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I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

272 points by dogweather 7y ago

mwnivek 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446
uhtred 7y ago
Who cares why you left.
- wikiman 7y ago
  he's running for senate in Maine. The blog post is probably a part of his campaign
nickv 7y ago
Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.) The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)
- fghtr 7y ago
  >> are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/ https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.
  - travmatt 7y ago
    Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.
    - fghtr 7y ago
      >> Also called social benefit corporations Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation >> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them. But Purism afaik does have them listed.
      - travmatt 7y ago
        I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.
      - travmatt 7y ago
        Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  It’s much easier to stay true to your values if you don’t take in as much investor money. Google shares are priced with an exception of rapid growth so management has to chase any profit possible. There are a lot privately held companies where the owners don’t demand continuous growth.
- LiquidSky 7y ago
  Or that "Don't Be Evil" was all PR nonsense from the beginning that we naively gobbled up.
  - nickv 7y ago
    Call me naive, but I genuinely believe Sergey and Larry believed in it (especially Sergey)
  - skizm 7y ago
    The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it? Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads? In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
- skizm 7y ago
  I wanted to point to Etsy, since they were a b-corp, meaning they were held to higher "social and environmental standards" than a typical company, but I just Google'd them to see how their stock is doing and it looks like they gave up their b-corp status sometime in 2017 and their stock price is up 400% since then (price was flat and declining previously).
- ronilan 7y ago
  One way Google, a software company in the broad sense of the term, could have avoided a blog post with such a title is to never hire a “Head of International Relations” in the first place. Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.
- suddenexample 7y ago
  I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
  - hpoe 7y ago
    The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie. They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
    - throwlaplace 7y ago
      >They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too? >do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
      - bg4 7y ago
        In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.
      - amylene 7y ago
- Haul4ss 7y ago
  Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores. If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special. I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    Costco has done a really good job of maintaining their values in the face of pressure from shareholders, so I'd argue it is definitely possible.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership). They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.
- hpoe 7y ago
  There is an interesting book called Maverick by Ricardo Selemar I think is his name, who took over Brazil's largest steel company in the 80's. One of the points he makes in the book is that we have this obsession with growing business, if the company does $200 million in revenue this year, it has to do $250 million in revenue next year, etc. That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline. I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work. To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.
- mkolodny 7y ago
  The only way I've thought of so far is to create a not-for-profit. Your not-for-profit can still make money. But since no one owns equity, no one has incentive to optimize for profit over values.
  - gowld 7y ago
    The managers paying themselves salary have an incentive. This is how most "charities" work. But that is naturally a lower ceiling than a for-profit corp.
- jedberg 7y ago
  I know I'm biased because I worked there, but I think Netflix is still true to its values. It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible. They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will. I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time. Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.
  - gowld 7y ago
    I thought Netflix was about super annoying auto-play video ads, and funneling users into cheaper IP regardless of their expressed desires.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Google has been an advertising company since when, 2000? I think it was naive for any of us to expect an advertising company to be an ethical company. Live and learn..
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S... In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination. [0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.
gadders 7y ago
>>> Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing? Has the US federal government suddenly become more corrupt? Is he trying to tie this back to Trump?
ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
He left.... because he got fired. I get that he could have sued to get some type of fake (reduced role) job back, but.... the blog would be better if he didn't make it sound it was 100% his choice.
- Multiplayer 7y ago
  Headline matters 10x more than the content I have read, as people won’t read more than a paragraph.
virtuous_signal 7y ago
I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press. People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first two controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.
  - akfanta 7y ago
    > Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. According to whom?
    - amadeusw 7y ago
      There's plenty. Here's one example [0] > Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants. [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/worst-fast-and-furious-movie-ever-convoys-ferrari-driving-pro https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/wors...
      - bduerst 7y ago
        That's an article about a car enthusiast club in Vancouver, not Google employees.
izacus 7y ago
This is a repost of an article with 300 comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446
- trevor-e 7y ago
  And this one doesn't even link to the Medium article, it's some other site that "sources" from it and doesn't even show the author's name. What's the point of write.as?
  - keb_ 7y ago
