Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google | Hacker News Reader

Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

wordsmith.social

258 pointsstego-tech199 comments

I was a teen in the 90s, in my circles it was Understood that the data was not private.

Some of this in any case sounds like the usual "did not grow up in white collar society, got white collar job, got in trouble for violating white collar norms" that class-changers go through. Lots of !!fun!!.

I too get troubled when the operations staff get "invisible'd" - they are members of society too and should be treated with dignity. But in a tolerably decent situation, they are recognized and respected in their field as well. Even if its the evening shift to do the janitorial work. There's nothing _immoral_ about having a party and hiring some people to clean up. It's treating them as _lower_ than you that is the failure.

Anyway. There's an - as far as I know - as yet unwritten story around those of us who came from non-white collar backgrounds and found this new world confusing.

As another poster[1] put it, it's important to remember that these white collar people's privilege often comes at the expense of others, and to not treat them like they are furniture in the background--they are people and deserve to be recognized and treated as people.

And this is true all the way up to the top! For each of the many rungs on the socio-economic totem pole, there are many people on that rung who treat everyone on rungs below them as if they're invisible robotic servants.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44201256

My manager at Google wanted me to change my personal “about me” snippet in the introductory email he was about to send out: It needed some information about where I previously worked (which I intentionally left out — who cares?? I’m here now!)

I never really thought much of it at the time. Internalized that as “oh, I misunderstood the purpose of the email.” But it tracks with elements of OP’s story; the exposition of your identity is curated.

> Google back then prided itself on broadcasting its Best Place To Work award, won year after year after year. Younger people will have trouble picturing this, but Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps;

It's crazy to think about now. Google's image was a big driver in my choice to go back to school and start a tech career, my end and pretty much only goal was to work at google. I made it through several rounds of interviews and got rejected pretty late. It hurt really bad at that time, but looking back now, I think it was one of the best things that could have happened to me.

I was curious about Google's current Best Place to Work rating. Forbes puts Alphabet at #2, but there are competing lists and Google is #6 on some others.

https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/

Very well-written. My main takeaway and constant reminder is that our privilege, no matter the size, usually comes at someone's expense.

Exactly, and it's funny because here everytime we discuss the impact of AI on vulnerable population, be it for taking jobs / increasing CO2 consumption / destabilizing politics, there's always a rich white guy with his cushy programmer job saying "but I don't understand, to me all this AI stuff is nice, I can work even more comfortably"...

I don't think I have ever seen someone on HN dismiss concerns about AI's impact on other people by saying it's good for them personally. I think you have a stereotype of a white guy with a cushy programmer job in your head, and you hear him saying this when other people of various races say other things.

I mean, just this week there was a popular post “My AI Skeptic Friends are all Nuts” that generated a ton of such discussion and dismissal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063

Exactly

I don't think I have ever seen someone on HN dismiss concerns about AI's impact on other people by saying it's good for them personally.

You may read different threads than the parent. I see it occasionally. Not as often as the crypto bros, but it exists on HN.

Oh my friend, you are visiting a different hn than a lot of us. I nearly got in a flame war yesterday with a noob and had to step back because of the density, caught my self being bated by a potential troll. Their argument was exactly what you’re claiming to have not seen.

To be fair I never stereotyped them even in my mind. But the audacity and dismissal of others was very bating.

I did my best but still a very poor job of arguing and had to step away.

> there's always a rich white guy with his cushy programmer job saying "but I don't understand, to me all this AI stuff is nice, I can work even more comfortably"...

How do you know they are white?

Thanks for your question that totally misses the point (get some basic statistics about the population reading HN if you want...)

So in other words: stereotyping and racism is okay when I do it because they're privileged? (Don't even bother with the bullshit power + privilege = racism formula definition of racism just made up by idiots.)

I may be white, but what I hear you saying is my being gay doesn't earn me any brown-ie points, then?

Please don't generalise by a single aspect (skin colour). You will skip over many minorities and individuals by doing so, just because they share one attribute.

"we need to be going after all these overly privileged white male programmers, they're horrible people" - said the overly privileged indian/chinese male programmer

Or a guy?

> You cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and how they deserve it actually.

I wonder why we don't see more software engineering co ops?

Because people don't like risk and if they can make a boat load of money without risk they would rather do that than make 10 boat loads of money with risk.

Eh it's because wealth accumulation has meant that those with money have too much money to fail, so to speak. Able to skirt legal boundaries and often push the cost onto the taxpayer.

