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Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google. Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initial

Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google. Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initially, very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively and the power structures move away from those driving forces. Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering. Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. It is much easier to bizdev and market a product and engineering led system/focus, though success through this is always forgotten when massive success comes around because engineering/research and development are hard to quantify and put metrics to which the power structures move away from. Let's hope there are factions of engineering/product focused people in Google that can gain back control.

Nokinside 8y ago
> Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering. It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it. MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.
orcdork 8y ago
That feels like whitewashing part of the blame that applies to engineers and product developers. We don't get to say "oh it's those pesky money people, how dare they", while drawing a salary from the same pockets.
- 49531 8y ago
  That just feels like Stallman-esque "lifestyleism". It's okay to be critical of a system while living in and part of it.
- radiorental 8y ago
  It's not a simple blame game. Whomever controls the product definition rules the roost. E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' model That is to say, it's organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the 'specs' have been written, hands are tied.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
    It’s actually very simple: anyone who makes a living from working on this product owns a share of the blame. Nobody in this industry can claim to have their hands tied; it’s not difficult for folks talented enough to land a job at Google to instead find work that doesn’t involve violating privacy at web scale. If you write code or participate in meetings intended to execute on a corrupt vision then you are tainted.
  - growse 8y ago
    I disagree. Specifications require implementation, and the implementation literally comes out of the engineers' fingers - if none of the engineers agreed to implement something they thought was unethical, then it's mostly irrelevant what the product definition says.
- snarfy 8y ago
  They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else? I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
  - nothrabannosir 8y ago
    > I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it. There are no poor engineers at Google. That is, ironically, the point people are making: if you make that much money doing something so (arguably) distasteful, you deserve scorn. It's in the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" family.
    - close04 8y ago
      There’s a difference between coming up with the requirement and the “order”, and implementing it because that’s your job. And don’t say they should quit. This isn’t the solution. At some point they will find an engineer to do it anyway. The solution should be applied at the source.
      - braythwayt 8y ago
        There is a wikipedia page devoted to the argument that they were only doing their job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
        darkcha0s 8y ago
        Are you really comparing a software developer completing tickets based on requirements to Nazis being told to kill? The fact that you need to draw that comparison tells me you are going overboard.
        8y ago
- pmontra 8y ago
  Exactly, there are plenty of other companies to go working for. People working for Google at best accept a compromise, at worst are actively working against their customers (should I say users?) That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    > any Google service except Play Yeah, that's enough, that logs you in on google play services, which has god mode on your phone.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Having play services (https://github.com/opengapps https://github.com/opengapps) on LineageOS is not like that. You can go to Privacy Guard and deny any permissions from Play Services.
      - pmlnr 8y ago
        Sure. Is it still in /system/priv-apps? If yes, you're wrong, it still has god mode.
- ptero 8y ago
  Engineers losing control to money types and bureaucrats is a gradual process. It is not that one day Google strikes out the second word from its unofficial motto ("do not be evil"). Engineers might dislike each small step in that direction, but it is not enough to make them pack up and move (house, family, kids, etc.). Pretty quickly they are tamed by both money people and the bureaucrats -- still appreciated and paid, but as brains to be tasked, with no ability to influence company policy. People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product. I bought a surface pad for my dad. Setting up was a pain, my dad had constant issues where he’d do something and didn’t know how to get out of it. UX was inconsistent. Bing ads everywhere. Yuck! It still very much felt like features were created for someone to get a promo. Google at the moment feels like a ruthless data driven company. “Our charts show that with this change people use more google services. It invades user’s privacy and pisses off a bunch of HN users but who cares? This will make us a trillion dollar company, and it is working!” And this is why everyone should fear Google. If they are willing to do this, as their AI capabilities advance, their actions show they value their stock price far above their users privacy. God knows what they’ll do next. It’s not the first time they’ve done something like this. On the other hand. The current US govt is in bed with Google. They lobby like crazy. The govt will not do anything. Gogo is a behemoth that can pretty much get away with anything now. May be the EU will. I really hope they get fined for this.
    - ptero 8y ago
      > I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product. I would not either, but this just reinforces the opinion that it is very hard for a company to get out of this state. Once engineers are domesticated even if the leadership wants to reinvigorate the company (and I think Microsoft's would like), empowering tame engineers is unlikely to produce earth-shattering results. Product improvements, sure; new technologies, probably not. My 2c.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  Yes we do. Just like Tesla employees get to critizise Musk for his Twitter market manipulation while still working their day job and drawing a sallery, and Americans can criticize Trump whithout moving out of the country. Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
