I'm glad Google Employees are taking a stand rather than just leaving the company and having their replacements do bad things thinking it will be a one off.
> Google can kick them out and replace within a month.
Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases.
Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
All of that is true, but it doesn't change the reality of how software engineers are perceived and treated in the vast majority of technology companies.
The typical ramp up time for a new Google engineer is roughly 3-6 months. So it's more like replace them within 3mo at a generous estimate. Also a few of those were staff You can replace those in 2-3yrs maybe.
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
I listened to a longform interview with the head of their HR strategy which referenced the company consistently citing talent attraction and retention as the number one limitation on company growth.
They invest extremely heavily in minimizing attrition and widening their funnel for recruiting. That's why their offices are crazy, they do 3 meals a day for employees, they pay a ton of money for people right out of college and for interns, everyone gets free massages, etc. They take any effect that narrows that funnel or increases attrition very seriously, as they view the company as fundamentally being a stable of the best software engineers they can get competing with the best software engineers other people can get to put out better solutions to problems.
At a size of Google, the company has to be mostly constructed out of "cogs", to be resilient. If Google couldn't handle losing ~40 (as of right now) employees, that would be something seriously strange for one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
I'm sure there are sets of 40 employees that would cripple Google, at least be extremely unfortunate if they left together. There are certainly important components with a bus factor of less than that.
Google has literally thousands of engineers. A significant percentage of those engineers leave every year as part of normal attrition. Google is certainly capable of dealing with the fallout these folks leaving without feeling a thing. While it's true there are some "one-in-a-million" type engineers that work at Google, I don't see any of the well-known ones on this list.
All that said, I commend the folks who signed this letter. If anything, the fact that most of the folks who signed are in relatively junior positions shows how Google has lost its way when it comes to it's morals. The more senior execs feel the pressure of serving Wall Street and have more to lose, while these more junior folks, while taking a risk know they can get hired anywhere else in a heartbeat. It's the kid standing up saying the emperor has no clothes.
Does a few engineers leaving hurt google? No. Does the massive PR storm that will never be erased from the Internet cause problems for them down the road? Absolutely.
The fact this is posted on HN and the regular gauntlet of tech sites is enough to have a major impact on their recruiting. I, like many of the people here, am a frequent target for Google recruiters and Dragonfly is more than enough for me to turn down an interview with them. Maybe they will have more luck with fresh college grads and interns who are less discerning.
There are hundreds of thousands of developers around the world who dream every day about working at Google. If you think a few dozen engineers aren't replaceable by a company like Google, you are wrong.
Firing all these engineers would be insanity, as the internal uproar over that would be much worse than that over Project Dragonfly. You might even see formalized organizing begin over it (look up what happened to Lanetix).
I don't have strong views either way on Project Dragonfly but I would absolutely be greatly pissed off if everyone opposing it were fired.
I don't think you understand Google culture. Kicking them out would have far greater repercussions. It might also expose them to lawsuits. It also will likely affect what they'll have to pay for top talent: the idea that Google puts core values above profits (or at least that they prioritize them at all) is a major perk.
Google has little reason to kick them out. They can ignore them instead. Some will leave due to this. Others will stay. The effect of the action overall would be diluted.
Worst thing that can happen here from Google's perspective is for this to get a lot of media attention & a lot of signatures.
Quick summary (if you don't know the name "Dragonfly", like I didn't):
> We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.
> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
> we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
And where's the actual research showing that Google in China would do such a thing? By all calculations, it would bring more knowledge and access to Chinese citizen that they already have.
This make it sound like Google is the reason why the citizen don't have access to information.
No? You're projecting your western values. They're not condoning anything, they are following local laws. And while Search will be crippled, they are still bringing dozens of other great and useful service to Chinese citizens. Almost any actual Chinese citizen I've spoken to would absolutely love to have Google back. Instead, Westerns are just outraged in their place and are trying to virtue signal.
Is it possible that people are kinda upvoting it as a "Yay for this!" type upvote without having anything to say on the topic and possibly not even reading the article?
It almost looks like it's a breaking news story and everyone's waiting for the mods to notice and condense them all into a single thread, like they always do.
If I was in China and had to choose between having a choice between censored baidu and censored google vs just censored baidu, I'd rather have both baidu and google. It's easy for us here in the western world as we have access to both and more uncensored sources to take the moral high ground and subject the Chinese to a "let them eat cake" attitude. Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google completely.
Come to think of it, that's exactly what it could do by refusing to do business with them. If China is left out in the cold for long enough they may move a little.
That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
But Facebook can influence elections. Something isn't adding up to 100% here.
More so, I'm not worried about Google influencing China, I'm worried about China putting pressure on Google to spy on the world or lose potential profits.
Google is technically superior to baidu in many areas, specially for a developers. It gives better answers in many subjects, not just the censored ones. Besides who are we to decide for the Chinese what is best for them? Sounds a bit condescending and paternalistic. Here here, baidu is enough for you to play with, don't bother with google.
It's only condescending in a nationalist sense. I look at my own government and how well it chooses what is best for me, and I have to ask, who is the Chinese government to decide what is best for the Chinese people?
Unless you're an anarchist, that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people. That's why you have prescription only drugs, anti-vice laws, securities. All these things exist because the government think the people are too dumb to decide things by themselves. Not saying I agree with it, just saying you would need to argue for anarchism if you were to argue "who is the X government to decide what is best for the X people?".
I think the government's job is to provide the goods and services that the free market can't effectively provide or wouldn't provide to most citizens. Roads, military defense, healthcare, etc. I'm no anarchist but I very much disagree the government should be deciding what is best for people. Areas where it tries to are a mistake.
> that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people.
Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.
Why could we not protect ourselves? Many ancaps or ancoms would argue that would be possible. The government assumes they know better than you do on how to enforce contracts or protect yourself and impose a monopoly on force by force to make sure you can't build alternatives. So yeah, it is based on the premise that they know better than you do on certain areas of life. People just disagree how wide these areas should be. I may be mistaken though so feel free to prove me wrong.
This argument is backwards - Google isn't the one preventing Chinese people from using Google! Nobody has said that China isn't allowed to have Google except the CCP.
Google has already provided China with a product: uncensored search. If the Chinese (for the sake of argument, naively assuming that the CCP acts on behalf of its citizens) don't think that's what's best for China, fine. They don't have to use it.
The Chinese appear to think, collectively, that authoritarianism is better than democracy. They could revolt. The Chinese military is under funded with failing equipment, though they are trying to improve in areas. The sheer size of their military makes it difficult to have common weapons and gear available. 100 million citizens throwing themselves against that machine, would wear it down quickly. They don't do this.
The Chinese had a century or more of bloody civil war recently, within historical terms. They don't like regime change.
They historically were fine under the emperor, who was authoritarian. They are use to autocratic, central government. Unless things get extremely bad, I don't see them thinking that democracy is better than their current stability. If Xi Jinping does a decent job of getting rid of corruption and improving the air quality, I doubt you'll see a revolt even with a depression in China.
Edit: for those downvoting, how about a dialog? Democracy is not a native idea for the Chinese. Their major philosophical systems support a rigid hierarchy, which is not compatible with the democratic norm of anyone can attempt to run for office. They've lost millions to wars before Mao calmed everyone down. Even with Mao's major famine, there wasn't a revolt. 45 million died, and no uprising. If 100k died at the hands of the US government, there would be blood in the streets. Probably true with 1k. The Chinese do not care about authoritarianism.
The military equipment is irrelevant; they are still far more coordinated than the civilians are permitted to be. Suppressing collective action is one of the central goals of authoritarian censorship.
Democracy is no more a native idea for western culture; 250 years ago every state was a monarchy, and political ideologies based in hierarchy still regularly win elections.
I think your notion here is naive. Assuming a majority of people in China is fine with the way the government runs, does not negate the fact that many people are not. In a country of a billion people, we are speaking of millions of people. For this, as a first step, you just need to look at minorities like Uighurs, Tibetians, Mongolians. It does not end there.
Also, you cannot use the word "choice" when no options were ever given. A large chunk of people can be unhappy with how the government operates while still not marching the streets. The world is not binary. People living in China also know that the government went to extreme lengths when it came to ending protests in the past: shooting at their own citizens.
The joy of market processes is that those who like Pepsi more and those who like Coke more can both be satisfied at the same time, unlike the Republican voters of San Francisco or the Democrats of Utah.
Also, Baidu is completely in the pocket of the Chinese government. They are happy to censor anything and everything they're asked. Google is not beholden in this way and will censor the minimum amount possible.
I think the situation should be looked at more holistically.
Here are some other factors to consider:
- Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it?
- Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it?
- Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
This disagreement is much more fundamental than China. It's about the role of free-information and free-education being the basis upon which beliefs should be formed, rather than beliefs being used to block out free-information.
Google is already censoring specific searches all over the world, in the EU for example, the right to be forgotten and many "hate speech" laws already force google to censor many sites that are filtered out.
Why single out China though? If Google had to stop doing business in any country that forces it to censor stuff, they would not be allowed anywhere, I think even the US forces them to filter out illegal gambling. Where does it stop?
Maybe google should commit to a policy of "protected free speech" on a wide range of political topics that it will never censor in any country (roughly in line with the first amendment).
So you do support censorship, just not on political topics you agree with. Problem is, what's politically acceptable is highly subjective and varies greatly from country to country.
I read the parent differently - just don't censor political speech. Regardless of whether we agree with it.
And that sounds reasonable. I hate FUD-spreading around e.g. immigration, but I don't support any censorship around it. Just debunk the FUD, hiding it won't solve anything, and might hurt a lot when some people get "redpilled" by discovering censored opinions.
It boils down to what the American culture, or I guess the employees at Google's culture, are willing to censor.
China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of integrating a company-wide value system? You want to mimic an individual value system, in that you are clear on why you made certain decisions, because you can point to your value system?
> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
> For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best.
That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?
Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.
> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism
So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.
>But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist?
Presumably legislatures, that are elected? I'm not sure how it works over there.
>Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search.
Well, that's happening in America right now, the executive branch is labeling his opponent political party as Communists, don't respect rule of law, saying they want Open Borders or to "Take the Guns Away!" despite the fact that this is factually incorrect. In the USA, we have several branches of government that helps balance when this happens - for example, our judicial branch recently restored the press pass of a journalist removed for being a thorn in the executive's side. I imagine a balance is similarly struck in these European nations? They are all democracies, right?
It seems very much an age of free flow information and rule of the people. Despite the warning-flag-waving of the alt-right in the USA that labeling people nazis will somehow cause totalitarian liberal rule, it really seems like the opposite is happening - far-right nationalism seems to be on the attack for totalitarianism, with the democratic systems keeping it at bay.
I am very interested in discussing this further, however, because I don't believe it's a simple, black and white issue, and I am curious if there's ways to prevent bad things like far-right nationalism without restricting speech (which, the argument goes, could backfire).
How about I said to you that all men are descendants of Genghis Khan? Well, 1 in 200 are, and Eric Swalwell is 1 of the 198 Democrat representatives (though that percentage gets much lower if we lump in total Democrats in elected office...) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...
My claim that the president's factually incorrect statements, are factually incorrect, remain unchallenged in any rhetorically effective way, though I invite you to try again if you please.
Picking some minority view and ascribing it to all of your political opponents seems to be a very popular tactic nowadays, on all sides of the political spectrum. All it does is raise the level of hateful rhetoric, and does nothing to actually help people discuss the actual issues. Because of flaws in the way our minds work, it continues to work, and people continue to use it.
> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship
But why don’t they apply the same censorship to the far left? That’s where I have my problem with it, it isn’t to protect the people from the far right, it’s to control public discourse in a way that reinforces their leftist ideology. The Communist Party isn’t censored in Europe, but right-wing groups are. You can celebrate Stalin, but would be arrested for celebrating Hilter. How is that any different than Chinese censorship? Maybe degree, but definitely not intent.
Nazism is wrong, though. So is a good majority of what far right nationalists preach.
It's almost, but not quite, false equivalence. You could make a moral relativism argument, but at the end of the day the global zeitgeist is moving towards the "good" that some people associate with liberal values, and always has been.
From an anthropological standpoint, I'm with you - the ideologies are indistinguishable. From a moral standpoint, I disagree strongly - one is generally Bad, the other is generally Good.
Communism is not Good either I'd say. Better argument would be "Europeans at least liked Commies when they have taken over, Nazis just invaded everyone".
The best would be to just admit that Europe is wrong in censoring stupid far right (Nazis), while mostly ignoring stupid far left (Commies).
But some people liked the pseudo-communist regimes, while almost nobody liked Nazi occupation (which is still in fresh memory). So the opposition to banning Commies is real and noticeable. So not so simple.
Tl;dr: Simplified "moral standpoint" holds no water in these discussions.
Censorship in the EU is generally intended to protect individuals; censorship in China is meant to protect the ones doing the censoring. The EU has democratically elected governments; China is an authoritarian dictatorship.
You do see what you're saying right? Essentially, you're saying the government is responsible for the laws regarding censorship, not the businesses that operate there.
If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint. This is no different than operating in China.
Google can't influence one way or another what censorship laws exist in China, currently. If they had a significant market share there, then they might be able to negotiate terms, since they would have some leverage.
Why would they have leverage? Oh no, Google is threatening to leave if we don't change our censorship policy, and if Google leaves - then what? Citizens get upset? I don't think that's exactly a strong motivator to the CCP. That's kind of the problem with dictatorships; you don't have to win elections.
>If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint.
"If the US were just like China, we'd be in no position to criticize them" - sure, but it isn't. The USA and the PRC are not the same, and I don't think it's a relevant hypothetical.
Laws passed by duly elected representatives (whether in the US, EU, or elsewhere) may not be perfect, but they certainly have more legitimacy than "laws" promulgated by an authoritarian regime that sends political and religious dissidents to "reeducation" camps.
I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
Comments like this make me glad I live in the USA. We don't discriminate on what types of censorship are acceptable or not. Less extraordinary exceptions (Child pornography, Libel), any censorship is in violation of our constitution and most closely held core values.
I also live in the USA. I think the differences between our censorship and the EU's are mostly of degree, but I wouldn't disagree too strongly with you if you think otherwise.
>I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
I'm sure they would. I'm also sure that Donald Trump would say that he's not a liar. That doesn't mean it's an argument we need to take seriously. You can make judgments for yourself - I believe that the EU leadership is more or less acting in good faith (and is likely to continue doing so), and the CCP is not. That's a meaningful difference.
> I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, because if they say something like that they're lying. Their censorship is meant to protect the power and privilege of the already powerful and privileged, and keep everyone else complaint to them.
The only way Chinese censorship "protects" individuals is by discouraging them from having dissident thoughts that the government may decided to personally and physically oppress them for having.
How is that any different from European censorship?
Nazism is despicable, but censoring the Nazi voice is effectively the same as preventing citizens from having those "dissident thoughts" that contradict modern western government, and you actually can receive prison time for expressing Nazi sentiments in Germany so the government absolutely does "oppress them" for having those thoughts.
China views western influence the same way. In China's history, rule by the west has seen terrorism, imperialism, and corruption, which have lasted far longer (since the 1800s when the First Opium Wars were fought), and I would argue have led to greater suffering (certainly the numbers are in favor of this being the case).
Accepting government censorship in the EU is, in principle, no different from censorship in China. The only difference is the flavor.
>Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
My guess is that it is already here, just for things we deem acceptable. The problem with censorship is that everyone has something they think acceptable to censor, so the infrastructure to censor will be developed with mass approval.
I wonder if these things go in both directions though. Google becomes beholden to the Chinese government on threat of being kicked out of the country. Maybe in a few years Google is making a bunch of money in China, and then the govt asks them to censor search results in the western world too.
Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
> Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google completely.
It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.
Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:
* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.
* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.
* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.
* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.
You assume they don't already have leverage in Google. I would be more surprised if the Chinese haven't already found ways to leverage Google for external influence (akin to Russia, Iran, etc. via Facebook).
But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.
Those are not the only two options. What if Google were to put some of its considerable technical resources toward undermining and subverting the Great Firewall of China? That would be in keeping with their mission statement, and might deliver a huge payoff in the long run.
