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."
As the actual submitter I'll post my thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did this for a living (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, I can see contracting this out (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of those sick-o jobs that messes with your brain so much that it's in your boss's and employer's best legal interest to NOT know what you did.
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? Google might win in the long run but they'd have to fight an uphill battle.
By making sure the person is never on the payroll and relying on the standard practice of only verifying employment dates, job titles/job descriptions, and eligibility for rehire to future employers, they've pretty much immunized themselves if one of there censors goes nuts and kills someone 5 years down the road.
Well, they have, EXCEPT legal theories of liability change over time and those changes have a way of biting you ex-post-facto.
Well said! (Score:2, Interesting)
One year you could be policing the internet for child porn websites, next you could be hoarding it yourself.
Even without a job like this, most adults are only 10-15 years away from total depravity if they start down a path that desensitizes them to evil and keep going in that direction.
Fortunately, even most people who are this far gone still have at least a little moral center left. With desire, work, time, and support from professionals and friends, they can return to a moral standard that most people would call civilized.
I know. I took a turn 10-15 years ago and walked that slow path to moral depravity. A few years ago I looked in the mirror and didn't like what I saw. With a strong desire, divine intervention, love, support, and lots of time I'm well on my way back to where I want to be. I expect to be there in a few more years.
The One Year Rule (Score:5, Interesting)
The story makes it sound like Google only uses contractors for this job because they know nobody could hold it down for more than a year. But it sounds more like Google is misusing contractors the way I've seen happen at many high-tech companies. Bad managers don't have it together well enough to come up with a proper plan for expanding their departments, so whenever they have a new project that needs heads they don't have, they hire some contractors. These are always hired under a time limit, to avoid a repeat of the Vizcaino v Microsoft [findlaw.com] lawsuit.
This ties in with one of my pet peeve with Google: they only seem to hire really brilliant people with great academic credentials who are never expected to bother themselves with scutwork. On the rare occasions when they realize that the scutwork can't be avoided (like manual crap filtering) they hire temps. Thus scutwork either doesn't get done or is done by people who aren't really a part of the employee community, and don't coordinate well with the real employees. That's why so many of their commercial products die on the vine, why so many of their products stay in beta mode for years, and why they have such abysmal documentation and tech support.
They did two things right: they came up with the best search engine ever, and they figured out how to make it generate huge tons of money. This allows the rest of the company to be run wastefully and ineffectively. The shareholders don't care for this, but the voting stock is controlled by a small cadre of insiders.
Assholes and the coporations that love them (Score:5, Interesting)
But lets be fair, this isn't about Google being evil. It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line. 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. They can send out all the memos and make rules until they are blue in the face, but at some point an employee chooses how to act, and the company can then react.
The real test is how Google reacts at this point. If they were really a 'good' corporation (whatever that really means), they would probably step in and help this guy out, while canning the person who fired him.
It kind of bugs me that people can't seem to differentiate between actions that employees of a corporation take, and actions that the corporation takes. (e.g. Microsoft buys companies. Microsoft employees disregard open XML standards.) This story seems like a perfect example of that.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps you're right about the sociopath's ability to do the job. Indeed, maybe they'd be more objective about it than a more empathic person.
And I wouldn't worry too much about feeding a crazy imagination. Anybody with access to Google (!) can do that without help.
Huh, we may have stumbled on a way for lifers to earn their upkeep....
Re:I highly doubt (Score:5, Interesting)
The contract with Google forced the guy to stay there for a whole year.
Re:Cue the obligatory goatse jokes in 3...2...1 (Score:0, Interesting)
That depends. How would you rank the following (randomly listed) items in regards to your examples?
-Vivisections.
-Amputating the limbs of someone living and conscious without any sort of anesthesia.
-Taking an apple peeler, and slowly peeling off a person's skin / genitals.
-Putting someone in a pair of cement shoes, locking them in a glass container, filling the container up with water, and watching them drown.
-Restraining someone, sticking a tube down their throat into their lungs, and pumping in water. A sort of out-of-water drowning.
I could go on, but I don't want to creep out too many people.
Re:I did this for a living (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a very large company and analysed data from network packet capture devices that would sift through data and find interesting items. It was quite a head job after awhile. So many people doing dumb things at work and getting caught. Reasonable seeming people looking at fucked up porn (men and women coworkers), people hooking up with random strangers in public restrooms (facilitating this online on their work computers, it happens alot), people having groupsex and viewing the photos at work (via web email), total perverts preying on teenagers (stockholm syndrome in full effect), really anything wrenched or nasty you hear about in the news is like the tip of the iceberg when given a large enough sample size of the general able populous. It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology. I wouldn't ever do that shit again, or anything close to it, but I have respect for people who do.
