The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet 535
Cutting_Crew writes "Gizmodo has called attention to a story that describes the worst job you can get at Google: wading through and blocking objectionable content, which includes watching decapitations and beastiality. A ex-Google-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year-long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet. In the end, he needed therapy, and since he was a contractor, he was let go instead of being hired as a full time employee."
Editors (Score:5, Informative)
Bestiality not beastiality.
Limit this to a few months + mandatory debriefings (Score:5, Informative)
An unnamed police department in the United States had a policy for child pornography investigators:
* You could only do it for a few months then it was someone else's turn
* You had mandatory psychological help
Oh, and you had to be trained ahead of time.
similar story from 2010 (Score:5, Informative)
Here [nytimes.com] is a 2010 New York Times article on the same subject. Seems like not much has changed. Apparently a bunch of it is outsourced, which in addition to the nature of the work, leads to questions about content privacy, especially when some of the images being reviewed are non-public (e.g. stuff you've sent through Facebook messages).
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
So do Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Myspace, et al (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html [nytimes.com]
The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:5, Informative)
That might be true with a psychopath but a sociopath (which is what the OP probably meant) would be quite capable of watching the videos and understanding how other people would react even if they don't react themselves. Sociopaths in general learn during their childhood to mimic empathy to fit in. The classic example is Ted Bundy, a perfectly (in public) outgoing and social individual who knew how to mimic empathy but in private was cutting people up to see what their insides looked like.
Re:On the other hand, I can see contracting this o (Score:5, Informative)
Can you imagine the lawsuits if Google DID have these guys on the payroll and, 5 years later, ONE of them went nuts-o and harmed another employee, and that employee was NOT aware of the attacker's previous job description?
The risk is not employee on employee violence, it is risk of suicide.
Psycopath == Sociopath (Score:5, Informative)
"Hare writes that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder." The term sociopathy may be preferred by sociologists that see the causes as due to social factors. The term psychopathy may be preferred by psychologists who see the causes as due to a combination of psychological, genetic, and environmental factors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy [wikipedia.org]
Research suggests that, “psychopaths are a stable proportion of any population, can be from any segment of society, may constitute a distinct taxonomical class forged by frequency-dependent natural selection, and that the muting of the social emotions is the proximate mechanism that enables psychopaths to pursue their self-centered goals without felling the pangs of guilt. Sociopaths are more the products of adverse environmental experiences that affect autonomic nervous system and neurological development that may lead to physiological responses similar to those of psychopaths. Antisocial personality disorder is a legal/clinical label that may be applied to both psychopaths and sociopaths” (Walsh & Wu, 2008).
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic-focus/2010/07/sociopathy-vs-psychopathy/ [psychcentral.com]
And if you want a bit more about the history of socio/psychopaths, reading this article [io9.com] about sherlock holmes not being a sociopath might also be helpful.
Re:Google Abusing "Contractors"??? (Score:5, Informative)
"I was wondering the same thing. Aren't there rules regarding employer responsibility? Surely such rules would apply to contractors as well."
It's not a cut-and-dried situation, but from what I have read, it looks to me like Google is pretty clearly over the line here.
Generally speaking, if you're a contractor, you have personal control over at least one, but probably all three, of the following things:
(1) What you charge for your work.
(2) The hours that you work.
(3) How you do your job. If you are a "contractor", you are presumed to already know how to do your job. If the company has to tell you how to do it, you're not a contractor, you're an employee.
Was this guy an "obscenity" expert before he was hired? Probably not. Google probably sat him down and said, "This is what you do, this is how you deal with violations, these are the hours you must do it in, and this is how much we pay.
Even if it's only for a year, that's not a "contractor". That's an employee. I think Google is really screwing up here, and they are bound to get caught at it.
Hey, don't listen to me (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're telling a few too many stories, yourself. As well as making assumptions.
Cool. Don't take my word for it. Research it yourself. Here's a start [wikipedia.org].
