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Comment by Puer | Hacker News Reader

I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me, but their decision to backtrack on their promise in China changed my mind. I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google. I have many good friends that are both bright engineers and undeniably good people that work there. I just feel that as someone who's family is Taiwanese, I cannot in good consciousness support the company. I let the recruiter know this because I believe it's important that they know. I'm curious if anyone else on HN has had similar experiences.

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Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.

While I think the average developer has a more negative opinion of Google these days, for years they have been considered one of the best places to work in the world.

I know if I told my parents, for instance, I had done what you did, they probably would've called me an idiot. :P They just know Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, they don't see a lot of their especially recent practices as bad.

To say 'no, thank you, I'd rather not as I don't agree with the company's practices' indicates a kind of moral standing I wish more people would confidently have. It shows you're taking a personal stand against what you believe to be corruption, and that's awesome.

Rock on!

> Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.

While it is a nice enough gesture, let's not kid ourselves that this was some difficult selfless act on the part of the OP. Apologies to the OP if I have misinterpreted their earlier post but:

> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me

This statement often becomes true by virtue of having a reasonable computer science qualification and living in the Bay Area - eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email. Actually converting an outreach from a recruiter to you know, an actual concrete job offer at Google, is another matter entirely.

If declining recruiters is the new (very low!) bar for high minded civic engagement, I'm accidentally a grizzled activist on the front line.

You don't just have to live in the Bay Area to get those emails, at the very least anywhere in the US you will get them.

Source: have never lived in the Bay Area. Have a large number of those emails in my gmail.

I live outside the US and have also received recruiter emails for Google offices throughout the EU.

People knowing about OP’s decision, was those in his social circle, makes a profound difference if compounded by others.

>eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email.

This. I have said 'no, thanks' to FAANG in the last 3 months because my life is in a bit of a flux right now. It was a bit more than a simple 'no, thanks' in case of Facebook, but that's a story for another thread :)

Post it, it's relevant

OTOH, AMZN and MSFT have never even hesitated to accommodate the Chinese govt's demands. Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances? (I don't work there.)

Dont forget AAPL! (who hesitated, but ended up capitulating on the iCloud front).

I think the moral of the story here is that it's better to sell out from day 1 than to be seen as a hypocrite.

> who hesitated

Source? I was not aware there was any hesitation or even disagreement from Apple's side. Is there an Apple statement saying they disagree w/ Chinese government requests similar to the statements saying they disagree w/ US government requests? In their absence, is it safe to assume they agree since they have shown that when they disagree they make public statements?

They didn't really hesitate, they just dodged questions. Apple moved their user data and keystore to local datacenters in China [1]. Apple even updated their TOS and forced their Chinese users to accept (or drop service) to reflect this.

As of July, these datacenters were nationalized [2], giving the Chinese government access to all Apple user data.

It took only two years to go from refusing the FBI request for one user to handing over the encryption keys to millions of users.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

[2] https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...

fyi neither of your links work.

Fixed - thanks.

Not selling out loses all meaning the moment you do.

> Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances?

If you wanted to do software work for a company that didn't kowtow to Chinese government demands, chances are 99% of jobs are available to you. Does that mean they could if they would? Unknown, and since regimes change with frequency you can't rely on stated principles, only actions.

Would you still work for Amazon? Microsoft? Apple? Facebook?

Because they are actually in China and give concessions to the government.

The idea that a foreign corporation has a duty to break Chinese law with regards to web filtering is very problematic, if that's what you mean by "give concessions to the government". How far should such a corporation go with breaking the law, is tax evasion against the Chinese state morally acceptable, since those taxes might be used for oppression?

We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.

That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.

Are there any legal restrictions on what the Chinese government can ask websites to censor? I am not aware of any, so I don't see where there would be an opportunity to protest.

I believe it's already established that operating in China means responding to all censorship requests. Nonetheless, there are still many things an ethical company could refuse: access to the private searches and information of an individual without a due legal process, collecting sensitive information altogether knowing that it's fair game for the state, knowingly alter or influence results to promote official narratives and propaganda, knowingly use or profit from the proceeds of labor camps, underage or other forms of work exploitation; and many, many more, which are surely not positively codified in any Chinese law, yet are widespread.

You can't change Chinese law from inside China either. The only winning move is not to play.

I don't think it's fair to try and nitpick people's ethical decisions like this.

Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.

Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?

A moral inconsistency is not a nitpick when it's the entire industry.

Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.