I have to agree with this. Some search is better than no search. Not everything can be censored and people WILL find information they are not supposed to find, just with more digging than in the rest of the world. Saying that Google should not provide any search product in China is shortsighted and purely ideological.
Totally agree with you. I guess that's the real reason that many Chinese googler don't want to sign.
I'm totally against censorship. But I also don't agree the those who see themselves stand on the moral high ground while don't understand the complexity of the issue. Also a lot of people don't differentiate facts and opinions. They blame those who don't agree them are influenced by China government.
There are not many Chinese names in the signed letter, and I can fully understand. If you are a Chinese H1B or green card holder, and you signed this letter, it is almost certain the Chinese government will contact your family in China.
Can confirm, China watches its citizens abroad, closely, and in person sometimes. Their families can be affected, and if they go back home to visit, there can be problems.
Now with increased efficiency with Dragonfly technology. Find enemies of the state with our world wide database, US and EU results included. All brought to you by the Alphabet platform.
Think about the synergy that this could unlock, Alphabet comes with the citizen tracking service (not malicious, just for ads, obviously) and plug it to their citizen scoring service.
Further research could be done on integrating this new dataset with Project Maven, think about the opportunities of engaging only with end users with score below a threshold.
Can confirm your confirm is fabricated from thin air.
The difference would be: you might not know you are lying while I do. We are doing the same thing, confirm something not conformable. Theoretically that's lying
You don't know he's lying, you just assume it because he didn't cite a source. It's not the first time I've heard people make his claim, so it might not be baseless.
Did you see my 2nd sentence which implied I was lying? Which almost means making a baseless claim?
You assumed that I assume he was lying only because he didn't cite source. That assumption is not correct.
Now I can tell you that I originally had 3rd sentence:
the 2nd sentence is a lie. I do have solid evidence that he was lying (unintentionally I believe) but it's too difficult to present the evidence.
1989, downtown Cleveland, soon after Tiananmen Square. We'd all seen the "tank man" and people were talking about all the dead witnessed by those present (~10k?) versus the official cover story of 300 and denial.
So there were protests across the US, including downtown Cleveland, mostly visiting Chinese students from CSU and CWRU, and plenty of horrified locals there to support them. There were a couple of Chinese guys not marching but watching from the edges while people walked past. They both had the same sunglasses, trench coats, and SLR cameras with long lenses, and they were taking pictures of the marchers. If you've ever been in Cleveland in June, this is not appropriate attire for cloudy and windy, so they stood out from the locals. The Chinese on student visas told me they were government, often seen at such events, and they were cataloging Chinese there for later study and reprisals to family or when they returned home.
Or it's because they would rather access to a censored Google without using a VPN when they visit China. If they really think that Dragonfly is worse than Baidu or Bing, they don't have to use it. This is a classic case of privileged westerners deciding that they know better than the actual residents – a modern day white man's burden.
Edit: Flagged for an unpopular view. Hacker news has sunk to a new low. Whatever guideline you think I violated, I guarantee that there are violations of equal magnitude on this thread that are very popular.
Too bad for the Chinese state. If you try to promote a view by threatening others who might express a different one, I'm not going to weigh that neutrally.
The thing is, ideas developed without free criticism are like programs without tests. (Only worse, because most programs aren't core to anyone's social identity, which puts extra pressure on the kind of ideas we're talking about here.)
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.
Well, presumably the ideas we are talking about are political/social/moral views. To base your acceptance/rejection of them, even in part, on your knowledge of their genesis is already quite intellectually lazy. ("John made such and such claim about topic X. When I consider the claim's intrinsic merits I'm not complete sure what I should think, but given these biographical knowledge I have of John I accept/reject the claim" is only acceptable reasoning when X is an empirical topic (say about genetics) but not when it's a moral/political one)
If someone were to say to me, say, "Pot should be legal everywhere", and you tell me it's unacceptable when considering this claim to consider that the speaker is high, then I don't accept your bounds of acceptable reasoning. (Yes, knowing enough directly about pot would screen off this evidence. I think pot should be legal.)
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
To me, that's further proof that this letter is spot on. Why should we ever cooperate with a government that has tens of thousands in concentration camps? It is becoming increasingly unethical to do any business in China.
Might be less than by analyzing all their searches...
This might not be an exact relation, but my point is that it still may be worthwhile in a longer perspective. Social changes and engineering are nontrivial processes.
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."
By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.
I'm confused by these exact point values. My understanding that the social credit system is not yet implemented, and it's unlikely it will be a number, probably more a set of black lists for different purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
another possibility is that a lot of Chinese googlers wanted dragonfly to continue because they think that even a sensored Google search would be beneficial for the people of China.
Part of it is almost certainly due to fear of reprisal, but consider also that many people of Chinese descent simply may not agree with the letter. I grew up in a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, and one thing you come to realize is that while many Chinese expats have very complicated feelings about the Party, they still tend to be intensely nationalistic and are very sensitive towards perceived slights directed at China.
They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.
Good for them. Any company claiming to have moral backbone should not cater to the demands of the Chinese government which has shown time and again that it is a tyrannical regime.
Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.
Try to do that at Oracle or IBM. This is the culture fostered by Google executives, so they shouldn't be surprised if employees are publicly outspoken about their business decision. Is it a good or bad thing? If the higher ups are OK with employees publicly voicing their opinion then I don't see a problem. Management doesn't seem to be fighting this and Google does seem to work that way. The only issue I'd see is if a public petition was created and employee were coerced into signing it by their fellow workers under threat of being put "on the list".
Agitating would be step 1. If enough employees speak up, perhaps the plans get changed or the practice stops.
Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.
For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
I think it is generally better to state your complaints to management first rather than leaving quietly. Give management a chance to fix whatever issue you have or to come up with an alternative. You can always leave as a last resort.
Google is a publicly traded company, so they unfortunately answer to shareholders and customers not to employees unless they are one or both of those things.
In this case investors are who can make any worthwhile difference and they should be appealing to investors. However, I imagine a significant chunk of investors don't even know/realize they are due to whole/broad market funds.
Google sees 17% of the world's population as potential customers via China so who is going to have their attention more 'thousands' of employees or 1.4 billion potential customers? The only way they're going to get Google's attention is to get shareholders concerned. There will always be employees willing to be on board with this, fact of the matter is most people just don't care as long as they are getting paid. They need to get investors against it if they want to have any hope of getting Google to not do this.
A Medium article, or a petition, or a 'hey thousands of us think you shouldn't do this', is unlikely to do a damn thing. If they want to make a stand they should have Amnesty International create a video campaign that describes, FROM PUBLIC SOURCES (to avoid any potential blowback from sharing company secrets/violating NDAs), what Dragonfly is and have non-Google employees that are industry experts comment on why they think it is a bad idea. Then the Google employees should share this on all of their social media, share it directly to their friends. You want to get outsiders championing the cause and generating attention and you want to minimize any single employees risk as much as possible by using non-employees to be the public face.
If I were doing it I'd do a video as Amnesty International, try and get the Internet Freedom Foundation on board, reach out to college human rights groups and try and grass roots the shit out of it to get as much media attention as possible which would increase chances of reaching the eyes of investors.
Doing it as a group of employees though, ehhhh, that's almost certainly going to do nothing and if anything it'll have a negative impact on employees and potentially result in future policies designed to thwart future attempts like this.
It sucks because it's too big of a market to effectively deter Google from wanting to bend to the will of the Chinese government.
It's refreshing to see people deciding that things can be important enough to warrant taking some sort of action other than washing one's hands of the matter.
Recognizing that there are paths available other than "doing what the company says" or "walking away" is a good thing, and people should speak up if they feel their work is being used in unethical ways.
There's a view that employees are subservient to employer's wills, to the extent they agree to stay under their employ. While obviously true to some extent, it seems silly to extend this to carte blanche for what employees must agree to be complicit in.
So, 36 people (at present, anyway) sign a letter. What in the flying frig is that actually supposed to accomplish? There's nothing really actionable here; you've got the nothingness of "that leadership commit to transparency, clear communication, and real accountability."
Are these people going to actually do anything - quit in protest, sabotage, what? No, they are going to whine, and keep drawing their very lucrative salaries and benefits. Put up or shut up.
Why would you start with ultimatums and demands? I think it's better to start soft and get a discussion going. Maybe these people are smart enough to realize that they don't know everything.
Activism takes many forms. They’re not mutually exclusive. Your contribution to this discussion (with a throwaway account) is to put boundaries on what activities you deem acceptable.
You're criticizing a snapshot of a process. I'd agree with your criticisms if we knew this was the end-game, but we don't know that it is. It is not, in general, the correct move to escalate to the maximum level in situations like this, so considered as a process this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The next move is currently Google's.
If this is immoral, it should also be illegal, no? Is anyone for also lobbying to create a law or executive order to that effect?
Otherwise, another company will simply step into Googles place, or they could be tempted later to try again. The market is too profitable to do otherwise.
Making everything that is immoral illegal is putting the government in charge of defining morality, it's a bad idea. It leaves little room for disagreement. Little room for nuance. Slows the ability to adapt to new situations or improved understanding. Opens up the process of deciding what is moral to abuse. Etc.
What am I missing? The cost of switching to an alternative search engine like Bing or Duck is next to zero. (Actually, I dropped Google for Duck just 2 months ago.)
Brand is the most valuable asset Google has. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil projects - really worth the damage to Google's public image?
It's a billion users potentially, and Google only has a few billion users to begin with. Which is to say, yes, corporate greed suggests the opportunity to grow by 20-30% is absolutely worth sacrificing petty things like conscience and morals.
Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.
If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
Western people don't really care much? Well, they should blame themselves then, not Google.
> Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.
You cant support diversity and cultural differences and not support it at the same time. But at the end of the day business is business and cash is king.
It’s not just about having a search engine that’s fast and convenient albeit “censored.”
It’s very plausible that Dragonfly will be used to feed people in China flat out misinformation and lies, and then monitor them 24/7.
News that doesn’t toe the party line will literally be deleted. Try and search for a controversial book or subject, and you’ll be placed on a watchlist. Fake news and government created media will be the first and only result always. In other words, the Chinese government will have more access than ever into the minds of its people, and then it will try to either manipulate them or just repress the problematic ones.
This will happen whether Baidu or Google does it, but that doesn’t make it morally acceptable for Google to join in. We don’t get a free pass to do evil just because we’re not the first.
In fact, it’s worse for Google than Baidu. The people at Baidu don’t have a choice, it’s the country they were born in. But Google is one of the world’s richest companies, and if they chose not to operate in China, it would just maintain the status quo, not actively hurt them.
There’s no moral justification for this, even if now the search engine is faster and more polished.
At this point I don't believe this project could be successful. Even if it's not canceled the Chinese government is never gonna let a foreign company get the market share against the local champions : even more as this company has internal disent about the project. Also the links with the US government won't help.
agree. i don't quite see what enduring, long-term competitive edge Google could actually have in China.
is it the huge quantity of computing resources behind their search engine? (wouldn't Baidu or other Chinese companies be able to easily outbuild Google?)
is it the incredible, mysterious superiority of the super-duper secret Page Rank algorithm? ( jk )
is it the sophisticated and complex home page design and superior google doodles?
i mean what is it exactly?
google won't be able to reach the monopoly level of market share it enjoys in the US search market so it would actually have to compete on a month to month basis for its very life. this means it will hire a lot of very hard workers in China. and that means google's secret sauce (if it even exists) will make its way out and into the competitive landscape before Google can get close to being a monopoly. it just seems like a losing game.
What are these people actually going to do about it? Are they going to resign in protest if they throw their tantrum and don't get their way? Go on strike? I don't think so.
Pretty bold. A lot of people are saying this wont work, but speaking from my own experience, you'd be surprised what companies are amicable to when it comes to business.
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP
We all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.
They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.
for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post.
Damn, good for y'all for sticking to your values. How did you argue against the inevitable "if we don't take this contract, dude across the street will"?
While I’d like to try and agree... I think you may be missing a sense of scale and the reality of just how replaceable people are... even magically-gifted google employees.
There's always a break even point on where keeping an employee is worth less than letting them go.
It truly depends on the company and employee though. For many people that point can be extremely high so they have the power to push for ethical (or not) choices.
That power of course multiplied by the number of such people.
> There's always a break even point on where keeping an employee is worth less than letting them go.
Not if they are employees that are complaining about doing the job you're paying them to do.
Not that I don't agree with them, but in this case, Google Co has decided a route and the employees don't want to do it. I think they may find that they are more replaceable than the down votes implying the opposite are willing to accept.
Replacing people might be easy, but it's never cheap - even in industries with an abundance of candidates.
The real issue with having your work-force leave is three-fold. First, you lose all the accumulated knowledge of your team. Second, you lose the cohesiveness of your team. Thirdly, you have to _pay to get a new team_.
All of these things conspire to make all but the lowliest of jobs (think Target Associate) much more painful to replace than it seems.
In short, there are lots of hidden costs in recruiting.
Point 4: the new people come in with knowledge of the walk out, which can cause all kinds of secondary reactions. If this goes through every new google employee will have something to think about during the HR feel good antics.
I think you maybe are now ignoring the number of H1B / Visa / or otherwise applicants happy to take a lucrative job that don't give 1/2 a damn about any of that.
My post about SCALE was apparently too hard to understand. There is a big sea of programmers that would be happy to work for Google censorship or not.
If you want to argue the cost of replacing people - I'd argue the cost of paying people who won't do the job you want them to do.
Allegedly the secret to Google's success is hiring (and more importantly, retaining) the best of the best. Presumably Dragonfly work can be done by any H1B, but all the people who no longer want to work at Google would impact plenty of other projects.
There's a difference between your coder who can build you a chat app and a coder who can keep you on the bleeding edge of innovation. In theory.
There are hidden costs to taking a stand too. The costs to either side are not the point of the story.
Nor are the outcomes produced by a few brave people locally.
The point of the story is to draw a line in the sand. And that line matters when people are afraid to stand together on one side of it.
If you look at the example of Gandhi and the Salt Tax the mere act of picking salt of the ground and being threatened with arrest unified a country and sent a signal to the British were the line was. Sending that signal matters. Countries were that signal was not sent took many more decades to get independence.
I don't know man, I see so many companies voluntarily do this aftering being bought by PE -- only to flip the same company for 5 to 6x 3 to 5 years later.
I think it is a engineer's dream to think they can't be replaced. But they can, and the probs created by it simply don't matter.
Negotiations like these aren't won by convincing the other side through making more points via logic or evidence. You must help decision makers to realize that their choice is not win-win, that hidden costs, unwanted consequences, or just plain bad publicity await. Almost always, bureaucrat decisions are driven more by fear of failure than prospect of success. As a naysayer, your goal is mostly to spread FUD and take the shine off their bauble.
>As a naysayer, your goal is mostly to spread FUD and take the shine off their bauble.
WOW. Yes, that must be it. I can't possibly have an opinion about the matter that doesn't align with yours because surely you are right!
The only logical option here is I am spreading fear uncertainty and doubt - because I'm Google and this directly impacts me. Anyone who disagrees must be silenced because they are wrong!
EDIT: Nope, opinions not allowed. Try and hide anyone that disagrees!
I think you misinterpreted that message. I think "naysayer" is still referring to the working people who take a stand against something they feel is morally wrong. They should focus on the more 'real' business concerns so they can affect actions if not minds.
Not that you are a "naysayer" and are trying to spread fear by commenting on this website.
Speaking of scale, while the world is big and a lot of people do all sorts of things in it regardless of what I do, I am the medium through which I experience the world, so betraying or not betraying myself affects everything, past, present and future, far beyond our galaxy -- as far as I am concerned.
How long does it take to get a sysadmin up to speed? And how much money do they lose while their websites are unavailable? What happens if YouTube.com doesn't work for a week while they get up to speed?
Google is well aware of the spyware that the Chinese govt is using to oppress it's ethnic minorities, but they don't lift a finger to thwart it. They don't blacklist the app that the government requires Muslims in Xinjiang to have on their phones at all time[1]. They could easily blacklist it.
How far is Google willing to go to be friends with China? Mass detainment and ethnic cleansing are well within the realm of possibility, especially in the likely event of an economic crisis.
Will Google help sniff out their Anne Franks? Imagine trying to operate an underground railroad against the full force of Google. There are so many ways that machine learning and modern private surveillance can determine things like if there are extra uncounted people living in an area.
