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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

When reading things like this (and assuming it's true), I always wonder how it works in practice. I mean somebody has to actually implement the trickery in the codebase, right? Does that mean that one day there was a ticket that could be summarized as "Implement scam"? Or was there an attempt to hide the true purpose of the requested changes? Were the programmers not bothered by it? Were they in on it too? Are the implemented changes kept in Google's monorepo for everybody to see? Is it hidden somewhere else? Is it hot patched?

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Here is what to say engineers:

(1) BidManipulation is only used in some testing/market simulation environment.

(2) only used in cases where some pricing bug/weird legal issue happened that needs some tweaking to be corrected.

(3) only used in some weird markets where it is legal.

(4) implement many weird obscure features for "next generation ad experience marketplace stuff" and push them to production leaving it to higher ups to configure which combination of them are being used at which market.

(5) empower engineers to come up with additional "whacky ideas" and keep a culture where it is assumed that almost all of them are not passing legal review but they could be enabled at any time.

Not a recommendation.

>(3) only used in some weird markets where it is legal.

This would set alarms off for me. In my opinion, legality != morality. Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical and vice versa.

If someone tells me something is okay and the only reason they can conjure is 'but its legal!' I'm gonna nope right out of there if it smells funny

A DBA I know very well was charged with modeling the accounts for an intentional illegal financial trick (in the 80s for Service Merchandise iirc) that would shift the proceeds from the trick into regular accounts after the statute of limitations ran out. The way it was explained to them was that if they were busted on it they would immediately apologize for the "oversight" and pay up. They did it because they enjoyed being employed.

> They did it because they enjoyed being employed.

Not just that, when the whole product is broken down into features, managed by Feature Managers (aka product manager), that is wrapped up in business speak, and there are whole hierarchies of [Engineering, Product, Project] managers, there are very few people, if any, who understand the whole thing and various side effects and so on.

So in end, in many cases people don’t even realize the nefarious nature of what they’re working on.

On top of that one is surrounded in the echo chamber of fellow employees all looking at the rising stock price and resulting bank balance.

I don't even understand the point of the "feature" as described in the article. Dropping bids (possibly including the second highest bidder), sure, that happens all the time when the creative is deemed inappropriate for the website. Changing the way charging is done and doing all the necessary accounting to create a "slush fund" to use to boost other bids? That doesn't really even make sense. Keep in mind that Google is already choosing the optimal bid prices based on the page & individual so why would they charge their slush fund when just charge the advertiser's account.

It sounds a lot like someone is upset that Google values ads on their site lower than ads on other sites and is upset that Google consistently bids less on their site than for other sites for the same ad (again no shock there as Superbowl advertising costs more than daytime television).

> Google is already choosing the optimal bid prices based on the page & individual so why would they charge their slush fund when just charge the advertiser's account.

To artificially increase the competitiveness of advertisers who use Google's ad tools, as said in the article.

The people in charge are too far removed to care and the grunts implementing it can be compartmentalised. Optimise for the right KPIs. Throw diffusion of responsibility and you're golden.

I can't help but think that some people compensated so highly to do code don't just sell their technical skills.

> Or was there an attempt to hide the true purpose of the requested changes?

Google's custom in-house version control software has an extremely elaborate system of access controls governing who can see which pieces of the monorepo.

I imagine it would be implemented as mundane looking levers and configurations. Especially easy to do in ML powered systems with lots parameters and moving parts.

Except for the part where certain accounts would need to be hardcoded instead of dependent on the advertiser. Moving money is probably the most audited part of any code base and something like that would be a big red flag.

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