The Google from 12 to 16 years ago was found guilty[1] in an antitrust suit of colluding with other industry leaders to keep tech employee compensation artificially low.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and illegal stuff.
Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to people. It is also natural that people want to be paid more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say this from an ethical point of view, I say how humans act.
Also, with all these regulations, unfortunately, government-company collusion is also there, not only among companies. I wonder if markets were more free than they are if the collusion among companies (given that governments cannot regulate as much) would be as effective. I just wonder, because I am not sure, but I am confident it would be better than what we usually see in the media, which much of it is the consequence of disproportionate power for regulating.
About behaving "poor" each person has her own ethics. Things that look ok to someone can look bad to others. And many look bad to most of us, especially when it is someone else who does it... which is curious. Companies are greedy, when it is not our company. Companies are bad, when it is not our company... our neighbor does not deserve what we deserve, because we are better.
So the only measure by which we should measure companies is by law (even I find some laws absurd, but that is another topic). If some laws and regulations give power to make excuses that favor corruption via favoring friends, then maybe the problem is the capacity to regulate.
I do not think an independent company would work for a government in "unethical" terms (as for many of our mostly accepted definition of unethical, like helping military research or giving surveillance tech to governments) if that government cannot give them something in exchange. We see the pattern? The problem is that exactly. Do not look further.
But the fact of creating laws in large sectors of people's lives creates evil incentives and dependence on people who did not take part in creating wealth for others.
I just find it contradicting.
As to your other point, I'm sure you're aware that governments and private companies are afforded different rules of engagement. We decided a century ago that allowing companies to collude ended up oppressing markets in negative ways and should not be tolerated. So not sure why you're using one to justify the other.
Thinking the opposite is being very innocent, in my view. But all happens in non-obvious ways and in the background, you are going to see a tiny fraction of what happens.
Compared with what came before and what was competing with it in those days google search was terrific. Finding more of what you wanted faster. Clean interface. Ads off to the side clearly identified. People just felt good about using google product. That's a great place to start any PR. People's affection for polish of Apple Product compared with horrible machines most have been forced to use in pod farms etc worked the same way for Steve Jobs.
Assange has been claiming for a decade that Google is now "big and bad." Not sure if I believed him then. He was also claiming the US desperately wanted to put in him in jail while being dismissed by Hilary Clinton. He was right there. And that many people in the US govt and military industrial complex wanted to kill him and it was a lot more than just an idle thought. Right there too. His PR is shockingly bad.
There is a huge difference between those two. Would be interesting to know how much was “forged.” At one point I thought they tried to vet the dumps pretty well to maintain credibility.
You can't publish what nobody has leaked to you. They don't investigate, they don't hack phones, they don't "go looking" they sit and wait with their secure drop boxes for someone to send them documents. They then try to verify them and publish them.
There is also zero accusation that I have ever seen that they've published anything forged. Which is remarkable given how controversial they are and how many people are desperate to make something stick.
Is it reasonable that these things are rarely at the top of the list of facts in this discussion of wikileaks good or bad? Is it reasonable to ask why the "Why don't you leak on Putin" comes up so often when its such obvious garbage for a publisher? [1]
[1] If wikileaks had not published something that makes Putin or Hilary or Donald or whoever you think they're in league with look bad when it was clear that it was leaked to them that's a very serious charge and one we would all take notice of. I'm pretty sure I'd cross the road to avoid Assange as a person myself. I don't know if I'd consider him worse than George Bush Jnr, the late Colin Powell, Hilary, Donald, Blair. Do you really /like/ these people more than Assange after what they have done? It's not necessary to like Assange to take an interest in the story and the evidence. And fwiw I don't particularly /like/ him at all.
It's insane! I would not have believed any of this a decade ago and yet here we are.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lon...
It's exactly because I never had any serious doubt, that I identify anyone promoting a narrative about it being revealed by a hero as someone's propaganda.
There are lots of competing conspiracy theories. That might be because there are lots of competing conspiracies.
Nothing people say is true or reliable, but the act of saying it is a kind of truth that seeps through about the PR operation behind it.
All my life, people have been blaming the CIA for everything. Regardless of how much is true, that propaganda can't exist without a source. You know who likes to blame the CIA, and who likes to blame Russians and who likes to blame "Zionists" and so on. I mean, you can guess.
"The sky is blue in Moscow" might be true or might not be. But if someone says that to me, then it expresses some truth about them, that they want me to believe it is true, or they are using reverse psychology, or something. But it represents a truth that can be relied on no matter how dishonest the speaker.
"Actions speak louder than words" including when the actions are speaking words.
But yeah, that's the next go to smear that you're identifying there. Can't make "Bernie or Tulsi works for putin" stick because it's false? Go with he's anti-semitic. It's nuts.
