Google and Personnel Management: New Taco Truck Operators Available
June 5, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I located another great example of the failure of modern hiring practices. The source of this information is the Alphabet Workers Union. I admit that it is a biased source. Those who work at Google are, by definition, the world’s smartest and most capable humans on planet earth. These humans create the must-have services that beg for personally identifiable information and do their level best to extract essential signals from clicks on their assorted online properties.
I read “We Are a Fighting Union.” I am not sure if the information in the Web page that displays is a call to action, a bunch of misfits complaining about work, or a disinformation operation powered by a Gemini agentic bot chain. Frankly I don’t care. What interests me is that the existence of “We Are a Fighting Union” provides a glimpse of the consequence of what might be called “flawed human resource intake, vetting, and training programs.” In a nutshell, the Web page illustrates the real or attributed behaviors of Google leadership. (Of course, I know the company is Alphabet, but, hey, I coined the word Googzilla for my monograph published by the now-defunct Infonortics Ltd. in the UK. Therefore, I stick with “Google” as an umbrella term and use “Googzilla” to signal brilliant actions taken by the company’s leadership.
I assume Google personnel has larger images of these individuals. I assume Google’s Lens technology or a variant can identify each individual as well. This snap from the AWU Web site suggests some Googlers are not happy campers:
What is the “problem” the union wishes to address. It is not working conditions. The offices, if one actually shows up, are comfy and provide some essentials like bean bag chairs, approved beverages, and some okayed snacks. Based on my scanning of the “We Are a Fighting Union,” the problem seems to be Google’s management failings. If Google were doing a good job, there would be no need to create a union. The AWU says:
Our union strives to protect Alphabet workers, our users, and our world.
The union in my opinion is unlikely to prevail. The typical Silicon Valley type of company is a caste system or a Great Chain of Being. The idea is that “leadership” is at the top of the hierarchy. Next in line are the smartest and most endorsed technical employees. Below the second tier are serf; that is, people who do work. The set up is efficient when viewed in terms of revenue, performance metrics, or other outputs deemed important to leadership. Thus, it is possible for some serfs to move up in the hierarchy. Certain “groups” of serfs have more difficulty moving up than others. Lawyers not skilled in technology face headwinds and may work from a trailer in a parking lot about a mile from Carpetland on Shoreline Drive. Others like a 17 year old whiz can go aloft carried by a hot air balloon of a technical breakthrough that produced a “big win” in the eyes of leadership.
The unionizers face a reality: Google wants compliant serfs. Dr. Timnit Gebru is the poster child for how Google responds to nails that stick up. The “no tech for apartheid” crowd found themselves free to operate a taco lunch wagon in Redwood City. And there are other examples.
The “We Are a Fighting Union” information says it wants:
- Job protection
- Fair pay for serfs
- Flexible work conditions
- Privacy protection
- Racial and economic justice.
Okay, this is a great list for a discussion group in a high school sociology class. The five items are simply not part of the modern Silicon Valley-type company operating modality. Here’s what’s expected of serfs and what the Boards of Directors want to happen:
- Screw up or are deemed not essential, a person will be terminated. The Meta email firings provide a good example of the modern management methods for personnel procedures
- Pay is based on the tier and an “employee’s big wins.” No wins? You are out.
- Work must be done within the “time” defined by leadership. This means a standard work day plus whatever additional hours are required and continuously over a seven day work week. Work, not the serf’s needs, comes first. Fail and the serf is pushed out.
- Privacy does not exist. The idea is 24×7 surveillance with analytics identifying the non compliant.
- Justice. Give me a break. Leadership defines the rules. Keep up and follow them or you will be in a taco truck in San Carlos.
Is this a good way to run a company? It depends on one’s point of view. From the leadership level, the answer is, “Absolutely.” From the mid-level, on the way up perspective, it’s not great, but it’s going to make me rich and I get nifty opportunities. From the serf level, it sucks. But throughout history, serfs have not been happy. Suck it up or quit strike me as the options.
Trust me. The creation of a union in a Silicon Valley type company is unlikely to result in the outcome the organizers and members expect.
Remember. Money and power in Silicon Valley type companies foster the emergence of Dark Age management methods.
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2026
A Big Waste of Time: Talking about Time to Young People
October 29, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I will be 81 in a matter of days. In 1963, I had a professor at the third rate institution I attended who required that the class read Sir Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Time.” Snappy stuff. I was 18 years old, and there was one thing I did not think about. I don’t recall worrying about time. I structured my life around what classes I had to attend, what assignments I had to do, when I worked at the root beer stand, and when I had to show up at some family function like a holiday. Time was anchored in immediacy. There was no past except the day before. There was no future except checking tasks off my mental checklist or the notecards for which I became famous. Yes, I still write down things to do on notecards.