  - HelloNurse 8y ago
    Twitter market manipulation is entirely Elon Musk's fault, not something Tesla and its employees are responsible for (except, perhaps, for some inner circle who might have stopped him). On the other hand, the newly revised Chrome is a core product: disagreeing with management but allowing it to be distributed isn't enough.
- czechdeveloper 8y ago
  But are there any moral corporations left? It feels like you can just keep running.
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    Is it the responsibility of a corporation to be moral or is the responsibility of the shareholders and customers to keep them moral?
  - trophycase 8y ago
    Not really, gotta work for small businesses or start your own.
    - czechdeveloper 8y ago
      And those will be sold to evil corp later on or will do subcontractors for them. I do not see any escape.
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        If you start a small business and then do those things, then you can no longer blame other people; You are the immoral person
- mdgrech23 8y ago
  It's not their pockets. We need to ditch this notion that marketing/business people provide our salary.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yeah, they do. That's exactly how it works with real (certified, legally-enforced labeling of) engineering. That is, civil engineers push back against (excessive) safety-cutting to save money while drawing a salary from the same companies that want to implement such design changes. They only differ in how effectively they have organized to prevent being overruled.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  I agree to some extent, but at the same time I think it would be silly for somebody to take a stand over this. In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue compared to all the other tracking they do and things like "Project Dragonfly".
SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
Only market forces can alter the course now. A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way that helps their bottom line and has been calculated to not trigger a massive PR backlash among the general public. The rank-and-file Googlers tasked with enabling these misdeeds have a simple choice: remain complicit or refuse to work on these products and accept the potential consequences.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  >>A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way Now it's obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what's left to do now stinks. They can't hide behind the "search" and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the "fair and balanced" search expert. Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.
paulriddle 8y ago
I think you're comparing imaginary perfect engineering team with stupid business people. How about we compare intelligent business people with autistic engineers who only want to write well designed, fast, secure code? Contrived examples and comparisons. Remember that good code, performance and security take time, money, and effort. You have to earn money. How sure are you that Google enters it's own Ballmer era? How likely is that a somewhat optimal business strategy involves alienating some privacy minded people? Very likely, judging from my perspective. I like privacy, but it seems to lose to convenience every time. You say > Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. Not necessarily true. It could be that bizdev + marketing should be the focus, and engineering should be the remaining 30% or something. I might be wrong. Most likely it isn't even uniform across all product. Some product should excel mostly on their technical merits. Others on hype and being cool. Personally, I'm already almost switched from Chrome to Firefox, and in the process of migrating from Gmail to other service. Because I want to support other companies by using their software and contributing to their ecosystem (Rust for example). I don't think Google is headed in the wrong direction, however. They are just way too big for my taste and for some reason I feel myself better being a user of smaller products.
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
  There’s a word in the first paragraph of your comment that should be replaced if you want to be taken seriously.
- bad_user 8y ago
  > autistic engineers How about we stop with this stereotype and with usage of this development disorder as an insult. It's unfair to people suffering from actual autism.
l5870uoo9y 8y ago
This is simply too naive. We need regulation to stop global tech monopolities shamelessly exploiting their dominant position, be it Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and so on. I doubt this can be done properly on any other level than national.
- briandear 8y ago
  Why? Don’t like Google, don’t use it. Pretty simple.
  - Elrac 8y ago
    That's from the gospel of the Libertarian Church of the Invisible Hand. This approach doesn't work in the real world because Google's consumers are neither perfectly informed nor perfectly rational. It also ignores the fact that major corporations can enlist the help of the US government in maintaining and extending their de facto monopolies.
    - etatoby 8y ago
      Still, it's hard to argue that Google Chrome is a monopoly, when it's not even the default in most user OSs (the exceptions bring ChromeOS and some of the Android vendors.)
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        Is it not a de-facto default when the first thing many people do on the internet is hit Google.com and get prompted to download it?
- rebornshellfish 8y ago
  Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn't have Intellectual Property laws? People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant. It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.
ur-whale 8y ago
>Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google. The engineers not being in charged happened a long time ago. To wit: the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was never an actual engineer. He actually learnt the ropes of his job at McKinsey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