    write.as can be used as a blog platform, or be used to write one-off, anonymous pieces of text. In this case, I think OP was trying to improve the readability of the original article by using write.as as opposed to linking directly to Medium (which is notorious for its intrusiveness). I think outline is better suited for these purposes, though, I typically just use Pocket or Firefox's built-in readability feature: https://outline.com/Xbykpn https://outline.com/Xbykpn
- p49k 7y ago
  And that one was quickly hidden on page 4 or 5 despite older articles with far fewer votes being placed before it. Why? It was the #1 story on page one, mentioned it to a colleague a few minutes later and he couldn’t even find it.
ausbah 7y ago
It is sickening but not surprising that these Wall Street & executive types put profits about human suffering & human rights. I wish more countries that claim to have hold human rights as a central value of their county's morality would put their money where their mouth is to regulate these modern day supervillains.
Multiplayer 7y ago
I would love to know how you effectively run a 100,000 person company, particularly when they are all knowledge workers as opposed to retail, food service, etc. Is google well run? How do you tell?
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
The easiest way to get to the top of HN seems to be joining Google, quitting, and writing about it.
sk55 7y ago
The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt. He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.
- sounds 7y ago
  I disagree. Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down." If he ended the article with, "Vote for me! Maine 2020!" It would sound highly self-serving. I believe he simply doesn't see his campaign as relevant to what he's writing here. This is his retrospective on his time at Google. He may post other things that combine the two, but this one is clearly focused on the things he experienced while working for one of the largest corporations in the world.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    He's running for Senate specifically. At this point Sara Gideon is going to win the nomination easily.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    Let's not fall into the populist trap of painting everything corporations do with the worst intentions while offering no skepticism to someone trying to get our vote. Both need to be evaluated critically.
  - cabaalis 7y ago
    > No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. It seems to me that if the actions you take are legal, it doesn't matter your size. Who is the government to decide what's too big to operate without their input?
sriram_sun 7y ago
It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby. What is this? I have worked in the valley in smaller companies, but this (the diversity exercises) takes the cake. Was there some context to this that is missing? Can anyone who participated throw more light?
- olalonde 7y ago
  That tops Michael Scott's Diversity Day. Life is stranger than fiction...
  - atom_enger 7y ago
    This exact scene played out in my mind as I was reading the article. Couldn't believe what I was reading and here I was wondering if the show would age well..
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- derivagral 7y ago
  Comment from a prior discussion around this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706
- dx87 7y ago
  The last time this was posted, someone found that it's an exercise based on a university study designed to address common stereotypes. The publishers of the study only tested it in an academic setting with students, though, and recommended that it not be done without a trained professional to guide the discussion. Google basically cargo-culted the experiment and assumed it would work in a corporate setting without the trained professionals.
methodin 7y ago
Are there any good companies on the stock market? Seems like inevitably they either go under or inch further towards evil over time.
SuperSandro2000 7y ago
"Source from medium".... Medium is also getting worse and worse. After 3 articles or so you are forced to pay or open an incognito tab....
wsetchell 7y ago
Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems like a bad idea. Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive. Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them. If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision. Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.
- philsnow 7y ago
  Google had this, at least around 2010. Product teams would have to get the go-ahead from a bunch of interested parties like legal, security, internationalization, etc. Each of those parties controlled a "launch bit" (literally a checkbox) for each product launch.
  - wsetchell 7y ago
    Yeah I was there during that time too. Chasing down launchcal bits was really expensive.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    It's still the same from what I understand from my Googler friends.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Mat companies have security teams and security review through, as well as web accessibility and the like. It seems to help since without those teams most product groups pay very little attention to either.
leoh 7y ago
I can't help but think that people are thinking about this the wrong way. Today, activists in China understand that the internet is not a safe place to engage in activist activities without extreme precautions. This was less well understood a decade ago and Yahoo really messed up when they handed over account information for an activist. I think Google entering China makes a lot of sense now, is an interesting technical and linguistic problem (how do you build an incredible search engines in a radically different language) and a worthwhile business aim (getting a foothold into the most important economy in the world). Also, to suggest, at this point, that US agencies haven't harmed an incredible number of people by co-opting information from tech companies and service providers would be absurd. Although companies sometimes contemplate how to protect their users (which doubtlessly Google would do in China), this essentially never blocks anyone from starting a company here.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
meddlin 7y ago
I'll just say it. Google you are being run by fools. Godspeed.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
I just want to cite this, for those who have voiced on HN the thesis that conservative opinions will get you fired in tech, but liberal opinions are “safe”: > Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights — had cost me my career. I would love if some other conservatives present, who care about free speech, could voice some support for this guy. It would help me feel unified with you, and want to support you more in “James Damore”-type situations.
mycentstoo 7y ago
