Google-gies: A New Literary Genre
January 19, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I think graduate students in American literature have a new genre to analyze. The best way to define an innovation in literature is to take an example and do what soon-to-be-unemployed MA and PhD candidates do best: Examine an original text. I think one word used to describe this type of examination is deconstruction. Close enough for horseshoes.
These former high tech feudal barons lament parties designed to facilitate discussion of dissolution, devolution, and disintegration. Thanks, second tier MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough again.
My name for this new branch of American writing is a combination of Google and elegy or Googlegy. I also considered Googletopsis in honor of William Cullen Bryant, but Googlegy is snappier in my opinion. The point is that the term applies to writing about the death of the Google myth.
Let’s turn to a recent example titled “Mourning Google.” The main idea is that the Google is dead or one facet of the estimable firm has passed into the Great Beyond. The writer is Tim Bray who was a Big Gun at OpenText and other firms before joining the Digital Camelot. He writes:
it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.
Funereal? Yep. He continues:
And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.
I like the metaphors and the lingo. (Subsequent sections of the essay use vulgar language. Some of the author’s words appear on Google list of forbidden words, so I won’t repeat them. This is a blog, not English 602, Googlegy: Meaning and Social Impact.
The wrap up of the essay reveals some of the attitude of a Xoogler or former Googler presents this wonderful blend of nostalgia, greed, and personal emotion:
It was ethereal — OK, pretentious — almost beyond belief. Almost entirely vegetarian, rare plants hand-gathered by Zen monks and assembled into jewel-like little platelets-full that probably strengthened eleven different biochemical subsystems just by existing. And the desserts were beyond divine. Admittedly, sometimes when I left, my Norwegian-farmer metabolism grumbled a bit about not having had any proper food, but still. It was wonderful. It was absurd. And I got a $90K bonus that year because Google+ hit its numbers. It’s over, I think. It’s OK to miss it.
Why are Googlegies appearing? I have a theory, and if I were teaching graduate students, I would direct those eager minds toward a research topic in this untrodden intellectual space.
Let me share several observations:
- Using Swisscows.com or another reasonably useful Web search engine, one can locate other articles about the mythical death of the Google
- Medium and Substack harbor essays in this genre
- Conferences featuring speakers who were Googlers provide an opportunity for first-hand data collection
- Apply for a job and learn up close and personal how money assuages one’s conscience, emotions, and ethical whimpers.
I have a different viewpoint. The Google is busy redesigning the Web to maintain its grip on revenue from advertisers. Googley technology will, its senior managers hope, will blunt the rapacious outfits which are equally inspired by the spirit of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller.
Welcome the birth of a new genre — Google-gies. Refreshing if too late.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2024
eBay: Still Innovating and Serving Customers with Great Ideas
January 16, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I noted “eBay to Pay $3 Million after Couple Became the Target of Harassment, Stalking.” If true, the “real” news report is quite interesting. The CBS professionals report:
“eBay engaged in absolutely horrific, criminal conduct. The company’s employees and contractors involved in this campaign put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand,” Levy [a US attorney] said. “We left no stone unturned in our mission to hold accountable every individual who turned the victims’ world upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts.”
MSFT Copilot could not render Munsters and one of their progeny opening a box. But the image is “good enough,” which is the modern way to define excellence. Well done, MSFT.
In what could have been a skit in the now-defunct “The Munsters”, allegedly some eBay professionals packed up “live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask.” The box was shipped to a couple of people who posted about the outstanding online flea market eBay on social media. A letter, coffee, or Zoom were not sufficient for the exceptional eBay executives. Why Zoom when one can bundle up some cockroaches and put them in a box? Go with the insects, right?
I noted this statement in the “real” news story:
seven people who worked for eBay’s Safety and Security unit, including two former cops and a former nanny, all pleaded guilty to stalking or cyberstalking charges.
Those posts were powerful indeed. I wonder if eBay considered hiring the people to whom the Munster fodder was sent. Individuals with excellent writing skills and the agility to evoke strong emotions are in demand in some companies.
A civil trial is scheduled for March 2025. The story has legs, maybe eight of them just like the allegedly alive spiders in the eBay gift box. Outstanding management decision making appears to characterize the eBay organization.