mannykannot 8y ago
The idea that technical people are all impeccably ethical is not very plausible. Consider the scientists who promoted the claim that smoking was harmless long after it clearly was not, the engineers who concocted VW's diesel-emissions fraud, and the developers who produced Madoff's fake accounting. And, of course, this particular deception is hardly the first fall from grace on the internet.
- Elrac 8y ago
  I don't think anyone is seriously promoting that idea. The implication, rather, is a more modest proposal: That, of a company's staff, the bean counters and executives are at least on average more bottom-line-motivated and hence more likely to push for changes that will pull in cash at the expense of honesty, privacy or consistency with user expectations, when compared with the technical types.
shimon_e 8y ago
Maybe an antitrust break up of Google will be a good thing.
kamaal 8y ago
>>Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering. If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft). But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what's to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss. I'm also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture/process is fairly dead by now. No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom. I'm guessing most of Google's growth will now come only from Acquisitions.
matz1 8y ago
Isn't it native to assume all the Engineer oppose to this ? Some, maybe many will be happy to work on this. This is not an illegal thing that is enforced and has severe punishment.
hennsen 8y ago
I don’t think there’s reasonable hope. Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail. I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not... For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.
pfortuny 8y ago
You are right. But in the end some engineer built that feature.
laumars 8y ago
> Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn't become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability). Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you'll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they're not engineers. So you'd be amazed at how little most people would care about what's happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)
- strictnein 8y ago
  > Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code Microsoft didn't create DOS
  - heartbreak 8y ago
    But they did sell it before they'd written a line of code.
  - laumars 8y ago
    No, of course they didn't. But that doesn't mean they didn't still modify the codebase of the DOS (I cant recall what it was called) that they bought. Besides, my point clearly wasn't who originally authored MS-DOS but rather that MS didn't even have a product to sell -let along a well engineered one- back when they first visited IBM.
    - einr 8y ago
      MS didn't even have a product to sell Microsoft BASIC was the original Microsoft product, written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates in 1975. It was already wildly successful and the default microcomputer BASIC dialect by the time they had talks with IBM. MS-DOS was originally 86-DOS, née QDOS, by Seattle Computer Products.
supernovae 8y ago
Google is an advertising company, Are we just now finally realizing "you get what you pay for?"?
brlewis 8y ago
Perhaps the (you won't be signed out of your Google account) language was something an engineer or product developer insisted on. Perhaps they figured that was their part, and that it's up to the rest of us to take 10 minutes and switch to Firefox so data-driven Google knows this was a bad idea.
- ReAzem 8y ago
  Mozilla are winding down their efforts to make Firefox competitive. They are not planning to make a full servo browser anytime soon and they are transfering resources to VR and other things. This is disapointing. You can't blame them, their user base is in free fall.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    Are you sure? Seems like a lot going on when I look at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
  - pmontra 8y ago
    From https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap > Our long-term plan is to: > > Incrementally replace components in Firefox with ones written in Rust and shared with Servo I don't know if they have a date in mind for the delivery of a 100% Rust Firefox, but they're not stopping the initiative. The page goes on with a list of stuff they planned to add to Servo in 2018, which will eventually go into Firefox. Edit: fixed the formatting of the quote
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
I am not sure if it is possible to generalize to the whole of Google.
samfisher83 8y ago
Engineers like money too. 85%+ of their revenue is from ads.
Pxtl 8y ago
I assume this is the engineering at work. "Okay, users are confused by how they're logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let's make them one and the same". "Okay, but once you're logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear" "Ugh, let's just notify the user that clearing the cookies won't clear the Google ones" "Yeah, that works". Come on, we're all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  Hackernews needs it’s own version of infowars where people can declare and believe in their most absurd and cynical conspiracy theories regarding tech.
  - bradleyankrom 8y ago
    as long as it also pushes dubious health supplmenets
    - platz 8y ago
      +NOOTROOPICS +KETAMINE +LSD +DMT +JUICERO
      - clevergadget 8y ago
        I'll have what he's having
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    What makes this a cynical and absurd conspiracy theory? Is it that cookies are being kept so as to not break browser login, or that the decision-making was driven by software engineers?
- bad_user 8y ago
  Everybody at Google, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact user privacy for those that care? Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so. And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don't care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that's not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla. So I'm not buying that. Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)
chaostheory 8y ago
> very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively I agree with the problem but not the cause. I don't feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street's myopic expectations of growth every quarter.

