It seems that no one is making the distinction between actually having an affair and simply the fantasy of it that most of these members probably engage in.
I would guess that of those 40m members only a small handful have ever engaged in an affair through the site.
Disclaimer: I work for Google. These are my opinions and not necessarily Google's.
My hiring experience was slower than other companies, but did not seem particularily obtuse. It was maybe a few weeks from my initial interview to an offer. I delayed my interview so I could study and had a waiting period after offer before I started due to visa, but the core hiring process was just a few weeks.
Talking with others internally about their experience, it was all pretty similar. No one I know internally suffered through their hiring process.
It does seem to be the case that we sometimes don't do a good job of properly rejecting candidates who didn't make the cut, but there are so many factors that go into these things it's impossible to take a face value a one sided view.
My advice for anyone who does want to work for Google is that you shouldn't, if possible, parallelize your Google application with any other companies. Try here, and if it doesn't work out, continue with your job hunt. But if you try and speed up the Google process by presenting competing offers, you're gonna have a bad time.
The free lunch might only cost the company $5 a day, but if I were to buy my own lunch I would be spending much more than $5 a day. And I would be with post tax money.
Before I worked at Google, I would frequently spend $10 - 15 a day in lunch costs. Add in dinner and snacks, and it could easily rack up to $40+. In pre tax terms that more like $55. Across an entire year that's close to $15k in benefit.
I work in NYC, so costs are inflated, and I realize this might not be true for people working in some less central location.
You are putting words into my mouth, and attacking me with an ad hominem (outrageous is totally unnecessary there). I never indicated we should all be the same, rather we should all be free to develop our identities without the social constructs that society puts in our way. If you want yo express your identity by farting, belching and touching your groin every five minutes, I'm fine with that. But if toy go round saying that women should do that, or its unladylike, or in any other way assert those behaviors as masculine to kids and teens who have no had a chance to fully form their identities, well then we have a problem.
As for source material, the bibliography of Delusions of Gender is a good place to start.
What is wrong with stereotypes is that they are stereotypes. They are fine as theoretical constructs in an educated debate, but they reek havoc on those who are still developing their sense of identity.
Gender stereotypes are the reason kids get called fag or dyke at school, irrespective of their sexual orientation. This is real, and these kids are suffering terribly because of it. The number of student suicides because of homophobic bullying is on the rise, and it is something we can fight against.
I'm not saying there are no differences (although there are virtually no professions that need be gender specific - men and women can be equally proficient at almost everything), but that we should foster an environment where we minimize those differences because the outcomes of not doing that quite literally destroys lives.
All the evidence you need can be found by checking out the "It Gets Better" campaign started by Dan Savage.
Teaching kids to ignore / combat that is just one part of what we need to do. Sadly not all parents are as forward thinking as this, and are quite happy to subconsciously nudge their children into gendered roles.
If we combat this at the systemic level we stand a much better chance of bringing up successive generations in a less biased way, and maybe one day society will look back and think of our time as barbaric in the field of gender equality.
I don't think this is fight we can totally win now, or even in 20 years, but that doesn't mean we should give up. If we help just a single child become comfortable with their own identity, without fear of crossing gender stereotype lines I think we might get there.
This article misses two absolutely critical points to the gender neutral debate.
1. Removing (or reducing) fixed gender stereotypes allows individuals to express themselves withut fear that they are different, or that some how their behavior is wrong. Weather girls prefer Barbies and boys prefer GI Joes is not relevant here. There are a significant number of kids who don't conform to gender stereotypes, and this is expressed through out someones life. The harder we make it for them as a kid to express preferences the more repressed they will be. The fact that some (but not all) of us break through this (women in technology...) is evidence of this problem.
2. That gender stereotypes are detrimental to the world, and the less we subconsciously enforce them, the easier it is for us to create a world where gender is not a factor in equality any more. We attach huge value to the gendered attribute of things, and we do it subconsciously because of the immense amount of gender biased media we have been exposed to over the years. The shock that (some) people express when they hear that a man they have met is a nurse, or that the woman they have just met is a truck driver causes fear of self identification.
You don't have to make a boy play with a doll, but you absolutely should make dolls available to him, without biasing the media he sees so that he thinks only girls play with dolls. Only then can he make a decision on what toy to play with without the influence of millennia of patriarchy.
I'd like to think that most HN readers are enlightened and are intellectually sensitive enough to not see gender biases by default, or at least work hard to over come them. And that this is a symtom of the uneducated, but I know that is not that case with everyone. I have seen it a thousand times in technology, and the only way we can ever change this is by starting young and eradicating gender bias where ever we see it.
I think striking a balance is better, or more specifically allowing individuals to find there personal optimum spot. Personally, I love working in a busy open place office with conversations and discussion going on all the time. I thrive on the energy and excitement. But I like to balance that with only working part of my day like that, and stay after the hubbub dies down.
I don't think this is true... Having never upgraded an unused old iDevice,I'm pretty sure I have still been able to restore from backup without upgrading. But this is really old, so maybe they stopped that in a later firmware update?
Why should I, as an innocent party to a companies security failings have my personal details revealed. This is exactly why we have laws protecting identity theft and fraud.
Naming and shaming the company and the extent of their security failing is enough. But only after they have patched the hole.
H-1B has no requirement that no US citizen can be found with the qualifications. This is a common misconception. In fact, H-1B is fairly trivial if you meet the criteria (degree or equivalent). This "no qualified US citizen" requirement is associated with EB-2 and EB-3 PERM applications, which is the first step to an employer sponsored green card process.
Also, It is not valid to start a business and pay yourself at least the prevailing wage in order to sponsor an H-1B. In fact, if you are in the ownership chain of a company you more or less can't have it apply for an H-1B on your behalf. There are other routes if you are making serious money though.
This. But, not everyone at Google is a search engineer. Many many engineers at Google work on one of our other products. We should, and probably do, have experts on online retail scale-ability somewhere
I would guess that of those 40m members only a small handful have ever engaged in an affair through the site.