"Don't Be Evil" Was a Lie from the Start (2024)

The don’t be evil thing was one engineer. The legend was that He was in some meeting where product managers were sounding a little evil in their presentation. He walked up to the whiteboard, wrote that on it and left.

Googlers adopted that as an unofficial motto. Until at some point Google leadership didn’t like it and officially declared that it was not, and had never been an official Google motto.

And saying there was no support is a bit odd. Crittenden 5 was a building entirely peopled by hundreds of AdWords support girls. (The head of that org only wanted to hire pretty young women for some reason).

I do believe the thing about inadequate communication of requirements, crappy appeals process and business risk. But I challenge one other thing. Pretty sure it returned more than it cost. Small business, tight margins. The only reason they continue to pay is that it makes them more money than it costs. The very second that changes people stop spending.

This is not a betrayal, it's a tiny study in Hegelian philosophy: the proposition is built from its negation.

The ideological aspect at play is that it was known and understood from the start that the temptation was there and a clearly defined as a means.

Someone telling you what they don't want to be may be telling you what they want to be.

Politics is rife with such seeming contradictions. The beauty of power is living beyond your own concerns.

> Don't anthropomorphize the grass cutter. All social structures...

What could be more anthropomorphic than "social structures"? Baffling comment.

Don't anthropomorphize the grass cutter. All social structures, be it for-profit corporation or something else, are ultimately like this. Use the good thing while it is still there, ditch it once they pivot to being assholes. No hard feelings.

In other words, it was a diversion away from the inevitable.

The sad part was the number of young, naive Google fans taken in by it.

These days, AI companies don’t even pretend anymore.

I agree with the sentiment although the post seems unnecessarily vitriolic. It's AI generated however, and I don't believe AI generated slop posts deserve consideration, either on HN or Reddit. If they rather not take the time to write something that long, they're free to write a prompt-length post instead of forcing us to read the AI equivalent of a zipbomb.