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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • An anecdote:

    My high-paying tech job wants us back 2 days a week. I intentionally bought a house near a train that will get me to the downtown office in about 15 minutes while many of my coworkers live in the distant suburbs where commuting will require a lot more time and effort.

    Despite this, I STILL don’t go into the office. The biggest reasons:

    1. Nobody is there - it’s a ghost town.
    2. I’m far less productive while I’m there because I have to leave early to pick up my kids from school.
    3. My boss doesn’t go in at all - ever - due to extremely valid health reasons (his wife is undergoing cancer treatment).
    4. His boss moved out of state. Like way, way out of state. He’s got a nice office with a beautiful view. He doesn’t and can’t use it.
    5. My boss’s boss’s boss - (the CTO) moved to Florida and, rumor has it, lives full-time on his yacht.

    I mean… at some point we just have to acknowledge that our giant, empty office space would be much better suited as housing.



  • Yes, I think that’s the reasonable argument Google’s lawyers and PR will use - but your example kind of demonstrates why that argument falls flat. The service DHL is providing to Amazon is logistics and shipping. This is an established, well-regulated industry all its own.

    Meanwhile, at Google, this contractor’s services are listed in the article:

    ensuring music content is available and approved for YouTube Music’s 80 million subscribers worldwide

    That sounds an awful lot like running the service to me. These employees perform key YouTube-specific work on an ongoing basis. For all intents and purposes, they work for Google, in Google’s offices, on Google’s systems, but their paycheck comes from Cognizant. The services being rendered aren’t on the level of “you make the widget and we’ll transport it to stores around the country because we’re a shipping company”. This is more like “we employ people for you, but provide a flimsy air gap so you don’t have to treat them like actual employees. We sell legally plausible deniability as a service.”