When corporations begin to take on the wealth, power, and size of nation-states, is it no wonder that they may have the same variety of opinion as one?
Most small to medium sized businesses have employees with a variety of opinion. But most businesses are mature, follow pretty standard norms of work decorum, and people leave their political positions out of their interactions with coworkers.
Should it? Sure, it detracts from the organizations mission. It's counter productive. However, if you eat all your meals at campus, then where else express politics? I think this is more about companies taking over too much of life and life bleeds into work.
My impression from the article (and Damore case) is not that discussing politics is a problem per se - the problem is people there taking their politics up to 11, and forgetting any kind of rationality or even common sense on the way.
I enjoyed your comment despite it being light gray. I never considered Google to be particularly rich in "opinions". Some buy into the culture more than others, but the workers are mostly left-wing. I also think a better term than opinion here is "radical ideology", which is more accurate and less vague. But yes, I found the comparison to communism to be quite apt,though it applies to much of SV. People are afraid of saying something they shouldn't. Even though the consequences may not be as severe as in the USSR, you can still lose your career for something like saying you agree with Trump on anything.
That's an interesting train of thoughts, in the same way, we criticise countries for not being democratic enough, whereas now we have corporations more powerful than most countries but with zero democracy inside them, the top has all the power
It used to be the prevailing wisdom in corporate America that discussions about religion and politics have no place in the office. It can only lead to conflict and furthermore, WTF does it have to do with the task at hand? I mean, pretty obvious stuff, right? But somewhere along the way the inmates started running the asylum, so to speak, and political discourse and activism became an integral part of the work place (although I’d argue this is more of a Bay Area/startup phenomenon, you obviously see very little of this in stuffy corporate gigs). Who knows the exact underlying reason for this, but it is what it is.
My understanding from the Damore case is that Google has internal message boards that discuss all sorts of political topics and things predictably get quite heated and has lead to people being blacklisted and fired. Nasty stuff, other companies should pay attention to what’s happening at Google.
But didn't Damore have to attend compulsory diversity classes, that solicited feedback from its attendees? So you are supposed to take your medicine and say it tastes wonderful eh.
Its wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company you pretty much had to attend. Even this statement might be over stating it, as we here much more from the employees who feel like they have to attend (and might then complain about it), then the ones who don't and would have no reason to ever bring it up.
I mean, if you work at a paperclip factory, sure, it doesn't matter, but if you work at Palantir, it certainly could. And if you work at Facebook? Right now, you'd better be thinking about the wider political context of your work.
It also used to be the prevailing practice in America that professionals were nearly exclusively male and not reflective of the broader racial makeup of the country. This still is the case in Google's industry.
I claim that not talking about politics at work and having a predominately privileged workforce are closely related. Heterosexual etc. white men like myself have less that we need to talk about, less support we need to ask for from our company and coworkers on "political" topics.
I would guess that a rich constellation of distinctive blends of political and social opinions populate the favored perspective list at various companies.
Imagine which political views an employee might want to avoid voicing while on the job at companies like:
* An oil refinery in Louisiana
* An ice cream maker in Vermont
* A defense contractor that makes unmanned aerial vehicles for the US Air Force in Southern California
Google is a global company with employees from many, many different countries working in offices all over the world. Many different social norms.
"Corporate America"'s prevailing wisdom can not be blanket applied to all these people in all these countries (both in a cultural "it ain't gonna work" sense but also legally things are different elsewhere too)
It really depends on whether you choose to participate. If you don't waste time on email groups and intranet social media, very little of this sludge actually seeps into the day-to-day work, or at least that has been my experience.
But isn't that the problem? When we see the news media blasting articles about internal disputes most Googlers hadn't heard of, that could mean the internal culture is secretly toxic and the employees are too brainwashed to notice.
Or it could mean that people are selectively leaking a misleading picture of the company.
Google has 80k employees. If just 10k employees have heard of some kerfuffle before it winds up on tech crunch, that's still a _lot_ of people.
But maybe the specifics of some individual disputes aren't widely known as the events are unfolding; still, lots of the stuff described did get wider airtime internally before being 'leaked'.
Anyway, it's not clear that anyone is making any attempt to "claw back" this sense of entitlement. It's always been this way and there isn't any evidence I'm aware of it's doing damage to the bottom line, so why would they try to control it.
Most businesses focus on the business mission and suppress distractions from that mission. Debates about ethics, politics and public policy are seen as unwelcome distractions.
But Google is a different kind of company. Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission. As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
You may be skeptical about this and see it as either
naïveté or as a cynical ploy, but the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.
So it should be no surprise that there's constant and vigorous debate at Google about what's right and wrong. Seems to be working pretty well for them [1].
If you can find another company Google's size with a similar cultural drive to be a force for good in the world, you'll probably find their employees also have vigorous debates about what's right and wrong.
Very few people think they are doing evil, most people think they are doing good. Humans first and foremost justify their actions.
Google's overriding value is money. That's what they care about. If it wasn't that way they would operate differently. What it appears like is Google operates in a way that prioritizes money and then later justifies it with this notion of "doing good", but that's vague enough to literally mean anything.
You think I'm exaggerating, but look at any number of organizations that have done things which nobody considers good and then look at how their members justify it. It always happens. How easy it to justify making 300k a year while pumping out walled garden mediocrity? It's really easy.
Chiming in feels like sour grapes, but this notion that a massive corporation gives a fuck about anything but it's own existence doesn't seem realistic.
Isn't that like saying that a person's overriding value is food because they spend so much time and money on it, eating repeatedly throughout the day? When instead that's more a necessity for doing anything else. I agree that Google cares about making money, because without it they wouldn't have a company. But isn't it strong to say their overriding value is money?
Contrast them with, say, the pre-Google search companies. Google was able to kick their asses because Google ignored higher short-term revenue (e.g., display ads) and focused on generating much more search value. Look at GMail, which was a money-loser for years. Or all of their blue-sky projects, the canceling of which would immediately improve their profitability.
This is not to say that they're all buttercups and moonbeams. But I think they could be much greedier, and much more awful.
I partly disagree, and I think you've created a false dichotomy.
We can look at any economic activity through two lenses: "serves others" and "fills my pockets". The more companies focus only on the latter, the more they are scammy, extractive, or exploitative. The more companies focus on the former, the more value they create for their customers.
But these things aren't mutually exclusive. They're independent. Companies that focus only on creating value while ignoring profit usually fail, as they aren't sustainable. Companies that focus only on profit usually fail, as customers realize they are getting taken for a ride.
Some companies can do both well. I think Google is in that category. They create massive value without worrying too much about extracting every penny of cash. Which means that their overriding value isn't really money.
They have much more money than necessity. If we're talking about eating they are foodies that spend $200 at every meal and give the scraps to the homeless guy on the way out.
It's not that they don't do good, but how do you quantify that even? The singular value that drives it (beyond the differing political values and the variety of tech they put out) is a desire to make money. What value does the organization have that is more central to that? If it was otherwise they wouldn't have hired a CFO who was in Wall Street at the height of its misbehavior.
It's been nearly 20 years since Google was the little guy. They're a massive corporation and many people have come and gone. The only constant is the need to make stockholders happy.
That might be cynical, but I just think it's realistic about how the modern world operates. They could be worse but they could also be much more and describing basic business behavior as "doing good" kind of dilutes the term and covers up what is really just a big corp being a big corp, the same way that MS's commercials with Common talking about "changing the world" is really just a way of selling stuff. It's a meaningless mantra.
I don't think they are nearly as good as they think they are. But in the universe of companies, I think they're much better than average.
I think your mistake here is to see business as zero sum. It isn't. As I mention in a nearby comment, businesses create value for customers and then extract cash from the result. Plenty of other organizations are less focused on creating value and more focused on extracting cash.
I agree that the machinery of American corporate capitalism is very focused on the latter, and personally think that MBAs are an infection vector for an ideology to justify that. However, I think Google has been so good at long-term investment because they have a strong competing strain of focusing on value delivery for customers and users. That is part of engineering culture, and also part of design culture.
So yes, Google's a large company. But it's a large company where engineers and designers have a lot of power. Where many of the senior people have fuck-you money, and can go do whatever they want once it stops being fun. Plenty of other companies don't even argue about mission. Power is concentrated at the top in the hands of execs, mostly with MBA training, who just tell everybody else what to do in hopes of juicing profit numbers for the next 1-3 quarters.
If you want to look at an organization who's overriding value really is profit, take a look at Yahoo. They used to be a beloved company with a lot of good people. But they honored the traditional American model of "rush after short-term profits". They rarely built anything truly useful, and when the they did get ahold of something good (e.g., Flickr), their lack of a sense of purpose meant they just flailed around, wasting their lead. Or you could look at many companies in the financial sector, who can only think in extractive terms.
