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Was the voiceover being done in a closet in a Google lobby or is there another reason for the depressed monotone? I mean, I understand we're trying to be moody and ominous here, but the voiceover could have been retelling the story of the Human Centipede and I'd have probably fallen asleep (or wanted to shoot myself).

I'm not defending Google, here, because I don't know anything about them beyond what everyone else knows from the outside. However, what do you expect the reaction to be when you are an employ for a company contracted to provide services to a client who grants you certain access and privileges which you then abuse to pursue your own interests and investigations outside of the scope of what you were employed to do?

Hell, at the end of this video, I'm still unclear what point is trying to be conveyed. Is it just "the racial balance of the employees that I saw exiting the building for two days didn't meet some proper balance I had in my head, so I decided to start doing a socio-economic documentary on my employer's dime and after everything went to shit, because of how I was conducting myself, I put together a ten minute video to explain myself to future employers"?

I saw a lot of smiling faces exiting the building and getting into nice cars. I don't see what the big deal is that people who are temporary or part of menial data-entry labor are not part of the greater events and benefits and festivities of the company. I'm sure it's that way at most companies. I'm on the development side of things and I don't get to go to the big sales-team getaways in Cancun or wherever else they go. And I doubt that the janitorial staff and security staff are sharing in the staff-bonus compensation that I am. And none of us are getting the several million dollar company loans to buy our mansion that CEOs have gotten.

Perhaps this will be an unpopular sentiment, but I just got a strong vibe of "this is my chance to be a documentary film-maker".
Getting paid to go to lectures about books is a "human right" now?
There's no "the" in the movie title and I don't really see the parallel.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
The divide between people from different backgrounds was really obvious to me once I moved to Asia. There's an extreme class system at play. There are certainly places with this is exploited, but this isn't always the case. Often times they are just paid less, have less benefits, and work harder (at least, physically)...but they are still free, treated well, and seem generally happy.

From the description given, there seems to be some parallels between yellow badges and what I've seen in Asia.

I'm not sure that this is a bad thing. We can't all be PhDs earning high 6 figure salaries. There is a need for mundane labor, requiring little education/creativity. Maybe it's weird because it's google, and the juxtaposition is great. But what's the difference between doing in in the Valley and outsourcing it to China/India? If Google did outsource these jobs, people would just be QQing about that instead.

As for the race angle, it's hardly Google's problem/responsibility. This is a fundamental cancer within the US that requires serious effort/rethinking required to even begin to address the situation.
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If I hire you to film some promotional company material for me and find that you're using the access we granted you and the time and resources we're paying you for to play documentary-film-maker/sociologist, I'll probably fire you, too.
You have to admit it /could/ be like something out of Brave New World, so, it demands exploring. I mean they come in at 4 and leave at 2. It conflicts with Google's ethos (perhaps) to have truly 2nd class citizens, so they hide it. That's curiosity-provoking.
I'm not sure it is off-topic so much as out of context. It's not just a technical post, but in large part a very technical blog and the author of the post is also the author of 'Dive into Python, Greasemonkey and HTML5', so it is also somewhat a reflection on his own work and place in the technical publishing sphere.
We can all speculate and make up theories on a late friday night but the fact is Google has a lot going on. Some of which is probably currently unknown by their competitors. They want to keep it that way. Who knows what these guys are working on. Naturally, this isn't the best PR story ever. They could have handled it better.

Clearly, from this guy's perspective, it was wrong for him to get fired but I'm sure the vendor that was providing him as contracted labor had to make a statement that they wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing. Would you hire a firm to video your office if they didn't fire a guy recording stuff you wanted confidential?
They guy was clearly insinuating that Google was being racist. He kept reiterating that the ScanOps workers were people of color and mentioned it in his letter. Google did the absolutely correct thing in getting him fired. You don't want that insanity walking around your campus and Transvideo didn't want to lose their contract with Google.
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Thanks for quick response.
Yeah, the weird thing is not the situation of the workers itself, but the total freakout by Google and firing of this guy.

I also wonder if he is going to get in legal trouble with Google for posting this.
I missed the point about janitors getting perks and they not.
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I'm pretty sure most companies reduce benefits for less skilled workers, just not as clear cut as this.

I wonder what's with the confidentiality at book search. The first two things that pop to mind is keeping the yellow badges secret and preventing their enemies from messing around(publishers are pretty mad at the whole book scanning thing).
This is an awesome idea. Even if the devices miss, they'll create terror in people thinking about the unexploded bombs.
> to have truly 2nd class citizens,

How is this any different than having guards and janitors that work odd hours? You think they get all the Google perks that software engineers get?
They are not allowed to communicate with other employees and are told to report such occurences.

Screams exploitation to me.
Why was it an overreaction? This guy was a contract worker who decided to pursue his own investigation during work hours, taking advantage of the privileges granted to him by Google. They're well within their rights to request his termination or removal from their contract.
Would be cool to put some sort of label on time sections. Editable ones that is.
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Except this guy wasn't a journalist and he wasn't a whistle-blower and he wasn't a documentarian. He was an employee of a company providing a service who was exploiting the access (and presumably paid-resources) to pursue his own agenda. They don't owe him an explanation or benefit of the doubt or anything else and he doesn't raise any questions and there isn't anything of interest in his commentary that suggests it's deserving of any followup. This smells of someone wanting to play 'Morgan Spurlock'.

