Ask HN: As a Facebook or Google engineer, do you consider your company evil?
Amid the severe backlash that tech companies currently face (Google and FB amongst others), how do you consider your own company from a moral POV?
Do you think the current backlash is justified?
No judgement, just curious.
135 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadNo the real solution is people actually need to be taught critical thinking skills at school. It's not Facebook's role to be the next nanny state.
Now one could argue that yes, Google and Facebook did profit financially from "fake news" during the last election because they make money from "attention", and did nothing to stop websites relaying misinformation because they were displaying Google ads or misinformation relayed on Facebook pages. Was there a "conflict of interest"? Always.
A company has no will of it's own, anything in the interest of the firm but not in the interest of any of the employees, it won't happen.
Sorry, I know this is a weak response to your argument but it would be too much to cover here, I don't have the time and I'm not sure I should convince anybody anyway. If you want to shake your beliefs on what life and intelligence are, go read the book.
Yes, they can be evil.
Now, the question of whether certain companies should be considered "evil" may not be something I want to spend a lot of time on, but the arbitrary philosophical distinction that only humans within those companies can be "evil" makes the discussion even less interesting.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/04/16/has-covid-19-k...
The issue is what does qualify as "evil"?
(https://decrypt.co/12708/most-facebook-employees-dont-trust-...)
I’ve thought of leaving for years. Problem is: I have a wife who doesn’t work, two kids, piles of debt, and live in the most expensive city in the country. We can’t just leave, our whole life is here. And moving to a bank now to make more money (if I even would, the tenure and promotions do pile up) means working harder and more hours. That comes out of spending time with my young kids.
I spent a couple of years having a tough time with this. It genuinely caused a long-term, slow burn existential crisis that only recently started to settle into a stable state. All of life is moral compromise, I think. It sucks and I’m sorry, but it would be too hard to stop and I’m just sort of accepting that now.
We grow in the face of adversity and challenge. I think as an ex-Googler you'll have a choice of interesting positions that will benefit your career in the long run.
What would work is enough people willing to organise politically. Unions, people. This is a synchronization problem.
Yes. If Google knew, say, 25% of its highly-skilled engineering workforce would strike in the face of unethical business practices, Google would not engage in unethical business practices. Tech companies are assholes because we allow them to be.
There are also companies who happen to make money doing something more-or-less good - for example life-saving medical devices, and even a company like Roland, which makes music equipment. I think those things contribute to a meaningful life, and are a good place to land if you're jumping ship.
Yes, Google does unethical things. This sucks and I feel uncomfortable supporting it. Quitting is just too costly in terms of personal cost and would not have much effect.
I spent years at Google. The trajectory was obvious even a decade ago. There were many reasons to leave and many of us did. I didn't have to wait for a line in the sand because we knew what was on the horizon and leaving was easy. (I did not have a family then, which is a consideration and why I left one of my last startups. Baby on the way, acquired by a big corp and knew it would be easy to become chained to that desk.)
Anytime you get a large enough group of people, minimum size of one, evil will exist. That’s something we have to learn how to cope with, and sometimes we have to accept that we aren’t in control.
There’s sort of a rebel spirit in the USA where people see themselves as perpetuating evil if they’re not actively fighting it, boycotting this and that, throwing the tea in the Boston harbor.
On the flip side, I’d make the argument that one’s personal self-preservation is more important than “making a difference,” and that people have way less of a chance to make a difference than they give themselves credit for. As you said, quitting Google would not have much effect.
All of that said, I don’t see anything uniquely evil about Google compared to any other Fortune 500 or even much smaller mid-sized business. I think I could even make the argument that they are decidedly less evil than many much smaller businesses with approximately 200 employees.
And the upside of Google is tremendous. A lot of commercial products have an incredibly positive impact.
