Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum."

In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise.

Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPhone wearing a suit writing business requiremnt compendiums.

Startups hired world changers and made a customer and emloyee happiness index. Google wrote "Don't be evil" on a chalkboard. Gmail was better than outlook. All was good.

Then some tension surfaced. Advertisers thought they would be happier tracking users. Users thought this was creepy. Making generals happy did not make employees happy. Someone erased "don't be evil" from the blackboard.

Back to square one.

Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank. Now, they use euphemisms and secrecy to avoid saying stuff that sounds bad.

Btw... It's interesting how iconic "don't be evil" was as a slogan. They couldn't live up to it, but that doesn't mean it didn't impact.

>Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank...

Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental.

People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy.

For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich.

We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even have a facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money.

I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.

good try but.. the Google'rs originally wanted to "index the worlds information" .. very, very smart engineers are motivated by that alone. They were competitive and highly-achieving coders from Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-CalTech-thatOtherOneIForget in an elite team environment.. There were ten other well-funded companies trying to be search engines with lots of publicity.. Google outperformed them..

In hindsight, after the money with so many zeroes, it is tempting to rewrite history, but this short "it was the money" doesnt tell the story

That techies were motivated by riches is not hindsight.

Google, pre-ipo, sucked in so much intellectual capital that other startups, my own included, were having trouble getting access to the elite techies at prices we could afford. Their salaries were well above market, and their options were clearly going to be worth more than everyone else' at the time.

And don't even get me started on Facebook. That one of facebook's early investors was the VC wing of the CIA was an open secret. Yet techies still flocked to them for the big paychecks and the options.

And good for those guys. For the vast majority of them, it worked out REALLY well. I don't fault them for any of it.

I just think that you're putting on rose colored glasses here. It was clear long before Google IPO'd, that there was a lot of money to be made. (That much was even clear before keyword auctions as a matter of fact.) And everyone wanted to be in on it. Everyone still wants to get in on the hot startups. Whether those startups are profitable or not. That's just the nature of this business.

Now again, I'm not complaining. That's just how the tech startup industry works. I get that. My issue is with everyone trying to turn it all around and act like a giant gold rush never blinded everyone. As if all those techies flocked to SV because it was all just about making the world a better place. That's just not true.

This isn't an all-in-one or all-out thing. Of course money was a consideration.

But, Google (and sv 2.0 generally) did both present and to an extent, live up to a certain ethic. Not perfectly, not without some hypocrisy but they did have an ethic. The sold it to their employees (and others).

Today, they have trouble living up to it. People got disillusioned or upset. That is what we're talking about it.

I agree that these people joined a company, not a monestary. But, 10 years ago working at Google was easier to be proud of, on an ethical/esthetic level.

We all want different things. Those who went to work not to be evil were duped from the start or lying to themselves as we all know money is the root...

Why do people want to try and summarize the motivation of why every person who worked for Goggle to a single cause? We all know that people are different and the each person is motivated by multiple things. People went to work for Goggle because of all the things that are being discussed here and more.

This is the right way to think about it. Tech/Knowledge workers are pretty smart. There's no real "tricking" going on, which is part of what makes the problem so difficult to rout and insidious. If we were 'tricked' major economic and societal upheaval would be around the corner. But we're not tricked. We're willing participants.

There is a prevailing cynicism among the working man in that he recognizes (though often doesn't articulate) the compulsion to participate in the market that comes with capitalist systems. We already knew these companies were not shining paragons of ethical values—almost every participant in capitalism has known this since Industrialization. To focus on the consciousness of particular individuals or the false ethos of particular companies is to miss the real problem, which is systemic and lies at the roots in the capitalist mode of life and organization of resources. So long as you have capitalism you will have companies that make profit and market-survival an all-encompassing goal (whether or not they admit it) and complacent workers who are forced to support the Darwinian market game to have access to the means of subsistence. Capitalist logic is defined by its unbridled replacement of all other values (ethical, spiritual, etc.) with the value of exchange.

> For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich.

Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense. Sure, techies (currently) have a good shot at an above average lifestyle, but that's it. Working as third engineer from the left is not going to provide generational wealth for their descendants, or significantly impact their retirement dates. like everyone else, they are still dependent on their ability to work in order to survive. And it's all highly dependent on the whims of the tech job market. Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn.

> Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense.

I can't speak for the OP, but there is absolutely a sense of getting rich working early at a tech company. The market for startup options is a direct indication of this. Google and Facebook both made, what..1000 millionaires each when they IPO'd? Point is, yes if you get in early to a world dominating technology company, you can absolutely become rich and be set for life.

> Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn.