Stephen E Arnold, January 16, 2024
Do You Know the Term Quality Escape? It Is a Sign of MBA Efficiency Talk
January 12, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I am not too keen on leaving my underground computer facility. Given the choice of a flight on a commercial airline and doing a Zoom, fire up the Zoom. It works reasonably well. Plus, I don’t have to worry about screwed up flight controls, air craft maintenance completed in a country known for contraband, and pilots trained on flawed or incomplete instructional materials. Why am I nervous? As a Million Mile traveler on a major US airline, I have survived a guy dying in the seat next to me, assorted “return to airport” delays, and personal time spent in a comfy seat as pilots tried to get the mechanics to give the okay for the passenger jet to take off. (Hey, it just landed. What’s up? Oh, right, nothing.)
Another example of a quality escape: Modern car, dead battery, parts falling off, and a flat tire. Too bad the driver cannot plug into the windmill. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough because the auto is not failing at 14,000 feet.
I mention my thrilling life as a road warrior because I read “Boeing 737-9 Grounding: FAA Leaves No Room For “Quality Escapes.” In that “real” news report I spotted a phrase which was entirely new to me. Imagine. After more than 50 years of work in assorted engineering disciplines at companies ranging from old-line industrial giants like Halliburton to hippy zippy outfits in Silicon Valley, here was a word pair that baffled me:
Quality Escape
Well, quality escape means that a product was manufactured, certified, and deployed which was did not meet “standards”. In plain words, the door and components were not safe and, therefore, lacked quality. And escape? That means failure. An F, flop, or fizzle.
“FAA Opens Investigation into Boeing Quality Control after Alaska Airlines Incident” reports:
… the [FAA] agency has recovered key items sucked out of the plane. On Sunday, a Portland schoolteacher found a piece of the aircraft’s fuselage that had landed in his backyard and reached out to the agency. Two cell phones that were likely flung from the hole in the plane were also found in a yard and on the side of the road and turned over to investigators.
I worked on an airplane related project or two when I was younger. One of my team owned two light aircraft, one of which was acquired from an African airline and then certified for use in the US. I had a couple of friends who were jet pilots in the US government. I picked up some random information; namely, FAA inspections are a hassle. Required work is expensive. Stuff breaks all the time. When I was picking up airplane info, my impression was that the FAA enforced standards of quality. One of the pilots was a certified electrical engineer. He was not able to repair his electrical equipment due to FAA regulations. The fellow followed the rules because the FAA in that far off time did not practice “good enough” oversight in my opinion. Today? Well, no people fell out of the aircraft when the door came off and the pressure equalization took place. iPhones might survive a fall from 14,000 feet. Most humanoids? Nope. Shoes, however, do fare reasonably well.
Several questions:
- Exactly how can a commercial aircraft be certified and then shed a door in flight?
- Who is responsible for okaying the aircraft model in the first place?
- Didn’t some similar aircraft produce exciting and consequential results for the passengers, their families, pilots, and the manufacturer?
- Why call crappy design and engineering “quality escape”? Crappy is simpler, more to the point.
Yikes. But if it flies, it is good enough. Excellence has a different spin these days.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2024
Has a Bezos Protuberance Knocked WaPo for a Loop?
January 12, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I thought the Washington Post was owned by one of the world’s richest me with a giant rocket ship and a really big yacht with huge protuberances. I probably am wrong, but what’s new? I found the information in “Washington Post Newsroom Is Rattled by Buyouts” in line with other organizations layoffs, terminations, RIFs, whatever. My goodness, how could an outfit with some Bezos magic be cutting costs. I think that protuberance obsessed fellow just pumped big money into an artificial intelligence start up. To fund that, it makes sense to me in today’s business environment to accept cost cutting and wild and crazy investments in relatively unproven technology amusing. No, it is not interesting.
An aspiring journalist at a university’s whose president quit because it was easier to invent and recycle information look at the closed library. The question is a good one, even if the young journalist cannot spell. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Three tries. Bingo.
The write up in Vanity Fair, which is a business magazine like Harvard University’s Harvard Business Review without the allegations of plagiarism and screwy diversity battles, brings up images of would-be influencers clutching their giant metal and custom ceramic mugs and gripping their mobile phones with fear in their eyes. Imagine. A newspaper with staff cuts. News!
