[bscphil]

I'm not saying this with the intent of harshly criticizing the author, but I admit it's surprising to me that someone (who had other options) would work for 14 years at a company they clearly came to believe was making the world a worse place.

[gonehome]

I think Google has a culture problem (they're massive, doesn't apply everywhere, etc. etc.).

There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand exposure, have only heard things through friends that were employees.

Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if they're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.

Reminds me of this: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s...

The employees also pushed to avoid working for the USG, pushed to avoid the JEDI contract (though they likely would have lost it anyway) while at the same time trying to work within China (while Deep Mind may or may not be indirectly assisting in Uighur camps [0]). I think this is morally wrong and the arguments are often simple/naive.

[0]: ">>Peter Thiel: ...But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that."

https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...

[faceplanted]

> There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd.

So far in my career I've worked for a government contractor, doing basically good things that benefit the government and the public, a large service exclusively serving gambling companies some of whom were committing obvious crimes including automatically gender detecting players and rate limiting anyone with a woman's name (under the assumption that any women on their service are men who've been banned or rate limited themselves using their wive's credit cards), and a supermarket, and honestly, the hardest place to leave was the gambling company that I thought constantly about how I should leave.

It took suddenly being made redundant due to the pandemic for me to really try hard to find another job, I'd applied to plenty but I never really pushed myself properly, or took them seriously enough because stability at the cost of bitterness and feeling like the smallest cog in a meat grinder of human misery is a weird sort of comfortable, it's leaving a splinter in because pulling it out is scary, it's not ripping off a bandaid, a "childish" failure of character, but ultimately relatable and human.

And I _wasn't_ making 6 figures. I _didn't_ spend years of my life building up to getting into that position, it was just the first job out of university paying slightly more than the average, I can't imagine if I had got into Google and realised what these people must've realised about themselves and the system and how they are really no exits that aren't steps down unless you're entrepreneurial and willing to take a big risk, you think Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Uber don't make some big moral compromises to sell and produce in China?

I'm not (trying to) justify their decisions, just rather painfully admit that I can relate.

[Clewza313]

The blog you link to was written by Noam Bardin, the CEO of Waze, a billion-dollar acquisition. His experience and incentives will be quite different from the average Googler.

[gonehome]

He talks about the average Googler and the culture, which was the relevant bit.

[lrem]

You make it sound as if Joe wants Google to stop working with the US and start working with China. The truth is that it's Frank who doesn't want to work with USG, Henry that organizes against Jedi and Sarah that tries to get back into the Chinese market. The three likely never met.

[ma2rten]

I think what Thiel is referring to is that advances in computer vision which are published in scientific papers enable others to build better surveillance systems.

This criticism doesn't just apply to DeepMind. The reason that he is mentioning them specifically is because was an early investor so he has access to their team.

[pydry]

>yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things

>Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if tthey're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.

Does the existence of people worse off than you eliminate your right to complain?

It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying. If you're coddled (by some metric) you should... shut up?

[gonehome]

You should have some perspective.

If your complaint is “what? Sushi again?!” then you should shut up (imo).

That’s just a subset, others take an overly adversarial stance to drive attention to themselves as activists - rather than have in-good-faith discussions about stuff.

[pydry]

>If your complaint is “what? Sushi again?!”

None of the cartoons were saying that though, were they?

>You should have some perspective.

Should my perspective expand to include straw men?

[CRConrad]

In comic #6, from 2010-07-27 ( https://goomics.net/6/ ) two street demonstrations -- one of Google employees -- run into each other, and the following conversation takes place:

> Hi there. Why are you demonstrating?

> They're laying off one in four workers in the hospital. You?

> They're taking away our M&Ms from building 42's microkitchen.

> Wow, that's harsh.

So apparently the author of TFA didn't think a scenario like this was all that much of a strawman... Either.

Honestly, you're really bending over backwards in defense of privilege here. Why?

[pydry]

You inadvertently stumbled on precisely the point. TFA isnt exhibiting a sense of entitlement the OP complained he was. TFA is instead making fun of it.

OP thinks complaining about the company's terrible behavior and complaining about the lack of M&Ms are more or less the same thing and that if you are bothered about the former you should quietly quit coz hey, not everybody gets sushi twice a week.

I'm not defending privilege. I'm attacking the notion that you should STFU and fuck off when you see injustice because YOU personally happen to be comfortable.

To port it to another context, for instance, Oscar Schindler could have given up his privilege (he was quite privileged!), quit his job and begged on the street for scraps of food and many would have honestly argued that if he was that bothered by what he saw that he should have.

Should he though?