I'm not sure. Bosch does fit the bill imho. It is mostly owned by a foundation [0] which tries "to be a force for good in the world". This global company has strong values [1] and 400k employees. I only joined it three months ago, but I already witnessed one case, where we denied a customer (car company) request because of end user security. It escalated quite a few levels up the management.
On the other hand, Bosch had to pay a few millions in fines [2] recently. So you can as well argue that they are evil.
Anyways, I don't see "vigorous debates" about moral issues as described in the article.
Depends on what they consider "the right thing" I guess. If that doesn't match what you consider the right thing you may want to change your preference :)
I strongly prefer a Google that focuses entirely on maximizing profit to a Google that tries to do the right thing -- for its definition of "the right thing", which includes things like giving a Google doodle to Yuri Kochiyama.
I want to point out that Larry Page himself thought advertising-funded search engines had an inherent conflict of interest, and that search needed to be in the realm of academia: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Appendix A)
Amazingly, several billion dollars, and a few private yachts later, nobody at Google calls into question the fact that the company's very existence is unethical.
Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.
You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product. Which let's face it, is really quite good. There is probably no other software product I've been as loyal to for as long. Even linux, which is amazing, I haven't used for as long. I started out on Windows. I almost always find what I'm looking for on the first page of Google results, if it's to be found at all. That's remarkable when you think of how much information is out there.
I believe it could or it could produce something of similar quality, but the incentives aren't there. You can spend years in academia trying to build something like that or you can just go to Google and mmake bank. It's an easy choice. That doesn't mean it's not possible, it is just that our incentives are distorted.
> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?
Well, then you got two choices: run by a non-profit or run by the government.
The first one is unsustainable and the second one ... well, that would turn into even worse politics. Can you say "Welcome to TrumpSearch" or "Welcome to SearchHill"?
Every four/eight years the search database would be completely upended/suppressed/repressed/uplifted to reflect current political thinking, favoritism, lobbying, fears, hopes, hatred, etc.
It would make gerrymandering look paltry.
Even worse because you couldn't guarantee that the politicians in charge would be competent to understand a spreadsheet, much less a search engine.
The Postal Service continues delivering me magazines and solicitations for donations from politicians and interest groups opposed to the party in power.
Profits drive competition and competition discourages stasis. So it is necessary? Probably not. But we probably get a better result with it being outside of academia.
> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?
Yes. What's not necessary is for those profits to come from advertisers instead of users.
If Google really wanted to do good for the world, it could show the world how a product like their search engine, or maps, or any of their mainstay apps, could be monetized by revenue directly from users. That's how for-profit is supposed to work: you find out what users want by finding out what they will pay for. And if there's any company that could do that, it's Google. But instead, they're monetizing our ad clicks. What the ...?
"X isn't an unethical way of doing business because the only successful people in the industry are doing it in X way" is a very bad principle. It can trivially be used to defent slavery, child labor, bribery and corruption, fraud, market manipulation, organized crime, etc.
The question is, if X were prohibited by law / social pressure, a) would anyone else show up in the market who's currently being crushed and b) if not, is the benefit to society of avoiding X practice worth not having anyone in this industry?
I'd bet that (a) is true in this case, especially considering that Google did come out of academia originally.
>Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.
Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied positive correlation with with ethics.
On the contrary, you can easily become very competitive by giving up on ethics (see Volkswagen diesels for example). So the best search product might belong to Google but that hardly implies its an ethical company.
True. However, the argument that advertising in search results is unethical seems weak, I don't see it. There is some conflict of interest, but Google walks the line pretty well. I don't think it necessarily follows that a conflict of interest mandates unethical behavior.
I correct my stance to be that the trade-off of having better search quality in exchange for ads in the search results and the associated tracking is still worth it to me. If I felt otherwise I would use a more privacy friendly search engine.
You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product.
Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.
What does this even mean? There are a lot more engineers, designers and product managers at Google devoted to what you deem “marketing” than ads. (Source: I’m a xoogler). People on those teams believe strongly in their missions and their KPIs are mostly not revenue-related. In general, there was a strong underlying philosophy while I was there that “if you do right for the user it will work out in the long term.”
Take GMail as an typical service. GMail exists solely to show me ads. It's not Google's product, Google doesn't sell it to me, it's a free tool that exists to display Google's real product, the ads. It's a billboard. A brilliant, useful, and clever billboard, but still a billboard nonetheless. This is true of every Google service that they give away for free.
This is rewriting history. GMail was created by Google engineers (as an internal only project) way back in the day because they wanted a better email client (Gmail was, originally, a 20% project). Eventually they added ads because well, sure, companies want to monetize things. But to say that it exists solely to show you ads is a disservice to the people who originally created the tool. It was not made to, and does not exist to show ads. It was made to, and exists to be a better email client. To do that sustainably, it now show ads.
Also I'm pretty sure you can disable all promotions within Gmail, and I'm fairly sure that Inbox has, to my knowledge, never shown ads. So as billboards go, I think it's anything but brilliant, since it has never shown me an advertisement!
Much like how CoLab[1] apparently exists solely to show you ads and how hangouts and Google Voice are there just to show you ads (I'm not sure where though). Duo is just a video chat app to show ads. Clearly.
This argument is so silly. Indeed there are people at Google whose job it is to do things with ads. That doesn't mean that everything that Google does for free is intended to be monetized with ads (see, again: CoLab, which gives away free GPU compute). There are a variety of reasons for a company of Google's size to make products freely available. Showing ads is one of those reasons, but by no means the only one.
It's a different aspect of the same. Your attention to ads or the ads themselves are the product. In the end if it sells it doesn't really matter what you call it.
For a very contrived definition of "product", search isn't a product, and for other definitions, it surely is.
You're trying to make a point that as search engine users, we are a means to an end for Google, like cattle on a farm.
And I agree with that.
But we can discuss this directly, there is no need for a passiv-agressive proxy discussion about what definition of product is right. And there is no need to draw the whole HN audience into this.
Whatever creates the revenue is the product that is being sold. Broadcast TV creates content for the purpose of attracting viewers that watch the ads that are sold as ad space/time for revenue. Product placement within the content plays a role as well.
I don't understand how this isn't clearly understood. That's been the business model for broadcast TV since pretty much the beginning. It hasn't been a secret, the networks have been rather clear about it.
I also use Google daily (startpage actually) but your reasoning is flawed a little. You always find the result in first page not because Google's product is that good because you're very familiar with the product and know how it behaves on what input. When I can't find the result in the first page I don't go to the second page, instead I change my input and find the result in some other first page. But ultimately Google failed to give me this result on my first try.
We don't need academia to do this. Those of us old enough to remember know that Infoseek was once a far, far better search engine than Google, but sadly, it was borged by Disney, emasculated as Go.com, and eventually, killed. (It's also worth remembering that Excite turned down Brin and Page's offer to sell Google for $750K!) Bing is the only real competition to Google today, and to its credit, it is approaching parity with Google...
Here's another take: someone was going to control the advertising space. Would you prefer it be a place like Google where there's vigorous debate about right and wrong, or someplace that isn't investing in that debate?
Back before Google, other search engines would let advertisers pay to boost their search ranking. Google promised not to do that. Ads are labeled and advertising is a separate division from search ranking.
These days, most of the first page for some queries may be covered with ads, but they are still labeled as ads. It appears that technically Google hasn't broken that promise for the actual search results.
They may be labeled as ads, but they still appear at the top of the search results as if they were search results. The only difference is that there's a small word with the url line that says "ad"; otherwise looks exactly the same as the results. Having ads presented in such a way I choose to interpret that as breaking that promise. Especially considering with an ad blocker the Google experience feels much different.
20 years ago I'd have believed that a government funded or non-profit search engine would show honest results. Now I would just assume the results would be determined by political and legal pressures.
A for profit company at least faces the fear that people will just switch to an alternative.
> Donations by its employees to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign outnumbered contributions to President Trump’s campaign 62 to 1
Trump isn't the most popular presidential candidate in recent history, but there does seem to be a left-wing bias at Google. Being left wing is clearly different from doing "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
Neither wing of politics has a particular claim to being more moral; and both left and right wing philosophies have seen great success stories and great tragedies when they are in the ascendant.
If the politics of Google is that biased from the mainstream (which, I remind you, is about a 50-50 split, not plausibly as extreme as 80-20) then there is a risk that their data and power will be used for political ends. The half of America that votes republican should not be sleeping easily on this one.
This seems to be almost completely irrelevant to what is being discussed here - you yourself admit the point you are raising has no particular impact on the morality of there actions.
Also, it is not accurate to say that politics in the US are split 50/50. It is more like closer to 40/30/30[1]
It is extremely relevant; the original article is literally titled "Google vs. Google: How Nonstop Political Arguments Rule Its Workplace". The thread started with an observation that deciding what is right and wrong is fundamentally a question of "ethics, politics and public policy".
If Google is going to be seen as a politically active entity, aligned with the left, then that is a problem. Particularly because aligning with one wing, with high probability, means that Google isn't going to be focused on the good deeds part of politics but on the political campaigning part of politics. That should honestly be a worry to everyone, but particularly the political right.