If Beijing did decide to solve the Uyghur problem, would Google cover for them and purge search queries?
No, this is not at all hyperbolic or reaching. American corporations did business with our enemies right up until they were forced to stop during WWII. American machines have been used to commit horrific atrocities. And read Chinese history. Read about what China has done as recently as a few decades ago.
I'm glad to see Google employees taking a break from their virtue pageantry to actually take a stand on something that matters, finally.
If Google actually were to do anything to help they Anne Franks of China, do you think they would announce it to the world to debate on HN, or do you think they would do it in secret?
Perhaps. But "Maybe Google is just pretending to be evil" does not give me much comfort. Especially as I have friends who are ethnic minorities in SE Asia.
this 100%. The business made a business decision : either veteran, that is, most valuable assets get mad and all sort of problems affecting productivty/quality happen or, a few not-yet-realized business opportunities disappears.
You deserve massive credit for striking a blow against this madness. A great example of how working people have more power than they think if they're willing to risk dollars and cents for matters of right and wrong.
I say that fully realizing that not everyone is in the financial position where they can risk a fight with their employer. You can't expect everyone to be Ghandi.
> A great example of how working people have more power than they think if they're willing to risk dollars and cents for matters of right and wrong.
I believe this is key. If more folks at more organizations were brave like this and willing to take the risk, a good chunk of the problems our civilization is facing might be greatly improved.
Unions are rarely formed unless conditions are particularly bad. One upon a time in this country, the national guard with machine guns might have been called out to clear a strike/protest. Most people are very happy being ignorant of their surroundings or influence of.
The most I've ever done is threaten to quit if a project for the RIAA was accepted by my employer when I was invited into the pre-pitch meeting. It just depends on a specific case.
I'm part of a very privileged workforce and our situation, while not great, was a lot better than the average worker. We still managed to form a union. It can be done.
> Worker's unions helped win the majority of our rights in modern democracies. I wish this fact was more widely appreciated.
The problem with modern unions, particularly in tech, is that the legacy structure is inapt for current problems. Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already. They don't need a huge bureaucratic structure for engaging in long-term detailed negotiations. They don't need a contract at all.
What they need is a no-dues no-fulltime-union-reps union that operates through direct democracy. It does nothing unless the employer is doing something bad wrong. Then if the majority of the union members vote to refuse, either the employer concedes or they strike.
Because it's not about a thousand little things here, it's about a small number of big things. It needs to be able to address those and then go back to being invisible instead of succumbing to feature creep and destroying the host with overhead and principal-agent problems as we've seen with the auto makers.
I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
Yes, having a higher salary would be ridiculous in a lot of these cases, but we should moderate that through legislation that benefits the most people - not by a public company further lining the coffers of its owners.
Apple and Google particularly have a lot of cash just lying around, and that cash is the result of the employee's efforts, and they deserve it. I think if we think their salaries are too high in that case, we need to talk about better taxation systems.
> I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time you haven't. The returns to success have to be enough to overcome the high failure rate.
Most of the employees aren't taking the same level of risk. If you work for a company for five years taking home a six figure salary and that company fails, you don't have to give back your salary and in a few months you're working for another company making the same amount of money.
If you think you can do better on your own, risking your own time and money instead of taking outside investment, go right ahead -- but then shouldn't it be you who gets more of the reward if you succeed rather than the people you hire in after you're already an established success?
On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.
It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they deserve literally billions of dollars.
Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee? Are you saying that because a founder may go bankrupt they are entitled to thousands of times more money? Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee? Could you help me understand what makes you think that?
> On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.
Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a <50% chance at $200,000, much less a <1% chance. A very high reward is inherently necessary to offset the very low probability of major success, otherwise people aren't going to do it.
> Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?
The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.
> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?
There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.
But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?
I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?
The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees. Employees compete with each other for salaries. Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable. Even Marx got this part correct
> The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees.
Incorrect, that value is only sustained and increased by the efforts of company workers.
> Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
Incorrect. Companies that don't have significant oversight in the form of government regulation or strong unions tend to collude to keep salaries low - which is exactly what has happened in the valley, and has meant that these companies have gigantic cash reserves that they aren't leveraging to hire the best talent.
> By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable.
No, I'm merely saying that the differences and risks suffered by investors and founders versus regular salaried employees are not a justification for the sometimes ridiculous difference between the compensation of the two.
> I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?
The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.
The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?
1) The collusion has presumably stopped now that they're caught.
2) It is possible for both to be true at the same time, because the industry is much larger than Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if they didn't compete with each other, they still have to outbid Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- and pay enough to prevent the workers leaving to found their own companies. It's not unreasonable to expect that the effect on wages was marginal even when it was occurring.
> Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already.
Software one of the highest margins of any industry. They can afford to pay more, especially since they are constantly whining about "shortages" of tech workers.
Which is why they already do pay more than other industries.
The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.
No, it really isn't. The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern, and be willing to risk their reputation. With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
> The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern
How is that different with a union?
> and be willing to risk their reputation
Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.
> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?
How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues? How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
> How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues?
The technology needed to let people submit proposals and let other people vote on them is on the level what individuals do over a weekend as adjunct to a side project.
> How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
Why do you need to force them to? By definition the majority will already agree, and then many in the minority would participate out of solidarity because that's the whole point of joining a union to begin with. You don't need 100.0%, a large majority is quite sufficient in general. And anything that actually required 100.0% is already lost, because then they could pay off the cheapest defector or contract it out.
The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.
And your picture of humam behavior is all too rose-colored glasses if it's having all members of a minority vote just go along out of solidarity when it's non-binding. I've seen unions vote on issues, and it's often contentious with emotions running high on all sides. If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have. Sometimes they try to anyway.
> The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.
This is a major problem for country-level populations. For corporations it typically comes pre-solved by the corporation itself, because each employee would have a company email address or Active Directory account etc. that could be used for authentication. (In theory the corporation could illegally tamper with the results that way, but the tampering would be immediately obvious to the person whose vote was changed.)
> If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have.
Because they're using the union for the wrong stuff. A lot of the votes would be for things like accepting a policy that gives raises to only senior people. No doubt the junior people being screwed over by that policy would strenuously object when they're the 49%, especially when being in the union deprives them of the opportunity to negotiate something else as an individual.
But how many Google employees have that kind of personal stake in a question like whether to censor search results in China?
If tech workers form a union, I'm sure it will look very different to the industrial worker's unions of the 20th century. And so it should, the needs of today are very different. The thing is, apart from the remaining unions from that time, most unions already look very different to that model so this is not really a good argument against unionising.
The other thing you aren't taking into account is the fact that this boom in the tech industry isn't guaranteed to continue forever. There will come a time, maybe pretty soon, where tech workers will become as precarious as those steel workers and autoworkers eventually became. Big tech companies are already putting a lot of effort and resources into educating the next generation of programmers to provide a more competitive labour market and drive down salaries. There's already talk of a coming recession, where I'm sure the belts will be tightened and people will be laid off. When we have a union, we will be more protected from the inevitable exploitation in such scenarios.
The temporarily embarassed unicorn founders among us need to realise that we are the creators of all the value in these companies and, collectively, we have the power to influence their direction and impact on society. We can help secure not only our own rights as workers but also have the power to change society at large and secure better standards of living for all workers (or non-workers). That's why these recent actions by Google employees have been so important. They can set a precedent for how other companies and even states can safely act in future, without fearing repercussions from their most valuable resource - the workers.
I wish more people knew that workers fought and died for those rights.
Its one thing to say maybe you'll quit, or skip your pay check for change, its another to actually put your life on the line for what you know is right.
4. Boycott silicon valley startups that have accepted chinese investments?
5. Boycott every product by US/Foreign company (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, GE, Disney, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, etc.) doing business in China?
There's a difference between boycotting products made in China and protesting against building technologies that enable dictatorial regimes. They do not deserve to be conflated.
You are essentially funding and enabling a dictatorial regime if you buy products made in China — you think Foxconn doesn’t pay the Chinese government any taxes?
There are over a billion innocent people in China. The products themselves are mostly innocent and the people who build them make their livelihoods manufacturing them. That the government takes a cut is incidental. It's simply not comparable to a product specifically built to support dictatorship.
Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?
“Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?”
They're not "enabling" a dictatorial regime, they're just following the laws of a foreign government. Making a censored search engine isn't "supporting" the government, it's just abiding by it.
A censored search engine is a direct instrument of oppression.
Contracting to build a censored search engine is the moral equivalent of contracting to build a barbed wire fence around a concentration camp.
You're being an active participant that directly assists in making that oppression happen by building tools required for the actual act of oppression, as opposed to building something that merely done in the same country.
"You're not allowed to do anything good ever if you're not already a maximally good person. That would make you a hypocrite, which is way worse than someone who doesn't do anything to help in the first place."
I don't understand the context in which you're posting this quote. pompousprick's argument was that we shouldn't morally prosecute these companies as supporting dictatorships just because they do business in China.
Bargaining power. (Organized) working humans have it...but it will erode as robots and algorithms take on more and more work. An argument for striking while the iron is hot. (No pun intended.)
Historically, whenever there's advancement in technology. Powers that control the current will get challenged, and so far, it has been for the better for the majority.
We've gone a long way from being serfs who have almost no rights, even the right to read and write.. to citizens who can communicate via the internet.
Advancement in technology will/have make current powers obsolete. Robots and algorithms have been taking more work since the stone age.
Better tools, means more surplus, means more time to think critically, more time to comment over the internet, or read books.
The only problem is that we probably won't see any observable improvement in one lifetime. It is however, also very possible that the incumbent powers put an end to our civilization. Hopefully enough people like these Google employees, Snowden, Assange will be there to stop fascism.
I think technology has allowed power to become more and more concentrated. Never before has one state had the power to annihilate entire cities, or land entire armies worth of troops at any point on earth within 24 hours. Never before have large and powerful organisations and governments had the capability to read every word that every person sends to each other and track their every motion around the city with cameras.
Yes there is more surplus, but where is that going? People in developed societies are working more hours now than they were 100 years ago. Wealth inequality has risen to higher levels than ever existed in modern society. I wish it gave me more time to read books...
We definitely need to be more engaged in resisting these dangerous tendencies, particularly with recent political developments. I think organised tech workers have immense power. If Google employees could formalise their current actions and then even unite with other groups across other companies, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
Agreed. But this many Google employees acting collectively, including some very senior and long-tenured Googlers, meet that additional condition.
(Disclosure: having worked at Google I know some names on that list personally, and respect them greatly. I haven't worked at Google since early 2015.)
It's been a long time since my statistics and econometrics courses, but one conclusion that's definitely unwarranted would be to assume that the rest disagree with the signatories. People who speak up on an issue will always be a small fraction of the larger population of people who share the same opinion.
People downthread have remarked on the lack of Chinese signatories, commenting on how the Chinese government tracks their citizens abroad. With ramifications for their family and friends as actual, real possibilities, according to some commenters.
If that were true, then their silence can definitely not be construed as any kind of tacit agreement, or even disinterest.
How many Chinese citizens (or people otherwise susceptible to this purported pressure) work at Google?
While threats from the Chinese government may be valid, it's more likely that they don't want to / cannot risk their H-1B status or green card priority date. So their immediate threat is more likely (indirectly) coming from USG.
They can get fired. If they're still an H-1B, that basically requires them to leave the country immediately.
There's a short grace period in practice (usually, and this isn't official) if you have another job all lined up that is ready to sponsor you. But if you were an H-1B applying for a green card via your employer, this basically resets your position in line, unless you're in late stages of the process. And keep in mind that the wait is measured in years for many countries (e.g. for India, >9 years right now unless you're in the "exceptional" category).
> While threats from the Chinese government may be valid, it's more likely that they don't want to / cannot risk their H-1B status or green card priority date. So their immediate threat is more likely (indirectly) coming from USG.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't see why the USG would want to sanction them, especially since this letter has nothing to do with the USG.
If they're discouraged from signing due to their US visa status, the mechanism that makes more sense is that they fear Google could fire them and it would take them longer than 60 days to line up another job that could sponsor them.
> People downthread have remarked on the lack of Chinese signatories, commenting on how the Chinese government tracks their citizens abroad. With ramifications for their family and friends as actual, real possibilities, according to some commenters.
Even as an American with no family in China, I'd be slightly worried that putting my name on such a list might prevent me from getting a visa to visit the PRC. They've shown a willingness to factor politics into visa decisions:
That guy didn't even express a stance, like these Google employees have, he just happened to be the acting leader of the club when a speaker the PRC opposed was scheduled to give a talk.
The activation energy to mobilize people is incredibly high, especially on issues that don't directly effect them. And even then it's still huge. People will always debate exactly why, but it does mean that the vast majority of people will remain mostly politically inert.
Yet 1 person in that company could kill it in 3 seconds even if this didn't happen. That's 1 in 88K.
My wife and I once went around and petitioned all 100 people that lived in a condo complex for a specific issue. About 80 people signed. We didn't even need to present the signature sheet - the one hold out on the board we had to convince had caved after learning about the efforts - not knowing the percentage of signers (only we had the number).
I'm more thinking from the side of all the other employees who either don't care, or have different perspetives on how well the Chinese government might or might not be doing with their tactics. I find the public internet form, especially sites like HN don't promote as much discussion from all angles as we think. I'm sure that anyone from Google who spoke up for moving into China would absolutely be skewered on here. Yet, I know they exist.
There's some statistic that says if one person is willing to speak out, then there's X number of people that agree but are unwilling to speak out. Don't know the accuracy of that, but I've taken it to heart and have been willing to be one of the first to speak out on multiple occasions at multiple jobs. Sometimes things change for the better. Sometimes things don't change, and I force a change by leaving. If nobody speaks up, then the status quo wins.
I could see it being considered both. I've also heard it applied to congress critters and senators. For every person that contacts them, they equate it to equaling a certain percentage of the people they represent. I've heard the weight of a phone call vs hand written letter vs email are different, but that was some time ago. It makes sense that when a small number/percentage of the people make contact out of a group in the thousands that some sort of statistical method would be used. These representatives should pay more attention the people as that is who puts them in their job. It doesn't really apply to corporations as they will just replace the squeaky wheels even if it's not the best thing to do morally/socially. They only care about this quarter's earnings. It's the rare company that will fix the squeak rather than replacing it, and they should be highlighted when it happens.
I think I covered ableness in the second paragraph. For a large and growing number of people in the US, taking on that fight could easily mean homelessness. I don't hardly consider them able on grounds of self preservation.
If we're talking about Ghandi, the man that fought for Indian rights (but not for Africans and in fact was a racist against them). And that is probably for the best:
Thank you. We literally need more people exactly like you in this world. The militarization of the police force is something that started with George W., continued unabated with Obama, and will probably be accelerated under Trump, and it is anti-democracy in my opinion.
In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
If it's considered bold in the USA involving Google, I shudder to think about anyone else doing this anywhere else.
In the year 2018 I would hope it's very much not bold to do so.
>> a massive proponent of free speech and human rights
Yeah, 'human rights', right, so that's why they're so[1] focused[2] on separating families[3], and I guess 'free speech' is what allows the POTUS to be a racist[4], fear-mongering, corrupt[5] liar[6]?
Or is 'free speech' the thing that allows denial[7] of climate change[8] even while California burns to the ground?
And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along with the USA's tendency to start senseless[9] wars[10], often ignoring[11] civilian casualites?
It seems as though 'make America great again' is almost an open confession that it no longer is, or was.
You're in for a bad surprise. A lot of people were opposed to Trump's "Make America Great Again" claim because the claim insinuates that the US might not be literally the greatest country in the world right now.
I hate many things about what the US is becoming--or has always been--but it does have some of the strongest free-speech rights in the world (though less so in recent decades as other nations catch up), and the world's highest public support for freedom of speech. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/freedom-of-speech-cou...
The Trump administration has stumbled backwards very publicly with regard to the people that the framers intended for free speech rights to protect: journalists. From overt anti-journalist rhetoric[1], to possible collusion in the murder of US national Jamal Khashoggi[2], a journalist critical of the Saudi regime. "Free speech" has been co-opted so effectively by the far-right movement that the same people who wave it around to defend debate of genocide simultaneously advocate for the prosecution of journalists.
