Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes | Hacker News Reader

Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes

bloomberg.com

348 pointspseudolus430 comments

Only a subset of Google docs were ever shared like this. The lawyers never shared. The internal security people had private files. HR had its files. The people doing the financial reporting were/are bound by all manner of rules. Google's famed internal openness was only ever for a subset of docs meant for developers, not anything like a free/open data policy.

Isn't that obvious? There are laws against having HR files available to anyone, and some fabled company culture doesn't get to override that.

Personnel files, yes, but one could definitely share hiring practice statements, salary schedules, rules for how requisitions are approved/allocated, how much freedom hiring manages have to negotiate salaries, etc. Whether that is a good idea is another question, but it could be done if the goal was as much openness as possible.

I've also heard (not a Googler myself), that parts of the code are private, like very specific parts of the search algorithm that are very critical IP. So while a vast majority of the code is readable by most, it's not some kind of completely transparent place.

Yes, this is true. It's usually code with sensitive IP in it, which is limited to the people working on it. The API around that code and the binaries that result from it are exposed to other teams, but not the original code.

Yeah this article really seems to confuse the monorepo and files.

The monorepo was always accessible to all. First day on the job, you can literally see all the source code. Which is crazy cool. (With a few exceptions I'm sure, but not many.) I'm assuming that's not changing?

But any time someone creates a Google Doc it defaults to private. People will then share it with other editors and then their team as necessary.

It happens all the time that you follow a link to a deck to try to understand what a team is working on, and you get a "no permission" and have to e-mail them to explain why you want to see it... and you usually get permission within a few hours but sometimes you needed to look something up quick before a meeting and missed the chance.

Most of the time it's not out of any great secrecy, just that teams don't want other teams to misunderstand info out of context, like whether a team is actually pivoting or just exploring it or just brainstorming internally.

While monorepo is still a thing, they created a feature called “silos” to allow secret projects, to prevent fiascos like Dragonfly (censored search in China) and Maven (DOD drone image recognition) which both were discovered from monorepo.

Ironically, Allo cancelation was discovered by Allo team from a comment in a check in which was made by mistake days/weeks before the announcement.

The feature is actually called silos? I thought the hip thing to do was tear down all the silos in a company?

Other companies tries to be like Google, while Google tries to be like other companies.

During my time there, the internal Android repo required VP approval to access. Though I understand this was relaxed later.

From the article:

> Many large companies have policies restricting access to sensitive information to a “need-to-know” basis. But in some segments of Google’s workforce, the reaction to Walker’s argument was immediate and harsh. On an internal messaging forum, one employee described the data policy as “a total collapse of Google culture.” An engineering manager posted a lengthy attack on Walker’s note, which he called "arrogant and infantilizing." The need-to-know policy "denies us a form of trust and respect that is again an important part of the intrinsic motivation to work here,” the manager wrote.

I don’t work for Google, and this kind of entitlement mentality confuses me. I’d hate it if everyone had access to the stuff I was working on. That seems weird and kind of creepy. Without proper context lots of stuff could get misinterpreted (broadly speaking).

Misinterpreted in what way? What are you doing that you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with other people in your own company?

Never mind misinterpreting docs then. There are documents that you wouldn't want read and properly interpreted by the wrong people at the wrong time.

For example, every year when it's time to allocate headcount resources, management has to make tough choices about which teams and projects should be expanded and which should be cut. This necessarily involves discussion about past performance and future expectations. Imagine seeing your team stack-ranked 3/4 of the way down some random prioritized list. You would be correct in interpreting that doc as meaning that management values your team in the bottom 1/4 of all teams in the org.

Without the context about expectations for funding, it might torpedo your psychological safety and ruin your Christmas. And then in January funding comes through for the whole organization (as management expected), and nothing ends up getting cut.

There are countless examples of how random docs can easily be taken out of context and cause angst and paranoia.

I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

It's actually with any company which gives you that much of freedome and voting power. And people hate it if something is being taken away.

I assume that the culture of employee activism or at least advocacy being encouraged and fostered by internal systems of communication was probably part of the selling point for a lot of people to begin with. I agree with your premise though - Google established a different kind of relationship when they did the brainwashing/cultural indoctrination. This is the kind of genie that gets let out of a bottle when you do that and then you change up your culture after the fact.

I think that's not a bad thing. For big companies like that it is impossible to drive them out of the market with a competing company, so if you want to change it makes sense to do so from within. Especially since its such a powerful corporation they will always find people to replace the ones that leave, so your leaving doesn't actually help your cause all that much. Much better to stay inside and exert your power from within.

> So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

(Quote from the post above yours, emphasis mine.)

I read the post you're replying to as saying they didn't understand why people don't just go work somewhere else, rather than burn out with futile attempts at trying to change the corporation from within. Whether they are right or not I can't really speculate in, just thought it interesting that we seem to have had different takeaways from the comment.

Even if your power doesn't change anything?

How is it impossible? Plenty of big companies — including tech companies — have been driven out of the market by competitors.

>I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google.

I'm not. Google encouraged it. Now they are forced to quash that culture because you can't run a multinational business that way. When profitability starts drying up in the ad business, you'll see a further shift.

> Google encouraged it.

Everyone's story is different but I joined in 2008 and it took me about a week to understand that the company did not want employees to get involved in a way that would affect day-to-day operations. As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon. As a different example, you could organise Irish-speaking evenings, and again - pat on the back. But try to push for an Irish language version of Google interface, and you can get in trouble if you make enough noise that decision makers hear about it. Both of these are actual examples I saw first hand.

I suppose what I'm trying to argue here is that adult people with average emotional intelligence understand the difference between what's said and what's meant. So I find the argument that 'Google encouraged it' rather weak, especially for the insiders. The only thing I know is that leaving Google was back then one of the most difficult decisions of my life, despite being aware of conditioning I've been subjected to. Looking back, it was the best decision of my career, except that I should have left 2 years prior.

>adult people with average emotional intelligence understand the difference between what's said and what's meant.

The problem with not defining boundaries and instead relying on some fuzzy notion of understanding the subtext is that it leads to confusion. The James Damore fiasco demonstrates this. They guy actually thought he could write an opinion on a highly controversial and inflammatory topic without repercussions. Why did he think that? The vast majority of HR departments would explicitly discourage it and the company culture (especially at a multinational) would make it clear this isn't a topic for the corporate intranet. But he was confused enough that he thought this was ok because he probably though Google is different and is OK with employees debating political and social positions on company boards. That's what I mean by 'Google encouraged it'.

> The problem with not defining boundaries

Isn't that what a successful socialisation process should equip you with?

Human society is all about infinite overlapping boundaries and rules for them and games people play and violations thereof.

"Successful socialization" is pretty nebulous. I think it's a phrase to imply that some people who are objectively functioning in society "don't count" as socialized.

Anybody can be successful in whatever respect until one day they aren't.

You can really, really not like any given person, but if you question whether Damore lacked/lacks basic socialization, then what do you make of Martin Shkreli, or Donald Trump? Are you ok until you get sentenced to prison? Or can you be a failure until you become POTUS? If you've failed at basic socialization yet held a six figure job at Google, what would you be if instead you were a supermarket cashier, but with the same beliefs and personality?

No. No socialisation process is going to equip you to maneuver around a bureaucracy with ill-defined boundaries. That's why you need a defined process with rules so that people know where they stand. Damore thought he was in the clear because others posted about controversial positions and the company didn't have any rules about it and seemingly encouraged it. It turns out there were secret unwritten rules that he crossed and cost him his job.

The fact that they even have internal discussion boards is a cultural choice of Google. Most companies don't have such a thing. But culture is always implicit, not explicit. If Google had traditions of encouraging those types of discussions and Damore engaged with that, it's still on Google for promoting that atmosphere. The fact that it got leaked and then there was blowback and the leadership reacted to that blowback in the way they did signaled a cultural shift to Google employees and prospective Google employees. That's okay. Corporate cultures change sometimes. It's unknown whether that will be good for Google in the long run or not, but just because some companies think that such a discussion is not ok does not mean that it wasn't implicitly acceptable at Google when Damore did it.

Actually, J.D. can be the one to organize software developers into a em.. guild: an organization with membership fees, staff lawyers, accountants and all that. The organization could start with the non-compete agreements nonsense. He's surely a controversial figure, but that only makes him more visible, and he has personal reasons to start such an organization. With the 250/month fee you only need 150 members to get the ball rolling. The memberships need to be sufficiently obscured and Damore has the suitable background to get the anonymity right. One idea is to use the DBAs - name aliases that can be registered with your company to hide your identity. Every member would be an LLC, but I'm sure software devs have money and ability to overcome this minor obstacle.

> As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon.

Awhile back people did ask for it and did secure said benefits, prior to the national legalization of gay marriage even.

So, in this case, organizing around and asking for those benefits did work.

The impression I have (as an outsider) is that Google is a totalitarian institution, in the same way universities are for undergraduates: it encourages employees to centre their entire lives around Google.

They provide employment, food, transportation, leisure activities, social validation; in some cases housing. It's no wonder employees (especially young ones fresh from the bosom of Mother Academe) who have their entire sense of self wrapped up in being a Googler are hesitant to just walk away from that.

That’s true for a lot of tech companies: the goal is to make sure you spend all of your time thinking about work.

I think the term is “total institution”—a totalitarian institution wouldn’t actually tolerate factionalism and infighting.

You say you are surprised but then provide a perfectly good explanation in the next sentences of your comment. It is not much different from nation-states indoctrinating their citizens to "love their country". Moreover, some degree of indoctrination seems essential for any large-scale organization. They simply begin to collapse without it.

This is fairly cynical but i think it's one consequence of the economic boom. During recessions and recovery aftermath there are rarely issues like this, people are generally grateful for their jobs, not looking to pick fights over it. Not saying that is a better situation since it enables more corporations to exploit their employees, but the pendulum has swung pretty far the other way. Will be interesting to see what happens next recession.

I've always likened it to the early days of computing when it was "Big Blue" vs everybody. Small upstarts like Apple were very much the Hippy compared to the Button-Down Square.

That Hippy rebel spirit is/was very much an identifying characteristic of `Silicon Valley`. I'd even say that Google is the poster child of Silicon Valley v2.0, and the people that work there might even resent the inevitable conservative slide that makes Google in 2019 look more like IBM in 1989. I know I resent that.

I suspect "corporatist" might be a better term than conservative.

“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.”

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff.

There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.

> Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital.

I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.

I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically.

This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.

This person is describing their own experience; what you're saying is that you haven't had that. Which is great for you, but it's not universal.

Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.

You're also making a lot of assumptions about me but I'd rather not make this anecdotal. I would have probably agreed with OP when I was 18 after watching Fight Club a hundred times that was what modern business life was like. But I've had a large variety of jobs in my life from working outdoors, brutal factory floor jobs in an auto factory and a wood flooring plant, to office-space style boring corporate HQ jobs for a big brand, to tech companies for the last decade and it's hardly the standard. Especially once you get past lower level drudgery work.

I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.

I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job.

It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)

I would also say it's not a good idea to burn bridges; which is what inevitably happens when you run around telling people the reason you're leaving is because the company sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway (see my original comment), and you risk coming off as toxic to people you might want to give you a recommendation later in your career.

I think giving honest feedback at exit is a good thing and I view it as showing respect. I would probably avoid the word “sucks” though.

Right, but the place for the honest feedback is the exit interview. Spare your co-workers your grievances; they probably already know why anyway.

This just boils down to social skills really. Some people are just killjoy grievance machines though so it's worth noting.

Very few people think their company is perfect, and being able to be honest about a company's shortcomings without resorting to "it sucks here" and similarly unhelpful non-constructive criticism is a sign of emotional maturity. People leave all the time, for various reasons, and most places I've worked that actually conduct exit interviews are genuinely curious as to why high performing employees leave.

I hesitate to say they "care" because I think that gives the wrong impression. Everybody wants to make a little more money, get a little more freedom in deciding their priorities, get a little more flexibility in their hours, etc. So if you say your only reason you're leaving is that you want more money, they're probably not going to give everyone a 10% raise next quarter. But if you have well thought out grievances that can be addressed without spending millions of dollars or completely changing the structure of the company, I think you'd be surprised how willing executives would be to try and make things better.

I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company.

If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature.

Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so.

A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.

Googlers are trained not to think of themselves as leaves, but as roots. That's the source of the friction.

The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.

I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.

* Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.*

Then size is the problem.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.

Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one.

This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things.

If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody.

Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary.

Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.

I agree. You see the same mindset in politics where people fanatically stick to one party or the other but barely can formulate an own opinion on issues.

On the other hand, the United States was created by people who preferred the former.

The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle.

Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too.

Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive.

Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.

In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.

This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics:

-stay and fight to fix

Vs.

-vote with your feet and compete

Each of these have positives and negatives :)

Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?

