I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
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In this case, I think OP was trying to improve the readability of the original article by using write.as as opposed to linking directly to Medium (which is notorious for its intrusiveness).
I think outline is better suited for these purposes, though, I typically just use Pocket or Firefox's built-in readability feature: https://outline.com/Xbykpn
It was the #1 story on page one, mentioned it to a colleague a few minutes later and he couldn’t even find it.
People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first two controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)
Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.
People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
Sometimes I think this is a result of information explosion. People gets overwhelmed by the amount of available information, so as a self-protection mechanism, they subscribe to the simplest binary thought process.
For a cartoonish example let's say Adolf Hitler approaches you to buy large quantities of morphine as a substitute for Zyklon B. Surely this is an improvement for the victims of extermination over their current situation, but you're still participating in the Holocaust.
I think utilitarianism has a big problem with myopia. It's extremely hard to do a real global calculation for outcomes so faithful practitioners inevitably end up following local gradients. I think a solid ethical equilibrium requires a certain amount of deontology, a framework of things that We Do Not Do.
What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns.
> I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?
It's called utilitarianism and here it demonstrates nicely that ethics comes in various flavors
Some would argue that denying people the ability to access information easily is unethically harming them. It preserves your own privilege instead of extending it to the less well off.
There are real ethical questions here that can be weighed. It's perhaps not quite as simple for some people as money on one side and every single possible ethical factor on the other.
Not GP, but that seems a bit unfair. Utilitarianism in various flavours is a popular ethical framework; for those who subscribe to it, ethical concerns are properly calibrated and measured in utility.
I suspect your argument (especially the SA comparison) would be better expressed as a tension between long- and short-term utility, but don't want to put words into your mouth.
Yes their lives are much better, just like the Zimbabweans.
I don't think so. If Chinese people want to use Google, then they have to use a VPN. And if Chinese people use a VPN, their search results won't be censored.
If Google releases a censored search engine in China, then people will have less incentive to access an uncensored one.
It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it.
The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese user data.
That's why this is a red herring. The problem you want to solve is Chinese citizen awareness when Google is just trying to provide the information that's available.
What does scare me though, is that by accepting censorship, it normalizes it and weakens the position of any company protesting against it even in countries that traditionally are more pro-human rights like European countries and the US. So it is a complex question...
Really? China's a huge country with huge differences in income and education. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are some people who aren't aware of the censorship or others even outside of the government that feel like it's a good policy. Mainly curious how small that population is.
When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the ball is in the citizens' court as to whether they want to advocate for a reform of that censorship.
When censorship is selective (e.g. "You can read all of Wikipedia, except for whichever articles the government doesn't currently like this week/year"), citizens are mostly going to be unaware of what they're missing and how selective their worldview might actually be. This is very insidious, stealthy, and difficult for a citizenry to be aware of and politically revolt against, especially given there will commonly be no transparency or oversight as to the banned-topic list at any given moment.
Personally, one of my stronger meta-values is that any state which stands on the side of forcibly hiding information from its citizens is on the wrong side of history and ethics. If you can only defend your government to its citizens by lying to them, there's clearly something wrong with what you're doing.
Also I don't think that posturing that may lead up to another Cold War is good for the world. Perhaps there can be greater understanding between peoples through a process of engagement, rather than standing-off.
There is a famous commencement speech by Solzentzyn at Harvard, that laments why the West, esp Americans haven't shown understanding of other cultures, and seem to think and act from a position of moral superiority, whose basis is not so sound as they think.
When a government is unelected, it needs to show its legitimacy through strength. This means censoring anything that would make it look weak. Censorship is simply a political tool by the CCP, not a cultural practice that deserves respect.
In fact, you could argue that political censorship is the actual enemy of Chinese culture. Historically, China has had a rich history of political theory and thought, but now any views that go against the party line are repressed.
Personally, I think Google is in an awkward position here. The Wikipedia can take a solid and principled stance because it has clear and transparent policy on what it censors (basically anything original, not NPOV, and not of general interest). The Wikipedia can do this, because it's edited by humans, and while humans are pretty bad at agreeing at these things, they're way better at it than computers.
Basically, Google wants to filter its results, but if it doesn't let the Chinese government control the filter in China, it runs the risk of appearing to be western propaganda.
Since your argument revolve around this, do you know if this is correct? As in, people in China does not know they're being censored?
And other people might think that since it adds a tiny positive in one area that it can't possible add a huge negative in another area--like normalizing censorship for profit (whoops, the horse already left that barn) and massively increasing the surveillance capabilities of a murderous oppressive regime. You're engaging in simplistic thinking too.
