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It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the wo

It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the worst companies out there. And yet, I think it is safe to say that Google basically defined the post-dot-com-bubble era, in a good way. So many things that comprise 'company culture' today and that have been emulated (whether willingly or out of pressure to stay competitive to other companies in the hiring market) by tech and non-tech companies around the world were pioneered by Google. Anyone who has actually worked in other industries will attest how much a breath of fresh air Google brought to corporate life. It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job. So many of Larry's and Sergey's ideas were truly about organizing the world's information. That vision statement wasn't just words. It affected how Google and Googlers thought of things. My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel? I doubt it. Or Google Street Maps, for that matter. And yet it has provided so much value to the world. It's almost never a good idea to make gods out of people. But it is at the same time a terrible idea to make absolute demons out of them. And I think we stray too much into the latter territory just because it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things A potent element of Silicon Valley’s filter bubble is casting complaints against highly profitable, breathtakingly damaging behaviour as trivial.
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  This comment seems to be perfectly emblematic of demonizing a target, rather than even attempting to take a more balanced approach (such as original comment). Does the next comment then deify Google, until the next one demonizes them yet again? That's the problem with binary criticism.
  - jdck1326 7y ago
    Surely the goal should be to be accurate rather than balanced?
  - C14L 7y ago
    Social media in a nutshell.
- freyr 7y ago
  > breathtakingly damaging behaviour This seems typically hyperbolic. What are examples of Google's "breathtakingly damaging behavior"?
  - DanBC 7y ago
    People remember a WWW before ad-words and SEO changed everything.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
      Yes, me too. It was an internet that only a relative handful of people produced content for because it was not worth the time for the vast majority of people. It's easy to put the target on Google and ad-words and SEO but literally no one has ever scaled payment for internet content. The countless people in India, Brazil etc who make livelihoods out of producing content make it out of Youtube ads, not Patreon.
      - Terretta 7y ago
        I’m not persuaded there are so many more longform or knowledge content creators today, publishing more of the contentful “fan fact” (as opposed to “fan fic”) content that mattered to them enough to publish. I find roughly the same amount of useful information now as 20 years ago, buried by the content-mill spam from the “countless people” you mention. I’d argue peak content may have been 2002 to 2007 or so. The original content mills (HuffPo 2005; Buzzfeed 2006) even had mostly useful content while honing in on the viral content form. There’s likely more substance now than then, but the signal to noise ratio is so much worse you’d have a better chance of finding the needle in the haystack then. I’d like to imagine people with something to say can and do still self-publish. Perhaps a reason posts about personal blogs are so popular here.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Conspiracy to cheat workers out of billions of dollars of wages comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... There’s also the project to build a government logged and censored search engine to get back into China. https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-human-rights-fe1fe1ddf55a/ https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chillacy 7y ago
Splitting people into good and evil, or just binary thinking in general, is all around us. "Good" people have done bad things, "bad" people often have good intentions. And Good and Bad can be vastly different in different places in the world or different time periods.
- Mugwort 7y ago
  It's a matter of degree. Everything is shades of grey. Google has become a very dark shade of grey.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    In case it wasn't clear my argument is that there is no single shade, there's just a bag of things. And these things are labeled good and bad by the observer.
chachachoney 7y ago
>>> Is it an obvious ad-funnel? I doubt it. Or Google Street Maps, for that matter. Google Street Maps was an incredible tool in dense urban environments before it became overwhelmed with sponsored pins. 2016 was the beginning of the effort to monetize it, and now it's overloaded with sponsored pins/badges that it's nearly nearly useless for most visual search tasks due to the noise. >>> It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the worst companies out there. Google's brand/reputation is suffering precisely because they positioned themselves as benevolent unstoppable underdog saviors (remember the whole "do no evil" thing?) who have since failed to live up to their mission. Hypocrisy is lethal to branding narratives. >>> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job. Dissonance poisons culture, and privilege doesn't toil in the mines for the sake of toil.
- nradov 7y ago
  The density of sponsored pins in Google Maps varies widely by area. In most of the Bay Area it's fine and not noticeably intrusive.
  - chachachoney 7y ago
    Sounds like you and and I disagree as to what constitutes a dense urban environment.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      Doesn't bother me in NYC either. But, if you're not a fan, there are alternatives out there.
- tessting 7y ago
  Are you really trying to say that the utility of a free map of the entire world that includes street level views of the entire developed world is negated because it has too many sponsored pins? Alright lol