Yes. In general it’s better to either stay or come back. Otherwise we are concentrating more and more into “good” countries and leave other countries behind. I understand it from an individual perspective but in the big picture I don’t think it’s a good thing. In the US it’s the same. Tech people and companies concentrate in a few centers. It’s probably better for companies and employees but not very good for the whole country.

>I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one

Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed.

You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example.

And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM )

Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.

there are democratic companies (called cooperatives) if you think workplace democracy is important, you should join one.

> changing of something from within is actually a good one.

Politics; yes. Corporations; no. Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not.

If shareholders and the board are happy taking on government work then Google will take on government work. Ditto military projects, ditto Chinese projects, ditto anything really. The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. The only influence they do have is to cause profits to go higher than people planned on; because that makes management happy.

> Politics; yes. Corporations; no.

I have seen this fallacious notion expressed a thousand times over, in multiple disparate venues, and it exhausts me. I am even now questioning why I would bother to step into this conversation, and propose an alternative outlook. I do not expect you to enjoy my contesting statements. I do not expect you to thank me for them.

Truly, at this point I expect negative votes, and some off-hand comments about how I am ignorant (despite the sources I can cite), or brainwashed (despite my personal experiences affirming the perspective). One thing I know is that "well actually"ing individually misguided forum comments isn't a sustainable method of educating Tech Workers like yourself–and please, don't bother denying that appellation. This is a forum for tech workers. That's what Hacker means, as it's used here.

So, to the point: Politics are the mechanics of power.

It's that simple. There are explicit politics in government, e.g. wherein the Constitution delineates literal powers of particular offices, and then there are the implicit politics of families, nations, firms, interpersonal relationships, administrators, etc. There is no sense in denying that the decisions we make in the systems we inhabit influence the balances of power between actors within them. When you pass me the salt at the thanksgiving table, you grant me a power to arbitrate the passing of salt. When I show up to work, I submit myself to the powerful authority of the Jira system, and the managerial strategy it comprises. These are political acts.

> Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board.

This is true.

> The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not.

> is to be

This is weird. There is so much rhetorical work being done by this innocuous compound verb "is to be". In it, you imply a definitive truth. An inescapable logic. Something akin to a physics engine, if not a type of physics itself.

But I do not believe the Firm "is to be" as you say. It is as we will it. The Firm is a social construct. It's boundaries, methods, and behaviors are socially constructed. They're defined, as Searle observes, by collective intentions. Collective will. If we will it otherwise, the Firm will be otherwise. As XKCD's Randall Munroe puts it, "we're the adults now, and that means we get to decide what that means."

> The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made.

I don't put much stock in rights. There is power, and there is motive, but rights are pure poetry. Do the workers have the power to influence the firm? Do we have the motive?

We certainly have the motive. The Firm shapes the conditions of our lives. The lighting. The furniture. The distance to the bathroom. The hours of the day. These are the material conditions of our sensable environment. They determine the quality of our life. The relationships we invest in, the food we eat, the financial resources we've available to furnish our habitats. These are all influenced by the firm.

The air we breathe. The water we drink. The development of the landscape around us. These are impacted, immensely, undeniably, by decisions made in pursuit of the Firm's strategies. These developments affect us.

So long as we are sensitive to our environments, we will have motive to influence the firm. Do we have the right? An immaterial question. Does a dog have a right to dig? Does a waterfall have a right to carve? Nonsense terms.

Do we have, then, the power to implement our motives? To bring about our goals–unceasing, corporeal, visceral goals stemming from our animal needs, our bodies desires, to be fed, sheltered, exercised?

You say we have only one power: to please the master. I would say we have another: to displease.

It's nonsensical to say we have the power to "do well" without also conceding we have the power to "do ill".

We have the power. We have the motive. Why talk of rights?

Sounds like you need to read up on unions.

By and large unions focus on pay and conditions, not corporate direction.

Insofar as unions do anything political it is usually inappropriate and better done through actual regulation so all companies obey in a coordinated fashion.

Hard disagree. A union is there solely to give employees a proper voice at the company. That this has by and large been to support working conditions historically is only because it was the issue of highest importance.

If the concern is corporate direction, the union has a seat at the table as well.

Labor unions serve to protect workers from poor physical working conditions...and in some cases their fragile ego too???

>> I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

How much of that is simply due to vesting schedules?

Not just for Google, but broadly in tech, that doesn't quite work. If you jet, you lose un-vested equity. Oh, and you are also forced, in many cases, to spend a boatload of current cash to exercise vested options and get stuck with illiquid holdings for 5 or more years.

This is not true at Google, you can trade all your vested equity ave the not vested ones should be replaced by a similar amount in your next job.

Google pays pretty well which makes it hard to leave, ave there is a lot of nice people to work with.

>> equity ave the not vested ones should be replaced by a similar amount in your next job.

If you are in the money, you're losing a LOT of money when you leave, join a new company, and get struck new equity at a higher strike.

You can ask the new company to match your unvested equity at current market value.

Google (and most large established tech companies) give RSUs instead of options, so you don’t have to spend any money to exercise them, but your point about vesting is good.

See "golden handcuffs".

Google RSUs also vest monthly (and no longer has a cliff at 1 year, you start venting 1 month after you join) so as far as I can tell it’s exactly equivalent to salary but paid in shares of GOOG rather than dollars. Waiting for vesting shouldn’t keep anyone around for more than 1 month.

>> Google RSUs also vest monthly (and no longer has a cliff at 1 year, you start venting 1 month after you join) so as far as I can tell it’s exactly equivalent to salary but paid in shares of GOOG rather than dollars. Waiting for vesting shouldn’t keep anyone around for more than 1 month.

This all the more reason employees dont "just quit" and join another company. Say they quit and join Amazon -- now they are stuck on a 15/15/30/40 vesting plan and just kicked all their comp into a future year that may or may not arrive. Say they quit and join a typical startup, now they have a 1yr vest.

Amazon vests 5/15/40/40, even worse than you said.

Not a googler myself, but if I had to guess I'd say they feel a sense of ownership in Google employees at other companies might not. I think that sense of ownership is warranted, if not in a strictly legal sense. If a Google employee feels that, it seems natural to want to see it change for the better, and stick around to help influence it to do so.

Moreover, the sheer size and power of Google means that changing its culture changes how it interacts with the world, which could have far-reaching consequences. Seems natural to want to see that impact improve.

Google attracts quite a few people who, were they not doing industry, would be in academia. There tends to be a lot of philosophy of why things are done overlapped with what is done.

Typically, I'd agree. However, I think leaving isn't a great option for a lot of FAANG employees.

They have two options:

1. Maintain high pay at another FAANG. Depending on perspective, at least one of those is no better than Google.

2. Take a significant pay cut to work somewhere else.

There is also the money. Truckloads and truckloads of money.

Probably the result of years of social engineering played upon the protesters. They fail to see Google is not their friend. But also fail to see that the part they play as Google employees is not that important either.

Maybe Google pays well and the work-life balance is great so the employees can enjoy a good life while spend most of their energy protesting, so much so they don't want to leave what they are protesting against /s

I see a very different explanation which could also explain this pattern. Employee activism doesn't make the news that often, but it's actually pretty common - as long as the activism doesn't challenge any core element of the business.

If you want your call center to be more ecofriendly or your consulting firm to support Fight For $15, you may or may not get support but you probably won't see consequences. In tech itself, I've watched plenty of people push for green policies, or organize donations to support immigrants, or even recruit for the DSA with no issues at all. But they were recruiting for border reforms and political groups, not workplace unions and H-1B liberalization - and certainly not user privacy. When it comes to the Kickstarter union or Wayfair stopping sales to the CBP, the accommodation dries up fast.

That doesn't mean the activism is insincere, or even about not making waves: there's also a powerful selection effect invovled. If you're passionate about the environment, you probably don't take a job at Shell, or you quit in protest. But if you're passionate about LGBT issues, there's much more reason to be optimistic about workplace activism, and it's mcuh easier to reconcile keeping your job while you do it.

So what's up with Google? They used to do one thing in one way, then branched out rapidly, so they have lots of employees who bypassed the normal selection effects. And now they do everything, so every issue is simultaneously non-central to Alphabet as a whole and a direct challenge to some component of it. We haven't heard much about Google employees protesting search ranking algorithms or advocating for GDPR, because that's been selected against from the beginning. But AI, military work, internal transparency, and even corporate hierarchy are comparatively new issues for Google. The people who object aren't gone yet, and nobody can tell what's fundamental and what's safe to challenge.

I think it's because Google started and sold itself as the Do No Evil company that inspired 1,000s to more to get into tech; aspire to want to work for or with such a company.

In the end we learn Google does evil for the sake of profits and many those who they inspired have become disenchanted.

This week Bezos said he wants to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, at Amazon.

Nurturing a work culture of employees who care and are passionate has always been a goal for many companies.

I mean, worker organization is never a bad thing. Just like democracy is good for decision-making in government, it's also good for decision-making in the institution that dominates most employees' lives: their employer.

Yeah it does feel overwhelming. I'm actually starting to think that some of this may be targeted. Meaning that actively political people (of any political affiliation) are actively looking to get hired at Google and stir shit up. One way to confirm this theory is to get the the seniority of people that start these internal movements/arguments/threads/etc.

The 4 people recently fired that were labour activists had tenure of 11, 8, 4, and 1 years.

I think it’s honestly ridiculous to suggest people are trying to get hired into Google to be political activists. We have no evidence of this and I’d need a lot to start believing it.

When your hiring process encourages critical thinkers, don't be surprised when they become critics.

The kinda critical thinking that makes them think working for China to throw people in deathcamps is good but working with the US government is bad?

Most employees working at companies (even Google) are seeking to just get their work done, be productive, draw a paycheck, and get some friendly socialization done along the way. It isn't a setting where they are seeking to fight political battles, argue about moral values, generate anxiety, be subject to leaks/doxxing, etc. But that's the exact environment created at places like Google where employee activism isn't shut down.

Effectively, a minority of these employees are using company time/resources to engage in personal activities. Often those employees are highly-vocal, cutthroat about shutting down others' differing views, and the voices of others who are just trying to get things done are not represented. I think the lack of an anonymous channel for others to push back is a big problem because there is no psychological safety afforded to the majority of employees.

Put another way, employee activism is an unscientific popularity contest where most people don't want to participate in the contest.

> they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ

Never once have I heard anyone describe Google in such high regard while working there. We're encouraged to be autonomous, self aware, thinking people, believe it or not. There are many things I agree and disagree with that Google does and expressing that is perfectly fine.

Kent Walker voiced his opinion about not sharing all information because folks did not agree

"programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all"

I can't help but feel maybe their culture is a little toxic?

I think the chief legal officer sending out a memo to the whole company is a little bit more than “voicing an opinion”. Nevermind when you add in the context of the actual actions taken against employees who were breaking the rules (firing).

As for the toxic thing, it’s 100,000 person company, I personally wouldn’t read into a couple bad apples spamming someone.

That being said, I think it’s hilarious so maybe I’m biased (and toxic).

> That being said, I think it’s hilarious

I think there are many things that would be hilarious and also should get people fired.

100%. Finding humor in things and lacking the judgement/empathy to see how harmful they play out in the real world should be a very clear boundary.

"Other employees say they are now afraid to click on certain documents from other teams or departments because they are worried they could later be disciplined for doing so, a fear the company says is unfounded."

“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

It will be interesting to see how companies will engage with culture wars in the upcoming years. I expect it to get back to firing of employees to create cultural hegemony, something that will be frowned upon in some societies.

We're 12 years into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

Moreover, the 2008 crash didn't really affect the tech workforce as harshly as the 2001 dot-com crash.

Altogether, this means an ENTIRE GENERATION of tech workers has NEVER really experienced a true labor market bloodbath in their career. Doesn't even fully comprehend what one looks or feels like. Believes that protesting your own employer, or management tolerating a fragmented internal culture, is normal and natural rather a temporary aberration.

As a 40-something who was around for the dot-com crash, I feel a blend of resentment and pity for the younger crowd. The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.

> The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.

Google employees probably have so much money laying around after years of working there that they don’t care anymore.

If that money is mostly captured in coastal overexpensive housing, the same property that would be hardest hit if something largely negatively impacts tech companies/workforce, then they have much less money than one might expect :)

> Believes that protesting your own employer [snip]

Unions would like to have a word. They started, in modern form, in the 1800s.

Isn't the history of unions and activists for workers' rights exactly the point, that it's not (usually, historically) easy or natural or uncontested to protest or try to change your employer? I mean, the people being discussed do not belong to a union, right?

Interesting comment, I relate to it. The recessions affected me pretty heavily. I'm in my late 40s. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, and was living in SoCal at the time which was really bad (military cutbacks hit the job market at the same time as the recession). The dot com crash hit later - I kept my job through it, but my wife's company went bankrupt and she had a lot of trouble getting back into it.