After reading, I can't help but wonder if this dismissive attitude Google (and others) have towards social and political issues such as censorship, privacy, diversity, etc. has something to do with the hiring model. I can't speak for other departments but in terms of engineering, competency in algorithms and system design are the only things that are screened for. These aren't well rounded people. They aren't leaders. They're not screened to think beyond the immediate task at hand which shouldn't leave us surprised when they fail to see beyond the objective. In some ways, it would be akin to colleges looking exclusively at SAT scores instead of the whole person. In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.
bytematic 7y ago
Shared this in my company slack. Everyone should read this
kkotak 7y ago
And yet you kept all the drug money.
chvid 7y ago
What is write.as? As why is the author's name not in the article?
ben7799 7y ago
Every one of these stories always seems to have the common theme that at some point Google HR seems to step in in a really big-brother/creepy way and start saying the employee has been tagged for poor performance. It always seems to happen as soon as someone starts to get in the way of a "Do some Evil" project. They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet. It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not ever ever interview with" list.
thrownaway954 7y ago
as i get older, i find myself more and more saying... it's just a job. i have no "moral code" anymore when it comes to what company i work for. i know they exist to make money and that what i do there... i just do my work, get my pay check and go home. i don't care what the company stands for or "making a difference" there. if i want to "make a difference" in my life, i'll do outside of work with my community. when i was young i wanted "change the world" at the place i worked at, that's no longer true.
mpiedrav 7y ago
Never trust a large company. Big money always trumps ethics in the long run, as "ethics" is just a PR stunt at FAANG scale. The big concern here is how Google, etc. are becoming an oligopoly with a very effective lobbying arm in any form of actual regulation. While the Western world holds democratic-ish values in public institutions, its large private companies are indeed totalitarian regimes.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  But trust the person who's writing a medium post just as they're about to run for senate and need to boost their name id?
  - mpiedrav 7y ago
    That post is just one of many anecdata (to some degree of truth) out there about Google and other FAANG companies being "ethically challenged". I remember having done a "computer and society" assignment about 14 years ago on Google and China. I also remember Microsoft's "Halloween Documents" (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) from early 2000s. And many other scenarios of Big Tech ignoring ethics. In general, trust (like attention) is a limited resource to be used wisely.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      I agree, but things also aren't as black and white as a lot of articles will try to make it. As pointed out in this very article, Google did leave China in 2010, leaving billions of dollar on the table. That is the exact opposite of "big money trumping ethics". Yes I realize they did explore returning to China last year, but it still isn't as cut and dry. I'm not saying any of these FAANG companies are perfect, but I also don't like grand standing by people like this that really only case about advancing their own image for political reasons.
Toastmx 7y ago
Lets not forget that Google is not controlled by its shareholders. Due to its multi-class stock structure Sergey and Larry control the majority of the voting rights, what makes the "Dont be evil" slogan more to a personal motto of these to founders than to a company policy.
williamDafoe 7y ago
This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black. ...
- Varriount 7y ago
  So which is better, to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, or to attempt to correct things? From what I can tell, he continually attempted to steer Google away from business in China, even after things started going downhill. To my mind, that takes quite a bit of bravery.
warpdrive 7y ago
"I saw them(Don’t be evil) used to guide product designs that put the company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz" Isn't it ironic that Buzz had major privacy issues - https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/
- apeace 7y ago
  Was that a typo? Did he mean to say "put the user's privacy above the company's success"?
bitxbit 7y ago
I never understand these pieces. To me they read like “I sold my soul to work for xxxxx, made my ‘f__k you’ money, and now I want my soul back.”
CPLX 7y ago
This guy has actually been a senior member of the organization that he's complaining has done bad things. He didn't prevent those things nor does he have a compelling narrative of working within the organization to change its path. Mostly he just collected his cash, and is now writing a transparently self serving piece as he begins his run for elected office. No thanks.
imw 7y ago
These sections really stood out to me: "there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members." This is a stark and honest way to put what Google is doing. These are actually fundamental values at stake. Not just 'privacy'. "Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight." So FMAGAN companies are weaponzied in the geopolitics. This sounds good when dropped over the wall, but when you try to play this out against the current state of the USA, it seems near certain to me to go horribly wrong. I would much rather break them up - all the way. Whatever that means.
escape_goat 7y ago
I don't know what the policy of Hacker News here, but this article is NOT attributed to its author and is "sourced" from the essay the author had published on Medium a few days prior. To me this suggests that the article might not have been reproduced here either by or with the permission of the author. To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather than 'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.
michalu 7y ago
Yes, Google isn't "don't be evil" anymore. People forget that what's left without Google is Microsoft, Oracle and the likes whose business strategy is outright racketeering. Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number, credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to paid if not you're having this account. At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium etc etc etc)
- whamlastxmas 7y ago
  I looked at Oracle's page for Datafox and there's no mention of a trial anywhere. I searched on google for a trial and the only page that exists is one that is clearly from before Oracle bought Datafox and it doesn't even load properly.
tomaszs 7y ago
Its great to hear people inside also seen where Google is going.
chengiz 7y ago
> I was told there was no longer a job for me as a result of a “reorganization,” He writes as if his morals made him leave but he basically left only because he was fired.

