5 ms·

>Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a b

>Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank... Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental. People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy. For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich. We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even have a facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money. I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.

mistrial9 8y ago
good try but.. the Google'rs originally wanted to "index the worlds information" .. very, very smart engineers are motivated by that alone. They were competitive and highly-achieving coders from Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-CalTech-thatOtherOneIForget in an elite team environment.. There were ten other well-funded companies trying to be search engines with lots of publicity.. Google outperformed them.. In hindsight, after the money with so many zeroes, it is tempting to rewrite history, but this short "it was the money" doesnt tell the story
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  That techies were motivated by riches is not hindsight. Google, pre-ipo, sucked in so much intellectual capital that other startups, my own included, were having trouble getting access to the elite techies at prices we could afford. Their salaries were well above market, and their options were clearly going to be worth more than everyone else' at the time. And don't even get me started on Facebook. That one of facebook's early investors was the VC wing of the CIA was an open secret. Yet techies still flocked to them for the big paychecks and the options. And good for those guys. For the vast majority of them, it worked out REALLY well. I don't fault them for any of it. I just think that you're putting on rose colored glasses here. It was clear long before Google IPO'd, that there was a lot of money to be made. (That much was even clear before keyword auctions as a matter of fact.) And everyone wanted to be in on it. Everyone still wants to get in on the hot startups. Whether those startups are profitable or not. That's just the nature of this business. Now again, I'm not complaining. That's just how the tech startup industry works. I get that. My issue is with everyone trying to turn it all around and act like a giant gold rush never blinded everyone. As if all those techies flocked to SV because it was all just about making the world a better place. That's just not true.
  - netcan 8y ago
    This isn't an all-in-one or all-out thing. Of course money was a consideration. But, Google (and sv 2.0 generally) did both present and to an extent, live up to a certain ethic. Not perfectly, not without some hypocrisy but they did have an ethic. The sold it to their employees (and others). Today, they have trouble living up to it. People got disillusioned or upset. That is what we're talking about it. I agree that these people joined a company, not a monestary. But, 10 years ago working at Google was easier to be proud of, on an ethical/esthetic level.
- jhabdas 8y ago
  We all want different things. Those who went to work not to be evil were duped from the start or lying to themselves as we all know money is the root...
- njarboe 8y ago
  Why do people want to try and summarize the motivation of why every person who worked for Goggle to a single cause? We all know that people are different and the each person is motivated by multiple things. People went to work for Goggle because of all the things that are being discussed here and more.
voidhorse 8y ago
This is the right way to think about it. Tech/Knowledge workers are pretty smart. There's no real "tricking" going on, which is part of what makes the problem so difficult to rout and insidious. If we were 'tricked' major economic and societal upheaval would be around the corner. But we're not tricked. We're willing participants. There is a prevailing cynicism among the working man in that he recognizes (though often doesn't articulate) the compulsion to participate in the market that comes with capitalist systems. We already knew these companies were not shining paragons of ethical values—almost every participant in capitalism has known this since Industrialization. To focus on the consciousness of particular individuals or the false ethos of particular companies is to miss the real problem, which is systemic and lies at the roots in the capitalist mode of life and organization of resources. So long as you have capitalism you will have companies that make profit and market-survival an all-encompassing goal (whether or not they admit it) and complacent workers who are forced to support the Darwinian market game to have access to the means of subsistence. Capitalist logic is defined by its unbridled replacement of all other values (ethical, spiritual, etc.) with the value of exchange.
ryandrake 8y ago
> For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich. Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense. Sure, techies (currently) have a good shot at an above average lifestyle, but that's it. Working as third engineer from the left is not going to provide generational wealth for their descendants, or significantly impact their retirement dates. like everyone else, they are still dependent on their ability to work in order to survive. And it's all highly dependent on the whims of the tech job market. Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn.
- mbesto 8y ago
  > Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense. I can't speak for the OP, but there is absolutely a sense of getting rich working early at a tech company. The market for startup options is a direct indication of this. Google and Facebook both made, what..1000 millionaires each when they IPO'd? Point is, yes if you get in early to a world dominating technology company, you can absolutely become rich and be set for life. > Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn. Disagree. Downturns force productivity and technology fuels productivity. If anything it's going to force more investment in technology to replace humans so businesses can maintain profitability. It's the sales & marketing folks that are usually in trouble, because many of these high growth companies will simply turn those functions off while we wait for the economy to swing back.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    The FB and Google scenarios were vanishing outliers. A whole lot of if statements had to evaluate to true to produce those outcomes, and at the end of the day, a FB IPO millionaire is pretty well off but his kids will still have to work for a living. The remaining 99% of early tech employees for other companies will end up with equity worth a house down payment if they are lucky, worth a few months of rent in the usual case, and often worth nothing. EDIT: As for the tech downturn, just wait and see. I assume you have not been through a significant tech bear market from your comment, but if you have, you should know better. Things dry up completely, for nearly everyone. If you miraculously keep your job, you are still not in any powerful bargaining position.
mbesto 8y ago
> Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in. It's also revisionist to interject your own thoughts and represent them to a party as whole. People may have been cognizant that there are ills to Google/Facebook's model, but these are mostly externalities and not necessarily related to the direct impact. The point is - it's in our nature to ignore externalities, as long as the immediate goal is achieved.
Aeolun 8y ago
I don't know about you. But if I can get riches at Google, I can get riches at Facebook, Apple or Microsoft too. The reason I would have chosen Google, and the reason I entrusted Google with all my personal information in the first place, was knowing they had that slogan. I just couldn't imagine they'd ever erase it... Now who is left? I guess I'm waiting for the Internet Archive to turn evil...
- neolefty 8y ago
  I still like Google. I never worked there, but "cataloging the world's information and making it available for free" is still great. It's complicated yes, but Google — more than any other tech company — has empowered me to do the things I care about. Mainly by making information easy to find.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > cataloging the world's information and making it available for free What does the mission of archive.org have to do with Google?
    - neuromantik8086 8y ago
      Or like, the mission of any academic library for that matter? Historically, Google owes its entire existence to an NSF grant that required heavy collaboration with Stanford Libraries, which is why academia to this day holds certain privileges at Google (free GSuite via memorandum of understanding, etc). I'd even argue that working at a library contributes substantially more to indexing the world's information, since libraries usually have one of a kind items in their cataloguing backlog that provide huge insights. As an example, I once met someone at a vintage computing festival who was writing an ENIAC simulator using the original specifications housed at UPenn. Unfortunately, he was having quite a bit of difficulty obtaining example programs to run on his simulator, not because programs didn't exist, but most likely because they were backlogged at UPenn and weren't being added to the library's catalog (i.e., so-called "hidden collections"). There are many ways to work on similar efforts without being at a tech company, but for better or worse the pay isn't remotely as good.
skybrian 8y ago
At the time I joined Google, I wouldn't have chosen to work on Wall Street or for Microsoft, but Google seemed very safe from an ethical point of view. Ads were just text links and none of the things people complain about had happened yet. (I also thought I was joining too late to make much from stock options and was... wrong about that, though it took a while.) Google left China after I joined. What other company would have done that? It still seemed way better than average. This idea that of course we all knew what would happen over the next decade is revisionist history via mood affiliation that has no factual basis.
- the-pigeon 8y ago
  But Google left China because the Chinese government wouldn't let them operate in a way that was profitable. It had nothing to do with ethics if you read beyond the PR speak.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    I don't know where you got that from. They got blocked and hacked. Also, there are ethical considerations in everything. They don't disappear when profit is involved.
pacala 8y ago
Google had a very reasonable money printing machine as its core business model: Search Ads. * You tell Google what you are looking for. * Google returns a handful of ads, alongside world-class organic search results. * Merchants bid to have their ads returned for specific search intents. None of this requires the 24/7 surveillance machine Google has ended up building.
- bdamm 8y ago
  Not true. Ad words is bigger. And to do that, they need to know as much about what you want or what you could want in order to deliver a nice juicy targeted ad. Advertisers can now target not just classes of people, but in fact target specific people, and they'll pay a premium for that.
  - aaron_m04 8y ago
    That sounds like the original product has morphed into something more invasive than it was in Google's early years. Could Google have kept making enough profit if they had stuck to the original plan?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eternalban 8y ago
> We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. Certainly, Eric Brewer and friends [1] understood these issues and were concerned in 1997. Today, Dr. Brewer is a "vice president of infrastructure" at Google. Is it money? I'm not sure. We're all human and have our weaknesses. Noting that Brewer was in near tears discussing Inktomi I would guess success and ambition are also driving factors. [1]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf [2]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/pet3.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/pet3.pdf
anigbrowl 8y ago
People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. I'm pretty skeptical of objective-sounding claims about people's motivations.