This is the problem. We want to hide ourselves from what humanity truly is but at the same time we want to act like we want to be open and accepting and to actually study humanity. You cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of people on this planet if not all people on this planet have some really ugly behavior. If we are ever going to truly know ourselves we have to know not just the good side but the dark side as well. So the fear of the darkside actually hinders us in understanding our species.
It's a job, it's not for everyone, but someone has to do these sorts of jobs. It's necessary for the progress of our species. It's also necessary in an age of surveillance and open transparency that we are going to see more and more gross, disgusting, obscene content, so it's about time we either develop the mental faculties to handle it, or we stop the surveillance all together but to try to have unlimited surveillance all over the place but then expect the people behind the monitor watching it all to cover their eyes and seek help it just isn't going to work.
Obscene content is definitely going to spread and the best we can do is hide it from the children. Adults however are going to have to get used to the real world and seeing the real humanity which isn't always whatever they thought it was growing up. In real life people hurt each other, and if people look closely enough they'd see this sort of abuse all the time, it's not just something they'd see in their job looking at obscene pictures for Google or Facebook but the abusers are essentially everywhere and abusing everybody. It's just a situation where people who somehow were sheltered from it, protected from it or who don't believe things like that can happen to them or in their town, they get shell shocked. Also it's understandable if someone has actually experienced the kind of abuse they see in the image that could cause them great trauma.
So I don't want to lead people to think I have no concern or empathy for people who might be in these positions who aren't prepared to see what they have to see. I just think people who are shocked about pictures on the internet probably should look around them and pay more attention to how humans actually treat each other. Humans aren't nice, and are obscene in general, those pictures are snapshots in time of humans acting like humans, and what can be learned? Humans are some of the most beautiful creatures on this earth but at the same time some of the most hideous all depending on the context.
Re:I did this for a living (Score:5, Interesting)
> It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology.
The fact that you think that, I view, as evidence that it may have tweaked your view of people.
One of the most interesting drug policy debates that I ever had was with a toxicologist at a major hospital. I don't remember the meat of the debate so much as the ending, her view was just...so dark. Thats when it hit me.... her only experience in this area, is in seeing the worst of the worst. She doesn't see the guy who gets stoned and eats some munchies. She sees the guy who tried to kill himself. She sees the guy who injected himself with an unknown dose of an unknown white powder in a bag, produced by god knows who, and is now having a life threatening reaction.
In short, the sample size that she has may be large, but, its all highly biased towards the absolute worst. A large portion of her professional career is dealing with people having serious issues beyond what even most drug users ever experience.
It is like you are looking at information thats coming through a filter. Its like sitting behind a big red gel filter...all you ever get is red light. Everything is shades of red. Its a distillation process....and you are sitting in the condenser. You make the boiling pot bigger and bigger, fill it with more of the same.... and what happens to the output? It goes up. The more you put in to distill, the more distillate you get out.... even if the overall rate of it is the same as it was before.
It doesn't say anything about the population as a whole except to help define the extremes in excruciating detail.... but the vast majority of "people" is not the extremes at all. Though, in many real ways, this is hardly unique. News is all rare events. Multiple murders, heinous crimes, anything that happens rarely for the size of our population. In fact, there is almost an inverse relationship to how many people are effected by something and how big of a story it can be.
I hunt, and at one time was once involved in a VFD (Score:5, Interesting)
I hunt, fish and have been on scene for a few automobile accidents. I've seen what happens when a guy falls from 15 stories onto cement in a construction accident. I've gutted and eaten my share of game. I've familiar with the story of Timothy Treadwell. I know what bears can do to a skeleton, and I can imagine pretty well what that camp looked like. I've seen fire photos.
It's grisly, but it doesn't stay with me because -- and I know I'm venturing into the domain of poets here -- it wasn't Evil. I didn't hate the deer. No one pushed the construction worker. His coworkers mourned for him, and it seemed sad, but proper. Carnivorous predation -- including my own -- and accidents don't "haunt" me. They seem "natural," as poor as that word choice is. I've experienced accidents -- some that put me in a hospital bed with stitches -- but they didn't --- I don't know -- "stain my soul." How's that for florid prose?
I wish I had never seen the Daniel Pearl video. Not that I wish I could have remained ignorant, but I wish I lived in a world where it just didn't happen. That video stuck with me. That video bothered me. I've met grizzled old firemen who were disfigured in a fire while they saved lives. I've shaken the hands of the men, and the burn scars shine like God's own merit badges.