I think I internalized the notion that it's essential to have very specific and in demand job skills, and I am innately pessimistic about my general ability to adapt and learn on the job as a means of attaining employment. I suppose that's always true to an extent, but in the early 90s, only certain engineering grads were getting good jobs, there were a lot of coffee shop humanities majors. In the late 90s, during the boom, I felt a world of difference between myself and people just 5 years younger, who seemed to think the difference between college and the working world is that now your employer pays for the booze. Even the humanities majors tended to land pretty good jobs - and I don't just mean money, I mean the kind that start to build up your resume. The dot com crash definitely hit like a hurricane, though.

That said, 2008 was rough, wasn't it? My company went bankrupt and I did get a new job, but options weren't great. That said, I do agree that the tech workforce was hit more harshly in 2001.

People talk a lot about generational differences, but I think that there's a large and generally hidden difference in cohort. It can hit hard. For instance, graduating into a severe recession can really set you back. The reason is that you don't get good experience (you string together freelance and coffee shop jobs), and then 4 years later, the economy picks back up. The problem is, you're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and companies tend to recruit at the colleges (and may wonder, why has this guy done nothing relevant for the last 4 years?). I've read that the effects of graduating into a recession can be seen 10-20 later, and I'm not surprised. I think it's harder to get an entry ramp back on when the economy does improve, and I suspect that people may develop a more risk-averse mentality about what kind career path to pursue.

The effect you write about in the last paragraph is academically studied and found to be true:https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/recession-g...

That captures my sentiment as well. The word that kept coming into my mind is "entitlement."

I'm surprised the Damore controversy didn't show up in this article. There are a couple of things that resonated for me:

"About 20,000 employees walked out last fall over the company’s generous treatment of executives accused of sexual harassment"

There is a kind of moral collapse in a company that fires a rank and file employee for writing a memo while quietly paying out massive exit packages to executives who have been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual harassment. I think people can agree on this while disagreeing about whether Damore should have been fired.

I'll admit to my own personal politics - free speech doesn't exist for you when you deny it to others. I'm not making a fairness argument, that it's unfair to deny free speech to others if you have yourself, I'm making an existential one. If it doesn't exist for others, it doesn't exist for you - free speech is the right to listen, otherwise it's nothing but a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Google employees are now getting fired for speaking out on activist issues, including unionization. Yeah, unions often protect their members right to speech, including unpopular speech. And guess what, your bosses may not like that. Why are people who decide to create an authoritarian tribunal always so sure they're going to be able to keep their little monster on a leash?

Those executives probably had their "massive exit packages" written into their employment contracts. Google couldn't not pay them, if that was the case, because it would have been a breach of contract. Rank and file employees likely don't have such a clause in their employment contracts.

Should they have had such clauses written into their contracts? Maybe not, but maybe it's hard to hire people at that level without them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...

This article asserts that google shielded a lot of higher ups and paid large exit packages in spite of having no obligation to do so.

I need to read this more thoroughly and I’m not claiming it’s the only word on the topic.

Whatever the difference, I think there is a compelling case that google exercised discretion in shield execs who were credibly accused of harassment while making a big public display of throwing damore under the bus for expressing an opinion.

Interesting read. I have no information that they actually had contractual requirements they had to meet, I was just putting it out there as a possible reason.

Exit packages generally don't apply if you're fired for cause e.g. due to sexual harassment. They weren't properly fired, they were gently and silently "let out" - in some cases with negotiated settlements that added payouts which weren't in their original "exit package", possibly due to added non-competes and silence clauses.

"maybe it's hard to hire people at that level without them"

At that level, maybe everybody just assumes you can't hire people without that sort of thing, and they don't test whether it's true.

> A group of Google programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The deluge of notifications was meant as a protest to what they saw as Walker’s insistence on controlling the minutiae of their professional lives.

Wow. Just wow. The level of highschool-level unprofessionalism displayed here is shocking to me. Are these the people we have trusted all of our personal secrets with?

This sort of malicious action needs to be nipped in the bud. Google's management failed to enforce normal workplace guidelines and created a culture where personal opinion and political warfare take precedence over making the business successful. Google remains strong just because of the coattails current employees are riding.

Seriously though: Is this something the ~2 billion people holding Google accounts need to think about?

Previously we sort of all trusted Google employees to be competent, smart and professional.

Should we still do that with these internal divisions becoming public?

Over the past few years I've taken to a habit to do the more personal searches about things about personal medical issues etc from a separate browser installation (with no Google cookies) using duckduckgo.com or bing.com. I just don't trust Google with new personal secrets any more.

I know it's kind of a tangent, but I want to point out that Google is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks, are trained not to fraternize with the rest of Google's employees, and are of a markedly different racial and cultural makeup than the rest of Google's employees.

Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an estimated $8,000,000,000)?

So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored by design by the other two groups.

Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually quit Google over this.

(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth.)

I don't think Anand Giridharadas will be invited back at Google Talks.

https://youtu.be/d_zt3kGW1NM?t=2900

I didn't watch the whole thing (yet) but the part that you link to is spot on: If the Google top brass or the rank-and-file wanted to give the service workers a better break they could do it overnight, it just costs money, and not enough people care or notice.

The first comment on the video has some context (if you take it at face value):

> Google initially decided, for the first time in its history, to not publish this video to its Talks at Google site here on YouTube after it was recorded. This presentation was given on the second week of September, note the publishing time lag. Giridharadas contacted Google to ask why, and his contact said "I'm not on that team anymore" and was blown off. He then leaked the story to a leading tech journalist, who started calling Google for comment because she was working on a story about why, for the first time ever, a Talks at Google video was not published. They published it the same week

For what it's worth, Talks at Google talks are often enough not posted online. This definitely wouldn't have been the first, or unprecedented. For example, I saw an in-person Talks at Google with Doug Stanhope where he said a lot of offensive shit, swore a lot, and made the audience feel uncomfortable. That one was never posted online.

If you could find that, I would absolutely love to see it. Doug is my favorite stand up and that sounds hysterical.

It wasn't posted. There's nothing for me to find. It's not like I sat there recording it on my cell phone.

Thanks for the link, really enjoyed those questions. I'll watch the rest later.

> is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks

Isn't this about government (IRS et al.) categorization of contractors vs. employees and not about GOOG specifically? IIRC there is a specific reason contractors cannot receive employee perks or even participate in team morale events.

Do you not think it says something, nobody much talks about google having worker-ants in uniforms? The IRS issue is why they have to wear a yellow star, yes. But the question is not that they wear the star its what the fuck is the culture which normalizes this

> Do you not think it says something, nobody much talks about google having worker-ants in uniforms?

No, not really. It says that people realize that low skill work isn't valued the same as high skill work. That's exactly what anyone with a basic understanding of economics would expect. It's not a human rights issue that people that are easier to recruit and replace aren't offered the same perks.

> wear a yellow star

This is so hyperbolic as to be offensive. Comparing people in a voluntary employment role to the victims of the holocaust is incredibly tone deaf and hysterical.

If a company insists a class of workers wear uniforms and a huge primary cohort do not, then the hyperbole is grounded in a fundamental problem. The uniform exists to mark them out. The function of the uniform is not to their benefit, it's to their detriment. The origin of the yellow star was functionally identical: mark the tainted that the righteous shall know them.

It's so people know who the staff are when they need help in the cafe.

And who the cleaners and gardeners and menials are. The ones not allowed in the nice places except to clean them and get out.

Overall Google employs roughly equal number of staff and contractors, the latter are in significantly different terms of employment. The functional maintenance and service staff were an outsource, they many be an in-house now, but you would have to be in denial to pretend they are not an underclass. My visit to mountain view was an eye opener.

This is backwards: companies began outsourcing support functions because it was cheaper, and the reason was precisely because the contracting companies would provide worse pay and benefits than the large company provided to its own employees. The worse benefits are the point, not a side effect. Nobody's forcing companies to outsource, especially not the IRS.

Another way to looking at it is the upper-middleclass at google is riding a large wave of ad-tech/search money and have comfortable jobs for relatively little grind and risk compared to other companies.

I really appreciate you connecting the struggle of the tech workers in google to those in other industries which don't enjoy a lot of the same freedoms. Understanding of this is severely lacking in tech, and once we develop it I think solidarity will build exponentially. It's high time google workers unionized, and that includes ALL workers -- not just those in the engineering org.

What is a TVA?

You know, I never actually knew what it stood for.

It's the same dodge as the service contractors, but for programmers: You're technically an employee of a separate company that then contracts your labor back to Google. It's a big open secret loophole to pay less in taxes and in overall benefits.

E.g. you work in the same buildings, ride the same buses, and eat the same food, but enough of a "fire-wall" is maintained between you and the "real" Googlers to satisfy the government that you're not legally an employee of Google.

The project I worked on was so inefficient that I suspect that Google is simply big enough and rich enough to sequester talented programmers just to keep them from working for competitors.

How do contractors cost less taxes??

I wonder if "TVC" was intended instead, which stands for "Temp, Vendor, Contractor".

If "TVA" is what was intended, I have no idea. This is the first time ever I've heard "TVA", let alone in relation to Google's unofficial workforce.

Oh, er, derp, yeah. "C", TVC.

Sorry about that.

Full time employees are around 100k with TVAs at around 120k. Yes, TVAs are more numerous and they enjoy different perks/benefits/etc (they aren't Google employees technically so that's not surprising) but we aren't talking about a 10% "elite" vs 90% "plebs" here.

To be clear, I left out the TVAs in the above breakdown (or lumped them in depending on your POV).

So: ~0.1% elites, N% Googlers-of-the-line, M% TVAs, P% service workers, where N+M+P ~= 99.9%

I guess even in California rich privileged people like class seperation

How does this differ from other organizations? Places I've worked or interviewed at outsource things like cleaning offices or running the mailroom. Are you saying that Google has their own employees do that stuff, but they are a separate class/caste?

Does Google also have significant numbers of temps from staffing agencies, or other contractors?

That's (part of) my point: Google isn't some egalitarian techno-utopia.

You could, say, have a policy that the lowest-paid employees have a floor of 1/7th the pay of the highest-paid employees, like the janitor makes $100k and the CEO makes $700K, or whatever.

If they have low-paid employees in house where other companies don't, then their stats on inequality could look worse while in reality, there is less inequality.

Google's mistake was to brand themselves as a moral cause. When you do that, you send out a beacon to some of the most righteous smart people on earth and they become employees. Righteousness and smarts is a toxic self-undoing mix.

If you add making a bunch of money on top of that you have the ultimate combination of toxicity. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, echo chambers, thinking you're an expert on matters outside of your field, random and inappropriate activism... Google brought all of it on themselves.

Google is now a blight on our industry (in terms of invasive technology and cargo cult copying of their culture and policies). It's so huge and entrenched that it will take a Microsoft amount of time for its relevance to die but thankfully it's going in that direction.

If Google wants to kill their special culture that's up to them, but I hope they know that without the "Google magic", a lot of their failings as a company become a lot less forgivable. For example, you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it.

> you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it

Like near-total dominance in multiple market spaces?

They don't need great customer service or continued innovation to remain absolutely ubiquitous for decades to come.

If you make big changes, just do it. Don’t explain it at length. If you explain it, you give people room to argue and hem and haw and ends up being counterproductive. It’s an invitation to bikeshedding.

Well said, comrade!

True!

But these are places of work not town hall. Get on with your work.

All I’m saying is it’s like getting into an argument with a kid and you try to explain every ensuing “why”? At some point it’s “because!”

Hey I would counteract my kids' 'Why?' with "Why is not a question. Why what?" They'd have to form a clear question. Made them digest the issue enough to say what they were curious about. And incidentally made it more work for them to keep asking "Why".

I would much more like to employ your children than ones which were taught to accept "Because."

Great! One was a soldier in Iraq and Korea, got his masters in MechE and is a process engineer in a factory now. Looking to move on.

The middle son is already employed in Silicon Valley, in some startup I can't pronounce. Getting bored, might want to move on.

The third is a trained pianist and cellist. Now is in IT in Target's national deployment center in St Paul. Definitely interested in broadening his experience, and would welcome a call to talk about other opportunities.

Could you drop me an email at username.co a t gmail with a way to get in touch? (With you or them)

Can't guarantee it would be a fit -- the stuff I do is either incredibly interesting or incredibly boring to people, depending on their interests.

Done

That seems like it be worse. Making unilateral changes without any rational would likely anger people more.

Sometimes a straight directive is more efficient than nuanced measures. Nuance is for intellectual pursuits, not for management.

True, unless you want to retain employees doing intellectual pursuits. I think Google is past that point.

Most folks don't really care what you are doing. Because they don't understand your issues at all. Just say "It was the solution to a problem we were facing. If you want to find another solution, be my guest" and watch their 'anger' disappear quickly.

That’s not that terrible of advice. You are empowering others to take action rather than feel disaffected. If they can come up with a better way with the same constraints then why not? Otherwise everyone gets to move on.

“Therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends; while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more.”