Nokinside 8y ago

> Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering. It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it. MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.

orcdork 8y ago

That feels like whitewashing part of the blame that applies to engineers and product developers. We don't get to say "oh it's those pesky money people, how dare they", while drawing a salary from the same pockets.

49531 8y ago
That just feels like Stallman-esque "lifestyleism". It's okay to be critical of a system while living in and part of it.
radiorental 8y ago
It's not a simple blame game. Whomever controls the product definition rules the roost. E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' model That is to say, it's organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the 'specs' have been written, hands are tied.
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
  It’s actually very simple: anyone who makes a living from working on this product owns a share of the blame. Nobody in this industry can claim to have their hands tied; it’s not difficult for folks talented enough to land a job at Google to instead find work that doesn’t involve violating privacy at web scale. If you write code or participate in meetings intended to execute on a corrupt vision then you are tainted.
- growse 8y ago
  I disagree. Specifications require implementation, and the implementation literally comes out of the engineers' fingers - if none of the engineers agreed to implement something they thought was unethical, then it's mostly irrelevant what the product definition says.
snarfy 8y ago
They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else? I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  > I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it. There are no poor engineers at Google. That is, ironically, the point people are making: if you make that much money doing something so (arguably) distasteful, you deserve scorn. It's in the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" family.
  - close04 8y ago
    There’s a difference between coming up with the requirement and the “order”, and implementing it because that’s your job. And don’t say they should quit. This isn’t the solution. At some point they will find an engineer to do it anyway. The solution should be applied at the source.
    - braythwayt 8y ago
      There is a wikipedia page devoted to the argument that they were only doing their job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
      - darkcha0s 8y ago
        Are you really comparing a software developer completing tickets based on requirements to Nazis being told to kill? The fact that you need to draw that comparison tells me you are going overboard.
        8y ago
pmontra 8y ago
Exactly, there are plenty of other companies to go working for. People working for Google at best accept a compromise, at worst are actively working against their customers (should I say users?) That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  > any Google service except Play Yeah, that's enough, that logs you in on google play services, which has god mode on your phone.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Having play services (https://github.com/opengapps https://github.com/opengapps) on LineageOS is not like that. You can go to Privacy Guard and deny any permissions from Play Services.
    - pmlnr 8y ago
      Sure. Is it still in /system/priv-apps? If yes, you're wrong, it still has god mode.
ptero 8y ago
Engineers losing control to money types and bureaucrats is a gradual process. It is not that one day Google strikes out the second word from its unofficial motto ("do not be evil"). Engineers might dislike each small step in that direction, but it is not enough to make them pack up and move (house, family, kids, etc.). Pretty quickly they are tamed by both money people and the bureaucrats -- still appreciated and paid, but as brains to be tasked, with no ability to influence company policy. People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
- nojvek 8y ago
  I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product. I bought a surface pad for my dad. Setting up was a pain, my dad had constant issues where he’d do something and didn’t know how to get out of it. UX was inconsistent. Bing ads everywhere. Yuck! It still very much felt like features were created for someone to get a promo. Google at the moment feels like a ruthless data driven company. “Our charts show that with this change people use more google services. It invades user’s privacy and pisses off a bunch of HN users but who cares? This will make us a trillion dollar company, and it is working!” And this is why everyone should fear Google. If they are willing to do this, as their AI capabilities advance, their actions show they value their stock price far above their users privacy. God knows what they’ll do next. It’s not the first time they’ve done something like this. On the other hand. The current US govt is in bed with Google. They lobby like crazy. The govt will not do anything. Gogo is a behemoth that can pretty much get away with anything now. May be the EU will. I really hope they get fined for this.
  - ptero 8y ago
    > I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product. I would not either, but this just reinforces the opinion that it is very hard for a company to get out of this state. Once engineers are domesticated even if the leadership wants to reinvigorate the company (and I think Microsoft's would like), empowering tame engineers is unlikely to produce earth-shattering results. Product improvements, sure; new technologies, probably not. My 2c.
talltimtom 8y ago
Yes we do. Just like Tesla employees get to critizise Musk for his Twitter market manipulation while still working their day job and drawing a sallery, and Americans can criticize Trump whithout moving out of the country. Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
- HelloNurse 8y ago
  Twitter market manipulation is entirely Elon Musk's fault, not something Tesla and its employees are responsible for (except, perhaps, for some inner circle who might have stopped him). On the other hand, the newly revised Chrome is a core product: disagreeing with management but allowing it to be distributed isn't enough.
czechdeveloper 8y ago
But are there any moral corporations left? It feels like you can just keep running.
- mbostleman 8y ago
  Is it the responsibility of a corporation to be moral or is the responsibility of the shareholders and customers to keep them moral?
- trophycase 8y ago
  Not really, gotta work for small businesses or start your own.
  - czechdeveloper 8y ago
    And those will be sold to evil corp later on or will do subcontractors for them. I do not see any escape.
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      If you start a small business and then do those things, then you can no longer blame other people; You are the immoral person
mdgrech23 8y ago
It's not their pockets. We need to ditch this notion that marketing/business people provide our salary.
SilasX 8y ago
Yeah, they do. That's exactly how it works with real (certified, legally-enforced labeling of) engineering. That is, civil engineers push back against (excessive) safety-cutting to save money while drawing a salary from the same companies that want to implement such design changes. They only differ in how effectively they have organized to prevent being overruled.
jlarocco 8y ago
I agree to some extent, but at the same time I think it would be silly for somebody to take a stand over this. In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue compared to all the other tracking they do and things like "Project Dragonfly".

SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago

Only market forces can alter the course now. A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way that helps their bottom line and has been calculated to not trigger a massive PR backlash among the general public. The rank-and-file Googlers tasked with enabling these misdeeds have a simple choice: remain complicit or refuse to work on these products and accept the potential consequences.

onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way Now it's obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what's left to do now stinks. They can't hide behind the "search" and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the "fair and balanced" search expert. Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.

paulriddle 8y ago

I think you're comparing imaginary perfect engineering team with stupid business people. How about we compare intelligent business people with autistic engineers who only want to write well designed, fast, secure code? Contrived examples and comparisons. Remember that good code, performance and security take time, money, and effort. You have to earn money. How sure are you that Google enters it's own Ballmer era? How likely is that a somewhat optimal business strategy involves alienating some privacy minded people? Very likely, judging from my perspective. I like privacy, but it seems to lose to convenience every time. You say > Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. Not necessarily true. It could be that bizdev + marketing should be the focus, and engineering should be the remaining 30% or something. I might be wrong. Most likely it isn't even uniform across all product. Some product should excel mostly on their technical merits. Others on hype and being cool. Personally, I'm already almost switched from Chrome to Firefox, and in the process of migrating from Gmail to other service. Because I want to support other companies by using their software and contributing to their ecosystem (Rust for example). I don't think Google is headed in the wrong direction, however. They are just way too big for my taste and for some reason I feel myself better being a user of smaller products.

SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
There’s a word in the first paragraph of your comment that should be replaced if you want to be taken seriously.
bad_user 8y ago
> autistic engineers How about we stop with this stereotype and with usage of this development disorder as an insult. It's unfair to people suffering from actual autism.

l5870uoo9y 8y ago

This is simply too naive. We need regulation to stop global tech monopolities shamelessly exploiting their dominant position, be it Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and so on. I doubt this can be done properly on any other level than national.

briandear 8y ago
Why? Don’t like Google, don’t use it. Pretty simple.
- Elrac 8y ago
  That's from the gospel of the Libertarian Church of the Invisible Hand. This approach doesn't work in the real world because Google's consumers are neither perfectly informed nor perfectly rational. It also ignores the fact that major corporations can enlist the help of the US government in maintaining and extending their de facto monopolies.
  - etatoby 8y ago
    Still, it's hard to argue that Google Chrome is a monopoly, when it's not even the default in most user OSs (the exceptions bring ChromeOS and some of the Android vendors.)
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      Is it not a de-facto default when the first thing many people do on the internet is hit Google.com and get prompted to download it?
rebornshellfish 8y ago
Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn't have Intellectual Property laws? People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant. It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.

ur-whale 8y ago

>Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google. The engineers not being in charged happened a long time ago. To wit: the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was never an actual engineer. He actually learnt the ropes of his job at McKinsey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

mannykannot 8y ago

The idea that technical people are all impeccably ethical is not very plausible. Consider the scientists who promoted the claim that smoking was harmless long after it clearly was not, the engineers who concocted VW's diesel-emissions fraud, and the developers who produced Madoff's fake accounting. And, of course, this particular deception is hardly the first fall from grace on the internet.