> possible collusion in the murder of US national Jamal Khashoggi
Not central to the point, but Kashoggi was not a US national. He was a US-resident Saudi citizen. It's possible to be a US national but not a citizen, but Kashoggi wasn't one: https://www.immihelp.com/immigration/us-national.html
Quibbling over status is an interesting fallout of the same right-wing nationalist rhetoric. You're right though. He was a Saudi citizen, US resident on an O Visa with US citizen children on his way to a green card[1].
> Should we not care about his murder as much then?
Actually, the correction was so that people wouldn't continue making the mistake, not because his citizenship status is a critical point. The error is a distraction from the main point that is avoidable in the future.
I think that the USA is definitely a proponent of free speech, and actually that it takes it to extremes.
Pretty much the only speech outlawed is child pornography and that which a reasonable person would see as inciting imminent violence. That's a pretty high bar, higher than any other country I've ever heard of.
These are much bigger restrictions that impact far more people than the others you mentioned.
>Fighting words is essentially a dead precedent, and all that remains is inciting imminent violence, which I mentioned.
There's also huge limitations on commercial speech; obscenity (which covers more than child pornography); reasonable time, manner, and place restrictions; perjury; blackmail; harassment; solicitations to commit crimes (not just inciting violence); student's speech while in school.
Obscenity doesn't cover much more than child pornography. It used to, but not anymore. You should read Reno v ACLU.
The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld, but you're right, perjury, blackmail and some kinds of harassment aren't covered. Solicitations to commit crimes actually aren't always illegal.
>Obscenity doesn't cover much more than child pornography. It used to, but not anymore.
The definition of obscenity isn't well defined, but there are still numerous laws throughout the US that ban obscene speech that have been upheld--zoophilia porn laws, and bans on selling sex toys are 2 examples I can think of off the top of my head.
>The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld
The government very regularly enforces this. What do you think free speech zones and protest permits are for?
> You said: "There has never been a better society than in the United States in 1958." What do you mean by that?
> FROMM: Well, I mean it, of course, in relative terms. The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas--and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique. So, I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.
Not that I disagree with you, and a lot of things changed for the worse. But still, the US has a lot of tools to fix its problems that other nations never had, and currently don't have. If the US falls for good, it will have an incredible domino effect, I for one don't want to see that happening. Wherever you are, count your blessings -- not to rest on them, but to use them, fiercely.
The US's failure/fall is inevitable under its current 'leadership'. I think it's fall basically began to the rest of the world when that 'thing' was voted into office.
Within the span of a night, the USA went from looking like one of the more progressive countries in the world, previously having an incredibly phenomenal African-American leader as a first, and was poised to have a female leader as a next first.
This would have been a sign of a progressive, still-growing, still meaningful country, that other countries can look up to, respect, and learn from.
And even as she 'swamped' Trump in the popular vote[1], the corrupt collegiate voting system in the USA, which is so easily bribed, went over and above the desires of the citizens of the country to instead swear in someone who is widely believed to be one of the more corrupt people in the country.
Bush Jr. also did a lot of destruction with the war on terror, and before that we had the war on drugs... Etc. Its something ongoing since the early days with the US (and most countries). Sometimes someone gets into power, but even if they wished to do great things, I get a feeling that they would not be allowed to do so.
Yeah, I guess blacks must hate record low unemployment. [1]
Lowest unemployment for the whole country since 1969 at 3.7% [2] 3.5-4.2 percent GDP growth [3] which Obama claimed Trump couldn't do, lacking a magic wand [4]
But I guess if you're interested in virtue signaling, checking boxes and waxing poetic about what could have been...rather than looking at actual quality of life stats for Americans...I guess the U.S. might look like a lost cause.
Oh and if you want to understand the electoral college, read The Federalist Papers [5]. It's far more resilient to corruption than a nationwide popular vote.
I think you're getting downvotes because your statement brooked no argument, and people know if they comment they will be dragged into an off-topic back-and forth battle with a 9/11 truther that nobody could win.
Despite what you want to believe, there is no virtue in having a first just to have a first. I’d rather have a kick-ass first female president than a “figurehead first”. You need to examine your virtues a little before getting uptight about missing a chance to signal.
Further, the US is not great because it’s progressive. It’s great because we are allowed to be progressive. It’s great because it is structured to systemically fight oppression. Does that mean we are absolutely free of all possible oppressions? No. But we have invented a society that limits the damage oppressive factions can do. In other countries the government, the monopoly on power, is allowed to oppress (and we’re trending that way in the US, which is unfortunate) for the “greater good”. Because the government can’t do that in the US, it means we e.g. can’t silence homosexuals or transgender people arguing for equality. It means you can call Trump a thing and not have the police at your door.
We are certainly not “the greatest country evar omgee” (I’m not into the imperialist stuff either). But the example we have set for the world has lead to the fastest expansion of human knowledge our species has ever seen. That’s pretty great.
The gap between rich and poor keeps increasing, the development of wages over the last few decades is GROSS. It's shameful. Yes, once again people in their despair got whipped into voting for a wolf in sheep's clothing, but also once again their despair is ignored.
Trump is a symptom, not a root cause. I was convinced he's a fascist nearly a year before he was elected, and even then was already annoyed by the circus around "what will he say next?". Then he did get elected (which I by the way considered to be a punishment for the popular support of Bernie Sanders... one thing is sure, the next president will just have to be a polite human being, and a lot of people will cry tears of joy and eat out of their hand, "progressive" now got reset to "not utterly mad"), and it go so much worse, instead of fixing their own mistakes, people just point fingers at him some more. He's a giant distraction.
It seems like your anti-Trump sentiment is serving as a heuristic for general anti-Americanism. The reality is far from this. The US scores high on list of freedom indices[1] and HDI[2].
So yes, the consequences of making a "bold" statement from a 6-figure tech job in the US will be different than taking similar actions in less developed places. Don't let your hatred of Trump bias you.
Nobody is "focused on separating families" and if you think so you've just fallen victim to divisive propaganda.
I'm not sure why you scare quote free speech and then use an example of free speech to somehow disprove free speech. Free speech isn't supposed to be just for propagating popular ideas, that's the entire point FFS.
>And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along with the USA's tendency to start senseless[9] wars[10] over oil
Ugh, what a boring and incorrect trope. The wars are not about oil, oil companies aren't the ones making money off of them. Show us all of the successful US oil companies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Additionally, the US produces enough domestic oil that it makes no sense to go after conflict oil even if that was a thing.
Finally, your whole post smacks of whataboutism. Pointing out shortcomings does not mean the US isn't leaps and bounds ahead of China/Russia/etc in human rights. Try running a newspaper truly critical of the government in China or Russia and then you'll see why 'free speech' matters.
>Nobody is "focused on separating families" and if you think so you've just fallen victim to divisive propaganda.
It's pretty clear that Stephen Miller has been pushing specifically for family separation. He appears to be fairly "focused" on the issue as a strategy in his goal of limiting immigration (legal and illegal) in general.
>Additionally, the US produces enough domestic oil that it makes no sense to go after conflict oil even if that was a thing.
This was a post-Bush II, Hillary Clinton-driven innovation[1]. She helped popularize the practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that has unlocked previously inaccessible domestic oil supplies. Before then, oil prices were virtually dictated by OPEC. Bush II's foreign policy was informed by this fact, and the ongoing war in Iraq he started opened their resources up to western multinational oil corporations[2]. Under Saddam, the oil in Iraq was extracted by a company that had been nationalized in 1961[3].
[1][2][3] Besides being a revised policy that no longer applies (and yes, policies take time to unwind)...there is no universal human right to emigrate to any country whatsoever. I know a lot of people think so...
but also this pales in comparison to the abuses of existing Chinese nationals by China, taking Muslim property [1], placing citizens in internment camps and abusing them, placing them under "deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs and cultural practices" [2], imposing a nationwide social credit system that can deny citizens of China basic access to education, air travel, etc on a whim [3]...
Whatever your thoughts on Trump (besides being off-topic...he's not racist, by the way [4])...he's kept in check by a robust court system, a constitutional republic and the congress itself from imposing the systems listed above on U.S. citizens.
And yes, free speech is the right to say offensive things. There's no reason whatsoever to protect "inoffensive" speech. Yes, free speech (and liberty in general) allows you to be skeptical of the assessment on global climate change. It allows you to question what role if any, our government should have in attempting to control the climate. Sorry you hate liberty, maybe you would prefer if a social credit system imposed punishment on those not pre-disposed to your particular beliefs? If so, then China is looking like a good move for you.
I'm sorry, but if 'liberty' includes the ability to reserve the right to deny science to continue destroying the entire planet, I'm not sure I can support it.
Sounds like liberty for humans, and not for the planet, which we have to live on.
What's the point in free speech if we destroy the place we live in? Who will be left to speak?
Yeah, and if the climate scientists are as wrong as nutritionists were about fats [1][2]...then what? We destroy the world economy for the wrong reason? In ANY complex system, there are trade offs for every choice. And would you starve a billion people to save the planet? Would you quadruple oil prices to cut emissions...hurting the poorest in the process? The point of free speech is that we DEBATE things like this so we can TRY to arrive at the best answer, knowing damn well we still might have to TRY AGAIN if and when we fail.
And then he counter-sued the DOJ and then reached a settlement. The disagreement was over welfare applicants. That can be twisted a number of ways, but you can't misconstrue that to imply racism. Landlords (and banks by the way) have a legitimate, financial duty to lease to the most-qualified tenants. When you ignore financial qualifications...you get the 2008 real estate crash.
> there is no universal human right to emigrate to any country
You've really mischaracterized the situation. Check out "No Wall They Can Build" for a closer look, and maybe "An Indigenous People's History of the US" for an explanation of the sentiment that "we didn't cross the border; the border crossed us."
It's not ambiguous, to those of us holding the facts, that the US' encroachment onto Latin American life is a violation of human sovereignty, and dignity—if not explicitly the peculiarly circumscribed "legal rights to emigrate."
Publicly calling out your employer is bold anywhere. Perhaps less so in countries like the US where that sort of speech is protected, and in sectors like tech where the speakers are likely to be well-off and not fungible, but doing this sort of thing publicly always puts you at risk of losing your job (for "unrelated performance reasons") and of being quietly blacklisted by future employers (for "poor culture fit" or any other easy excuse).
> In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
Free speech only applies to the government though? Your employer is still free to fire you.
Sure you won't be put in jail but for most people losing their job still certainly affects their livelihood.
Corporations are explicitly tyrannies. Check out Corporate Confidential for a flavor of what a typical corporate employee could expect for signing a letter like this.
This is a problem that my employer faces. We have a strong concept of corporate responsibility, and plenty of opportunity for employee pushback, but we repeatedly see our decisions simply subverted by competitors who don't have any sense of morals and just go where the money is. It becomes a nasty tradeoff where you think about building/doing things that don't feel good, just to maintain a position to have a positive influence on _other_ areas, where a competitor might simply act without morals everywhere. It's not fun to think about these things in a market with bad incentives.
I mean, all I'm trying to say is that most companies are subject to the competition pressure in their market regardless of internal employees' morals, and it becomes hard to justify "standing up for your beliefs" in a business sense that isn't just "shut down the business or change industries," if there are inherent moral issues in the current industry.
When I say "have no sense of morals," I'm talking about competitors who were acquired by large PE firms a decade or more ago and do not have any internal discussions about the morals of what their employees are building/maintaining. They operate entirely by asking what clients want and then trying to build what they can of those requests.
I'm mostly talking about incentives and market pressures, not "imposing morals on others" or other such emotional nonsense that you are reading into here.
Because that's the only way to solve moral co-ordination problems?
If you leave a morally odious contract on the table (lets say it's cutting up human babies for baby veal) knowing your competitors will take the project, enrich themselves, expand, and develop the capacity to engage in larger, even more odious business, then what's the proper course of action?
Do you cut up babies because fuck morals? Or do you try to get no one to cut up babies? What if you have imperfect information and aren't certain if your competition would do it? What if they have imperfect information about your intentions and decide to take the deal purely on that basis?
Should be straightforward to recognize how corrosive this cycle gets.
EDIT: some people seem to be upset with the baby example. Just exchange that with anything you find clearly morally unacceptable. Like selling reverse mortgages to elderly people with limited capacity, or signing people up for ponzi schemes or adding intentionally addictive additives to a harmful consumable product, etc.
I get what you mean and it's a case by case basis, if people didn't try and push any morals we would all live in vacuums where all we have is the law to tell us what is _right_.
A lot of people have no problem with their countries governments manufacturing and/or selling arms to dictatorships that inflict harm on innocents and supply extremists e.g. UK-Saudi arms trading. As far as some are concerned the UK is just doing what another country may do instead.
If that one employer made it public that they chose not to deal with MRAP repair, I would wholly choose to do business with them and spread the word that they have are a responsible corporate citizen like wildfire.
Great story dude. We can't pretend more people don't think like this. People working in and around corporations can make a difference by talking about it with other people. Thanks for sharing!
I wonder how this policy would interact with something like the Posse Comitatus Act.
Would it effectively require applying the label "terrorist" or "national security threat" to any criminal who shows they are prepared to use lethal force against a law enforcement officer?
Yeah, life isn't "Die Hard", if someone is using "high caliber armor piercing guns" against the local PD, then classifying them as "domestic terrorists" and calling in specialists to deal with them seems appropriate to me.
Police have to deal with enough crap that they shouldn't be expected to handle paramilitary situations as well, is what I'm saying.
As a counterexample, remember the "Bundy standoff"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff That's the kind of situation where the Posse Comitatus Act means you don't send in the Army. However, if they had shot a bunch of people I'm sure they would have had to face at least the National Guard, eh?
It's not just about the equipment the police force use, it's also about the training. Given military equipment, the police force will also get military training matching the equipment they get. Military knowledge and tactics should not be used used to police a civilian population.
The key here is you acted together. Individuals acting alone have very little bargaining power. But once employees start acting together with a single purpose their power gets very difficult to ignore.
Whether people believe unions are a good idea or not, the key is to organize into something that allows people to work together and find common ground to address common problems.
I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me, but their decision to backtrack on their promise in China changed my mind. I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google. I have many good friends that are both bright engineers and undeniably good people that work there. I just feel that as someone who's family is Taiwanese, I cannot in good consciousness support the company. I let the recruiter know this because I believe it's important that they know. I'm curious if anyone else on HN has had similar experiences.
I sympathize with your position, especially regarding Taiwan, but I wonder if your early rejection was as effective as employees rebelling? One need not take the most effective route, but given the size of Google, when I was in a similar position to yours I justified it by saying if I got an offer, I'd make it very clear I'd want nothing to do with the censorship work for the exact reason you listed.
Both are good. I'm sure Google carefully tracks why candidates decline jobs at Google, and if enough of them say "I can't work with you because you're doing specific evil thing X," then it becomes more and more worth it not to do X.
Similarly, if internal morale is in decline and reports come back saying that it's because of X, that also has a real (and quite possibly quantifiable) cost.
Do you think that recruiters spend time forwarding your response to someone at Google who actually cares? I usually decline jobs/projects outright, but I wonder if I shouldn't waste some time on interviews before telling the company why I won't work for them. It's not like there's a shortage of projects, and I'd like to maximize my political "leverage".
Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.
While I think the average developer has a more negative opinion of Google these days, for years they have been considered one of the best places to work in the world.
I know if I told my parents, for instance, I had done what you did, they probably would've called me an idiot. :P They just know Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, they don't see a lot of their especially recent practices as bad.
To say 'no, thank you, I'd rather not as I don't agree with the company's practices' indicates a kind of moral standing I wish more people would confidently have. It shows you're taking a personal stand against what you believe to be corruption, and that's awesome.
> Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.
While it is a nice enough gesture, let's not kid ourselves that this was some difficult selfless act on the part of the OP. Apologies to the OP if I have misinterpreted their earlier post but:
> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me
This statement often becomes true by virtue of having a reasonable computer science qualification and living in the Bay Area - eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email. Actually converting an outreach from a recruiter to you know, an actual concrete job offer at Google, is another matter entirely.
If declining recruiters is the new (very low!) bar for high minded civic engagement, I'm accidentally a grizzled activist on the front line.
>eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email.