The article points out:
Scaling back staff while heading into a pivotal presidential election year seems like an especially ill-timed move given the _Post_’s traditional strengths in national politics and policy. Senior editors at the _Post_ have been banking on heightened interest in the election to juice readership amid slowed traffic and subscriptions. At one point in the meeting, according to two staffers, investigative reporter Carol Leonnig said that over the years she’d been told that the National team was doing great work and that issues on the business side would be taken care of, only for the problems to persist.
The write up states:
In late December, word of who’d taken a buyout at _The_ _Washington Post_ began to trickle out. Reporters found themselves especially alarmed by the hard cost cutting hit taken by one particular department: news research, a unit that assists investigations by, among other things, tracking down subjects, finding court records, verifying claims, and scouring documents. The department’s three most senior researchers—Magda Jean-Louis and Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Crites and Jennifer Jenkins—had all accepted buyouts, among the 240 that the company offered employees across departments amid financial struggles. That left news research with only three people: supervisor Monika Mathur and researchers Cate Brown, who specializes in international research, and Razzan Nakhlawi.
The “real news” is that research librarians are bailing out before a day of reckoning which could nuke pensions and other benefits. Researchers are quite intelligent people in my opinion.
Do these actions reflect on Mr. Bezos, he of the protuberance fixation, and his management methods? Amazon has a handful of challenges. The oddly shaped Bezos rocket ship has on occasion exploded. And now the gem of DC journalism is losing people. I would suggest that management methods have a role to play.
Killing off support for corporate libraries is not a new thing. The Penn Central outfit was among the first big corporate giant to decide its executives could live without a special library. Many other firms have followed in the last 15 years or so. Now the Special Library Association is a shadow of its former self, trampled by expert researchers skilled in the use of the Google and by hoards of self-certified individuals who proclaim themselves open source information experts. Why wouldn’t an outfit focused on accurate information dump professional writers and researchers? It meshes quite well with alternative facts, fake news, and AI-generated content. Good enough is the mantra of the modern organization. How much cereal is in your kids’ breakfast box when you first open it? A box half full. Good enough.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2024
A Google Gem: Special Edition on 1-11-23
January 11, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I learned that the Google has swished its tail and killed off some baby Googlers. Giant creatures can do that. Thomson Reuters (the trust outfit) reported the “real” news in “Google Lays Off Hundreds in Assistant, Hardware, Engineering Teams.” But why? The Google is pulsing with revenue, opportunity, technology, and management expertise. Thomson Reuters has the answer:
"Throughout second-half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally," a spokesperson for Google told Reuters in a statement.
On YCombinator’s HackerNews, I spotted some interesting comments. Foofie asserted: “In the last quarter Alphabet reported "total revenues of $76.69bn, an increase of 11 percent year-on-year (YoY). Google Cloud alone grew 22%.”
A giant corporate creature plods forward. Is the big beastie mindful of those who are crushed in the process? Sure, sure. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough.
BigPeopleAreOld observes: “As long as you can get another job and can get severance pay, a layoff feel like an achievement than a loss. That happened me in my last company, one that I was very attached to for what I now think was irrational reasons. I wanted to leave anyway, but having it just happen and getting a nice severance pay was a perk. I am treating my new job as the complete opposite and the feeling is cathartic, which allows me to focus better on my work instead of worrying about the maintaining the illusion of identity in the company I work for.”
Yahoo, that beacon of stability, tackled the human hedge trimming in “Google Lays Off Hundreds in Hardware, Voice Assistant Teams.” The Yahooligans report:
The reductions come as Google’s core search business feels the heat from rival artificial-intelligence offerings from Microsoft Corp. and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. On calls with investors, Google executives pledged to scrutinize their operations to identify places where they can make cuts, and free up resources to invest in their biggest priorities.
I like the word “pledge.” I wonder what it means in the land of Googzilla.
And how did the Google RIF these non-essential wizards and wizardettes? According to 9to5Google.com:
This reorganization will see Google lay off a few hundred roles across Devices & Services, though the majority is happening within the first-party augmented reality hardware team. This downsizing suggests Google is no longer working on its own AR hardware and is fully committed to the OEM-partnership model. Employees will have the ability to apply to open roles within the company, and Google is offering its usual degree of support.
Several observations:
- Dumping employees reduces costs, improves efficiency, and delivers other MBA-identified goodies. Efficiency is logical.
