People agree that this is what is happening.

People disagree about whether it was reasonable to expect Google management to be anything like the public image it tried to cultivate.

I, personally, expected this reaction from management and I wouldn't have put my own career at risk. But I also never thought Google was an unconventional company.

Is that a good way to cope with confusing events, to assume that other people are just being totally unreasonable?

> I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, _OR_ they're just being totally unreasonable..

I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the other side believes the facts of the case are.

The first possibility, that of inaccurate reporting, is always likely. If that turns out not to be the case, the next most likely possibility is probably not that these brilliant people who are paid extravagantly to create and maintain a wide array of popular products and services are "totally unreasonable". I would suggest that they might have a different cultural understanding of workplace privacy norms. Their different understanding might be "wrong" in a universal sense, but it isn't for that reason unreasonable.

For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness; more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic, however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with more openness.

Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is. Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you. Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)

It’s totally reasonable, almost a guarantee, that they were in fact stalking their perceived enemies. The fact that they are highly paid Googlers makes this more likely, not less. I don’t want to drop names, but multiple people have been fired for openly targeting others at Google on ideological grounds. There are definitely some vindictive nutjobs there.

> "People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate."

If that's an accurate characterization of what the employee doing the calendar tracking was doing, then I agree that it was reasonable in the context of Google employment. However that would mean the article is very misleading as I suspected. The article says the subjects of the tracking felt unsafe, which says to me the tracked employees weren't sympathetic to the cause and believed motive for the tracking to be intimidation or harassment.

I have never and would never work for google so I can't say for sure, but I doubt openness as espoused by the company ever meant using openness to intimidate or harass others. IF that is what the employee in question was in fact doing, then it seems plainly unreasonable to me that anybody would defend it. I find it hard to believe such behavior was ever part of [official] company culture.

I think the surmise in your last paragraph is basically correct. I have no idea if there was any stalking going on. My calendar is public within the company like everyone else, but I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable if I found that an enemy were using that information to harass or intimidate me, and I would expect management to deal with that severely. This goes twice for engineers stalking HR people, since generally the HR folks have much less power and influence in the organization.