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by dkobran·8y ago·view on hn ↗
While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It strikes me as a possible next iteration of native advertising. This is not an attack on WP -- just something I thought might be worth discussing. The tech giants are becoming increasingly more powerful and this could be a new frontier to assert that power.
5 comments
While it's certainly possible there's some bias going on there, I can confirm that this guy really worked at Google. He contacted me a few months ago about a position, but I decided not to pursue a role there.

Maybe this wouldn't have been published otherwise, but I definitely believe it to be genuine.

The Washington Post is not owned by Amazon. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also is CEO of Amazon.
Distinction without a difference maybe?
It does seem an odd choice to publish. Sourcers (that's what Google calls people like that regardless of what his job title was) have existed for a long time there. I was recruited to Google by someone just like that. And yes it's clearly a very boring job: they're basically human search engines.

Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he was mistreated or anything.

> Sourcer

If I were the manager of that department, I'd up-title them all to "sourcerers". :)

And in doing so, make the author's point for them?
To be clear, Washington Post is not owned by Amazon. It's owned by Jeff Bezos. To accuse one of the nation's most respected papers of sacrificing its 139 year reputation over an opinion piece about working in Google HR is kind of farcical.
Thinking that tech money can't destroy a respected hundred year old publication is naive: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-si...
For every story like this out of Google there seem to be5 of the same sort out of Amazon.