16 ms·

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from readi

• oth001 5y ago
  Epic Games seems like one of the good guys for the most part at least.
• alaeraky 5y ago
  There is no safety in Corporate America. Exploiting the weaknesses of the largest group possible has been the name of the game for such a long time, that for many well meaning corporate robots it has become automatic behaviour. They defend, justify and most importantly have no roadmap to how corporate america can reduce exploitating knowledge gaps, info assymetry, biases, weaknesses at scale.
• bsenftner 5y ago
  The moment I saw "Don't be evil" as their motto/slogan back in the 90's. I rolled my eyes and said out loud "What a load of shit, I bet they are evil incarnate."
  • MandieD 5y ago
    As my (devout but quietly Baptist) boss at my childhood town’s local ISP told me, “if you ever run into a businessman who is eager to tell you what a strong [Christian] believer he is, or has a [Jesus] fish on his signs or business cards, watch your wallet!” (Things in [square braces] as added context for people who didn’t grow up as Evangelicals in the South)
    • sonofhans 5y ago
      William S Burroughs: "When doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. He's word isn't worth shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal."
• feanaro 5y ago
  > Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays? The smaller ones.
  • SCUSKU 5y ago
    And consequently the ones where employees make a smaller salary.
  • microtherion 5y ago
    I would argue that * There are plenty of evil small companies as well. * Small companies can turn evil more quickly than big ones can. * The evil things big companies do is more likely to be a matter of public record already than the evils of a small company. * Big companies sometimes have the scale to make a bigger impact at the "nice" things they do than small companies. That's not to say that there aren't some impactful, ethical small companies out there. I'm just saying that the choice is not as clear cut as it's made out to be. Sincerely, your BigCo Corporate Drone
• tjpnz 5y ago
  Of FAANG I've still got a soft spot for Netflix. Even if they're selling my data there's less potential for harm given that they're not a glorified advertising company.
  • rambambram 5y ago
    > given that they're not a glorified advertising company They're still an advertising company, just on a level people are less aware of. And they might not 'advertise' the usual products.
    • tjpnz 5y ago
      >And they might not 'advertise' the usual products. Based on my recent viewing history (mostly old Star Trek, first season of Blacklist and the Inspiration Four documentary) I'm struggling to see what those might be.
      • fullshark 5y ago
        Well they advertise their own shows to keep you subscribed, and they also have product placement. I remember Lagavulin scotch showing up in the TV show Lost in Space for example, an incredibly out of place product placement.
    • davedx 5y ago
      No they're not. Customers pay Netflix subscriptions.
      • christophilus 5y ago
        There is certainly product placement. But I’d agree Netflix doesn’t feel as egregious as GOOG or FB.
        • izacus 5y ago
          > There is certainly product placement. But I’d agree Netflix doesn’t feel as egregious as GOOG or FB. Keyword being "feel". Google and FB "felt" nice for a long time. Now, after old media smearing blitz, they don't "feel" as nice anymore. Key takeaway: "feeling" about a corporation has very little to do with their practices and everything to do with the PR budget and loudness of screaming about them. They're all sociopathic by design.
• torben-friis 5y ago
  I wonder if the behavior of the largest tech companies is a cause or an effect of their size. Is unethical behavior pushing companies to the top of the food chain? Or is it that other companies feel more ethical simply because they don't have as many chances to engage in unethical behavior? If it's the latter, all the push to split the companies is for nothing and we should just consider "ethics at scale" to be an unsolved problem I guess.
  • bsenftner 5y ago
    Humans don't scale: we get big egos, we exploit size advantages far in excess of ethics, and we believe our own PR. Humans do not scale. We need to philosophically admit that with greater influence only fictional heroes can remain ethically honest. Self deception typically ruins a wealthy person's honesty; it is natural human nature. Until we recognize this innate fact of human nature, we will continually create large disasters, over and over again.
  • wetmore 5y ago
    Perhaps when they are large enough to have significant power, they attract more employees with looser morals who see them as places where they can profit.
  • bawolff 5y ago
    I suspect its less size then being at or near the top. If you're up and coming, the best strategy is to just make a better product. You know whose at the top and you can adapt your product to where they are weak. If you're at the top, i suspect the optimal strategy is to try and cut your competition off at the knees before its a threat. I think we see this across many things. Just look at all the messed up things states do when they're super powers vs middle power states.
    • gonzo41 5y ago
      It's cartel behavior, they are trying to control every facet of the environments they live in. Hence why there are no competitors and all the upcoming platforms get acquired and absorbed.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  None of them, I am quite old to have learned in a capitalist society it is always about the money. Company mottos, cultural values, we are family, and all the marketing garbage that they sell for new hires to feel good is just that, plain marketing. When things get though, the "values" hardly matter to get deals or fire people.
  • b112 5y ago
    And now you know the true reason for age discrimination. It takes time, no matter how intelligent, to see through such dogma.
  • okusername 5y ago
    Yeah and communist society is about who has the best connections to the people in the party who decide who gets what. And socialist societies are about not making too much money because you'll lose the subsidies.
