I'm absolutely astounded that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.
There are tens of thousands of Google employees who have access to data which is commercially sensitive and worth, literally, millions. (To say nothing of how many search engineers could transfer a million dollars with a single hand-edit to "remove web-spam" on a single keyword.) Most of them are AdWords account reps, Google's dirty little secret: we'll pay you $40,000 to about one step above a call center monkey intellectually, you have no opportunity for advancement, and the work is soul-suckingly boring next to the Wow I Get To Work At Google thoughts that brought you here.
(Disclosure: I was once a call-center monkey, though not at Google.)
In banking or finance, there would be an entire department tasked with nothing but playing Big Brother over these employees. Failure to aggressively monitor for non-compliance would result in regulatory slap-down.
Does Google strike you as the kind of place where they monitor every entry made by employees and have an actual human perform random audits just to be sure?
Insider trading? You mean that defined crime with the lock-you-away-in-federal prison penalties routinely imposed? Investigated by a dedicated government agency? Which I got an email about four days ago? From the corporate division whose job it is to sniff out and eliminate insider trading? By, for example, emailing every engineer 4th class to remind them that earnings announcements are coming out this week and that all trades of company stock within 4 days of the announcement are to be made only with signed authorization and that infringement of the rule is grounds for immediate termination regardless of whether I have actual insider information or not? That insider trading?
This resembles what you think goes on inside Google? In what way, pray tell?
There's a market for keywords, and these employees (we are, I guess, assuming for this discussion) have insider information on those. Like you said, it's worth millions, and like stock trading, it's basically a zero-sum game, so if you become a big winner by cheating, there are people losing unfairly.
Just because it doesn't have the kind of rules around it that you describe doesn't mean it's not analogous. In fact, I thought that analogy and the galling lack of such oversight was your original point.
Yes, this happens in many industries, but what he's saying is that Google probably doesn't take the same precautions that other industries do/are forced to.
the Google employee in question should be fired, out of a cannon, into the sun.
If this story turns out to be true, I think this might not bode well for Google, given their current position with antitrust and their dominating (monopoly?) position in online advertising.
There are tens of thousands of Google employees who have access to data which is commercially sensitive and worth, literally, millions. (To say nothing of how many search engineers could transfer a million dollars with a single hand-edit to "remove web-spam" on a single keyword.) Most of them are AdWords account reps, Google's dirty little secret: we'll pay you $40,000 to about one step above a call center monkey intellectually, you have no opportunity for advancement, and the work is soul-suckingly boring next to the Wow I Get To Work At Google thoughts that brought you here.
(Disclosure: I was once a call-center monkey, though not at Google.)
In banking or finance, there would be an entire department tasked with nothing but playing Big Brother over these employees. Failure to aggressively monitor for non-compliance would result in regulatory slap-down.
Does Google strike you as the kind of place where they monitor every entry made by employees and have an actual human perform random audits just to be sure?