[gonehome]

It was a direct quote from the article I linked: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s... - not a straw man I made up [0].

The 'You' wasn't you personally, but the general 'you' (similar to what you used in "you should... shut up?")

I'm sensing snark, but I'm genuinely not being snarky and I'm not really interested in fighting over this.

[0]: "After being acquired by Google, we had a “fun day” at the Google campus where we were shown around, wide eyed, to see the facilities. We had lunch in the cafeteria and while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I had an initial reaction when reading this comics of, "Man, this guy has become very cynical about the company!" I remember reading some of the earliest comics and having a little laugh, but I kind of lost track of it and hadn't checked up on his stuff for a while.

But then I looked back to the earliest comics and even most of those come off as fairly critical of the company. There doesn't seem to be so much of an attitudinal shift as this guy has been focused on criticism from day 1. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every big organization can benefit from reasonable criticism.)

[wombatmobile]

This isn't the only possibility, but bald cynicism might just be the only creative tool he's got in his quiver.

Makes you appreciate the likes of Scott Adams, XKCD and Norman Rockwell, who use parody, irony, and soul respectively, each with skilled nuance that shifts the viewer from their same old place to open the possibilities for some new take.

[rawtxapp]

The alternatives aren't really all that better on the topics that he criticized. If you work at big tech, at that scale, it's inevitable there will be parts of the company you disagree with. From my experience there, as long as your criticism is legitimate and constructive, it'll be well received by Googlers/company, heck some of his criticism pales in comparison to the ones done with memes.

[rtpg]

You can simply choose to not work at that scale if they're all making the world worse.

Part of an aspect of sticking to your guns ethically and morally is making choices that leave you worse off. If your ethics align with what is best for you, personally, it's not much of an ethical code

[refulgentis]

I don't have as thick a skin as you, and I get really dispirited when this sort of criticism is adopted as a personality trait / cause internally. It's barely criticism rather than hyperbolic rancor, and while every good community needs people pointing out the bad, as you note, people know they're working at a big company and should value how we avoid things like JEDI, etc. thanks to leadership.

[triactual]

I tend to agree. There are enough problem alerters without solutions in most organizations that it’s not necessary to amplify one’s lack of solutions or influence with comics.

[hiptobecubic]

Alerting is meaningless if it doesn't motivate people enough to organize. You're way underestimating the influence of media like this.

[triactual]

No one is motivated by snark. They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative.

[jbigelow76]

No one is motivated by snark.

I can agree with that.

They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative.

Not so much on this one, one person's ideals could be another's hate speech.

[Talanes]

Have you conducted a study, or did you just mean to type "I am not motivated by snark."

Personally, I find a complete lack of snark to be alienating. I'm not motivated by pure positivity, just creeped out.

[whoisjuan]

Believe it or not, there’s people who just want to write code and get paid well. In fact I know more people like that, than those who are lofty about their goals.

He hints that’s the way he feels in this comic: https://goomics.net/309/

[CRConrad]

Isn't what he hints at here actually more that even he does have a limit where "the price of his soul" will exceed his compensation, and the job won't be worth it any more?

(And squinting at the dotted continuations of the red and green lines, looks like he even estimated when that time would come pretty well. EDIT: But yeah, maybe not all that amazing, since it was only a year or so in advance.)

[gravypod]

(Opinions are my own)

An alternate way of looking at it:

When you work at a place you can help influence the culture to move it in the right direction. When you aren't working there you can't.

[dasil003]

If you are good, the best thing you can do is go leave and go work for a company doing things a better way. If you are not good the best thing you can do is stay and incrementally dilute their talent pool.

If you actually want to have more impact than that as an IC you could try your hand at internal activism, but I'd say you have a dramatically higher chance of damaging your career than creating any real change at a company that scale.

[pydry]

Internal activism has demonstrably achieved a noticeable amount in steering the company to act a bit more morally.

As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).

Interestingly every time this topic crops up there's a chorus of "just quit if you feel that way about it" as if the exact opposite was true although in reality I think everybody kind of knows it's really not.

From a non American perspective it's really strange watching this play out. Like looking at a culture that cant see the color blue or something.

[dasil003]

> As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).

The idea is that you leave and go work on something else that makes the world better versus contributing to the borg.

[pydry]

Still a good chance it'll come to nothing and your efforts to help reform the borg if you stayed (even by a tiny amount) would have been more effective in making the world a better place.

It's definitely a trade off thats quite personal.

Unlike other personal trade offs people seem quite comfortable making this one on your behalf.

[CRConrad]

> As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).

The thesis being, AIUI, that then they weren't good enough. Because if they had been, the competitor they started after leaving would have buried their original employer.