Also 40/30/30 isn't even close to a figure like 61-1. Even if Google were leaning 40/40/20 it would still be markedly biased. I'm from Australia where voting is compulsory, and the undecided 40% usually splits about 20%-20% both ways when made to decide.
EDIT I looked it up for your interest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_federal_ele... ) - our most decisive federal-level election was 41.5% to 58.5% on a rough left-right split, aka 2-party-preferred, back in 1931. 55% to 45% would be a landslide in a modern election. America will be different, but realistically I doubt the split would be as bad as 65-35. Probably more like 55-45.
I'm not asking this to be snarky, but for anyone who might be privy to these discussions, is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?
I was an Ads PM at Google several years ago. While there are many reasons I personally disliked working there, how Google handles the ethical concern of advertising and Search is not one of them. Google cares about being Search first. Ads are seen as a happy side effect of being able to fully and correctly answer a user's question. Search is often used with commercial intent, after all. One piece of thing most people don't realise is that showing an ad doesn't make Google money. In fact, showing an ad that doesn't convert into a purchase can often lose Google money by depressing the value of an impression. So Google invests a lot in the "targeted" part of the advertising, and making sure that the ad actually provides value.
A long time ago, ads on google search were clearly distinct from organic results. Nowadays, they're mixed so well that only those who know they should check for the difference notice it.
I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".
I'll use very strong words here, but that paid ad for me is not different from "protection money" you pay to a racket so they ensure nothing bad happens to your business. It's highly unethical, but, I'm sure, incredibly profitable: in these cases I make the conscious choice to click the organic result, and NOT the paid one, but I'm pretty sure I'm one in 100.
So, I don't doubt that there are ethical debates inside Google, but it's clear that, the more it becomes just another public company for which the overriding concern can only be increasing shareholder value, the less any ethical consideration that has an impact on the bottom line can have an effect.
> I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".
Haha that annoys me too, and I can totally follow the logic for choosing the organic result, but I use the reasoning that I want to "stick it" to the company whose advertising and force them to pay for the ad they are showing me, so I actually intentionally click the paid result.
Well, some advertisers for sure deserve that, but think about, eg, SomeGoodCompany.com which is organically and legitimately the top result if I search "SomeGoodCompany" in my url bar.
If SomeBadCompany comes and starts bidding for the keyword "SomeGoodCompany", and SomeGoodCompany doesn't, when Joe Average searches "SomeGoodCompany", he will see "SomeBadCompany.com - we're even better than SomeGoodCompany..." as his top result - guaranteed by Google, the expert Joe trusts to find the best websites for any subject!
How can SomeGoodCompany NOT pay Google to stop that from happening, supposing they have the means to do it?
When "SomeBadCompany" had their results displayed on the right column, that wasn't an existential threat. Now, it is.
many of us are well aware of the massive efforts google puts into tracking every detail of our lives whether we want them to or not. your spin on this is downright hilarious
Not really no. I think at this stage, anyone at Google knows how it works. If you are ethically opposed to advertising, then Google may not the place you should choose to work at.
Google does not build a dossier up on individuals nor sell your data directly to advertisers. It collects signals about random cookie GUIDs and uses those to show ads about shoes that is trivial to opt out of and block.It does not know "who you are" (no names, no dates of birth etc - only guessed-at genders and ages brackets that are usually laughably out of whack) it just knows that a cookie has some vague city-level geo-location, watched some fashion videos on YouTube and searched for "shoes". Then advertisers can chose to show ads to people in New York who might want to buy a new handbag and that cookie is part of that potential audience.
Personally I do not see an ethical problem with cookie IDs. Please elaborate on what your ethical issues to random GUIDs are?
> is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?
Yes. Sometimes it's overshadowed by debate on other issues.
I don't always agree with it, but there is a diversity of opinion expressed, at least among the people who engage in said debate.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience." -CS Lewis
Politics/religion and business don't mix, you will alienate half your potential audience and piss off your employees. When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you?
With the power that Google has as a conduit for information, having any sort of political bias in presenting information is frighteningly Orwellian. Their recent egregious transgressions has caused me to avoid their products wherever possible. The most ironic thing IMO is their willingness to neuter one of the most amazing free speech platforms that has ever been created, YouTube. I've switched off their search engine and now primarily use duckduckgo and bing. I'm also using the brave browser. I am distancing myself from that company as fast as alternatives present themselves.
“Half” is a joke. If you look at the entire market (i.e the entire world) that Google is addressing, the segment of American Republicans who support gun rights and are concerned about equal time for the extreme right wing is vanishingly small.
About half of Americans are right of center. What I'm saying is EVERY political stance google takes alienates a segment of their customers and employees. This includes stances which alienate left leaning people too.
Does anyone remember that the YouTube shooter was a PETA activist who was enraged over the demonetization and de-circulation of her videos?
The idea that any apolitical company exists is fanciful. Simply giving employees the right to political opinions is hardly a reason to boycott the company; it's a reason to support it.
That said, Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions is itself problematic.
OK, but google's approach is more akin to your car insurance company denying your business because they disagree with your political opinion bumper sticker and then refusing to tell you why.
Their position in the video market is such that they don't need to compete for content providers and that is a problem.
Lobbying is different. Democracy is for finding how to define common policy, lobbying can be (though not always is) a legitimate part of this. This is different, for example, from refusing to do business with people holding certain political opinion or actively trying to silence them.
It's not even that. It's "tolerance only for opinion which nobody out of the list of groups that are allowed to object finds objectionable". The groups of course are defined by Google HR politics. So if you are animal rights activist and group in power dislikes you - you're not tolerated and even people in Google that want to hear you can't. If this is "tolerance" then what is intolerance, I wonder?
the second half of the quote might even be more relevant:
>"This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”"
> When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you
Is it still common in the US that car insurance company look at gender and race when determining a individuals premium? That gender or race matters when determining a individual person risk for accidents seems very political.
(FTR: I make good money making web apps. I'm also an honest person who, if asked or given a chance to tell, will tell people that they'll often reach their goals faster and save money by building and old fashioned solution with minimal Javascript.)
So is flying to Silicon Valley per an invite from Google regarding your blood/sweat/tears/dreams to discuss supposedly buying your app/technology only to then be baited by them in the meeting for your secret sauce which you divulge because this is your dream ... once divulged they kick you out and say the race is on.
While I sympathize with your concern, and agree with you, pasting the same comment repeatedly in a thread is likely to get you slapped by the admins. They don't like it, and most of us need not read the same comment three or more times.
Link doesn’t work. Anyways: is it evil to teach something about intellectual property? You failed to properly prepare the meeting, hire a lawyer and patent your invention. What exactly did you think you were selling to them? Don’t be evil doesn’t entail: don’t conduct proper business.
I think I would disagree with the notion of teaching about intellectual property by stealing somebody's intellectual property. For a company to publicly express "we are about doing the right thing", I would hope that wouldn't include conducting "proper business" of taking advantage of people. I would think "doing the right thing" would more along the lines of "great idea you have there, let's help you get that patent and work together to get it market".
Umm it’s you who has no money vs. multi-billion dollar Google who out of nowhere is chasing you saying would you consider selling your tech to us? Let’s meet to discuss.
I filed a provisional patent before the meeting and later a non-provisional. I chased money and those who have strong ties to Google and their competitors in terms of working together, investment, etc. with no success. I’ve been at this for 11 years.
So the biggest company on the planet is pursuing you for your blood/sweat/tears/dreams(all u ever wanted to do was to create amazing technology for a living and u believe you have a knack for it)... what else would you have done?
Again your one dude with no money or strong connections vs. Google. A company whose motto is Do No Evil!
The relative size or your beliefs on technical prowess does not add an ounce to your right on calling the company evil.
Personally, I feel that calling a company evil because it exploits ignorance, carelessness, impatience and greed (and it has a track history of doing that) is in itself an unethical act.
How am I ignorant .. is there a class that teaches you how to get powerful ppl behind you when your talent is innovation vs. people skills? Is there a class that teaches you how to make a meeting with the biggest company on the planet a win for you?
It’s all about money and getting those with it to get behind you. That’s not my strong suit .. innovation is.
As you can read above the sheer disregard for my tech partner and I was downright wrong .. rude... disrespectful and more negative adjectives ... all done at the hands of a company whose motto is don’t be evil. Kicking us in the face and then getting a patent runs in the total opposite direction from their motto!
Overall my dream has been to build amazing technology and be paid well for it. Not greedy .. nor impatient I’ve been at this for 11 years . Overal We’d love to have worked with Google!
Love to hear how non ignorant you who also has no money or connections to google would have handled it.