- Machiavelli, The Prince

That quote gave me some serious creeping chills down my spine.

what is creepy about it? it’s downright humanitarian. ‘mitigate negative experiences and protract pleasant ones.’

Hmmm

>Therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends;

That doesn't say to mitigate negative experiences, it says to do them quickly to get them over with

>while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more.”

This says to dole out benefits slowly little by little so the masses can savour each little good thing given.

That's not humanitarian that's Pavlovian.

Humanitarian isn't really the right word, but it's good advice even if you're not being evil about it. If you have to give out bad news, it's better to be quick and complete about it than have rumors swirling for weeks, or have to keep giving out a new bit of bad news every week for months. That's true even if you're not intentionally being cruel, and can help people process it all at the same time, instead of just living in a deluge of bad feelings.

This is true. I just don't think Machiavelli was well known for his positive humanitarian outlook towards things. I suppose it's assuming bad faith. You do make a good point though, and it's probably better to try and take a positive message out of it.

Are you confusing Machiavelli for Hobbes? Machiavelli was largely a proponent of liberty, and his patrons whom he gifted the Prince, the Medicis, don't even make the top 5 list for inhumane behavior as far as powerful Italian ruling families go.

I think "concentrate negative experiences and dilute pleasant ones" would be a more accurate restatement.

Yeah, Machiavelli tends to do that.

Fitting that most top-tier business schools quite literally use The Prince as a textbook for building and maintaining organizational power structures. Future executives are taught that Machiavellianism is very bad... unless you're the one doing it.

The modern word "Machiavellian" has had a life of its own and doesn't correlate directly to what is actually in The Prince, though. When we (in 2019) describe someone as machiavellian, we tend to imagine some sort of mustache-twirling evil mastermind. The book itself is more like a dispassionate, semi-scientific textbook on how to be a ruler.

The quote I listed above is a good example. M. is essentially just saying that, "if you have to do bad things, do them quickly and all at once." Generally good advice, I'd say.

A modern analog would be firing employees - avoid it if possible, but once it's determined to be absolutely necessary, just do it. Don't waffle, give conflicting messages, or build an atmosphere of dread. Make the tough decision, execute it quickly, and then move on. Of course, one could argue that the manager should have made better decisions to avoid the need to fire people in the first place, but that's a deeper discussion.

And honestly, the reverse idea in the quote is also true. If you have finite resources to spend on perks, don't blow the perk budget in Q1; divide it up into several smaller boons and spread it out across quarters. We know human psychology has diminishing returns on positive feeling and you'll get more out of several small dopamine boosts than one big one.

Machiavelli is still taught because, frustratingly, it still applies.

I call bullshit. If there is a single class at HBS, Wharton or Stanford that uses The Prince as a textbook I will eat a teddy bear. I’d be slightly surprised if there was a class that used readings from it extensively but that at least is possible. Business schools don’t have courses in political philosophy, nor do top ones have courses that are brain dead airport business books in lecture form.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/machiavelli-morals-and-you

Good news for you though, 24-packs of Gummy Bears are available on Amazon for just $8.79, thanks to the demand for them from large companies as a low-cost perk that can be doled out across quarters cheaply. ;)

Technically, they said teddy bear. We demand stuffing!

First of all, this is an excellent comment thread. Secondly - I think technically they said "used as a textbook," not sure if the link demonstrates this extent of reliance on the book.

> Business schools don’t have courses in political philosophy

You're completely wrong here. My business school (global top 10) had multiple required courses on political philosophy -- both corporate politics and government politics. Navigating complex political situations is the most important skill to have as an executive in corporate America. In fact, those classes are usually the most popular with students and consistently rated as being some of the most valuable by alumni.

I'm not surprised that business schools have students reading The Prince, but I highly doubt that any classes are treating as a practical how-to manual... which is what the GP was clearly implying.

That's exactly how it was taught, supplemented by HBS case studies that heavily referenced The Prince.

Granted, it's taught as "here are things to look out for from your subordinates" -- but if you read between the lines, it's "here's how to walk the line on this stuff and get away with it".

Much of google’s success is built on trust. People had to trust them a whole lot to sign up for most of their services at one point or another. Most employees I have met felt the company was very open, their ideas mattered and that they were working on something positive.

Maybe that much trust is naive but when your decisions can amount to things like censoring the internet for half the world it’s maybe not the best plan to just pull the trigger and tell everyone who works for you to just deal with it.

Having recently spent some time in a leadership position, I must admit I became disillusioned with "consensus emerging from democratic debate" - everyone tends to argue from their myopic view of the issue and to avoid thinking through the consequences fully (because ultimately they won't be responsible for them).

That said, as a subordinate, I hate it when no rationale is given. And it can be counterproductive too because people will start to speculate about "true reasons" behind the decision. Instead a reasonable thing to do seems to be to publish a rationale but make it clear that the debate is over and everyone has to commit to the decision even if they disagree with it.

I agree with your experience. However I disagree with one aspect, in my experience.

Giving a rationale hasn’t engendered trust, and instead has contributed to conspiratorial discussions (they say it’s about x, but it’s really about y!) and often times the conspiratorialists were kind of right. There is no good answer but a straight directive with little food to chew on leads to less counterproductive speculation. And often it is less “dishonest”.

> and often times the conspiratorialists were kind of right

I think people are fairly good at noticing when they are just getting “spin” or an incomplete answer. The conspiracy theories pop up to fill the void. The only way to avoid this is to give enough information. Once you are caught withholding key information you will never be fully trusted again.

Giving no information is probably better than giving misleading information but it certainly doesn’t engender trust.

If you want your employees to be honest with you then you must give them a reason to trust you. Personally I believe part of that is being as transparent as is rationally/legally possible.

I think Google has finally embraced the fact that they're an advertising company and they're not going to change the world for the better. This means they need to drive off the idealistic hackers that built the company and replace them with corporate drones who aren't focused so much on building an empire as much as protecting it.

This has been happening at both Google and Facebook over the last 5 years. I think the fact that they're driving off their most talented (and expensive!) employees is part of the plan for transitioning from explosive growth to maintenance. The growth mindset has become a liability for them.

Tangentially related I hope developers will realize that the current stack inherited from them is basically enterprise software made for large teams of interchangeable developers, just with better marketing than J2EE 15 years ago.

For reference: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2008/05/11/ruby-on-rails-vs-jav...

> I believe that if there was a full standard distribution for Java EE (e.g. Icefaces+JSF+Seam+EJB3+JPA+Hibernate+Glassfish, to name just one possible API stack out of thousands of different combinations), people would write a lot more good documentation for that particular stack, and it would become a lot easier for more developers to start using it effectively. With the right tools and good documentation, productivity could potentially be about the same for Rails and Java, but at the moment Java is shooting itself in the foot in this regard.

Spring has basically accomplished the “as productive as Rails” part, as has ASP.NET Core, which would be my personal preference.

There are few technologies I despise more than Spring. Well, maybe OSGi. Also, hibernate and JPA. I've lost so many hours of my life fighting those things.

I try to stick to Clojure for most of my JVM-ing these days. Right now I've got this one large Java/Spring-boot service I've inherited sitting in the middle of an otherwise micro-services-based architecture built using Clojure/ring and Python/flask services (for the ML stuff). I keep thinking about how I want to start calving off chunks of that thing to re-implement in something not Java/Spring.

Because Spring magic is great until it's not. And then you're banging your head against your desk for a week chasing down some weird heisenbug related to some nonsensical Spring behavior. And there's no sense of accomplishment when you finally resolve it, because the entire exercise only served to increase your esoteric knowledge of Spring, which you never wanted to deal with in the first place.

ASP.NET is rather different in that regard. Much better documented and supported.

You must be joking. A good Rails dev will run absolute rings around any java or .NET effort no matter what tools they're using. I don't even think I'm being subjective here; I work with java (well, kotlin/scala) devs and even they wouldn't say anything like that.

Rails has disadvantages yes, concurrency and its lack of ability to support long-running tasks foremost amongst them, IMO. But dev speed, for standard "startup web app" features? There is no contest and I'm baffled as to why you would claim otherwise.

You work with Java devs? Have you actually tried using the Java or .NET web frameworks? They’ve come a long way.

I would have to agree with this -- I work with a lot of large telecoms and nearly all of them use Java for any back-end services that need scale. Sure, Java is insanely verbose syntactically; but that has the side-effect of forcing you to formally model your application architecture in order to generate stub code. The unfriendliness of Java is just managed through tooling that presents a simplified interface to developers. It's easy enough to wrap a JVM in a container to work with Kubernetes or arbitrary cloud services, so many of the operational aspects of working with the JVM are greatly simplified.

Moreover, Java on the web (first in the form of JSPs, later Spring-based frameworks) was largely a reaction the shortcomings of LAMP, which was largely a reaction to the shortcomings of Perl5 CGI-BIN (what I consider to be the first widely-used web framework). The great irony is that Perl had an advanced dependency management system in CPAN in the mid-1990s and PHP had nothing for years. Ruby on Rails succeeded largely by combining a CPAN-like dependency management system with a web-native development framework.

Facebook was founded as an amoral version of Google. It never had idealistic hacker culture.

Not explaining is a bad idea, since it means that people who disagree have no chance to be convinced or even understand the motives if not convinced, so they are much less likely to effectively cooperate with the new course.

Instead, explain at length and let people discuss, but at some point explain that the decision is final unless some major new elements come up.

People who disagree are not going to be convinced by corporate comms. It’s not going to happen. It’s a bigger distraction than what you’d otherwise get.

The idea is not to release "corporate comms", but in full transparency, honesty and with complete willingness to be proven wrong release all the data (email messages, meeting transcripts, web sources, documents, spreadsheets, simulations, etc.) the decision was based on and your thought process.

The "radical transparency" is probably just propaganda (on management's part) and self-delusion (on some employee's part).

It says:

> When google was founded... Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could ... dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps

Oh, how transparent! You get look at more source code. Such a deep dark company secret! Or you could track someone's calendar. Amazing! ... not.

"Nearly all internal documents" likely means "...except the import stuff": Finances, investor relations, interactions with the US government, senior management internal discussions. Did employees have access to any of that? I doubt it.

I wonder why these types of gossipy internal company strife articles are never written about big news orgs. For example, I'd love to know how 2k+ reporters who work at Bloomberg feel about their recent editorial decisions re: Mike Bloomberg's campaign. Is it that these orgs are so ideologically homogenous that everyone mostly agrees?

More likely it's that they don't cover themselves, or each other, with nearly the same scrutiny.

if you go look at the twitter accounts of the journalists you can see all the gossip in real time. it seems like a lot of people are very unhappy about the Bloomberg reporting decisions.

(there are occasionally actual articles written about internal news industry drama but they're absolutely insufferable. you don't want more of them.)

It's kinda hard to justify running a story about internal strife at another newspaper if you know the odds are good that you're going to get laid off in the next 2 years and potentially look for an opening at that newspaper. The job market for journalists is nasty lately.

I may get downvoted for this but IMO these days everything is a collapse. Of course the same policies can’t apply when you are 100,000 large vs when you were smaller. Look at this complaint by one employee on transparent policy

“In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the targeted employee feel uncomfortable”

I mean its ok to change with time, if you get stuck in the past then you are not seeing the real problem that google is too big to be 100% open for internal employees. This is when you see out of context protests and mob attacks.

So let me get this straight these busybodies wrote some code to spam companies lawyer with notifications.. and they did not get all fired on the spot?

I'm always surprised about workers attitudes on "transparency". Google created a monster, not only internally, but among troves of idealists in corporate America/SV who distrust structure and strategy in the business world, in lieu of free-for-all style of management. To the googlers who whined about Walker's memo: you are a total disgrace to the business of engineering.

Do you season the boot before you lick it?

Ha! Get back in your bubble you sellout

Archive: http://archive.is/iO1ls

So long as people are leaking Google's "Internal Culture" like a sieve, can someone upload the xtranormal "Borgmon Readability" video somewhere? Even though I'm a huge fan/proponent of Prometheus... I feel like that video is a necessary warning to those going in.

you should try offering three peer bonuses

Not surprising. Corporate entities will tolerate employee 'activism' so long as it doesn't interfere with day-to-day business. Once that line is crossed, the business is going to start providing guidelines that focus attention where it needs to be.

This is how it should be. Activism is fine and belongs in personal lives and organizations dedicated to the cause. It does not belong in companies with a diverse workforce.

Perhaps Google is less transparent than it once was, but once again it seems like people are lamenting the passing of a Google culture that never really existed. Parts of Google's monorepo were restricted to specific owning teams over a decade ago, and sending email to an executive would get you a talking-to from your manager if they didn't like the tone of it.

Wow, 5 posts attacking Google in the HN top right before Christmas. That can't be a coincidence. Someone with money clearly has personal issues with Google, but I don't see what this is to do with Christmas. P.S. I'm not defending Google as it's indeed done some questionable things, but 5 posts at the same time is really rare event.

> The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors.

