I'm not saying this with the intent of harshly criticizing the author, but I admit it's surprising to me that someone (who had other options) would work for 14 years at a company they clearly came to believe was making the world a worse place.
There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand exposure, have only heard things through friends that were employees.
Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if they're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.
Reminds me of this: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s...
The employees also pushed to avoid working for the USG, pushed to avoid the JEDI contract (though they likely would have lost it anyway) while at the same time trying to work within China (while Deep Mind may or may not be indirectly assisting in Uighur camps [0]). I think this is morally wrong and the arguments are often simple/naive.
[0]: ">>Peter Thiel: ...But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that."
https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...
So far in my career I've worked for a government contractor, doing basically good things that benefit the government and the public, a large service exclusively serving gambling companies some of whom were committing obvious crimes including automatically gender detecting players and rate limiting anyone with a woman's name (under the assumption that any women on their service are men who've been banned or rate limited themselves using their wive's credit cards), and a supermarket, and honestly, the hardest place to leave was the gambling company that I thought constantly about how I should leave.
It took suddenly being made redundant due to the pandemic for me to really try hard to find another job, I'd applied to plenty but I never really pushed myself properly, or took them seriously enough because stability at the cost of bitterness and feeling like the smallest cog in a meat grinder of human misery is a weird sort of comfortable, it's leaving a splinter in because pulling it out is scary, it's not ripping off a bandaid, a "childish" failure of character, but ultimately relatable and human.
And I _wasn't_ making 6 figures. I _didn't_ spend years of my life building up to getting into that position, it was just the first job out of university paying slightly more than the average, I can't imagine if I had got into Google and realised what these people must've realised about themselves and the system and how they are really no exits that aren't steps down unless you're entrepreneurial and willing to take a big risk, you think Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Uber don't make some big moral compromises to sell and produce in China?
I'm not (trying to) justify their decisions, just rather painfully admit that I can relate.
This criticism doesn't just apply to DeepMind. The reason that he is mentioning them specifically is because was an early investor so he has access to their team.
>Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if tthey're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.
Does the existence of people worse off than you eliminate your right to complain?
It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying. If you're coddled (by some metric) you should... shut up?
If your complaint is “what? Sushi again?!” then you should shut up (imo).
That’s just a subset, others take an overly adversarial stance to drive attention to themselves as activists - rather than have in-good-faith discussions about stuff.
None of the cartoons were saying that though, were they?
>You should have some perspective.
Should my perspective expand to include straw men?
> Hi there. Why are you demonstrating?
> They're laying off one in four workers in the hospital. You?
> They're taking away our M&Ms from building 42's microkitchen.
> Wow, that's harsh.
So apparently the author of TFA didn't think a scenario like this was all that much of a strawman... Either.
Honestly, you're really bending over backwards in defense of privilege here. Why?
OP thinks complaining about the company's terrible behavior and complaining about the lack of M&Ms are more or less the same thing and that if you are bothered about the former you should quietly quit coz hey, not everybody gets sushi twice a week.
I'm not defending privilege. I'm attacking the notion that you should STFU and fuck off when you see injustice because YOU personally happen to be comfortable.
To port it to another context, for instance, Oscar Schindler could have given up his privilege (he was quite privileged!), quit his job and begged on the street for scraps of food and many would have honestly argued that if he was that bothered by what he saw that he should have.
Should he though?
You now appear to be in violent agreement with them, and the misunderstanding seems to be mainly on your side.
The 'You' wasn't you personally, but the general 'you' (similar to what you used in "you should... shut up?")
I'm sensing snark, but I'm genuinely not being snarky and I'm not really interested in fighting over this.
[0]: "After being acquired by Google, we had a “fun day” at the Google campus where we were shown around, wide eyed, to see the facilities. We had lunch in the cafeteria and while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
But then I looked back to the earliest comics and even most of those come off as fairly critical of the company. There doesn't seem to be so much of an attitudinal shift as this guy has been focused on criticism from day 1. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every big organization can benefit from reasonable criticism.)
Makes you appreciate the likes of Scott Adams, XKCD and Norman Rockwell, who use parody, irony, and soul respectively, each with skilled nuance that shifts the viewer from their same old place to open the possibilities for some new take.
Part of an aspect of sticking to your guns ethically and morally is making choices that leave you worse off. If your ethics align with what is best for you, personally, it's not much of an ethical code
I can agree with that.
They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative.
Not so much on this one, one person's ideals could be another's hate speech.
Personally, I find a complete lack of snark to be alienating. I'm not motivated by pure positivity, just creeped out.
He hints that’s the way he feels in this comic: https://goomics.net/309/
(And squinting at the dotted continuations of the red and green lines, looks like he even estimated when that time would come pretty well. EDIT: But yeah, maybe not all that amazing, since it was only a year or so in advance.)
An alternate way of looking at it:
When you work at a place you can help influence the culture to move it in the right direction. When you aren't working there you can't.
If you actually want to have more impact than that as an IC you could try your hand at internal activism, but I'd say you have a dramatically higher chance of damaging your career than creating any real change at a company that scale.
As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).
Interestingly every time this topic crops up there's a chorus of "just quit if you feel that way about it" as if the exact opposite was true although in reality I think everybody kind of knows it's really not.
From a non American perspective it's really strange watching this play out. Like looking at a culture that cant see the color blue or something.
