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Comment by BrandonMarc | Hacker News Reader

Tell that to the Google. Their employees scoffed about working with the Pentagon and dropped the contract, but happily helped China build an authoritarian social-punishment system.

Then denied it ... and then more details kept coming out showing Google continued working on it, just more quietly.

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Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future. There are multiple organized groups of employees trying to enact change internally, but some who previously did that have already recognized that as futile and left, so presumably more will eventually.

Google is already an extremely large company, and I think that many are only just now realizing the problems that they were contributing to. It may take a while for employee actions (both protests and resignations) to have a visible impact due to it's size, but I think they're making progress.

As per my thoughts I expounded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.

I doubt that Google's options are shrinking. There aren't that many companies with similar pay scale or culture.

Isn’t the culture the problem, and that’s why they are leaving?

Ethical ground is definitely part of the culture but not entirty of it.

>I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.

I think you overestimate how skilled you need to be to work at Google. Google has famously put people through enormous hoops to work there, regardless of the complexity the engineering the new hire will work on.

Organizations like NSA also have a negative reputation, but find plenty of people to hire. They just look outside Stanford,CMU, etc.

I suspect that as the people who don't have to work there stop applying, Google will widen it's parameters to snare in the people who have to work there.

(I've met many a person at Defcon who did a stint in the intel community because they saw it as the only path to a high paying job if you don't have an elite upbringing and don't want to directly kill people.)

Sure, any employer can always choose to lower their standards, but wouldn't you argue then, that the quality of their output is also likely to suffer?

The goal here is to ensure their ethical competitors have access to resources they don't.

Lot of companies have already a recruitment policy based on other parameters than skills, so they already chose the PR boost at the cost of output.

You seem to think that technical ability and ethics are somehow related. That's a sad misconception which leads to all kinds of bad results. There are many people with very high ability that have an ethical framework which would make them feel right at home in dictatorial regimes. They probably wouldn't even notice it. "I'm just doing my job" is alive and popular.

No, I don't think they're related at all. But if some percentage of high ability users have ethical concerns, it reduces the overall pool of high ability individuals available to them, while more ethical companies have their pick from the entire pool.

>You seem to think that technical ability and ethics are somehow related. That's a sad misconception which leads to all kinds of bad results.

Sure, but I also think if you have enough money to retire early, you're less likely to do something you don't agree with. Many people don't have that luxury.

>Sure, any employer can always choose to lower their standards, but wouldn't you argue then, that the quality of their output is also likely to suffer?

No. As I previously stated Google puts people through enormous hoops to work there. That has no bearing on the quality of the worker.

For example, it's been noted that past a certain IQ, there is diminishing returns - eg, past ~130 IQ you're no more likely to win a Nobel Prize.

I think the real threat is that Google "lowers" it's standards and output remains the same. This would threaten the business models of "elite" schools who pretend to have a monopoly on talent.

Maybe true in the very early days but Google has 100K employees now. It's a mixed bag of skilled and mediocre.

> Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future.

Leaving Google is not enough already, it will manage on its own (because it already has the power and because because so many gifted people still just dream to work at Google). But creating and promoting numerous better alternatives to Google may help.

Pretty sure Google wasn't working on a social punishment system (ie the Chinese "credit score" that's based on social factors), but a censored search engine, which is still pretty shitty but not nearly as bad as what you claim, unless I missed some big piece of news and am myself mistaken

Dragonfly allegedly is designed to associate searches with a user's phone number, which can be tied to their identity. Since China would have access to this system, it's likely searches for banned topics would be able to impact your social credit, or potentially get you disappeared in the middle of the night.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...

I didn't know that, thanks

BTW although having searches on political topics banned explicitly tracked doesn't sound too scary from a pragmatic point of view I doubt they will stop at this point. They probably will analyse whole search histories of people to produce their social portraits so a person interested in whatever unorthodox kind stuff can get penalized too.

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