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It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining for exploitative "startup" culture to ge
by _coveredInBees 6y ago
It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining for exploitative "startup" culture to get more than what they are paying for out of their employees. If you consistently feel the need to impinge on your employees weekends or PTO, that's a management failure, not an entitled employee problem.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y agoThere's also this lovely comment in the "focus" session where he plainly asserted that "privacy has no value to his users".
- bagacrap 6y agoI think it's important for all the Google bashers out there to note this example of a high profile employee leaving because Google cared too much about privacy (or "noise" as he terms it).
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI read that as "legal got involved and we had a ton of meetings that achieved nothing for our users" rather than "privacy did nothing for our users". I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.
- watwut 6y ago"we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google" The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google". This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoAgain, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.
- watwut 6y agoIf you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands people following some rule, really the only way is if you create processes that check and force that. There is no way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on it. Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
- shadowgovt 6y ago"The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus." Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even that their customers care about those things (although they do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are significant legal consequences for doing things or failing to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will decide after the fact was something they "should have known better" about. Startup companies end up concerned less about this because they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google will definitely pay for itself.