The idea is that you leave and go work on something else that makes the world better versus contributing to the borg.
It's definitely a trade off thats quite personal.
Unlike other personal trade offs people seem quite comfortable making this one on your behalf.
The thesis being, AIUI, that then they weren't good enough. Because if they had been, the competitor they started after leaving would have buried their original employer.
Assuming that the new company will displace the old one.
However at a large monopoly like google/facebook/amazon, if you want to change the world, you need to first change the company.
The vague thing about "damaging my career" is a bit nebulous.
I was bought out, so most of my remuneration is in stocks. There is almost no incentive for me to "build out my career" year. So I have no issue with calling out obvious bullshit/stuff that goes against publicly stated principles.
> Since starting at Google in 2007, Cornet's use of art to critique the company has become prolific, with ex-Google manager Claire Stapleton describing him to The Information as the tech firm's "moral bellweather." Cornet published a collection of his work, "Goomics", in 2018.
Having someone with first hand experience and knowledge about your organization and making "fun" of some of the sore points it can actually be good for the Org itself, because you have one more data point about how employees are feeling.
[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-carto...
For anyone wondering, that words makes a whole lot more sense when written correctly(?) as: bellwether (the sheep carrying the bell).
Talking about how awesome Google's main search page is? Not very funny. Making fun of Google's endless list of failed chat apps? Much funnier.
https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/google-and-app...
A loss leader is a product which is used to acquire revenue through a different channel, such as game consoles which often sell at a loss on hardware to encourage game sales.
But Nest is, when viewed in a context that understands why most Google products exist. It should be obvious that Search exists to serve Ads. The first result of every search is generally an ad. That one's easy. Android and Chrome both exist to protect Google Search: They ensure that most people's default experience is to search Google for everything, so they get ads.
Nest is about ads, but you have to look at the competitive context. Apple, Microsoft, Google, are all shipping ecosystems. Large catalogs of products which interoperate best with each other. It's absolutely anticompetitive and most likely illegal, but that's a digression: The issue is that for Android and Chrome to protect Search to serve Ads is that people have to pick Google's ecosystem over other ecosystems. Sure, you can pick Apple's, and Google has paid Apple eleventy-billion dollars to still send you to Google Search, but they can change their minds at any time, and it's more beneficial for Google if they don't have to pay another company for your attention. Also sometimes Apple gets on a privacy kick and makes tracking users harder, which Google wants to do to sell ads better, so they gotta fight that too.
So the issue here is that Apple has iOS and then it has Siri, and then it has HomeKit, which all works very well together and provides a very clean unified experience. If Google didn't have an experience comparable to Apple's experience, people might leave Android for Apple, and that's bad. So products like Nest are entirely there to provide a Google ecosystem that is competitive to other tech companies' ecosystems, so that you view ads.
If not, how do you know that data from Nest isn't used to enhance your profile?
I mean: knowing the sounds or patterns of sounds (I'm trying to be generous here and not accuse them of actually using every word spoken near a listening device as input) or just the general pattern of temperature etc could be useful in figuring out what ads to show.
... on a less generous note they mostly don't need that data: their AI has already calculated that if you are a male at least you need to see even more ads for scammy dating sites or - lately - ads for pay-to-win games - possibly with female narrators that could also have been in the aforementioned ads.
I encourage anyone to point to a google product that isn't either selling ads or trying to get people to spend more time on the internet so google can sell them more ads.
The work I do on AI-based medical device infrastructure has nothing to do with ads.
How many people who are active users of these products Bing something when they need to look it up?
Granted, I only use those products because my employer uses them internally.
I'll give you cloud and nest though.
Docs and Drive want to sell you storage and collaboration capabilities. Not ads.
A lot of the work is sorting the incoming goods. Much of this work is done by volunteers. As a result it isn't uncommon for spoiled food to accidentally be stocked and distributed to people. It is a rare but not infrequent occurrence to have someone get sick and report back to the food bank.
Not unequivocally good! :]
I live in the UK, and the BBC is definitely propaganda.
I also agree with you that private broadcasters can definitely be worse.
OTOH, it's a vicious circle: you cannot fix society without fixing propaganda, and if the propaganda is any good, you cannot fix propaganda without fixing society (most people will lend an ear to it, believe it, parrot it, support it, work for it, etc.)... so we just have to learn to live with it :/
EDIT: I see from your profile you're not in the US, which is probably the source of the confusion. Examples of Public Broadcasting are https://www.npr.org and https://www.pbs.org.
Maybe not quite as strongly so as the NYT, but it was definitely there.
There are plenty of organizations that mostly do good. To pick the first example that comes to mind, Partners in Health.
Thank you for sharing that, I was uncertain if it was my own bias that was making me think similar things
But there have been a lot of changes in recent years, and Google is playing with fire in its military and government support projects (as well as struggling with the increased union consciousness that is permeating white-collar Silicon Valley culture at the FAANGs). I'm not profoundly surprised he finally decided the balance had swung too far.
Using Google Maps won't give you lung cancer (unless you are using it to find smoke shops that is). It erodes your privacy, sure, but it won't deteriorate your health...
Let's be real here, China's tech industry revolves around mimicking American/European/Japanese/Korean tech, they rarely ever innovate and create first of their kind things.