I just don’t think anyone has to feel bad for holding down a steady job, especially since we shouldn’t judge people on their employment prestige in the first place. Having the ability to choose employer based on moral compass is itself an indicator of privilege, so I wouldn’t want to look down on a cigarette company employee (especially individual contributors) for holding down that job, never mind a software company that makes a bunch of stuff that people largely like and benefit from.
I thought, though, that "being evil" (whatever that means) came from some kind of instinct of survival experienced when facing the threat of bankruptcy, or at least very strong market pressures. And and it didn't seem to me that Google had been facing these yet.
Google didn't need to fight to survive, but they also didn't have the option of remaining "Google, circa 2004" or whatever we think their last year as a mostly-good company was.
I met a guy studying CS in Cuba (he grew up there) on a Congress and visited him there. The living conditions there are not nice, wealth is something most people there don’t have access to. But this guy was asked by FB/Google to interview for a position and he proudly told me how he declined and wrote them exactly why he morally thought he will never work there. Regardless of the correctness of his view it impressed me that he held principles higher than his potential income. If you just follow financial incentives in your decisions plus a minimal ethical code that will keep you out of prison you are contributing to humanities demise. Long term if too many people just follow their incentives without reflecting on their net contribution to society as a whole this will destroy our society.
Also it’s not like you will be out on the streets if you don’t work for Google/FB. You’ll most likely still be considered rich with whatever you make at other companies in this sector.
I have to say I'm slightly surprised, because I thought that top SWE like the ones working at "elite" companies such as Google were enjoying more freedom when choosing their employer.
Seems like it's hard for everyone then... (again, no judgement)
But, I think the point he was trying to make is that because of these mega-companies coalescing their people in certain cities, the economics of that takes a toll on everyone but the top executives who are already getting paid big cheddar + their enticements for being at the company: their stock awards which if there for even 5-10 years can amount to a huge amount. Enough for said ~managers~ [executives] to do the same sorts of hops globally as ~managers~ [executives] are interchangeable regardless of the product they produce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-P4mx1FLU
I looked into moving to silicon valley for the enormous salaries, and even when you take into account the insane rent you're still taking home more than you would anywhere else in the world. I suspect it is the prospect of a pay cut keeping him there rather than actual massive debts.
Do you feel like this feeling is common among Googlers?
Also, I'd be very interested in hearing what you think of the reasons from Googlers defending the company, since you probably hear them a lot by working at Google.
I get dozens of questions answered each day through your search engine that before would go unanswered. (my last question was: "how does a digital scale work?")
I get to write beautiful documents, spreadsheets and presentations that I can easily share with colleagues, who in turn, easily can provide feedback and comments inside the documents themselves.
I tracked the length of my last run with only my phone using android and maps, something that otherwise would have been difficult to do.
My family easily collects photos of our holiday together in a single shared space.
These are just the first things that came to mind I used google for in the last week. Whatever evils google do, you do at least as much good as well.
It's absurd to me that you are feeling guilt because of this. I can't tell you what to feel, but people like you have made my life significantly better and I want to express thankfulness for that.
> All of life is moral compromise
So true. I wonder what sort of life critics of FANG/big-tech live.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
The framing of your question has no good answer like the classic “are you still beating your wife?” where either a yes or no is still a bad look.
This sounds a lot like whataboutism.
> The framing of your question has no good answer like the classic “are you still beating your wife?”
I don't agree your analogy holds.
1. That famous question was rhetorical, this one isn't;
2. That was a riposte to a grand claim that questions can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" and no explanation whatsoever, the "framing" of this one — i.e., the expanded text after the headline — clearly asks for explained responses and not a simple "yes" or "no".
Not sure I see the point you want to make with COVID-19 though... You mean there is "worse" evil going on somewhere else?
That being said, I do think big tech has been scapegoated for years. Everything is blamed on these companies: eroding privacy, Brexit, Trump, fake news, social breakdown -- at some point we as a society need to take responsibility as well because frankly these platforms are a reflection of us as a species.
I understand the skepticism, but after seeing how things work on the inside I trust my employer far more.