The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1] and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].

> Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa.

I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent documentation.

I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn. The learnings / information weren't pull anymore, you had to get it pushed to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the scale at which the company was operating.

Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be secret, got you nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had a special mention of how you needed to improve earn trust and tone down learn and be curious [3], just because...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526

> “It was that way since the early days of Google, and it’s that way now,” [Walker] wrote.

Then the article ends with

> “Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” [Humu] wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”

Who’s in place to be the next Google? Amazon has built all the foundational pieces for scalable cloud services. Could we see Amazon Mail? Amazon Calendar? Etc....

This is just another tail function department wanting to enhance its role, very common for HR, Building services etc.

https://outline.com/etcKaN

Regarding the data policy, is the reason that the risk of someone leaking information is now being perceived as higher than in the past?

If so, why? Have there been leaks? Is there a plan to hire a bunch of new less vetted employees?

Or maybe it's a manipulative attempt to make those with undesirable cultural traits (including a desire for internal openness) leave the company without saying so explicitly?

Check out this piece https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...

The excuse is that those for abusing that freedom to gather information outside the scope of their jobs (no details given though).

Plus I think they recently cancelled the Friday meetings because information was being leaked to the media. Inevitable at a large corporation but when a few people act this way, if ruins it for everyone

The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil".

All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.

This. I think the belief that Google wasn't evil and is losing its way come from people not wanting to accept they'd been duped. The company was always evil. It was always built around selling your attention to advertisers who want you to buy things. And ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results.

As ad blockers have become popular and the demand for continual growth has remained steady, the costs they accepted to hide their evil were the first expense to get cut.

I think it's worse than that. I think "Don't be evil" implied that the company sought to avoid taking its highly-trained technical talent and applying them to the job of, say, weapons systems. In that sense, they weren't evil; attention shifting isn't nearly as bad as drone targeting.

... but if the money isn't there in ads in the future, I don't expect the company to just curl up and die. It'll be interesting to see what comes next when "The smartest people" need to find something to do.

Smart people gravitate to AI like a magnet. Or completely tangential things like starting a bakery, restaurant, etc.

We’re all going to be left in a Wall-E universe though unless they help fight climate change.

I think you're right on the AI, and I think Google agrees. https://ai.google/

Problem is, while there's certainly money in applications of AI (the ad auction is one of them), it's unclear that "AI" as a discipline is a money-factory like ads is. Google's looking for a money factory to replace ads because they're worried about that revenue stream being fragile (for the reasons ocdtrekkie highlighted).

Fight climate change? How?

"The smart people" provided a recipe for preventing/fixing climate change several decades ago. The politicians have never gone along, and now it's pretty much too late. It's no use hoping for a magic technical solution -- the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission".

"the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission"."

Why?

Internalizing externalities with a tax only works if the actual correct amount of those externalities equals or exceeds the amount that would reduce demand for fuel enough to stop climate change.

This is a huge assumption that I never see anyone even acknowledge needs to be demonstrated.

I think in fact they are far less, but my point is that debating that would be a red herring, since people seem to talk of externalities while never even believing in the concept, and that tension needs to be resolved.

The externalities are a number that in principle has a correct value, and the increase in price to change behavior sufficiently to stop warming is another number that independently has a certain value. But you have to have a logical reason for thinking they match if you think internalizing the costs is a solution.

Mother Earth has a magical technical solution. It’s called a “hard reset” so hopefully we can come up with something better.

I am smart and I find AI as it is currently practiced utterly boring (always did, ever since my first course on neural networks back in university). I think I am not alone here.

Have you thought of potential ways to use AI to help some problem domain you’re interested in? Like maths and other sciences it’s important to have an interesting application that you can get behind. It’s just a tool after all.

I'd say creating the surveillance state is on par with weapons systems, drones, etc. The fact that every American is spied on (I know they accepted the T&Cs) and has zero privacy anymore is not "don't be evil".

Not if the people actually ask for it. Adoption shows people want the features the "surveillance state" empowers.

A definition that calls that evil also calls auto manufacturers evil because of the car accident rate.

Sure; In the same way that a pediatrician would have the slogan "Don't diddle kids." If you need a slogan like that, there is already a problem.

Eventually, as we saw, they couldn't help themselves -- Maybe just one little oppression platform wouldn't be such a big deal...

ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results

Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true.

Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results.

And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.

You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.

> always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads

I would not call a tiny label saying "Ad", with the same color as the text right next to it, a clear distinction.

When using a browser without an ad blocker, I often click on ads by accident.

It's very far from the clearly distinguishable background that ads used to have, and designed to be easily overlooked.

Google literally sells the top spots on results pages to advertisers. Come on. A little notation many will ignore doesn’t make it not a sale of the top spot.

> And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.

They do exactly that on mobile, and if you watch non-geeks use Google they cannot reliably spot the ad versus the "natural" results. Hell, I tap the ad about half the time, because I'm in a hurry and don't look closely enough, and they've extorted the owner of whatever company I'm searching for to pay for their own name so the top result is an ad for the thing I obviously wanted to find anyway.

seriously, the difference between google and everyone else was vast.

You had a lot of services that were literally amalgamations of all the other searches. They would would automatically go search 3, 4, 5+ other search engines because they all sucked in their own way.

And then google came along. Google was good enough that the approach of sifting through multiple search engines wasn't necessary. All those other search engines disappeared practically overnight. No one who experienced google would touch anything else.

google today might not be as technically superior anymore since we as a species understand the search space better, but at the time? google was absolutely game changing.

The days of Google's search engine ads being small text links off to the side of the search results page and the entire section clearly being labeled as ads are long gone.

People forget that Google ran without ads for several years.

Also one reason their search was so much better, was that they refused to sell search result placements.

While it's made them financially successful, it is in some sense a bit depressing that the company has spent years casting about for an economic engine that will generate revenue as efficiently as ads and nothing has been found.

One could ask for better of the world, but the world does not deliver. "People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.

> People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.

It’s the scarcest resource we all have. Makes sense that mining it is so valuable.

Nobody in any of these articles complains about ads, so that is nonsense. They complain about becoming like Apple and handing over unrestricted access to data to the Chinese government or about becoming like Palantir. They also complain about bigwigs being protected after harassing lower level workers. Those things, and the no-poach agreement Google entered with Steve Jobs, are evil.

People expect ad-tech companies to be evil; once you've sold your soul once the second time it's a lot cheaper.

Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary.

Once upon a time, Google was the most admired, brilliant company on the net and doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates. Then Google bought doubleclick...

> Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary.

You agree then that GGP's assertion doesn't fit the data.

> doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates

I'm willing to bet your company uses that ad-tech.

The reason I dislike Google is for all the actually evil things it has done. Its implementation of ad-tech doesn't pass the evil bar.

What dishonest about "Don't be evil" ? The definition of evil is relative and subjective. Lets say building weapons systems to suppress dissident, is it evil ? It depends on who do you ask.

Sure, that's cool. Then I can also redefine words, sometimes retroactively and perhaps in contradiction to reason and rationality, as I see fit, to match whatever I subjectively feel is in my best interests.

Are you saying evil is not subjective ? What is your reason and rationality ?

Pain is subjective too, but it's reasonable to say that being poked in the eye it's painful.

Sure, its painful to you, but there may exist some people who will describe it as pleasure instead of pain.

I’m sure there are, but it would be stupid to say as a result that in general it’s not painful.

you described this better than I would ever have.

I also always thought that the whole "Google got the best engineers in the world" was the best marketing campaign ever. Reinforced by all those people amazed by the stupid Google interview questions (how many ping pong ball in a 747?). It's amazing that all those engineers thinking of themselves as best in the world managed to get duped so easily by a marketing scheme.

That's interesting. Google certainly did pick up a number of world class engineers from Microsoft and Bell Labs (Ken Thompson!). I wonder though if it was a conscious strategy to get these top-level engineers in order to retain a vast pool of average-level engineers by inflating their egos with the positive association.

Speaking of shame: Many people in the Bay Area blame tech workers for their woes. A friend of mine, an engineer at Google, also believes this and feels much shame. If they can focus on what others are doing wrong it makes them feel a little better.

A couple of years ago I was walking around downtown SF, and I noticed someone had drawn a chalk outline on the sidewalk and labeled it "techie fuck". I had a good chuckle. We are not loved there.

The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian.

Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

I see this as obvious. We should always expect a company to gravitate to whatever policies generate the most revenue and fight off the competition. Anything else is a Disney fairytale.

In Google's case I think they were playing the long game and the "do no evil" mantra wasn't disingenuous, but they still need to compete. /shrug

Eventually this is all going to get regulated, and the real story is how incredibly long it is taking to implement that regulation.

Wow, you nailed it. The culture was easily the #1 reason IMO that Google kept getting getting on top of the top places to work lists. No other company could do it such a that scale - transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week. And no one there really, truly actually appreciates the fact that the entire empire is built on digital ads. Yes it's known, but it's not appreciated. It's just kind of understood that the business org sells ads so the rest of the company can work on other things, almost none of which make money and are largely built to squeeze out competitors in a given space that they can't or won't acquire. It's no longer a place I'd ever want to work again and hasn't been for years.

There's a scale here for "evil" and it seems this discussion is sloppily equating all evil as the same.

But it's mostly subjective.

They also serve meat (including veal) in the cafes. Some find that pretty bad.

Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons.

Is weapons research evil? Hurts people in new ways, also can deter violence and defend from bad guys.

But, can we say without hesitation that it's just as evil as helping ICE break up families, or helping Chinese censorship?

People joined Google knowing about the ads (and the meat) but didn't expect other stuff they're seeing now. And that's perfectly reasonable.

Few firms (any?) pass every possible "not evil test," so let's strengthen the quality of the debate here by avoiding logical sloppiness that would invalidate the important questions being discussed.

>Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons.

It's entirely possible to run ads based on what might be of interest to someone reading that particular content without spying on users.

It's just not as profitable.

That's just utter nonsense.

It's almost tautologically obvious that the more you know about someone, the more likely you can predict what might be of interest to them. If you don't believe me, try selling something with ads sometime. Even with all the tools Google and Facebook offer, it's hard.

There is no magic universe where you can get perfectly tailored ads along with perfect anonymity.

I don't think the comment you replied to was suggesting that privacy respecting ads would be "perfectly tailored". Targeting ads based on page content alone would be less profitable for adtech companies and possibly less effective but it's entirely possible to do and would raise fewer moral objections.

Not nonsense at all. Nobody claims that you can get "perfectly tailored ads along with perfect anonymity"; the claim is that one can get sufficiently tailored ads with almost perfect anonymity - by tailoring the ad to the content, not the user.

That's just utter nonsense.

No, perfectly targeted advertising is actually very easy. You just place the ad in a topically appropriate place. Selling sports equipment? Put an ad on a site dedicated to that sport, problem solved. And zero tracking required.

> There is no magic universe where you can get perfectly tailored ads along with perfect anonymity.

That's not what they said, and I don't think it's what they meant. Seems they meant to point out that one can run ads simply based on product rather than user: e.g., if I'm buying a hammer, it's reasonable to show me an ad for a box of nails. It won't be perfectly tailored to the individual, but that's not the point.

The word “evil” itself is a loaded word that comes with its own baggage.

It’s a great way to “other” a group or idea, signal tribal loyalty and feel good about oneself for having superior moral values.

It’s much harder to recognize that things are not a binary good/evil, they are a sliding scale as you mentioned.

"bad" itself is a loaded word because people don't like bad things.

"negative" itself is a loaded word because why can't it be positive instead?

etc.

In some cases, like this one, usage of the word "evil" is not implausible. The tribes already exist here, regardless of the verbage being used.

For a great discussion about how to reason about 'evil' without putting everything in the same bucket check out Zero Degrees of Empathy: https://www.goodreads.com/sl/book/show/10887102-zero-degrees...

>transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week.

Sure there's the elephant in the room but all that still sounds pretty good. Is it right to call that a lie?

Oh, their recent way to make money with hotel/flight bookings, restaurant reviews, etc is even scarier.

They essentially use their search engine market domination to find out who else makes money off the biggest searches, and then clone those products and show the clones on top of the originals. Good luck competing with that...

Wouldn’t doing the same thing be feasible to anyone with access to Google Trends?

You mean, placing their own offering directly on the Google Results page before any kind of paid or organic links in a highly competitive area?

Do you know examples of these services? What can you search for that does this?

Ya, it seems like a carefully orchestrated plan to envelop a big chunk of the internet. Google Featured Snippets began doing it with static content, now features like Google Flights are doing it with a lot of dynamic content. I especially dislike how they're pursuing this strategy in regards to Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google has done a lot of incredible things, and I think fears about killing the golden goose merit serious consideration, but all this does make one appreciate the value of antitrust laws.

