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This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business. 11

This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business. 11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then. The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit. Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like this to keep HRs job manageable. If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement. Full stop. (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

tomaskafka 5y ago
This. In a long term, company will never do anything against incentives their business model sets up. Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  Tell that to the many SF tech workers optimizing for profit.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    I am an SF tech worker. Lots of companies here selling pickaxes. Twilio, for example, doesn’t need engagement. Last I heard they were swimming in money.
    - aiisjustanif 5y ago
      Oh I agree that there are companies selling pickaxes and not doing business realm of Facebook and Google (if we are sticking to the subject of ads). However, hopefully anecdotally, just go take a look a metrics and sentiments from tech employees on Blind. If Google is paying more than Twilio, there will be droves of people grinding to get in.
    - tomaskafka 5y ago
      Selling pickaxes for companies building engagement human traps? :) How far are you not afraid to look?
  - yupper32 5y ago
    Not optimizing for profit is a very privileged position to be in. Are people with poor backgrounds supposed to think that selling some ads is worse than having your family suffer? I can make a third as much and maybe do something better for society, but what happens then if the industry collapses? I'm not coding killer drones. I'm working for an ad company.
    - aiisjustanif 5y ago
      I don't disagree with you, if anything I'm in a similar camp. The incentives just so happen to end up supporting features like the ones this post refers to.
- tolbish 5y ago
  But then if I don't work for Google, how can I write a blog post patting myself on the back for finally having the guts to leave Google?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Someday I need to write a blog post patting myself on the back for never having worked for Google.
Swizec 5y ago
At the dawn of my career I made myself two commitments: 1. Only projects/companies you enjoy 2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers So far so good. It’s amazing the cool stuff you can build when engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the goal is “Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to pay”. Feels nice to be aligned
- zarkov99 5y ago
  I like your way of thinking. What companies do you think fit that goal?
  - Swizec 5y ago
    B2B companies are an obvious example. Find expensive problem, solve it, add sales team. Iterate. DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does Twilio. Huge huge space :) Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder. B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are here also. There’s also the indie/freelance market that sits between B2B and B2C – consumers who think of themselves as a business. Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you’re charging users for value provided, based on the revenue they can generate using your platform. I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use the app as little as possible to increase margins. Currently working with a health care startup and that’s taking off like a rocket.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cratermoon 5y ago
> 11 years ago PG ... > work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement. Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.
asiachick 5y ago
Your comments make no sense to me in relation to Google. Google of all companies seems to follow this rule of no distractions. which of their apps/services does anything to distract and waste your time? At least for me gmail, photos, docs, Android, maps, are all good stewards of not distracting me. Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:" Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:" Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level. Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless. The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Youtube?
  - filleduchaos 5y ago
    I don't really understand how YouTube distracts people, or maybe my viewing habits are just weird. I go to YouTube to watch exactly what I want to - usually either a livestream or a VOD from the handful of streamers that I follow - and then I leave. That's it. Maybe this is easy for me because my watch history is already so tailored that all the videos YouTube throws at me are things I've already seen (and decided to watch/not watch).
RGamma 5y ago
If iPad is the hip flask, the smartphone is the needle and TikTok the heroin. I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many small increments of change, but intellectually I know the culture shock would be massive today. So much activity is generated and has converged on so few platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. (There's always exceptions) The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall. Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it. And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen the end of whatever this is yet. BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation was a leak, not a PR move: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude other posturing around this issue of course)

tomaskafka 5y ago

This. In a long term, company will never do anything against incentives their business model sets up. Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.

aiisjustanif 5y ago
Tell that to the many SF tech workers optimizing for profit.
- Swizec 5y ago
  I am an SF tech worker. Lots of companies here selling pickaxes. Twilio, for example, doesn’t need engagement. Last I heard they were swimming in money.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    Oh I agree that there are companies selling pickaxes and not doing business realm of Facebook and Google (if we are sticking to the subject of ads). However, hopefully anecdotally, just go take a look a metrics and sentiments from tech employees on Blind. If Google is paying more than Twilio, there will be droves of people grinding to get in.
  - tomaskafka 5y ago
    Selling pickaxes for companies building engagement human traps? :) How far are you not afraid to look?
- yupper32 5y ago
  Not optimizing for profit is a very privileged position to be in. Are people with poor backgrounds supposed to think that selling some ads is worse than having your family suffer? I can make a third as much and maybe do something better for society, but what happens then if the industry collapses? I'm not coding killer drones. I'm working for an ad company.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you, if anything I'm in a similar camp. The incentives just so happen to end up supporting features like the ones this post refers to.
tolbish 5y ago
But then if I don't work for Google, how can I write a blog post patting myself on the back for finally having the guts to leave Google?
- bluGill 5y ago
  Someday I need to write a blog post patting myself on the back for never having worked for Google.

Swizec 5y ago

At the dawn of my career I made myself two commitments: 1. Only projects/companies you enjoy 2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers So far so good. It’s amazing the cool stuff you can build when engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the goal is “Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to pay”. Feels nice to be aligned

zarkov99 5y ago
I like your way of thinking. What companies do you think fit that goal?
- Swizec 5y ago
  B2B companies are an obvious example. Find expensive problem, solve it, add sales team. Iterate. DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does Twilio. Huge huge space :) Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder. B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are here also. There’s also the indie/freelance market that sits between B2B and B2C – consumers who think of themselves as a business. Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you’re charging users for value provided, based on the revenue they can generate using your platform. I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use the app as little as possible to increase margins. Currently working with a health care startup and that’s taking off like a rocket.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cratermoon 5y ago

> 11 years ago PG ... > work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement. Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.

asiachick 5y ago

Your comments make no sense to me in relation to Google. Google of all companies seems to follow this rule of no distractions. which of their apps/services does anything to distract and waste your time? At least for me gmail, photos, docs, Android, maps, are all good stewards of not distracting me. Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:" Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:" Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level. Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless. The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google

cratermoon 5y ago
Youtube?
- filleduchaos 5y ago
  I don't really understand how YouTube distracts people, or maybe my viewing habits are just weird. I go to YouTube to watch exactly what I want to - usually either a livestream or a VOD from the handful of streamers that I follow - and then I leave. That's it. Maybe this is easy for me because my watch history is already so tailored that all the videos YouTube throws at me are things I've already seen (and decided to watch/not watch).

RGamma 5y ago

If iPad is the hip flask, the smartphone is the needle and TikTok the heroin. I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many small increments of change, but intellectually I know the culture shock would be massive today. So much activity is generated and has converged on so few platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. (There's always exceptions) The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall. Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it. And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen the end of whatever this is yet. BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation was a leak, not a PR move: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude other posturing around this issue of course)