Google might be evil. They certainly aren't pure of heart and all that. But there's nothing in this ten minute monotone "expose" that really gives any legitimate concern.
There's nothing surprising about a company having different classes of employees. If that was all that the article was about, it would be a minor curiosity. However, Google's extreme overreaction to someone trying to get some very basic information about the other set of employees is what's concerning. It's difficult to know how much of this story is speculation vs fact - whether or not the yellow badged employees are really data entry, whether there are really instructions on the back of the badge with a number to call if someone starts asking questions. If true, though, it's highly concerning coming from a company that flaunts the openness of their products, and whose corporate motto is "don't be evil".
Which is true, but as long as the company does not mind making up for performance+inflation, I dont see a financial reason to ditch them.
I do not have another _job_ offer, but I do have consulting gigs, so I am comfortable moving out of the job, anyways.

> Also - I don't understand what you mean by the cost of living increase over 3 years is more than 60%... did you have to move somewhere?

I work in a major city of the country, and in recent years, rate of inflation averaged between 15-18%/annum.
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The guy making the video implied that the security guards and janitors have "red badge" status, getting the same perks as any other contractor, but not the perks reserved only to full-time employees.
I've heard that segregation is a big deal, and it's what is happening according to the article.
I think if folks here (or the public in general) knew how common this was, they'd be shocked and outraged. I can say with quite a bit of conviction, experience and data that this is incredibly common - even overwhelmingly so.

My conservative guess is that for 50-100K+ keyword searches where substantive commercial value exists in ranking well, 50%+ of the top 10 ranking pages have engaged in manipulative link practices. They're not usually this blatant (though plenty are), but penalization is rare and link spam is on the rise.

My sense is that rather than try to write algorithms to compensate, Google's webspam team has been focused on finding less manipulatable signals like social data (which is currently relatively clean), user+usage data (through Chrome, GG toolbar, GG analytics, etc) and more sophisticated citation analysis.

Still, it's hard to preach white hat SEO when black hat works so frequently and so well (and from outward appearances, Google rewards it).
What I find mind-blowing in this story is not how "4th class" workers are treated like at Google, but rather how the author was fired with no serious reason whatsoever, and the whole secretive atmosphere around the issue.
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Addendum questions I have in addition to the above questions:

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Because being treated inequally, deprived of things people around you take for granted, can damage oneself seriously.
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> I mean they come in at 4 and leave at 2.

The article failed to mention that there are shifts throughout the entire day. There's lots of books to scan!
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It seems pretty obvious to me that the reason the yellow badge worker's aren't given those benefits is to keep them separate from the rest of the work force for security reasons (to keep them from talking about their work)

They allow janitors and food service workers access to these perks, it seems kind of weirdly targeted if they are just doing it to save money.

They're probably doing work that is so confidential that google doesn't want to give them the chance to socialize with other workers.
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No, it screams these employees are working on something confidential. Google keeps them from socializing with everyone else in order to keep them from talking about their work.
To me it's much more shocking to what great length you go to defend the rights of the company. It seems to me that freedom of speech should come before the right of firing at will. Or is your opinion that companies are about as souverign as states?
Ok? The point is that Google has tiered benefits. The outrage that guards have more benefits than other people in their building makes zero sense to me.
I kind of see the original point as it relates to coding, but anecdotally StartupsOpenSourced.com has made $10k+ in revenue in the past week (not all of it is owned by me, but that's what people have paid so far)

I think it fits into more motivational type of book than anything else. At the end of the day, it's like Starcraft casters: there are guys like HD, Husky, and Day9 but I don't think they ever see themselves as competitive (while the users seem to think the exact opposite) because users will always want to watch more of them. just like I would never see something like Mixergy as competitive because the two things are so complimentary, plus it seems like there isn't really a lot of reading material for early stage founders anyway. Mixergy, StartupFoundry, and
Founders at Work might be the three things I'd go to, thinking off the top of my head.

I want to believe that if what you write has some value to it, people are willing to pay. I didn't pay for Photoshop licenses until I was about 18, when I could actually afford it, so I pirated it until I could. There was enough value that it allowed me to pay for it over time.
Everyone laughed because they released it way too early without proper security mechanisms in place.
> They say "the world's most popular 'erotic' site for women is FanFiction.net".. and it only gets 1.5 million visitors a month. Something tells me there are way more women than that surfing the web for erotic material.

You are assuming that for a site to be the most popular, it has to be visited by a large fraction of the women who seek erotic material on the web. That's not necessarily so. If there are many sites supplying such material, and women's taste varies sufficiently that the traffic spreads fairly evenly among most of the sites, you could easily end up with a situation where you have a large number of women surfing for such material, but the largest site only seeing a small fraction of the total traffic.
A little off topic, but I was wondering if you do away with any sort of GUI on your primary desktop and only use emacs, does that get you a distraction free environment?
Have you done much n-back training? Notice a difference? I've spent a little time and can see how it could help, but haven't spent enough time yet.
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IANAL. I'll grant you that this is sketchy. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects employees from engaging in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.

