Senior Google employee says quest to stop leaks is now management's top priority
businessinsider.in
businessinsider.in
But this gradually eroded over the years, as more leaks happened and distrust increased, and now it seems to have mostly broken down.
1) A bias in the media and on Hacker News against Google?
2) Evidence that Google is doing a lot of bad things?
There’s certainly a cadence of stories that appear which seem to assert that Google’s practices are as scummy as/ equivalent to Facebook.
It feels like farming “whataboutism” and fud. That may be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Certain things become popular clichés, such as complaining about Go generics or Atom's alleged slowness, and so they get repeated in the comments about about that entity.
The tipping point seems to be when low-information comments start getting upvoted rather than downvoted. At some point people stop seeing anything wrong with them as long as they're on the same side.
Ad hominem is not really a good strategy for this these days. While we need to be cautious about veracity of any statement, using "disgruntled" is disqualifying anyone who uses it.
They probably do it because it still works. Muddy the waters, suggest there’s another side, play to people’s desire for a middle ground. Then the dust will settle and they’ll get to set the narrative again.
Media coverage really needs to be relentless to get through their tactics.
But the real point of my original comment was that this article is subpar journalism. The implication of the article, at least to my reading, is that there is a trend of declining morale at Google and dissatisfaction amongst the rank-and-file with the company's senior leadership. As evidence we are given... one guy's opinions.
He's having a good run giving the media what they want.
Particularly disheartening has been complete radio silence from Google based on plans, timeline, support, and bugfixes (e.g., on data takeout).
I'm among those who've speculated on an internal gag order. BI's story could be better sourced, but it strongly reinforces impressions of a crackdown on any information disclosure. Google have never been particularly forthcoming, but they're being pointedly antagonistic (or frightened, or both), now.
I wish they will be back to hearth the "organizing the world knowledge" mission instead of just working on making ads to look like organic results.
Seriously though, that release was a disaster from a secret-keeping standpoint. That may be what this is about more than anything else.
Working for Google used to be argubly the most prestigious job among software engineers, but they're heading towards the same path as Facebook.
And working for Google hasn't changed one iota. Stop pretending like HN is a bellweather of anything at all. It's not. Get out of your bubble.
If you think Facebook and Google hasn't been affected by the evil "nonsense" then I suspect you greatly underestimate the quantity and quality of the HN engineers, as well as how big the topic of privacy has become outside HN/Reddit/etc as well. The ivy league school I went to certainly discussed the evil practices of Facebook very often, and several would be ashamed of working there.. I graduated long before the Dragonfly project came to light, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's a hot topic at all the top universities, as well as workplaces around the world.
You're not grounded in reality, so your opinions as you've expressed them so far are not even remotely accurate, for the reasons I've listed above, as well as many others. You're going to continue to be surprised and confused about why things happen, and it's not going to get better until you figure out a way to hop off your cloud and come join us in the real world, because here no one gives a shit about Dragonfly (many down here, including at least one Chinese citizen, think it's better to have Google at all), and everyone is laughing at Google for their inability to keep the Pixel 3 under wraps.
You hate Pence so much that selling out to totalitarian regimes is worthwhile if it spites him?
You really can't even fathom any possible other meaning behind what I wrote than that?
In context, no.
But rather than reiterate the last few posts in this thread, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Please explain to me how Googlers should wear Pence's accusation that they're "abetting Beijing’s oppression" with pride.
Well, that marks you as a dishonest actor. Have a nice day!
Your stupidity is astounding.
B) Don't be ridiculous. They're going to be fined for violating people's privacy and engaging in evil behaviour. European companies won't get a free pass.
C) I was obviously referring to tech companies, whom in this case happen to be among the best paid in the world. I'd love for you to find a single other instance.
D) It's not a small topic among software engineers, especially the brightest ones.. you know, the kind of people Google wish to employ.
E) I obviously don't know how every engineer feel. I just know that a significant percentage of the software engineers I've known would never want to work for them. It's difficult to tell to which degree Facebooks downfall can be attributed to the employees they've lost and the people they've failed to attract.
F) I am doing something. With regard to privacy I use every opportunity to recommend everyone to use Signal, Firefox, Duckduckgo, NetGuard, Cookie Autodelete extensions, etc.
All the churn around Google's other products and services have ~zero impact on their revenue stream. What matters is ensuring Google maintains goodwill so that governments won't do anything to harm their money mill - so it makes sense that controlling information would be management's priority.
I worked at a place where a small group of people angry about certain things started selectively leaking things in a way that painted a few people with an air of scandal and incompetence.
When I react to stuff like this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the other party. I don’t know anything about Google internals or people, but remember that humans react to things in a certain way.
We know how Google worked originally, because that's patented and you can read the patent. Today, nobody outside Google really knows. The anti-patent lobby made a horrible mistake.
Assuming this is true and that trade secret laws are being abused, isn't the solution to make trade secret laws less abusable? I don't quite understand the logic behind fixing this by making patents stronger.
But that is moot - today's high margins don't seem to be based around novel software, or even software execution, but marketing and hence public image. Google isn't worried that somebody is going to clone the additional censorship techniques they've developed for China, but about controlling the public narrative to avoid disrupting their current marketshare/mindshare.