[rangeofmotion]

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared and willing to sell everyone else out so they can pay their mortgage? Are there efforts internally to try and stop them from centralizing everything? What's going on here? I know only a couple of people who don't think Google is a real problem today.

[bsimpson]

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective:

The difference is trust:

These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.

The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.

I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:

https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...

---

Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.

The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too.

That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.

[techsupporter]

> it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.

Couple of points from someone who survived working for the Evil Empire when the entire technology world wanted to see "M$," "Micr0Squ1sh," "MacroSloth," and many other clever puns crushed under the weight of first the Department of Justice and later Netscape/Mozilla and Apple and Google.

First, you get used to it, especially faster once you realize it's not personal. The people making the comments are just seeing your company and what you do from the outside. They don't know your personal or professional reasons and, sometimes, rationalizations for those decisions. But you still really should come back and read the words and maybe even rebut them when you feel like it. Why? Because...

Second, there's a reason people are making these comments. Are they good reasons? Maybe. Are they your customers and do they, quite literally, hold the fate of your paycheck and continued good fortune and success in your hands? Damn right. Hiding from the negative feedback is just as much a "bubble" as negative feedback is on HN. You know what sucks worse than negative words on Hacker News? Negative words spoken at friendly social gatherings by people who aren't emotionally and financially invested in the technology industry because once those happens, your company is SCREWED.

You can't stop people having the feelings they do about your employer but you can ask why those feelings exist and what you can do to change them. Sometimes there's nothing but, often, there really is something.

[bsimpson]

Hard agree.

That post was both an answer to the OP's question and a refutal of the idea that the only way here was evil.

I think it's important for people to recognize an echo chamber and to realize its ramifications. At the same time, I agree that it's important for employees to understand how their products/actions will be perceived (even those of us who don't work on projects that get written about here).

Thanks for sharing. =)

[al2o3cr]

    I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm
    developers into using their framework, or to funnel all
    traffic through Google

TBH it doesn't matter what their intent was, it matters what the results of their actions were.

The packaging thing doesn't seem like a "fix" to the URL issue so much as a "let's add a feature to Chrome that lies to users and then make it a web standard".

[robin_reala]

The trouble is that trusting individual developers at Google is fine, but I don’t trust the overall flow of how things are moving. AMP is one possible response to “websites are slow”, but it also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace and makes things worse for people that try to opt out of the ecosystem. Which is a shame, because it needn’t have been like that.

[lern_too_spel]

> also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace

How? If they had gone the Apple News route of making publishers integrate directly with them, that would have been consolidating power. Instead, they ask publishers to output pages that any link aggregator can use, and many other link aggregators do use.

[JohnFen]

> I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.

I don't question the intentions of the team. I question the intentions of Google.

> for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem

Yes, which is a thing I object to even more than I object to AMP.

But, truthfully, here's my real problem with AMP: I genuinely hate AMP formatted pages, and they are increasingly being foisted on me. Every time I have to manually copy/edit/paste a URL to get the real page, I get a little bit angry, and I'm having to do that increasingly often. If there were some way I could opt out of getting AMP links, I wouldn't be quite so emotional about it.

There are a small handful of things about the web that make my suspect that I'll generally just stop using the web at some point, and AMP is one of those things.

[whalabi]

> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework

Regardless of their intent, Google IS strong-arming publishers, by:

* Pushing publishers to do something effectively none of them want to do (and making them pay for it)

* Limiting lucrative Google search real estate if they don't

* Not having any publishers or content makers on the technical steering committee of AMP (3/7 are Google employees, another 3 are platform people who exploit content (Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest)

You know how I know that Google is strong-arming publishers?

Because none of them would implement AMP if they weren't being strong-armed.

Logically speaking, if publishers wanted to make their sites faster, and considered it cost effective, they would have already done it.

[la_barba]

>The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution

The simplest way to do this is to boost the rank of small-foot-print/fast-loading websites. That would mean websites with little-to-no-ads-or-shitty-JS-scripts will get ranked higher up. Tweak the base offset till the required performance numbers are reached.

[crispinb]

I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people ..