dnautics 7y ago
> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things I think that's a reaction against how it's also fashionable to worship whatever Google does. And just cargo culting google practices can be damaging, at least from a selfish perspective. I lose developer hours because our entire 13-person company's (with 2.5-ish developers but 7 years worth of code) is hosted in a monorepo. I've now worked at two out of two companies that have gotten stuck because they built with an Angular stack and management refuses to switch to a stack that I can reliably hire or train juniors out of a bootcamp for, etc.
- crdoconnor 7y ago
  Also: * The ridiculous nosql fad that led to a tsunami of databases with horribly invalid data because constraints aren't sexy. * The ridiculous academic fetish that triggered the leetcode phenomenon and led to a tsunami of developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    > developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly. I don't understand this belief. Where does it come from? Junior engineers don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly, whereas senior engineers do. Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. If they're wrong, companies will outhire and outcompete them eventually.
    - crdoconnor 7y ago
      >Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. Exactly. This belief that the two correlate closely enough that you can supplant one kind of test (physically writing code, discussing it and architecting it) with another (leetcode) is massively, horre ndously wrong and damaging. The two do not correlate well. They correlate very badly.
garaetjjte 7y ago
>My favorite example is Google Books. It is sad that we could have millions of books searchable and publicly available, but it got shot down in publishers and authors guilds litigation crossfire :( https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
- tekkk 7y ago
  I didn't expect to read that so thoroughly, thanks for the interesting article. =) Sad indeed that is how it turned out to be. And why authors would object their works being copied if they were out of print already? They weren't exactly making money in the first place. And wouldn't it have been easy to ask Google to delist their books if they wanted? I can see why Google was so eager to digest yet another big lump of information but the authors wouldn't have been left empty-handed. Now they got nothing, and I guess Google saved a lot of money too.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  I am of two minds about Google Books. On the one hand, it would be great to have some sort (any sort) of online access to millions and millions of books that would otherwise require a physical trip to a library or a slow, painful hunt through used book stores to obtain and would otherwise not be searchable online at all. On the other hand, I'm very reluctant to have Google be my gateway to that data. Take a look at what it did with the Usenet archive it acquired. In order to access those archives, I'm forced to use Google's awful web interface instead of a sane, capable standalone news reader of my choice, and I'm unable to download their archive to use for my own purposes. All access is through Google. Their way or the highway. This is not to mention all of the tracking and privacy concerns that giving Google access to my reading history would entail. Nor all the ads I'd have to swallow to read books through them. A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to. I'd much rather this information reside in the hands of public organizations like the Library of Congress, whose mission is to be a steward of such information for the public good rather than its own profit.
mattkevan 7y ago
It’s not so much hiring people more interested in activism than their jobs, it’s that Google positioned themselves as something better than all the others. A company determined to do the right thing. This naturally attracts people who are interested in making a difference and want to work somewhere that aligns with their values. You don’t go and work for somewhere like Phillip Morris or Oracle if you care about making the world a better place - and neither company would claim they’re trying to do so. But Google said they were different, and it’s disillusioning to discover that somewhere you love and have worked hard for is just as evil as everywhere else - moreso as it wasn’t up-front about it. And then you’re going to want to do something about it.
- irrationalactor 7y ago
  Except, most companies make the world a better place. On the whole, private enterprise is almost entirely responsible for humanity's rise out of impoverished suffering over the past 200 years. The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history. I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.
  - immawizard 7y ago
    > The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history. That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.
    - irrationalactor 7y ago
      That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely. But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919. Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise. Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?
geofft 7y ago
> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job. So long as Google's recruiters pitch jobs by saying "Change the world, build a better future, don't be evil" and not "Optimize click-through rates on animated ads by a few fractions of a percent," I'm not so sure that there's a difference between activism and doing their job.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
eitland 7y ago
Good points, this however seems weird: > My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel? Definitely. Hard to imagine many better places to sell ads for books.
- Terretta 7y ago
  Built into every Kindle unless you pay extra.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things A potent element of Silicon Valley’s filter bubble is casting complaints against highly profitable, breathtakingly damaging behaviour as trivial.