mistrial9 8y ago

good try but.. the Google'rs originally wanted to "index the worlds information" .. very, very smart engineers are motivated by that alone. They were competitive and highly-achieving coders from Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-CalTech-thatOtherOneIForget in an elite team environment.. There were ten other well-funded companies trying to be search engines with lots of publicity.. Google outperformed them.. In hindsight, after the money with so many zeroes, it is tempting to rewrite history, but this short "it was the money" doesnt tell the story

bilbo0s 8y ago
That techies were motivated by riches is not hindsight. Google, pre-ipo, sucked in so much intellectual capital that other startups, my own included, were having trouble getting access to the elite techies at prices we could afford. Their salaries were well above market, and their options were clearly going to be worth more than everyone else' at the time. And don't even get me started on Facebook. That one of facebook's early investors was the VC wing of the CIA was an open secret. Yet techies still flocked to them for the big paychecks and the options. And good for those guys. For the vast majority of them, it worked out REALLY well. I don't fault them for any of it. I just think that you're putting on rose colored glasses here. It was clear long before Google IPO'd, that there was a lot of money to be made. (That much was even clear before keyword auctions as a matter of fact.) And everyone wanted to be in on it. Everyone still wants to get in on the hot startups. Whether those startups are profitable or not. That's just the nature of this business. Now again, I'm not complaining. That's just how the tech startup industry works. I get that. My issue is with everyone trying to turn it all around and act like a giant gold rush never blinded everyone. As if all those techies flocked to SV because it was all just about making the world a better place. That's just not true.
- netcan 8y ago
  This isn't an all-in-one or all-out thing. Of course money was a consideration. But, Google (and sv 2.0 generally) did both present and to an extent, live up to a certain ethic. Not perfectly, not without some hypocrisy but they did have an ethic. The sold it to their employees (and others). Today, they have trouble living up to it. People got disillusioned or upset. That is what we're talking about it. I agree that these people joined a company, not a monestary. But, 10 years ago working at Google was easier to be proud of, on an ethical/esthetic level.
jhabdas 8y ago
We all want different things. Those who went to work not to be evil were duped from the start or lying to themselves as we all know money is the root...
njarboe 8y ago
Why do people want to try and summarize the motivation of why every person who worked for Goggle to a single cause? We all know that people are different and the each person is motivated by multiple things. People went to work for Goggle because of all the things that are being discussed here and more.

voidhorse 8y ago

This is the right way to think about it. Tech/Knowledge workers are pretty smart. There's no real "tricking" going on, which is part of what makes the problem so difficult to rout and insidious. If we were 'tricked' major economic and societal upheaval would be around the corner. But we're not tricked. We're willing participants. There is a prevailing cynicism among the working man in that he recognizes (though often doesn't articulate) the compulsion to participate in the market that comes with capitalist systems. We already knew these companies were not shining paragons of ethical values—almost every participant in capitalism has known this since Industrialization. To focus on the consciousness of particular individuals or the false ethos of particular companies is to miss the real problem, which is systemic and lies at the roots in the capitalist mode of life and organization of resources. So long as you have capitalism you will have companies that make profit and market-survival an all-encompassing goal (whether or not they admit it) and complacent workers who are forced to support the Darwinian market game to have access to the means of subsistence. Capitalist logic is defined by its unbridled replacement of all other values (ethical, spiritual, etc.) with the value of exchange.

ryandrake 8y ago

> For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich. Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense. Sure, techies (currently) have a good shot at an above average lifestyle, but that's it. Working as third engineer from the left is not going to provide generational wealth for their descendants, or significantly impact their retirement dates. like everyone else, they are still dependent on their ability to work in order to survive. And it's all highly dependent on the whims of the tech job market. Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn.

mbesto 8y ago
> Most "techies going to work for google" or any other tech firm, are not going to get rich, in the Bill Gates or Larry Ellison sense. I can't speak for the OP, but there is absolutely a sense of getting rich working early at a tech company. The market for startup options is a direct indication of this. Google and Facebook both made, what..1000 millionaires each when they IPO'd? Point is, yes if you get in early to a world dominating technology company, you can absolutely become rich and be set for life. > Everything about how good techies have it could be negated during the next tech downturn. Disagree. Downturns force productivity and technology fuels productivity. If anything it's going to force more investment in technology to replace humans so businesses can maintain profitability. It's the sales & marketing folks that are usually in trouble, because many of these high growth companies will simply turn those functions off while we wait for the economy to swing back.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  The FB and Google scenarios were vanishing outliers. A whole lot of if statements had to evaluate to true to produce those outcomes, and at the end of the day, a FB IPO millionaire is pretty well off but his kids will still have to work for a living. The remaining 99% of early tech employees for other companies will end up with equity worth a house down payment if they are lucky, worth a few months of rent in the usual case, and often worth nothing. EDIT: As for the tech downturn, just wait and see. I assume you have not been through a significant tech bear market from your comment, but if you have, you should know better. Things dry up completely, for nearly everyone. If you miraculously keep your job, you are still not in any powerful bargaining position.