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

There was no real ad-tech concept before Google. We didn't really realized the problems with this business model and its effect on society until much later. I do believe that Google's claim to actually try and create good products, was an honest try to be "good". Search was a game changer, it really helped information be more accessible than ever. AdWords made sense, if people search for a product they won't mind seeing an ad for one. As opposed to tv commercials, which were the main ad platform, which was basically a brainwash machine sitting in people houses.

Gmail was an amazing product that email much more useful for the non techie, and techie user.

I believe, Google, as opposed to Facebook was honest in their mission statement. Facebook's "connecting people" was a sham from the get go, zukerberg's "dumb fuck" comments about his first users proves it.

Google is an organism, organism change and adapt, corporates are organisms with one pure value function, shareholders bottom line. MBA types took control of the company because they are trained to optimize corporations to thrive, nothing else.

I think saying Google was always evil is missing the real point. That corporations are not humans, they can't have human values while bottom line is the only value that counts.

The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click them and then actually willingly give money to the advertiser in exchange for something they offer. While it is annoying, and in a sense the 99.9% of us that don't click/buy any specific ad are paying the price (by wasting our attention for no personal gain), we all get tons of cool stuff for that price. Is it worth it? That's a different question, but it's not evil per se imo.

> ads actually work.

Yes. That's the (biggest) problem.

No. The real problem is that no business model other than ads actually works for small to medium sized web sites at scale.

Subscriptions might work.

Except there hasn't been any successful go-to services for web subscription model. Google Contributor program is exactly the one, but it gets no traction from either users or publishers.

https://contributor.google.com/

Netflix and The New Yorker, for example.

Neither of them are small to medium sized web sites, unfortunately.

The thing about being a small website is I probably haven't heard of it. https://lwn.net/ comes to mind, I'm sure there are many others.

You could argue the influence ads have on people is now at a level of power (thanks in part to advancements by Google) that no one should have over others.

This is the same reason spammer keep spamming too: it works. The pursuit of profit by means that work regardless of the external costs seems evil.

Agree with most of the points but I mean people want to work for google is also due to their tech and innovation. Look at the products that has come out if google !

Are you being sarcastic? Most projects get abandoned by the developers, or get canceled within 18 months. Search is good, maps is good. Everything else isn't industry leading or is just involuntary data collection (i.e. Android)

There are thousands of internal projects that are never cancelled and are very innovative. Serving queries at Google scale in Google times involves massive amounts of custom hardware, custom infrastructure, reliability engineering and many other things.

Many projects are cancelled, and I hate that, but that isn't really what life is like on the inside.

No not being sarcastic...projects you mentioned alone were world changing when they came out.

Which did Google invent vs which did they buy?

Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if you want, but that's a different matter.

And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But, everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception necessary.

Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work, ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally misunderstood what google is.

See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this reduction.

Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes.

(To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is focused.)

It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time.

But to everyone else, they're a source of information and entertainment that's available to anyone with an antenna, a tuner, and a speaker/display.

And again, it's not as if broadcast media are universally great, but there's value in them outside of the advertising business.

In many countries, public broadcasters have explicit government funding and a government charter to educate and inform (including an injunction to refrain from promoting vested interests). Thus, they are fundamentally different from commercial broadcasters and Google.

Now, if we had a publicly funded search engine, that might not be a bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

>It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time.

Yes. I would call broadcast TV advertisers. Have you given mass media a critical analysis lately? It’s chalk full of subtle product placement and other brainwash, on top of in-your-face advertisements every few minutes. The Simpsons made fun of this a decade ago, and it seems to have only gotten worse. I limit television exposure just the same as Google exposure.

I speak for myself only of course, but jumping to defend Google with broadcast tv made me laugh.

Didn't intend to "defend" any company or industry really. Just wanted to point out that there are multiple transactions taking place.

Advertiser/ad platform is one of them, but it's not the only one.

Mass media is an interesting choice of example given the recent digital media collapse. There, too, people who were recruited on idealistic visions of “journalism” are being forced by their bosses to reckon with the fact that their job is not to report stories they consider important, but to create content that turns a profit on ad revenue.

The analogy works in other cases, though.

Local newspapers are pretty much exactly "advertising companies", with advertising making up two thirds or more of each printed page, and no real care given to the journalism side of things.

Given that there clearly are "advertising companies" (or "users-as-product" companies) masquerading as user-serving companies, it might be sensible to talk about a spectrum between user-serving and user-as-product, and where companies fall on this spectrum. You can be, say, 30% a user-serving company, and 70% a user-as-product company. You could also trend in one direction or the other over time.

I would absolutely put broadcast media in the bucket of advertising companies. For any given hour of TV you're lucky to get 30 minutes of content that is free from advertising (includes product placement), it's probably even worse at this point for terrestrial radio.

Hence why the switch to netflix, spotify, hulu etc... has been such a disruptor.

At this point their "users" are really more like unpaid laborers. The only entities I would really consider "google customers" would be the individuals and organizations which advertise through them, and the folks who pay to use their APIs.

This kind of dishonesty is exactly what I'm talking about. Users are compensated for viewing the ads in the form of services that Google delivers to them. If it were not so, people would quickly stop using the site. There is no reasonable similarity between Google users and unpaid laborers. I really don't feel like the discourse is served by you making inflammatory remarks like this.

I dont think the discourse is served by regurgitating the rhetoric from google's pr think tank. I'm going to have a look at their quarterly reports when I have time later. They're legally required to tell the truth to their shareholders, so that information is at least true enough to comply with regulations.

Yeah plus Bing basically pays people to search on them, so if you don't feel like Google is giving you enough value for the amount of ads on it, you can go over to Microsoft Rewards and get some gift cards while you search.

Dishonest!? You base this on the assumption of ubiquitous use of Google products. I don’t elect to use Google products, but I still am subject to Google ads and adtech.

You are subject to the ads chosen by the websites you use. You are compensated in the form of the service of those sites. Google is just incidentally the ad provider the websites you visit choose to use. All assuming you don't block of course. The comparison to unpaid labor is still unapt. Unless you are gaining no value from these sites that are showing you ads? If so then why do you keep visiting them?

I’m tracked around the web against my will. I cant tell Google to stop, I can only try and prevent/corrupt their attempts. That’s despicable behavior.

Now you're complaining about a different thing. A thing which I'm not even sure happens. I know for a fact you can disable ads personalization, which should eliminate all incentives for google to track you, in the event that they were doing so before.

As to the rest, people have different views on the ethics of these kinds of voluntary interactions.

> Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services.

How do adsense and doubleclick fit in this explanation?

I didn't mean to be exhaustive when I said consumer services, but rather to describe the bulk of the work. That is not the whole extent of their business. For example Google Cloud is largely B2B. As you rightly pointed out, there is a significant amount of B2B adtech that gets done at Google. Google/Alphabet also appears to have or have had aspirations to be a power company, a taxi company, and a logistics company, among other things.

Aspirations are great! We should all have aspirations.

> As you rightly pointed out, there is a significant amount of B2B adtech that gets done at Google

B2B adtech is the overwhelming source of revenue. The consumer services you mention exist either a) to entrench the ad business by commoditizing its complements, or b) as a side-effect of Google’s strategy to secure all the best R&D talent even if it means inventing fun projects to keep them busy.

Neither of those things make Google a consumer services business that happens to sell ads. It makes Google the largest ad business in history, which happens to build free consumer products as a means to protecting and expanding its business.

Google Cloud or Waymo could, perhaps one day, become a source of revenue large enough to truly change the nature of Google’s business. But at this time their revenue is not large enough, and Google’s leadership has not shown the desire to shift their strategic focus decisively.

> B2B adtech is the overwhelming source of revenue.

This is wrong and therefore all conclusions based on it, most of their ad revenue comes from ads on their own services, most notably search. B2B adsence is a big chunk of money but it is not their main business.

By "B2B adtech" I mean "sells ads to businesses". This includes not just adsense, but adwords as well. Whether the ad is served on Google's sites or elsewhere, it's a business paying for it.

Not that this semantic point makes any difference either way. Google is an ad business that happens to make consumer products.

> The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users.

This is less and less true. These last few years we have seen aggressive monetization push on most popular Google products, at the expense of product quality: search, maps and Youtube have all seen a significant increase of advertising that degrades the core product value. Mobile search & maps in particular have implemented deceptive techniques that make sponsored ads look like "native" results.

Try typing "car insurance in San Francisco" and tell me how many times you can see the little "ad" logo... Getting tinier and tinier by the day. Remember when sponsored search results used to have a blue background color?

The Maps app is also barely useable anymore because of how bloated it is. I have a basic Nexus phone from 2 years ago, and it takes ~10 seconds to fully load (!)

> Try typing "car insurance in San Francisco"

It refused to show me any ads at all. Perhaps because I live in a different locale. I did "Car insurance in <my city>". There were two ads below the fold. Everything above the fold was organic -- local insurance agencies and web links to the usual suspects (Esurance, etc.). I live in a large East Coast city for what it's worth.

For me from my laptop: 4 above the fold, 3 below the fold. Each ad also has more pixels of real-estate than an "organic" search result. More than 70% of the pixels I see on my screen before scrolling belong to ads!

I got 4 ads, 3 were Progressive, Geico, and AAA. Those are likely to be top results for car insurance even without the ads.

> there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google

I think this is largely because of brand cachet and good pay. How many people would take a serious paycut to work for Google? I'm sure there are some, but I doubt there are many. And amongst those I bet a non-trivial amount would just be in it for the perks (free food, busses to work, childcare, etcetera).

I obviously have no way of verifying this, but amongst my circle of friends (not representative of the general population at all) most people no longer want to work for Google. It's more than just talk - I just turned down a job offer from Google recently.

There's no doubt that good pay has always been part of the appeal. I don't know if there was ever a time when Google was offering below market average pay, so it's going to be hard to separate the attractiveness of the culture from the attractiveness of the comp, perks, and benefits. FWIW, when I joined in the mid 2000s, I felt like most people were coming because of the compensation and career growth potential. Free food was obviously a plus, but that's not why I picked it over Microsoft.

There are a couple of things that make your claim about Google being a "consumer services company" fall apart in my view:

1. The only parts that make money are the ads. You characterize it as "great services" that "incidentally" make money via ads. Incidental means an "unpredictable or minor consequence." A more fair characterization in my opinion would be that it is an advertising company that uses consumer-targeted services to create space for its advertising market. The advertising is in no way "incidental," it is integral.

2. They have notoriously poor support for their "consumer services." If they were really a consumer services company at heart you would expect that supporting the consumers who use their services would be important to them. But it's clearly not.

Advertising is not only proximal, it is causative. Google functions very differently than a traditional consumer services company. Saying that it's because they're "innovative" or "disruptive" is obscuring the fact that the reason they can operate so non-traditionally is because they do not face the same constraints and pressures that a traditional consumer services company faces because they are not a traditional consumer services company which makes money from their consumer services. They are an advertising company which uses their consumer services as a vehicle for their actual money-making product: advertising.

If nobody was truly ashamed then it's because they probably weren't paying attention to the shadier sides of your business. One example was back in the 2000's, google knowingly profited from online pharmacies that sold controlled substances to US citizens illegally[1].

1 - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...

I don't think that many Google employees would be heartbroken over facilitating the disruption of the fundamentally broken US healthcare system by making it easier for people to buy lifesaving medications without hideous markup by the middlemen. Especially when they are just letting people buy same drugs from right across the border at a reasonable price thanks to a functional socialized healthcare system.

People in Canada can't goto the pharmacy and pick up as much oxycontin as they would like whenever they feel like it. The majority of the drugs being marketed by those pharmacies were narcotics, not insulin. I agree that the US Healthcare system is insanely broken and kills people, but pretending like those pill mills were just a bunch of honest dudes helping down trodden Americans is a fucking joke.

> no one _was ashamed_ of the company or how it made money.

do you think the sentiment has changed since?

last time when the occulus VR targeted ads news broke, some prominent people defended them on twitter. that took me by surprise.

could it be that people from inside (or who have been inside) don't see things the way others do? kinda like a stockholm syndrome thing?

just curious...

Google’s founders easily could have run the company to be purely a force for good. They have a huge amount of equity and the company generated huge profits before it went all-in on maximizing ad revenue. They could have used share buybacks to buy out their other investors. They could have been billionaires who created something good but they choose to be $50 billionaires instead. Now the only option left is to regulate Google the way natural monopolies used to be regulated.

> fundamentally this was an ad-tech company

Sure ads are their only real revenue source but the vast majority of engineers there are not working on ad-tech, many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome, that drastically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Your view is quite cynical and conveniently ignores the leverage and impact that an engineer can have there.

many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome

All of those exist purely to expand opportunities to show more ads.

Ads aren’t hurting you or anyone else

The entire purpose of ads is to psychologically manipulate people into taking actions against their own best interests. If you need a thing you will just go and buy it yourself after all.

> they were deeply ashamed of how they made money

I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, so I can tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely, 100% wrong about this. To the contrary, in the early days we believed (correctly) that we were improving the situation by providing text-based ads that were related to the search the user was conducting rather than the indiscriminate banner ads that were the standard in the industry at the time. We were proud of what we were doing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with being "Googley".

Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again?

> Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world?

No. I'm pretty horrified at what it has become actually.

> If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again?

Of course. But I would use my foreknowledge to try to steer things in a better direction.

Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit?

That aside, I can't fathom any other sense that amounts to "my scientific and programming expertise is required to build this ad business, and I feel a duty to do it".

> Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit?

Yes. Of course. :-)

Also because I feel like I kinda screwed it up the first time and it would be a chance to redeem myself.

Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to sell you stuff based on buildling up some asinine aspirational self-image almost entirely unrelated to the advertised product, you actually got low key, clearly demarcated, non-intrusive text-only ads, relevant to what your were looking for at the moment. And the ads funded genuinely cool and transformative tech.

A lot of technical people would have been qute happy to work for that. It just turned out that the social good of making the tumor of advertisement benign and even possibly a net positive didn't pay as well as slowly evolving a strain of previously unheard of malignancy.

I worked at google for 8 years, 2005-2013, and I disagree with your statement. Nobody was ashamed of how we made money, and the ads organization was a great place to be an engineer and get promoted. Early on, 20% time most certainly did exist, but you had to push for it, and among some managers, it was impossible to get it during normal work hours, but in the broader organization, it existed. People genuinely did try to do the right thing. Google was not my first job, I had already been working for quite a few years, so I had many earlier silicon valley companies to compare it against, and it genuinely was a fun, interesting and well meaning place to work. That started to shift over time and turn into a bureaucratic corporation where people were no longer rewarded on merit, and so I left, that was six years ago.

During the years that I enjoyed there, we got to work on some truly difficult problems in terms of scale, built a whole lot of cool stuff that's helpful to the world, but doesn't make money (Maps, for example). These cool projects happened because advertising brought in so much money that we could waste some on providing something of value without clear financial return, and Sergey, Larry, and Eric were behind that.

So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.

This is the same sort of bias I witness in Facebook.

>Built a whole lot of cool stuff that’s helpful to the world, but doesn’t make money(Maps, for example).

Through your lens, perhaps, from my perspective you made a series of sophisticated data harvesting apparatuses for one of the biggest advertisers on the planet. You conflate the work Google has done with something like OSM.

The fact that open source Android is corrupted by Google Play services belies the idea that they work for anyone but themselves, one of the largest businesses in the world.

>So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.

I certainly wasn't saying that rank-and-file Google employees were dishonest. Larry and Sergey understood that advertising could be deeply corrupting, and they said it themselves in their paper [1]:

>8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

>Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

The "Googley" culture was an artifice built to paper over the central conflict of Google. I'm sure that the early years were great and that everyone genuinely believed they could avoid being corrupted by it. But a leopard can't change its spots and in the end that's what happened.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Google is a company that sells multi hundred dollar clicks to lawyers, locksmiths, insurance companies, and brokerages. Plus a lot of cheap ads to everyone else. It is not very romantic to be writing software to connect people to the DUI lawyer they are looking for with incrementally improving efficiency.

It's not nuts to create a romantic narrative to motivate your employees, but it is more than a little dishonest to try to convince investors that they are buying into something that's heading into a better direction than the digital edition of the Yellow Pages. However, you can't say that investors have not wanted something to believe in -- and Alphabet was more than happy to fulfill the desire for tech stock fairy tales. Despite this the fundamentals of selling search ad insurance leads to insurance salesmen is a great business from a numbers perspective.

I think it's sort of an open question about whether or not it makes sense to burnish corporate brands with saving the world fairy tales, but the smartest people in America have decided that fairy tales are what works, so that is what they put people to work in burnishing and promoting. Obviously it has worked pretty well for a lot of companies, especially considering that they are competing with companies that sell candy, toothpaste, and fizzy corn syrup fluid for investor attention and acclaim. Even McDonalds is now saving the world with burgers or something, and that's because these kinds of spiritual fables have been so successful in helping companies to stand out from the pack.

Your Yahoo comparison is a good one. Google at the end of the day is a marginally improved iteration of Yahoo with a slightly broader product offering and better core services. However, Google's brand fluff makes it appear to be something so much different and more grand than Yahoo 2.

For what it's worth I think the old Google statement that they were here to organize the world's information and to make it more accessible and organized is a big enough goal as it is: they don't also have to be a rocketry and car navigation system company.

Interesting. The first thought that popped into my head as I read the article was ..this is the corporate version of the evolution of the rise and fall of communism.

Prediction: Google will be in 20 years what Soviet Russia became at around 2000s.

They will go from utopia to totalitarian to insignificant player in a few decades.

Why this happens puzzles me..I grew up when Soviet Russia/USSR was still alive and then watched it go away. And see where it is at now. I don’t understand it. It’s like a mystery. But the pattern to dissolution is inevitable.

Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.

> Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

Yes. Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent leave to force their hand. Anything else is mostly just noise.

"Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent leave to force their hand."

Is there historical proof that this is more effective than a union effort?

That is basically a union effort. The cognitive dissonance on display with regard to labor in tech is fascinating. Many have internalized the propaganda created by big business that "unions are bad, unions are expensive, you don't want to unionize" and they aren't willing to revisit that internally, but they're like "what if we just organize without a union, refuse to work unless our demands are met" failing to realize that's exactly what a union is.

Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.

The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.

FWIW, what's amazing to someone like me, who is anti-union (in tech, at least), is that pro-union people don't seem to understand why people who have succeeded by being highly differentiated from the rest of the talent pool would want to participate in a scheme where the entirety of labor is presented to an employer as a homogenous block.

>where the entirety of labor is presented to an employer as a homogenous block.

Maybe do what actors do?

My understanding is that actors don't typically have a choice whether to join a union. SAG-AFTRA has enough power and preference agreements that you can't really make it in the industry without joining, even if you don't otherwise want to.

You are mostly correct. You can do one off acting but any major production will only hire SAG artists

Possibly, but it doesn't have the problem of treating the actors as a homogeneous equally skilled block; "10X actors" are definitely getting adequate compensation while at the same time all guild members benefit from the common protections.

I don't know where this perception comes from but it's not true. Collective bargaining isn't about the entire employee pool being represented as one skilled homogeneous block. It's about giving employees a voice at the decision-making tables in a company.

I'm sure you've heard the myriad stories about where the decision makers at a company have done some damn boneheaded thing, something so rock stupid that could only come from never having worked on whatever ground floor the business has. And what can the employees do? Nothing. They have to comply because they don't have a voice, because if they argue, they're fired. If they don't do it, they're fired.

THAT is what a union can fix, among tons of other problems. A smart boss is one that listens to his employees when they speak up about problems; a boss working with a union doesn't have a choice.

And that's not to say that unions are perfect, like anything else made by humans and run by humans they have flaws. But IMO, problematic representation is better than no representation.

Right. Unions have their problems, but they provide considerable protection against arbitrary actions by management.

Here's The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE, which represents Hollywood animators at the major studios.[1] Disney, Pixar, Warner, etc. This union is all creative people. They have salary floors, but not ceilings. Most usefully, they have overtime rules. Beyond 8 hours, time and a half. Weekends, time and a half. Crunches, double time. In Hollywood, management tries hard to avoid crunches, because they have to pay for them. The Animation Guild has a pension plan, which has, they point out, outlived all but two animation studios.

The Animation Guild tried to organize game development companies. They got Pixar, but not EA. They used to send a labor organizer to Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings.

That's what Silicon Valley needs.

[1] https://animationguild.org/

I wouldn't categorize individual decisions to quit as union action. The whole point of unions is that collective action is massively more powerful than individual voluntary action.

I would argue that the cognitive dissonance regarding labor from pro-union advocates is more fascinating. Anyone can organize themselves already, independent of organized labor laws - it's called a company. If employees are so confident in their abilities, they could just as well form their own company and sell their labor as a service back to their former employer. It doesn't make sense to have a special allowance for unions that forces everyone into collective bargaining and effectively a second, parallel management structure.

How does trying to form a different company (which has additional concerns a union doesnt) deal with issues like noncompete, arbitration clauses, etc?

California is solving those issues by passing laws, which solves the problem for everyone, not just a subset.

It doesn't. The comment you're replying to completely discounts the systemic power imbalance at play that unionization is meant to counteract.

This is honestly naive, if I dump poison in the river your village is drinking from you should move the village. If a company is abusing the employees what is the danger in organizing and negotiating better conditions as a group and not as individuals . The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."

> The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."

And one could easily say this is a ploy by management-level people to show the other serfs that "You can make it too!" because paying one dev who's a little better than his peers costs a fraction of paying them all what they should be paid.

> "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."

This is a valid concern for highly-paid/specialized individuals, IMO. Price's Law (https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/): 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

Probably true but how many devs that think they are 10X are just regular devs with 10X ego that compare themselves with the lowest possible dev to feel superior.

I could see a union that won't put upper limit but would fight for fairness, extra hours paid double, no more then X hours a month etc.

Except that the very concept of a 10X developer, no matter what they themselves may say about it, is disgusting; it's a person who has, even if willingly, distorted their work/life balance to a point where they "go the extra mile" as management would put it; usually involving working off hours, working extra hours, working from home on weekends and evenings, or eschewing general life activities in favor of doing more work.

I know this is sacrilege to say this in our system and even moreso in our profession, but this is not good for you. I don't care how much you like it, I don't care how much money you're gaining from it, I don't care if you're the most willing of willing to have ever willed. You're abusing yourself in exchange for money, and that's the end of it and it shouldn't be allowed.

You should have a salary commensurate with your skill set, and you should not have to eschew anything resembling a proper work/life balance to do it.

You are assuming that greater value generation is only a function of greater effort in the form of more hours. It is also a function of other things like higher talent, smarter decisions, and past investment in one’s skills.

I think you are glossing over the reality of how unions work. If someone is dumping poisons in the river, you have the chance to get laws passed against it. Others can organize to prevent those laws from being passed as well. Everyone is not compelled to take a single position on the issue or obligated to join a single party, and there is no mandatory fee either. It is a very different situation from being in a union (in the US, anyways).

Can't you have multiple unions in US? like teachers,medics have more then 1 union here in Romania and you are not forced to join,

I do not understand the rest of your comment, what I was trying to argue against is the idea of "leave if you don't like it" so it appears to me that some people are trying to suppress employees that complain, organize and demand improvements.

Are you suggesting that the only way for say game developers to get better condition is to lobby some politicians to pass a national law for the sector ?

The way the union regulations work out here, you may only work at a certain company if you belong to a certain union (a single organization). You can’t for example, choose between multiple competing unions or work without representation. I’ve heard this is different in other locations like Germany.

As a result, having a job at that company means you automatically adopt paying their fees, their organizational structure, the pay scale they’ve negotiated (often can turn into tenure-based, which is basically age-based), etc. This means you sort of have two management structures in a sense. Since unions participate politically and fund campaigns and such, you are automatically paying your salary to support political candidates you may disagree with, because union leadership makes the choice on how to spend the money it collects.

It can also lead to workplace inefficiency and frustrations that customers end up paying for. As an example, if you work at Boeing you may have some task you can finish immediately yourself (like screwing something in) but the union protects the job security of some people by saying that only those people may do certain tasks. As a result you might need to wait to coordinate with the screw guy to do something you could finish in 5 seconds.

Corruption is also common, although I cannot say how much exactly. One of the largest unions in the US is currently going through an embarrassing corruption scandal right now (https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-prosecutors-ask-uaw-mem...). There’s also a history of unions and the mafia working together (https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/), although it might be unfair to blame unions for this pattern as much as blaming the mob.

I am wondering if years of anti union propaganda pushed to the surface the bad examples and all the good ones are just hidden. I am not in a union but what I know from my family that are in such jobs in public or private sector is that6 they get only benefits. Like if they have to work more hours you get paid double for those hours, you are forced to take your vacation days - this means that management can't put pressure on you to work on weekends because they are bad at managing, management will try to optimize to avoid extra hours. Where my brother works he is evaluated each year, there is company wide(multinational) scheme on how people are paid so you can get a raise but there are no 10X mechanical engineers that work 1 night and have the output of 10 good regular engineers.

Without this protections the company could promote the people that stay and work extra hours and from home for free or find different ways to abuse you.

That's an overly idealized view of unions. In practice union leaders are often going to bat for themselves rather than the members. The level of corruption in larger unions is off the charts.

In principle I do support the right of workers to unionize. But the current implementation of unions in the US has a lot of problems.

And this is an overly cynical one, painting all unions as the same despite them being individual entities, all composed of different people.

Plenty of them have problems. Plenty more don't. Generalizing them all in this way is exactly how big business has demonized them to the average worker.

If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates. Can you say the same for your employer?

Which are the unions without these problems?

> If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates.

Really? I'd likely have very close to the same amount of say I have in my company, namely, zero. I might even have more in my company, depending on my position and the relative size.

