> Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist?
Suppose Hitler said exercising is good for health. Now Hitler was one sick son of a bitch, but that has nothing to do with whether exercising is good.
May be rachelbythebay holds a grudge against Google, but here she is specifically pointing out negotiators taking free food into account while negotiating, cafes closing down and shortage of food.
I don't know about you, but her article sounds pretty genuine to me.
That might be because I dislike the "green initiatives." Most of the "green initiatives" are done as a PR move or cost cutting measure, totally disregarding the employees.
At an earlier workplace, man, was I pissed when they replaced the urinal flushes with bio cubes. Thankfully, it didn't last long(1 week).
Another workplace switched off escalators after 5 in the evening, even though the escalators were the auto on/off model, and didn't consume much power when they weren't actively used. What pissed me off more was when there was some HR conference going on in the same building, the power saving mode wasn't engaged.
I remember the conversation with a senior folk:
Me: Hey, escalators are working today?
Oh, there is a HR conference going up on the 2nd floor, and people need to use it.
Me: Has it ever fucking occurred to you that there are engineers working on the 3rd floor, who regularly stay well after 5, and need to use the escalators?
Oh, you can use the stairs or the elevator in the other section? Come on, it's not a big deal - we are being green.
I don't think I've ever read a post by her previously but I'm looking at her index of posts and at least by title there sure seems to be a lot of variety.
Regardless of her previous comments on Google (I don't think sexism is relevant here) I don't think the authorship in this case warrants dismissal. I think your point about 10% salary increase is relevant, but perk-baiting itself is a very important issue that more new hires should be aware of.
I've seen this many times in many different industries. Without good advice early on I would have fallen for it myself more than once, I'm sure.
This is mostly ad hominem. The 10% bump happened in January 2011. From her post, it sounds like she started in the fall of 2006. It's not clear when the food started disappearing, or when she left, but it's entirely believable that she did experience the food perk loss and not the salary bump. And this happened at the same time Google was colluding with other major Silicon Valley employers to depress the wages of top talent.
Notice what she does not mention: Google massively increased salaries during the same time period, including the 10% across the board bump.