[thesmallestcat]

On the other hand, I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Google's certainly not alone in having clauses like that, but the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf. So that's where my cynicism comes from.

[EmployedRussian]

> I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company.

You understand this based on what?

Out of curiosity, I just went through my employment agreement, and did not find any such clauses.

> Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk.

Or due to the fact that they rarely happen (I am not disputing that they do sometimes happen).

> the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf.

Like I said earlier, since you are dead set to never apply, you'll never find out what (if anything) you've missed.

[thesmallestcat]

Seriously? Maybe you're an exception, but it's not like a search for "google employee nda" returns nothing. It's been discussed on HN as well.

[EmployedRussian]

Google NDA covers (non)disclosure of Google confidential info. It has nothing to do with "bad-mouth"ing before or after termination of employment.

[ocdtrekkie]

Perhaps not, but if you say something negative about Google, and it gets a lot of attention from the public, I think you can agree that you're probably going to get fired. Let's be real here, NDA or no NDA, this is true of working for any company.

Which is why the "personal views" of a current company employee of any organization posted publicly is close to useless.

[EmployedRussian]

> I think you can agree that you're probably going to get fired.

thesmallestcat claimed "that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company", and I claimed that no such clause exists in the standard contract of employment.

By the time you are an ex Googler, getting fired is unlikely to be an effective deterrent.

> Which is why the "personal views" of a current company employee of any organization posted publicly is close to useless.

Either you believe that the company is forcing me to write this (instead of just remaining silent), or your argument is not very logical.

[ocdtrekkie]

Ah, I do see thesmallestcat mentioned "ex", but as the topic was you, a current employee, that seems to be an error on their part. (I don't think the topic at that point was applicants, who would not have signed an NDA at that point, and the conversation had since moved to "Googlers defending Google on HN".) Correct me if I read this wrong.

The problem is that there are likely current employees with both positive and negative feedback about the company. However, you will only hear the former, because the latter would get fired for speaking. Therefore, at the very best, we have to assume your view isn't necessarily representative of the whole.

But more than that, I don't feel Google employees have a particularly balanced view about their employer. You can see my thought on the issue here, and Frqy3's response is succinct in the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14159213

But moving all the way back to the top of this chain, I do see a lot of bad interview stories with Google. Whether through malice or not, there is a lot of hoops to jump through, and as thesmallestcat indicated, people who don't have an incredible amount of enthusiasm for Google are unlikely to bother to continue the process. As it stands, each time one of those "horror stories" comes out, a variety of HN members often state that they would not want to work for Google, in part because of that process.