Actually, this is a common job requirement (Score:5, Informative)
My sister worked for the eBay thought police for several years. Mostly it was offensive images that people replaced on their web site in place of an existing image that someone else linked into an auction page so that they victim had to pay the bandwidth costs for the picture of the picnic table (or whatever), rather than the seller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking [wikipedia.org]
Apple employees who work with customer data in Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime, Logic Studio, and Aperture, as well as some other packages get to sign agreements about exposure to offensive material.
Adobe has similar agreements for employees who might be doing work on Photoshop for customer data.
If you're actually in the industry that generates the images in the first place, there are similar agreements.
I was at a startup that did web site reverse proxy caches for a while, and had a similar agreement; you can guess at the sites where you'd want the ability to carry heavy load on a landing page.
Occupational Health and Safety Administration (Score:5, Informative)
One word: OSHA. Much as Google may not like it, they're not exempt from workplace health and safety regulations. If those truly are the working conditions, the contractors need to have a good sit-down with one of the local OSHA inspectors complete with show-and-tell. Note: being a contractor doesn't change things, the regulations apply to the workplace and not just the employees.
Re:Assholes and the coporations that love them (Score:4, Informative)
Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening.
This isn't even baloney. It's olive loaf.
The way something like this works is that people have to collude. The way they collude is to use exactly the logic you have here: it's not *my* job to deal with the consequences. It's not *your* job. It's the job of someone not in this room.
The reason this is olive loaf is that everybody knows somebody has to do this job. Trace the chain of command up from this guy's boss, to the bosses boss and so forth. This is an important job. Someone fairly high up on that chain of command made sure it was getting done, and when he did, he must have known it was being done with contractors. That meant he made a conscious decision that this important job should be done by a low status worker which Google had no long term responsibility for. That person handed a "it's not my job" card to every manager down the line.
Any time you have someone who to all practical purposes looks like an employee, doing a permanent, line oriented job (as opposed to support like janitorial services), and that person is *not* an employee, there's something fishy going on.
Re:A weak mind (Score:1, Informative)
I wrote a web filter in 1996. Between then and when I sold the company in 1999 part of my job was reviewing reported URLs for addition to the database.
Most of the time you're right. It's just porn. Some of it's nasty in an I-just-stepped-in-a-pile-of-dog-poo kind of way, but it's just porn.Yellow Showers because apparently peeing all over someone is a turn on. Click the button to classify it and look at the next reported image.
But then there was the little girl, two maybe three years old. Side-on shot, lying on the beach towel and holding her legs back to her shoulders. All you can see of the guy is his buttocks and genitals. Most of his torso and legs are off camera. Part of his genitals. He's inserted pretty far.
The girl's head is turned to the camera and apparently she's been told to smile. She's giving it her best little-girl grin.
That photo haunts me. If I never see something like that again it'll be too soon. If you can look at that sort of image and compartmentalize it as "just work," a "bunch of pixels on the screen," something is very wrong with you.
Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that repeated viewing of these kinds of images can de-sensitise a person enough to affect their personality.
A friend of mine is a child psychiatrist and she told me that the uk serious crimes unit have specialist child porn officers who have to sift through thousands of images on a day-to-day basis. They are only allowed to do this for a maximum of (if IRC) six months before they are taken off the job and a lot are given therapy because they become so traumatised by it.
They do this because they found that after a while people can not only become de-sensitised to it but they can actually start to be aroused and find they like what they are viewing.
Re:Bloody hell ... (Score:4, Informative)
So people who work as EMTs or as nurses who have to actually talk to and care for victims, don't you think they'd have the worst PTSD of all? What about people who have to do autopsies?
You're incredibly naive. I'm an emergency physician. I'll bet I've seen more fucked up shit in one week than you will in your lifetime, unless you've served in the military in active combat, and even then I doubt you've seen the outcome of child abuse.
People in my line of work do get burned out, do get PTSD, and do require counseling from time to time, and we only see the aftermath. And we don't actually see the bad deeds happen. It's much easier to distance yourself from the events when you only have to deal with comforting the injured. I've been mugged at gunpoint and been struck on the head multiple times in the mugging, and that had me looking over my shoulder for years. It affected me more than all the other shit I've seen in my life combined.
Autopsies are pretty sterile things. I've been in on a few. Not a big deal. Dead body? Seen lots of those.