I mean, these are the two companies nearly every other company on the planet is in business with, and the negotiating terms are pretty one-sided.
I am not sure any other industry in human history has ever held so much power, and it's largely wielded by incompetent kids with little understanding of how what they do translates to the global stage.
You could make this argument about any revolution in tech/communications: The printing press certainly had similar concerns (politics + propaganda), same with the telephone ("people are listening in"). Powerful shady people have always been in charge of giant telecoms networks - I'm not saying if that's good or bad, just how it's always been.
The biggest difference I can see is that the web (and the networks big tech maintain) are far more open and free. That comes with downsides like even easier spreading fake news, but I don't see this as an issue with big tech, but with people. We've always been like this, but the internet just makes it easier.
So what are Facebook supposed to do in this situation. Just roll over and die?
How are they supposed to take responsibility for the the words the entire western world puts onto their platform?
I would call them psuedo-communists because they continually engage in the same self-centered practices that corporations do, but it’s “okay” for individuals or hipster small businesses but not for larger companies.
Money is seen as some kind of evil but all it is is an exchange method. It’s a way to convert one type or good or labor into another.
The evil practices tied into money are human evils. Money is impartial and neutral, therefore trying to gain money is not inherently evil or good.
So it's more interesting to contemplate what does head that off. Laws, incentives, competition, unions, etc.
This does not mean I support either company, it just means they have manipulated culture to ensure they are the only choice.
I was much warier of trusting Google with my data pre-Google to post-Google. It's constantly drilled into you the sacred nature of user data, and the technical protections seemed sound.
The elements I was most uncomfortable with were the profit-shifting/tax optimization, i.e. the Double-Irish Dutch Sandwich.
Historically, it also seems a shaky defense argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
Now find some obscure niche case and blame Google. It's fun when the anti Google narrative here is spoilt.
To be able to do the Irish haven, Google is and was abiding by all laws in doing it. Google was doing what all the lawmakers of various countries allowed, and they allowed it for a long time. It also only impacted a portion of Google's overall revenue. It also led to Google having a fairly massive presence in Ireland, which I'm sure the people employed there are happy with.
As countries have been figuring out how to tax companies like Google, they have been forcing them to create local entities so all business with people in those countries can be taxed locally. I can tell you this was not a simple thing for companies like Google to conform to (massive amounts of work by lots of people to bill locally).
You can see if you are billed locally based on the company your invoice or payment is collected under.
I think some of the backlash is justified and pushes the company to do better, but there's also some amount of what feels like backlash for backlash's sake where it just gets everyone here paying less attention to what critics think.
(speaking only for myself)
2 questions:
- what's the most negative in Google's actions in your opinion? - do you have examples of routine critiques of Google that you feel are unjustified?
One that I was pretty angry about a few months ago was soliciting the business of ICE/CBP, and firing workers who tried to raise awareness of this internally: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...
> do you have examples of routine critiques of Google that you feel are unjustified?
One relatively recently one I remember was when Chrome announced that they were deprecating Chrome Apps in favor of Progressive Web Apps there was a lot of "Google is killing something again" backlash. But Chrome Apps were a Chrome-only solution Google came up with to make Chromebooks usable, and PWAs are the cross-browser replacement. Proprietary things that only work in Chrome should be replaced by standardized things, and this is actually a really good change.
The general backlash against Google is the obvious one that Google collects a ton of data about you. Google is an ad company, and it makes as much money as it does BECAUSE it can put the ads in front of those users where it will be most effective. It can only do that because it knows a lot about users. It's google's core business. The trade-off makes a lot of sense to me: users get to use a really good product for free (It is hard to impossible to compete with google search), and in return Google gets to serve them targeted ads that it sells to other businesses. That's a fairly obvious and IMO very good deal, and it's easy to see how this happened historically, and it's likely not going to change -- people are too used to getting good search for free, you simply can't charge money for a search engine these days. I think the issue is that users aren't always conscious of this transaction taking place (you get free search-results and emails, and google gets to use the data it collects when you use the services). But the good news is that as far as I can tell, Google takes privacy concerns very, very serious. It's mind boggling (but technically obvious) how much Google _could_ know about you, since it has your location data, search results, and theoretically even your emails (as far as I know, gmail data is fairly sacred and not exploited to better sell you ads). The mean reason I think google is still a good company (and doesn't deserve the backslash) is that, simply, Google doesn't exploit all the data it could c...