Code doesn’t make engineers money.

Selling the code does.

Engineers typically aren’t very good sales people.

Why not have a marketer at the co-op?

That is how a lot of software engineering firms run in practice - the good engineers have buy in through stock options.

A lot of engineers are replaceable though. They get less stock.

Meritocracy

the myth of

Because people who would support a coop and write posts like these usually end up being disastrous company leads. Then add multiple of them and committees.

Co-ops amplify the people problems and you are now locked in a room with people who know how to code but don't know how to make money.

Because someone has to put up the money. And the people who put up the money want a return on it, or they will put their money somewhere else.

I believe Spain does this.

Annoyingly this is a hard concept to search because co-op is also another word for, basically, an internship.

Here is an example: https://autonomic.zone/

A combination of a persistent strain of rugged individualist libertarian attitudes and ego. Everyone thinking we're better than everyone else and if only we could be in charge everything would be better than if those other idiots were prevents the kind of solidarity needed to do co-ops or professional associations or partnerships like lawyers.

Imagine having 2 or more of the OP in the same organization, raging at each other about a tiny, perceived difference in outlook. You can easily have software engineering partnership but it's clear that a person like the OP would destroy any organization, no matter the structure, which is probably why they describe themselves as an anarchist (i.e. a person with a life-long inability to adapt to any give context).

>OP would destroy any organization, no matter the structure, which is probably why they describe themselves as an anarchist (i.e. a person with a life-long inability to adapt to any give context).

Hardly 'anarchist'.

Man, "bring your whole self to work" was well intentioned but ultimately a mistake. Just bring the part that knows how to program computers, and leave whatever part this is turned off from 9-5.

I always assumed "bring your whole self to work" was just a nice way to lead into "you don't need work/life balance because your work is your life"

What kind of life is that? To be a sterile, subservient entity for the majority of your existence.

Being authentic in the working world helps in so many ways. And it works when your goals and the goals of the company align. The advice to just shut up and code leads to no good outcomes for anyone.

Are there parts of your whole self that are not always appropriate to bring up? I sure think so. If one team mates whole self includes their support for Israel and another whole self is their support for Palestine, maybe we can leave some of these whole selfs at home, and just talk about work, and maybe how our camping trip this weekend was. People shouldn't have to be proselytized by any other people's extreme religious or political views at work.

Very true, there is a balance to be found. The suggestion from OP to leave it all at home, to focus purely on skill and merit is too black/white.

Good ways to bring your unique perspective to a professional context: intervening to avoid making some users feel offended or excluded, before a project ships to those users.

Bad ways: just yammering about how you are poly, bi, trans, and a revolutionary anarchist while we are trying to finalize OKRs for the quarter.

>be a sterile, subservient entity for the majority of your existence

yeah, having a job sucks shit, we know

most people don't have the luxury of working a job that's worth aligning with

This isn't how people really are.

People have different presentations for different social contexts. That's typical and normal. For a working example, the social context of the marital bedroom is not the social context of the city playground where you mind your kids. Differences in clothing, actions, words.

This spans into most areas of life.

You don't have to sterilize your work life - but you do have to have _boundaries_.

But this is how people really are. Being authentic is easier for some because the corporate world more closely aligns with the dominant culture. Take the casual ignorance of an employee PC background of a sexy woman, because that's just how the boys are. Or how women are meant to breastfeed out of sight.

People do present differently in different contexts. But it is a requirement to file off all your sharp edges to participate effectively in the workplace. Intentionally limiting yourself, your output, to cater to the social conformity of others seems to be an anti-goal. But it is what we do.

Your authenticity is not everyone’s authenticity.

And the opposite is true. There's a balance. For some that authenticity really works for them at work (those with a general curiosity, an interest in how groups interact and work, who are workaholics) and it aligns. For others it does not and is unfortunate in its requirement of more energy to suppress and lack of natural culture-fit.

Obviously. And I do believe the same type of person who wants to "bring your whole self to work" also is the most disgusted by seeing it implemented. If there had been a culture of professionalism you obviously do not ask some random other employees about gay slang.

Ultimately work is a give and take. And it gets easier when it is clearly defined what is given and what is taken. That is what "professionalism" in a work environment is about. Pretending that work is some great family adventure can only lead to terrible results when conflict inevitably arises.

To be honest, I don't even know what "bring your whole self to work" means. If it means that I need to mix my personal life with my work life or a rejection of behaving as a mature professional, then I object strongly to the idea.