- The competitive environment is more difficult than some perceive. Microsoft, OpenAI, and the many other smart software outfits are offering alternatives to Google search even when these firms are not trying to create problems for Google. Search sucks and millions are looking for an alternative. I sense fear among the Googlers.
- The regulatory net is becoming more and more difficult to avoid. The EU and other governmental entities see Google as a source of money. The formula seems to be to litigate, find guilty, and find. What’s not to like for cash strapped government entities?
- For more than a year, the Google has been struggling with its slip on sneakers. As a result, the Google conveys that it is not able to make a dash to the ad convenience store as it did when it was younger, friskier. Google looks old, and predators know that the old can become a snack.
See Google cares.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2024
A Decision from the High School Science Club School of Management Excellence
January 11, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I can’t resist writing about Inc. Magazine and its Google management articles. These are knee slappers for me. The write up causing me to chuckle is “Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, Says Laying Off 12,000 Workers Was the Worst Moment in the Company’s 25-Year History.” Zowie. A personnel decision coupled with late-night, anonymous termination notices — What’s not to like. What’s the “real” news write up have to say:
Google had to lay off 12,000 employees. That’s a lot of people who had been showing up to work, only to one day find out that they’re no longer getting a paycheck because the CEO made a bad bet, and they’re stuck paying for it.
“Well, that clever move worked when I was in my high school’s science club. Oh, well, I will create a word salad to distract from my decision making.Heh, heh, heh,” says the distinguished corporate leader to a “real” news publication’s writer. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough.
I love the “had.”
The Inc. Magazine story continues:
Still, Pichai defends the layoffs as the right decision at the time, saying that the alternative would have been to put the company in a far worse position. “It became clear if we didn’t act, it would have been a worse decision down the line,” Pichai told employees. “It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas.”
And Inc Magazine actually criticizes the Google! I noted:
To be clear, what Pichai is saying is that Google decided to spend money to hire employees that it later realized it needed to invest elsewhere. That’s a failure of management to plan and deliver on the right strategy. It’s an admission that the company’s top executives made a mistake, without actually acknowledging or apologizing for it.
From my point of view, let’s focus on the word “worst.” Are there other Google management decisions which might be considered in evaluating the Inc. Magazine and Sundar Pichai’s “worst.” Yep, I have a couple of items:
- A lawyer making babies in the Google legal department
- A Google VP dying with a contract worker on the Googler’s yacht as a result of an alleged substance subject to DEA scrutiny
- A Googler fond of being a glasshole giving up a wife and causing a soul mate to attempt suicide
- Firing Dr. Timnit Gebru and kicking off the stochastic parrot thing
- The presentation after Microsoft announced its ChatGPT initiative and the knee jerk Red Alert
- Proliferating duplicative products
- Sunsetting services with little or no notice
- The Google Map / Waze thing
- The messy Google Brain Deep Mind shebang
- The Googler who thought the Google AI was alive.
Wow, I am tired mentally.
But the reality is that I am not sure if anyone in Google management is particularly connected to the problems, issues, and challenges of losing a job in the midst of a Foosball game. But that’s the Google. High school science club management delivers outstanding decisions. I was in my high school science club, and I know the fine decision making our members made. One of those cost the life of one of our brightest stars. Stars make bad decisions, chatter, and leave some behind.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2024
Cyber Security Software and AI: Man and Machine Hook Up
January 8, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
My hunch is that 2024 is going to be quite interesting with regards to cyber security. The race among policeware vendors to add “artificial intelligence” to their systems began shortly after Microsoft’s ChatGPT moment. Smart agents, predictive analytics coupled to text sources, real-time alerts from smart image monitoring systems are three application spaces getting AI boosts. The efforts are commendable if over-hyped. One high-profile firm’s online webinar presented jargon and buzzwords but zero evidence of the conviction or closure value of the smart enhancements.
The smart cyber security software system outputs alerts which the system manager cannot escape. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. You produced a workable illustration without slapping my request across my face. Good enough too.
Let’s accept as a working presence that everyone from my French bulldog to my neighbor’s ex wife wants smart software to bring back the good old, pre-Covid, go-go days. Also, I stipulate that one should ignore the fact that smart software is a demonstration of how numerical recipes can output “good enough” data. Hallucinations, errors, and close-enough-for-horseshoes are part of the method. What’s the likelihood the door of a commercial aircraft would be removed from an aircraft in flight? Answer: Well, most flights don’t lose their doors. Stop worrying. Those are the rules for this essay.