"Trying to not be evil just doesn't scale so easily": your remark reminded me of this quote from Leopold Kohr:
"There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. … And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units."
(The Breakdown of Nations, 1957)
Why can't a company be honest when their statements are shared with Bloomberg? In fact, can you trust what they're saying if they're afraid of it making it to Bloomberg?
Generally when companies keep secrets, like salaries, it's so it can get away with treating people unfairly or lying to one group or the other.
This is new from 2018 IIRC. Before emails from free accounts where scanned for ads tailoring. They had problem selling GSuite, because clients where confused between the privacy of free and paid tiers. So they estimated it would be more beneficial to stop using mail data for all account, and simplify GSuite sells.
When I joined Google I was very influenced by the 'Google is the good guy PR'. I never liked the Ads business model, but there a few Google products I really liked (Inbox, Maps and YT notably).
It's hard to pinpoint the wake up call, but I'd say it was project Maven (aka let's make an AI to help US drones kill more people), and all the lying and mislabeling there was around it (our AI don't kill people, etc…).
Wrt Cambridge Analytica, you have to go back to the mind state of 2016. At the time FB was mostly attacked because it was a walled garden hoarding all the precious data. So FB allowed users to share data with external apps. Then one apps managae to get data about 100k Americans and their friends and use it for helping Trump. And then 'data portability' was evil.
So are you seriously asking people who work in tech companies that spread cat videos and enable video chats if their companies are "evil"? With a straight face? Come on.
This thinking betrays both that people in the industry take themselves far too seriously, and that we're so brainwashed to accept these kind of glaring double standards, we don't even stop for a second to question them.
Also, the moral problems arising from having a military force have been studied for centuries, so nothing new here. It doesn't mean we cannot be critical of the military at the same time (and it's not all bad either btw).
Finally, the tech industry has a huge power on us. This power is rising every day, and has been invisible to most until recently. So questioning its morals, intentions and agenda today matters.
FYI: they buy that, with tax dollars. Same way they get editorial control over hollywood movies in which military hardware is featured.
It’s part of the advertising budget. It’s no accident that these mass events seem to be widely aligned with the military. It’s an explicit taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign.
That said, the military and private surveillance companies can both do evil, and their evils can indeed synergize: tech databases can be used to determine who to mass murder, e.g. Palantir, or PRISM, resulting in more murder and terror than without the tech involved.
I don't consider the company evil. In fact, I think it's leading the way that we talk about ethics in computing. People talk about Maven, but it was an internal revolt--not external influence--that challenged the issues with the project.
Secondly, there's a lot of criticism about supposed violations of "Don't Be Evil". As a multi-national company, it's almost impossible these days to avoid morally complex issues. Microsoft, on the other hand, has recently been seeing in much better light due to Nadella's leadership in the post Ballmer-era. But Microsoft never had the "Don't Be Evil" and isn't getting criticism for its, e.g. defense contracts. I don't consider Microsoft to be an immoral company either.
Concerns about privacy and data handling are warranted. There should be stronger consumer protections in there area, and legislation like GDPR is good, and should be more widespread. I honestly don't think Google is the company to worry about here (or at least the biggest threat). It's companies who aren't as closely watched that are the highest risk to you. Google is pushing the state-of-the-art here, with efforts like differential privacy. From what I can see, Google respects your PII and has more advanced internal mechanisms for handling it than any other company I know about.