This. I have said 'no, thanks' to FAANG in the last 3 months because my life is in a bit of a flux right now. It was a bit more than a simple 'no, thanks' in case of Facebook, but that's a story for another thread :)
Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government? I'm asking because the government doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country and kicked Taiwan out of the United Nations in 1971.
> Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government?
What kind of question is that? No citizen supports all the actions of their government. Government options are a lot more limited than employment options.
The United States did not kick the Republic of China out of the United Nations in 1971, the UN General Assembly did. The US voted against Resolution 2758.
OTOH, AMZN and MSFT have never even hesitated to accommodate the Chinese govt's demands. Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances? (I don't work there.)
Source? I was not aware there was any hesitation or even disagreement from Apple's side. Is there an Apple statement saying they disagree w/ Chinese government requests similar to the statements saying they disagree w/ US government requests? In their absence, is it safe to assume they agree since they have shown that when they disagree they make public statements?
They didn't really hesitate, they just dodged questions. Apple moved their user data and keystore to local datacenters in China [1]. Apple even updated their TOS and forced their Chinese users to accept (or drop service) to reflect this.
As of July, these datacenters were nationalized [2], giving the Chinese government access to all Apple user data.
It took only two years to go from refusing the FBI request for one user to handing over the encryption keys to millions of users.
> Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances?
If you wanted to do software work for a company that didn't kowtow to Chinese government demands, chances are 99% of jobs are available to you. Does that mean they could if they would? Unknown, and since regimes change with frequency you can't rely on stated principles, only actions.
I, too, had a very similar experience. Although I am of Indian descent, I still strongly agree with your views. It's really unfortunate that the leadership at Google doesn't follow the "do no evil" mantra anymore. These sorts of decisions aren't in the hands of an every-day engineer, so they are not at fault here in my opinion. And by standing up and vocalizing that distaste, I believe they are doing the right thing. Google makes some amazing products, so I see the appeal of working there. But many of those engineers have been around before the company started going in this direction, so I can't blame them. It's the leadership that needs to understand values > profits. At least if they want my continued support.
Yeah, I have ignored recruiters hiring for companies I have moral qualms in regards to, despite the jobs being undoubtedly quite lucrative. Haven't ever let them know about my moral aversion though.
It's much easier to excel in the pursuit of something you believe in. Seems like folks who accept jobs that they don't believe in are liable to become increasingly demotivated and eventually burned out.
I'm fairly anti-China and loved Taiwan, can't wait to go back, loved it, loved the Taiwanese people.
Good for you on making a decision like that.
But... Just so long as you know that someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked. That's something I think many idealistic users here aren't understanding.
> someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked.
If talented engineers were that easy to find, Google wouldn't have participated in illegal wage-fixing; and that's without selecting for engineers that want to support an authoritarian regime. Statistically speaking, every rejection drives up the price. To wield even more power, we'd need to form some kind of industry-wide union.
The idea that a foreign corporation has a duty to break Chinese law with regards to web filtering is very problematic, if that's what you mean by "give concessions to the government". How far should such a corporation go with breaking the law, is tax evasion against the Chinese state morally acceptable, since those taxes might be used for oppression?
We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.
That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.
Are there any legal restrictions on what the Chinese government can ask websites to censor? I am not aware of any, so I don't see where there would be an opportunity to protest.
I believe it's already established that operating in China means responding to all censorship requests. Nonetheless, there are still many things an ethical company could refuse: access to the private searches and information of an individual without a due legal process, collecting sensitive information altogether knowing that it's fair game for the state, knowingly alter or influence results to promote official narratives and propaganda, knowingly use or profit from the proceeds of labor camps, underage or other forms of work exploitation; and many, many more, which are surely not positively codified in any Chinese law, yet are widespread.
I don't think it's fair to try and nitpick people's ethical decisions like this.
Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.
Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?
A moral inconsistency is not a nitpick when it's the entire industry.
Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
> Saying they spurned Google...the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.
Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.
If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.
> Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.
The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.
There's a big difference between operating a business in China in general, and operating a business that necessarily involves implementing their surveillance infrastructure.
I honestly have no idea. Last I heard, Bing is blocked in China, which I assume means that there are things that come in its search result that Chinese government doesn't like.
But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.
bing.com redirects to a Chinese version of Bing, which prioritises Chinese sites.
I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.
Much of this is PR dominance as well. Corporate media has already done 90% of the hard work for people to be able to easily market and feel good about opposing specific issues. You just need to fill in the colors in the coloring book. But these issues have been done and accepted for the longest time, such as Google's State Department staffed Jigsaw branch that creates tools, shown in Wikileaks, to assist overthrowing foreign governments in collaboration with the State Department, or tools that AI-censors comments, or tools that delegates control of the discoverability of grassroot contents to other corporate conglomerates.
I respect the motivation of the people behind this but I disagree with the logic here. It seems to be a zero or none type of logic. Are Chinese better off with not having google search engine as a choice, even if censored and having only local options, or are they better off having at least some choice, even if that choice is censored? I think it's the second, not the first.
(Spoken as if to a Google employee) — Someone will build them a search engine. In fact several someones have already. Your company doesn’t have to do it, and you don’t have to work for them if they do.
well, the company doesn't have to do it, I agree. the discussion is, if the company were to do it, would it be a bad thing for the company to do, conditional on professed company values? I don't think so.
What's the difference between choice A and choice B? It seems there is no difference. Let's move onto the next logical argument. If the argument is that someone else will do it if we don't then do morals and values ever come into play?
This is one reason why export controls on technology are important. The corporations don't mind helping oppressive governments lock up dissidents.
choice A is for google not to build a Chinese engine and for Chinese to use censored versions of locally built search engines.
Choice B is for them to have a choice of local search engines and a google search engine ( all censored ). Seems to me from moral point of view, Chinese are better off under B and so I don't see why it's wrong for google to go with B
If there was some way to ensure that this never got bigger than China, I doubt there would be as much opposition. The problem arises when you ask the question "Who, next?"
Who, next, wants all of Google's information about people in their country turned over to them?
As much as we in the US talk about out government compelling companies to turn over data, those companies _do_ have a say in what they will or can turn over and our government has some burden of proof that they need it. In China, based on my understanding, they have no choice, no say.
If the question was just "is this better for the Chinese?", I think I would agree with you. This _is_ better for the Chinese. The problem is that this raises the question of "where does this lead?" I don't think it leads anywhere good and, clearly, I'm not alone in that assessment.
> If there was some way to ensure that this never got bigger than China, I doubt there would be as much opposition.
Are you saying US companies should get one moral lapse for free?
> This _is_ better for the Chinese.
Neither you or the parent poster have indicated why it's better. You've described it as exactly the same as local search options. Is Google magical or what? Can the Chinese not make a search engine? Is it beyond them?
The Chinese people may or may not be better off with a censored Google. The rest of the world would be worse off with a Google that has to take orders from the Chinese government.
Hypothetically: Google starts making tons of cash from China. China threatens to cut off the cash-flow if certain results aren't removed from search results outside of China (or something similar).
We'd like to think Google wouldn't do this just for the money, but Dragonfly sets precedent that it would do something just for the money.
If Google makes enough money from China, they would have as much leverage against China as China has against it. The resulting social unrest caused by a major search engine disappearing in China would far exceed any benefit they would get from censoring other countries. In my opinion, it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
> The resulting social unrest caused by a major search engine disappearing in China
There was no social unrest in China when Google pulled out and I’m pretty sure that in the scenario you’re describing, the Chinese wouldn’t give a fuck.
I mean they have had plenty of reasons for social unrest thus far, far better reasons actually and it did not happen.
> it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
When Google pulled out of China, they has no market share. If Dragonfly isn't successful, they'll abandon that as well. There is a lot of social unrest in China. China does a good job at preventing it from escalating with supression, but that cost would certainly outweigh any benefits of China trying to mess with Google outside their jurisdiction. This isn't even considering how the US simply just wouldn't allow Google to do so.
> Seriously? Why?
Because this is actually happening. We're basically giving up billions of dollars to China for free.
So you're saying that people of a sovereign nation use local products and that is somehow dangerous. You're also saying that you're entitled to their money.
I find this line of thinking to be very troubling, to be honest.
Think of it kind of like sanctions. Sanctions usually hurt the people of the countries they target in the short term, but they also embarrass the government (if only slightly) and increase dissatisfaction with the government among the population.
Another way to look at it is legitimization - Google doing the Chinese government's bidding through censorship could be construed as tacit approval. Indeed, the Chinese government may advertise it as such.
It might be interesting to hear the answer Eric Schmidt himself gave to the question: "Is Google willing to accept internet censorship to enter China?" here: https://youtu.be/3tNpYpcU5s4?t=4296.
(I find I had to update the old aphorism for the late 20th and 21st century. After centuries of studies on how to use words to manipulate people, words are now simply nearly useless and while I'm human and I can't claim total success, I try to just ignore them now. )
Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years - should they move forward with Dragonfly. Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
China has a vested interest in spreading it's influence globally, the same way the United States has (and is receding from a bit under the current administration). It would be far more valuable to China to get a global company like Google propagating their censorship requirements than continuing to prop up their own state-run option. If Google caves, other countries might ask for the same demands as well, which supports the notion that China's way of doing things is the 'right' way. In short, having global companies doing China's bidding expands China's influence.
Reading a bit about the Belt and Road Initiative is probably a good primer on some of China's global interests right now.
Google is dominant nearly worldwide. If China is able to get Google to cave and build the censorship machine then what barrier is there to turning the feature ‘on’ for other countries that ask for it? There are plenty of oppressive regimes interested in a censored Google but they don’t have the pull to get Google to build it right now. Once it’s built though why wouldn’t Google’s response just be shrugs “sure why not?”
I think it is indeed a slippery slope and legitimizes China’s plan to influence the internet for the worse.
Further, once Google depends on its China operations for revenue, what's to stop the Chinese state from leaning on them further? With enough leverage, they won't scruple at affecting what Google does in the west as well.
Any company that adds a customer that becomes the source of ~20% of the company's revenue implicitly gives the customer power over the company, the bigger share of revenue the more power. Google would be insane to give this much power over itself to China, ignoring that developing this technology sets the precedent for oppressive regimes to demand flipping on the "more speech suppression" switch.
You are spot on, and there already is a track record of this with telecom.
Remember all of the handwringing about BBM messages being difficult to intercept? Then the crying suddenly went away, and a few months later you heard about police breaking up organizers of riots.
Businesses are not in the business of simply being profitable, they are usually in the business of increasing revenue and profits beyond the current state.
Nothing about my question suggests Google wouldn't be able to continue to grow by focusing on the 80% of the world that isn't China.
China may be the lowest-hanging fruit of the search and ad market, but surely you're not suggesting Google would shy away from a challenge and only go for the easy win? That doesn't sounds like the Google we all know.
I'd say it sounds exactly like the google we know.
People want a messenger app? Let's make one! Oh, it takes time and energy. Let's shut it down. Oh wait, people want a messenger app. Let's make one. Oh, it takes [........]
If I was a business I would avoid low hanging fruits in favor or more risky ventures that are perhaps less likely to succeed or yield profit. Businesses are in the business of business, not in the business of tacking hard problems just to spite the rest of the world. I think the image of Google being this almighty good intentioned soul is over blown because at the end of the day they answer to share holders, they profit of advertisement and the rest of it is ice cream that goes on their advertisement cake. I love google for the services they provide me but I also am not naive that a business is going got be a business first and a good hearted soul last.
Is there even a market for Google? The median income in China is like $12k, and most Chinese net worth is tied up in property that's widely considered to be in a massive bubble. Not sure it would be profitable at all for Google. I work in the industry and we don't even waste our time in China, Russia, etc, since the advertising dollars are worthless.
AMZNs stock price isn't driven by current earnings, but it isnt driven by investor magnanimity either. It's all about the promise of future earnings. If revenues flatline or decline, you can expect their stock prices to fall in line with their peers.
This is a universal argument for doing anything that makes a profit in the short term. Usually, apologists for corporate immorality bring up fiduciary duty, as if it explains and justifies things. But the argument falls apart if you poke at it even a little, because it completely omits the other side of the argument.
Why doesn't Google start a restaurant chain, or start making PCs, or selling servers, or licensing software defined networking stacks to other companies, or monetize many of their other assets? Surely they must if they're supposed to make as much money for their investors as possible?
Why don't they sell search data on individuals to repressive regimes, so people can be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed? Would make some decent coin for investors, I expect, lots of repressive governments would probably pay a pretty penny for it.
How about selling searches emanating from US government IPs to the Kremlin, selling tracking data linked to Google accounts, or otherwise monetizing espionage interests?
The problem with doing these things is that it affects the value of the Google brand, both internally to employees and externally to customers. If you can't hire the best employees or encourage customers to trust your software and services, then long or even short term decline is pretty much assured.
And how about swapping cause and effect? You're positing the tail should wag the dog - that the stock market should control what the company does. How about the stock market chooses to invest in companies that are doing things that it believes will make money? From this perspective, the company is free to do whatever, and investors are free to sell the stock if they don't agree. In truth, there's a mutual dependence here - the company can't just fraudulently give away investors' cash, but likewise, if investors knew what was best for companies, we wouldn't need CEOs or leadership of any kind - we'd just advertise choices to the investors / market and go with whatever pushes up the stock most.
I agree, but there is an extent to which these companies by law are forced to operate against the positive value of their brand [0]; see Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co. I realize it's not the same, just that there's some amount of precedent.
And there's been pushback from subsequent cases, from that very article:
The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
Any good China does for its people or for other nations? That will just serve to legitimize their totalitarian government and encourage imitations abroad. Ergo it's bad.
In general it's better to state your fundamental premises at the beginning of the argument rather than reveal them midway through
Because coordination problems are really hard and that’s what governments and the WTO are for. Also, I’d be very surprised if that kind of coordination didn’t bring national competition authorities down like a hammer on all participants.
Are there? You can’t open a business in China without it being majority Chinese owned. There are plenty of companies doing their manufacturing in China, but every example I know of the wforeigb company contracts the Chinese company to do the manufacturing. Often they’re even further removed, such as Apple who works with a Taiwanese company who just happens to have their manufacturing in China.
> Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years
You can't be serious. Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China. If Google had any chance at all, and assuming the Chinese government or Baidu's friends in the government wouldn't interfere with the "free market" in China to hurt Google at every turn, it would still take at least 5-7 years for Google to even get close to Baidu's market share.
Also this assumes this wouldn't catch a fire under Baidu's ass to start innovating and investing more into its search software and server farms.
I still believe it would be all but impossible for Google to beat Baidu in China. I just don't ever see it happening. If it was so easy, why hasn't even happened in Russia, where Google actually had significantly larger market share, had to deal with fewer political games than in China, and its Chrome browser I think was actually the most popular there until recently (or it may still be the most popular there).
If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu, no matter how much it "complies" with the Chinese governments' rules.
> Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China.
OTOH Chinese consumers are recently obsessed with western products actually. Not with iPhones (you can buy Xiaomi smartphone, laptop, and Bluetooth headset for the price of iPhone), but with clothes, food, and many other goods.
> If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu
I guess thry could create a new China-venture Google owned company and hire lots of locals in cooperation with other development teams, be they in MTV or other campuses worldwide.
Baidu currently has no real competitors so they can afford to be a bit lazy. If Google enters the Chinese search engine market then Baidu won't just surrender, they'll improve their product to compete. They certainly have the capital and resources to do so if they make it a priority.
Baidu has been worse than Google at Chinese language search for its entire existence and only got traction because it was the best way to get porn and Google’s performance was highly degraded by package dropping. Google has no competitors in search. It’s so much better that the other search engines are just comical.
> Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
You completely missed the point and failed to address any of the serious ethical problems they raised in the letter. We would be living in a dark dystopia if everyone's biggest priority was penetrating markets.
Tech workers are in high demand and have great salaries. Their livelihoods are not in jeapordy; they have their pick of where to work.
If only giving up salary was equivalent to serving more ads. I get paid by serving ads so by actively not serving ads they actively not get paid. On top of that offering some of what you do get paid to make up the difference leads to zero quickly. I do agree with you in principle, more alternatives should have been offered if they really wanted to catch someone's ear in upper management
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadUnfortunetly I dont think executives will give a slightest heck about this article..
Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases.
Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
It may be true that in some companies, engineers are treated as cogs, but this line of work is _heaven_ compared to those other industries.
it's a win/win no matter what
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
They invest extremely heavily in minimizing attrition and widening their funnel for recruiting. That's why their offices are crazy, they do 3 meals a day for employees, they pay a ton of money for people right out of college and for interns, everyone gets free massages, etc. They take any effect that narrows that funnel or increases attrition very seriously, as they view the company as fundamentally being a stable of the best software engineers they can get competing with the best software engineers other people can get to put out better solutions to problems.
All that said, I commend the folks who signed this letter. If anything, the fact that most of the folks who signed are in relatively junior positions shows how Google has lost its way when it comes to it's morals. The more senior execs feel the pressure of serving Wall Street and have more to lose, while these more junior folks, while taking a risk know they can get hired anywhere else in a heartbeat. It's the kid standing up saying the emperor has no clothes.
The fact this is posted on HN and the regular gauntlet of tech sites is enough to have a major impact on their recruiting. I, like many of the people here, am a frequent target for Google recruiters and Dragonfly is more than enough for me to turn down an interview with them. Maybe they will have more luck with fresh college grads and interns who are less discerning.
In other words, every single person who is not a software developer, especially anybody in any form of "management"?
I don't have strong views either way on Project Dragonfly but I would absolutely be greatly pissed off if everyone opposing it were fired.
Worst thing that can happen here from Google's perspective is for this to get a lot of media attention & a lot of signatures.
> We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.
> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
And where's the actual research showing that Google in China would do such a thing? By all calculations, it would bring more knowledge and access to Chinese citizen that they already have.
This make it sound like Google is the reason why the citizen don't have access to information.
Google has agreed to remove plenty of stuff from the search engine that many Europeans see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
Sounds like double standards to me.
People should be made aware that there's a filter and all searches are made available to the government.
That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
China is already the second largest economy and their goal is to be a world leader in AI by 2025. China isn't going to be left out of anything.
But Facebook can influence elections. Something isn't adding up to 100% here.
More so, I'm not worried about Google influencing China, I'm worried about China putting pressure on Google to spy on the world or lose potential profits.
Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.
That's exactly the issue people have. Censorship. No one should be deciding what others can search.
Google has already provided China with a product: uncensored search. If the Chinese (for the sake of argument, naively assuming that the CCP acts on behalf of its citizens) don't think that's what's best for China, fine. They don't have to use it.
You do realize that the "people" do not have a voice in China right? It is not a democracy...
The Chinese had a century or more of bloody civil war recently, within historical terms. They don't like regime change.
They historically were fine under the emperor, who was authoritarian. They are use to autocratic, central government. Unless things get extremely bad, I don't see them thinking that democracy is better than their current stability. If Xi Jinping does a decent job of getting rid of corruption and improving the air quality, I doubt you'll see a revolt even with a depression in China.
Edit: for those downvoting, how about a dialog? Democracy is not a native idea for the Chinese. Their major philosophical systems support a rigid hierarchy, which is not compatible with the democratic norm of anyone can attempt to run for office. They've lost millions to wars before Mao calmed everyone down. Even with Mao's major famine, there wasn't a revolt. 45 million died, and no uprising. If 100k died at the hands of the US government, there would be blood in the streets. Probably true with 1k. The Chinese do not care about authoritarianism.
Democracy is no more a native idea for western culture; 250 years ago every state was a monarchy, and political ideologies based in hierarchy still regularly win elections.
Also, you cannot use the word "choice" when no options were ever given. A large chunk of people can be unhappy with how the government operates while still not marching the streets. The world is not binary. People living in China also know that the government went to extreme lengths when it came to ending protests in the past: shooting at their own citizens.
Here are some other factors to consider:
- Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it?
- Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it?
- Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
This disagreement is much more fundamental than China. It's about the role of free-information and free-education being the basis upon which beliefs should be formed, rather than beliefs being used to block out free-information.
Maybe google should commit to a policy of "protected free speech" on a wide range of political topics that it will never censor in any country (roughly in line with the first amendment).
Great idea.
And that sounds reasonable. I hate FUD-spreading around e.g. immigration, but I don't support any censorship around it. Just debunk the FUD, hiding it won't solve anything, and might hurt a lot when some people get "redpilled" by discovering censored opinions.
China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of integrating a company-wide value system? You want to mimic an individual value system, in that you are clear on why you made certain decisions, because you can point to your value system?
But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?
Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.
> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism
So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.
Presumably legislatures, that are elected? I'm not sure how it works over there.
>Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search.
Well, that's happening in America right now, the executive branch is labeling his opponent political party as Communists, don't respect rule of law, saying they want Open Borders or to "Take the Guns Away!" despite the fact that this is factually incorrect. In the USA, we have several branches of government that helps balance when this happens - for example, our judicial branch recently restored the press pass of a journalist removed for being a thorn in the executive's side. I imagine a balance is similarly struck in these European nations? They are all democracies, right?
It seems very much an age of free flow information and rule of the people. Despite the warning-flag-waving of the alt-right in the USA that labeling people nazis will somehow cause totalitarian liberal rule, it really seems like the opposite is happening - far-right nationalism seems to be on the attack for totalitarianism, with the democratic systems keeping it at bay.
I am very interested in discussing this further, however, because I don't believe it's a simple, black and white issue, and I am curious if there's ways to prevent bad things like far-right nationalism without restricting speech (which, the argument goes, could backfire).
Democrat Rep Eric Swalwell advocates for a complete gun ban: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/this-democratic-c...
So, your claim that it’s factually incorrect, is incorrect.
How about I said to you that all men are descendants of Genghis Khan? Well, 1 in 200 are, and Eric Swalwell is 1 of the 198 Democrat representatives (though that percentage gets much lower if we lump in total Democrats in elected office...) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...
My claim that the president's factually incorrect statements, are factually incorrect, remain unchallenged in any rhetorically effective way, though I invite you to try again if you please.
But why don’t they apply the same censorship to the far left? That’s where I have my problem with it, it isn’t to protect the people from the far right, it’s to control public discourse in a way that reinforces their leftist ideology. The Communist Party isn’t censored in Europe, but right-wing groups are. You can celebrate Stalin, but would be arrested for celebrating Hilter. How is that any different than Chinese censorship? Maybe degree, but definitely not intent.
It's almost, but not quite, false equivalence. You could make a moral relativism argument, but at the end of the day the global zeitgeist is moving towards the "good" that some people associate with liberal values, and always has been.
From an anthropological standpoint, I'm with you - the ideologies are indistinguishable. From a moral standpoint, I disagree strongly - one is generally Bad, the other is generally Good.
The best would be to just admit that Europe is wrong in censoring stupid far right (Nazis), while mostly ignoring stupid far left (Commies).
But some people liked the pseudo-communist regimes, while almost nobody liked Nazi occupation (which is still in fresh memory). So the opposition to banning Commies is real and noticeable. So not so simple.
Tl;dr: Simplified "moral standpoint" holds no water in these discussions.
It's literally both the biggest player and the biggest threat to freedom in the world.
That's a good place to start.
Those are differences in kind, not just degree.
If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint. This is no different than operating in China.
Google can't influence one way or another what censorship laws exist in China, currently. If they had a significant market share there, then they might be able to negotiate terms, since they would have some leverage.
>If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint.
"If the US were just like China, we'd be in no position to criticize them" - sure, but it isn't. The USA and the PRC are not the same, and I don't think it's a relevant hypothetical.
I seem to recall that anything about Nazis is censored in France. I believe selling Nazi stuff on eBay is forbidden, for example.
But I haven't heard about this in a long time, so this may not still be true.
Comments like this make me glad I live in the USA. We don't discriminate on what types of censorship are acceptable or not. Less extraordinary exceptions (Child pornography, Libel), any censorship is in violation of our constitution and most closely held core values.
>I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
I'm sure they would. I'm also sure that Donald Trump would say that he's not a liar. That doesn't mean it's an argument we need to take seriously. You can make judgments for yourself - I believe that the EU leadership is more or less acting in good faith (and is likely to continue doing so), and the CCP is not. That's a meaningful difference.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, because if they say something like that they're lying. Their censorship is meant to protect the power and privilege of the already powerful and privileged, and keep everyone else complaint to them.
The only way Chinese censorship "protects" individuals is by discouraging them from having dissident thoughts that the government may decided to personally and physically oppress them for having.
Nazism is despicable, but censoring the Nazi voice is effectively the same as preventing citizens from having those "dissident thoughts" that contradict modern western government, and you actually can receive prison time for expressing Nazi sentiments in Germany so the government absolutely does "oppress them" for having those thoughts.
China views western influence the same way. In China's history, rule by the west has seen terrorism, imperialism, and corruption, which have lasted far longer (since the 1800s when the First Opium Wars were fought), and I would argue have led to greater suffering (certainly the numbers are in favor of this being the case).
Accepting government censorship in the EU is, in principle, no different from censorship in China. The only difference is the flavor.
For the record, I support neither.
My guess is that it is already here, just for things we deem acceptable. The problem with censorship is that everyone has something they think acceptable to censor, so the infrastructure to censor will be developed with mass approval.
Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.
Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:
* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.
* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.
* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.
* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.
* etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency#Bias_&_poli...
But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.
> and purely ideological.
Umm. Is that not _the_ point? OP disagrees with China gov't ideology so hard, that it just can't support it (the ideology) in any direct way?
I'm totally against censorship. But I also don't agree the those who see themselves stand on the moral high ground while don't understand the complexity of the issue. Also a lot of people don't differentiate facts and opinions. They blame those who don't agree them are influenced by China government.
Now with increased efficiency with Dragonfly technology. Find enemies of the state with our world wide database, US and EU results included. All brought to you by the Alphabet platform.
Further research could be done on integrating this new dataset with Project Maven, think about the opportunities of engaging only with end users with score below a threshold.
Did I see something like this on Black Mirror?
The difference would be: you might not know you are lying while I do. We are doing the same thing, confirm something not conformable. Theoretically that's lying
Did you see my 2nd sentence which implied I was lying? Which almost means making a baseless claim?
You assumed that I assume he was lying only because he didn't cite source. That assumption is not correct.
Now I can tell you that I originally had 3rd sentence: the 2nd sentence is a lie. I do have solid evidence that he was lying (unintentionally I believe) but it's too difficult to present the evidence.
1989, downtown Cleveland, soon after Tiananmen Square. We'd all seen the "tank man" and people were talking about all the dead witnessed by those present (~10k?) versus the official cover story of 300 and denial.
So there were protests across the US, including downtown Cleveland, mostly visiting Chinese students from CSU and CWRU, and plenty of horrified locals there to support them. There were a couple of Chinese guys not marching but watching from the edges while people walked past. They both had the same sunglasses, trench coats, and SLR cameras with long lenses, and they were taking pictures of the marchers. If you've ever been in Cleveland in June, this is not appropriate attire for cloudy and windy, so they stood out from the locals. The Chinese on student visas told me they were government, often seen at such events, and they were cataloging Chinese there for later study and reprisals to family or when they returned home.
Edit: Flagged for an unpopular view. Hacker news has sunk to a new low. Whatever guideline you think I violated, I guarantee that there are violations of equal magnitude on this thread that are very popular.
Just because a workaround exists does not mean the problem is solved, or that the workaround will exist forever.
>Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
It's futile to explain yourself to someone if the person will just declare you "brainwashed" if you don't agree with them
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
This might not be an exact relation, but my point is that it still may be worthwhile in a longer perspective. Social changes and engineering are nontrivial processes.
Boiling frog paradox and such...
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."
By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.
They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.
Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.
For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
In this case investors are who can make any worthwhile difference and they should be appealing to investors. However, I imagine a significant chunk of investors don't even know/realize they are due to whole/broad market funds.
Google sees 17% of the world's population as potential customers via China so who is going to have their attention more 'thousands' of employees or 1.4 billion potential customers? The only way they're going to get Google's attention is to get shareholders concerned. There will always be employees willing to be on board with this, fact of the matter is most people just don't care as long as they are getting paid. They need to get investors against it if they want to have any hope of getting Google to not do this.
A Medium article, or a petition, or a 'hey thousands of us think you shouldn't do this', is unlikely to do a damn thing. If they want to make a stand they should have Amnesty International create a video campaign that describes, FROM PUBLIC SOURCES (to avoid any potential blowback from sharing company secrets/violating NDAs), what Dragonfly is and have non-Google employees that are industry experts comment on why they think it is a bad idea. Then the Google employees should share this on all of their social media, share it directly to their friends. You want to get outsiders championing the cause and generating attention and you want to minimize any single employees risk as much as possible by using non-employees to be the public face.
If I were doing it I'd do a video as Amnesty International, try and get the Internet Freedom Foundation on board, reach out to college human rights groups and try and grass roots the shit out of it to get as much media attention as possible which would increase chances of reaching the eyes of investors.
Doing it as a group of employees though, ehhhh, that's almost certainly going to do nothing and if anything it'll have a negative impact on employees and potentially result in future policies designed to thwart future attempts like this.
It sucks because it's too big of a market to effectively deter Google from wanting to bend to the will of the Chinese government.
Recognizing that there are paths available other than "doing what the company says" or "walking away" is a good thing, and people should speak up if they feel their work is being used in unethical ways.
There's a view that employees are subservient to employer's wills, to the extent they agree to stay under their employ. While obviously true to some extent, it seems silly to extend this to carte blanche for what employees must agree to be complicit in.
Are these people going to actually do anything - quit in protest, sabotage, what? No, they are going to whine, and keep drawing their very lucrative salaries and benefits. Put up or shut up.
Your cynicism is not insightful or interesting.
Otherwise, another company will simply step into Googles place, or they could be tempted later to try again. The market is too profitable to do otherwise.
Isn't that the sort of thing that diplomacy, and national policy is for?
Brand is the most valuable asset Google has. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil projects - really worth the damage to Google's public image?
If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
Western people don't really care much? Well, they should blame themselves then, not Google.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.
Not even close. See my other comment.
Like a search-engine in NSAland?
China isn't any more Evil than The US. Grow up.
That said, I never see a discussion about China, even here, that isn't saturated with whataboutism, often to the point of hyperbole.
If you continue to break the site guidelines like this we're going to have to ban you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For work reasons I had to use chinese web, and believe me, the later is much worse for a westerner.
Minimal i18n, confusing visual design, payments that dont go throught, random network errors, total reliance on you having a mobile phone.
Yes, censhorship is bad, but I rather use censored service from a western company than a censored service from a chinese company.
It’s very plausible that Dragonfly will be used to feed people in China flat out misinformation and lies, and then monitor them 24/7.
News that doesn’t toe the party line will literally be deleted. Try and search for a controversial book or subject, and you’ll be placed on a watchlist. Fake news and government created media will be the first and only result always. In other words, the Chinese government will have more access than ever into the minds of its people, and then it will try to either manipulate them or just repress the problematic ones.
This will happen whether Baidu or Google does it, but that doesn’t make it morally acceptable for Google to join in. We don’t get a free pass to do evil just because we’re not the first.
In fact, it’s worse for Google than Baidu. The people at Baidu don’t have a choice, it’s the country they were born in. But Google is one of the world’s richest companies, and if they chose not to operate in China, it would just maintain the status quo, not actively hurt them.
There’s no moral justification for this, even if now the search engine is faster and more polished.
"Believe me" signals to me that I'm about to hear something shocking, yet it's followed by the anticlimactic "for a Westerner".
is it the huge quantity of computing resources behind their search engine? (wouldn't Baidu or other Chinese companies be able to easily outbuild Google?)
is it the incredible, mysterious superiority of the super-duper secret Page Rank algorithm? ( jk )
is it the sophisticated and complex home page design and superior google doodles?
i mean what is it exactly?
google won't be able to reach the monopoly level of market share it enjoys in the US search market so it would actually have to compete on a month to month basis for its very life. this means it will hire a lot of very hard workers in China. and that means google's secret sauce (if it even exists) will make its way out and into the competitive landscape before Google can get close to being a monopoly. it just seems like a losing game.
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP
We all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.
They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.
for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post.
Collective action. They can hire 14 new guys, but they won't have any to instruct the new employees in their work.