This misses the point. Certain groups of people have always been able to bring their whole selves to work. For example, if you're straight and married with kids, there's never been a problem about casually mentioning these things to your colleagues.

In another post, you mention

>Bad ways [to bring your whole self to work]: just yammering about how you are poly, bi, trans, and a revolutionary anarchist while we are trying to finalize OKRs for the quarter.

Do you know who 'yammers' most about their personal lives? Straight people with kids! It's not even close. I wish the majority of people doing the yammering were poly, bi and trans. It might be a touch less boring.

See, you have improperly conflated reproductive preference with sexual orientation and gender expression. That's exclusionary!

No, I haven't. I'm just saying that straight people with kids often talk about their personal lives at work (which is fine), whereas other groups of people don't always feel as free to do the same thing. If we were making a list of "kinds of people who are likely to talk lots about their personal lives in a work environment", then bi trans poly folks would not be at the top of it. If you genuinely disagree with any of those points then we can have a discussion about it. But I can't really connect your sarcastic response with what I originally said.

> If we were making a list of "kinds of people who are likely to talk lots about their personal lives in a work environment", then bi trans poly folks would not be at the top of it.

Correct. The #1 position for people who talk about their personal life and interests at work, far ahead of anyone else, would be the people who really love bicycles. Straight people with kids would be somewhere in the top 10, although perhaps not in the top 5. And gay, bi and trans folk would not even be in the top 10.

> Like most employees I blamed myself for not working hard enough to get good compensation

ohh. I feel like I understanding something about my peers now that I had not caught onto before

The dictbot story's interpretation of why TVCs (that's what they were called when I was at Google; never heard "temps, part-timers, and contractors") need to be treated like second-class citizens is incorrect.

It's not because they wanted Engineers to feel like golden gods to build their egos - it's because they don't want the TVCs to be treated as employees under employment law. There was a guy who worked in the kitchens who got added to access the music room storage closet in PDX so he could keep his guitar there, and we were told he had to be removed since he was a TVC. That closet is apparently "FTEs and interns only", because if we treat our kitchen staff too well they might have to be given the same benefits as the rest of us.

It used to be possible for somebody to work their way up from the mailroom to the executive suite. This path has been deliberately destroyed because the owning class wants to divide employees into different classes.

No war but class war.

Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email. The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform. The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday. The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about. What a dystopia, Brazil would have been better off without Google definitely, if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things.

all the instances they discussed highlight the contrast between what google presented itself as, vs what it actually was. i dont think this person is asking for sympathy, i think they hate google for trying to pretend its anything different than any other big profit seeking enterprise. sounds like you are well on your way to the hostility the author very succinctly describes

And yet, there are much more pernicious elements to dystopia Google has become and ways that it perpetuates them through the efforts of people just like this so that they can literally have a "free lunch". These are the type of complaints that minimize the actual failure of "don't be evil" as implemented by their very efforts. Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.

> Personnel minutia distract from the Orwellian prize.

The "minutiae" you so casually refer to are people. The OP understands that:

> The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

Actually, no. Anyone can be "creeped the Fuck out" about anything anywhere. It's their right. That's "just like uh, your opinion, man". One can be annoyed by business processes, vaguely offended by decor, or the stiffness of the uniforms at Dachau, and it's kind of irrelevant.

I'll try to be more clear. This reads like reality TV drama when there are bigger things going on. It misses the dark forest for the brown weeds.

To me the bigger point really IS the corporate dehumanization, but the details (other than the white gringos laughing about layoffs) distract from the deeper issues and sound more like gripes of a coddled coder than real criticism. When an individual is more concerned with their own personal jokes/disses than the work they're doing, you get folks at Enron joking about turning off "GrandMa Millie's" electricity in profitable, but unnecessary rolling blackouts.

They actually sold out.

Thank you :)

The “obnoxiously open about” part of your post says much about you. Your post would have been much better without that part.

Google was “obnoxiously open about” do no evil and the other stuff described in the blog post. It’s natural for people who bought into those lies to react accordingly. Nothing in the blog post suggests a belief that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things.

Anarchists generally don't want to run things, they usually aim for that thing witj freedom, um, what's it called again... oh yes, democracy.

Yeah it says that I think she sounds obnoxious. Google's PR was also annoying. Considering she calls it a dystopia and her usage of Marxist terms I do think she believes that she has better ideas about how society should work. Saying nothing in the blog could suggest that is absurd.