You're saying his moral position is invalid because he doesn't apply it consistently, and that is not true, and also possibly harmful.

I said the moral position is disingenuous because it is both inconsistent and opposite to what he is describing, when considering all things related.

But each "related" decision is different, and there is no accurate generalization, by the very nature of what a generalization is.

> Saying they spurned Google...the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.

There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.

Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.

If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.

> Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.

The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.

How many of those companies can be considered substitute employers to Google? That offer the same level of compensation?

That is what an economic substitute is. SMB tech companies typically don't compare.

There's a big difference between operating a business in China in general, and operating a business that necessarily involves implementing their surveillance infrastructure.

And Bing doesn't, while Dragonfly does?

I honestly have no idea. Last I heard, Bing is blocked in China, which I assume means that there are things that come in its search result that Chinese government doesn't like.

But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.

bing.com redirects to a Chinese version of Bing, which prioritises Chinese sites.

I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.

I sympathize with your position, especially regarding Taiwan, but I wonder if your early rejection was as effective as employees rebelling? One need not take the most effective route, but given the size of Google, when I was in a similar position to yours I justified it by saying if I got an offer, I'd make it very clear I'd want nothing to do with the censorship work for the exact reason you listed.

Both are good. I'm sure Google carefully tracks why candidates decline jobs at Google, and if enough of them say "I can't work with you because you're doing specific evil thing X," then it becomes more and more worth it not to do X.

Similarly, if internal morale is in decline and reports come back saying that it's because of X, that also has a real (and quite possibly quantifiable) cost.

Do you think that recruiters spend time forwarding your response to someone at Google who actually cares? I usually decline jobs/projects outright, but I wonder if I shouldn't waste some time on interviews before telling the company why I won't work for them. It's not like there's a shortage of projects, and I'd like to maximize my political "leverage".

Yeah, I have ignored recruiters hiring for companies I have moral qualms in regards to, despite the jobs being undoubtedly quite lucrative. Haven't ever let them know about my moral aversion though.

Sounds like a good call.

It's much easier to excel in the pursuit of something you believe in. Seems like folks who accept jobs that they don't believe in are liable to become increasingly demotivated and eventually burned out.

I will not work for Google for the same reason, fwiw.

Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government? I'm asking because the government doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country and kicked Taiwan out of the United Nations in 1971.

> Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government?

What kind of question is that? No citizen supports all the actions of their government. Government options are a lot more limited than employment options.

The United States did not kick the Republic of China out of the United Nations in 1971, the UN General Assembly did. The US voted against Resolution 2758.

This absolutist view of things is really problematic.

It's true that the US government officially recognizes the Beijing government as the legitimate Chinese government and doesn't recognize Taiwan.

OTOH, the US has a security partnership with Taiwan. See https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-united-states-securit... for details of this unique relationship.

I, too, had a very similar experience. Although I am of Indian descent, I still strongly agree with your views. It's really unfortunate that the leadership at Google doesn't follow the "do no evil" mantra anymore. These sorts of decisions aren't in the hands of an every-day engineer, so they are not at fault here in my opinion. And by standing up and vocalizing that distaste, I believe they are doing the right thing. Google makes some amazing products, so I see the appeal of working there. But many of those engineers have been around before the company started going in this direction, so I can't blame them. It's the leadership that needs to understand values > profits. At least if they want my continued support.

Much of this is PR dominance as well. Corporate media has already done 90% of the hard work for people to be able to easily market and feel good about opposing specific issues. You just need to fill in the colors in the coloring book. But these issues have been done and accepted for the longest time, such as Google's State Department staffed Jigsaw branch that creates tools, shown in Wikileaks, to assist overthrowing foreign governments in collaboration with the State Department, or tools that AI-censors comments, or tools that delegates control of the discoverability of grassroot contents to other corporate conglomerates.

> I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google.

How can you say this when those that build, even small parts, of surveillance technology are directly contributing to oppression?

Workers absolutely have a moral obligation to what they work on. This notion that they're not responsible for this is horrifically wrong.

I'm fairly anti-China and loved Taiwan, can't wait to go back, loved it, loved the Taiwanese people.

Good for you on making a decision like that.

But... Just so long as you know that someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked. That's something I think many idealistic users here aren't understanding.

> someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked.

If talented engineers were that easy to find, Google wouldn't have participated in illegal wage-fixing; and that's without selecting for engineers that want to support an authoritarian regime. Statistically speaking, every rejection drives up the price. To wield even more power, we'd need to form some kind of industry-wide union.

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