It truly depends on the company and employee though. For many people that point can be extremely high so they have the power to push for ethical (or not) choices.
That power of course multiplied by the number of such people.
Not if they are employees that are complaining about doing the job you're paying them to do.
Not that I don't agree with them, but in this case, Google Co has decided a route and the employees don't want to do it. I think they may find that they are more replaceable than the down votes implying the opposite are willing to accept.
The real issue with having your work-force leave is three-fold. First, you lose all the accumulated knowledge of your team. Second, you lose the cohesiveness of your team. Thirdly, you have to _pay to get a new team_.
All of these things conspire to make all but the lowliest of jobs (think Target Associate) much more painful to replace than it seems.
In short, there are lots of hidden costs in recruiting.
My post about SCALE was apparently too hard to understand. There is a big sea of programmers that would be happy to work for Google censorship or not.
If you want to argue the cost of replacing people - I'd argue the cost of paying people who won't do the job you want them to do.
There's a difference between your coder who can build you a chat app and a coder who can keep you on the bleeding edge of innovation. In theory.
Nor are the outcomes produced by a few brave people locally.
The point of the story is to draw a line in the sand. And that line matters when people are afraid to stand together on one side of it.
If you look at the example of Gandhi and the Salt Tax the mere act of picking salt of the ground and being threatened with arrest unified a country and sent a signal to the British were the line was. Sending that signal matters. Countries were that signal was not sent took many more decades to get independence.
I think it is a engineer's dream to think they can't be replaced. But they can, and the probs created by it simply don't matter.
WOW. Yes, that must be it. I can't possibly have an opinion about the matter that doesn't align with yours because surely you are right!
The only logical option here is I am spreading fear uncertainty and doubt - because I'm Google and this directly impacts me. Anyone who disagrees must be silenced because they are wrong!
EDIT: Nope, opinions not allowed. Try and hide anyone that disagrees!
Not that you are a "naysayer" and are trying to spread fear by commenting on this website.
Hmm, I must have misinterpreted that. Maybe you're right.
How far is Google willing to go to be friends with China? Mass detainment and ethnic cleansing are well within the realm of possibility, especially in the likely event of an economic crisis.
Will Google help sniff out their Anne Franks? Imagine trying to operate an underground railroad against the full force of Google. There are so many ways that machine learning and modern private surveillance can determine things like if there are extra uncounted people living in an area.
If Beijing did decide to solve the Uyghur problem, would Google cover for them and purge search queries?
No, this is not at all hyperbolic or reaching. American corporations did business with our enemies right up until they were forced to stop during WWII. American machines have been used to commit horrific atrocities. And read Chinese history. Read about what China has done as recently as a few decades ago.
I'm glad to see Google employees taking a break from their virtue pageantry to actually take a stand on something that matters, finally.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
If Google actually were to do anything to help they Anne Franks of China, do you think they would announce it to the world to debate on HN, or do you think they would do it in secret?
That was very pragmatic. Both sides wins.
I say that fully realizing that not everyone is in the financial position where they can risk a fight with their employer. You can't expect everyone to be Ghandi.
I believe this is key. If more folks at more organizations were brave like this and willing to take the risk, a good chunk of the problems our civilization is facing might be greatly improved.
The most I've ever done is threaten to quit if a project for the RIAA was accepted by my employer when I was invited into the pre-pitch meeting. It just depends on a specific case.
The problem with modern unions, particularly in tech, is that the legacy structure is inapt for current problems. Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already. They don't need a huge bureaucratic structure for engaging in long-term detailed negotiations. They don't need a contract at all.
What they need is a no-dues no-fulltime-union-reps union that operates through direct democracy. It does nothing unless the employer is doing something bad wrong. Then if the majority of the union members vote to refuse, either the employer concedes or they strike.
Because it's not about a thousand little things here, it's about a small number of big things. It needs to be able to address those and then go back to being invisible instead of succumbing to feature creep and destroying the host with overhead and principal-agent problems as we've seen with the auto makers.
I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
Yes, having a higher salary would be ridiculous in a lot of these cases, but we should moderate that through legislation that benefits the most people - not by a public company further lining the coffers of its owners.
Apple and Google particularly have a lot of cash just lying around, and that cash is the result of the employee's efforts, and they deserve it. I think if we think their salaries are too high in that case, we need to talk about better taxation systems.
They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time you haven't. The returns to success have to be enough to overcome the high failure rate.
Most of the employees aren't taking the same level of risk. If you work for a company for five years taking home a six figure salary and that company fails, you don't have to give back your salary and in a few months you're working for another company making the same amount of money.
If you think you can do better on your own, risking your own time and money instead of taking outside investment, go right ahead -- but then shouldn't it be you who gets more of the reward if you succeed rather than the people you hire in after you're already an established success?
It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they deserve literally billions of dollars.
Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee? Are you saying that because a founder may go bankrupt they are entitled to thousands of times more money? Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee? Could you help me understand what makes you think that?
Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a <50% chance at $200,000, much less a <1% chance. A very high reward is inherently necessary to offset the very low probability of major success, otherwise people aren't going to do it.
> Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?
The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.
> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?
There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.
But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?
Incorrect, that value is only sustained and increased by the efforts of company workers.
> Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
Incorrect. Companies that don't have significant oversight in the form of government regulation or strong unions tend to collude to keep salaries low - which is exactly what has happened in the valley, and has meant that these companies have gigantic cash reserves that they aren't leveraging to hire the best talent.
> By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable.
No, I'm merely saying that the differences and risks suffered by investors and founders versus regular salaried employees are not a justification for the sometimes ridiculous difference between the compensation of the two.
The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.
The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?
2) It is possible for both to be true at the same time, because the industry is much larger than Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if they didn't compete with each other, they still have to outbid Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- and pay enough to prevent the workers leaving to found their own companies. It's not unreasonable to expect that the effect on wages was marginal even when it was occurring.
Software one of the highest margins of any industry. They can afford to pay more, especially since they are constantly whining about "shortages" of tech workers.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...
Which is why they already do pay more than other industries.
The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.
How is that different with a union?
> and be willing to risk their reputation
Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.
> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?
The technology needed to let people submit proposals and let other people vote on them is on the level what individuals do over a weekend as adjunct to a side project.
> How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
Why do you need to force them to? By definition the majority will already agree, and then many in the minority would participate out of solidarity because that's the whole point of joining a union to begin with. You don't need 100.0%, a large majority is quite sufficient in general. And anything that actually required 100.0% is already lost, because then they could pay off the cheapest defector or contract it out.
And your picture of humam behavior is all too rose-colored glasses if it's having all members of a minority vote just go along out of solidarity when it's non-binding. I've seen unions vote on issues, and it's often contentious with emotions running high on all sides. If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have. Sometimes they try to anyway.
This is a major problem for country-level populations. For corporations it typically comes pre-solved by the corporation itself, because each employee would have a company email address or Active Directory account etc. that could be used for authentication. (In theory the corporation could illegally tamper with the results that way, but the tampering would be immediately obvious to the person whose vote was changed.)
> If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have.
Because they're using the union for the wrong stuff. A lot of the votes would be for things like accepting a policy that gives raises to only senior people. No doubt the junior people being screwed over by that policy would strenuously object when they're the 49%, especially when being in the union deprives them of the opportunity to negotiate something else as an individual.
But how many Google employees have that kind of personal stake in a question like whether to censor search results in China?
The other thing you aren't taking into account is the fact that this boom in the tech industry isn't guaranteed to continue forever. There will come a time, maybe pretty soon, where tech workers will become as precarious as those steel workers and autoworkers eventually became. Big tech companies are already putting a lot of effort and resources into educating the next generation of programmers to provide a more competitive labour market and drive down salaries. There's already talk of a coming recession, where I'm sure the belts will be tightened and people will be laid off. When we have a union, we will be more protected from the inevitable exploitation in such scenarios.
The temporarily embarassed unicorn founders among us need to realise that we are the creators of all the value in these companies and, collectively, we have the power to influence their direction and impact on society. We can help secure not only our own rights as workers but also have the power to change society at large and secure better standards of living for all workers (or non-workers). That's why these recent actions by Google employees have been so important. They can set a precedent for how other companies and even states can safely act in future, without fearing repercussions from their most valuable resource - the workers.
Its one thing to say maybe you'll quit, or skip your pay check for change, its another to actually put your life on the line for what you know is right.
1. Give up their Chinese-Manufactured iPhones/Android Phones? Tablets? Laptops and workstations??
2. Give up watching movies/shows on their Chinese-manufactured TVs??
3. Stop wearing Chinese-made iwatches/fitbits/etc.??
4. Boycott silicon valley startups that have accepted chinese investments?
5. Boycott every product by US/Foreign company (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, GE, Disney, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, etc.) doing business in China?
Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?
incidental?
Lol
“Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?”
thanks for proving my point.
Contracting to build a censored search engine is the moral equivalent of contracting to build a barbed wire fence around a concentration camp.
You're being an active participant that directly assists in making that oppression happen by building tools required for the actual act of oppression, as opposed to building something that merely done in the same country.
We've gone a long way from being serfs who have almost no rights, even the right to read and write.. to citizens who can communicate via the internet.
Advancement in technology will/have make current powers obsolete. Robots and algorithms have been taking more work since the stone age.
Better tools, means more surplus, means more time to think critically, more time to comment over the internet, or read books.
The only problem is that we probably won't see any observable improvement in one lifetime. It is however, also very possible that the incumbent powers put an end to our civilization. Hopefully enough people like these Google employees, Snowden, Assange will be there to stop fascism.
Yes there is more surplus, but where is that going? People in developed societies are working more hours now than they were 100 years ago. Wealth inequality has risen to higher levels than ever existed in modern society. I wish it gave me more time to read books...
We definitely need to be more engaged in resisting these dangerous tendencies, particularly with recent political developments. I think organised tech workers have immense power. If Google employees could formalise their current actions and then even unite with other groups across other companies, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
It only works if everyone goes along.
Be brave and stand up for yourself, what do you have to lose?
+ if they're willing and able
FTFY
(Disclosure: having worked at Google I know some names on that list personally, and respect them greatly. I haven't worked at Google since early 2015.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
Out of the 88k how many dont care, how many cant afford to care, how many are looking to profit off not caring.
If that were true, then their silence can definitely not be construed as any kind of tacit agreement, or even disinterest.
How many Chinese citizens (or people otherwise susceptible to this purported pressure) work at Google?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543164
There's a short grace period in practice (usually, and this isn't official) if you have another job all lined up that is ready to sponsor you. But if you were an H-1B applying for a green card via your employer, this basically resets your position in line, unless you're in late stages of the process. And keep in mind that the wait is measured in years for many countries (e.g. for India, >9 years right now unless you're in the "exceptional" category).
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't see why the USG would want to sanction them, especially since this letter has nothing to do with the USG.
If they're discouraged from signing due to their US visa status, the mechanism that makes more sense is that they fear Google could fire them and it would take them longer than 60 days to line up another job that could sponsor them.
Even as an American with no family in China, I'd be slightly worried that putting my name on such a list might prevent me from getting a visa to visit the PRC. They've shown a willingness to factor politics into visa decisions:
https://www.ft.com/content/b1bd2aec-e333-11e8-8e70-5e22a430c...
That guy didn't even express a stance, like these Google employees have, he just happened to be the acting leader of the club when a speaker the PRC opposed was scheduled to give a talk.
My wife and I once went around and petitioned all 100 people that lived in a condo complex for a specific issue. About 80 people signed. We didn't even need to present the signature sheet - the one hold out on the board we had to convince had caved after learning about the efforts - not knowing the percentage of signers (only we had the number).
I've heard this before. I'm not sure if it's a statistic or just a saying. What's the standard formulation?
Maybe, you meant to say - Gandhi [0] ?
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
If we're talking about Ghandi, the man that fought for Indian rights (but not for Africans and in fact was a racist against them). And that is probably for the best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTxNSU2k6l4
It's interesting you would label this as such.
In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
If it's considered bold in the USA involving Google, I shudder to think about anyone else doing this anywhere else.
In the year 2018 I would hope it's very much not bold to do so.
Yeah, 'human rights', right, so that's why they're so[1] focused[2] on separating families[3], and I guess 'free speech' is what allows the POTUS to be a racist[4], fear-mongering, corrupt[5] liar[6]?
Or is 'free speech' the thing that allows denial[7] of climate change[8] even while California burns to the ground?
And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along with the USA's tendency to start senseless[9] wars[10], often ignoring[11] civilian casualites?
It seems as though 'make America great again' is almost an open confession that it no longer is, or was.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-fa... [2] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family... [3] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-ice-raids... [4] https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racism-h... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/opinion/trump-administrat... [6] https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/108885940/factcheckin... [7] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/18/opinions/trumps-failure-to-fi... [8] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/opinion/climate-change-de... [9] http://theindependent.ca/2018/06/01/why-is-the-united-states... [10] https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/04/is-america-addicted-to-... [11] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-we-ignore-the...
"As appears or is stated to be true, though not necessarily so; apparently."
I would certainly never in a million years hope anyone would seriously claim the US to be the greatest country in the world.
I am quite certain a significant proportion of Americans genuinely believe it is.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35EWlJMmO4s
2. https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1064718127903268864
Not central to the point, but Kashoggi was not a US national. He was a US-resident Saudi citizen. It's possible to be a US national but not a citizen, but Kashoggi wasn't one: https://www.immihelp.com/immigration/us-national.html
Should we not care about his murder as much then?
1. https://qz.com/1428499/jamal-khashoggi-what-trump-owes-khash...
Actually, the correction was so that people wouldn't continue making the mistake, not because his citizenship status is a critical point. The error is a distraction from the main point that is avoidable in the future.
Point taken. The intricacies of status continue to wonder and delight. :)
Pretty much the only speech outlawed is child pornography and that which a reasonable person would see as inciting imminent violence. That's a pretty high bar, higher than any other country I've ever heard of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Fighting words is essentially a dead precedent, and all that remains is inciting imminent violence, which I mentioned.
These are much bigger restrictions that impact far more people than the others you mentioned.
>Fighting words is essentially a dead precedent, and all that remains is inciting imminent violence, which I mentioned.
There's also huge limitations on commercial speech; obscenity (which covers more than child pornography); reasonable time, manner, and place restrictions; perjury; blackmail; harassment; solicitations to commit crimes (not just inciting violence); student's speech while in school.
The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld, but you're right, perjury, blackmail and some kinds of harassment aren't covered. Solicitations to commit crimes actually aren't always illegal.
The definition of obscenity isn't well defined, but there are still numerous laws throughout the US that ban obscene speech that have been upheld--zoophilia porn laws, and bans on selling sex toys are 2 examples I can think of off the top of my head.
>The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld
The government very regularly enforces this. What do you think free speech zones and protest permits are for?
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
> You said: "There has never been a better society than in the United States in 1958." What do you mean by that?
> FROMM: Well, I mean it, of course, in relative terms. The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas--and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique. So, I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.
Not that I disagree with you, and a lot of things changed for the worse. But still, the US has a lot of tools to fix its problems that other nations never had, and currently don't have. If the US falls for good, it will have an incredible domino effect, I for one don't want to see that happening. Wherever you are, count your blessings -- not to rest on them, but to use them, fiercely.
Within the span of a night, the USA went from looking like one of the more progressive countries in the world, previously having an incredibly phenomenal African-American leader as a first, and was poised to have a female leader as a next first.
This would have been a sign of a progressive, still-growing, still meaningful country, that other countries can look up to, respect, and learn from.
And even as she 'swamped' Trump in the popular vote[1], the corrupt collegiate voting system in the USA, which is so easily bribed, went over and above the desires of the citizens of the country to instead swear in someone who is widely believed to be one of the more corrupt people in the country.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary...
edit: would love to understand why the downvotes, any comment on that?
But I guess if you're interested in virtue signaling, checking boxes and waxing poetic about what could have been...rather than looking at actual quality of life stats for Americans...I guess the U.S. might look like a lost cause.
Oh and if you want to understand the electoral college, read The Federalist Papers [5]. It's far more resilient to corruption than a nationwide popular vote.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/01/news/economy/black-unemploy... [2] https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/410081-kudlow-says-latest-... [3] https://www.bea.gov/news/glance [4] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/281936-oba... [5] http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786-1800/the-federalist...