IMHO, Google tried to be as transparent as possible in this area. Concerned about data collection? Review your activity on myactivity.google.com. Want to move all of your data out, or back it up? takeout.google.com Location data? Google literally regularly emails you a report on your location summary so you know what's going on.
Is it perfect? No. Is there valid criticism? Sure. Could it do a lot better in many different areas? Absolutely.
Is it evil? I honestly just don't see it. Feel free to ask about individual issues if you disagree.
The revolt started internally despite a lot of effort to conceal the project, even from engineers working on it. And Google management started to stepback only after the press got involved.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are few other companies where the rank-and-file have as much pull with executive leadership and can influence strategy based on moral reasoning.
Obviously Maven wasn't shut down due to government pressure, but I feel like you drastically exaggerate how concerned Google is about valuing its employees.
> I feel like you drastically exaggerate how concerned Google is about valuing its employees.
I don't know what I would have to gain by such an exaggeration. It's not like there aren't a lot of current and X-Googlers that are highly critical [1] of the organization for a number of reasons. I'm not afraid of being critical, and I have nothing to gain by talking positively.
Are there other companies that regularly survey (see Googlegeist) their employees and actually make some progress on issues? Do those companies hold regular meetings with the CEO (TGIF) where anybody can ask a question? Tough questions aren't rare. They are quite common. Which other companies have those both and a survivor benefit? I'm asking seriously because I think that it's quite rare.
Do I have criticisms the company? Absolutely. But compared to corporate america, yeah, I will go out on a branch and say that Google values its staff.
[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
I think Googlers like to believe their employer cares about them, and the internal activists in particular, like to believe they are effective at creating real change. Ultimately though, I believe the Congressional hearings created that change, and more Congressional action will be necessary to curb their other issues.
> Are there other companies that regularly survey (see Googlegeist) their employees and actually make some progress on issues?
This is actually incredibly common. My employer does it, and it's one of hundreds of companies in my local geographic area that participate in the given employee survey system. At our all hands meetings, the best and worst results are shared, as well as a plan to address where employees most feel improvement is necessary.
> Do those companies hold regular meetings with the CEO (TGIF) where anybody can ask a question?
No, but then again, neither does Google after they started getting real questions that they didn't want to answer: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/15/google-cancels-tgif-weekly-a...
(Side note, reading Steve Yegge's original platform rant was an incredible highlight of my early days on G+!)
Also, I wonder whether the fact that most comments on this thread come from Google (ex-)employees, and not FB's, is saying something...
IMHO, Yes, very much so. There are lots of other initiatives as well (can't find a public link at the moment).
> and not FB's, is saying something...
I don't think they are an evil company either, but they were somewhat cavalier with handling PII until recently. This is why I support stronger personal and data privacy laws. It's very easy to mishandle info, even with the best of intentions. Take a look at Zoom, which prioritized ease-of-use over security and privacy. This is another example of why I think people shouldn't worry (first) about FAANG, they should worry about the much smaller players that don't receive nearly as much scrutiny.
First, I believe in our basic mission to make the world more open and connected, and I think in many ways we do work toward that. We're especially seeing that now. Tons of people are using FB (including IG and WA) as a way to stay connected during this crisis, and it makes me proud.
On privacy: yeah, we've made some mistakes. Were they evil mistakes? Let's put that in context. I was around when "information wants to be free" was everyone's mantra. When Facebook was being criticized for not making information they had available to third parties. I do not accept the gaslighting about attitudes toward privacy always being like they are now. They weren't. Should FB have put in better controls, and more strongly enforced those controls? Almost certainly. Was the lack of such efforts "evil"? Only if you apply today's standards of diligence to events and decisions in a very different time. Right now, I can see some of the problems that occur as we apply rigorous access control to user data even as it moves between internal systems. How many of our critics have ever needed to deal with such issues? There will always be more to do, but I'd say we're a bit ahead of the industry in that area now.
