a negative way by
placing an unreasonable amount of stress on him and the employees around him,
while ignoring their complaints.

I suppose the question is whether the manager's behaviour is something
permitted by Google as a company and the quotes from HR in the article imply
that it is.

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mc32
It looks like VB is taking one incident somewhere in Atwater/Merced and
attributing it to work culture of the co at large. From my limited interaction
with googlers as well as hearsay, it would rather seem very atypical of what
goes on over there. For me most part they seem somewhat coddled rather than
overworked.

And then as if that unfounded generalization were not enough, they also
sprinkled something about harassment and bro culture --which as far as I
understand, google fights very hard against. I mean, it would seem the last
big co one could accuse of sex harassment and bro culture would be google.
Someone wanted to try to write something explosive where there isn't.

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sjg007
12 hour days in 100+ weather and you think they were coddled?

The more disturbing parts are the political pieces. Because of this manager
you've now lost a bunch of good people (and maybe a good team). And of any
company google should be able to find a new job for a qualified person who
requested a less demanding role due to a health issue. There should be HR and
executive review of these actions.

~~~
mc32
I'm not saying this didn't happen and that that can't be overwork, but they
are trying to paint it as a company culture issue, or at least an X issue
--where this might have been one manager and one team. I think unless they
have more evidence this is a very isolated incident. Google is not known as a
company which works people to death, most of the accusations, even by VB is
that people at Google have "first world" problems and overwork is the least of
their issues. VB is peddling this as part of a larger "tech companies are bad
and foster bad behavior in their ranks, to an extent it's noticeable and worse
than industry in general" meme.