Further, the US is not great because it’s progressive. It’s great because we are allowed to be progressive. It’s great because it is structured to systemically fight oppression. Does that mean we are absolutely free of all possible oppressions? No. But we have invented a society that limits the damage oppressive factions can do. In other countries the government, the monopoly on power, is allowed to oppress (and we’re trending that way in the US, which is unfortunate) for the “greater good”. Because the government can’t do that in the US, it means we e.g. can’t silence homosexuals or transgender people arguing for equality. It means you can call Trump a thing and not have the police at your door.
We are certainly not “the greatest country evar omgee” (I’m not into the imperialist stuff either). But the example we have set for the world has lead to the fastest expansion of human knowledge our species has ever seen. That’s pretty great.
This is true:
~(p ^ q) -> ~(p because q)
Trump is a symptom, not a root cause. I was convinced he's a fascist nearly a year before he was elected, and even then was already annoyed by the circus around "what will he say next?". Then he did get elected (which I by the way considered to be a punishment for the popular support of Bernie Sanders... one thing is sure, the next president will just have to be a polite human being, and a lot of people will cry tears of joy and eat out of their hand, "progressive" now got reset to "not utterly mad"), and it go so much worse, instead of fixing their own mistakes, people just point fingers at him some more. He's a giant distraction.
So yes, the consequences of making a "bold" statement from a 6-figure tech job in the US will be different than taking similar actions in less developed places. Don't let your hatred of Trump bias you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2018_H...
I'm not sure why you scare quote free speech and then use an example of free speech to somehow disprove free speech. Free speech isn't supposed to be just for propagating popular ideas, that's the entire point FFS.
>And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along with the USA's tendency to start senseless[9] wars[10] over oil
Ugh, what a boring and incorrect trope. The wars are not about oil, oil companies aren't the ones making money off of them. Show us all of the successful US oil companies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Additionally, the US produces enough domestic oil that it makes no sense to go after conflict oil even if that was a thing.
Finally, your whole post smacks of whataboutism. Pointing out shortcomings does not mean the US isn't leaps and bounds ahead of China/Russia/etc in human rights. Try running a newspaper truly critical of the government in China or Russia and then you'll see why 'free speech' matters.
It's pretty clear that Stephen Miller has been pushing specifically for family separation. He appears to be fairly "focused" on the issue as a strategy in his goal of limiting immigration (legal and illegal) in general.
This was a post-Bush II, Hillary Clinton-driven innovation[1]. She helped popularize the practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that has unlocked previously inaccessible domestic oil supplies. Before then, oil prices were virtually dictated by OPEC. Bush II's foreign policy was informed by this fact, and the ongoing war in Iraq he started opened their resources up to western multinational oil corporations[2]. Under Saddam, the oil in Iraq was extracted by a company that had been nationalized in 1961[3].
1. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/hillary-clinton...
2. http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/list-of-international-oil-c...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iraq#His...
but also this pales in comparison to the abuses of existing Chinese nationals by China, taking Muslim property [1], placing citizens in internment camps and abusing them, placing them under "deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs and cultural practices" [2], imposing a nationwide social credit system that can deny citizens of China basic access to education, air travel, etc on a whim [3]...
Whatever your thoughts on Trump (besides being off-topic...he's not racist, by the way [4])...he's kept in check by a robust court system, a constitutional republic and the congress itself from imposing the systems listed above on U.S. citizens.
And yes, free speech is the right to say offensive things. There's no reason whatsoever to protect "inoffensive" speech. Yes, free speech (and liberty in general) allows you to be skeptical of the assessment on global climate change. It allows you to question what role if any, our government should have in attempting to control the climate. Sorry you hate liberty, maybe you would prefer if a social credit system imposed punishment on those not pre-disposed to your particular beliefs? If so, then China is looking like a good move for you.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m... [2] http://www.tribtown.com/2018/11/26/us-united-states-china-in... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/23/trump-pushes-senate-to-pass-...
Sounds like liberty for humans, and not for the planet, which we have to live on.
What's the point in free speech if we destroy the place we live in? Who will be left to speak?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#Origi... [2] http://www.jbc.org/content/86/2/587.full.pdf+html
Literally his first appearance in the NYT was for being a racist asshole - https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/07/30/1973-meet-d...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2186613-realty-compa... https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2186614-trump-promis...
You've really mischaracterized the situation. Check out "No Wall They Can Build" for a closer look, and maybe "An Indigenous People's History of the US" for an explanation of the sentiment that "we didn't cross the border; the border crossed us."
It's not ambiguous, to those of us holding the facts, that the US' encroachment onto Latin American life is a violation of human sovereignty, and dignity—if not explicitly the peculiarly circumscribed "legal rights to emigrate."
When pointing in this direction, take a big U-turn or don't post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Free speech only applies to the government though? Your employer is still free to fire you.
Sure you won't be put in jail but for most people losing their job still certainly affects their livelihood.
Your morals are your own? Why do you insist on imposing them on others?
When I say "have no sense of morals," I'm talking about competitors who were acquired by large PE firms a decade or more ago and do not have any internal discussions about the morals of what their employees are building/maintaining. They operate entirely by asking what clients want and then trying to build what they can of those requests.
I'm mostly talking about incentives and market pressures, not "imposing morals on others" or other such emotional nonsense that you are reading into here.
If you leave a morally odious contract on the table (lets say it's cutting up human babies for baby veal) knowing your competitors will take the project, enrich themselves, expand, and develop the capacity to engage in larger, even more odious business, then what's the proper course of action?
Do you cut up babies because fuck morals? Or do you try to get no one to cut up babies? What if you have imperfect information and aren't certain if your competition would do it? What if they have imperfect information about your intentions and decide to take the deal purely on that basis?
Should be straightforward to recognize how corrosive this cycle gets.
EDIT: some people seem to be upset with the baby example. Just exchange that with anything you find clearly morally unacceptable. Like selling reverse mortgages to elderly people with limited capacity, or signing people up for ponzi schemes or adding intentionally addictive additives to a harmful consumable product, etc.
A lot of people have no problem with their countries governments manufacturing and/or selling arms to dictatorships that inflict harm on innocents and supply extremists e.g. UK-Saudi arms trading. As far as some are concerned the UK is just doing what another country may do instead.
What should a police crew use against a criminal equipped with high caliber armor piercing guns?
The Army?
Would it effectively require applying the label "terrorist" or "national security threat" to any criminal who shows they are prepared to use lethal force against a law enforcement officer?
Police have to deal with enough crap that they shouldn't be expected to handle paramilitary situations as well, is what I'm saying.
As a counterexample, remember the "Bundy standoff"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff That's the kind of situation where the Posse Comitatus Act means you don't send in the Army. However, if they had shot a bunch of people I'm sure they would have had to face at least the National Guard, eh?
Thank you for standing up to this.
Whether people believe unions are a good idea or not, the key is to organize into something that allows people to work together and find common ground to address common problems.
Similarly, if internal morale is in decline and reports come back saying that it's because of X, that also has a real (and quite possibly quantifiable) cost.
While I think the average developer has a more negative opinion of Google these days, for years they have been considered one of the best places to work in the world.
I know if I told my parents, for instance, I had done what you did, they probably would've called me an idiot. :P They just know Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, they don't see a lot of their especially recent practices as bad.
To say 'no, thank you, I'd rather not as I don't agree with the company's practices' indicates a kind of moral standing I wish more people would confidently have. It shows you're taking a personal stand against what you believe to be corruption, and that's awesome.
Rock on!
While it is a nice enough gesture, let's not kid ourselves that this was some difficult selfless act on the part of the OP. Apologies to the OP if I have misinterpreted their earlier post but:
> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me
This statement often becomes true by virtue of having a reasonable computer science qualification and living in the Bay Area - eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email. Actually converting an outreach from a recruiter to you know, an actual concrete job offer at Google, is another matter entirely.
If declining recruiters is the new (very low!) bar for high minded civic engagement, I'm accidentally a grizzled activist on the front line.
Source: have never lived in the Bay Area. Have a large number of those emails in my gmail.
This. I have said 'no, thanks' to FAANG in the last 3 months because my life is in a bit of a flux right now. It was a bit more than a simple 'no, thanks' in case of Facebook, but that's a story for another thread :)
What kind of question is that? No citizen supports all the actions of their government. Government options are a lot more limited than employment options.
It's true that the US government officially recognizes the Beijing government as the legitimate Chinese government and doesn't recognize Taiwan.
OTOH, the US has a security partnership with Taiwan. See https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-united-states-securit... for details of this unique relationship.
I think the moral of the story here is that it's better to sell out from day 1 than to be seen as a hypocrite.
Source? I was not aware there was any hesitation or even disagreement from Apple's side. Is there an Apple statement saying they disagree w/ Chinese government requests similar to the statements saying they disagree w/ US government requests? In their absence, is it safe to assume they agree since they have shown that when they disagree they make public statements?
As of July, these datacenters were nationalized [2], giving the Chinese government access to all Apple user data.
It took only two years to go from refusing the FBI request for one user to handing over the encryption keys to millions of users.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
If you wanted to do software work for a company that didn't kowtow to Chinese government demands, chances are 99% of jobs are available to you. Does that mean they could if they would? Unknown, and since regimes change with frequency you can't rely on stated principles, only actions.
It's much easier to excel in the pursuit of something you believe in. Seems like folks who accept jobs that they don't believe in are liable to become increasingly demotivated and eventually burned out.
Good for you on making a decision like that.
But... Just so long as you know that someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked. That's something I think many idealistic users here aren't understanding.
If talented engineers were that easy to find, Google wouldn't have participated in illegal wage-fixing; and that's without selecting for engineers that want to support an authoritarian regime. Statistically speaking, every rejection drives up the price. To wield even more power, we'd need to form some kind of industry-wide union.
Because they are actually in China and give concessions to the government.
We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.
That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.
Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.
Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?
Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.
If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.
The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.
That is what an economic substitute is. SMB tech companies typically don't compare.
But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.
I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.
How can you say this when those that build, even small parts, of surveillance technology are directly contributing to oppression?
Workers absolutely have a moral obligation to what they work on. This notion that they're not responsible for this is horrifically wrong.
This is one reason why export controls on technology are important. The corporations don't mind helping oppressive governments lock up dissidents.
Who, next, wants all of Google's information about people in their country turned over to them?
As much as we in the US talk about out government compelling companies to turn over data, those companies _do_ have a say in what they will or can turn over and our government has some burden of proof that they need it. In China, based on my understanding, they have no choice, no say.
If the question was just "is this better for the Chinese?", I think I would agree with you. This _is_ better for the Chinese. The problem is that this raises the question of "where does this lead?" I don't think it leads anywhere good and, clearly, I'm not alone in that assessment.
Are you saying US companies should get one moral lapse for free?
> This _is_ better for the Chinese.
Neither you or the parent poster have indicated why it's better. You've described it as exactly the same as local search options. Is Google magical or what? Can the Chinese not make a search engine? Is it beyond them?
We'd like to think Google wouldn't do this just for the money, but Dragonfly sets precedent that it would do something just for the money.
There was no social unrest in China when Google pulled out and I’m pretty sure that in the scenario you’re describing, the Chinese wouldn’t give a fuck.
I mean they have had plenty of reasons for social unrest thus far, far better reasons actually and it did not happen.
> it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
Seriously? Why?
> Seriously? Why?
Because this is actually happening. We're basically giving up billions of dollars to China for free.
I find this line of thinking to be very troubling, to be honest.
Another way to look at it is legitimization - Google doing the Chinese government's bidding through censorship could be construed as tacit approval. Indeed, the Chinese government may advertise it as such.
TL;DR: He said no.
(I find I had to update the old aphorism for the late 20th and 21st century. After centuries of studies on how to use words to manipulate people, words are now simply nearly useless and while I'm human and I can't claim total success, I try to just ignore them now. )
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
You assume that the government would ever let a foreign company get dominant market share over a domestic one.
China is no where close to a free market, the winners are chosen.
Reading a bit about the Belt and Road Initiative is probably a good primer on some of China's global interests right now.
Google is dominant nearly worldwide. If China is able to get Google to cave and build the censorship machine then what barrier is there to turning the feature ‘on’ for other countries that ask for it? There are plenty of oppressive regimes interested in a censored Google but they don’t have the pull to get Google to build it right now. Once it’s built though why wouldn’t Google’s response just be shrugs “sure why not?”
I think it is indeed a slippery slope and legitimizes China’s plan to influence the internet for the worse.
Remember all of the handwringing about BBM messages being difficult to intercept? Then the crying suddenly went away, and a few months later you heard about police breaking up organizers of riots.
Google could continue to operate profitably without doing business in China, so what makes your statement true?
China may be the lowest-hanging fruit of the search and ad market, but surely you're not suggesting Google would shy away from a challenge and only go for the easy win? That doesn't sounds like the Google we all know.
People want a messenger app? Let's make one! Oh, it takes time and energy. Let's shut it down. Oh wait, people want a messenger app. Let's make one. Oh, it takes [........]
It's all about returning as much money to investors as possible. Period. Otherwise you suffer the consequences.
AMZNs stock price isn't driven by current earnings, but it isnt driven by investor magnanimity either. It's all about the promise of future earnings. If revenues flatline or decline, you can expect their stock prices to fall in line with their peers.
Why doesn't Google start a restaurant chain, or start making PCs, or selling servers, or licensing software defined networking stacks to other companies, or monetize many of their other assets? Surely they must if they're supposed to make as much money for their investors as possible?
Why don't they sell search data on individuals to repressive regimes, so people can be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed? Would make some decent coin for investors, I expect, lots of repressive governments would probably pay a pretty penny for it.
How about selling searches emanating from US government IPs to the Kremlin, selling tracking data linked to Google accounts, or otherwise monetizing espionage interests?
The problem with doing these things is that it affects the value of the Google brand, both internally to employees and externally to customers. If you can't hire the best employees or encourage customers to trust your software and services, then long or even short term decline is pretty much assured.
And how about swapping cause and effect? You're positing the tail should wag the dog - that the stock market should control what the company does. How about the stock market chooses to invest in companies that are doing things that it believes will make money? From this perspective, the company is free to do whatever, and investors are free to sell the stock if they don't agree. In truth, there's a mutual dependence here - the company can't just fraudulently give away investors' cash, but likewise, if investors knew what was best for companies, we wouldn't need CEOs or leadership of any kind - we'd just advertise choices to the investors / market and go with whatever pushes up the stock most.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
They just keep getting picked off one by one.
The best way for the world to improve is for all scientific and technology advancements to be freely available.
Any good China does for its people or for other nations? That will just serve to legitimize their totalitarian government and encourage imitations abroad. Ergo it's bad.
In general it's better to state your fundamental premises at the beginning of the argument rather than reveal them midway through
But still, not sure if they would give up the low cost of manufacturing for this. Frankly, the regime makes that possible.
Isn't companies banding together and agreeing to restrict business in a market a combination in restraint of trade, which is explicitly illegal?
You can't be serious. Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China. If Google had any chance at all, and assuming the Chinese government or Baidu's friends in the government wouldn't interfere with the "free market" in China to hurt Google at every turn, it would still take at least 5-7 years for Google to even get close to Baidu's market share.
Also this assumes this wouldn't catch a fire under Baidu's ass to start innovating and investing more into its search software and server farms.
I still believe it would be all but impossible for Google to beat Baidu in China. I just don't ever see it happening. If it was so easy, why hasn't even happened in Russia, where Google actually had significantly larger market share, had to deal with fewer political games than in China, and its Chrome browser I think was actually the most popular there until recently (or it may still be the most popular there).
If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu, no matter how much it "complies" with the Chinese governments' rules.
OTOH Chinese consumers are recently obsessed with western products actually. Not with iPhones (you can buy Xiaomi smartphone, laptop, and Bluetooth headset for the price of iPhone), but with clothes, food, and many other goods.
> If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu
Don't underestimate Yandex.
You completely missed the point and failed to address any of the serious ethical problems they raised in the letter. We would be living in a dark dystopia if everyone's biggest priority was penetrating markets.
Tech workers are in high demand and have great salaries. Their livelihoods are not in jeapordy; they have their pick of where to work.
You mean Google's effort to break into a market that it's currently frozen out of.