It's easier to know how things "should not work", and that's a good thing. At least knowing what is not right you're allowed to do a quarter of a step in the right direction. Being an anarchist herself, I don't think she'd know how things should be, only how it should not be.

You didn’t say she sounds obnoxious. You said she is obnoxiously open about her identity. The phrasing you used says much about you.

Nothing in the post suggests that polyamorous anarchists would be better at running things. The post suggests that there are things Google didn’t live up to in terms of what it claimed about itself. You should try to analyze things unemotionally. Perhaps then you wouldn’t make such obviously bad conclusions.

Well let me be clear, I think she sounds obnoxious in general too. What does that say about me?

I think pretty much every example given in this story is pretty typical and in line with the expectations a sane person should have when deciding to work at a large corporation. Clearly the author didn't like it, and I think it's fairly obvious that the author thinks Google should have done things differently. If that reads as too emotional on my end for you I am sorry but I can't help but be a human being.

You do have a capacity to misread and draw the wrong conclusion. The emotional part of your original response refers to the “obnoxiously open” about her identity statement and your ending sentence regarding polyamorous anarchists being better about things. Your biases interfered with your interpretation of what she wrote. Your original post would have been much better had you kept these parts out of your response.

All interpretations are biased, thanks for letting me know what you like and dislike about my post.

Yes all interpretations are biased. Not all elucidations expose those biases to the reader. You had the right amount of sarcasm for most of your post but then brought in references to gender identity that were not germain to your points. They were needless digs that detracted from your main points.

Yes, she did bring up the part about being asked for terms her community uses. She came across as irrational in this part. It’s best to just leave it alone or mention how she came across irrational without saying she is “obvious” about her identity. That line took away some of your credibility. At least to me. I could be wrong.

germane

Your comments tell me you're pretty obnoxious in general

There's a quote, at least from the movie, where Zuckerberg calls people "dumb fucks." I honestly have to think the same about anyone that seriously bought into a corporation putting "do no evil" in a mission statement.

It is simply not possible to extract billions of dollars unless you have ascended above the idea of not fucking people over.

This is gonna sound like I disagree, but I don't. What is the amount of money that a company, or better yet, a person can earn before the explotive alarm goes off?

I bet if we really start hashing this out the number is real small, but you won't be able to talk about it because it'll make everyone in $750,000 houses feel bad.

It's one of the reasons I'm loathe to look for another "job" and instead pitch my services on HN or wherever. I cannot abide another job that pays well but makes it impossible to get a good night's sleep, regularly.

>The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about

>if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things

This comment comes off as highly reactionary.

Using "reactionary" as a boo light is not a substantive comment. If you think he's wrong, argue why rather than just going "ew, right wing".

> if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things

The straw man is obvious. There was no coherent argument to be made against a constructed absurdity.

She says she is a polyamorous anarchist...

That she is one, is fact. That she claimed she or people like her should be running things, is an imagined strawman.

Not really. She clearly thought that Google was doing things wrong and that her suggestions to make them better and correct them weren’t sufficiently heard.

Yeah, because Google at that time claimed to be the sort of company that would listen to complaints. Being upset with a company for not following their own publicly stated policies, e.g. the bait and switch of "20% time" plus "we're assigning you at least 40 hours work per week" is entirely reasonable and not an implied "and I should be running things".

Some people are able to point out problems without saying "and I am the solution".

Others are not capable of seeing a problem pointed out without assuming the speaker is holding themselves up as a paragon of what ought be.

Literally everyone can complain about problems. You can see in the post she has different ideas of how things should be done, how she should be working on different things, how she should be allowed to go to Japan, how they shouldn't use air purifiers, how people should act when a layoff is about to happen, how temp workers should be treated and on and on. I'm not even saying all of these ideas she had are all wrong or bad. But she clearly has solutions and a vision of how Google should operate.

It's only a "boo light" if you think that it's a bad thing.

Do you think that being reactionary is a bad thing?

The GP obviously used reactionary as a negative term to dismiss their arguments, and this line of thinking does not answer the arguments.

What arguments did they even make? All they did was make a snarky comment against the "vibe" of the article. That's why I called it "reactionary"

Was it against the vibe or against almost every anecdote she shared that isn’t really dystopic at all?

>If you think he's wrong, argue why rather than just going "ew, right wing".

I'd rather save my energy. Not every comment you see online is deserving of respect or a thoughtful response. It's clear they weren't willing to actually engage with the article and provide a meaningful comment, and I pointed that out before disengaging.