272 points by dogweather 7y ago

mwnivek 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446

uhtred 7y ago

Who cares why you left.

wikiman 7y ago
he's running for senate in Maine. The blog post is probably a part of his campaign

nickv 7y ago

Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.) The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)

fghtr 7y ago
>> are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/ https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.
- travmatt 7y ago
  Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.
  - fghtr 7y ago
    >> Also called social benefit corporations Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation >> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them. But Purism afaik does have them listed.
    - travmatt 7y ago
      I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.
    - travmatt 7y ago
      Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
It’s much easier to stay true to your values if you don’t take in as much investor money. Google shares are priced with an exception of rapid growth so management has to chase any profit possible. There are a lot privately held companies where the owners don’t demand continuous growth.
LiquidSky 7y ago
Or that "Don't Be Evil" was all PR nonsense from the beginning that we naively gobbled up.
- nickv 7y ago
  Call me naive, but I genuinely believe Sergey and Larry believed in it (especially Sergey)
- skizm 7y ago
  The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it? Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads? In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
skizm 7y ago
I wanted to point to Etsy, since they were a b-corp, meaning they were held to higher "social and environmental standards" than a typical company, but I just Google'd them to see how their stock is doing and it looks like they gave up their b-corp status sometime in 2017 and their stock price is up 400% since then (price was flat and declining previously).
ronilan 7y ago
One way Google, a software company in the broad sense of the term, could have avoided a blog post with such a title is to never hire a “Head of International Relations” in the first place. Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.
suddenexample 7y ago
I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
- hpoe 7y ago
  The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie. They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
  - throwlaplace 7y ago
    >They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too? >do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
    - bg4 7y ago
      In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.
    - amylene 7y ago
Haul4ss 7y ago
Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores. If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special. I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  Costco has done a really good job of maintaining their values in the face of pressure from shareholders, so I'd argue it is definitely possible.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership). They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.
hpoe 7y ago
There is an interesting book called Maverick by Ricardo Selemar I think is his name, who took over Brazil's largest steel company in the 80's. One of the points he makes in the book is that we have this obsession with growing business, if the company does $200 million in revenue this year, it has to do $250 million in revenue next year, etc. That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline. I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work. To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.
mkolodny 7y ago
The only way I've thought of so far is to create a not-for-profit. Your not-for-profit can still make money. But since no one owns equity, no one has incentive to optimize for profit over values.
- gowld 7y ago
  The managers paying themselves salary have an incentive. This is how most "charities" work. But that is naturally a lower ceiling than a for-profit corp.
jedberg 7y ago
I know I'm biased because I worked there, but I think Netflix is still true to its values. It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible. They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will. I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time. Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.
- gowld 7y ago
  I thought Netflix was about super annoying auto-play video ads, and funneling users into cheaper IP regardless of their expressed desires.
catalogia 7y ago
Google has been an advertising company since when, 2000? I think it was naive for any of us to expect an advertising company to be an ethical company. Live and learn..
DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
> The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S... In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination. [0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.

