Google trusts algorithm, not people, and this is what gets them into potential PR disasters like this.
Whether the closing of the account was right or not doesn't really matter here, what does matter is that this doesn't convey trust in Google at all. The accountholder is left with no options, and money that has outright been stolen from him by Google - at least this is what the the rest of the world sees.
The interesting thing here is that any competent PR or HR person would be able to tell you that this code of conduct was a PR disaster waiting to happen, but apparently the engineers got the last word.
It's OK to do regression testing on which words in a CV makes you a potential succesfu hire based on past history (which Google does), but it's not OK to let it replace the hiring process completely.
That's what seems to have hapened here. Google should hire some good people-people. They need it.
In retrospect, this is a bad business for Google to have gotten into for that reason. They are not good with the type of problems that come up.
I was using paypal the other day & thinking the same thing about them. I came to the conclusion that they never would have made it today. Paypal is harder to use & more confusing then the Banks' online banking platforms. In a way, that's a huge missed opportunity. If they were the super-easy-to-use-and-understand-without-feeling-dumb type of company, they might have taken a stab at being an online bank.
They did succeed because the technology was the key. From reports, the technology was just so far ahead of anyone else' that nothing else mattered.
Google is not in that boat. There are all sorts of solutions and they all work. It's not adwords where "it's my way or the high way".
Whether the closing of the account was right or not doesn't really matter here, what does matter is that this doesn't convey trust in Google at all. The accountholder is left with no options, and money that has outright been stolen from him by Google - at least this is what the the rest of the world sees.
The interesting thing here is that any competent PR or HR person would be able to tell you that this code of conduct was a PR disaster waiting to happen, but apparently the engineers got the last word.
It's OK to do regression testing on which words in a CV makes you a potential succesfu hire based on past history (which Google does), but it's not OK to let it replace the hiring process completely.
That's what seems to have hapened here. Google should hire some good people-people. They need it.