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Comment by bakhy | Hacker News Reader

i hope things like this serve as a wake up call to all young talents willing to sacrifice their lives for these companies, enamored with some idealized visions of what they are and do.

a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information like this.

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And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad.

To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.

I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks.

Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible.

Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.

Here's my list of things that you mentioned which aren't shitty:

    search

Can you name any other huge scale user facing software product that isn't shitty by your standards?

Gmail is good. Search is good. Docs+Sheets are .. ok for small things. The rest of Drive is a mess. I've not used the photos nor ever been linked to someone's gallery there. Youtube is technically impressive but also notorious for its comments section, and of course all of these are subject to the usual data retention questions.

I'm not sure if you've worked at Google. There is a ton of bleeding edge software systems at Google that aren't user facing.

What does "making money" mean?

What they pay. I didn't sign off 37 of my hours each week because I like a company's logo. I did it because they pay me for it.

My question was a rhetorical one to get the OP to think about what the relationship between "making money" and "generating value" might be. The way he put it, it's as if they are completely disconnected. Another way to phrase "making money" is "providing a service that people are willing to trade some of their livelihood for." Could that not be a proxy for at least some "positive change"? And anyway, is "change" the only thing of value?

and i ignored you because this method of trolling with "rhetorical" questions is first of all very disrespectful, and somehow always used by people with predictably boring insights.

if you will pay more attention to what i actually wrote, i never implied that "making money" and "positive change" exclude each other, nor did i ever say something so incredibly stupid like saying that providing a livelihood for people was wrong.

edit - ok, after rereading the comment: i'm sorry, this was an over the top reaction..

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