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Comment by throwaway667555 | Hacker News Reader

Some details of an offer & acceptance of employment are trivial and not worth spoiling good will.

Me: "Hey manager, can I make an expense report for this work phone?" No matter the response, I'm ok with it, because I make Google money, and that's policy. I should work towards becoming management if I want that to change. But I probably have better things to do than such a trivial disagreement.

I wish corporations were less psychopathic, too, but this is not the hill I'd die on. Or, I'd be damn sure ready to die if I redlined as a "nice to meet you" first act.

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I think I'd agree that it is a weird spoiling of goodwill, but would put this one entirely as Google's fault. Requesting a minor change to a contract the first time you see it is the expected behavior, not an outlier. That's the entire point of contracts, in order to come to a meeting of the minds. This is the equivalent of haggling at a flea market, and being thrown out as a result.

I'd agree if this redline didn't require several departments to sign off costing $x million. Internal developers, internal security ops, legal, and C-suite coordinating these departments.

Also Google is very special in that their employees are extremely sophisticated and curious, so they need ~complete~ control of any electronics that access their networks.

Just fill your personal device with dick pics.

They'll stop looking pretty quick.

Only partially joking.

> I'd agree if this redline didn't require several departments to sign off costing $x million.

Straw man. If a small change like this costs a company any more than a thousand bucks, they are Doing it Wrong.

You might argue that $1k is also a lot to expect, but consider that the company has likely already spent north of $25k (and sometimes a lot more than that) on the recruiting process that brought them this new employee. If they're going to throw that away to avoid an internal approval process that costs another thousand, that sounds like a bad financial decision to me.

So if your first paragraph is correct, what are we to make of the HR person saying "But that isn't how we use it, we would never access your personal data."? Were they lying? Or was there a real internal rule about "never" accessing personal data? A rule that was in disagreement with the $x million worth of coordinations of legal documentation?

And if your second paragraph is correct, then "Google HR lies to you on your first day as policy - if you ask certain questions" seems to be the only logical conclusion.

Perfectly determining company data from personal data on a personal device is impossible. "We would never access your personal data" means "we would never access your personal data deliberately, only accidentally in the course of an investigation of your work-related activities". Obviously no company is ever going to sign an agreement promising to do something impossible like perfectly avoid inspecting any personal data during a device audit. The person from the story might as well have been asking for the moon.

If they make verbal assurances that they'll do nothing bad, perhaps they'd be willing to write them down on the contract.

The upstream comment says that not only did they refuse to back up their verbal assurance that "they'll do nothing bad" with anything in writing, they withdrew the job offer over it.

It's been some time since "Do no evil" meant anything there...

It's the equivalent of haggling of the flea market, and being told to give back the goods you are holding because there is no agreement on the price.

Alternative analogy. The haggling at the flea market already occurred (compensation negotiation), and the price was agreed upon. As you are picking up the goods, the seller shouts at you that he also gets to rifle through your phone, no take-backs, and you definitely agreed to it because you're picking up the goods.

One party here is altering the verbal agreement, and expecting the other party to accept without additional negotiation.

It's more like trying to haggle over the price of some bananas at Safeway.

maybe if bananas cost six figures people would negotiate over them.

> I wish corporations were less psychopathic, too, but this is not the hill I'd die on. Or, I'd be damn sure ready to die if I redlined as a "nice to meet you" first act.

And what does Google (and most companies) do as a "nice to meet you" first act? Present you with adhesion contracts that you must sign with barely enough time to go over them. Nice.

I'm not a privacy nut, but I am concerned about a company owning my ideas when I'm working on personal projects.

I'm careful about that.

Would that be a deal breaker even at a dream job, yes.

I admire that and wish more employees looked after their interests, too, so that the commons weren't so poisoned with corporation-morality rather than humanity-morality.

Practically speaking, I think giving The Guardian or some pro-union think tank/lobbyist a copy of internal corporate policies would move the needle a lot more than a personal stand, but the personal stand is admirable nonetheless. Currently my financial freedom supersedes that level of moral freedom and agency.

Tech Solidarity collected those years ago. I think he came to the conclusion that you can't get anyone in tech to organize for anything so it didn't really matter.

Although it does seem like Googlers organize for their own comfort; they don't seem to bother doing it for their users though.

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