Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by prepend 2003 days ago
No, I think Google built a system to link every email address used by an individual and all their browsing habits. Not specific to their employees but to do that on everyone in the planet.

It also makes the simple connection that a user also has a google.com account without doing anything special.

Although I suspect they do have something home built as every single company I’ve worked for with a broad customer facing product has had some flag to note employee accounts. I built this sometimes and was usually to help understand if some random suggestion was from a bigwig worth looking up. You never want to be in a situation where “Ms So and So, EVP of some department you don’t know submitted a question a week ago and got no answer. She mentioned it to me at the EVP monthly hobo hunt, yadda yadda yadda.”
1 comments
alisonkisk 2003 days ago
You're misunderstanding as you speculating. You've now shifted to "Googler has a special friendly-spying apparatus, enabled by its core technology", to "every company has the same apparatus, and low level line employees are treated the same as EVPs", which is absurd as everyone here knows.

And saying "hobo hunt" shows you obviously aren't engaging in serious conversation.

link
prepend 2003 days ago
I may likely be misunderstanding.

I was trying to convey that Google just already tracks all linked email accounts so it seems natural that they would be able to trivially identify or prioritize inbound suggestions from employees.

I also wanted to say that even if they did build a custom system to sort employees, it’s not hard. It’s not a super secret tech, but something I’ve personally implemented in an afternoon 20 years ago, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easy to do. If they want to.

I added the “hobo hunt” joke as I think infusing humor in arbitrary engagements makes it easier to engage in serious conversation. And all my serious conversations involve humor. Of course, I seriously doubt that any company executives routinely engage in hunting homeless persons and used something extremely absurd and impossible.

link