No, there isn't really. But I do know that going into the bowels of one of the most powerful companies in the world requires due diligence. Preparation. Patience. For example, start with hiring an IP lawyer. Write down exactly what you want to divulge and what stays secret. Draw a strong line between intellectual property and functional application. Personally, I would never do business directly with Google, since I am simply not qualified enough. If I can afford it, I would hire a representative. If I cannot, I would probably simply refrain from doing business. There are other companies and investors out there.
Patience: I think you're mixing it up with perseverance. Both are laudable, but the former is what needs to be expressed when a big multi-billion dollar company knocks on your door. You had a patent application pending!
You knew from the start that it was your innovation they were after. When they invite you, they'll be interested in it tomorrow, in two months or a year from now.
But there is another thing I find interesting. If you work at something for 11 years, how can you possibly divulge everything in one meeting?
Anyways, from someone who was careless with his own ideas and innovations in the past, I know how hard it is to get over this. Value your brain, not your things :)
Lastly, I'd like to add that being good at innovation is definitely not enough to make a marketable product. In my opinion, innovation happens at the crossroads of intellectual thought and business sense.
So is flying to Silicon Valley per an invite from Google regarding your blood/sweat/tears/dreams to discuss supposedly buying your app/technology only to then be baited by them in the meeting for your secret sauce which you divulge because this is your dream ... once divulged they kick you out and say the race is on.
Edit: after reading the article I have very little sympathy for OP. Samsung clearly developed their technology without you, and Google was rewarded a patent 5 years after meeting you. Which likely means you didn't even file an affordable provisional patent.
No we filed our provisional before the meeting and later filed our non provisional that is slowly making its way thru the patent office due to resources.
For me the worst thing was how they treated us so wrongly.. kicked us out and said, "The race is on."
Obviously our work had value to them as they patented it.
We do not have any high powered connections to Google and if you don't this is what they will do to the little innovator guys/girls. An invite from a Fortune 500 without any high powered connections is an invitation to get kicked in the face and they say that's how it goes. But no that's not how it should go!
> Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission.
Those would be the ethical and moral principles that Google has since broken?
> As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
Which apparently includes: entrenching the ad-supported business model regardless of the damage it does; killing apps that were extremely popular with and beneficial to users, because they weren't generating enough ad revenue; locking people into walled gardens; etc.
> the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.
Is it? Because it's sure hard to tell from the user's perspective.
> Seems to be working pretty well for them
For those who are benefiting from Google's profits and stock price, sure. But doing good for the world?
> their objective is to do "good things for the world"
And if some people disagree that what Google is doing are "good things", too bad for them. Also, they are so fired.
> see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy
I see it as intolerance and blindness to even a possibility of one's position being wrong or incomplete. If you define what you are doing as "good thing", then automatically everybody who disagrees is "bad", and what shouldn't you do to not allow bad persons to ruin a good thing?
> Seems to be working pretty well for them
Except those who get disinvited, or not hired, or fired, for taking a wrong side (which is, any side that somebody in power disagrees with) in the debate. But yeah, they are making a boatload of money, so I guess that's a "good thing" too.
>the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.
That's the most highbrow way I've ever heard to describe googlers arguing internally about the day's hot button political issues while turning a blind eye to the ethical monsters in their own basement.
That might be the case but given their biases it's hard to take the WSJ's spin at face value.
They're agenda is to hurt google and with this one I'm guessing they want to further damage google's image with conservative culture warriors.
As for the issue at hand, even if it might not be as drastic as described it's definitely affecting business most evident by some rank and file employees' public objection to their DoD AI work.
Fixing matters will involve more than intranet discussion moderation, it's about hiring. Perhaps they should optimize for a different kind of prospect.
I didn’t perceive any spin, and I’m a liberal. Perhaps we’re so in tune with predominantly left-leaning media that we’ve come to perceive balanced, centrist articles as biased?
I commented about this the last time [0] the Damore issue came up here. Google's culture (as represented by this article and the Damore issue) is anti-liberal. This is one of the cases where liberals and leftists are not on the same side.
And I'm libertarian (more or less). I think they probably made too much of disparate incidents and assumed strong connections between them and between them and the damore case.
At any rate, there is too much baggage there to take anything they publish about google at face value.
The article mentions 'Talks at Google' : I think that this channel was much more interesting something like two years ago; Is that just my impression? Does anybody know what happened to these talks and how they turned lame?
This is such a bizarre article. How normal is this type of work culture in the valley? Doesn't it make sense to keep politics and personal choices outside of the workplace? Is it really important to bring in a PETA person to talk about animals feeling prejudice at one of the biggest tech companies that makes money via advertisements?
I think this all comes from too many smart people left with too little meaningful things to do. So they get bored and start playing the usual 1000+ years old game of forming cliques and figuring out who's more important. Kinda comes from the current investment climate.
Every fucking office, every workplace, every barbecue and famly gathering since November 8, 2016, has been a fucking Nightmare Mode political minfield. And half of everything anyone says is unsafe.
Shit is fucked. I hate the news. I don’t like talking to human beings, pretty much at all now.
If the conversation doesn’t start of politicized, give it five minutes, and then someone might interject, disagree, you have to pick a side, draw a weapon and make a decision about who to fight alongside, or against, possibly to the death, or at least enough to establish enemies for life.
I’m done with all of you. Just go away. Stop talking to me. I don’t even want to pan handle for some spare change, whether you have it or not.
I can't read the article, but I'm willing to bet that it's focusing on a small subset of loud opionated Googlers and convienently ignoring the 99% of employees who don't care about politics as long as they're getting paid.
The other thing that seems to be largely true is that these "loud opinionated Googlers" are the ones in the Bay Area. You don't hear about things like this from other offices, even the other large offices in the US (Cambridge, NYC, Seattle/Kirkland).
Googlers are definitely loud and politically opinionated at the NYC office.
Seattle/Kirkland tends to be older, more domestically settled people hired from Microsoft/sometimes Amazon, so just demographically it’s no surprise that they don’t agitate as loudly for social justice.
There is debate from other places of course, but 99% of people just get on with their job and leave the arguments up to those in MTV who give a shit. MTV can be very blinkered - rightly or wrongly the people there forget that people outside of SV - let alone outside of the USA - exist.
The sheer volume of news that comes across the wire every minute of every day is out of control.
I was working in online media 5 years ago and the number of sites using bots to compile half-baked articles that a junior editor could quickly tweak to meet his 10+ article a day quota was disheartening. Again, that was 5 years ago. Now we have today's news automation capabilities + political drama + Facebook/Twitter/Slack/et al, and you've magnetized millions of consumers with a reality TV soap opera that has infected everything.
Google is at the center, and so is Facebook and Twitter as distributors. They've all built information vacuums which tailor news & content based on your profiles, search intent, visit history, purchasing habits, and predictive attributes to target you. However, no matter how sophisticated the AI/ML becomes – the underlying program is still written by a human and expressed biases are engrained the day we're born. And, they will never go away.
In a company and environment like today, I'm not sure how one can begin to escape the discussions around society and politics while operating an organization that has a larger GDP than Switzerland coupled with uncontested scale that touches nearly every person worldwide...
This article lacks focus. It starts well, sticking to the headline, but then all kinds of stories we already know about Google and other tech giants start rolling in, on and on.
Good, let large powerful companies have robust internal debate. Suppressing it in the name of efficiency will lead to the kinds of terrible decisions industry is known for. Google is currently providing support for TensorFlow to assist the pentagon's drone assassination program. They ought to be taking a hard look at themselves.
I might play devil's advocate from a, lessor of two evils, perspective and argue that supporting the Pentagon's use of tensorflow in this use case might lower the number of civilian casualties in a battle or wartime.
Posting from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
There are a lot of internal discussion groups - it is just an internal Google groups thing so anyone can create a group about anything. Often they are purely work related (e.g. groups for specific tools/services/teams that people can join), but there are some that are not work related.
I'd say that these sort of political debates are the extreme outliers. I've never encountered any significant political debate/argument during my 6 years at Google, but then I don't go looking for it on the groups. From my experience people at google are well-mannered, polite and respectful; disagreement of course occurs but is usually handled professionally without much fuss.
What does happen though is that although we do have an online tool to vote up questions for the TGIF meetings, you get "regulars" who ask in-person questions at TGIF in Mountain View. These people are often fine, but there are a couple who clearly have their own political/moral axe to grind. I find these people the most irritating, since unlike the questions which have been voted up to the top on the online tool, they don't need votes to ask their questions. This can give their opinions -minority or majority held- more apparent credibility than they might otherwise deserve if it had been left to the online voting only.
There is also a lot of focus from certain groups on purely US related things - e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or democratic in the HR system. These blinkered people asking these in-person questions in California don't realise that they live in one country, and that the political parties in that country aren't the same as the ones in others (most countries are not a two party polatised system like it is in the US)
TL;Dr there are jerks if you go looking for them but 99.9% of the time yiu just do your job and no one wants to know or cares what your political or moral views are.
Can't know which people to mistreat if you can't label them from the beginning.