Honestly, you sound like a propagandist here.

I agree completely.

Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.

Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves pro se (without a union).

I am not sure you get the result you predicted but 100% you don't get safer products

And arguing over slack / e-mail achieves any better results?

Yes, eventually it will leak to the press that developers at X are arguing if they should ignore pedestrians in the self driving cars because the code is too bad, or colleagues that work on other sections will find the shit that is happening and would intervene.

I understand that you are thinking at some stupid politic arguments but I am talking about larger topics like killing drones, self driving cars, law enforcement AI , I want the developers to be able to speak when they see something questionable then leave.

I think the point OP was making is that dozens of people died because executives as Boeing “shut down” concerns that some long time engineers had. I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products but I think the point is hoping that a half a trillion dollar monopoly will change its ways because lots of employees leave is wishful thinking and might only happen if it results in a catastrophe. Google can replace them easily and regardless a majority of their profit comes from search which only requires a small fraction of their employees to keep operating at profit.

>I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products

Google is experimenting with self driving cars and they are always interested in working for the military or the police. I want the employees to talk if they feel something is not right rather then do the Uber thing and disable the safety because the code was garbage and had too many false positives.

Sounds good, doesn't work. No essential change was ever achieved by boycott. What works is enough people willing to stick their necks out and organize politically.

And which essential change was achieved by internal political battles?

I never said this should be limited to internal battles.

The 'unsafe culture' at Boeing is an overblown fear, IMO. The two crashes on the 737 MAX were both on airlines that are not known for adequate training or maintenance. Everyone got on the "bash Boeing" train while ignoring the reality of what happened. The NY Times finally wrote about it, after numerous articles presenting a one-sided story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/world/asia/lion-air-boein...

> Crash investigators were presented with photographs supposedly showing that a mandatory test was done after the vane had been replaced. But upon further inspection, investigators concluded the photos were from a different aircraft.

> “This is a test that Lion Air was required to do, and they didn’t,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant.

> If the test had been done, engineers likely would have realized the vane was calibrated incorrectly by 21 degrees. The misalignment would prove fatal because it mistakenly catalyzed Boeing’s anti-stall system, forcing the plane into its final plummet.

Please stop with false information, one of the companies has a good record. The safety concerns are real, documented and were ignored. There are many more issues with the MAX then the one causing the crashes, as an example while trying to patch the current software issue a new software problem was found that delayed the update.

What part of my post is false? If you are going to label my comment as false information, the burden is on you to point out explicit falsehoods (not just mere differences of opinion).

Your reference to unrelated issues such as the software patch can apply to numerous complex systems in many industries (not just aircraft), and I bet it applies to planes from other manufacturers as well. Your comment seems more like FUD, since it casts doubt in one instance (one aircraft) without a comprehensive understanding and comparison across other comparable aircraft or manufacturers. You can't just take one complex system, scrutinize it, come up with a wish list of things you would want (without knowing the tradeoffs/implications), and then say there is something systematically broken here.

Your argument was like this

We know that both airlines are bad so this implies the airplane has no fault.

First of all even if the pilot crashed the plane ntentionally this does not invalidate the reality:

- MCAS was hidden and pilots were not trained because of economic reasons.

- MCAS had too much autority then the regulation allowed , so basically this is a black and white situation no shifting the blame on a third-world country company

- after the first crash and even after the second crash Boeing failed to consider the safety of people and ground the planes until the MCAS is fixed or pilots were trained.

- the MAX can enter in a state where you don't have enough power to control, the warning messages were a paid DLC and there was no training on how to handle this cases.

Even if you did not intended your comment is sounding racist, those poor country companies used the plane wrong.

Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%. If you care that much about this topic please put a reminder in your calendar and get back to me when the investigations are over and MAX is back in the air and tell me "I told you so"

> Even if you did not intended your comment is sounding racist, those poor country companies used the plane wrong.

This is an uncalled for exaggeration, and not based on anything I said. Lion Air lied about testing their angle of attack sensor, per that NYT article. It isn't racist to point out that fact.

And Ethiopian also had issues - for example, the copilot had just 200 hours of experience (https://www.businessinsider.com/ethiopian-airlines-flight-30...). Pilots have commented on how the gap in experience between the pilot and copilot can be confusing in an anomalous situation.

> Still, 200 hours of flying experience is far below the requirement to copilot a plane in countries including the US. In 2013, the FAA upped its copilot (also called first officer) qualification requirement to 1,500 hours from 250 hours, while European airlines often require at least 500 hours.

> And having just 200 hours of experience is especially cumbersome when flying a massive jet like the Boeing 737 Max 8, which was the plane involved in the March 10 crash, said Ross Aimer, the CEO of the airline consulting and legal firm Aero Consulting Experts.

> "Two-hundred hours is extremely low," Aimer told Business Insider. "In an emergency, it becomes a problem. If you have a complicated airplane and you basically put a student pilot in there, that's not a good thing. Even if the guy in the left seat has so much experience, if you have so much imbalance of experience, that can be a problem."

-------

> Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%.

Yes I think there is blame on both sides. I don't think Boeing is "a lot more than 50%", personally. And I don't know that their safety culture is "completely broken" as is often claimed. I think there may be room for improvements, but these are highly-complex machines, and highly-complex organizations, that work hard to strike a balance between being economically-efficient and perfectly-safe (since no system is truly perfect). If we pull back the covers, I bet we will find similar tradeoffs and decisions being made regularly in most industries, for most manufacturers, and for most aircraft.

There are always things under the average so it is not surprising that some co pilot has less experience then US average or minimal, Your argument sounds like this

Say my Ford brakes stop working while I am speeding, then we find that there was a software bug but we blame the driver because if he would have driven with 10 km less speed maybe he would have survived and if he would have been above average the diver would have known how the transmission works under the hood and in an instant would have executed an engine brake by shifting the transmission into lower gear (thing that was not learned in driving school and tested for)

Basically the airplane should never had placed the pilots in the situation they were in.

Because some super hero american pilot could have saved the plane does not excuse the fact that every pilots that is given a license should be able to safely operate it.

While that CHP officer that died in one of the Toyota unintended acceleration crashes apparently was too panicked to shift into neutral, I want to take exception to your specific example. Do I want a driver who never even bothered to ask themselves what the lower gears were for?

We all want the best drivers and pilots, but all the drivers or pilots have to pass an exam, if there is no fraud then all the drivers and pilots that are licensed are capable to operate the vehicles and you can't demand that only race/rally drivers and military grade pilots would operate this machines.

Anyway the fact that the pilot could have done more or not is a completely unrelated topic with all Boeing issues, MCAS or non-MCAS. I will patiently wait for the full reports, I hope there will be record on how did Boeing decided to make the warning that the sensors are malfunctioning a paid DLC, who was the person that decided or what were the procedures that decided that a malfunction warning should not be the default.

> Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

Absolutely not. And if you leave, at least do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail. But serious as Googlers' misgivings may be, it's hard to compare their concern to what Boeing did.

Google is working on self driving cars and they were planing to work for military, so I would prefer Google employees to speak up then shut up and leave.

>do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail.

Are you saying that an employee might be convicted of a crime in the US for not speaking out as he or she quit? If so, I disagree.

If they quit but keep quiet about suspected criminal activity or negligence then at least in my country they could still be prosecuted.

Airplane safety is fairly black-and-white compared to, say, the decision to partner with law enforcement or to censor certain kinds of content on YouTube.

Given that Silicon Valley engineers have attitudes that are not broadly representative of the general public, I think it's rather presumptuous for them to operate as moral crusaders within a company.

I think the difficulty was that it wasn't black and white. You can say "I think MCAS is a danger because it only relies on one sensor and has authority to make the plane uncontrollable" and someone can counter with "MCAS failing looks like and is fixed the same way as any runaway stabilizer trim, every pilot knows how to handle that".

Obviously the second hypothetical statement was wrong, but it's hardly "evil" to make that argument.

Though from what I read they MCAS had too much authority so it was basically operating "illegally"against regulations.

Aircraft safety is the opposite of black and white. Engineering is all about making compromises, in aircraft, you compromise with weight, otherwise, we would be giving every passenger an ejection seat/parachute.

> Engineering is all about making compromises, in aircraft, you compromise with weight, otherwise, we would be giving every passenger an ejection seat/parachute.

You forgot cost. The 737-MAX is fairly well documented to have been pushed by management for the purpose of increasing profits while compromising safety.

Airplane safety is/must be regulated by laws, not by companies cultures and values.

In the case of boeing/uber the problem is the regulators are getting more and more relaxed and/or corrupt.

But if it wasn't regulated by laws, would the same thing apply? People should just leave if they don't like it and don't try and rock the boat?

If they want to rock the boat who I am to tell them no to.

In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781771.

I'd like to think they're just engaging in internal sabotage as a form of activism, like the OSS field manual for disrupting organizations suggests:

https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/

Seems to have this effect anyway, and I support the google workers trying to destroy this evil company.

I did not know they had this transparency policy. Did it (hopefully) exclude documents containing personal information? Google has a lot of info ona lot of people, surely every employee can't access all of it?

When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...) created internally by employees.

Getting access to personal information within Google is very, very difficult - it's not like you can query the user's sql table and get all the PII. Everything PII related is highly protected.

Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).

It's an awesome philosophy if everybody plays by the rules and doesn't leak stuff to the outside world. Sometimes people create "Ideas Docs", "Best practice docs", "Design Docs", "Algo Docs" etc, and then receive feedback from random Googlers which accidentally stumbled upon them. It's also a fantastic way of knowledge transfer as anyone can look up the design doc for problem X of product Y and read about it.

> Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).

False; Google docs have always[1] been private by default, and must be explicitly shared, either with individuals, groups, or made world-readable.

[1] I mean, I wasn't around for the earliest releases of Google docs, but even before Larry was CEO the sharing was off by default. That's just a sane default, because if you forget to share your document the first person you send it to will let you know, but if you forget to unshare you only find out the hard way.

I’ve been at Google for 10 years and I don’t think that’s true. I distinctly recall the public by default era.

You've got years on me, and my memory from before 5-6-7 years ago is fuzzy, but it's definitely not new.

I started 11 years ago and left 5.5 years ago and new Docs were public by default the whole time I was there. When I left there were murmurs about making Docs private by default but it hadn't happened yet.

Wiki pages are another source of information, definitely not private by default.

Sometimes you have to stand-up to your employees. Having a small group of activists driving your business decisions is unsustainable. Google is a multinational behemoth, and as much as it likes to think of itself as a small nimble progressive startup, those days are long gone.

>Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company, who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the Pentagon and China.

Google had the benefit of obscene profits from their ad business that let the rest of the company do whatever, which also enabled internal activists to exert pressure for them to not do business with the American government.

Google had obscene profits _because_ of the rest of the company. Mano of us were working on weekends because we thought that it's a different company. And it was.

No. Non ads wasn't making the profits sorry.

That's naive. Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads. They go to search, or to read their mail or to get a map somewhere, or dozens of other things. All of those services are the things that users value, and ads are the tool for monetizing valuable services. You can't separate it that cleanly.

How much ad revenue comes from ads on Google properties vs someone else's properties that show Google ads?

83% of Google ad revenue is from ads on Google sites, and only 17% is from ads on someone else’s properties. If you also consider traffic acquisition costs, ads on someone else’s properties are very small part of Google profit.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q1_alphabet_earnings...

Actually after search I went to ads as well to learn the maths part of it. Both are very interesting as long as you don't get to a team led by politics and PMs.

After politics/PMs creep in you have to stop looking at the data to improve the product because you get so many ,,little'' tasks to implement from the outside.

To clarify, I meant users. :) Ads is totally interesting from a technical perspective.

Ah, cool, yeah, sorry, actually I wrote the same thing in a sibling comment after you, that Google's product could easily be monetized without ads as well (just not as well). :)

>Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads.

Sure. But ads are the reason how Google can support and pamper their workforce. It's what allowed them to bow to internal activists to give up on multi-billion dollar contracts with the Pentagon and maybe even other federal agencies (like ICE and CBP - though I'm not sure they would be crazy enough to do that).

I would happily pay for Google search as a service, as I'm paying for Youtube Premium.

Ads works better for Google, so it doesn't switch, but search in itself without ads is extremely valuable service as well.

It never was, on August 19, 2004 they went public. That day they became the same as any pharma company/oil company/Nestle. The shareholders will always win

>we thought that it's a different company. And it was.

What do you mean a 'different company'. You mean different in that it wouldn't do business with the American government? Different in that it would bow to a small pool of activists to drive business decisions?

All engineers were driving business decisions in the past actually. The headcounts were centrally set, but the whole team usually had one or two main focuses that it could execute on.

When Larry became the CEO, the whole thing changed. He took an engineer driven organization and changed it into a PM driven organization, just what Microsoft had under Steve Ballmer. And if there are too many PMs, engineers become Go pieces that PMs try to steal from eachother all the time.

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