Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

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> like FAANG employees with 200K+ salaries.

At first I was a little amazed that many negative articles and comments about these companies were being down-voted, just notice the latest article on the status of a pregnant employee at Google, where the discussion's focus was very quickly and conveniently moved from how said employee had been mistreated by Google to how bad it is that Google allows its employees to discuss freely on these topics.

I didn't understand how come these companies have so many fans on this website, but then I realized that some of these users' total comp largely depends on how those companies' shares behave. If I'm not mistaken a FAANG engineer with 10 year of experience has his comp at about 200k in actual salary and the same figure in redeemable shares, so their total comp can approach 4-500k, half of it in shares. As such, it makes perfect sense to downvote everyone that says bad and unpleasant things about your company, because your money actually depends on it. Not sure that there's anything we, the non-FAANG employees, can do about that.

If it matters I've been an user of this website for quite some time, I just wanted to mention that I'm neither powerful nor wealthy.

From the point of view of an ex-Googler who worked there for many years, the frustrating thing about discussions of Google isn't criticism so much as lazy assertions of things people couldn't possibly know. (They are often things I don't know either, because in a 100,000 person company, there's no way to know everything, and since I left my knowledge is out of date.) And if you ask how they know it, it is apparently just conventional "wisdom" in some circles.

I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.

Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:

http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

So, if you're wondering about downvotes, overconfidence might be a reason, or at least for one downvote.

Even if this was true, wouldn't it be in the best interests of employees from other FAANG companies to upvote these stories?

No. A decrease in Google's share price doesn't increase Facebook's share price. These companies are mostly in the same boat of being large tech companies with significant amounts of power. It's in all of the employees' best interest to suppress stories critical of anything that could be generally applicable to that power structure.

What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. I think people just disagree. And by working in a place you get a different perspective than on the outside.

For example, I often downvote uninformed and highly opinionated financial comments because working inside the industry gives me a different perspective. Also there’s a self selection effect: Those who hate Google probably won’t work there.

Moreover, the less popular a company is, the more they are going to have to pay you. For example in finance Goldman almost always pays below the market rate, because they are the best at what they do and everyone wants to work their. So I think employees of FANG actually have an incentive to spread and promote bad news about the company, to an extent (they don’t want to depress the share price, though).

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