Regardless, I believe the statement was more like certain groups are trying to get something in the HR for people to volunteer such information. Not that the company has it as mandatory.
Which, by the way, is an incredibly horrible idea. Not only does it open the door for certain people to mistreat other people, as I said; it also creates the situation where certain types of people will treat others that don't volunteer such information as suspicious. As in, "what do you have to hide?"
No. Read it more carefully. There is someone who asks that they be allowed to register which political view they favor. There is no such system to actually register one's political views.
Progressive means that you want to change society while conservatives want to preserve it as it is.
The Nazi party was as progressive as it can get since they wanted to restructure all of German society and the whole world, so were the Bolsheviks neither of them were particularly liberal or democratic.
A purely conservative society will stagnant and decay a purely progressive one would result in chaos.
The tool that mediates this in a modern democracy is bureaucracy which provides resistance to change but ensures that once it reaches critical mass it would go through.
Which is why the extremes of both political ends attack or try to circumvent it.
The denotation of the words progressive/conservative in isolation is as you say, but in a political context, the meaning can be 180 degrees from denotation. It is typical words are selected as half truths and outright propaganda. And I think you're avoiding complex social origins, culture, era and the inherent contradictions within all organizations (and people, by extention).
e.g. Democratic People's Republic of Korea is certainly not in any meaningful way democratic, it is a hereditary dictatorship. The former German Democratic Republic likewise was in no meaningful way democratic or a republic. The words socialist and socialism are likewise commonly usurped to impugn or to attract; they are signals that work or don't work based on time, geography, culture, history, neighbors. It's an exercise in anti-denotation, and appeal to emotion, and it is strategic.
This is exactly why it’s important because words do have a meaning.
Calling the left at large liberal when today significant portion of it could not be further from it is something that needs to be called out.
Having a comparison which says “Democratic” vs “Conservatives” is also harmful as you now paint one side as authoritarian.
I want to have clear definitions and for words to have meaning specifically to avoid any confusion in regards to the issues you have mentioned and many more.
If we take the the US an example I think you would want to make a distinction between civil war republicans and those of today just as you would want to make a distinction between the democrats that institutionalized racial segregation through Jim Crow and those of today.
So I do not believe I’m avoiding anything I’m just not picking and choosing based on what would benefit my agenda.
Identify politics is poison in general and if we must resort to it in since casss we must make sure that we use the clearest definitions possible and use them correctly.
To all startup founders: if you think that any part of this mix of ethical infighting and jockeying for position among employees will be good for your venture, think again - do your business honestly and with integrity and focus single-mindedly on executing on a sound business model and the ethics will take care of itself. The rest is divisive and distracting. Perhaps Google is big and dominant enough to rise to a higher level but, for mere mortals, the tried and true way is probably the best.
I have a job role that has brought me into regular contact with Google as an external partner for the last five years. I won’t go into specifics, other than to say that what used to be admiration has entirely faded.
Their culture really turns me off. I am a mid-30’s white male, for the record.
A few months ago, I visited one of their main campus locations.
When I walked in the door, there was a group of female employees huddled in the lobby having some sort of private discussion. When they saw me walk in the door, I received what I can only describe as a “death glare” from them. I felt like I was walking into a junior high school cafeteria and interrupted the cheerleader table. It was at that level of childish tribalism and latent tension.
I know this sounds thin skinned. I regularly have been involved with Amazon, Microsoft and others and never got a vibe approaching open cliquish behavior.
I talked about it to some minority friends and their response was: “well maybe that is how minorities are used to being looked at in these environments.”
I can’t remember ever giving anyone a death stare in my career because they were a minority or due to their gender.
With the description given, I think your argument is shallow. An Odd experience with one group of woman at one campus is unfortunuate but doesn't make for a good representation of ~88,000 full-time employees, the company culture, and a result of the policy in question.
If you dismiss every data point (anecdote) you come across, one at a time, of course you can eventually say there's no pattern: you dismissed all of the data.
> animals can be subject to prejudice just as people can, as part of the company’s “Talks at Google” series. Another group of employees said the topic was offensive to humans who face racism, and they protested.
I read that a few times and I just fail to parse it. Can anyone explain the idea there. How are the topics connected? Is there something obvious I am missing or it is supposed to be satire which points that people can offended about anything.
> The dilemma is especially striking at tech companies, which typically cast themselves as open meritocracies
Not like all tech companies. Google milked morality perception for years "Don't be evil etc...". It has no doubt paid huge dividends. "We are not like those crusty old evil companies with suits and ties, we are young playful, cool and super-nice! Come join us!".
Even though it is a huge tech giant which tracks millions of people, know what they email, what credit cards they use, what sites they visit, lobbies the government more than financial giants, defense contractors or telecom companies, somehow deep down the first instinct I have is still to think of it as cutesy little startup with colorful letters that does search better than AltaVista. A small underdog that everyone loves to root for. Their morality marketing is really that good.
And well people bought into that propaganda and now they are finally paying for it internally. So animal rights activists are somehow fighting with racial justice ones. And besides getting invited to product management meetings, one gets invited to talks about how their coworkers sexually identify as "a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin".
> The Google spokeswoman said an employee working on Talks at Google on a volunteer basis unilaterally made the decision to cancel the talk
Aha, I think they are slowly, after great fanfare and drama, realizing that maybe the workplace should just be for work. People will just start objecting to any talks. Doesn't matter the topic, because with a few rhetorical tricks, an intelligent enough person can be offended (or claim to be offended) by anything.
The idea is that something being offensive is inherently subjective. If you claim being offended, you are offended. Offending people - at least people that Google management is inclined to listen to - is a no-no. Consequently, if you want to veto a speaker, you just need to proclaim your offense. There's no proof required because there's no proof possible - there's no objective test for being offended, only your feelings, of which you are the only judge. As soon as you decided to proclaim your veto, that's it, the deed is done.
Why people at Google decided to veto PETA speaker - who knows. But there's no point in digging deeper than that and trying to find logic in it - there's no logic in this setup.
> People will just start objecting to any talks.
That'd work if the decision were impartial. But an anonymous "employee working on Talks at Google" doesn't have to be impartial.
That's why if I'm ever presented with such a setup I would protest by voting to veto everything, even the talks I would be interested in. If any one person is to be censored by such drivel, then none should be heard until the divisive and bigoted system is removed.
Of course, people who run such a system would immediately remove my ability to vote. Which, in a way, would prove a point.
I can't speak for these particular people, but people can be offended by equating people and animals.
I wouldn't be offended, and I'd be tolerant of these kind of PETA lectures, but I do find the underlying emotional appeals presumptuous and tone deaf. I can see why someone would feel offended by the argument.
I don't see why someone would be intolerant of it, though.
As somebody who used to live in the bay area, for the most part there aren't debates and conversations to be had. If you are fiscally conservative or republican you are evil, racist, sexist, and have no moral compass.
I find it comically hypocritical they claim to be inclusive and an open company. Alternative viewpoints are not accepted, and even if you can make logical arguments you are dismissed and bullied. Frankly a lot of the viewpoints in the bay are very extreme, and disconnected from the vast majority of American's.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadMy understanding from the Damore case is that Google has internal message boards that discuss all sorts of political topics and things predictably get quite heated and has lead to people being blacklisted and fired. Nasty stuff, other companies should pay attention to what’s happening at Google.
Even that seems unlikely. Certainly, managers have to be trained about compliance and inclusiveness, but was JD a manager? I guess not.
I claim that not talking about politics at work and having a predominately privileged workforce are closely related. Heterosexual etc. white men like myself have less that we need to talk about, less support we need to ask for from our company and coworkers on "political" topics.
Imagine which political views an employee might want to avoid voicing while on the job at companies like:
* An oil refinery in Louisiana
* An ice cream maker in Vermont
* A defense contractor that makes unmanned aerial vehicles for the US Air Force in Southern California
* A film studio in Atlanta
* A slaughterhouse in East Texas
"Corporate America"'s prevailing wisdom can not be blanket applied to all these people in all these countries (both in a cultural "it ain't gonna work" sense but also legally things are different elsewhere too)
Or it could mean that people are selectively leaking a misleading picture of the company.
But maybe the specifics of some individual disputes aren't widely known as the events are unfolding; still, lots of the stuff described did get wider airtime internally before being 'leaked'.
I've been there 6 years and it has had essentially zero impact on me.
I usually only find out about it when people are making fun of it on memegen.
I think I probably hear more about politics at Google from HN than from actually working at Google.
In the US you rarely even know who the gal in the cube next to you voted for.
A proper sense of entitlement used to be considered (tongue in cheek) a basic requirement of fitting in at Google.
But Google is a different kind of company. Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission. As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
You may be skeptical about this and see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy, but the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.
So it should be no surprise that there's constant and vigorous debate at Google about what's right and wrong. Seems to be working pretty well for them [1].
[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht...
[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-ea...