gadders 7y ago

>>> Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing? Has the US federal government suddenly become more corrupt? Is he trying to tie this back to Trump?

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago

He left.... because he got fired. I get that he could have sued to get some type of fake (reduced role) job back, but.... the blog would be better if he didn't make it sound it was 100% his choice.

Multiplayer 7y ago
Headline matters 10x more than the content I have read, as people won’t read more than a paragraph.

virtuous_signal 7y ago

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press. People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first two controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)

shadowgovt 7y ago
Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.
- akfanta 7y ago
  > Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. According to whom?
  - amadeusw 7y ago
    There's plenty. Here's one example [0] > Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants. [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/worst-fast-and-furious-movie-ever-convoys-ferrari-driving-pro https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/wors...
    - bduerst 7y ago
      That's an article about a car enthusiast club in Vancouver, not Google employees.

izacus 7y ago

This is a repost of an article with 300 comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446

trevor-e 7y ago
And this one doesn't even link to the Medium article, it's some other site that "sources" from it and doesn't even show the author's name. What's the point of write.as?
- keb_ 7y ago
  write.as can be used as a blog platform, or be used to write one-off, anonymous pieces of text. In this case, I think OP was trying to improve the readability of the original article by using write.as as opposed to linking directly to Medium (which is notorious for its intrusiveness). I think outline is better suited for these purposes, though, I typically just use Pocket or Firefox's built-in readability feature: https://outline.com/Xbykpn https://outline.com/Xbykpn
p49k 7y ago
And that one was quickly hidden on page 4 or 5 despite older articles with far fewer votes being placed before it. Why? It was the #1 story on page one, mentioned it to a colleague a few minutes later and he couldn’t even find it.

ausbah 7y ago

It is sickening but not surprising that these Wall Street & executive types put profits about human suffering & human rights. I wish more countries that claim to have hold human rights as a central value of their county's morality would put their money where their mouth is to regulate these modern day supervillains.

Multiplayer 7y ago

I would love to know how you effectively run a 100,000 person company, particularly when they are all knowledge workers as opposed to retail, food service, etc. Is google well run? How do you tell?

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

The easiest way to get to the top of HN seems to be joining Google, quitting, and writing about it.

sk55 7y ago

The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt. He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.

sounds 7y ago
I disagree. Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down." If he ended the article with, "Vote for me! Maine 2020!" It would sound highly self-serving. I believe he simply doesn't see his campaign as relevant to what he's writing here. This is his retrospective on his time at Google. He may post other things that combine the two, but this one is clearly focused on the things he experienced while working for one of the largest corporations in the world.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  He's running for Senate specifically. At this point Sara Gideon is going to win the nomination easily.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  Let's not fall into the populist trap of painting everything corporations do with the worst intentions while offering no skepticism to someone trying to get our vote. Both need to be evaluated critically.
- cabaalis 7y ago
  > No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. It seems to me that if the actions you take are legal, it doesn't matter your size. Who is the government to decide what's too big to operate without their input?

