Large companies work by inertia. Google is actually more agile for its size, but it's still a big company and ruled by inertia.

In a large company, the majority of people don't know each other, and don't communicate on a daily basis. This means that things of interest get passed from person to person, usually by email, and so the original intent of the message tends to get lost due to the 3rd or 4th reader having no idea what kind of person the original writer is, what his writing style is, whether he's being serious or joking, etc.

As a result, you end up with lots of requests for clarification, especially where it's an event that falls outside of the normal routine. It takes a lot to rile up a company, but Andrew did it expertly, pushing all the buttons his background in sociology and politics gave him a solid understanding of.

Notice how it went through three separate "request for clarification" requests, each more formal than the last. Each time, he responded in a passive-aggressive manner that re-pushed those same buttons.

As it pushed its way through the various departments and echelons of the company, such a message would become more and more threatening as the person became less and less known. People go into CYA mode (better safe than sorry), the company momentum changes and things start rolling.

Let's look at the course of events again:

1: Andrew is intercepted by someone who is probably a manager (notice his description "Agitated Chubby White Male", with the connotations of bourgeoisie).

2: The manager takes Andrew to explain the situation to security (pointing out that the security guard is a black man in a menial job, with "sedate" added for connotations of passively accepting his proletariat fate).

3: Security contacts Transvideo to get clarification from Andrew and find out his intentions (notice his description "so that the issue can be filtered and separated neatly into their bracketed accounts", with the connotations of the soulless bureocratic corporate machine).

At this point, the security department is unsure of Andrew's intentions. Was it just harmless curiosity? Is he a plant, trying to dig up dirt to embarrass Google? They can't know for sure, so they ask him to clarify his position.

What Andrew sends back is a passive-aggressive letter covering class, race, and labor, all hot button topics. His manager asks for even more clarification. People are getting very nervous at this point.

Andrew's response is political dynamite, once again using passive-aggressive techniques to all but accuse Google of racist discriminatory labor practices.

That someone with "backgrounds in sociology and political philosophy" wouldn't understand what panic his second letter would produce is incredibly hard to believe. In fact, Andrew's entire description is so slanted and colored that I'm inclined to suspect that he deliberately set about getting himself fired so that he could trumpet "Google is Evil!" from his blog, Michael Moore style.

Four days ago, Bitcoin was under $2 USD. Now it's over $4 USD (depending on when you refresh the page). There are 6 million bitcoins in existence, and trade volume is only about 54,000 according to the biggest exchange. There aren't enough bids/asks to soak up more than about $100 USD without throwing the exchange rate one direction or the other.

For example, right now (as I write this) exchanging $1000 USD for some Bitcoins is all it takes to push the exchange rate up $0.10 from $3.77 to $3.87.

What a lot of Bitcoin newcomers don't realize is that Bitcoin depends on 'mining' to generate new bitcoins. Computers run cryptographic hashes to find the 'winning' has which is less than the current difficulty target number. The computer that finds this hash is awarded 50 BTC. The difficulty target is automatically adjusted upward to keep new bitcoin generation at a constant pace.

Some quick research shows a handful of big players in the mining market who have invested heavily in high-end GPUs for dedicated bitcoin mining, some with over 50 GPUs running 24/7 for months now. These guys are bound to have huge quantities of bitcoin they are eager to unload when the price is right. Meanwhile, news coverage is driving exploding popularity, which appears to be pulling the exchange rate sky high. On paper, many of these guys have become overnight millionaires just by running a bunch of computers 24/7.

Of course, as these players cash out the exchange rate will fall. These guys are too smart to sell all at once and flood the market, but with volatility like this I'm willing to bet a lot are eager to pull their bitcoin out of the game before the bubble pops.

Meanwhile, hardware enthusiasts all over the internet are rushing to buy GPUs to dedicate to mining. They don't seem to realize that the bitcoin system automatically adjusts to keep the bitcoin generation rate constant at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. As the mining market becomes flooded with new 'miners' the difficulty will climb rapidly, until it becomes unprofitable to run a GPU if you have to pay for electricity.