Google's overriding value is money. That's what they care about. If it wasn't that way they would operate differently. What it appears like is Google operates in a way that prioritizes money and then later justifies it with this notion of "doing good", but that's vague enough to literally mean anything.
You think I'm exaggerating, but look at any number of organizations that have done things which nobody considers good and then look at how their members justify it. It always happens. How easy it to justify making 300k a year while pumping out walled garden mediocrity? It's really easy.
Chiming in feels like sour grapes, but this notion that a massive corporation gives a fuck about anything but it's own existence doesn't seem realistic.
Contrast them with, say, the pre-Google search companies. Google was able to kick their asses because Google ignored higher short-term revenue (e.g., display ads) and focused on generating much more search value. Look at GMail, which was a money-loser for years. Or all of their blue-sky projects, the canceling of which would immediately improve their profitability.
This is not to say that they're all buttercups and moonbeams. But I think they could be much greedier, and much more awful.
That's just a competitive strategy any company takes to displace incumbents. Hardly a moral high ground.
We can look at any economic activity through two lenses: "serves others" and "fills my pockets". The more companies focus only on the latter, the more they are scammy, extractive, or exploitative. The more companies focus on the former, the more value they create for their customers.
But these things aren't mutually exclusive. They're independent. Companies that focus only on creating value while ignoring profit usually fail, as they aren't sustainable. Companies that focus only on profit usually fail, as customers realize they are getting taken for a ride.
Some companies can do both well. I think Google is in that category. They create massive value without worrying too much about extracting every penny of cash. Which means that their overriding value isn't really money.
It's not that they don't do good, but how do you quantify that even? The singular value that drives it (beyond the differing political values and the variety of tech they put out) is a desire to make money. What value does the organization have that is more central to that? If it was otherwise they wouldn't have hired a CFO who was in Wall Street at the height of its misbehavior.
It's been nearly 20 years since Google was the little guy. They're a massive corporation and many people have come and gone. The only constant is the need to make stockholders happy.
That might be cynical, but I just think it's realistic about how the modern world operates. They could be worse but they could also be much more and describing basic business behavior as "doing good" kind of dilutes the term and covers up what is really just a big corp being a big corp, the same way that MS's commercials with Common talking about "changing the world" is really just a way of selling stuff. It's a meaningless mantra.
I think your mistake here is to see business as zero sum. It isn't. As I mention in a nearby comment, businesses create value for customers and then extract cash from the result. Plenty of other organizations are less focused on creating value and more focused on extracting cash.
I agree that the machinery of American corporate capitalism is very focused on the latter, and personally think that MBAs are an infection vector for an ideology to justify that. However, I think Google has been so good at long-term investment because they have a strong competing strain of focusing on value delivery for customers and users. That is part of engineering culture, and also part of design culture.
So yes, Google's a large company. But it's a large company where engineers and designers have a lot of power. Where many of the senior people have fuck-you money, and can go do whatever they want once it stops being fun. Plenty of other companies don't even argue about mission. Power is concentrated at the top in the hands of execs, mostly with MBA training, who just tell everybody else what to do in hopes of juicing profit numbers for the next 1-3 quarters.
If you want to look at an organization who's overriding value really is profit, take a look at Yahoo. They used to be a beloved company with a lot of good people. But they honored the traditional American model of "rush after short-term profits". They rarely built anything truly useful, and when the they did get ahold of something good (e.g., Flickr), their lack of a sense of purpose meant they just flailed around, wasting their lead. Or you could look at many companies in the financial sector, who can only think in extractive terms.
On the other hand, Bosch had to pay a few millions in fines [2] recently. So you can as well argue that they are evil.
Anyways, I don't see "vigorous debates" about moral issues as described in the article.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung [1] http://wearebosch.com [2] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-962_en.htm
Amazingly, several billion dollars, and a few private yachts later, nobody at Google calls into question the fact that the company's very existence is unethical.
You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product. Which let's face it, is really quite good. There is probably no other software product I've been as loyal to for as long. Even linux, which is amazing, I haven't used for as long. I started out on Windows. I almost always find what I'm looking for on the first page of Google results, if it's to be found at all. That's remarkable when you think of how much information is out there.
Well...but it did, and they did. But you (and Larry Page) raise a good question: is it necessary for web search to be profitable?
Well, then you got two choices: run by a non-profit or run by the government.
The first one is unsustainable and the second one ... well, that would turn into even worse politics. Can you say "Welcome to TrumpSearch" or "Welcome to SearchHill"?
Every four/eight years the search database would be completely upended/suppressed/repressed/uplifted to reflect current political thinking, favoritism, lobbying, fears, hopes, hatred, etc.
It would make gerrymandering look paltry.
Even worse because you couldn't guarantee that the politicians in charge would be competent to understand a spreadsheet, much less a search engine.
In industry, yes. Academia, no.
Yes. What's not necessary is for those profits to come from advertisers instead of users.
If Google really wanted to do good for the world, it could show the world how a product like their search engine, or maps, or any of their mainstay apps, could be monetized by revenue directly from users. That's how for-profit is supposed to work: you find out what users want by finding out what they will pay for. And if there's any company that could do that, it's Google. But instead, they're monetizing our ad clicks. What the ...?
The question is, if X were prohibited by law / social pressure, a) would anyone else show up in the market who's currently being crushed and b) if not, is the benefit to society of avoiding X practice worth not having anyone in this industry?
I'd bet that (a) is true in this case, especially considering that Google did come out of academia originally.
Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied positive correlation with with ethics.
On the contrary, you can easily become very competitive by giving up on ethics (see Volkswagen diesels for example). So the best search product might belong to Google but that hardly implies its an ethical company.
I correct my stance to be that the trade-off of having better search quality in exchange for ads in the search results and the associated tracking is still worth it to me. If I felt otherwise I would use a more privacy friendly search engine.
Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.
Also I'm pretty sure you can disable all promotions within Gmail, and I'm fairly sure that Inbox has, to my knowledge, never shown ads. So as billboards go, I think it's anything but brilliant, since it has never shown me an advertisement!
Much like how CoLab[1] apparently exists solely to show you ads and how hangouts and Google Voice are there just to show you ads (I'm not sure where though). Duo is just a video chat app to show ads. Clearly.
This argument is so silly. Indeed there are people at Google whose job it is to do things with ads. That doesn't mean that everything that Google does for free is intended to be monetized with ads (see, again: CoLab, which gives away free GPU compute). There are a variety of reasons for a company of Google's size to make products freely available. Showing ads is one of those reasons, but by no means the only one.
Note: I work, tangentially, on Gmail.
[1]: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb
For a very contrived definition of "product", search isn't a product, and for other definitions, it surely is.
You're trying to make a point that as search engine users, we are a means to an end for Google, like cattle on a farm.
And I agree with that.
But we can discuss this directly, there is no need for a passiv-agressive proxy discussion about what definition of product is right. And there is no need to draw the whole HN audience into this.
Whatever creates the revenue is the product that is being sold. Broadcast TV creates content for the purpose of attracting viewers that watch the ads that are sold as ad space/time for revenue. Product placement within the content plays a role as well.
I don't understand how this isn't clearly understood. That's been the business model for broadcast TV since pretty much the beginning. It hasn't been a secret, the networks have been rather clear about it.
Um, isn't that exactly what Larry Page and Sergey Brin produced while they were in academia?
These days, most of the first page for some queries may be covered with ads, but they are still labeled as ads. It appears that technically Google hasn't broken that promise for the actual search results.
(But if you know otherwise, please share.)
A for profit company at least faces the fear that people will just switch to an alternative.
Trump isn't the most popular presidential candidate in recent history, but there does seem to be a left-wing bias at Google. Being left wing is clearly different from doing "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
Neither wing of politics has a particular claim to being more moral; and both left and right wing philosophies have seen great success stories and great tragedies when they are in the ascendant.
If the politics of Google is that biased from the mainstream (which, I remind you, is about a 50-50 split, not plausibly as extreme as 80-20) then there is a risk that their data and power will be used for political ends. The half of America that votes republican should not be sleeping easily on this one.
Also, it is not accurate to say that politics in the US are split 50/50. It is more like closer to 40/30/30[1]
1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/180440/new-record-political-inde...
If Google is going to be seen as a politically active entity, aligned with the left, then that is a problem. Particularly because aligning with one wing, with high probability, means that Google isn't going to be focused on the good deeds part of politics but on the political campaigning part of politics. That should honestly be a worry to everyone, but particularly the political right.
Also 40/30/30 isn't even close to a figure like 61-1. Even if Google were leaning 40/40/20 it would still be markedly biased. I'm from Australia where voting is compulsory, and the undecided 40% usually splits about 20%-20% both ways when made to decide.
EDIT I looked it up for your interest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_federal_ele... ) - our most decisive federal-level election was 41.5% to 58.5% on a rough left-right split, aka 2-party-preferred, back in 1931. 55% to 45% would be a landslide in a modern election. America will be different, but realistically I doubt the split would be as bad as 65-35. Probably more like 55-45.
