Google forces employee to disavow MVP status

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/02/google_microsoft_mvp/

by madair • 17 years ago

32 34 17 years ago

theregister.co.uk

prat• 17 years ago

Unless there is a contractual clause saying that google employees shall have no services provided to them from another company (and from the word "forces" I assume there is not), google should not have forced this employee. Insecurity is not a hallmark of a genuinely better company.

jriddycuz2• 17 years ago

I don't see what's different about this and, say, the Minnesota Vikings asking Brett Favre not to wear a Packers hat.

jrockway5• 17 years ago

This is more like them asking him not to receive an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin.

pmorici• 17 years ago

doesn't say he was forced to just suggested. If he didn't want them to say "no" he shouldn't have asked.

madair2• 17 years ago

Ah, yes, "suggested"

natrius• 17 years ago

It is perfectly reasonable for Google to discourage employees from entering into non-disclosure agreements with competitors.

patio11• 17 years ago

But its an NDA about their upcoming C# news, something Google has less-than-zero interest in. This rationale makes about as much sense as a corporate directive to avoid signing NDAs for MMORPG betas.

hussong• 17 years ago

Heh, I'm amused by the term "Mountain View Chocolate Factory" -- but where's Charlie?

jriddycuz2• 17 years ago

Did anyone else catch that guy's name? Ah Skeet!

nixme• 17 years ago

Jon Skeet also has the highest rep of any user on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656

Evgeny• 17 years ago

Not only that, but his status there is of a legend.

"Jon Skeet Facts" - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts

Some of those are quite hilarious

Oh, and this site http://askjonskeet.com/

jrockway5• 17 years ago

Google is pretty nice to this guy, though, as it's clear from SO that he must not do very much work for them.

wyday• 17 years ago

I must say this is pretty shitty thing to say about someone. A backhanded compliment at best.

mpk• 17 years ago

I usually refrain from making 'me too' comments, but sheesh, really, what a lousy remark to make.

jrockway5• 17 years ago

His post rate is around 15 answers a day. Considering that most of these are highly-rated (and thus, not stuff like "lol you r dum"), it is likely that this eats up a good portion of his workday.

codexon2• 17 years ago

Everyone talks about Jon Skeet's reputation.

But Alex Martelli ("Google Uber Tech Lead") is far more ridiculous. He has netted 37,778 rep / 130 day = 290.6 rep/day.

Jon Skeet only has 102,115 rep / 371 day = 275.2 rep/day.

I know this because I started my goal of getting 10k rep shortly before Alex joined Stackoverflow, and I saw him answering every day, usually within 1 minute of people asking a question, and even when I was on vacation.

aleax• 17 years ago

@codexon, my deepest respect for _noticing_ this -- I had kind of started to wonder if anyone ever would (except a couple of my colleagues, also active on SO but less openly, had already commented privately to me about this;-). Still, seniority counts for A LOT on SO, and of course I'll never catch up to Jon -- if I keep gaining 15.4 points/day on him, bridging the 64337-points gap would take me almost 12 years from now... I kind of doubt it will happen!-)

BTW, I made a "lateral career shift" within Google -- since about a year ago -- I'm not "uber tech lead" now, I'm "senior staff engineer" (no people-management chores -- I get to hack on code/design/debugging/architecture, nag^H^H^H evangelize on proper development methods, &c, in >80% of my time, vs ~40/50% of my time -- and that, with an effort!-) -- averaged over the many years in which I was uber tech lead, saddled with people management, budgets, strategy staff meetings, and the like... management at google is cooler than anywhere else I had ever managed, but, it IS still management in the end;-).

madair2• 17 years ago

It's like being a vassal. People can worry about contract this and contract that, but that's all a distraction from the feudal servitude that developers are under to their corporate lords.

willwagner• 17 years ago

I think this is bad PR for Google but the fact that Microsoft makes MVPs sign non-disclosure agreements might be a contributing factor.

IANAL, but if it were me and I had been working on technologies for which there may be information that I potentially couldn't disclose to my day job, I would be worried about the conflicts that might result. For instance, if you are spending several days working around a bug in the OS and Microsoft gives you a pre-release version of a service pack that fixes that bug, would you continue to work on the work around or just tell your boss it's not worth the effort? As an employer, I'd be even more worried about a bogus lawsuit that might result.

Sometimes you can't have it all.

Google forces employee to disavow MVP status

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