I think we've got to hold anti-semitism smears without evidence backing them in about the same regard as disparaging people for being Jewish. Both are actually promotion of anti-semitism. When anti-semitism is a go-to smear it loses meaning and the real thing, the vile thing, the thing that is actually violent and dangerous that must be opposed draws strength far more so than some hideous human goose stepping in the ugliest fancy dress, for example.
Maybe you should look at individual claims about the CIA and what evidence supports them before deciding if an individual claim is justified or garbage.
Pompeo has said the leakers of the yahoo story should be jailed. Not something you say if there isn't rather a lot of truth behind it. Isikoff isn't known for being friendly to russia in his reporting. He's recanted much of it now but was pushing the Trump is compromised by Putin line based on the ridiculous Steele dossier. May have been first cab off the rank there, I don't recall.
Something else that surprised the hell out of me recently was that the FBI never saw the Democrat party servers claimed to have been hacked by Russia. Only private contractors saw the evidence, contractors hired by the same crook-lawyer who fabricated the Trump has a private server connected to alpha bank insanity. Everyone has been repeating the democrats were hacked by the russkies and wikileaks published it with very, very scant evidence in support of it.
It'd be easy to weave conspiracy theories about it but waiting for more evidence to hold people to account is fine. And maybe I'm getting conspiracy minded in my old age because I'm not completely convinced that Epstein committed suicide either, I'd like more evidence for that before accepting it as fact as well. Has anyone actually asked Bill Gates about his story that he hung out with Epstein because Epstein had access to donors? Like "Who on this planet can you not get a meeting with given you're the richest guy in the world for the past 2? 3? decades? Seriously who can Epstein introduce you to who won't take your phone call Bill?" [1] Why has no interviewer asked him that? Why hasn't the media reporting on Bill's excuses for hanging with Epstein pointed out that this question is unanswered whenever they write about it? It just doesn't seem like quality journalism does it?
[1] There may be a good answer. Bill may have done nothing at all wrong. It's just hard to understand how it makes sense and needs further explanation at the minimum.
It might be true at the very beginning when Google was simply a search engine that they truly were "doing no evil." It's also true at the very beginning of Facebook that they were truly trying to build a social network that made the world more open and connected by bringing grandparents closer to their grandkids thousands of miles apart.
Is this really true about Facebook?
Having your company put billions into the bank every year because they "don't know what to do with it" while you're not even a millionaire is disheartening.
I mean, if they were still paying us all handsomely like stock brokers then I bet popular opinion would be on their side.
Aren't FAANG salaries still absurd?
After say twenty years, my friends on Wall Street are mysteriously richer than I am. Of course the ones who didn’t survive the early treadmill aren’t included, but I guess that’s the trade off. Engineering is fairly stable and well paying, but you don’t get million dollar payouts unless you are a founder.
After all, if I wanted to be paid for stock performance I would’ve been a stockbroker (and like I pointed out up there, gotten paid way more after 20 year survivorship).
Also, I didn’t think it needed to be said but apart from Apple all the FAANG companies are really young, Google is only 23 years old. Back in 2001, they had less than 500 employees. I’m not one of the golden era. If I were, you’d already know my name and I of course would be a multimillionaire.
Multimillionaires are not people who joined Google 20 years ago. That's a different league altogether.
Multimillionaires are just normal people you've never heard of who work 9-5 and drink beer on the weekends with their friends and have a normal house in South Bay.
They joined Snowflake, Square, Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, or any other of the hundreds of SV companies like those in the last decade, even the last few years.
They are the average homebuyers for 1500-2000 sq foot ranch houses in Bay Area right now.
A high-growth company will, by definition, be a short-tenure company. Ironically, it's at shrinking companies that relative tenures often increase, especially as those who cannot (or feel they cannot) compete elsewhere remain.
For a company increasing headcount by 35%/yr, half of all employees will have been hired within the past two years, even with no attrition.
Statistics under conditions of rapid change are ... counterintuitive. And you'd probably want measures that better indicate length against hire date, or at departure date, or similar factors. In some ways this is similar to the challenge of identifying disease mortality during early phases of emergence as not all cases will have reached conclusion and identification of all infections or instances is likely to be incomplete.
Not that I can think of any phenomena where this might be exhibited in the past few years....
Sure I was being hyperbolic, but the point is legitimate. They used benefits to get people willingly to sign up for a lifestyle, then used hierarchy to efficiently accomplish a bunch of insidious tasks.
You have an entire generation of students majoring in computer science and "grinding leetcode" to get a high paying job and never once stop to think about the consequences. The job is just like another homework set and the employees want those good grades (a PIP... oh no!). And like the military, you're a "professional" which means you aren't allowed to talk politics. (I know the Damore's of the world will complain that Google is run by "SJWs"... but that's only because that line of corpo-liberal talk is good for attracting people who don't think too hard about the actual mission.) I mean... they even had PIPs in the military (though had a different name)!