[protonimitate]

An employee of Google who jumped from the Google office is a pretty obvious connection. Don't really see how this is clickbait.

[bhouston]

Google employs 200,000 people. Suicide rate in the US is ~13 per 100,000 per year. This means there is an expected base rate of Google employees committing suicide per year regardless of working conditions that is likely higher than just 2. Maybe there is a real issue but two suicides within such large number of employees isn’t statistically significant.

EDIT: I added "statistically" in the last sentence to clarify my intended meaning.

[pengaru]

> Google employs 200,000 people. Suicide rate in the US is ~13 per 100,000 per year. This means there is an expected base rate of Google employees committing suicide per year regardless of working conditions that is likely higher than just 2. Maybe there is a real issue but two suicides within such large number of employees isn’t really significant.

How many of those 13/100,000/year have jobs?

[totalZero]

You're assuming randomness among the US population. Might be a good assumption.

However, there are externalities to this suicide that may affect others who work at Google or in NY, and so the story is worthy of being contextualized. It might be clickbait to put the word "Google" in the title but not because of probabilistic irrelevance. People who kill themselves at work have an impact on coworkers and company, no two ways about it.

[protonimitate]

Suicide is tragic regardless of the circumstances, and it's a really bad take to try to minimize this because it's not statistically "significant" or "clickbait".

[jckr]

If you want to have a meaningful comparison, then compare Google’s suicide rates with those of people in their thirties, gainfully employed / making six figures and have free access to mental health resources.

[hgsgm]

2 per year worldwide vs 2 per half-year in NYC office.

[relativeadv]

Bad take

[atlantic]

If you're seriously considering suicide, why would you bother going in to work, and then commit suicide in your place of work (your company's HQ, no less), if not to make a statement of some sort?

[haswell]

Why is this a pretty obvious connection vs. just the pragmatic reality of having access to the Google building?

The factors that play into suicide are numerous, and there is no apparent reason that Google was a causal factor.

This is also not to say that they aren’t, but to point out that speculation about this has zero standing.

[ziziyO]

A worker kills himself at work by jumping off a work building and you are here trying to tell me speculation about work being involved has zero standing? I don't buy it.

[woooooo]

I don't think they'd have put Duane Reade in the headline if one of their employees killed themselves. Probably wouldn't be a story at all, actually.

[everly]

If it happened on the job then, yeah, they probably would. Just like there is a Walgreens security guard in the news currently for killing a shoplifter in SF. If he had killed someone outside his capacity as a Walgreens security guard, they wouldn't describe him as such.

If this engineer had killed themselves in another manner besides jumping off the top of their workplace, they might not be described as a Google engineer.

Edit to add: Statistically, I suspect that there have to have been many instances of Google employees committing suicide outside of work. I doubt those got headlines at all, let alone headlines including Google's name.

[Jenk]

Alternatively it is a high-up point from which to jump that the person(s) has easy access to.

[bsimpson]

Just like how people famously jump off the Golden Gate Bridge to protest bridges.

[Ferret7446]

Their living in NYC is a more obvious connection, as there are studies showing that urban populations have significantly higher rates of mental disorders.