And before you ask, there were large technical and ethical differences in my opinion with the censorship of nazi results in germnny vs the censorship that China demands- for one thing, the Chinese government needed real-time control and could have been involved in the process of putting the results together. That kind of product compromise isn’t anything I want to work on personally. I’m not going to work on something that lies in real time to people about the quality of the air they are breathing, using the google brand, for example.
ahem...
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement
I think the answer is obvious, but in the opposite sense you imply. Google acts as a window into the universe. Not the only one, of course. But if you have a window into the universe that lies to you about the universe (and of course, assuring you that I will tell you everything that is important, and then omitting certain important things, is lying), it is best for you to be without it, and rely on whatever windows you have left.
According to whom?
> Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/wors...
It takes years in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don't come up often that they may not even realize.
For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embass.... The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn't fit the narrative so it wasn't reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?
The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people?
Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can/would mesh well in Chinese society.
I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
Nobody is advocating overthrowing Xi Jinping. But if you're in America, benefiting from the freedoms afforded to Americans (and their fruits), it's fair to ask you don't undermine those values at home or abroad.
thankfully for you, you live in a place where you can't be put in prison for expressing an unpopular idea.
The topic of this subthread is not the attitudes of mainland Chinese, it's the attitudes of mainland Chinese who have immigrated to work at Google for economic reasons. I have friends who came from mainland China, and have talked to them about how their attitudes have changed over time. They don't all stay fixed in the officially-sanctioned mainland mindset.
> Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
So you're saying if someone is happy with something at least in part because they've been lied to, it's wrong for someone to interfere with their attitudes by trying to tell them the truth?
Still the test for me is how a society treats its weakest members. And in China, one is severely restricted to even talk about its weakest members! That hampers everybody in knowing how they're doing. In light of the information we outsiders have, the censorship is hurting these people. I'm not willing to accept this oppression as a matter Chinese citizens are best equipped to decide when they are not allowed to learn the facts.
Because i am a foreigner the worst that could happen from me voicing such an opinion is the government doesn't renew my work visa. For Han, it could affect their social credit rating. For ethnic minorities it could land them or their families in "reeducation camps".
That's the trick of authoritarian regimes. If you just shut up and do whatever the government says, they won't bother you (unless you are rich enough to bother extorting). But if you make a noise, you are screwed. That's the reason why everyone you talk to is allegedly happy with the regime. It's not in their interests to be anything else.
The people I talk generally genuinely are really happy with the regime though. People respect the hell out of Xi, and faith in the central government combined with the Maoist nationalism that still prevails as the dominant form of identity for most mainland Chinese you see the average citizen that really has no criticisms of the government.
I've had conversations with Chinese people before about the American bipartisan system and free speech vs the Chinese counterparts and usually they come to this conclusion: "Americas system works for America, Chinas system works for China. If people could say whatever they want here there would be much more trouble, if there were multiple competing political parties they would be at each others throats in a way that makes Americas current polarization look like a beautiful political climate".
Let what works for China continue to work for China, and what works for us continue to work for us. People, cultures, and ideas are different depending on where and how you were raised. The ideas that made the west great don't necessarily work for everyone.
While living here i have spoken to plenty of people who do not parrot the party line. Even in the middle class there are a lot who don't like it when the government censors their shows or deletes well-loved memes. In fact, that is one of the more common grievances i've heard from the middle class here. This is a group of people who can comfortably afford VPN, but they'd still prefer not to have to.
In the working class people seem less concerned about censorship as a moral issue, but it still negatively impacts their lives. There is a real resentment of the corruption that is rife in the party and amongst the elites. Censorship means the working class can't talk about it outside the dinner table and they can't mobilize. Rural people get a raw deal on education and they know it. The poor are upset about rising income inequality and gentrification.
Migrant workers in many larger cities still don't get hukou (residence), so they cannot get healthcare, their kids can't attend public schools, they do not qualify for public housing and so on. Their lives are precarious. Entire neighborhoods can be marked for demolition and there is no avenue for protest because the tenants don't count as residents anyway.
Meanwhile the government constantly crack down on the lower class - shutting down food stalls, kicking out street vendors, fining delivery drivers and so on. I can assure you that people on the receiving end of this aren't as thrilled with the regime as the ones who can afford an iPhone and an apartment in a gated community.
Still, let's address the "Chinese exceptionalism" argument. The idea that China needs socialism "with Chinese characteristics" is CPC propaganda, not some innate truth. It can be debunked simply by looking across the strait at Taiwan, where there is a majority (Han) Chinese country that operates perfectly fine with a democracy and no censorship. For sure, the whole island has less people in it than Shanghai, but the proof is there: Chinese people can thrive in a free state. Tens of millions of ethnic Chinese live in democratic countries all over the world and don't pine for the days of living under authoritarianism.
