Googlers' Parties Restricted By Confidential Agreements

An interesting article published by Peter Harkins, web developer and entrepreneur from Chicago, reveals some interesting aspects concerning the Google employees. In a friendly conversation with some good friends working at the Mountain View company, Peter Harkins was amazed because the Googlers refused to talk about some technologies as the non-disclosure agreement signed by every of them prohibits them from doing this thing. If you didn't know, every new Google employee has to sign the NDA in order to protect the company from malicious information disclosure that might affect the evolution of the giant.

"Google employees get distracted by mentally rereading their NDA and figuring out what they can say, can't say, and can't say that they can't say. It just gets worse if you keep talking and extrapolating (that is to say, holding a conversation) because you're giving them O(n2 interrelations + m potential suggestions from them) more topics to analyze. I've never quite managed to crash them, but I imagine it's entirely possible given the NP nature of conversations," Peter Harkins wrote according to blogger Ionut Alex Chitu.

Valleywag goes even further than that and published some time ago a Google NDA that must be signed by any visitor of the Googleplex. According to the article, every new person must avoid disclosing private information such as "(a) trade secrets; (b) financial information, including pricing; (c) technical information, including research, development, procedures, algorithms, data, designs, and know-how; (d) business information, including operations, planning, marketing interests, and products; (e) the terms of any agreement and the discussions, negotiations and proposals related to any agreement; and (f) information acquired during any facilities tours."

This is not something new because any large corporation prefers to create similar non-disclosure agreements to avoid publishing important information concerning the company. Google is just one of those but, the things might go a little bit too far if two old friends can't discuss about Internet technologies and latest innovations created by famous companies.