sriram_sun 7y ago

It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby. What is this? I have worked in the valley in smaller companies, but this (the diversity exercises) takes the cake. Was there some context to this that is missing? Can anyone who participated throw more light?

olalonde 7y ago
That tops Michael Scott's Diversity Day. Life is stranger than fiction...
- atom_enger 7y ago
  This exact scene played out in my mind as I was reading the article. Couldn't believe what I was reading and here I was wondering if the show would age well..
deleted 7y ago
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derivagral 7y ago
Comment from a prior discussion around this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706
dx87 7y ago
The last time this was posted, someone found that it's an exercise based on a university study designed to address common stereotypes. The publishers of the study only tested it in an academic setting with students, though, and recommended that it not be done without a trained professional to guide the discussion. Google basically cargo-culted the experiment and assumed it would work in a corporate setting without the trained professionals.

methodin 7y ago

Are there any good companies on the stock market? Seems like inevitably they either go under or inch further towards evil over time.

SuperSandro2000 7y ago

"Source from medium".... Medium is also getting worse and worse. After 3 articles or so you are forced to pay or open an incognito tab....

wsetchell 7y ago

Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems like a bad idea. Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive. Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them. If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision. Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.

philsnow 7y ago
Google had this, at least around 2010. Product teams would have to get the go-ahead from a bunch of interested parties like legal, security, internationalization, etc. Each of those parties controlled a "launch bit" (literally a checkbox) for each product launch.
- wsetchell 7y ago
  Yeah I was there during that time too. Chasing down launchcal bits was really expensive.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  It's still the same from what I understand from my Googler friends.
chillacy 7y ago
Mat companies have security teams and security review through, as well as web accessibility and the like. It seems to help since without those teams most product groups pay very little attention to either.

leoh 7y ago

I can't help but think that people are thinking about this the wrong way. Today, activists in China understand that the internet is not a safe place to engage in activist activities without extreme precautions. This was less well understood a decade ago and Yahoo really messed up when they handed over account information for an activist. I think Google entering China makes a lot of sense now, is an interesting technical and linguistic problem (how do you build an incredible search engines in a radically different language) and a worthwhile business aim (getting a foothold into the most important economy in the world). Also, to suggest, at this point, that US agencies haven't harmed an incredible number of people by co-opting information from tech companies and service providers would be absurd. Although companies sometimes contemplate how to protect their users (which doubtlessly Google would do in China), this essentially never blocks anyone from starting a company here.

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meddlin 7y ago

I'll just say it. Google you are being run by fools. Godspeed.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

I just want to cite this, for those who have voiced on HN the thesis that conservative opinions will get you fired in tech, but liberal opinions are “safe”: > Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights — had cost me my career. I would love if some other conservatives present, who care about free speech, could voice some support for this guy. It would help me feel unified with you, and want to support you more in “James Damore”-type situations.

mycentstoo 7y ago

After reading, I can't help but wonder if this dismissive attitude Google (and others) have towards social and political issues such as censorship, privacy, diversity, etc. has something to do with the hiring model. I can't speak for other departments but in terms of engineering, competency in algorithms and system design are the only things that are screened for. These aren't well rounded people. They aren't leaders. They're not screened to think beyond the immediate task at hand which shouldn't leave us surprised when they fail to see beyond the objective. In some ways, it would be akin to colleges looking exclusively at SAT scores instead of the whole person. In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.

bytematic 7y ago

Shared this in my company slack. Everyone should read this

kkotak 7y ago

And yet you kept all the drug money.

chvid 7y ago

What is write.as? As why is the author's name not in the article?

ben7799 7y ago

Every one of these stories always seems to have the common theme that at some point Google HR seems to step in in a really big-brother/creepy way and start saying the employee has been tagged for poor performance. It always seems to happen as soon as someone starts to get in the way of a "Do some Evil" project. They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet. It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not ever ever interview with" list.

thrownaway954 7y ago

as i get older, i find myself more and more saying... it's just a job. i have no "moral code" anymore when it comes to what company i work for. i know they exist to make money and that what i do there... i just do my work, get my pay check and go home. i don't care what the company stands for or "making a difference" there. if i want to "make a difference" in my life, i'll do outside of work with my community. when i was young i wanted "change the world" at the place i worked at, that's no longer true.