On disinformation: this is the real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. There's no logically-consistent reason why Facebook should exercise more control over content than Verizon does over the content of phone calls. To do so is to invite accusations of censorship, and run the risk of being treated as a publisher rather than a carrier. Nonetheless, we're devoting more human and computer time to detecting disinformation than most companies have in total. Vast data centers' worth. I'm in storage, so I see only the edge of this, in the form of (insanely complex) analysis pipelines and models. That's enough to get a feel for the scale of these efforts, and it boggles my mind. People are honing these techniques all the time, and having some successes. These successes are drastically under-reported compared to failures, for reasons I won't get into here, but they are reported. Anybody who's actually paying attention can see thousands of accounts being banned at a time for inauthentic content. Think for a moment about the computational complexity of detecting a thousand-node subset within a billion-node graph. Most people who accuse FB of taking this issue lightly just don't grasp the scale at which we operate and the additional difficulty that entails.
Does FB still do things that make me cringe? Sure does. The disrespect for user choice (e.g. chronological-timeline settings constantly being reset) pisses me off to no end. The demands put on moderators of large groups, and the dearth of tools made available to them, is inexcusable. Likewise for the lack of decent support or appeal processes when users are adversely affected by our own screwups. I've come to the conclusion that even though the people I work with directly are great, there are some other people at the other end of the company (user-facing product rather than deep infra) and at a different level who ... well, let's just say I wouldn't get along with them so well. It does give me pause sometimes, but not enough to outweigh my belief in the basic mission.
You want evil companies? How about those who make much of their money from contracts with ICE/CBP/NSA? How about those that have helped hollow out the economy with their anti-labor "gig economy" BS, leading to millions of unemployed right now? Or the worse half of the finance or defense industries? How about those helping to destroy our health or our planet? There are absolutely better companies I could work for. My ideal would be to do what I do at a company that's making vaccines or something, but they didn't seem interes...
> First, I believe in our basic mission to make the world more open and connected
Real question: do you think the top management feels the same? In general, do you see a lot of cynicism in workers around you?
> You want evil companies? How about...
Not saying GOOG/FB were worse than others, but people and the MSM began to increasingly question their moral alignment in the past few years, which is why I'm asking.
Honestly I don't know. If I had to guess I'd say they probably do agree with the words but might have different ideas of what they mean. Should "open" mean literally anyone can see literally anything? Clearly not. I might put limits where they wouldn't. Maybe the converse is true sometimes.
> do you see a lot of cynicism in workers around you?
Nope. TBH that's mostly because they're heads-down solving technical problems. Or maybe they're focused on social problems other than the ones that apply to the company from an external perspective (e.g. diversity is a big one). To the extent that I see these company-direction issues discussed at all, I do see people trying sincerely to grapple with them and do the right things. Are those people just fooling me? Are there others who take a more cynical position? Don't know and can't know. I can just say what I see.
A company that’s as large and fundamental as Google will always have detractors. They pay too much. They pay too little. They collect too much data. They don’t make their data open enough. There will always be something.
For privacy perspective, I'm not very satisfied with the status quo, but at least for Ads, privacy is now the top priority with a strict deadline so the situation may get improved. But I still think collecting less (or no) user data solves just a part of the problem; users still don't have understanding on what the real trade-off between their privacy and benefits to themselves/the overall web ecosystem from the ads they're watching is. Without this information, users cannot really make informed arguments and decisions on their privacy and ads. IMO, this is one of the fundamental reason of having significant discrepancies on the ads' perception across many people. But as this is not just a technical problem like 3rd party cookie but more of a subjective issue, this might be a much harder problem to tackle though.
I kinda consider ads a violation of human rights, given they're literally made to influence your decision making, therefore taking away a bit of your free will
Beside of free-will arguments, I'm seeing the huge (both positive and negative) impacts of ads on both societal and economical aspects and there's no real practical way to make it undone, it's pretty important to guide it to the right way. Yes, you can argue that it's better not to have it from the first moment but it's not the reality so the only option is making it better.
You show me any sufficiently big company and I will show you enough reasons to call them evil.