| > Being ethical is a core value of the company > Google is trying hard to make it's hiring and promotion process objective and unbiased Google tries very hard to appear to be ethical, unbiased, responsible, and generally virtuous. Sometimes this attitude results in good work. Other times, and I think more often, it amounts to empty posturing and counterproductive gestures. In the social sphere, this "be seen as good" attitude manifests itself as annoying virtue signaling, speech policing, and other behavior that you also see on American college campuses. This behavior is annoying, but very common in tech and easy to ignore. The "be seen as good" attitude also manifests in technical culture, however. There's this weird attitude inside Google that what is painful must therefore be right, as if difficulty were its own reward. While it's true that the right thing is often painful, the converse does not hold, so Google makes some bad decisions. Google's attitude toward developer friction is, "This process is slowing you down? Too bad. That's how responsible engineers work." This hairshirt-loving attitude leads to large teams, moving slow, and general risk aversion, and I think it leads to bad engineering-cultural choices. Google: "This language feature causes problems? Let's ban it. We'll add headcount to make up for the productivity drop." Facebook: "This language feature causes problems? Let's add tooling to warn developers about the dangerous usages and make sure we can quickly find bugs." I've worked at a lot of tech companies. I don't think the people at Google are actually any more or less ethical than the people at other top-tier tech companies. > moving fast is not valued as much It's important not to underestimate how much moving fast makes you happy and how unhappy you become when moving to a slow environment having worked in one that moves fast. Facebook's elevation of moving fast to a first-class goal goes a long way to slowing the kind of decay that Google has suffered. |