10 ms·
Senior Google employee says quest to stop leaks is now management's top priority
- ohashi 8y agoSeems silly, especially calling it their top priority? Really? You've got nothing better to do?
- twtw 8y agoProbably not. They basically print money. All the churn around Google's other products and services have ~zero impact on their revenue stream. What matters is ensuring Google maintains goodwill so that governments won't do anything to harm their money mill - so it makes sense that controlling information would be management's priority.
- Spooky23 8y agoPeople react strongly to these things because it feels like a stab in the back. I worked at a place where a small group of people angry about certain things started selectively leaking things in a way that painted a few people with an air of scandal and incompetence. When I react to stuff like this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the other party. I don’t know anything about Google internals or people, but remember that humans react to things in a certain way.
- Despegar 8y agoGoogle management should try treating the cause rather than the symptom.
- wutbrodo 8y agoI was at Google during the time period when they shifted from leaks being rare to "literally every non-public thing told to the wider company got leaked". I can't say there was any particular cause, at least at the time, beyond just getting large enough that the probability of having a few assholes take advantage of management transparency goes up. Note that I'm very much not talking about leaks for perceived moral reasons, like the China search engine, pentagon contracts, etc; these make up a small fraction of the leaks, which are more around things like product and feature launches.
- cbsmith 8y agoI think you've made the same mistake the article has: presuming that they aren't treating the cause.
- abc-xyz 8y agoIf they had any intention of treating the cause then they would've abandoned the Dragonfly project. It's violating all their own AI principles, and I've never seen Google receive so much backlash by their own employees, human rights organizations, as well as the public as a whole. It's proof that there's no evil they won't stoop to as long as they can make a couple of extra bucks.
- dmm 8y ago"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO until last year.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hartator 8y ago2011, but yeah Page, Bring and Schmidt were the mark of great leadership. I wish they will be back to hearth the "organizing the world knowledge" mission instead of just working on making ads to look like organic results.
- diminoten 8y agoYeah, how dare they develop the Pixel 3! Seriously though, that release was a disaster from a secret-keeping standpoint. That may be what this is about more than anything else.
- abc-xyz 8y agoI'd say it's far more likely that they're concerned with Google's increased evilness becoming a hot topic among current employees as well as the general public. This will no doubt result in many of the brightest engineers choosing to work for competing companies that aren't morally bankrupt. Working for Google used to be argubly the most prestigious job among software engineers, but they're heading towards the same path as Facebook.
- xibalba 8y agoThis article relies on a single former (disgruntled) employee as its source. We should definitely not be making inferences about the top priorities of Google's management based on his claims.
- riyadparvez 8y agoIs there any single day goes by without a negative article against Google on HN?
- briandear 8y agoWell the shoe seems to be fitting quite nicely lately.
- Veen 8y agoIf it's true that there is a negative article every single day, do you take that as evidence of: 1) A bias in the media and on Hacker News against Google? 2) Evidence that Google is doing a lot of bad things?
- Spooky23 8y agoMy “3” is Facebook opposition PR. There’s certainly a cadence of stories that appear which seem to assert that Google’s practices are as scummy as/ equivalent to Facebook. It feels like farming “whataboutism” and fud. That may be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
- skybrian 8y agoI won't get into whether they deserve it, but it's quite clear that a lot of people on HN are very happy to hate on Google, because we see lots of perfunctory, low-information comments here. It's mostly not about sharing new evidence, it's about people expressing opinions they already have. Certain things become popular clichés, such as complaining about Go generics or Atom's alleged slowness, and so they get repeated in the comments about about that entity. The tipping point seems to be when low-information comments start getting upvoted rather than downvoted. At some point people stop seeing anything wrong with them as long as they're on the same side.
- skybrian 8y agoIn some sense this isn't really new. Google has always emphasized the importance of keeping confidential things secret, with the argument that it allows them to share information more widely internally and have robust internal discussions. (In contrast to Apple which is much more secretive internally.) At least at first, employees mostly bought into it. It was always understood that if you get caught leaking you'll be fired and maybe worse, and generally people assumed you deserved it. But this gradually eroded over the years, as more leaks happened and distrust increased, and now it seems to have mostly broken down.
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18634941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18634941
- Animats 8y agoOn the technical side, this is the price we pay for weakening software patents. With strong patents, everyone knows what the proprietary technology is, and after 20 years, it's public. Without strong patents, we've seen companies get much more secretive. Trade secret laws are being used against employees routinely now. That used to be very rare. We know how Google worked originally, because that's patented and you can read the patent. Today, nobody outside Google really knows. The anti-patent lobby made a horrible mistake.
- JamesBarney 8y agoI haven't heard the argument that software patents are weaker than 20 years ago before. And this run scounter to a lot of others things that I've read. Do you have anything you can link to?
- Animats 8y agoYes, but I don't have time to write a personal tutorial. Look up "America Invents Act", "Post-grant proceedings", and "eBay vs. MercExchange".
- csallen 8y ago> Trade secret laws are being used against employees routinely now. Assuming this is true and that trade secret laws are being abused, isn't the solution to make trade secret laws less abusable? I don't quite understand the logic behind fixing this by making patents stronger.
- mindslight 8y agoIf software patents had similar effectiveness to hardware patents, sure. But rather what we've observed with software patents is that they don't actually work for the kind of things that should be protected, while encouraging a myriad of Foo-but-over-a-network and linked-list-for-Bar. But that is moot - today's high margins don't seem to be based around novel software, or even software execution, but marketing and hence public image. Google isn't worried that somebody is going to clone the additional censorship techniques they've developed for China, but about controlling the public narrative to avoid disrupting their current marketshare/mindshare.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI've been following (and helping organise) the Google+ exodus over the past two months (to the day). Particularly disheartening has been complete radio silence from Google based on plans, timeline, support, and bugfixes (e.g., on data takeout). I'm among those who've speculated on an internal gag order. BI's story could be better sourced, but it strongly reinforces impressions of a crackdown on any information disclosure. Google have never been particularly forthcoming, but they're being pointedly antagonistic (or frightened, or both), now.