[KaiserPro]

> If you are good, the best thing you can do is go leave and go work for a company doing things a better way

Assuming that the new company will displace the old one.

However at a large monopoly like google/facebook/amazon, if you want to change the world, you need to first change the company.

The vague thing about "damaging my career" is a bit nebulous.

I was bought out, so most of my remuneration is in stocks. There is almost no incentive for me to "build out my career" year. So I have no issue with calling out obvious bullshit/stuff that goes against publicly stated principles.

[TheRealSteel]

An employee cannot realistically hope to change the morality of a publicly traded corporation.

[dharmab]

https://goomics.net/339/

[bb88]

No kidding.... Money corrupts, doesn't it?

[darkwater]

From another HN linked article [1]:

> Since starting at Google in 2007, Cornet's use of art to critique the company has become prolific, with ex-Google manager Claire Stapleton describing him to The Information as the tech firm's "moral bellweather." Cornet published a collection of his work, "Goomics", in 2018.

Having someone with first hand experience and knowledge about your organization and making "fun" of some of the sore points it can actually be good for the Org itself, because you have one more data point about how employees are feeling.

[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-carto...

[eitland]

> bellweather

For anyone wondering, that words makes a whole lot more sense when written correctly(?) as: bellwether (the sheep carrying the bell).

[klipt]

The comics suffer selection bias because "this thing is great" doesn't have as much humor potential as "this thing is broken".

Talking about how awesome Google's main search page is? Not very funny. Making fun of Google's endless list of failed chat apps? Much funnier.

[galoisgirl]

I find this funny:

https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/google-and-app...

[klipt]

I think that still counts as a "this thing is broken" joke though.

[magixx]

Honestly, I don't find it that surprising. I mean the whole advertising industry does exist and will continue to do so. Plus, if they didn't directly hate doing the work itself I could see someone tolerating it especially knowing that google's compensation is pretty good.

[Xorlev]

Most of Google is not dedicated towards building Ads, surfaces where ads are displayed, or collecting data for ads, despite popular perception.

[kevin_thibedeau]

All that other stuff is a loss leader for selling ads.

[Xorlev]

Sorry, but that's not correct. As a counterexample, Google Cloud is not a "loss leader for ads". The hardware division is not a loss leader for ads. There are a myriad of counterexamples.

A loss leader is a product which is used to acquire revenue through a different channel, such as game consoles which often sell at a loss on hardware to encourage game sales.

[pabs3]

Doesn't the hardware produced by Google direct users towards Google services that contain advertising? Or are they producing non-consumer hardware?

[Xorlev]

My Nest devices don't have even tenuous links to advertising.

[Maken]

There is a comic for that too.

https://goomics.net/70/

[hiptobecubic]

It used to be that way. Now there are several businesses that aren't just surfaces for ads. The productivity suite, cloud, etc

[colinmhayes]

Every google product exists to encourage people to see more ads, even if he product isn't showing the ads.

I encourage anyone to point to a google product that isn't either selling ads or trying to get people to spend more time on the internet so google can sell them more ads.

[Xorlev]

Drive/Docs/Meet. Cloud. Nest. These are a few examples of (though far from the only) products completely orthogonal to ads.

[QuercusMax]

All of Verily, Calico, and Google Health, and Fit/FitBit.

The work I do on AI-based medical device infrastructure has nothing to do with ads.

[paulcole]

> Drive/Docs/Meet

How many people who are active users of these products Bing something when they need to look it up?

[NateEag]

I do, by way of DuckDuckGo.

Granted, I only use those products because my employer uses them internally.

[colinmhayes]

Drive/docs absolutely contributes to google selling ads since it brings you to their home site.

I'll give you cloud and nest though.

[Xorlev]

How do you figure? There's no offramps from Drive or Docs into Search as far as I know. Are you saying that because they're subdomains, it somehow works to get you to ads?

Docs and Drive want to sell you storage and collaboration capabilities. Not ads.

[jldugger]

As it happens, the author left the company two days ago.

[dijit]

The point made was "why work there for so long?"

[ekianjo]

Is there any human organization that is not making the world worse in one way or another? Its pretty much relative in any case, hardly purely evil or purely good unless you are very naive or very young.

[dharmab]

Most food banks are pretty easily in the "unequivocally good" category, unless you're a Malthusian. Charity Navigator is a great way to find the best-managed and highest-impact food banks.

[malwarebytess]

I volunteer all the time at a food bank.

A lot of the work is sorting the incoming goods. Much of this work is done by volunteers. As a result it isn't uncommon for spoiled food to accidentally be stocked and distributed to people. It is a rare but not infrequent occurrence to have someone get sick and report back to the food bank.