Finally, bitcoin is highly illiquid. My research was brief, but I couldn't find an easy way to exchange small amounts of BTC for USD that didn't look terribly sketchy or involve a lot of fees. Stores aren't eager to accept bitcoin because the exchange rate at the moment can easily swing 10% between when the user presses 'check out' and the transaction is processed.

The bitcoin system is a very interesting concept, and it was clearly implemented by some very intelligent people. But as it currently stands it's just a playground for speculators and market manipulators. Expect some carnage in the coming months.

Note to young videographers: When a company asks whether you're working on an expose, the phrase "I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor" will not defuse the situation.

Chill dude.

We call ourselves hackers or entrepreneurs because we question the status quo.

All this guy seems to have done is do just that. I dont think he deserves any of what you just called him. Who made you the jury and executioner here on HN?

Whatever you call it, social experiment or whatnot, it seems to have gotten out of hand and the guy got fired. And he blogs about his experience. Lets not read much more in to it.

As for people getting fired because of what he did, would you blame someone who blew the cover on a sweatshop and in turn cause the sweatshop being shut down? Google is a better employer than a whole lot of others, but these actions sure seem heavy handed.

There's nothing surprising about a company having different classes of employees. If that was all that the article was about, it would be a minor curiosity. However, Google's extreme overreaction to someone trying to get some very basic information about the other set of employees is what's concerning. It's difficult to know how much of this story is speculation vs fact - whether or not the yellow badged employees are really data entry, whether there are really instructions on the back of the badge with a number to call if someone starts asking questions. If true, though, it's highly concerning coming from a company that flaunts the openness of their products, and whose corporate motto is "don't be evil".

I personally find this article's brand of narcissism-masquerading-as-activism really upsetting. This is not a blog entry about uncovering the seedy side of Google and how they abuse their employees. The only information of this kind to be found in the article is that a). Google has contract workers and b). they're mostly minorities. That's it.

The rest of the blog entry is a passive-aggressive lament wherein the author attempts to convert the reader's sympathy for said workers into sympathy for himself and his treatment at the hands of Google. If this were really an article about class conflict in tech companies, that might be interesting, but it's not. The way the author flings around adjectives that border on insults ("chubby white man"; "sedate black guard" -- what?) indicates that he doesn't really have any substantial background in race, class, or gender studies. Nor does he have anything interesting to say on those subjects.

As it is, this is (passive-aggressive) mud-flinging with no real evidence or substance behind it.

> Google's extreme overreaction to someone trying to get some very basic information about the other set of employees is what's concerning.

Probably this is what set them off -

"...Most of them are people of color and are supposedly involved in the labor of digitizing information. I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor, and so out of general curiosity I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs. I am aware of internal mechanisms for discussing labor issues with Google, and had no intention of defaming the company..."

A lot of times you can dig a hole for yourself that wasn't there by trying to explain things. Just a, "Was I breaking the rules? Okay, my bad, I didn't mean to. What was I doing? Eh, just screwing around with a video camera, exploring, I won't do it again if it's a problem" probably gets you out of there without hassle.

I mean, his simple explanation covers mentions race, labor, labor issues, defamation, legal contracts... that would scare the hell out of anyone. If he'd just written, "Hi guys, I'm just learning about Google and I like the company. I didn't mean any harm - I'll make sure not to do that again if it's against policy" then that probably would have been the end of it.

Interesting.

My Dad once sued microsoft because they had many "temporary" workers who did not get the full benefit of full time workers. These workers were labelled as contract workers however, he was able to win his case because at the end of the day, they were working full time for Microsoft. Not only that, they were often employed by microsoft for many years, even though the claim was generally that these employees were fulfilling a short term need.

He was able to get them damages for all sorts of things, including the fact that they were not entitled to store discounts while other employees were.

Even though he won, many companies including Microsoft still do the exact same thing with their employees. The only difference is they are trying to keep it under wraps so they don't get sued again.

Very likely, Google is trying to cover it's tracks in the same manner. They are probably less worried about racism than they are about this sort of permatemp law suit.

Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

From my dad's firm's website: http://www.bs-s.com/cases/c-microsoft-vizcaino.html