alexpetralia 7y ago
This comment seems to be perfectly emblematic of demonizing a target, rather than even attempting to take a more balanced approach (such as original comment). Does the next comment then deify Google, until the next one demonizes them yet again? That's the problem with binary criticism.
- jdck1326 7y ago
  Surely the goal should be to be accurate rather than balanced?
- C14L 7y ago
  Social media in a nutshell.
freyr 7y ago
> breathtakingly damaging behaviour This seems typically hyperbolic. What are examples of Google's "breathtakingly damaging behavior"?
- DanBC 7y ago
  People remember a WWW before ad-words and SEO changed everything.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    Yes, me too. It was an internet that only a relative handful of people produced content for because it was not worth the time for the vast majority of people. It's easy to put the target on Google and ad-words and SEO but literally no one has ever scaled payment for internet content. The countless people in India, Brazil etc who make livelihoods out of producing content make it out of Youtube ads, not Patreon.
    - Terretta 7y ago
      I’m not persuaded there are so many more longform or knowledge content creators today, publishing more of the contentful “fan fact” (as opposed to “fan fic”) content that mattered to them enough to publish. I find roughly the same amount of useful information now as 20 years ago, buried by the content-mill spam from the “countless people” you mention. I’d argue peak content may have been 2002 to 2007 or so. The original content mills (HuffPo 2005; Buzzfeed 2006) even had mostly useful content while honing in on the viral content form. There’s likely more substance now than then, but the signal to noise ratio is so much worse you’d have a better chance of finding the needle in the haystack then. I’d like to imagine people with something to say can and do still self-publish. Perhaps a reason posts about personal blogs are so popular here.
- sneak 7y ago
  Conspiracy to cheat workers out of billions of dollars of wages comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... There’s also the project to build a government logged and censored search engine to get back into China. https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-human-rights-fe1fe1ddf55a/ https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chillacy 7y ago

Splitting people into good and evil, or just binary thinking in general, is all around us. "Good" people have done bad things, "bad" people often have good intentions. And Good and Bad can be vastly different in different places in the world or different time periods.

Mugwort 7y ago
It's a matter of degree. Everything is shades of grey. Google has become a very dark shade of grey.
- chillacy 7y ago
  In case it wasn't clear my argument is that there is no single shade, there's just a bag of things. And these things are labeled good and bad by the observer.

chachachoney 7y ago

>>> Is it an obvious ad-funnel? I doubt it. Or Google Street Maps, for that matter. Google Street Maps was an incredible tool in dense urban environments before it became overwhelmed with sponsored pins. 2016 was the beginning of the effort to monetize it, and now it's overloaded with sponsored pins/badges that it's nearly nearly useless for most visual search tasks due to the noise. >>> It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the worst companies out there. Google's brand/reputation is suffering precisely because they positioned themselves as benevolent unstoppable underdog saviors (remember the whole "do no evil" thing?) who have since failed to live up to their mission. Hypocrisy is lethal to branding narratives. >>> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job. Dissonance poisons culture, and privilege doesn't toil in the mines for the sake of toil.

nradov 7y ago
The density of sponsored pins in Google Maps varies widely by area. In most of the Bay Area it's fine and not noticeably intrusive.
- chachachoney 7y ago
  Sounds like you and and I disagree as to what constitutes a dense urban environment.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Doesn't bother me in NYC either. But, if you're not a fan, there are alternatives out there.
tessting 7y ago
Are you really trying to say that the utility of a free map of the entire world that includes street level views of the entire developed world is negated because it has too many sponsored pins? Alright lol

dnautics 7y ago

> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things I think that's a reaction against how it's also fashionable to worship whatever Google does. And just cargo culting google practices can be damaging, at least from a selfish perspective. I lose developer hours because our entire 13-person company's (with 2.5-ish developers but 7 years worth of code) is hosted in a monorepo. I've now worked at two out of two companies that have gotten stuck because they built with an Angular stack and management refuses to switch to a stack that I can reliably hire or train juniors out of a bootcamp for, etc.

