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I'm not saying this with the intent of harshly criticizing the author, but I admit it's surprising to me that someone (who had other options) would work for 14
by bscphil 5y ago
I'm not saying this with the intent of harshly criticizing the author, but I admit it's surprising to me that someone (who had other options) would work for 14 years at a company they clearly came to believe was making the world a worse place.
- refulgentis 5y agoThe only disappointing part of Google, for this former Apple aficionado, is how self-flagellating the internal and external culture are. (ex. we see other Googlers/ex-Googlers in this thread noting how funny these are) Thank you for sharing that, I was uncertain if it was my own bias that was making me think similar things
- bb88 5y agoWho knows about bias? Im largely pro Google, and laughed anyway.
- refulgentis 5y agoA non-Googler replying with the same take I was worried that was biased simply by being a Googler, rules out that the take can only be had if you have bias due to being a Googler (as does your take: we're both Googlers and have different opinions!)
- rawtxapp 5y agoThe alternatives aren't really all that better on the topics that he criticized. If you work at big tech, at that scale, it's inevitable there will be parts of the company you disagree with. From my experience there, as long as your criticism is legitimate and constructive, it'll be well received by Googlers/company, heck some of his criticism pales in comparison to the ones done with memes.
- refulgentis 5y agoI don't have as thick a skin as you, and I get really dispirited when this sort of criticism is adopted as a personality trait / cause internally. It's barely criticism rather than hyperbolic rancor, and while every good community needs people pointing out the bad, as you note, people know they're working at a big company and should value how we avoid things like JEDI, etc. thanks to leadership.
- triactual 5y agoI tend to agree. There are enough problem alerters without solutions in most organizations that it’s not necessary to amplify one’s lack of solutions or influence with comics.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoAlerting is meaningless if it doesn't motivate people enough to organize. You're way underestimating the influence of media like this.
- triactual 5y agoNo one is motivated by snark. They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative.
- jbigelow76 5y agoNo one is motivated by snark. I can agree with that. They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative. Not so much on this one, one person's ideals could be another's hate speech.
- Talanes 5y agoHave you conducted a study, or did you just mean to type "I am not motivated by snark." Personally, I find a complete lack of snark to be alienating. I'm not motivated by pure positivity, just creeped out.
- rtpg 5y agoYou can simply choose to not work at that scale if they're all making the world worse. Part of an aspect of sticking to your guns ethically and morally is making choices that leave you worse off. If your ethics align with what is best for you, personally, it's not much of an ethical code
- gravypod 5y ago(Opinions are my own) An alternate way of looking at it: When you work at a place you can help influence the culture to move it in the right direction. When you aren't working there you can't.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoMany people at Google have held this opinion over the past decade are now former Googlers because they've realized you can't fix it. They've realized this is an excuse people in the cult use to justify to themselves and their conscience still being there, when all evidence points to it being impossible to course correct Google from within as an engineer.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe company has made the transition from small to large and pretends (culturally) to not have noticed. It still bills itself as small and individual-driven, but that's propaganda. It'll still welcome an individual or small team working their ass off to make the next Gmail, but it doesn't care about that individual's opinion on whether it's acceptable to materially support Border Patrol and would much prefer they get on with those table-stakes improvements to the BigQuery search engine properly handling Hispanic names.
- TheRealSteel 5y agoAn employee cannot realistically hope to change the morality of a publicly traded corporation.
- dasil003 5y agoIf you are good, the best thing you can do is go leave and go work for a company doing things a better way. If you are not good the best thing you can do is stay and incrementally dilute their talent pool. If you actually want to have more impact than that as an IC you could try your hand at internal activism, but I'd say you have a dramatically higher chance of damaging your career than creating any real change at a company that scale.
- magixx 5y agoHonestly, I don't find it that surprising. I mean the whole advertising industry does exist and will continue to do so. Plus, if they didn't directly hate doing the work itself I could see someone tolerating it especially knowing that google's compensation is pretty good.
- Xorlev 5y agoMost of Google is not dedicated towards building Ads, surfaces where ads are displayed, or collecting data for ads, despite popular perception.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoAll that other stuff is a loss leader for selling ads.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoIt used to be that way. Now there are several businesses that aren't just surfaces for ads. The productivity suite, cloud, etc
- Xorlev 5y agoSorry, but that's not correct. As a counterexample, Google Cloud is not a "loss leader for ads". The hardware division is not a loss leader for ads. There are a myriad of counterexamples. A loss leader is a product which is used to acquire revenue through a different channel, such as game consoles which often sell at a loss on hardware to encourage game sales.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 29athrowaway 5y agoIf Google didn't exist, then Baidu, Tencent or Alibaba would be mining your data instead. Is that what you would prefer?
- travoc 5y agoI’d prefer that they all take their place in history next to the cigarette and trans fat corporations. Thanks for asking.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoI would rather compare them with Bonzi Buddy, but OK. Using Google Maps won't give you lung cancer (unless you are using it to find smoke shops that is). It erodes your privacy, sure, but it won't deteriorate your health...
- hiptobecubic 5y agoCigarettes and trans fats are both still hugely popular.
- Talanes 5y agoQuietly continuing to make profits for decades after a brief period of major blowback?