I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".
I'll use very strong words here, but that paid ad for me is not different from "protection money" you pay to a racket so they ensure nothing bad happens to your business. It's highly unethical, but, I'm sure, incredibly profitable: in these cases I make the conscious choice to click the organic result, and NOT the paid one, but I'm pretty sure I'm one in 100.
So, I don't doubt that there are ethical debates inside Google, but it's clear that, the more it becomes just another public company for which the overriding concern can only be increasing shareholder value, the less any ethical consideration that has an impact on the bottom line can have an effect.
Haha that annoys me too, and I can totally follow the logic for choosing the organic result, but I use the reasoning that I want to "stick it" to the company whose advertising and force them to pay for the ad they are showing me, so I actually intentionally click the paid result.
If SomeBadCompany comes and starts bidding for the keyword "SomeGoodCompany", and SomeGoodCompany doesn't, when Joe Average searches "SomeGoodCompany", he will see "SomeBadCompany.com - we're even better than SomeGoodCompany..." as his top result - guaranteed by Google, the expert Joe trusts to find the best websites for any subject!
How can SomeGoodCompany NOT pay Google to stop that from happening, supposing they have the means to do it?
When "SomeBadCompany" had their results displayed on the right column, that wasn't an existential threat. Now, it is.
Edits: clarified language
Google does not build a dossier up on individuals nor sell your data directly to advertisers. It collects signals about random cookie GUIDs and uses those to show ads about shoes that is trivial to opt out of and block.It does not know "who you are" (no names, no dates of birth etc - only guessed-at genders and ages brackets that are usually laughably out of whack) it just knows that a cookie has some vague city-level geo-location, watched some fashion videos on YouTube and searched for "shoes". Then advertisers can chose to show ads to people in New York who might want to buy a new handbag and that cookie is part of that potential audience.
Personally I do not see an ethical problem with cookie IDs. Please elaborate on what your ethical issues to random GUIDs are?
Yes. Sometimes it's overshadowed by debate on other issues.
I don't always agree with it, but there is a diversity of opinion expressed, at least among the people who engage in said debate.
Politics/religion and business don't mix, you will alienate half your potential audience and piss off your employees. When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you?
With the power that Google has as a conduit for information, having any sort of political bias in presenting information is frighteningly Orwellian. Their recent egregious transgressions has caused me to avoid their products wherever possible. The most ironic thing IMO is their willingness to neuter one of the most amazing free speech platforms that has ever been created, YouTube. I've switched off their search engine and now primarily use duckduckgo and bing. I'm also using the brave browser. I am distancing myself from that company as fast as alternatives present themselves.
Does anyone remember that the YouTube shooter was a PETA activist who was enraged over the demonetization and de-circulation of her videos?
That the overton window has shifted doesn't mean what's on display is just "right wing" - it's extreme.
So what is "center" anyways? The single-axis political scale is a very flawed way of looking at
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=F09
The idea that any apolitical company exists is fanciful. Simply giving employees the right to political opinions is hardly a reason to boycott the company; it's a reason to support it.
That said, Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions is itself problematic.
Their position in the video market is such that they don't need to compete for content providers and that is a problem.
> Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions
It's not even that. It's "tolerance only for opinion which nobody out of the list of groups that are allowed to object finds objectionable". The groups of course are defined by Google HR politics. So if you are animal rights activist and group in power dislikes you - you're not tolerated and even people in Google that want to hear you can't. If this is "tolerance" then what is intolerance, I wonder?
>"This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”"
Is it still common in the US that car insurance company look at gender and race when determining a individuals premium? That gender or race matters when determining a individual person risk for accidents seems very political.
(FTR: I make good money making web apps. I'm also an honest person who, if asked or given a chance to tell, will tell people that they'll often reach their goals faster and save money by building and old fashioned solution with minimal Javascript.)
is that what you call Pentagon funded military research (DLI, NSA and CIA under MDDS) ?
Is that ethical... moral... just?
That's what happened to me in April 2013 when I was invited and met with Motorola/Google ATAP(https://ryanspahn.com/my-google-NDA-experience.html) re: my dream/blood/sweat/tears. Also they recently were awarded a patent for the exact same thing I created/met them about(https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-patent-speaker-m...).
Don't be evil ... HA
I filed a provisional patent before the meeting and later a non-provisional. I chased money and those who have strong ties to Google and their competitors in terms of working together, investment, etc. with no success. I’ve been at this for 11 years.
So the biggest company on the planet is pursuing you for your blood/sweat/tears/dreams(all u ever wanted to do was to create amazing technology for a living and u believe you have a knack for it)... what else would you have done?
Again your one dude with no money or strong connections vs. Google. A company whose motto is Do No Evil!
Personally, I feel that calling a company evil because it exploits ignorance, carelessness, impatience and greed (and it has a track history of doing that) is in itself an unethical act.
It’s all about money and getting those with it to get behind you. That’s not my strong suit .. innovation is.
As you can read above the sheer disregard for my tech partner and I was downright wrong .. rude... disrespectful and more negative adjectives ... all done at the hands of a company whose motto is don’t be evil. Kicking us in the face and then getting a patent runs in the total opposite direction from their motto!
Overall my dream has been to build amazing technology and be paid well for it. Not greedy .. nor impatient I’ve been at this for 11 years . Overal We’d love to have worked with Google!
Love to hear how non ignorant you who also has no money or connections to google would have handled it.
No, there isn't really. But I do know that going into the bowels of one of the most powerful companies in the world requires due diligence. Preparation. Patience. For example, start with hiring an IP lawyer. Write down exactly what you want to divulge and what stays secret. Draw a strong line between intellectual property and functional application. Personally, I would never do business directly with Google, since I am simply not qualified enough. If I can afford it, I would hire a representative. If I cannot, I would probably simply refrain from doing business. There are other companies and investors out there.
Patience: I think you're mixing it up with perseverance. Both are laudable, but the former is what needs to be expressed when a big multi-billion dollar company knocks on your door. You had a patent application pending!
You knew from the start that it was your innovation they were after. When they invite you, they'll be interested in it tomorrow, in two months or a year from now.
But there is another thing I find interesting. If you work at something for 11 years, how can you possibly divulge everything in one meeting?
Anyways, from someone who was careless with his own ideas and innovations in the past, I know how hard it is to get over this. Value your brain, not your things :)
Lastly, I'd like to add that being good at innovation is definitely not enough to make a marketable product. In my opinion, innovation happens at the crossroads of intellectual thought and business sense.
Is that ethical... moral... just?
That's what happened to me in April 2013 when I was invited and met with Motorola/Google ATAP(https://ryanspahn.com/my-google-NDA-experience.html) re: my dream/blood/sweat/tears. Also they recently were awarded a patent for the exact same thing I created/met them about(https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-patent-speaker-m...).
Don't be evil ... HA
Edit: after reading the article I have very little sympathy for OP. Samsung clearly developed their technology without you, and Google was rewarded a patent 5 years after meeting you. Which likely means you didn't even file an affordable provisional patent.
Obviously our work had value to them as they patented it.
We do not have any high powered connections to Google and if you don't this is what they will do to the little innovator guys/girls. An invite from a Fortune 500 without any high powered connections is an invitation to get kicked in the face and they say that's how it goes. But no that's not how it should go!
Those would be the ethical and moral principles that Google has since broken?
> As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".
Which apparently includes: entrenching the ad-supported business model regardless of the damage it does; killing apps that were extremely popular with and beneficial to users, because they weren't generating enough ad revenue; locking people into walled gardens; etc.
> the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.
Is it? Because it's sure hard to tell from the user's perspective.
> Seems to be working pretty well for them
For those who are benefiting from Google's profits and stock price, sure. But doing good for the world?
And if some people disagree that what Google is doing are "good things", too bad for them. Also, they are so fired.
> see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy
I see it as intolerance and blindness to even a possibility of one's position being wrong or incomplete. If you define what you are doing as "good thing", then automatically everybody who disagrees is "bad", and what shouldn't you do to not allow bad persons to ruin a good thing?
> Seems to be working pretty well for them
Except those who get disinvited, or not hired, or fired, for taking a wrong side (which is, any side that somebody in power disagrees with) in the debate. But yeah, they are making a boatload of money, so I guess that's a "good thing" too.
That's the most highbrow way I've ever heard to describe googlers arguing internally about the day's hot button political issues while turning a blind eye to the ethical monsters in their own basement.
They're agenda is to hurt google and with this one I'm guessing they want to further damage google's image with conservative culture warriors.
As for the issue at hand, even if it might not be as drastic as described it's definitely affecting business most evident by some rank and file employees' public objection to their DoD AI work.
Fixing matters will involve more than intranet discussion moderation, it's about hiring. Perhaps they should optimize for a different kind of prospect.
EDIT: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16416016#16416416
At any rate, there is too much baggage there to take anything they publish about google at face value.