crdoconnor 7y ago
Also: * The ridiculous nosql fad that led to a tsunami of databases with horribly invalid data because constraints aren't sexy. * The ridiculous academic fetish that triggered the leetcode phenomenon and led to a tsunami of developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly.
- triceratops 7y ago
  > developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly. I don't understand this belief. Where does it come from? Junior engineers don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly, whereas senior engineers do. Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. If they're wrong, companies will outhire and outcompete them eventually.
  - crdoconnor 7y ago
    >Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. Exactly. This belief that the two correlate closely enough that you can supplant one kind of test (physically writing code, discussing it and architecting it) with another (leetcode) is massively, horre ndously wrong and damaging. The two do not correlate well. They correlate very badly.

garaetjjte 7y ago

>My favorite example is Google Books. It is sad that we could have millions of books searchable and publicly available, but it got shot down in publishers and authors guilds litigation crossfire :( https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

tekkk 7y ago
I didn't expect to read that so thoroughly, thanks for the interesting article. =) Sad indeed that is how it turned out to be. And why authors would object their works being copied if they were out of print already? They weren't exactly making money in the first place. And wouldn't it have been easy to ask Google to delist their books if they wanted? I can see why Google was so eager to digest yet another big lump of information but the authors wouldn't have been left empty-handed. Now they got nothing, and I guess Google saved a lot of money too.
pmoriarty 7y ago
I am of two minds about Google Books. On the one hand, it would be great to have some sort (any sort) of online access to millions and millions of books that would otherwise require a physical trip to a library or a slow, painful hunt through used book stores to obtain and would otherwise not be searchable online at all. On the other hand, I'm very reluctant to have Google be my gateway to that data. Take a look at what it did with the Usenet archive it acquired. In order to access those archives, I'm forced to use Google's awful web interface instead of a sane, capable standalone news reader of my choice, and I'm unable to download their archive to use for my own purposes. All access is through Google. Their way or the highway. This is not to mention all of the tracking and privacy concerns that giving Google access to my reading history would entail. Nor all the ads I'd have to swallow to read books through them. A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to. I'd much rather this information reside in the hands of public organizations like the Library of Congress, whose mission is to be a steward of such information for the public good rather than its own profit.

mattkevan 7y ago

It’s not so much hiring people more interested in activism than their jobs, it’s that Google positioned themselves as something better than all the others. A company determined to do the right thing. This naturally attracts people who are interested in making a difference and want to work somewhere that aligns with their values. You don’t go and work for somewhere like Phillip Morris or Oracle if you care about making the world a better place - and neither company would claim they’re trying to do so. But Google said they were different, and it’s disillusioning to discover that somewhere you love and have worked hard for is just as evil as everywhere else - moreso as it wasn’t up-front about it. And then you’re going to want to do something about it.

irrationalactor 7y ago
Except, most companies make the world a better place. On the whole, private enterprise is almost entirely responsible for humanity's rise out of impoverished suffering over the past 200 years. The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history. I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.
- immawizard 7y ago
  > The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history. That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.
  - irrationalactor 7y ago
    That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely. But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919. Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise. Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?

geofft 7y ago

> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job. So long as Google's recruiters pitch jobs by saying "Change the world, build a better future, don't be evil" and not "Optimize click-through rates on animated ads by a few fractions of a percent," I'm not so sure that there's a difference between activism and doing their job.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

eitland 7y ago

Good points, this however seems weird: > My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel? Definitely. Hard to imagine many better places to sell ads for books.

Terretta 7y ago
Built into every Kindle unless you pay extra.