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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

The most famous anti-value was "Don't be evil" and look where that ended up.

"Don't be a dick" has good practical mileage.

The Kantian ideal of the Kingdom of Ends is pretty good one if you formulate it as "Don't use people", but that's too high a standard for almost any business today (especially the ones whose entire model is "using people").

One of my personal maxims is "Lead people not into temptation". In other words, no addictive (engagement) features, no lock-in, don't create dependency, make sure the code you write enables people and gives then freedom and choice (migration/federation etc). Again, those values are almost impossible to maintain in todays climate of hyper-exploitation.

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Don't be evil, is not an anti-value. It's negatively-stated-yet-positive value.

The article says people should state values as a tradeoff. So for google it should have been something like:

Favor not being evil over making more money.

I think "favor not being evil over making more money" is exactly how the "don't be evil" motto is commonly interpreted.

I’d think it’s commonly interpreted as “don’t be evil” where the cost of not being evil isn’t specified.

As a shareholder, I think that not making as much money as possible is the real evil here. I always interpreted "don't be evil" as "don't waste money building an aquarium for sharks with lasers on their heads". I never in my darkest nightmares thought it meant "shut down profitable centers of corporate growth just because some bleeding hearts say that it's bad to pollute developing countries with planned obsolescent e-waste."

Poe's law right here. I really had no idea if this was genuine or satire the first 3 times I read it. I'm pretty sure it's satire.

Yeah, the ambiguity was intentional, and you're right.

Your problem is that you are "as a shareholder" where the values are the business proposition to the customers.

Also your problem is that you favor evil ways of making money, but don't call it evil, instead of owning the evil.

In American capitalism the investors are the real customers, not the consumers.

Of all the massive cash fires at Google (Cloud) you’re concerned about the shark photonics lab? That one might actually pay off some day with meaningful improvements in marine fiber optic cables. Given how important deep sea optics are for Google’s core business it is a negligible cost with a huge upside.

I always felt it was meant to imply something more like: "show the world that not being evil is a better business strategy".

I guess it didn't work for them so they just abandoned it.

"Don't be evil [at all costs]"

A truly uncompromising value, if that was the intent of Google's motto, sits at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the tradeoff is literally everything else.

You could add "at all costs" to any value. That would likely make it less true instead of more bold.

You could only add it to values that are truly uncompromising, as I mentioned. Any value not at the tippy top of the hierarchy would bend to some other cost in some scenario.

“Don’t be evil” is a slightly edgier version of the typical corporate value of “Do the right thing” which I’ve seen in many companies. Sounds good, but vague enough to be meaningless.

Toyota's "Respect for People" was a sort of joke to me when I worked there, then I worked at Amazon and saw the opposite.

Toyota is a great company to work for, albeit super boring.

Most well-run operations tend to be boring, because there are not enough fuck-ups to make it interesting. Kind of what you want. Agree on the Amazon thing, despite being super efficient, and operationally well-run, they could care more about people. To put it diplomatically. Amazon is very consistent between blue and white collar so. That cannot be said about a lot other companies out there.

Being ethical is often aligned with being boring. I don't want the employees at my insurance company doing anything exciting with my personal information.

Or with two ton metal death traps going at 100mph.

Boring in manufacturing is good.

The ethical and boring axes are orthogonal.

I didn't expect to read that ethical and boring are aligned during Black History Month (US).

I would still argue that orderly actions that follow an established code tend to be boring, and that such codes are generally set up to encourage ethical actions.

"Don't be evil" was a good value. Google just didn't want to be bound by it.

"Google: We Are Beyond Good-versus-Evil" (TM)

Google meets Nietzsche.

> One of my personal maxims is "Lead people not into temptation". In other words, no addictive (engagement) features, no lock-in, don't create dependency, make sure the code you write enables people and gives then freedom and choice (migration/federation etc). Again, those values are almost impossible to maintain in todays climate of hyper-exploitation.

This is the most insightful comment I've read this week. I'm surprised no one has made the connection before. It has deep historical meaning and deep implications for where we're headed.

I'd suggest the best example of anti-values is in the Agile Manifesto.

They state that they value (as an example) individuals and interactions over processes and tools. But they make it clear that while there's value in the things on the right, they value the things on the left more.

In the way the author describes, I always found this framing to be super helpful for decision-making.

It's also something that frustrated me about the (otherwise fantastic) Amazon Leadership Principles. When should I dive deep and when should I have bias for action? I realise now that I should have bias for action when it's a reversible decision and dive deep when it's a one way door. But it's not clear from the principles themselves in the way it's clear in the Agile Manifesto.

I’ve come to wonder if Google’s “don’t be evil” secretly always meant “don’t be truly evil, just skirt the edge of being evil”. It’s much more profitable being in the grey zone.

"Don't be evil" is a dreadful credo. Allows a ridiculous amount of wiggle room. The fact that these very smart people formulated their beliefs in such a self-consciously childish manner should have been taken as a warning.

I don't think you are giving them enough credit.

Choosing "don't be evil" as a credo deliberately encourages others to view the company through a moral lens. It is an invitation to judge the company according to a higher standard than most businesses would hold themselves to. It makes explicit that the company takes responsibility for the moral implications of what they do instead of pretending to live in an amoral value-free universe like many other corporations do.

I think it was a courageous motto and I'm sad they dropped it.

Fair enough. Although I still think people should not have expected so vague an ethos to survive the transition to a huge, publicly traded company.

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