Shit is fucked. I hate the news. I don’t like talking to human beings, pretty much at all now.
If the conversation doesn’t start of politicized, give it five minutes, and then someone might interject, disagree, you have to pick a side, draw a weapon and make a decision about who to fight alongside, or against, possibly to the death, or at least enough to establish enemies for life.
I’m done with all of you. Just go away. Stop talking to me. I don’t even want to pan handle for some spare change, whether you have it or not.
Perhaps in USA.
Seattle/Kirkland tends to be older, more domestically settled people hired from Microsoft/sometimes Amazon, so just demographically it’s no surprise that they don’t agitate as loudly for social justice.
There is debate from other places of course, but 99% of people just get on with their job and leave the arguments up to those in MTV who give a shit. MTV can be very blinkered - rightly or wrongly the people there forget that people outside of SV - let alone outside of the USA - exist.
I was working in online media 5 years ago and the number of sites using bots to compile half-baked articles that a junior editor could quickly tweak to meet his 10+ article a day quota was disheartening. Again, that was 5 years ago. Now we have today's news automation capabilities + political drama + Facebook/Twitter/Slack/et al, and you've magnetized millions of consumers with a reality TV soap opera that has infected everything.
Google is at the center, and so is Facebook and Twitter as distributors. They've all built information vacuums which tailor news & content based on your profiles, search intent, visit history, purchasing habits, and predictive attributes to target you. However, no matter how sophisticated the AI/ML becomes – the underlying program is still written by a human and expressed biases are engrained the day we're born. And, they will never go away.
In a company and environment like today, I'm not sure how one can begin to escape the discussions around society and politics while operating an organization that has a larger GDP than Switzerland coupled with uncontested scale that touches nearly every person worldwide...
They are still in violation of human rights, international law, in some cases laws protecting American citizens.
The argument you are espousing is the same one that justified the use of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus without anything to show for it.
There are a lot of internal discussion groups - it is just an internal Google groups thing so anyone can create a group about anything. Often they are purely work related (e.g. groups for specific tools/services/teams that people can join), but there are some that are not work related.
I'd say that these sort of political debates are the extreme outliers. I've never encountered any significant political debate/argument during my 6 years at Google, but then I don't go looking for it on the groups. From my experience people at google are well-mannered, polite and respectful; disagreement of course occurs but is usually handled professionally without much fuss.
What does happen though is that although we do have an online tool to vote up questions for the TGIF meetings, you get "regulars" who ask in-person questions at TGIF in Mountain View. These people are often fine, but there are a couple who clearly have their own political/moral axe to grind. I find these people the most irritating, since unlike the questions which have been voted up to the top on the online tool, they don't need votes to ask their questions. This can give their opinions -minority or majority held- more apparent credibility than they might otherwise deserve if it had been left to the online voting only.
There is also a lot of focus from certain groups on purely US related things - e.g. asks about allowing people to volunteer if they are conservative or democratic in the HR system. These blinkered people asking these in-person questions in California don't realise that they live in one country, and that the political parties in that country aren't the same as the ones in others (most countries are not a two party polatised system like it is in the US)
TL;Dr there are jerks if you go looking for them but 99.9% of the time yiu just do your job and no one wants to know or cares what your political or moral views are.
Sorry, what? You have to formally register your political views with the HR?
Regardless, I believe the statement was more like certain groups are trying to get something in the HR for people to volunteer such information. Not that the company has it as mandatory.
Which, by the way, is an incredibly horrible idea. Not only does it open the door for certain people to mistreat other people, as I said; it also creates the situation where certain types of people will treat others that don't volunteer such information as suspicious. As in, "what do you have to hide?"
Liberal/Authoritarian Progressive/Conservative Democrat/Republican
Progressive means that you want to change society while conservatives want to preserve it as it is.
The Nazi party was as progressive as it can get since they wanted to restructure all of German society and the whole world, so were the Bolsheviks neither of them were particularly liberal or democratic.
A purely conservative society will stagnant and decay a purely progressive one would result in chaos.
The tool that mediates this in a modern democracy is bureaucracy which provides resistance to change but ensures that once it reaches critical mass it would go through.
Which is why the extremes of both political ends attack or try to circumvent it.
e.g. Democratic People's Republic of Korea is certainly not in any meaningful way democratic, it is a hereditary dictatorship. The former German Democratic Republic likewise was in no meaningful way democratic or a republic. The words socialist and socialism are likewise commonly usurped to impugn or to attract; they are signals that work or don't work based on time, geography, culture, history, neighbors. It's an exercise in anti-denotation, and appeal to emotion, and it is strategic.
Calling the left at large liberal when today significant portion of it could not be further from it is something that needs to be called out.
Having a comparison which says “Democratic” vs “Conservatives” is also harmful as you now paint one side as authoritarian.
I want to have clear definitions and for words to have meaning specifically to avoid any confusion in regards to the issues you have mentioned and many more.
If we take the the US an example I think you would want to make a distinction between civil war republicans and those of today just as you would want to make a distinction between the democrats that institutionalized racial segregation through Jim Crow and those of today.
So I do not believe I’m avoiding anything I’m just not picking and choosing based on what would benefit my agenda.
Identify politics is poison in general and if we must resort to it in since casss we must make sure that we use the clearest definitions possible and use them correctly.
Their culture really turns me off. I am a mid-30’s white male, for the record.
A few months ago, I visited one of their main campus locations.
When I walked in the door, there was a group of female employees huddled in the lobby having some sort of private discussion. When they saw me walk in the door, I received what I can only describe as a “death glare” from them. I felt like I was walking into a junior high school cafeteria and interrupted the cheerleader table. It was at that level of childish tribalism and latent tension.
I know this sounds thin skinned. I regularly have been involved with Amazon, Microsoft and others and never got a vibe approaching open cliquish behavior.
I talked about it to some minority friends and their response was: “well maybe that is how minorities are used to being looked at in these environments.”
I can’t remember ever giving anyone a death stare in my career because they were a minority or due to their gender.
I wouldn’t work there.
I read that a few times and I just fail to parse it. Can anyone explain the idea there. How are the topics connected? Is there something obvious I am missing or it is supposed to be satire which points that people can offended about anything.
> The dilemma is especially striking at tech companies, which typically cast themselves as open meritocracies
Not like all tech companies. Google milked morality perception for years "Don't be evil etc...". It has no doubt paid huge dividends. "We are not like those crusty old evil companies with suits and ties, we are young playful, cool and super-nice! Come join us!".
Even though it is a huge tech giant which tracks millions of people, know what they email, what credit cards they use, what sites they visit, lobbies the government more than financial giants, defense contractors or telecom companies, somehow deep down the first instinct I have is still to think of it as cutesy little startup with colorful letters that does search better than AltaVista. A small underdog that everyone loves to root for. Their morality marketing is really that good.
And well people bought into that propaganda and now they are finally paying for it internally. So animal rights activists are somehow fighting with racial justice ones. And besides getting invited to product management meetings, one gets invited to talks about how their coworkers sexually identify as "a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin".
> The Google spokeswoman said an employee working on Talks at Google on a volunteer basis unilaterally made the decision to cancel the talk
Aha, I think they are slowly, after great fanfare and drama, realizing that maybe the workplace should just be for work. People will just start objecting to any talks. Doesn't matter the topic, because with a few rhetorical tricks, an intelligent enough person can be offended (or claim to be offended) by anything.
The idea is that something being offensive is inherently subjective. If you claim being offended, you are offended. Offending people - at least people that Google management is inclined to listen to - is a no-no. Consequently, if you want to veto a speaker, you just need to proclaim your offense. There's no proof required because there's no proof possible - there's no objective test for being offended, only your feelings, of which you are the only judge. As soon as you decided to proclaim your veto, that's it, the deed is done.
Why people at Google decided to veto PETA speaker - who knows. But there's no point in digging deeper than that and trying to find logic in it - there's no logic in this setup.
> People will just start objecting to any talks.
That'd work if the decision were impartial. But an anonymous "employee working on Talks at Google" doesn't have to be impartial.
That's why if I'm ever presented with such a setup I would protest by voting to veto everything, even the talks I would be interested in. If any one person is to be censored by such drivel, then none should be heard until the divisive and bigoted system is removed.
Of course, people who run such a system would immediately remove my ability to vote. Which, in a way, would prove a point.
I can't speak for these particular people, but people can be offended by equating people and animals.
I wouldn't be offended, and I'd be tolerant of these kind of PETA lectures, but I do find the underlying emotional appeals presumptuous and tone deaf. I can see why someone would feel offended by the argument.
I don't see why someone would be intolerant of it, though.
I find it comically hypocritical they claim to be inclusive and an open company. Alternative viewpoints are not accepted, and even if you can make logical arguments you are dismissed and bullied. Frankly a lot of the viewpoints in the bay are very extreme, and disconnected from the vast majority of American's.
Make them busy with overwhelming work