Elrac 8y ago
I don't think anyone is seriously promoting that idea. The implication, rather, is a more modest proposal: That, of a company's staff, the bean counters and executives are at least on average more bottom-line-motivated and hence more likely to push for changes that will pull in cash at the expense of honesty, privacy or consistency with user expectations, when compared with the technical types.

shimon_e 8y ago

Maybe an antitrust break up of Google will be a good thing.

kamaal 8y ago

>>Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering. If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft). But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what's to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss. I'm also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture/process is fairly dead by now. No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom. I'm guessing most of Google's growth will now come only from Acquisitions.

matz1 8y ago

Isn't it native to assume all the Engineer oppose to this ? Some, maybe many will be happy to work on this. This is not an illegal thing that is enforced and has severe punishment.

hennsen 8y ago

I don’t think there’s reasonable hope. Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail. I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not... For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.

pfortuny 8y ago

You are right. But in the end some engineer built that feature.

laumars 8y ago

> Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn't become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability). Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you'll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they're not engineers. So you'd be amazed at how little most people would care about what's happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)

strictnein 8y ago
> Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code Microsoft didn't create DOS
- heartbreak 8y ago
  But they did sell it before they'd written a line of code.
- laumars 8y ago
  No, of course they didn't. But that doesn't mean they didn't still modify the codebase of the DOS (I cant recall what it was called) that they bought. Besides, my point clearly wasn't who originally authored MS-DOS but rather that MS didn't even have a product to sell -let along a well engineered one- back when they first visited IBM.
  - einr 8y ago
    MS didn't even have a product to sell Microsoft BASIC was the original Microsoft product, written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates in 1975. It was already wildly successful and the default microcomputer BASIC dialect by the time they had talks with IBM. MS-DOS was originally 86-DOS, née QDOS, by Seattle Computer Products.

supernovae 8y ago

Google is an advertising company, Are we just now finally realizing "you get what you pay for?"?

brlewis 8y ago

Perhaps the (you won't be signed out of your Google account) language was something an engineer or product developer insisted on. Perhaps they figured that was their part, and that it's up to the rest of us to take 10 minutes and switch to Firefox so data-driven Google knows this was a bad idea.

ReAzem 8y ago
Mozilla are winding down their efforts to make Firefox competitive. They are not planning to make a full servo browser anytime soon and they are transfering resources to VR and other things. This is disapointing. You can't blame them, their user base is in free fall.
- brlewis 8y ago
  Are you sure? Seems like a lot going on when I look at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
- pmontra 8y ago
  From https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap > Our long-term plan is to: > > Incrementally replace components in Firefox with ones written in Rust and shared with Servo I don't know if they have a date in mind for the delivery of a 100% Rust Firefox, but they're not stopping the initiative. The page goes on with a list of stuff they planned to add to Servo in 2018, which will eventually go into Firefox. Edit: fixed the formatting of the quote

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

I am not sure if it is possible to generalize to the whole of Google.

samfisher83 8y ago

Engineers like money too. 85%+ of their revenue is from ads.

Pxtl 8y ago

I assume this is the engineering at work. "Okay, users are confused by how they're logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let's make them one and the same". "Okay, but once you're logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear" "Ugh, let's just notify the user that clearing the cookies won't clear the Google ones" "Yeah, that works". Come on, we're all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.

dev_dull 8y ago
Hackernews needs it’s own version of infowars where people can declare and believe in their most absurd and cynical conspiracy theories regarding tech.
- bradleyankrom 8y ago
  as long as it also pushes dubious health supplmenets
  - platz 8y ago
    +NOOTROOPICS +KETAMINE +LSD +DMT +JUICERO
    - clevergadget 8y ago
      I'll have what he's having
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  What makes this a cynical and absurd conspiracy theory? Is it that cookies are being kept so as to not break browser login, or that the decision-making was driven by software engineers?
bad_user 8y ago
Everybody at Google, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact user privacy for those that care? Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so. And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don't care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that's not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla. So I'm not buying that. Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)

chaostheory 8y ago

> very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively I agree with the problem but not the cause. I don't feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street's myopic expectations of growth every quarter.