An older person provides some advice to a young person about using time and taking risks. The young person listens and responds in an appropriate way for 2025 college graduates. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
That sporty guy Francis wrote:
“Men fear time, but time fears the pyramids.”
I know that this thought did not resonate for me in 1963, and to be frank, I am not sure it resonates with me. The pyramids exist but data about when they were constructed strikes me as fuzzy. I thought about this mismatch between youth, time, and the lack of knowledge about pyramid construction or similar matters when I read “Don’t Waste Your 20s Not Taking Big Risks: You Have It So Easy, and So Little Time.”
The time talk doesn’t work for young people. Time is measured in weird and idiosyncratic ways. The “amount” of time is experiential, contextual, and personal. The write up says:
You don’t appreciate how little time you have to easily go after it and how much harder it’s going to be later.
I am sorry. This does not compute.
The write up continues:
Each year you delay is costing you 10% of the easiest period in your life to take a big risk. So if you are in college or you’re in your 20s and you think that you might want to start a business, completely change your career, move to a new city, do something radical like that, you should do that as soon as humanly possible. Ignore the scared voice in your head. The downside is basically non-existent.
I view this statement as generally bad advice. An informed decision is important. The key word is “informed.” The meaning of “informed” depends on the individual. We are dealing with moving targets. An “informed” decision to a drug addict means one thing. Time to this individual is defined by narcotic need. An “informed” decision for a person who wants to do well in college means doing the work, trying to be organized, and obtaining information to achieve desired outcomes.
“Ignore” is important when one deals with life. “Ignore” is not important in the context of time. I am not sure what time is. I have zero interest in trying to defend Sir Francis’ pyramid time nor do I pay attention to the floundering physicists who argue about what time is.
For a young person today, life is like the world of any young person at any point in history. Telling that young person to not waste time is pointless. In fact, it is a waste of time.
The cited essay wants young people to do stuff, probably backpack in some remote country or start an AI company. The environment today is that the experiential, contextual, and personal cues for “time” come from inputs unique to this point in history. Nevertheless, young people make what they can of their life in the digital fish bowl.
Several observations:
- Decisions occur even if the person involved does not go through the weird notecard drill I did and do. The reality is “stuff happens” and then young people adapt in a way defined by their experiential, contextual, and personal space
- Young people hear “time” and define it as a young person. That means most have no clue what time means in a philosophical or technical context. Give them an essay to read. Have them write 500 words. Forget it. That worked for me and it probably works for many young people if they can actually read Bacon’s essay without AI support.
- At any point in a human’s life, time is not viewed as part of a big picture. Those words about “using time wisely” tell me more about the person speaking them than valid inputs for another individual. Thanks, but I don’t think about time unless it is anchored in some way.
Net net: As the general environment in the US and the technical business sector seems less warm and fuzzy, making informed decisions works better than watching roses die. Risk must be assessed. If it is not, interesting things happen to people. But time as a big idea or a resource to be use in a way that fits into some grand life plan is something oddly positioned in a TikTok-type of amped up Hollywood movie world. Making the best decision based on the information one has is a more useful way to mark off life intervals in my opinion. If your inputs come from Twitter, well, that may work for you. For me, not a chance.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2025
US Needs to Do Better at Building Digital Skills
January 10, 2022
A recent study sums up the state of worker skills in this country, and it is far from rosy. Tech News World connects the dots in its piece, “Report Finds US Workers Lagging in Digital Skills.” In both educating our youth and keeping adult workers up to date, the US is falling behind. It seems playing online games, watching TikTok, and using chipped credit cards do not provide a high-value tech foundation. Citing a recent think-tank report, writer John P. Mello Jr. tells us:
“One-third of U.S. workers lack digital skills, with 13 percent having no digital skills and 18 percent having, at best, limited digital skills, noted the report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a science and technology institute. In essence, the ITIF reported, one in six working-age Americans are unable to use email, web search, or other basic online tools. ‘It begins with insufficient teaching of digital skills in the K-12 education system. Only a quarter of U.S. high schools have computer classes,’ the report’s author, ITIF Director of Global Innovation Policy Stephen Ezell told TechNewsWorld.”
Another roadblock is a lack of digital platforms at home for many students. Apparently 23% of households do not possess a computer and over seven percent of Americans do not use the internet.
Not only are we failing to teach our children what they need to know, efforts to keep the existing workforce current are insufficient in several fields. We learn:
“The lack of workforce digital skills is particularly acute in certain industries, according to the report. Across the U.S. construction, transportation and storage industries, half of all workers have no or only limited digital skills, while that share is over one-third across the health and social work, manufacturing, hospitality and retail and wholesale industries, it continued. The lack of digital skills in the manufacturing sector is particularly concerning, it added, especially because jobs in U.S. manufacturing increasingly demand a facility with digital skills, which is important for individual workers to be both competitive and productive, and for broader U.S. manufacturing industries as well.”
