Comment by throwaway19937 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway19937 | Hacker News Reader

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> I dunno but perhaps it was better to spend the money on human support staff. Or on means to become less dependent on advertising income. Or on open-sourcing those "shut-down by Google" projects. Or on improving the sandbox/permissions system of Android.

I certainly have my complaints about Google but this post is way off base.

Whether Google pursues any of these possibilities has nothing to do with this sponsorship; they would all be in separate budgets.

It's also highly unlikely that the grandparent has any input on these topics - how much influence do you have over your employer's strategic decisions? It's absurd to chastise someone in a large organization for decisions they almost certainly had nothing to do with.

> But I suppose that the corporate culture dictates that you don't discuss most of these topics with management.

Questioning strategic decisions is rarely beneficial to your career in any organization. I have yet to see anyone promoted for doing so but can think of at least 5 firings related to this.

> Questioning strategic decisions is rarely beneficial to your career in any organization.

So, you always make the more "convenient" decisions instead and pretend there aren't any problems?

If this is the result of company culture then this is indeed not the individual's fault, but I sure hope I can at least comment on it?

> So, you always make the more "convenient" decisions instead and pretend there aren't any problems?

Denying a problem is senseless but you have to pick your battles. It's a waste of time and political capital to question some decisions. You have to pick the hill you want to die on.

Strategic decisions are divided into at least the following categories:

1. Decisions and practices that are effectively written in stone. You probably aren't, for example, going to be able to move Google away from a monorepo. It can be difficult to identify this category from outside the organization.

2. Decisions that are open to influence by people in that part of the org chart. The Chrome developers, for example, probably have some influence on Google's involvement in WHATWG. Someone who works on ad quality probably doesn't.

3. Decisions that seems possible from outside the organization but the inside perspective is quite different.

4. Decisions that anyone can influence. Some of the successful Google protests fall into this category.

5. Decisions that only a director can influence because they don't listen to anyone below them in the org chart. Google is large enough that there are probably some directors like this.

Google has been pursuing non-advertising sources of income for at least a decade; your other asks fall into at best category #2.

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