Work elsewhere.
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.