4 ms·

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

by 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?
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    Google is a brand. If that brand was held in the low regard it deserves the problem would work itself out. People would still work there, but they would be embarrassed about it. I talk about this stuff whenever I get the chance to do so. Hopefully it will help remind people that working at Google is not cool.
onli 7y ago
This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with a law of big numbers or the difficulty of making everybody happy. The adsense scam Google is running, if the description provided here is correct, is just fraud. Both is just Google being evil. > nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it" You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.
- ddalex 7y ago
  How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use? Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy. On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.
  - maze-le 7y ago
    >> How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse
ArnoVW 7y ago
Nobody said it was easy to solve these issues without collateral damage. The point being raised is that when you become a statistic, you have no recourse. Sort of like "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" If this were some small fledgling start-up, that is to be expected. It costs money to get things right for everyone. But this is a huge, profitable, mature company. And one that is playing a key role in our society. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than they are now. Or else, in the end, society will make them.
antoinevg 7y ago
The real world is also hard and you also cannot make everyone happy. Which is why we invented DUE PROCESS.
feanaro 7y ago
How about Google stops using dark patterns in order to dissuade users from using alternative app stores or side-loading then? They can police their own app store any way they feel they have to, but then let's foster the culture of having multiple places to install applications from.

by ddalex 7y ago

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?
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  Google is a brand. If that brand was held in the low regard it deserves the problem would work itself out. People would still work there, but they would be embarrassed about it. I talk about this stuff whenever I get the chance to do so. Hopefully it will help remind people that working at Google is not cool.

onli 7y ago

This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with a law of big numbers or the difficulty of making everybody happy. The adsense scam Google is running, if the description provided here is correct, is just fraud. Both is just Google being evil. > nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it" You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.

ddalex 7y ago
How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use? Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy. On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.
- maze-le 7y ago
  >> How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse

ArnoVW 7y ago

Nobody said it was easy to solve these issues without collateral damage. The point being raised is that when you become a statistic, you have no recourse. Sort of like "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" If this were some small fledgling start-up, that is to be expected. It costs money to get things right for everyone. But this is a huge, profitable, mature company. And one that is playing a key role in our society. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than they are now. Or else, in the end, society will make them.

antoinevg 7y ago

The real world is also hard and you also cannot make everyone happy. Which is why we invented DUE PROCESS.

feanaro 7y ago

How about Google stops using dark patterns in order to dissuade users from using alternative app stores or side-loading then? They can police their own app store any way they feel they have to, but then let's foster the culture of having multiple places to install applications from.