Why on earth would you assume this, so obviously contradicted by the evidence?

The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid

The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy. It's not a matter of 'everyone' being malign, it's that we live in a society (which often, and tellingly, mislabels itself an 'economy') carefully designed to place the worst people in positions of power.

Most people understand this now (even if they're not sure what to do about it yet). It's perhaps unsurprising that the news takes a while to filter through to those benefitting most.

[a1369209993]

> The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy.

Molochian[0], not Darwinian. And it's not just placing the worst people in positions of power, but ensuring that people in any kind of decision-making position are the worst people they personally can be.

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[malvosenior]

I'm sorry but you are being naive.

> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google.

Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP).

Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less.

I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them.

For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.

[sverige]

You might be amazed how easy it is to rationalize such concerns away for $250k (or more) per year. The first sentence of the internal response of a Googler will be, "You don't understand."

[ptconroy]

. . . and the marketability and prestige of having Google on your resume.

[zelphirkalt]

Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired.

To work at Google has to be an ethical decision by now. If you are not at Google internally working against its evil tactics subverting it wherever you can and work against its taking over the web, then you are probably working for the evil machinery. For an entity spying on people wherever it gets the chance, seducing uneducated people into helping them to track as many people as they can online and shred their privacy, while trying to come up with "new standards" all the time, trying to make others jump on the bandwagon to unfree Internet.

So in general, a person with ethical concerns should avoid working for Google, no matter how good the pay.

[pgcj_poster]

I largely agree, so I'd like to ask: do you hire people?

[dentemple]

ANY sort of relevant engineering experience is good enough to get a great job in this industry.

Going out of your way to work for a mega-corp like Google is unnecessary.

[oneepic]

It's very possible they genuinely think they're doing the right thing and helping the world. Meanwhile, many, many people outside of that bubble think they're doing the wrong thing. (If only they talked to their users... but I say the same thing about every tech co in general.)

It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off.

I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions.

How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?

[buboard]

> Google is a threat

Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot.

> engineers still sign up i

A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.

[carapace]

I worked there for about two years. Afterward I described it as, "It felt like I was kidnapped by aliens and have just returned to Earth."

The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people.

Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy:

One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left.

No one mentioned it.

He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work.

I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.

[m463]

I think you have to look deeper at the draws people have to work certain places.

I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.

[matz1]

It should be obvious that everyone has their own interest, everyone ideals are different, maybe for google it make sense to increase centralization.

[wysifnwyg]

They're people who value the rewards reaped by working there more. The prestige from working at a business like this can make positive impacts far beyond the period of your employment there. Heck, just getting to in person interviews are statistically rare and an indication of exceptional ability.

[dylan604]

When the morals of a company with a supposed high value of prestige becomes bankrupt (morally), when does the prestige of working there diminish? Ever?

[Ygg2]

Well, essentially, once Google either:

A) Runs out of funds

B) Ruins its prestige by accepting lower quality people

I personally wouldn't bet on B), however once ad money dries up, it's possible Google we know will just be a Yahoo of future era.

[BeetleB]

Disclaimer: I do not work at FAANG. Having said that, if you are sincere in trying to understand, consider the following:

1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy.

(I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more).

2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this.

From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace.

The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades.

I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees.

Local effects matter more.

Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.

[P_I_Staker]

This is a very good response, most people who have worked in corporate America, know exactly what you're talking about.

Also, there's some "just following orders" and "what could I possibly do about it" mentality. Bad things tend to happen to "troublemakers", and your only option is often to leave; but you're comfortable, and there's no guarantee that the next company will be any better, so you start asking "how bad is it?"

[SpicyLemonZest]

You can make an argument that Google is a threat, but it's certainly not obvious. It requires a complex analysis to explain why Google leaning on AMP is different than Oracle and IBM leaning on ANSI SQL.

[JoshMnem]

It's possible to get otherwise ethical people to write unethical code by telling them that "it's to make the Web faster" and "it's 'open'" (even if it isn't truly open technology). It also seems like parts of Google are starting to rot from group think.

[grillvogel]

i think most people just like money