Apparently Working For Google Will Give You Nightmares

The Frat Czar13 years ago

How many of you expect to be employed by some hot-shot law firm or daddy’s accounting office straight out of college? For the rest of us who don’t have those opportunities, we’re forced to compete like lowly plebeians for jobs that only vaguely relate to what we studied in college. Well, I for one would be happy with manual labor over what this poor son of a bitch had to go through while working for one of the world’s most reputable companies, Google.

After college, I went to work in politics; I was a social media guy. A recruiter called me and said, “You should work for Google.” It never occurred to me to work for a tech company. They convinced me it was the right place to go. So I went there. I was kind of repulsed at how much I had. I think anyone who said they didn’t enjoy it would be a filthy liar: I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner there every day. They give you everything you need. As a person just getting out of college, it was fantastic. My parents, being traditional, were very proud that that I was working for this huge company. Over the phone, the recruiter informed me I’d be dealing with “sensitive content.” It didn’t occur to me that I would be doing the work without technical and emotional support.

So what did he have to do, look at countless Bieber/Gomez music videos? No, my friends, it’s much worse than that.

One of the most shocking parts of my job was working on porn issues. Child porn is the biggest thing for internet companies. By law you have to take it down in 24 hours upon notice and report it to federal authorities. No one wanted to do it within Google. I dealt with all the products that Google owned. If anyone were to use them for child porn, I’d have to look at it. So maybe like 15,000 images a day. Google Images, Picasa, Orkut, Google search, etc. I had no one to talk to. I couldn’t bring it home to my girlfriend because I didn’t want to burden her with this bullshit. For seven, eight, nine months, I was looking at this kind of stuff and thinking I was fine, but it was putting me in a really dark place.

Not just child porn though, as if that wasn’t enough, the list goes on. The unnamed employee described viewing absurd sexual fetishes, beheading videos, and even necrophilia. So what do you do when your entire job is drudging thorough some of the most fucked-up parts of the internet? Surely that’s a job hazard, which would mean your employer should pay for treatment, right?

So I went to get therapy. Google covered one session with a government-appointed therapist — and encouraged me to go out and get my own therapy after I left.

Not only did Google not pay for the therapy he needed, they refused to take him on as an employee after his contract expired.

A lot of people I know are ex-Google and they have the same story. Three people here were on the midnight shift for YouTube and they were given the promise that if they were going to see beheadings and child porn and all this shit all the time, they’d get hired. YouTube’s review process is proactive — they have to sit there and look at all of it, from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., for a year. One of my really good friends lost her life for a year doing that.

So what have we learned from this? Stay the fuck away from Google.

[Ed. Note: Never again will I complain about seeing a fucked up butt pee picture]

• [via Buzzfeed]