I've seen photos of women disfigured by jealous men. Context seems to be everything. Just looking at the photos of those poor girls twists my guts into a knot. Maybe it's because I'm a parent, but those kiddie porn photos the cops published where all the people were removed and only the background shown make me wish God had personally appointed me to Go Smite Someone. I know the rage is just a cover for the anguish those photos of Best Western hotel rooms cause me.
If I had to spend a year, eight hours a day, looking at the worst the world had to show me, I'd need a padded cell at the end of it, and I'm a man with some scars and some grey in his hair. Shame on Google for doing this to some kid fresh out of school and then flushing him like toilet paper at the end of it. When you're the Boss, you're responsible for your people, and anyone who could do this is a reprehensible human being.
Re:actions that the corporation takes (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally! All those hours wasted on cracked.com pay off now:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18385_7-bullshit-police-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to-movies.html [cracked.com]
the Insanity Defense is attempted in less than one percent of all legal cases, which essentially means that more people have tried to pin their crimes on aliens or their evil twin rather than their own basket case, shoelace-eating lunacy.
Of that tiny fraction where the lawyer was even willing to try it, the defense is successful less than 25 percent of the time. Three states in the US don't even allow insanity as a defense.
Then, in that tiny, tiny fraction of cases where the guy "got off" because he convinced the court he was insane, he doesn't get to just go home. You get sent to a mental institution where you don't have a set sentence at all--they keep you as long as they see fit, which may be forever. You're there until "deemed safe to return to society", which according to the American Psychiatric Association is usually twice as long as the jail sentence would have been.
It's fun to dream of comparable actions against "insane" corporations though. I'm sure a lot of slashdoters can draw parallels between their workplace and a lunatic asylum anyway.
LOTS of weird crap online (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people are more sick than you can imagine. You don't want to expose your kids to to the worst of humanity.
Re:Limit this to a few months + mandatory debriefi (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to be a content moderator and then a trainer for content moderators, and I can tell you that it's slightly different. Child pornography investigators will spend a lot of time over a small amount of images, all of which are horrific. Content moderation is all about getting through a large amount of material quickly, most of which will turn out to be false positives.
Two months isn't an option. It takes a month to get up to an acceptable speed, and about three months to really hit your stride. You have to moderate quickly - the article suggests 15k images per day, which is two seconds per image over an 8 hour shift. That would be about a second on each innocent image, and maybe 8-10 seconds on those that are borderline or need responding to.
The job isn't for everyone. It will change how you look at life and people around you, because you're essentially training yourself to see the worst in every image. Over a third of people quit shortly after being hired because they genuinely cant deal with doing it every day, and that's fine. But it doesn't have to fuck you up long term.
What google did wrong here was letting him work alone: The way to get through a job like this is to be in a room with other people doing exactly the same thing as you. Asking for advice, pointing things out, joking about the images...sharing helps you distance yourself from it.
Re:The word "Worst" is relative (Score:5, Interesting)
In the first dot-com boom, I worked on a large groups application, kind of like what Google Groups is now. We had ~3m users, uploading thousands of images per day. For the first 6 months or so, it was the developers who had to do the moderation. We saw a lot of stuff that we could (and, frankly, had to) laugh about - anatomically impressive feats of stretching, comically ludicrous insertions, etc - but then there was the other stuff, the ones that you just couldn't laugh off. Stuff being done to others who clearly weren't old enough to consent. Some of the things I saw cannot be unseen or forgotten, however much I've wanted to in the ten years or so since.
After a while it does get you down. The very ordinariness of the backdrops was what got to me. People's ironing boards in the background. Their work uniforms hanging on the back of the door. You realise that this kind of shit is not done by crazed inbreds in the mountains or by foaming-at-the-mouth psychos, but by everyday people like the ones you sit next to on the bus or who smile at you as you buy a coffee from them every day. And that really got to me. I started looking at people and society very differently, and feeling constantly angry or sad.
In the end we hired a team of dedicated moderators, who had an enforced 1-to-1 counselling session every week. We also started working with law enforcement and people in suits whose cards just listed their job as 'the home office', and every now and again we'd get an email from the higher-ups telling us that our evidence had been crucial in securing a conviction in some case that had been in the news recently. And that helped.
There are far worse things on the internet than Goatse or tub girl, and a depressingly large number of people who produce them, consume them, and share them with others. Anyone who does that job for a sustained period has not only my sympathies, but my thanks