It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.
So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra layer of anonymity.
> Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your
> calibration scores and that translates into real money.
Based on the successful career progressions of several well-known troublemakers at Google, I believe this statement is not currently accurate (if it ever was).
I was far from a model employee at Google - I continued to post on HN, I would challenge executives as to whether their actions were really in the best interests of users, and I would raise complaints I heard about elsewhere internally - and I don't feel like it hurt my career progression at all. I was promoted during my time there, and I largely got my pick of projects. When my old manager left the department, he told me that one of the things he and his superiors had really valued about me was my willingness to call things out that weren't working.
I do think that there's a right way and a wrong way to criticize your organization. As Ben Horowitz says, "Come from the right place." When I would say something negative about Google it's because I want it to be the best company it could be, and I'd often raise complaints internally rather than externally because that's where the decision-makers are. And if you want to be taken seriously, you also need to buckle down and contribute, and listen to considerations you may not have thought of. My manager said once that the folks who get fired are those who "Complain too much and contribute too little", and I can think of some prominent personalities on Hacker News who fit that description. Complain and contribute and you do fine.
> Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.
Wow. Did you actually see first hand anyone who was punished by Google for things said outside the workplace? And did this extend to topics other than Google?