There is no doubt that East Asian culture is different to western culture, but it's not that much different. People still like to be able to talk about things they care about, read about what's actually happening in their neighborhood, and express grievances when they see injustice. Although most Chinese tolerate the current situation, i think it's misleading to imply that there is full-throated support of the status quo. My personal feeling is people would be very pleased if the government were to become more transparent and less authoritarian.
The government here also has significant problems with management of immigration and with ownership of neighborhoods; the words used are different, Americans call it "gentrification," but the effect is the same when an entire population in a city is displaced from the place they live because they cannot afford the housing. Cities also kick out street vendors, fine delivery drivers, and so on via the network of laws around zoning, habitation, and usage. And the poor in the US are also concerned about rising income inequality and gentrification.
I think I'm inclined to agree that the cultures are not that much different. And many Americans accept or advocate for this status quo also.
Google hires heavily from universities and the popularity of free speech amongst university students has been down over the last decade. The title 9 inquisitions and general climate has completely changed the tone to the point that many adults exiting college don’t really have any problem with suppression of “harmful speech”.
The same applies to their employees abroad, most of which also view “freedom of speech” as a strange American obsession rather than a right worth trying to impose on the Chinese.
Status seeking. Google has become the safe, secure job for people with low risk tolerance. That personality has predictable effects in any bureaucracy.
This likely goes for any company that grows from small to giant: early on, you hire people you know and trust, or that your (trustworthy) employees know and trust. But when you're deluged with applicants, you hire people who can solve leetcode hards in 30 minutes.
Back in 2010 there were many other opportunities to grow the company. The bigger you get the harder it is to grow.
Playing ball with China becomes one of the easier ways to keep growing once you reach a certain size. The NBA did the same thing after they saturated the US market.
I'm sure many execs have performance incentives / stock options that caused the shift in policy.
In a few years, the US understanding of morality might change to Christian fundamentalism, gun culture, anti-vaxxing, respect to the authority, anti-euro and so on and the US might differentiate even from the UK in many aspects and fall in odds even with Western Europe.
Would it be expected that the employee's rally for these causes too and try to overcome some German vaccination laws? If the new cool becomes Mormonism, should employees make sure that the message of the Mormons must be delivered in Turkey?
Sure, my examples are extremely exaggregated but winds are blowing in different directions in every part of the world and I would prefer if the companies don't pick sides here. Not censoring Google doesn't change a thing in China because the problem is not that the locals in China are looking into these things but couldn't find info due to the censorship.
For these tech giants, I think, is enough if they don't turn into a tool for control and surveillance. Serve the censored search results, show your ads and make your money, obey the local laws and Just don't be enablers for oppression. There's a difference between limiting your product to obey the law and gathering list of people for persecution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_com...
The UN lists privacy as a human right. The entire company is built on violating human rights at scale no matter where those people reside.
It seems the Googlers of today are holding Google to a higher ethical standard than the Googlers of 2009, since Google offered a censored search engine in china at that time and this did not produce the sort of outrage we see today.
I don't think this is limited to China. Google has no qualms surveilling on behalf of the US government either.
But it's not really a matter of ethical sense. Google is big enough that everyone has a bone to pick with something Google does. Conversely, people can find a way to justify anything. So when anything you do is ethically wrong (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Wrong), and anything you do is also ethically justifiable (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Right), ethics isn't really how you make decisions anymore. It's just a matter of how much money will we make, will we get sued, and who's gonna manage PR.
https://diversity.google/annual-report/
In my personal opinion, it has become more common for me to see groups of software engineers informally discuss an issue (say, at someone's desk, or walking down the hallway) entirely in Mandarin instead of English.
And now Google employees, with their all righteousness, are claiming that Chinese people don't deserve a much better product, because they need to suffer for these employees' political ideal? If this is not hypocrisy, I don't know what is.
(To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.)
The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)
Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.
If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.
Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation
>> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.
But Purism afaik does have them listed.
Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads?
In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.
They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?
>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time
i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
And sometimes when people get rich, they add value to the world. The getting rich may be the goal, but it can also help other people too.
Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.
economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.
some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.
you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.
edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obses...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...
That's a hard lesson for a lot of people. Unfortunately it comes in different forms as well. I cant tell you how many places I've run across that seem to be paying slightly more than lip service to safety standards.
I’ve had a boss who tried to give out rewards to people and announced them without possessing them, and we had to harass him to get them. By the time they were delivered it felt like we’d earned them a second time, completely undermining whatever message he was trying to send.
The first “idiot” I worked for has the honor of my best anecdote for underestimating work and would pull this stunt where we could “go home early if we get everything done” on random Friday’s. On average we left an hour later on these days than on a typical Friday. The last time he tried this the entire team shot daggers at him and wandered back to their desks.
