5 ms·

Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.

pnw_hazor 7y ago
Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does. Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known for years that Google is tracking everyone. Moreover, most of it is perfectly legal. In any company, whenever you say "no" to your manager you need to have a solid ground. I can't imagine anyone even starting such a conversation.
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    It is immoral. Perfectly legal or not. I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group. Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.
    - Kiro 7y ago
      That's just your opinion. I don't think they are evil or that working there is immoral.
  - _AzMoo 7y ago
    > Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You are. Don't they teach people ethics anymore?
  - drtillberg 7y ago
    "Unfair" has a funny way of becoming (or retroactively being) "illegal," especially when you are talking about a consumer-facing monopoly. Who knows, long-term, you might be doing your boss a favor.
- ddalex 7y ago
  Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfortunate corner case of a tool trying to protect against scammers. I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy. I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer. It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    People who work for Google are supporting a company that is building the dystopia my children will have to deal with. Google programmers have other options. But the pay and prestige is not there. I can understand why people work at GOOG and FB. But it does not absolve them from being part of the problem (a big part of problem). But there is no reason for people who work at GOOG to be respected for working there or otherwise held in high regard by their peers in the industry. It is a job for them, okay, I get it. But there are plenty of jobs for them to choose from.
    - ddalex 7y ago
      > building the dystopia my children will have to deal with So you want other people to fight your ideological battles. If this would be 4chan I'd tell you that those programmers are "not your personal army". But have you considered that those people are actually happy to be building this dystopia and they think building it will advance their own children? And what you might construe as "evil" they would see as "advancing the future" and making the world a better place? Kidding aside, don't you think a bit presumptuous on your side to go and simply ask people to stop working where you don't like them to work, as they might be owning you something? A more fair course of action would be you to go out and build a better working place, one that doesn't build said dystopia, one with better perks and reputation and pay, and those programmers working at FB / Google would actually WANT to quit said companies and come work at this better place?
ummonk 7y ago
How exactly could programmers stop this?
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  Work elsewhere.
  - scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
    Huh? We don't work at Google, we use Google services
    - pnw_hazor 7y ago
      The Goog employees, several who comment here at HN, could stop it tomorrow. Not plebes like you and me.
      - londons_explore 7y ago
        If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        finnthehuman 7y ago
        >If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. Parent poster isn't advocating the "fix it from the inside" route, he's advocating you leave. >This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. It's so "seriously hard" that you had to use a different example that's more favorable to google's position (identifying a bot user without data access) in a thread about a different topic (your distaste for manual, thoughtful app reviews)?
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
>Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. Thousands of others would replace them next minute, so why do you think it would change anything?
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  True, but Goog would be like Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, the government, Geico, etc. Each have 1000's of programmers, but no one works for them unless they have to. Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  I'm sorry this isn't even true of low skill workers. Turnover is destructive in the best case. If 50% of talent left it would be a disaster.
dang 7y ago
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a bunch of that in this thread. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826827.

pnw_hazor 7y ago

Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does. Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known for years that Google is tracking everyone. Moreover, most of it is perfectly legal. In any company, whenever you say "no" to your manager you need to have a solid ground. I can't imagine anyone even starting such a conversation.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  It is immoral. Perfectly legal or not. I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group. Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.
  - Kiro 7y ago
    That's just your opinion. I don't think they are evil or that working there is immoral.
- _AzMoo 7y ago
  > Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You are. Don't they teach people ethics anymore?
- drtillberg 7y ago
  "Unfair" has a funny way of becoming (or retroactively being) "illegal," especially when you are talking about a consumer-facing monopoly. Who knows, long-term, you might be doing your boss a favor.
ddalex 7y ago
Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfortunate corner case of a tool trying to protect against scammers. I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy. I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer. It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  People who work for Google are supporting a company that is building the dystopia my children will have to deal with. Google programmers have other options. But the pay and prestige is not there. I can understand why people work at GOOG and FB. But it does not absolve them from being part of the problem (a big part of problem). But there is no reason for people who work at GOOG to be respected for working there or otherwise held in high regard by their peers in the industry. It is a job for them, okay, I get it. But there are plenty of jobs for them to choose from.
  - ddalex 7y ago
    > building the dystopia my children will have to deal with So you want other people to fight your ideological battles. If this would be 4chan I'd tell you that those programmers are "not your personal army". But have you considered that those people are actually happy to be building this dystopia and they think building it will advance their own children? And what you might construe as "evil" they would see as "advancing the future" and making the world a better place? Kidding aside, don't you think a bit presumptuous on your side to go and simply ask people to stop working where you don't like them to work, as they might be owning you something? A more fair course of action would be you to go out and build a better working place, one that doesn't build said dystopia, one with better perks and reputation and pay, and those programmers working at FB / Google would actually WANT to quit said companies and come work at this better place?

ummonk 7y ago

How exactly could programmers stop this?

pnw_hazor 7y ago
Work elsewhere.
- scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
  Huh? We don't work at Google, we use Google services
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    The Goog employees, several who comment here at HN, could stop it tomorrow. Not plebes like you and me.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - finnthehuman 7y ago
        >If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. Parent poster isn't advocating the "fix it from the inside" route, he's advocating you leave. >This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. It's so "seriously hard" that you had to use a different example that's more favorable to google's position (identifying a bot user without data access) in a thread about a different topic (your distaste for manual, thoughtful app reviews)?

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

>Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. Thousands of others would replace them next minute, so why do you think it would change anything?

pnw_hazor 7y ago
True, but Goog would be like Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, the government, Geico, etc. Each have 1000's of programmers, but no one works for them unless they have to. Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.
michaelmrose 7y ago
I'm sorry this isn't even true of low skill workers. Turnover is destructive in the best case. If 50% of talent left it would be a disaster.

dang 7y ago

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a bunch of that in this thread. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826827.