Ezell reports private-sector investment in training, as a share of US GDP, fell 30 percent over the past 20 years. According to the international Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), we invest about one-sixth the OECD average in labor market retraining among leading countries. Where does this lack of investment get us? Well below average in the developed world. A 2021 study from online education provider Coursera ranked the U.S. just 29th out of 100 countries in digital skills proficiency, putting us behind many countries in Europe and Asia.
This sorry state of affairs could all change if Congress ever manages to pass the Build Back Better bill, which includes funding for digital-skills training for both youth and established workers. We also see a ray of hope from yet another report, this one released last April by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. That study found 69%of organizations are doing more skill-building now than they did before the Covid-19 crisis. A silver lining, we suppose.
Cynthia Murrell, January 10, 2022
Brief Configuration Error by Google Triggers Japanese Investigation
October 12, 2017
When a tech giant makes even a small mistake, consequences can be significant. A brief write-up from the BBC, “Google Error Disrupts Corporate Japan’s Web Traffic,” highlights this lamentable fact. We learn:
Google has admitted that wide-spread connectivity issues in Japan were the result of a mistake by the tech giant. Web traffic intended for Japanese internet service providers was being sent to Google instead.
Online banking, railway payment systems as well as gaming sites were among those affected.
A spokesman said a ‘network configuration error’ only lasted for eight minutes on Friday but it took hours for some services to resume. Nintendo was among the companies who reported poor connectivity, according to the Japan Times, as well as the East Japan Railway Company.
All of that content—financial transactions included—was gone for good, since Google cannot transmit to third-party networks, according to an industry expert cited in the post. Essentially, it seems that for those few minutes, Google accidentally hijacked all traffic to NTT Communications Corp, which boasts over 50 million customers in Japan. The country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is investigating the incident.
Cynthia Murrell, October 12, 2017
Alphabets Employees Feel Empowered
May 29, 2017
Discrimination at the workplace is a real issue, including Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Employees now are trying to fight this off by curating complaints and circulating it within the company using weekly newsletter.
According to an article published by Bloomberg titled At Google, an Employee-Run Email List Tracks Harassment and Bias Complaints, the author says:
Yes, at Google tracks allegations of unwelcome behavior at work in an attempt to make the company more inclusive, said the employees, who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak about internal company matters.
The list is allegedly managed by a group of employees who redact the personal information before circulating the content. Google though is aware of the list, the company is silent on it considering the fact that no one really knows who is running the list.
So far, the list has yielded positive results. Behavior by employees that do not adhere to company policies or are offensive towards certain sex or people of ethnicity has been handled by the company through regular channels.
Vishal Ingole, May 29, 2017
Innovations in Language Understanding
May 25, 2017
AI and robotics have advanced significantly. However, machines are yet to achieve that level of sophistication in language understanding. The work is in progress as these trends indicate.
Abbyy in an eBook titled Killer Language Understanding Innovations says:
Pioneering advances in natural language processing and machine vision are re-defining the computing landscape. And disrupting every single industry in the process.
One of the major trend is training chatbots to automate the entire customer services. Chatbots if become capable of interacting in natural language, it would revolutionize several industries. Another trend is combining geospatial data with language understanding to thwart terrorist threats.
In a corporate domain, decision making can become easier if AI is able to decipher the data an organization has and provides real-time actionable inputs. Similarly, data extraction which is still is a manual process can be expedited with optical recognition capabilities of machines.
These are few of the trends that are dominating the language innovations. You can read more about it by clicking here.
Vishol Ingole, May 25, 2017
Passion for the Work Is Key to Watson Team HR
May 17, 2017
Have you ever wanted to be on the IBM Watson team? Business Insider shares, “An IBM Watson VP Says He’s Hired Candidates Without Even Conducting an Interview—Here’s Why He’d Hire You on the Spot.” The brief write-up introduces Watson’s VP of HR Obed Louissant, who reveals that he has offered some folks a job they weren’t actually seeking after speaking with them. Writer Áine Cain specifies:
In certain conversations, Louissant says that he’s been blown away by the passion and engagement with which some individuals speak about their work. … ‘It was more about the experience and what types of places they like to work at,’ Louissant says. If the type of workplace happens to sound just like IBM Watson, the branch of the company that focuses on the question answering computer system, then Louissant says he’s willing to make a job offer right then and there.”
So, never underestimate the power of revealing a passion for your work. It could just land you a better job someday, with Louissant or other corporate leaders who, like him, are ready to snap up enthusiastic workers as soon as they recognize them.