In the US you can't stop person A from talking to person B if the purpose is to make your job better (better benefits/working conditions/almost anything).

IANAL (again)..but, yes, if they aren't allowed to talk to other employees about non-NDA stuff, I agree that maybe a line is slightly being crossed.
I've been told about this sort of thing, but I wasn't sure how widespread it was. Reading the latest RFO from Amazon, I guess I'm not terribly suprised. Its unfortunate that its so difficult to get 3rd party storage into amazon's infrastructure without paying an arm and a leg, maybe someone will do this some day.
Apple has never done anything approaching what Microsoft did to Be and Hitachi
Salary negotiation is cultural — so saying which country you are in is critical. In fact my advice was going to be to jump to a new job is you're below market value, but in some cultures that's a bad idea, yet in other cultures one would be surprised that you didn't do it sooner...
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It sounds curious that people with a yellow badge are forbidden to speak to people with badges of another color.

If that's true, Google has some explaining to do, methinks.
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It's the funniest language I've ever seen.
> Google's extreme overreaction to someone trying to get some very basic information about the other set of employees is what's concerning.

Probably this is what set them off -

"...Most of them are people of color and are supposedly involved in the labor of digitizing information. I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor, and so out of general curiosity I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs. I am aware of internal mechanisms for discussing labor issues with Google, and had no intention of defaming the company..."

A lot of times you can dig a hole for yourself that wasn't there by trying to explain things. Just a, "Was I breaking the rules? Okay, my bad, I didn't mean to. What was I doing? Eh, just screwing around with a video camera, exploring, I won't do it again if it's a problem" probably gets you out of there without hassle.

I mean, his simple explanation covers mentions race, labor, labor issues, defamation, legal contracts... that would scare the hell out of anyone. If he'd just written, "Hi guys, I'm just learning about Google and I like the company. I didn't mean any harm - I'll make sure not to do that again if it's against policy" then that probably would have been the end of it.
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So not getting rides to Disney Land is the same as being worked to death? Way off doesn't begin to describe how screwed your comparison is.
You missed the point: the guy was fired for recording conversations with other employees. After being given permission from his supervisor to do exactly that. On his lunch break. Wtf is that all about?
Umm, I fail to see the relevance of your response to the comment you're responding to.
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I don't think it's highly concerning that a badge has a number for employees to call if someone starts asking questions.

The last three companies I've worked for are very big heavy hitting technology industry names and every single one had a policy that employees are not to give interviews and that if anyone asks you questions, you should refer them to the PR department or other relevant division within the company. This is to avoid situations where some random employee says something unintentionally stupid and it gets promoted to the top of all the sites as official company line. Or to prevent things like, you know, everyone claiming that "Wozniak wants to return to Apple, if they ask him!" when he never said any such thing.

Additionally, you're supposed to report anyone suspicious on the campus, whether they're trying to coat-tail into the building after you badge-in or whether they're snooping around outside and asking questions.

Imagine you hire a big pool of people who punch in a bunch of 10 key or flip pages on a book and press "SCAN" on the machine all day and someone comes snooping around to ask questions about a project (the digitizing of books) that is currently in litigation and some random jackass employee mouths off about something they haven't the slightest clue about and now it's headline news on all the tech industry rags?

Anyway, it's not peculiar or unusual practice. Its' very common. And from what I've seen, this is all speculation. And not even by an employee (or journalist). It's all speculation by a guy who was hired by a company who was hired by Google to get some footage who didn't like the racial makeup of the people he saw walking out of the building for a few days and then started to ask questions of employees who don't know him from any other random guy on the campus filming stuff and asking strange questions.

The way the accusation is made and the whole "expose" is presented is just absurd. Almost surreal, it's so silly. I can't help but think of it in the same light as the internet meme from a couple years ago, where some guys used Glenn Beck's techniques against him by starting up the website "glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com" and then posted the following:

"This site exists to try and help examine the vicious rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?"

Except, in this case, it's "This video exists to try and help examine the vicious rumor that Google is classist and racist and abuses its employees. Why won't Google deny these allegations?"
So not being permitted to speak to other employees is the same as not getting rides to Disney Land? Way off doesn't begin to describe how screwed your comparison is.
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Apparently Google feels that this situation does not fit the public image they want to project so the want to keep it under wraps.

My opinion is that their behaviour isn't exactly evil and probably not unusual but it's uninspiring, uncreative and not up to standard with their approach to other matters. It's a missed opportunity. They have all these people together on the campus so why would they reinforce the existing social segregation instead of weakening it?

It's not simply a matter of cost or security. What does it cost to let everyone ride the same bus and have them eat in the same place? Maybe the kids of those workers would be more inspired if their parents could tell them about a chat they had with some of the Google engineers on the book search project.