(Author here) It's complicated :-). I will say: it's hard to define "gambling" in the corporate setting.
Is it gambling to do an extra project in hope of getting a "Spot Bonus" (~$250-$1000) in recognition? That was a very standardized process at Google.
Is it gambling to file a patent application, which if approved, would lead to a $1000 bonus and a trophy you'd often see on the desks of Google Brain researchers?
Is it gambling to decline auto-sale of RSUs, and have your compensation determined more by movements in GOOG than in your cash salary?
1. No, Google isn’t taking actual money bets from their employees.
2. No, Google isn’t taking actual money bets from their employees.
3. What employees do with their vested RSUs isn’t at all the same as hosting an internal gambling platform. Once they are vested, employees own the stock, they can do whatever they want. One could sell them all and use the money to bet on roulette, which I think is obviously gambling, but that’s also obviously not Google hosting a gambling platform internally?
I’m just surprised that Google hosting a platform where employees gambled was… allowed? This isn’t a moral judgement, I’m surprised that Google was operating a gambling platform internally and legal etc. thought that was a good idea.
I think you are making a lot of assumptions about how the program was run. For example, are you assuming that the employees were betting their own money or exposed to any downside at all?
I assume they were given free credit for the system, and had the chance to turn it into cash bonus if they won.
It is closer to a company giving out a prize for the winner of a free fantasy sports league.
I'm not even sure there was any way to turn credits won into anything fungible. Everyone was given a small amount of credit to start, and it was perfectly allowable to go negative... Afaict, it was almost more of a "long bets" type sentiment platform where employees could "vote" (with their bets) on one side of a wager or another -- where many of the wagers dealt with inside baseball topics.
Outside of this Google case, that’s what predictions markets are, they’re for gambling.
The Google case turns out to not be real money, but it’s weird that the article never said that, and it’s weird that the author responded with three points of whataboutism instead of just saying “it wasn’t real money”.
If someone wrote an article that Google set up a roulette wheel in the microkitchen and employees “bet” on it, yes I’d assume they were running an actual casino and find that weird too!
Semi-related: I had a dream about a law firm that specializes in suing casinos that prey on gambling addicts (in a way that violates the law), and has to make sure that their constant interaction with the gaming world doesn’t re-trigger their clients into old patterns.
Then it occurred to me that there are a lot of major lawsuits that depend on litigation finance, someone to front the cost of the lawsuit and return for a share of the winnings. So you could have a situation where gambling addicts are forced to resort to “their old ways” to get it off the ground!
(And leading to a paradox where, if they can bet on this case in a controlled way … maybe they really weren’t addicted the whole time? Like in the paradox about the lawyer who sues over getting a bad legal education.)
Well, that explains it. I didn’t see that mentioned anywhere in the article, but maybe I missed it not being real money. I don’t think there’s any legal risk then.
