From: Sachi Kittur [mailto:xxxxxx@yahoo-inc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 9:22 AM
To: all-canada@yahoo-inc.com
Subject: AMEX corporate cards and Taxi Chits

Use of Taxi Chits:

In addition to our recent halt of pre-paid transportation services, please note that effective immediately, we will no longer be using taxi chits. These changes will allow us to institute better controls as we try to streamline our approvals and tracking of corporate expenditures. We ask that all employees simply expense any business related transportation expenses as per our expense policy guidelines. Taxi chits will now reside with HR so if you have any extra-ordinary circumstances that justify their use (ie. client visit etc), please come and see HR.

Corporate AMEX cards:

Keeping in line with our goal of ensuring better cost controls across our business, we have decided to significantly reduce the use of our AMEX corporate cards. Effective immediately, ALL employees (with the exception of senior management team or newcomers that don't have any credit history ) that currently have a corporate card will no longer be eligible to use these and will be asked to return these cards into HR over the next 2 week period. For those of you that are impacted, a reminder that you will be responsible for clearing up any outstanding balances so please ensure that any expenses owing are submitted into AP immediately. If there are any extra-ordinary circumstances that warrant access to a corporate card for frequent business expenditures, please speak to HR/Finance and we will work out an alternate arrangement.

Thanks in advance for your support and cooperation.

Best regards,

Sachi

Sachi Kittur I Senior HR Manager I Yahoo Canada I 207 Queens Quay West Suite 801 Toronto M5J 1A7 416.687.xxxx M: 416.500.xxxx IM: xxxx

The company, founded by white male Matt Mullenweg, has just increased its white maleness with the acquisition of PollDaddy, a two-white-males Irish firm.

Are we being too harsh on Automattic? Should we give it credit for not being 100 percent white and male? After all, Google prides itself that 32 percent of its employees are women; that it views that level as an achievement shows how imbalanced Silicon Valley's scales of equity are. Still, look at the Automattic company photograph, taken at a staff retreat in Breckenridge, Colo. If I were a woman or a minority working at this company, I'd hide in the corner, too.

One of the most significant employment law cases of 2007 was Reid v. Google, Inc., in which the search giant was charged with age discrimination for terminating PhD. computer scientist Brian Reid at the age of 54. Prior to his firing, Reid was reportedly subjected to a plethora of age-related disparagement, made the butt of jokes, and found himself a fish out of water in a "youthful atmosphere" featuring employee participation in hockey, football and skiing. Reid testified that upon being fired, he was told he was not a "cultural fit."

Google maintained it had simply eliminated Reid's dead end job, but in a unanimous decision last fall, the Court of Appeal for the Sixth District wrote:

We conclude that Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a factfinder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination.

With the case headed to the California Supreme Court, it's all the more incredible that Google is reprising Enron's work-hard-play-hard motto — a red flag for ageism — in its current recruiting. But anything's fair game after using Hitler in your hiring.

But besides the commercial rationale, there's a more disturbing reason for Facebook to throw a prom for its employees. With its cafeterias, gyms, and volleyball courts, Google likes to makes its employees feel like they never left college. Could Facebook be trying to make its workers feel like they never left high school? Infantilization is an effective employee-retention program. But it is not a particularly attractive one.

More pictures from Facebook's prom.

They'd read a lot of research around how to form the best companies and a lot of studies show that if you fall below 20 percent of the workforce being women, things become really imbalanced and unhealthy inside the corporate culture.

Brenco also counts former president Bill Clinton, big money Democrat Ron Burkle and AOL founder Steve Case as investors. 133 workers freed from their servitude received a final paycheck and bus tickets home. I guess Brazilian workers just don't understand the entrepreneurial spirit of putting in long hours at a startup to help the company succeed. Savvy Valley employees know that if you want to enjoy basic human freedoms you should work at Starbucks or the post office.

(Photo by AP/Andre Penner)

I try to scare people in the interview. It's basically my technique. I tell them this is going to be hard. You're going to suffer, but we're going to make great stuff. I try to create an entity where people who are not passionate get expelled by the system.

"I don't actually have that data at my fingertips," was Bock's reply. "I apologize." Ludicrous. Google runs on numbers. Had that been Bock's answer in a presentation to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he would have been frog-marched out of the Googleplex by security. Let me venture a guess here: Bock knew the figure, at least approximately, and realized it was embarrassing. Recently, Google itself has provided evidence of this.

Forward to 55:09 in the clip above to check out the size and makeup of the audience at a Google Talk sponsored last month by what Bock characterized as the "very strong" Black Googler Network. Judging by the crowd BGN drew to a talk by Ralph Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad, Google's dominant ethnic group is the invisible man.

As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we'll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

To all the commenters saying "stfu and stop whining": the thing you're missing is the false advertising on Google's part. Google doesn't tell you when you're going through their intense and selective recruiting process that your job is going to be crap.

Google managers like Paul Carff *specifically* make plans to dress up the job descriptions of what are essentially CSR positions, to lure top talent from top universities. Where they do mention CSR-type work, it's often called a "minor" or "infrequent" part of the job.

And regardless of the position, if you're accepting something on the order of 0.01 percent of applicants like Google is, and you're asking the kinds of quantitative+creative interview questions for which they're known, you are GOING to get a lot of intelligent, highly talented people. Lying to these people and putting them in dead-end positions is a recipe for disaster, which is why Google Support has such incredibly quick turnover.

You have to realize that high-caliber recent college grads are probably friends with lots of other high-caliber recent college grads. This means that, when they get lured across the country to the Bay and end up in a crappy CSR job they didn't sign up for, while their friends get much more appropriate roles in companies like Bain, Salesforce, and McKinsey, they aren't happy about it — and they shouldn't be.

"You can't do this job effectively if you leave dead bodies in your path."

(Base Salary X Incentive Target Percentage) X

Company Customer Individual
Performance X Satisfaction X Performance
Factor Factor Factor

X Pro-ration Factor = Total Annual Incentive