[owkman]

Googler here. This is pure and simple click-bait. We are asked not to speculate on legal matters precisely so that it doesn't get misrepresented in the media or in lawsuits. I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.

[oska]

It's entirely predictable that Google would have this policy. It's also entirely predictable that the NYT would write this article. However, the article still contains interesting detail and will be informative for a lot of the NYT's general readership who don't work for a (somewhat controversial) big corp. Dismissing it as 'simple click-bait' is an over-reaction. Not improved at all by the snark in your second paragraph.

[rjkennedy98]

> I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

If you are even slightly historically aware, US labor history is one of the most violent and adversarial in world history. We've had plenty of strikes in this country where the company literally murdered employees. Google itself has been convicted of suppressing engineering wages.

I honestly am so baffled that all these liberal "woke" people suddenly come to the defense of a company (who along with small oligarchy of peers) now own 90 percent of the internet. They think its fine that the company suppress internal and external free speech, especially on the most important items to them.

I find the whole thing just utterly baffling.

[esoterica]

There is literally no competently run company that will let an employee say things in public or recorded chat logs that could potentially cost them billions of dollars in lawsuits if found in discovery. This policy is neither unreasonable nor specific to Google at all. Does it also offend you that banks don't allow their employees to speculate about committing securities fraud?

If you get paid in company stock it's entirely in your interest to agree to let your company take measures to not get sued for billions of dollars, especially if those measures have ~0 actual negative impact on you. So why would employees push back against a banal rule regarding antitrust speculation?

[rjkennedy98]

Part of it is that Google does a very good job making it FEEL like employees are making a lot of money, plus they have all these perks, which are mostly gimmicks.

The reality is that Google, Facebook, and Apple make at least 2x what they spend on software engineers. Good software engineers are enormously valuable. They are making products used by billions of people.

Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house! This is the most lucrative sector of the economy (like Banking was before, and Chemicals was before that), and the best grads go there. Adjusted they are still making less than bankers did in the 80s.

We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down. That kind of thing would never happen in a fair economy. I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down, which may hurt Google stock, but would benefit the whole development community.

[esoterica]

> We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down.

True, but Facebook was the one that busted the cartel by ignoring the anti-poaching agreement and hiring employees away anyway. Not the government! That seems to prove that the job market is at least competitive enough for cartels to be unsustainable in the long run.

> I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down

This is clearly contradicted by looking at the job market. The fact that the best paying companies are pseudo-monopolies like Apple and Google, or extremely well-funded startups/unicorns that aspire to pseudo-monopoly status by spending their way there with VC money, is evidence that tech monopolies are good, not bad for tech wages (at least if you're good enough to land a job at one of the monopolies).

If the companies were broken up they would make less money, and the reason why software engineers make so much money in the first place is that the pseudo-monopoly created by network effects allows for massive profits, at least some of which trickle down to the engineers. Software engineering is not in any sense harder than any other kind of engineering. The only reason why FAANG engineers make more money than electrical or civil engineers is their employers make way more money too.

The thing about monopolies is tech skills are portable across verticals. So if you have a monopoly on search, you can squeeze advertisers for money because there is no competition. But you can't squeeze your employees the same way, because they can jump ship to other non-search-engine tech companies and their skills will translate. So the monopoly power in the search space allows them to make a lot of money while the lack of monopoly power in the job market means they have to give some of those profits to their employees to stay competitive in hiring.

> Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house

You can definitely afford a home on a FAANG income (especially if your spouse also works). Let's say you make $300-$400k / year and your spouse makes another $100+k. You definitely have plenty of options within your budget.

Maybe you can't buy a large single family house in the middle of the city, but do you think the typical banker owned a McMansion with a yard in Manhattan? You can't bring your provincial suburban values with you if you want to live in a big city.