mbesto 8y ago

> Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in. It's also revisionist to interject your own thoughts and represent them to a party as whole. People may have been cognizant that there are ills to Google/Facebook's model, but these are mostly externalities and not necessarily related to the direct impact. The point is - it's in our nature to ignore externalities, as long as the immediate goal is achieved.

Aeolun 8y ago

I don't know about you. But if I can get riches at Google, I can get riches at Facebook, Apple or Microsoft too. The reason I would have chosen Google, and the reason I entrusted Google with all my personal information in the first place, was knowing they had that slogan. I just couldn't imagine they'd ever erase it... Now who is left? I guess I'm waiting for the Internet Archive to turn evil...

neolefty 8y ago
I still like Google. I never worked there, but "cataloging the world's information and making it available for free" is still great. It's complicated yes, but Google — more than any other tech company — has empowered me to do the things I care about. Mainly by making information easy to find.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > cataloging the world's information and making it available for free What does the mission of archive.org have to do with Google?
  - neuromantik8086 8y ago
    Or like, the mission of any academic library for that matter? Historically, Google owes its entire existence to an NSF grant that required heavy collaboration with Stanford Libraries, which is why academia to this day holds certain privileges at Google (free GSuite via memorandum of understanding, etc). I'd even argue that working at a library contributes substantially more to indexing the world's information, since libraries usually have one of a kind items in their cataloguing backlog that provide huge insights. As an example, I once met someone at a vintage computing festival who was writing an ENIAC simulator using the original specifications housed at UPenn. Unfortunately, he was having quite a bit of difficulty obtaining example programs to run on his simulator, not because programs didn't exist, but most likely because they were backlogged at UPenn and weren't being added to the library's catalog (i.e., so-called "hidden collections"). There are many ways to work on similar efforts without being at a tech company, but for better or worse the pay isn't remotely as good.

skybrian 8y ago

At the time I joined Google, I wouldn't have chosen to work on Wall Street or for Microsoft, but Google seemed very safe from an ethical point of view. Ads were just text links and none of the things people complain about had happened yet. (I also thought I was joining too late to make much from stock options and was... wrong about that, though it took a while.) Google left China after I joined. What other company would have done that? It still seemed way better than average. This idea that of course we all knew what would happen over the next decade is revisionist history via mood affiliation that has no factual basis.

the-pigeon 8y ago
But Google left China because the Chinese government wouldn't let them operate in a way that was profitable. It had nothing to do with ethics if you read beyond the PR speak.
- skybrian 8y ago
  I don't know where you got that from. They got blocked and hacked. Also, there are ethical considerations in everything. They don't disappear when profit is involved.

pacala 8y ago

Google had a very reasonable money printing machine as its core business model: Search Ads. * You tell Google what you are looking for. * Google returns a handful of ads, alongside world-class organic search results. * Merchants bid to have their ads returned for specific search intents. None of this requires the 24/7 surveillance machine Google has ended up building.

bdamm 8y ago
Not true. Ad words is bigger. And to do that, they need to know as much about what you want or what you could want in order to deliver a nice juicy targeted ad. Advertisers can now target not just classes of people, but in fact target specific people, and they'll pay a premium for that.
- aaron_m04 8y ago
  That sounds like the original product has morphed into something more invasive than it was in Google's early years. Could Google have kept making enough profit if they had stuck to the original plan?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eternalban 8y ago

> We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. Certainly, Eric Brewer and friends [1] understood these issues and were concerned in 1997. Today, Dr. Brewer is a "vice president of infrastructure" at Google. Is it money? I'm not sure. We're all human and have our weaknesses. Noting that Brewer was in near tears discussing Inktomi I would guess success and ambition are also driving factors. [1]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf [2]: https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/pet3.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/pet3.pdf

anigbrowl 8y ago

People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. I'm pretty skeptical of objective-sounding claims about people's motivations.