As a former employee it never really surprised me that the company would want to move back into China, but it did surprise me a bit that they were doing so under heavy secrecy. I suppose in practice they were right to want to keep it secret (employees were unhappy) but on the other hand it's impossible to keep secrets in that company so they should have known it would leak eventually.
Microsoft, Apple, etc. doing business in China is unsurprising in comparison since we all know what big tech companies with 10k+ employees are about: Making money.
Working there seemed to be Good.
Where as it was obvious with Apple's anti competitive policies, they'd be evil/corrupt. When they ban Apps, I don't bat an eye anymore.
What you're seeing in people's reactions is disappointment. No one's ever seen Microsoft as an ethical company, so no one bats an eye when they enter the Chinese market and embrace the questionable ethics of the Chinese government.
That doesn't make it right, but it certainly gets less attention.
You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).
People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.
They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.
It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.
There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.
The second guy I talked to at Google was such an asshole that I doubted my read on the other three people. It shakes you, and me in particular. I have a problem with saying no to all offers on the table, which shows up as self-sabotage in interviews. I don’t want to work with you, so I’m not going to try to convince you to want to work with me. It would be better for me to stick with it and get comfortable just saying no to all bad offers even if that’s all the offers I have. Least objectionable has won out a time or two and I’ve always paid for it in the end.
If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special.
I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.
They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.
That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline.
I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work.
To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.
It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible.
They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will.
I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time.
Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.
If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S...
In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination.
[0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.
What is this? I have worked in the valley in smaller companies, but this (the diversity exercises) takes the cake. Was there some context to this that is missing? Can anyone who participated throw more light?
He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.
Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down."
If he ended the article with, "Vote for me! Maine 2020!" It would sound highly self-serving. I believe he simply doesn't see his campaign as relevant to what he's writing here.
This is his retrospective on his time at Google.
He may post other things that combine the two, but this one is clearly focused on the things he experienced while working for one of the largest corporations in the world.
Both need to be evaluated critically.
At this point Sara Gideon is going to win the nomination easily.
It seems to me that if the actions you take are legal, it doesn't matter your size. Who is the government to decide what's too big to operate without their input?
Nowhere in this article do I see evidence of a "change of heart." He didn't suddenly quit to run for office. He fought for what he believed in, putting human rights above profits, until the culture changed so much as to axe him. It sounds like he's taking his wealth and prestige to the place he thinks he will have the most power: senate
Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number, credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to paid if not you're having this account.
At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium etc etc etc)
The big concern here is how Google, etc. are becoming an oligopoly with a very effective lobbying arm in any form of actual regulation.
While the Western world holds democratic-ish values in public institutions, its large private companies are indeed totalitarian regimes.
I remember having done a "computer and society" assignment about 14 years ago on Google and China. I also remember Microsoft's "Halloween Documents" (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) from early 2000s. And many other scenarios of Big Tech ignoring ethics.
In general, trust (like attention) is a limited resource to be used wisely.
I'm not saying any of these FAANG companies are perfect, but I also don't like grand standing by people like this that really only case about advancing their own image for political reasons.
"there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members."
This is a stark and honest way to put what Google is doing. These are actually fundamental values at stake. Not just 'privacy'.
"Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight."
So FMAGAN companies are weaponzied in the geopolitics. This sounds good when dropped over the wall, but when you try to play this out against the current state of the USA, it seems near certain to me to go horribly wrong.
I would much rather break them up - all the way. Whatever that means.
To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather than 'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.
Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive.
Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them.
If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision.
Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.
They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet.
It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not ever ever interview with" list.
Is google well run? How do you tell?
Isn't it ironic that Buzz had major privacy issues - https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/
He writes as if his morals made him leave but he basically left only because he was fired.
Mostly he just collected his cash, and is now writing a transparently self serving piece as he begins his run for elected office.
No thanks.
In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.
Also, to suggest, at this point, that US agencies haven't harmed an incredible number of people by co-opting information from tech companies and service providers would be absurd. Although companies sometimes contemplate how to protect their users (which doubtlessly Google would do in China), this essentially never blocks anyone from starting a company here.
> Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights — had cost me my career.
I would love if some other conservatives present, who care about free speech, could voice some support for this guy. It would help me feel unified with you, and want to support you more in “James Damore”-type situations.
From what I can tell, he continually attempted to steer Google away from business in China, even after things started going downhill. To my mind, that takes quite a bit of bravery.
I get that he could have sued to get some type of fake (reduced role) job back, but.... the blog would be better if he didn't make it sound it was 100% his choice.
Google you are being run by fools. Godspeed.
Has the US federal government suddenly become more corrupt? Is he trying to tie this back to Trump?