mpiedrav 7y ago

Never trust a large company. Big money always trumps ethics in the long run, as "ethics" is just a PR stunt at FAANG scale. The big concern here is how Google, etc. are becoming an oligopoly with a very effective lobbying arm in any form of actual regulation. While the Western world holds democratic-ish values in public institutions, its large private companies are indeed totalitarian regimes.

ehsankia 7y ago
But trust the person who's writing a medium post just as they're about to run for senate and need to boost their name id?
- mpiedrav 7y ago
  That post is just one of many anecdata (to some degree of truth) out there about Google and other FAANG companies being "ethically challenged". I remember having done a "computer and society" assignment about 14 years ago on Google and China. I also remember Microsoft's "Halloween Documents" (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) from early 2000s. And many other scenarios of Big Tech ignoring ethics. In general, trust (like attention) is a limited resource to be used wisely.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    I agree, but things also aren't as black and white as a lot of articles will try to make it. As pointed out in this very article, Google did leave China in 2010, leaving billions of dollar on the table. That is the exact opposite of "big money trumping ethics". Yes I realize they did explore returning to China last year, but it still isn't as cut and dry. I'm not saying any of these FAANG companies are perfect, but I also don't like grand standing by people like this that really only case about advancing their own image for political reasons.

Toastmx 7y ago

Lets not forget that Google is not controlled by its shareholders. Due to its multi-class stock structure Sergey and Larry control the majority of the voting rights, what makes the "Dont be evil" slogan more to a personal motto of these to founders than to a company policy.

williamDafoe 7y ago

This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black. ...

Varriount 7y ago
So which is better, to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, or to attempt to correct things? From what I can tell, he continually attempted to steer Google away from business in China, even after things started going downhill. To my mind, that takes quite a bit of bravery.

warpdrive 7y ago

"I saw them(Don’t be evil) used to guide product designs that put the company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz" Isn't it ironic that Buzz had major privacy issues - https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/

apeace 7y ago
Was that a typo? Did he mean to say "put the user's privacy above the company's success"?

bitxbit 7y ago

I never understand these pieces. To me they read like “I sold my soul to work for xxxxx, made my ‘f__k you’ money, and now I want my soul back.”

CPLX 7y ago

This guy has actually been a senior member of the organization that he's complaining has done bad things. He didn't prevent those things nor does he have a compelling narrative of working within the organization to change its path. Mostly he just collected his cash, and is now writing a transparently self serving piece as he begins his run for elected office. No thanks.

imw 7y ago

These sections really stood out to me: "there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members." This is a stark and honest way to put what Google is doing. These are actually fundamental values at stake. Not just 'privacy'. "Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight." So FMAGAN companies are weaponzied in the geopolitics. This sounds good when dropped over the wall, but when you try to play this out against the current state of the USA, it seems near certain to me to go horribly wrong. I would much rather break them up - all the way. Whatever that means.

escape_goat 7y ago

I don't know what the policy of Hacker News here, but this article is NOT attributed to its author and is "sourced" from the essay the author had published on Medium a few days prior. To me this suggests that the article might not have been reproduced here either by or with the permission of the author. To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather than 'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.

michalu 7y ago

Yes, Google isn't "don't be evil" anymore. People forget that what's left without Google is Microsoft, Oracle and the likes whose business strategy is outright racketeering. Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number, credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to paid if not you're having this account. At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium etc etc etc)

whamlastxmas 7y ago
I looked at Oracle's page for Datafox and there's no mention of a trial anywhere. I searched on google for a trial and the only page that exists is one that is clearly from before Oracle bought Datafox and it doesn't even load properly.

tomaszs 7y ago

Its great to hear people inside also seen where Google is going.

chengiz 7y ago

> I was told there was no longer a job for me as a result of a “reorganization,” He writes as if his morals made him leave but he basically left only because he was fired.