The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds

>You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

1. Or work in areas which do not handle data that the US requires by law. You can find software jobs in the US that do not require collaboration with governmental domestic spying. For instance many people choose not to work for companies that build weapons of war for a variety of reasons. These people can still work inside the US.

2. Additionally non-US residents work for Google. Being outside the US doesn't really have much relevance to the discuss.

3. I also reject the notion that Google had no choice. Google may have been able to comply with the letter of the law without giving up user data by using e2e cryptography. One can support or question their actions, but they are not powerless victims in this drama but active agents that can be held responsible for what they do.

There is something these companies allowed that went beyond others, Twitter is not listed for example. As Snowden pointed out [1], these companies need to make some kind of technical assurances for privacy, otherwise customers (and potential employees) should look elsewhere.

[1] "The [telcom] companies should write enforceable clauses into their terms, guaranteeing their clients that they are not being spied on. And they should include technical guarantees. If you could move even a single company to do such a thing, it would improve the security of global communications. And when this appears to not be feasible, you should consider starting one such company yourself."

> You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

What makes you think you don't have to comply with US law if you work outside of the US?

If you're a US citizen living and working abroad, it will quickly become painfully clear exactly how much work you have to do to comply with US law (and how severe the penalties are if you don't). And US citizen or not, you might be surprised at how many non-US companies elect to comply with various aspects of US law for business reasons.

We still don't really know what PRISM is or how it functions. It does appear that US companies did provide overly broad information to the US government using the following logic.

1. The US government gets massive amounts of information from these companies and can get this information in real time with no oversight,

2. none of these companies seem upset about it, which one imagines they would be if the US government was just stealing it without their permission,

3. and these companies have cooperated with the governments misinformation campaign (denials of "direct access" and such).

If they aren't responsible for initially giving them access, they are now responsible the governments continuing access since they have learned that the government does have access and they have not attempted to prevent the government from maintaining access and furthermore they have aided the government ability to maintain access by stifling public outcry about this access by lying to their users.

No, it's not. It's the truth.

Agreed. Even if it's true, I hope that the HN community can all agree that comments like this reflect poorly on us -- lets certainly not reward them.

Just curious, how offensive is "chick"? I catch myself accidentally using it every once in a while (a vestige of shitty, all-boys Catholic high schooling). Should I be mildly embarrassed or mortified?

I doubt you would have said the same thing if the post started with "that dude" or "that guy".

How is it misogynistic?

Calm down a second. You're obviously taking offense of the phrase "The chick in charge of the Internal Tools team?". While the word is often used in the fairly female hostile line of "I'm off to pick up chicks", it also has a very common usage for an (attractive) young woman in certain demographics.

As far as I can tell, the OP is not trying to make a misogynistic comment on purpose and biting his head off and shouting at him is not going to help the community, or the OP, or your point. If this was an actual misogynistic comments - "A girl in Google? Fire her!" - then the outrage would be well placed. A very commonly used colloquial term, however, at most deserves a polite request to use better language in future.

Once upon a time the word "misogynistic" actually had real meaning.

But, thanks to mostly people like you, that word has been hugely trivialized to mean not much more well... than anything really.

Let's not burn the OP at the stake just because he used a word that you think is somehow improper. That's something you have to deal with all on your own.

It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).

The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.

I think the fact that I worked there for over 5 and a half years should afford my opinion a bit more weight, but as I despise the Argument By Authority fallacy, I'll concede that any other Xoogler should be able to chime in and contradict me here.

Steve Yegge is probably a better example, but another that comes to mind is that Guido wrote the code review system there. He left for dropbox, but he was at Google for years, so clearly something was worth the 50% or whatever of his time left over from python dictatorship duties.

In an earlier comment, OP mentions leaving Google before Go was released, which was quite a while ago now, so not sure why he felt the need to chime in. He just sounds like he wanted to be an asshole, honestly.

I'm mocking the situation:

- Promotion is largely driven by launches

- Erego, people launch unnecessary shit

- That's ridiculous

- ???

- The New Hangouts

...any comments about the actual content of my post, or are we just going to talk about my odd use of SoCal surfer idioms for a while?

I'd disagree. But even if it is the "most direct", whatever that means, you don't think that there are more serious gender-assumption transgressions in the tech world? It's a little annoying to me that the first anecdote is the most superficial one.

I give the writer a pass, if Melody herself insists that that's the most important issue, or if that was, chronologically the first thing that Melody brought up.

One of the major design goals for Go was that incremental compiles should not require a rebuild of all dependencies. I believe they bake interface information into the library files for this reason. If you don't change a file, you shouldn't need to rebuild it.

If you sync to a later CL, you might need to rebuild what's changed, but even then all this should be cacheable across the company. Go was designed as a language to avoid a lot of the mess that the build tools have to deal with for C++.

I agree. I was approaching from the angle of being amused that they obviously put a lot of work into making C++ compile reasonably fast when they created a language that, amongst other things, addresses that issue by addressing the actual causes of slowness (as opposed to some giant cluster). I agree that for very few people compilation speed is "their" winning Go feature. (Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run)