> It's clear they weren't willing to actually engage with the article and provide a meaningful comment, and I pointed that out before disengaging.

Irony is a lost artform.

Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things!

You can't have radical transparency without a blameless culture. Calling someone out in the open is in bad taste anywhere. It's also common sense. As Omar says, "If you come at the king, you best not miss." It's possible that the author really did just write an innocuous post criticizing recruiting practices, but I don't see why their the manager would single out the boss if that were the case.

The negative thing being described was the inability of 95% of the engineers to use the 20% time which was being described by the company as a general perk.

"The company is deceiving people and should reconsider messaging to reflect reality" is not a personal attack; even in a "blameless" culture, you are expected to note that the causal chain includes "Dave hit the wrong button, which should not have happened because we should have safeguards on the button and reviews to make sure we have safeguards on all the expensive/dangerous buttons." Sorry, Dave.

20% time was always for the high performers who can do 100% of their work in 80% of the time.

That's what she portrayed it as, but it doesn't pass the smell test. Why would a manager be yelled at for company wide statistics? This and all the other aggressive framing suggests to me that she's not a reliable narrator. If everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it’s time to check your shoes.

I believe what he likely meant (though not what he said), was that radical transparency shouldn’t be taken as a license to be an asshole.

I say that as a manager of narcissistic assholes who are always “brutally honest” and feel that their honesty excuses their brutality.

> Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email.

The horror of finding out that my employer lies to me and invades my basic human right to privacy, because they know they can only get what they want from me by manipulating me.

> The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform.

The tragedy of pointing out, that apparently only some deverse clean water, while others don't, and having it fall on deaf ears.

> The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday.

The inhumanity of devaluing people based on their misfortune in life, that didn't enable them to jump into a well paying tech job.

> The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about.

The absolute gall of my employer to berate me about my pride, my _identity_ they find so obnoxious, only to take advantage of it once it serves their purpose.

The water purifier thing was CARTOONISHLY evil, like you took it from the fucking Fallout Universe!!!!

> The horror of finding out that my employer lies to me and invades my basic human right to privacy

It’s a pretty well known fact that work communication isn’t private, for auditing purposes, business continuity etc. You can always use your personal email instead.

Be kind. Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

found one

you read the whole thing taking notes and ignored the main theme? that's some bootlicking good dedication. I'm impressed.

I didn't need to take notes. I didn't need to ignore the theme

I feel sad for you that are actually humans and are saying negative things against this extremely well written post.

Perhaps you are doing it out of cognitive dissonance that you could be a baddie too. Perhaps you have lost the ability to read long form, it's certainly not encouraged any more. Perhaps doing it because you are being paid to shill a narrative (I still feel bad for you).

And for those of you that are bots saying these things, I probably feel bad for the ones who programmed you.

And I feel bad for us all that it is now almost impossible to know who is human, what is paid for, and what is real discourse.

I do not think the original post was propaganda. I think this was just someone who cares and wrote something because she wanted people to care. I applaud the author. I feel good knowing that something like this got written and read and shared.

Could it be that I am wrong in my assessment that this is excellently written and negative assessments are unfounded? I could be, but I wanted to add my assessment to the fray. I identify as human and not paid to write this comment, btw.

> And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy. With no exciting research positions nor self-managed time nor compensation, what was the advantage over a high-paying job at Microsoft or IBM?

When did Google pay less than Microsoft/IBM?

I think the author is taking about Brazil? It wasn't clear to me until later in the article.

The two-paragraph introduction explicitly places this article in Brazil in 2007

Which confused me, as someone from Belo Horizonte who started uni just around that time. As far as I knew, Google was generally known one of the highest paying companies by far back then. It's benefits were unmatched because the SV-style of office with all the perks were not commonplace in the region, and employee turnover was low to non-existent. Even getting an interview if you didn't have a masters or phd was pretty difficult if not impossible(without connections).

This entire blog post is so poorly written that I was confused as well. They mention Brazil, but they also mention Arizona. And for some reason the person who asked them about gay lingo wasn't Brazilian so were they in the US? It was a very tough read.

> Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again

This part is talking about VISITING ARIZONA. As in, they are not from nor do they live in Arizona.

> One day one of the AdSense people asked me for a little meeting. They sat right by my desk, all sleek and confident, and said that they had heard I was a Gaygler™ and were wondering if I could help with one of their clients. “Can you tell me some words that the Brazilian gay community uses? like slang, popular media you like, names of parties, that kind of thing?”