Let’s look at “The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence.” I grant the title may not be the best one I have spotted this month, but here’s the main point of the article in my opinion. Writing about automated threat and security alerts, the essay opines:
When reports are made to look better and to appear to have a point, it takes a longer time for us to research and eventually discard it. Every security report has to have a human spend time to look at it and assess what it means. The better the crap, the longer time and the more energy we have to spend on the report until we close it. A crap report does not help the project at all. It instead takes away developer time and energy from something productive. Partly because security work is consider one of the most important areas so it tends to trump almost everything else.
The idea is that strapping on some smart software can increase the outputs from a security alerting system. Instead of helping the overworked and often reviled cyber security professional, the smart software makes it more difficult to figure out what a bad actor has done. The essay includes this blunt section heading: “Detecting AI Crap.” Enough said.
The idea is that more human expertise is needed. The smart software becomes a problem, not a solution.
I want to shift attention to the managers or the employee who caused a cyber security breach. In what is another zinger of a title, let’s look at this research report, “The Immediate Victims of the Con Would Rather Act As If the Con Never Happened. Instead, They’re Mad at the Outsiders Who Showed Them That They Were Being Fooled.” Okay, this is the ostrich method. Deny stuff by burying one’s head in digital sand like TikToks.
The write up explains:
The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they’re mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.
Let’s assume the data in this “Victims” write up are accurate, verifiable, and unbiased. (Yeah, I know that is a stretch.)
What do these two articles do to influence my view that cyber security will be an interesting topic in 2024? My answers are:
- Smart software will allegedly detect, alert, and warn of “issues.” The flow of “issues” may overwhelm or numb staff who must decide what’s real and what’s a fakeroo. Burdened staff can make errors, thus increasing security vulnerabilities or missing ones that are significant.
- Managers, like the staffer who lost a mobile phone, with company passwords in a plain text note file or an email called “passwords” will blame whoever blows the whistle. The result is the willful refusal to talk about what happened, why, and the consequences. Examples range from big libraries in the UK to can kicking hospitals in a flyover state like Kentucky.
- Marketers of remediation tools will have a banner year. Marketing collateral becomes a closed deal making the art history majors writing copy secure in their job at a cyber security company.
Will bad actors pay attention to smart software and the behavior of senior managers who want to protect share price or their own job? Yep. Close attention.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2024
THE I IN LLM STANDS FOR INTELLIGENCE
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Quantum Management: The Google Method
December 27, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read a story (possibly sad or at least bittersweet) in Inc. Magazine. “Google Fired 12,000 Employees. A Year Later, the CEO Says It Was the Right Call, Just Done in the Wrong Way” asks an interesting question of a company which has triggered a number of employee-related actions. From protests to stochastic parrots, the Google struggles to tailor its management methods to the people it hires.
What happens when high school science club engineering is applied to modern tasks? Some projects fall down. Hello, San Francisco, do you have a problem with a certain big building? Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.
The story reports:
A few days ago, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai openly acknowledged that the way Google managed the layoff of 12,000 employees, about 6 percent of its workforce, was not done right…. Initially, Google’s stance on the layoffs was presented as a strategic necessity, a move to streamline operations and focus on crucial business areas…. Pichai’s frank admission that the process could have been handled differently is a notable shift from the company’s earlier justifications??.
What I think this means is that Google’s esteemed leader made a somewhat typical decision for a person imbued with some of the philosophy of a non-Western culture. In 2023, Google has lurched from Red Alert to Red Alert. In January 2023, Microsoft seized the marketing initiative in the lucrative world of enterprise artificial intelligence. And what about some of Google’s AI demonstrations? Yeah, some were edited and tweaked to be more Googley. Then after a couple of high profile legal cases went against the company, Sundar Pichai has allegedly admitted that he has made some errors.
No kidding. Like the architect engineers of the Florida high rise which collapsed to ruin the day of a number of people, mistakes were made. I suppose San Francisco’s Millennium Tower could topple over the holidays. That event would pull some eyeballs off the online advertising company.