- KoftaBob 5y agoBaidu, Tencent, and Alibaba wouldn't exist in their current form without companies like Google and Amazon to take heavy inspiration/copy from. Let's be real here, China's tech industry revolves around mimicking American/European/Japanese/Korean tech, they rarely ever innovate and create first of their kind things.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe ability Google has to make the world better is significant, and folks like Manu were (are) excited to be a part of that. For example, Google came up with a privacy-conscious way to surface enough data to track and address the COVID-19 spread, which was huge for US state governments trying to handle the disease by giving them signal to shape outbreak mitigation strategy (https://fpf.org/press-releases/fpf-issues-2021-award-for-research-data-stewardship/ https://fpf.org/press-releases/fpf-issues-2021-award-for-res...). But there have been a lot of changes in recent years, and Google is playing with fire in its military and government support projects (as well as struggling with the increased union consciousness that is permeating white-collar Silicon Valley culture at the FAANGs). I'm not profoundly surprised he finally decided the balance had swung too far.
- bingidingi 5y agoThat's pretty normal for the advertising industry.
- ekianjo 5y agoIs there any human organization that is not making the world worse in one way or another? Its pretty much relative in any case, hardly purely evil or purely good unless you are very naive or very young.
- tolbish 5y agoPublic broadcasting/public radio seems like a pure public good. Along with the people working on disaster.radio [0] [0] https://disaster.radio/ https://disaster.radio/
- ekianjo 5y agopublic broadcasting? you mean state sanctionned propaganda disguised as news?
- dharmab 5y agoAre you sure you know what "public broadcasting" is? It's broadcasting funded by the public, mostly through private donations and some funding through competitive grants. EDIT: I see from your profile you're not in the US, which is probably the source of the confusion. Examples of Public Broadcasting are https://www.npr.org https://www.npr.org and https://www.pbs.org https://www.pbs.org.
- NateEag 5y agoAs a US citizen who used to listen to NPR daily, it may not be state-sanctioned, but it definitely had a propagandistic narrative tying together the reporting. Maybe not quite as strongly so as the NYT, but it was definitely there.
- esrauch 5y agoI'm curious what country you're from to have that point of view. In the US the public radio is extremely clearly not a state sanctioned propaganda; some of the corresponding private news corps are much more.
- VictorPath 5y agohttps://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- whoisjuan 5y agoBelieve it or not, there’s people who just want to write code and get paid well. In fact I know more people like that, than those who are lofty about their goals. He hints that’s the way he feels in this comic: https://goomics.net/309/ https://goomics.net/309/
- CRConrad 5y agoIsn't what he hints at here actually more that even he does have a limit where "the price of his soul" will exceed his compensation, and the job won't be worth it any more? (And squinting at the dotted continuations of the red and green lines, looks like he even estimated when that time would come pretty well. EDIT: But yeah, maybe not all that amazing, since it was only a year or so in advance.)
- dharmab 5y agohttps://goomics.net/339/ https://goomics.net/339/
- bb88 5y agoNo kidding.... Money corrupts, doesn't it?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoI had an initial reaction when reading this comics of, "Man, this guy has become very cynical about the company!" I remember reading some of the earliest comics and having a little laugh, but I kind of lost track of it and hadn't checked up on his stuff for a while. But then I looked back to the earliest comics and even most of those come off as fairly critical of the company. There doesn't seem to be so much of an attitudinal shift as this guy has been focused on criticism from day 1. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every big organization can benefit from reasonable criticism.)
- wombatmobile 5y agoThis isn't the only possibility, but bald cynicism might just be the only creative tool he's got in his quiver. Makes you appreciate the likes of Scott Adams, XKCD and Norman Rockwell, who use parody, irony, and soul respectively, each with skilled nuance that shifts the viewer from their same old place to open the possibilities for some new take.
- jldugger 5y agoAs it happens, the author left the company two days ago.
- dijit 5y agoThe point made was "why work there for so long?"
- fossuser 5y agoI think Google has a culture problem (they're massive, doesn't apply everywhere, etc. etc.). There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand exposure, have only heard things through friends that were employees. Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if they're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop. Reminds me of this: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-stay-so-long/ https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s... The employees also pushed to avoid working for the USG, pushed to avoid the JEDI contract (though they likely would have lost it anyway) while at the same time trying to work within China (while Deep Mind may or may not be indirectly assisting in Uighur camps [0]). I think this is morally wrong and the arguments are often simple/naive. [0]: ">>Peter Thiel: ...But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that." https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2021-transcript/ https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...
- ma2rten 5y agoI think what Thiel is referring to is that advances in computer vision which are published in scientific papers enable others to build better surveillance systems. This criticism doesn't just apply to DeepMind. The reason that he is mentioning them specifically is because was an early investor so he has access to their team.
- 5y ago
- decker 5y agoMoney.
- darkwater 5y agoFrom another HN linked article [1]: > Since starting at Google in 2007, Cornet's use of art to critique the company has become prolific, with ex-Google manager Claire Stapleton describing him to The Information as the tech firm's "moral bellweather." Cornet published a collection of his work, "Goomics", in 2018. Having someone with first hand experience and knowledge about your organization and making "fun" of some of the sore points it can actually be good for the Org itself, because you have one more data point about how employees are feeling. [1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-cartoonist-manu-cornet-quits-company-after-14-years-2021-7 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-carto...
- eitland 5y ago> bellweather For anyone wondering, that words makes a whole lot more sense when written correctly(?) as: bellwether (the sheep carrying the bell).
- klipt 5y agoThe comics suffer selection bias because "this thing is great" doesn't have as much humor potential as "this thing is broken". Talking about how awesome Google's main search page is? Not very funny. Making fun of Google's endless list of failed chat apps? Much funnier.
- galoisgirl 5y agoI find this funny: https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/google-and-apple-versus-your-companys-application/ https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/google-and-app...
- klipt 5y agoI think that still counts as a "this thing is broken" joke though.