Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s
Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826827.
There will be people they could hire, but it wouldn't be anyone that would get invited to conferences, and so on. Nobody that would make Stanford proud.
People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things (there are plenty of those...) but those programmers, every single one of them, is able to easiliy work somewhere else. It isn't like they are warehouse workers slaving for Amazon.
Probably not that large of a group of people that both read hacker news, read this exact article, even care about such things, and work at google. At a company of that size, they are maybe fancy cogs, but still replaceable.
A, the evergreen, "since nobody puts a gun on your head, you're free to work elsewhere".
Some people don't understand that limited job options, lack of skills (or money to increase them), need to feed a family, etc, are also "guns on the head".
To understand how much, consider than people can sell their bodies (for sex), or even get into slave-like servitude with no pay, just to get something to eat. Heck, in poorer societies (and even western countries, not more than a century ago) people would even sell one or more of their kids to help feed the others (and of course, would send their 8-14 year old kids to work).
Just because something is better than dying of hunger doesn't mean it's a "free choice" option. It's just, like avoiding getting shot from someone "holding a gun to your head" the best of shitty options.
In fact, by providing one more job option, they are helping slightly.
It's the same as this old classic: Nike builds a shoe factory on a small island with subsistence agriculture and pays people almost nothing to make shoes. And people castigate Nike for that. But Nike hasn't done anything evil. They have given people one more option. If subsistence agriculture is better, people can go back to doing that instead of working in the shoe factory.
Just got banned by a dozen of "thought leaders" on Twitter for saying the same things about people working for Facebook and all these "poor souls" who just got fired by Apple after it was leaked that they were listening in on Siri conversations.
If you can get hired at a software division in Google, Facebook, or Apple, you can get hired anywhere else.
Be honest. You just care more about money and prestige more than you care about doing scummy work.
I work at Google, and I don't think it's terrible. Neither do most of my coworkers. There are things I wish were better, and things I'm working on improving, but overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
I couldn't disagree more. Google doesn't make bazillions of dollars because they provide us with live traffic on maps. Google has significantly enabled and actively driven the mindless consume-everything-all-the-time culture with all the horrible consequences for our mental-health and the environment.
The world would be a much better place without the ones like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Upton Sinclair
[1] https://jefftk.com/donations
[2] https://jefftk.com/p/value-of-working-in-ads
I think the exact opposite, which is why I've went to great lengths in an attempt to de-google my life, but google still forces itself on me through stuff like recaptcha.
Maybe google once had a positive impact once, but not anymore. Now google just kills products, forces tracking on people who don't even use google themselves and pushes adverts in front of us, while de-monitizing Youtubers and pushing its political/social justice agendas.
The fact that you and your coworkers don't see the problem just highlights what the people up-thread were saying and is the big part of the problem.
Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"
Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known for years that Google is tracking everyone. Moreover, most of it is perfectly legal. In any company, whenever you say "no" to your manager you need to have a solid ground. I can't imagine anyone even starting such a conversation.
I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group.
Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.
You are. Don't they teach people ethics anymore?
I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy.
I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer.
It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?
Both is just Google being evil.
> nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it"
You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.
Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy.
On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.
If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse
It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?
When you're starting your relationship, it's very clear (in the ToS) that they can reject your apps or terminate the relationship however they choose. If they would start quitting developing for Play Store because of these opaque rules, perhaps Google will listen to them. But reality shows that this problem doesn't happen often enough, so the opaque filters work as intended.
So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).
> So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).
If you don't like the rules (or their behaviour when supposedly applying them), you can also:
1. Criticize, explain why the behaviour is bad and spread the word about it. This is what we are doing now.
2. Regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence.
It’s weird how Google knows everything about you when it suits them, and nothing when it doesn’t
The point being raised is that when you become a statistic, you have no recourse. Sort of like "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company"
If this were some small fledgling start-up, that is to be expected. It costs money to get things right for everyone.
But this is a huge, profitable, mature company. And one that is playing a key role in our society. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than they are now. Or else, in the end, society will make them.
Which is why we invented DUE PROCESS.
Thousands of others would replace them next minute, so why do you think it would change anything?
If 50% of talent left it would be a disaster.
Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.