The sad reality is that Google’s senior management is pushing buttons and getting poor results. The Inc. Magazine article ends this way:
The key questions moving forward are: Will Google face any repercussions for the way it handled the layoffs? What concrete actions will the company take to improve communication and support for its employees, both those who were let go and those who remain? And, importantly, how will this experience shape Google’s, and potentially other companies’, approach to workforce management in the future?
Questions, just not the right one. In my opinion, Google’s Board of Directors may want to ask:
Is it time to big adieu to Sundar Pichai and his expensive hires? With the current team in place, Google’s core business model at risk from ChatGPT-type findability services, legal eagles hovering over the company, and now a public admission that firing 12,000 wizards by email was a mistake, I ask, “What’s next, Sundar?”
Net net: The company’s management method (which reminds me of how my high school science club solved problems) is showing signs of cracking and crumbling in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, December 27, 2023
Google Gobbles Apple Alums
December 27, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Technology companies are notorious for poaching employees from one other. Stealing employees is so common that business experts have studied it for years. One of the more recent studies concentrates on the destination of ex-Apple associates as told by PC Magazine: “Apple Employees Leave For Google More Than Any Other Company.”
Switch on Business investigated LinkedIn data to determine which tech giants poach the industry’s best talent. All of the big names were surveyed: Uber, Intel, Adobe, Salesforce, Nvidia, Netflix, Oracles, Tesla, IBM, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google. The study mainly focused on employees working at the aforementioned names and if they switched to another listed company.
Meta had the highest proportion of any of the tech giants with 26.51% of employees having worked at rival. Google had the most talent by volume with 24.15%. IBM stole the least employees at 2.28%. Apple took 5.7% of its competitions’ talent and that comes with some drama. Apple used to purchase Intel chips for its products then the company recently decided to build its own chips. They hired 2000 people away from Intel.
The most interesting factoids are the patterns found in employee advancements:
“Potentially surprising is the fact that Apple employees are twice as likely to make the move to Google from Apple than the next biggest post-Apple destination, Amazon. After Amazon, Apple employees make the move to Meta, followed by Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel, and Oracle.
As for where Apple employees come from, new Apple employees are most likely to enter the company from Intel, followed by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, Tesla, Nvidia, Adobe, and Meta.
While Apple employees are most often headed to Google, Google employees are most often headed to Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, with Apple only making it to fourth on the list.”
It sounds like a hiring game of ring-around-the-rosy. Unless the employees retire, they’ll eventually make it back to their first company.
Whitney Grace, December 25, 2023
Amazon and the US Government: Doing Just Fine, Thanks
December 26, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
OSHA was established to protect workers from unsafe conditions. Big technology barons like Jeff Bezos with Amazon don’t give rat’s hind quarters about employee safety. They might project an image of caring and kindness but that’s from Amazon’s PR department. Amazon is charged with innumerable workplace violations, including micromanaging yawning to poor compensation. The Washington Posts details one of Amazon’s latest scandals, “A 20-Year-Old Amazon Employee Died At Work. Indiana Issued A $7000 Fine.”
Twenty-year old Caes Gruesbeck was clearing a blockage on an overhead conveyor belt at the Amazon distribution center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He needed to use an elevated lift to reach the blockage. His head collided with the conveyor and became trapped. Gruesbeck later died from blunt force trauma.
Indiana safety officials investigated for eleven weeks and found that Amazon failed to ensure a safe work environment. Amazon was only cited and fined $7000. Amazon employees continue to be injured and the country’s second largest private employer is constantly scrutinized, but state and federal safety regulators are failing to enforce policies. They are failing because Amazon is a powerful corporation with a hefty legal department.
“‘Seven thousand dollars for the death of a 20-year-old? What’s that going to do to Amazon?’ said Stephen Wagner, an Indiana attorney who has advocated for more worker-friendly laws in the state. ‘There’s no real financial incentive for an employer like Amazon to change their working environment to make it more safe.’”
Federal and state governments are trying to make Amazon take responsibility through the current system but it’s slow. Safety regulators can’t inspect every Amazon complaint and building. They are instead working towards a sweeping company approach like the Family Dollar and Dollar Tree investigations about blocked fire exits. It took six years, resulting in $15 million in fines and a $1.35 million settlement.
Once companies are hit with large fines it changes how they do business. Amazon probably will be brought to justice but it will take a long time.
Whitney Grace, December 26, 2023
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