Nowhere does it say that they're not Brazilian. Is this because they asked for Brazilian gay slang specifically? I assume they just wanted to be specific, to get terms used in Brazil. If I ask someone to name some Canadian foods, that doesn't mean I'm not Canadian.

I'm not in love with this article or anything but I am baffled by the number of people on this website, who I assume have rudimentary reading comprehension, getting confused by the fact that a different location is mentioned, even though the article opens by specifying exactly where and when it's set.

English is not everybody's first language. And, fwiw, I like to think that I'm as fluent in English as I am in my native language but still the article threw me off too (even while I otherwise liked it).

Notably, it doesn't start with something like "I'm from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and worked at the local Google branch back in 2007" or something like that. Instead, it says this:

> let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007…

I mean if you're from Brazil, this is kinda weird no? Who describes their home country as a tropical place to "journey" towards? It reads like the start of a small anecdotal flashback, and not like the setting of the entire story. It took me many paragraphs to figure out that actually Arizona was the trip, and Brazil was the home base, and not the other way around. I did figure it out in the end, but I can understand why people might be thrown off.

If I read something that isn't in my native language and don't understand it, I don't claim that it's poorly written.

I didn't defend that claim, I agree that it's ridiculous.

I was responding to this accusation, which I think is also ridiculous:

> I am baffled by the number of people on this website, who I assume have rudimentary reading comprehension, getting confused [..]

It's hard to admit publicly that you're confused by something. It's easy to call people who do so idiots, "ha! i did understand it so you must be stupid!". You didn't use those kinds of words but you did imply it and I didn't think it was good style.

And yes, if I was telling someone a story, I might say "cast your mind to the snowy wastes of Canada..." as a fairly standard rhetorical flourish for someone who doesn't think of their country as the default location.

I just love how John Patience became Джона Пейшенса, like it is some exotic slavic woman's name.

Wait until you hear how USSR VLKSM used to denounce the “KLESh” in posters.

> It did not even occur to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the actual point was to get rich.

I feel that as a GenX'er I should now dispense some wisdom to Millenials and Zoomers about life, but I just don't have the energy. Read Gaetano Mosca.

Some of us are in our 40s. We know how shit works. Almost everyone can fall into the trap of telling yourself that "it's not that bad", "this is how it's suppose to work" or "If it was that bad it would be illegal/have been shutdown", only to later get wiser and see it scam, fraud or just the darker side of how some companies operate.

Millenials are not young anymore, haven't been for some time. We know.

>Millennials are not young anymore

As a middle of the pack Millennial (late 30s) Its wild to think I'm older than my Dad was when he introduced me to Slashdot as a young teen.

Now that’s a cool dad!

Thank you o wise one, may you rest and gather enough mana to dispense your wisdom next time you comment.

What a terribly written article. I do not understand at all why you wouldn't start out by saying that you worked in Brazil for Google, instead the reader has to discover that half way in, suggesting you were in Phoenix was a really nice move to make sure that essential detail was hard to extract. There was "tea" promised but the story is literally "I was an obvious nuisance because I was the only one who believed corporate propaganda and got fired for it", how absolutely uninteresting and I do not understand why it would take this amount of space to write down.

It does start out by saying they worked in Brazil for Google.

> The fact that Google fired me...

Normally you have to work somewhere to get fired. I suppose that's an assumption I made upon reading that part.

> let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007…

This article is set in Brazil, in 2007. Did you skip the introduction and then complain about the lack of an introduction?

Didn't even get fired for it, they were laid off because of 2008!

Yes, although being on the "annoyed me" list of the boss likely played part in whom to fire.

They shut down the boss's office in Arizona too

I experienced no such confusion.

From the second paragraph before any mention of Phoenix or Arizona:

> let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007

I feel exactly the same as you. The entire thing is horribly written and feels like they think were victimized when I can't see where they were.

This kind of literary genre is popular these days and it always ends with being surprised that actions have consequences

> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's “organising the information of the world” turned out to be indexing which Gaza families to bomb, children and all; “making money in the free market to invest in social change” was about bankrolling literal, textbook fascism. Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again, and my kids will never know a world that's not like this; but for me I saw this world being forged up close and personal, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

This hits home.

Seems overly dramatic

Sure, to make a point though.

Dark times when people can become "overly dramatic" for things that are essential. A relaxation, and forgotten fundamental rights. "It is what it is"

From a place of privilege, it might seem so!