Not unequivocally good! :]

[tooltower]

Fine. I'll settle for a net social good

[tolbish]

Public broadcasting/public radio seems like a pure public good. Along with the people working on disaster.radio [0]

[0] https://disaster.radio/

[ekianjo]

public broadcasting? you mean state sanctionned propaganda disguised as news?

[esrauch]

I'm curious what country you're from to have that point of view. In the US the public radio is extremely clearly not a state sanctioned propaganda; some of the corresponding private news corps are much more.

[berdario]

Not the person you're responding to, but...

I live in the UK, and the BBC is definitely propaganda.

I also agree with you that private broadcasters can definitely be worse.

OTOH, it's a vicious circle: you cannot fix society without fixing propaganda, and if the propaganda is any good, you cannot fix propaganda without fixing society (most people will lend an ear to it, believe it, parrot it, support it, work for it, etc.)... so we just have to learn to live with it :/

[dharmab]

Are you sure you know what "public broadcasting" is? It's broadcasting funded by the public, mostly through private donations and some funding through competitive grants.

EDIT: I see from your profile you're not in the US, which is probably the source of the confusion. Examples of Public Broadcasting are https://www.npr.org and https://www.pbs.org.

[NateEag]

As a US citizen who used to listen to NPR daily, it may not be state-sanctioned, but it definitely had a propagandistic narrative tying together the reporting.

Maybe not quite as strongly so as the NYT, but it was definitely there.

[CobrastanJorji]

Always seems like it's the people doing the worst things that pull out this line. They also like "well, if I didn't do it, someone else would've, so it might as well be me."

There are plenty of organizations that mostly do good. To pick the first example that comes to mind, Partners in Health.

[pieterk]

Or if you’re very Apple. They didn’t start out as that organization per se, but there’s lots of things to be said about how they’re committing to being at least carbon neutral to the planet over the whole lifecycle of their products. They set 2030 as that goal, but I believe they’ll get there much earlier than that. Google just went from one extreme to the other, and it’s seen by many as driven by a focus on Ads. Edit: the FOSS Community with Linus at its helm could be seen as an organization that’s focused on making the software world a better place.

[underwater]

The assertion was that companies aren't unequivocally good. Apple are better than most, but still support Foxconn and terrible factory conditions, use their ecosystem to crush open competitors, and push planned obsolescence via software updates.

[VictorPath]

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

[decker]

Money.

[bingidingi]

That's pretty normal for the advertising industry.

[refulgentis]

The only disappointing part of Google, for this former Apple aficionado, is how self-flagellating the internal and external culture are. (ex. we see other Googlers/ex-Googlers in this thread noting how funny these are)

Thank you for sharing that, I was uncertain if it was my own bias that was making me think similar things

[bb88]

Who knows about bias? Im largely pro Google, and laughed anyway.

[refulgentis]

A non-Googler replying with the same take I was worried that was biased simply by being a Googler, rules out that the take can only be had if you have bias due to being a Googler (as does your take: we're both Googlers and have different opinions!)

[shadowgovt]

The ability Google has to make the world better is significant, and folks like Manu were (are) excited to be a part of that. For example, Google came up with a privacy-conscious way to surface enough data to track and address the COVID-19 spread, which was huge for US state governments trying to handle the disease by giving them signal to shape outbreak mitigation strategy (https://fpf.org/press-releases/fpf-issues-2021-award-for-res...).

But there have been a lot of changes in recent years, and Google is playing with fire in its military and government support projects (as well as struggling with the increased union consciousness that is permeating white-collar Silicon Valley culture at the FAANGs). I'm not profoundly surprised he finally decided the balance had swung too far.

[29athrowaway]

If Google didn't exist, then Baidu, Tencent or Alibaba would be mining your data instead. Is that what you would prefer?

[travoc]

I’d prefer that they all take their place in history next to the cigarette and trans fat corporations. Thanks for asking.

[Talanes]

Quietly continuing to make profits for decades after a brief period of major blowback?

[hiptobecubic]

Cigarettes and trans fats are both still hugely popular.

[29athrowaway]

I would rather compare them with Bonzi Buddy, but OK.

Using Google Maps won't give you lung cancer (unless you are using it to find smoke shops that is). It erodes your privacy, sure, but it won't deteriorate your health...

[KoftaBob]

Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba wouldn't exist in their current form without companies like Google and Amazon to take heavy inspiration/copy from.

Let's be real here, China's tech industry revolves around mimicking American/European/Japanese/Korean tech, they rarely ever innovate and create first of their kind things.