Cynthia Murrell, May 17, 2017
AI Might Not Be the Most Intelligent Business Solution
April 21, 2017
Big data was the buzzword a few years ago, but now artificial intelligence is the tech jargon of the moment. While big data was a more plausible solution for companies trying to mine information from their digital data, AI is proving difficult to implement. Forbes discusses AI difficulties in the article, “Artificial Intelligence Is Powerful Stuff, But Difficult To Scale To Real-Life Business.”
There is a lot of excitement brewing around machine learning and AI business possibilities, while the technology is ready for use, workers are not. People need to be prepped and taught how to use AI and machine learning technology, but without the proper lessons, it will hurt a company’s bottom line. The problem comes from companies rolling out digital solutions, without changing the way they conduct business. Workers cannot just adapt to changes instantly. They need to feel like they are part of the solution, instead of being shifted to the side in the latest technological trend.
CIO for the Federal Communications Commission Dr. David Bray said that:
The growth of AI may shift thinking in organizations. ‘At the end of the day, we are changing what people are doing,; Bray says. ‘You are changing how they work, and they’re going to feel threatened if they’re not bought into the change. It’s almost imperative for CIOs to really work closely with their chief executive officers, and serve as an internal venture capitalist, for how we bring data, to bring process improvements and organizational performance improvements – and work it across the entire organization as a whole.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are an upgrade to not only a company’s technology but also how a company conducts business. Business processes will need to be updated to integrate the new technology, but also how workers will use and interface it. Businesses will continue facing problems if they think that changing technology, but not their procedures are the final solution.
Whitney Grace, April 21, 2017
The Design Is Old School, but the Info Is Verified
April 5, 2017
For a moment, let us go back to the 1990s. The Internet was still new, flash animation was “da bomb” (to quote the vernacular of the day), and Web site design was plain HTML. While you could see prime examples of early Web site design visiting the Internet Archive, but why hit the time machine search button when you can simply visit RefDesk.com.
RefDesk is reminiscent of an old AOL landing page, except it lacks the cheesy graphics and provides higher quality information. RefDesk is an all-inclusive reference and fact checking Web site that pools links of various sources with quality information into one complete resource. It keeps things simple with the plain HTML format, then it groups sources together based on content and relevance, such as search engines, news outlets, weather, dictionaries, games, white pages, yellow pages, and specialized topics that change daily. RefDesk’s mission is to take the guesswork out of the Internet:
The Internet is the world’s largest library containing millions of books, artifacts, images, documents, maps, etc. There is but one small problem in this library: everything is scattered about on the floor, with growing hordes of confused and bewildered users frantically shifting through the maze, occasionally crying out, Great Scott, look at what I just found!’ Enter refdesk.
Refdesk has three goals: (1) fast access, (2) intuitive and easy navigation and (3) comprehensive content, rationally indexed. The prevailing philosophy here is: simplicity. “Simplicity is the natural result of profound thought.” And, very difficult to achieve.
Refdesk is the one stop source to find verified, credible resources because a team dedicated to fishing out the facts from the filth that runs amuck on other sites runs it. It set up shop in 1995 and the only thing that has changed is the information. It might be basic, it might be a tad bland, but the content is curated to ensure credibility.
Elementary school kids take note; you can use this on your history report.
Whitney Grace, April 5, 2017
U.S. Government Keeping Fewer New Secrets
February 24, 2017
We have good news and bad news for fans of government transparency. In their Secrecy News blog, the Federation of American Scientists’ reports, “Number of New Secrets in 2015 Near Historic Low.” Writer Steven Aftergood explains:
The production of new national security secrets dropped precipitously in the last five years and remained at historically low levels last year, according to a new annual report released today by the Information Security Oversight Office.
There were 53,425 new secrets (‘original classification decisions’) created by executive branch agencies in FY 2015. Though this represents a 14% increase from the all-time low achieved in FY 2014, it is still the second lowest number of original classification actions ever reported. Ten years earlier (2005), by contrast, there were more than 258,000 new secrets.
The new data appear to confirm that the national security classification system is undergoing a slow-motion process of transformation, involving continuing incremental reductions in classification activity and gradually increased disclosure. …
Meanwhile, ‘derivative classification activity,’ or the incorporation of existing secrets into new forms or products, dropped by 32%. The number of pages declassified increased by 30% over the year before.
A marked decrease in government secrecy—that’s the good news. On the other hand, the report reveals some troubling findings. For one thing, costs are not going down alongside classifications; in fact, they rose by eight percent last year. Also, response times to mandatory declassification requests (MDRs) are growing, leaving over 14,000 such requests to languish for over a year each. Finally, fewer newly classified documents carry the “declassify in ten years or less” specification, which means fewer items will become declassified automatically down the line.
Such red-tape tangles notwithstanding, the reduction in secret classifications does look like a sign that the government is moving toward more transparency. Can we trust the trajectory?
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