Disagree. Downturns force productivity and technology fuels productivity. If anything it's going to force more investment in technology to replace humans so businesses can maintain profitability. It's the sales & marketing folks that are usually in trouble, because many of these high growth companies will simply turn those functions off while we wait for the economy to swing back.

The FB and Google scenarios were vanishing outliers. A whole lot of if statements had to evaluate to true to produce those outcomes, and at the end of the day, a FB IPO millionaire is pretty well off but his kids will still have to work for a living.

The remaining 99% of early tech employees for other companies will end up with equity worth a house down payment if they are lucky, worth a few months of rent in the usual case, and often worth nothing.

EDIT: As for the tech downturn, just wait and see. I assume you have not been through a significant tech bear market from your comment, but if you have, you should know better. Things dry up completely, for nearly everyone. If you miraculously keep your job, you are still not in any powerful bargaining position.

a significant tech bear market from your comment, but if you have, you should know better. Things dry up completely, for nearly everyone

Can confirm. 2001 was utter carnage. Developers hit a lot worse than ops but no one got out unscathed.

> The FB and Google scenarios were vanishing outliers.

Not my point.

> The remaining 99% of early tech employees for other companies will end up with equity worth a house down payment if they are lucky, worth a few months of rent in the usual case, and often worth nothing.

Agreed. People are disillusioned to believe they'll become one of the "first 1000 have become millionaires". My point is that this a motivating factor, even if incorrectly assumed by most people.

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

> I assume you have not been through a significant tech bear market from your comment

To be clear - wasn't there only one tech bear market that is historically significant? (2001) If so, I would greatly challenge that we will hit another one similar to that anytime soon. Is there a frothy market right now? Yes. However most tech companies today have the discounted future economics to sustain themselves in an downturn. In 2001 that was not the case - you had companies IPO'n with 0 in revenue. A macro economic downturn is absolutely right around the corner, but a "fall out the bottom" bear tech market is very far from us.

Even in smaller company's you can do that at one UK place I worked at one point everyone (approx. 50-55) was $millionare.

That's 5% of your 1000 right there and I know peope who have made $200,000 effectively tax free on a single 5 year UK sharesave

> Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense.

You're describing 2 of the 10 richest billionaires in the world. Most people in general are not going to get that rich, most rich people are not going to get that rich, and nobody is going to get that rich by joining a company that has 100 or more employees already.

Gates, Ellison, Allen, Ballmer, Bezos, etc. are the richest 1% of the richest 1% of the richest 1%, and then some. There is tons of room in the category of "rich" that doesn't involve being particularly close to their level. Sure, you won't be able to single-handedly afford a professional sports franchise, but you'll be rich.

We can agree that a successful conversation on this topic requires a shared definition of “rich”. I just don’t think the fleeting wealth that comes with able-bodied employment counts. Rich implies some level of financial independence. One is rich if they can stop working immediately and maintain their existing standard of living indefinitely. This definition includes many more than just the top 0.01% but does not include employees who spend all $500k they make in the year and those who are temporarily well off because they just won the IPO (or other) lottery. I’d call those people merely “currently highly paid workers.”

Well, the only gate from $500k a year to financially independent is spending. In my current situation, if I made that much I would happily retire with an improved standard of living in about a year. But I also value financial independence above most other things, so I'm spending less than 1/10th of that per year.

Financial independence at an annual living rate of $100,000 is “rich”—you can live off more money a year than most people make, and you don’t even work. At a conservative 3% withdrawal rate, a lump sum of $3.33 MM can provide that income in perpetuity, assuming an otherwise functioning world economy. It wasn’t hard to get $3-5MM of stock as an early employee of a successful IPO tech company.

The very framing of this reply shows the incredible privilege of SV software engineers. Google has minted hundreds if not thousands of millionaires, that may not be "generational wealth", but it sure as hell is not-worried-about-the-next-downturn wealth. This is far more opportunity than the vast majority of humans have ever had, setting Gates or Ellison as your target wealth is a recipe for misery.

> Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.

It's also revisionist to interject your own thoughts and represent them to a party as whole.

People may have been cognizant that there are ills to Google/Facebook's model, but these are mostly externalities and not necessarily related to the direct impact. The point is - it's in our nature to ignore externalities, as long as the immediate goal is achieved.

I don't know about you. But if I can get riches at Google, I can get riches at Facebook, Apple or Microsoft too. The reason I would have chosen Google, and the reason I entrusted Google with all my personal information in the first place, was knowing they had that slogan.

I just couldn't imagine they'd ever erase it... Now who is left? I guess I'm waiting for the Internet Archive to turn evil...

I still like Google. I never worked there, but "cataloging the world's information and making it available for free" is still great. It's complicated yes, but Google — more than any other tech company — has empowered me to do the things I care about. Mainly by making information easy to find.

