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Comment by ckelvin | Hacker News Reader

Do you work for Google? If you do, ny the same metric, shouldn't we discount all your numerous posts defending Google and attacking their competitors?

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I do work for Google, but i explicitly don't speak for them on HN. I also don't work for Google Legal, and don't work on issues related to this stuff. I have opined on this stuff long before i worked for Google, and will long after.

Google literally does not pay me for my views on this.

Ben is literally paid for his anti-google views on this stuff.

You are of course, welcome to discount whatever you like. You should always read and judge everything critically :)

You may feel that way, and you may really be acting that way, but what matters is not so much what you do but how it is perceived. Simply being employed by someone introduces bias, or at least the perception of bias. Just as you raise important notes about Ben that readers of his "work" ought to be aware of while drawing conclusions from it, readers of your comments ought to be aware of your association to Google while drawing conclusions from what you say about its critics.

My conclusions from this thread are in fact that you mostly just happen to work for Google, that you have a long personal (and vaguely professional) interest in observing this dispute, and that Ben is a paid shill that abuses his credentials and the brand of his employer to make easy money. But it gave me pause that you weren't up-front about your own employer.

He's been consistently up-front about who he works for; he's even talked about which projects he's worked on. You haven't paid attention, and that's fine, but you can't then feign offense when he doesn't start every single conversation he has on the site with "I work for Google".

Also, once again: you can't accuse someone of being biased by their employer, and then say you've "taken pause" about it, without insulting that person's integrity. To do so casually says much more about you than the person you're talking about.

People like Daniel take a lot of flak on HN simply because they sign their names to their comments. As we saw downthread: not only do the anonymous assholes taking potshot not do that, but those anonymous people are actually paid shills.

It is fine to have questions about people, but you should have been much more careful asking them. You share a community with these people, but just now, you didn't act that way. Like they say on Wikipedia: WP:AGF.

(This is a hobby-horse issue with me on this site, because I've been here awhile and had a lot of dipshits question my integrity over utterly fictitious biases, like "you work in security so all that government contracting money you get selling vulnerabilities to the CIA is why your crypto advice is obviously corrupted by NSA".)

(Also: 'DannyBee is one of several compiler-wonk/lawyers we have on HN, and how cool is it that we have any of those? It pisses me off to see people try to chase them off with torches and pitchforks, even if those chasers are so dumb they're using nerf pitchforks.)

who is your employer?

I am going to suggest that the best settlement is probably a tutorial on the layout of Google search result pages.

You are part of Google, an you are paid by them. You are invested in Google, and your interests are heavily aligned with them.

Claiming that they don't pay you for your views may be true in the sense that this is not an official assignment for you, but to pretend that you are not heavily incentivized to act in what you perceive to be Google's interests is dishonest.

Not every Google employee is part of the sect. Some of us have our own opinions outside of what Google's PR-bullshit department comes up with.

Disclaimer: I work for TAGA (The Arrogant Google Assholes)

Come on. Really? This is a ridiculous post. Seriously go back and read it. The worst part about Google is its employees insistence that they can do no wrong.

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