> indexing which Gaza families to bomb

Wtf does this even mean? If Hamas used Google docs to plan their attack, does that make Google guilty of killing Israeli families? Coincidentally, this sort of hyperbole always seems to end at the critic's own actions in the chain of complicity of evil. I've never heard an activist call claim that they were personally funding genocide by paying taxes.

Israel has many ties with corporations and governments. This might be why, but I'm also not sure what the author's talking about. It would be nice to have some context.

the author is grandstanding from an unprincipled stance. Israel can choose which families are harboring Hamas members and decide which houses to bomb or just bomb everything.

Hamas could also surrender after losing the war they started, at any time, and stand trial for starting a war. Hamas can choose to stop using their children as shields at any time. Hamas is to blame for everything.

If a murderer hides in your home, or not, when you and your children are inside, whether you like it or not, you can be bombed, if said house is in Gaza.

If you live in the US or Israel, you would have hundreds of effectives for every house, instead of killing people in a ratio of 60 to 1 (and counting)

I understand your confusion. The author wrote this article for an audience that has the same background as her, ignoring that not everyone has the same information. So it ended up confusing for a lot of people.

It’s a metaphor, probably referring to military contracts that have come to light: https://theintercept.com/2025/05/12/google-nimbus-israel-mil...

Accepting a mil/gov contract is quite a few steps removed from incidental usage of google docs.

> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware

This is not true. Free software is not.

It can be. Ubuntu is spyware according to RMS[0].

[0]https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

Mmm. Every time I download an ISO image or clone a Git repository, there is a record

So you are talking about the software running on the server.

Of course, it can be, but it's so easy to fix by forking that it doesn't matter, unlike with non-free software. AFAIK Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu is not spyware.

Also, Ubuntu is not free software. Only some parts of it are free.

Just a small caveat, that article was from 2012 (13 years ago). Things may have changed for the better or worse since then.

> Free software is not.

A lot of free software is.

Give me examples not containing proprietary bits.

You are disagreeing about the meaning of the word free.

No, the definition is settled and based on the license.

self built chromium

This is a good example. It demonstrates that today the four freedoms may not be sufficient. Of course if you compile it yourself, you can remove the spying, but with the Google's browser it becomes harder and harder with time.

The article is better than I expected. I'm about of the same age of the author and Brazilian, and I can relate to the feeling that Internet companies would improve the world

My only nitpick it to charge Google of the invisibility of maids and servants in Brazil. Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world and this is part of the country culture. Google is not guilty here.

At least we are improving. Nobody with a brain still think that techno companies and billionaires are anything more than comic book super villains.

> Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things.

Lmao. This level of cognitive dissonance is always incredible to me.

Coming from their manager, I suspect it could have also been meant as:

"Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things."

That isn't cognitive dissonance - it is doublespeak. Cognitive dissonance is when someone's mind unexpectedly encounters an internal contradiction and goes haywire trying to match assumptions up.

Old mate manager doesn't have any internal mental contradictions. They are explaining that the words have one meaning in the dictionary and another meaning when used together in the workplace. Well understood thing that happens everywhere.

Like the old Simpsons episode : Marge, there is the truth and the truth

pd: I watched it in Spanish, so perhaps it is different in English.

As the author himself points out, nobody but him believed the corporate nonsense. This isn't cognitive dissonance, this is "You actually really believe these things?"

*herself

Started off naive and then transitioned to considering Google to be representative of all Capitalist enterprises. Progress?

> Google, if you remember, was the Best Place To Work. It was very important that every promising young engineer thought of Google as the dream job where everyone is happy. Unhappiness isn't allowed. My manager was severely scolded by his manager for having dissatisfaction (gasp) within his team.

Gotta love the pure distilled dystopia concentrate here, complete with totalitarianism vibes!

> What is crypto mining if not a textbook Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did lots of killing and razing and destroying?

Are you serious? You complain about the 2008 crisis and capitalism and yet completely neglect the true purpose of crypto? No wonder you drank the Google kool-aid

>the true purpose of crypto

What's the latest version of this one these days?

“Enabling the Dark Economy” is one I’ve heard.

>the true purpose of crypt

Fraud?

Fraud is a tiny sliver and it would be unfair to judge crypto on that alone. There's also ransomware, extortion, payments for drugs and theft by North Korea hackers.

You missed arms dealing, human trafficking and sanctions avoidance, but then there seems to be a lot of cryptobros who would think those are features not bugs.

