The case of Google and the Disappearing Employee Blog

Or just confused bloggers with too much leisure time?

[Brett_Tabke]

[blog.outer-court.com...]
[battellemedia.com...]
[bloglines.com...]

let me summerize the high points:

- google employee starts blog [99zeros.blogspot.com] of work at google.
- blogger is critical of google.
- gets blog is not in index or google cache, and page is blank on the blog.
- blog can still be found in Yahoo cache [216.109.117.135].

[pmkpmk]

Seems to me someone overreacted here. It doesn't read much different than the first days in EVERY new company. Actually in some aspects it does read BETTER than a few starting days I had in my career so far...

Maybe it's the existance per se, which triggered the alarms. If you build a facade of obscurity, you don't want to have somebody reporting from the inside.

What he reports, though, is pretty harmless. And we all KNOW that EACH Human Ressources department throughout the world sucks...

[jaffstar]

The guy is not a happy camper, that’s if he actually works for Google. If he does, what an idiot for posting on a blog about Google and violating confidentiality.

[Chndru]

hehe.. he just joined Google on 17th from M$.

full blog here: [bloglines.com...]

[randle]

If you sign a non-disclosure then certainly you need to be quite careful on what you write about. However, the guy is just keeping a blog about his experiences at a new job. Actively going into a search engine, (yeah I know it’s theirs) and wiping it right out is a little bizarre, don’t you think?

[web_india]

>> he just joined Google on 17th from M$

his microsoft blog is still available online

[ciml]

Do we know that the page was in Google?

[vabtz]

wow what a big non-issue

he didn't even post anything remotely controversial

[div01]

What's my impression as well. He liked his T41 laptop...heck, so do I!

[pmkpmk]

Read the full blog now. Nothing shocking about it. Sounds a bit like a "new economy" tale to me. Douglas Copelands "Microserfs" was far more shocking. I'm even more convinced now, that someone overreacted.

To say it with Shakespeare: Much ado about nothing.

[garyr_h]

I just find it unbelievable that an employee of google would use an already made template and have it hosted off blogspot... along with bad punctuation and capitalization..

[BigDave]

I didn't find his complaints about the compensation package to be all that bad, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that is so concerned about their image would have a problem with a brand new employee posting it.

I'm not saying that I agree with the company taking it down (if that is in fact what happened), I'm just saying that it doesn't surprise me. Writing critical work related blogs ain't exactly the safest career move, and not a game that I would be playing less than a week into signing up.

He does seem to be a bit of a whiner. He chooses to move to SF, and complains that the free shuttle they provide is crowded and takes 1:20 each way.

If he isn't damn good at his job, I suspect that he will have a very short career he maintains that sort of attitude.

[plumsauce]

i took the time to read the remaining available scraps and the newer version pointed out by Brett. there is nothing in any of it that even comes close to being sensitive information or truly critical. just fairly well written observations of his own reactions.

so, first, google is truly thin skinned, and second this seems remarkably schizophrenic in that google wants to index all available information ... except that which it deems not to be in it's own interest.

think about this:

do no evil
do no good
do nothing

are not mutually exclusive.

do no evil leaves an awful lot of wiggle room.

btw, it seems that while they have an understaffed spam management team, the team responsible for maintaining a watch on google related materials does not suffer from the same problem.

[BigDave]

so, first, google is truly thin skinned,

You should note, that the blog is gone. That is not *proof* that it was google that pulled it.

It just might be that he thought better of publically whining about a company that he has only worked at for a week, and pulled it himself after noticing that it was actually getting some attention.

[Chndru]

It is now back with a few lines about financial and product details out.

[99zeros.blogspot.com...]

[pmkpmk]

they didn't ask me to take anything down (even the stuff where i'm critical about the company). i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things. the quickest way for me to fix the situation at the time was to take it all down

[walkman]

"the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear"

yp, he sure missed the boat. No wonder he got beef. he choose to go there though and he can still leave.

On another note, If I owned the company I wouldn't be happy if an employee of mine did that. Plus, if you're working next to him, you have to wonder if what you say will end up online.

[pmkpmk]

Nothing new since January 27?

[conspiracy theory]Maybe the let it run for a few days with boring stuff about the weather and THEN pulled the plug so nobody notices?[/conspiracy theory]

[plumsauce]

You should note, that the blog is gone. That is not *proof* that it was google that pulled it.

and it is not proof to the contrary either.

i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things

certainly, he was "spoken to" or "counseled", whatever.

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Continued: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 5:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2005]