[bluedevilzn]

> And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy. With no exciting research positions nor self-managed time nor compensation, what was the advantage over a high-paying job at Microsoft or IBM?

When did Google pay less than Microsoft/IBM?

[esprehn]

I think the author is taking about Brazil? It wasn't clear to me until later in the article.

[rdlw]

The two-paragraph introduction explicitly places this article in Brazil in 2007

[mrisoli]

Which confused me, as someone from Belo Horizonte who started uni just around that time. As far as I knew, Google was generally known one of the highest paying companies by far back then. It's benefits were unmatched because the SV-style of office with all the perks were not commonplace in the region, and employee turnover was low to non-existent. Even getting an interview if you didn't have a masters or phd was pretty difficult if not impossible(without connections).

[blindriver]

This entire blog post is so poorly written that I was confused as well. They mention Brazil, but they also mention Arizona. And for some reason the person who asked them about gay lingo wasn't Brazilian so were they in the US? It was a very tough read.

[rdlw]

> Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again

This part is talking about VISITING ARIZONA. As in, they are not from nor do they live in Arizona.

> One day one of the AdSense people asked me for a little meeting. They sat right by my desk, all sleek and confident, and said that they had heard I was a Gaygler™ and were wondering if I could help with one of their clients. “Can you tell me some words that the Brazilian gay community uses? like slang, popular media you like, names of parties, that kind of thing?”

Nowhere does it say that they're not Brazilian. Is this because they asked for Brazilian gay slang specifically? I assume they just wanted to be specific, to get terms used in Brazil. If I ask someone to name some Canadian foods, that doesn't mean I'm not Canadian.

I'm not in love with this article or anything but I am baffled by the number of people on this website, who I assume have rudimentary reading comprehension, getting confused by the fact that a different location is mentioned, even though the article opens by specifying exactly where and when it's set.

[skrebbel]

English is not everybody's first language. And, fwiw, I like to think that I'm as fluent in English as I am in my native language but still the article threw me off too (even while I otherwise liked it).

Notably, it doesn't start with something like "I'm from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and worked at the local Google branch back in 2007" or something like that. Instead, it says this:

> let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007…

I mean if you're from Brazil, this is kinda weird no? Who describes their home country as a tropical place to "journey" towards? It reads like the start of a small anecdotal flashback, and not like the setting of the entire story. It took me many paragraphs to figure out that actually Arizona was the trip, and Brazil was the home base, and not the other way around. I did figure it out in the end, but I can understand why people might be thrown off.

[rdlw]

If I read something that isn't in my native language and don't understand it, I don't claim that it's poorly written.

[rdlw]

And yes, if I was telling someone a story, I might say "cast your mind to the snowy wastes of Canada..." as a fairly standard rhetorical flourish for someone who doesn't think of their country as the default location.