> there seems to be a lot of cryptobros who would think those are features not bugs.

That's an unfair generalization of a completely normal group of people who just want to own islands where age of consent doesn't exist.

Touche! They have gotten so innovative with it

But what about theft?

Clearly there are way too many bad actors now which makes it seem like a fraud to anyone from the outside

A system that enables a proliferation of fraudsters _might_ have an inherent flaw that needs addressing.

As if the banking system is any better. How can any legitimate payment system which has no cryptographic operations, is highly centralized, where the money can be printed out of thin air and way too many other reasons, be taken seriously?

Because it works, and we've developed massive institutions (the federal reserve, FDIC, SWIFT, credit rating agencies, and other financial market utilities) to keep it working in a way that benefits the vast majority of people that use money

I'm so glad to witness the evolution from "Revolutionize finance" to "No worse than banking most of the time, right?"

Somehow 99.999% of the world's economy takes place upon it. Is all economic activity from the advent of banks to now not to be taken seriously?

You've essentially just backed up the quote from your first post with this comment.

What's the true purpose of crypto? It can be used to escape the banking system?

Asset that can't be involuntarily taken away or printed by a government.

It seems like Crypto can be taken away by the government. If the government orders you to give up your crypto they will just throw you in a cell until you comply. Or as it happening more and more often, a guy with a wrench persuades you to give it up.

They can't actually do that at a mass scale - they don't reliably know how much crypto any given person owns.

Ditto, if someone beats me with a wrench and I give them a password accessing $500 of crypto, what % of my stash have they just claimed? Do they stop or continue with the wrenching? What is the stopping condition here?

It blew my mind they did that with Gold in the US. It's really scary what were are capable of.

Only if you are "legible" to them.

Maybe barter should be better, then.

Sure it can.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...

> On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant of ZHONG’s Gainesville, Georgia, house, law enforcement seized approximately 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion. This seizure was then the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice and today remains the Department’s second largest financial seizure ever.

Having you physically within their jurisdiction (and/or drone strike reach) permits quite a bit of leverage. As the XKCD comic notes… https://xkcd.com/538/

It does seem slightly silly that a through-line of the article is disgust at societal power dynamics and surveillance, and then not recognize that Bitcoin and other proto-cryptocurrencies were invented by anarchist cypherpunks as a solution to the same thing in the monetary system.

The author of this article is not slamming the authors of the protocol. They're criticizing what it became and what it's used for now. There's a difference.

You can not seriously claim that this modern incarnation of Bitcoin is what was originally intended. That would be ridiculous.

Did it work?

"Privacycoins" exist and lots of anarchist cypherpunks are able to use them to buy drugs, so I'm liable to say yes

Not for you. Come to think of it, a monetary system which is designed on cryptographic operations would never be truly understood by people who love being oppressed and thrive under the mass surveillance of the banking system. You are just a stupid pawn

If only we were all as smart and enlightened as you.

That's a no then?

avoiding monetary control policies?

hmm, disagree with many of the takes in here, although some sentences of insight and truth.

Can you elaborate?

Peter Thiel said it better: https://youtu.be/gQPlhycLmMk?t=415

I never sold out. When I sold off the last of my web sites and domains (mostly ad driven), I only sold the web sites, and not the code that ran them. I had built a very complicated spider that scraped all the main social media sites looking for my articles, that would suggest places they weren't found that might do well. I never built an auto submit bot, but could have easily. I submitted them manually to each site, so as not to break there TOS. I'd then track the newly submitted articles and see how they would spread on social media. I built a basic visualization tool that allowed 'seeing' the way information flows in an intuitive way.

What I learned about memetics and the way information flows was incalculable, and I realized it was like holding a weapon of mass destruction. The last thing I wanted to do was allow others to understand how it worked, or how to build one. I essentially burnt what I built because I didn't want it to fall in the wrong hands.

Could someone build it themselves? Probably, but I put 15 years of my life into building it, and I did so when the Internet was still useful. I only put enough of my thought process about the system online to allude to the fact that I had built it, not enough for someone to reconstruct it. When I sold the last of the sites, I took the code offline and unplugged the hard drive and hid it.

It's been almost 6 years since then and the only companies to come close are wasting there time with LLM. I do not think the current iteration of A.I. is even close thankfully, but at some point someone is going to crack it, probably even better than I did (I had a limited budget, slow internet, and was working mostly by myself).

Can't tell if schizo or not.

I love this so mysterious.

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