> cataloging the world's information and making it available for free

What does the mission of archive.org have to do with Google?

Or like, the mission of any academic library for that matter? Historically, Google owes its entire existence to an NSF grant that required heavy collaboration with Stanford Libraries, which is why academia to this day holds certain privileges at Google (free GSuite via memorandum of understanding, etc).

I'd even argue that working at a library contributes substantially more to indexing the world's information, since libraries usually have one of a kind items in their cataloguing backlog that provide huge insights. As an example, I once met someone at a vintage computing festival who was writing an ENIAC simulator using the original specifications housed at UPenn. Unfortunately, he was having quite a bit of difficulty obtaining example programs to run on his simulator, not because programs didn't exist, but most likely because they were backlogged at UPenn and weren't being added to the library's catalog (i.e., so-called "hidden collections").

There are many ways to work on similar efforts without being at a tech company, but for better or worse the pay isn't remotely as good.

For that matter, what did AltaVista and Yahoo's index have to do with Google? And how does DDG relate now? It's a good discussion.

Google contribution is algorithmic ranking, in my opinion, which amounts to an ongoing war / immune response with SEO and huge stakes for visibility of accurate information.

Cataloging it, as long as it suits their agenda. Otherwise, deranked.

Removing videos from war reporters' channels, but promoting garbage like Lil Yachty to the top of the Youtube etc charts out of nowhere with no view numbers, let alone talent...

The Internet Archive is a non-profit which in and of itself provides it with freedom to pursue unselfish ends. As long as decent people remain at the helm, the only acceptable options for it and similar non-profits at critical times would be to downsize or close, but never to repurpose the resources they've been entrusted with toward selfish and evil ends that will bring them loads more money.

For public companies beholden to greedy, money-focused shareholders, it's a different story. I don't know that they can help to be anything BUT selfish and probably evil. "Don't be evil" can only be a secondary directive to these beasts, and one to be discarded when it gets in the way of the primary directive of making as much money as possible. For these corporations, if being "good" ever requires "making less money than legally possible", they won't be able to stay good for long.

I think it’s a perfectly valid strategy for a corporation to make less money now for more money in the future, but apparently all investors disagree?

At the time I joined Google, I wouldn't have chosen to work on Wall Street or for Microsoft, but Google seemed very safe from an ethical point of view. Ads were just text links and none of the things people complain about had happened yet. (I also thought I was joining too late to make much from stock options and was... wrong about that, though it took a while.)

Google left China after I joined. What other company would have done that? It still seemed way better than average.

This idea that of course we all knew what would happen over the next decade is revisionist history via mood affiliation that has no factual basis.

But Google left China because the Chinese government wouldn't let them operate in a way that was profitable. It had nothing to do with ethics if you read beyond the PR speak.

I don't know where you got that from. They got blocked and hacked.

Also, there are ethical considerations in everything. They don't disappear when profit is involved.

Google had a very reasonable money printing machine as its core business model: Search Ads.

* You tell Google what you are looking for.

* Google returns a handful of ads, alongside world-class organic search results.

* Merchants bid to have their ads returned for specific search intents.

None of this requires the 24/7 surveillance machine Google has ended up building.

Not true. Ad words is bigger. And to do that, they need to know as much about what you want or what you could want in order to deliver a nice juicy targeted ad.

Advertisers can now target not just classes of people, but in fact target specific people, and they'll pay a premium for that.

That sounds like the original product has morphed into something more invasive than it was in Google's early years.

Could Google have kept making enough profit if they had stuck to the original plan?

> We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on.

Certainly, Eric Brewer and friends [1] understood these issues and were concerned in 1997. Today, Dr. Brewer is a "vice president of infrastructure" at Google.

Is it money? I'm not sure. We're all human and have our weaknesses. Noting that Brewer was in near tears discussing Inktomi I would guess success and ambition are also driving factors.

[1]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf

[2]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/pet3.pdf

People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich.

I'm pretty skeptical of objective-sounding claims about people's motivations.

In the past one could escape "evil" environment in private life; now with overreaching/intrusive tech on a global scale and companies losing their initial (even if only public) philosophies under the pressure of making more profit after reaching market saturation that possibility is going to be vastly reduced, and only then we will see what they are really capable of (with warning signs already popping up).

Perhaps a correction, if we are talking about the phrase "don't be evil", literally, I can see it on: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Perhaps "erased" is not quite accurate.

Well expressed. I look forward to the next world-changing movement/technology/culture that'll make google/facebook look like the IBM/Microsoft of old. Hope it'll be soon, so that I'm still young enough to enjoy the next counter-culture.

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