    • mola 5y ago
      Strawman... The alternative to purely profit driven society is not a communist society. It's social democratic where values of freedom rights and wellfare actually matters and are not just axes to grind on. The US internal anti socialist propoganda is so strong that it makes people believe that this middle ground doesn't exist.
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Communism is not the only alternative. It still implies an economy and endless human work to sustain it. Capitalism is automating everything and if this continues we'll either end up in a post scarcity society like Star Trek or some dystopian hell where corporations create artificial economies just to maintain their power and wealth.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      Apparently I touched a nerve....
  • Tarsul 5y ago
• stevage 5y ago
  I think any tech company that is growing, and has not achieved profitability by a clear mechanism that you're ok with is a risk.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  The Google from 12 to 16 years ago was found guilty[1] in an antitrust suit of colluding with other industry leaders to keep tech employee compensation artificially low. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  • TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Yeah I don’t think people understand the extent to which public relations influences our beliefs. Google was able to maintain a polished image in well known areas while silently behaving poorly in others and we believed it for a long time. I remember about ten years ago meetings Eric Schmidt had with US military generals. That didn’t even register on mass media so most people probably never heard of it. I wonder how deep the connection between Google and the government really goes.
    • germandiago 5y ago
      I did not go into details as to what Google misbehaviors were. But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and illegal stuff. Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to people. It is also natural that people want to be paid more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say this from an ethical point of view, I say how humans act. Also, with all these regulations, unfortunately, government-company collusion is also there, not only among companies. I wonder if markets were more free than they are if the collusion among companies (given that governments cannot regulate as much) would be as effective. I just wonder, because I am not sure, but I am confident it would be better than what we usually see in the media, which much of it is the consequence of disproportionate power for regulating. About behaving "poor" each person has her own ethics. Things that look ok to someone can look bad to others. And many look bad to most of us, especially when it is someone else who does it... which is curious. Companies are greedy, when it is not our company. Companies are bad, when it is not our company... our neighbor does not deserve what we deserve, because we are better. So the only measure by which we should measure companies is by law (even I find some laws absurd, but that is another topic). If some laws and regulations give power to make excuses that favor corruption via favoring friends, then maybe the problem is the capacity to regulate. I do not think an independent company would work for a government in "unethical" terms (as for many of our mostly accepted definition of unethical, like helping military research or giving surveillance tech to governments) if that government cannot give them something in exchange. We see the pattern? The problem is that exactly. Do not look further.
• willvarfar 5y ago
  Answering my own question, What about the timescales and starbursts and small tech startups that we like to see crop up on HN? My list above is tainted by my own interest in data; what is there in other spaces? Impressions and anecdotes?
• danbmil99 5y ago
  A startup, perhaps?
• lazyeye 5y ago
  Yep...in a very short amount of time they went from "dont be evil" to "hide your evil".
  • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    “See no evil”?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• blackandsqueaky 5y ago
  All that changed is a breakdown in perception management. Google definitely had positive and idealistic beginnings, but through growth eventually innate properties of the species will express and become difficult to centrally control. This is a feature Google has in common with any other large organization, be it IBM, Amazon or the Catholic church. Your solution is finding a good employer who you know and vet personally, and avoiding working entirely for large companies. Managing human rot at scale is an unsolved problem, and few seem to survive exposure to extraordinary cash flows without some aspect or other of their humanity being impacted.
  • laurent92 5y ago
    > avoiding working entirely for large companies. Managing human rot at scale is an unsolved problem Isn’t it, then, solved? The scalable way is liberalism = the ability to change employers and swap companies when they rot. It comes at the loss of having to dismantle mature companies frequently, but it is one way to solve rot. Like you change window frames when they rot.
• matsemann 5y ago
  Being a xoogler used to be something to put in your profile bio, and basically an instant hire if in your CV. Now it almost carries a stigma.
  • nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    Man, I don't know, if you need some binary trees inverted on a whiteboard, they are still the go-to folks.
    • ctvo 5y ago
      Can we stop with this meme? I've seen it now twice in this thread and across the boarder Google threads today. The hiring process is this way for the entire industry. Multiple startups have failed trying to move it away from its current incarnation of technical phone screen -> technical on-site, where the majority of technical questions asked are data structures, algorithms, and system design based. Implying that the people at Google are only good at whiteboard interviews, and not much else, in terms of both intelligence and technical ability is laughable. Google's influence on software engineering is broad and deep. Their papers moved the industry, their open source projects power the industry, their internal tools influence shifts in the industry. There's something wrong with you when you let their signal / data gathering for their hiring process impair your ability to see what they contribute clearly, and what obviously works for them in terms of hiring able engineers. Using this issue, which is clearly not related to engineering ability (it's a systemic management issue as far as I can tell), as a data point to demonstrate that their interview process is flawed, and that the engineers that made it through it aren't able says more about your own emotional state.
      • throwawaycuriou 5y ago
        Binary trees during the hiring process for software engineers is not a part of the entire industry. I'd be surprised if it was even the majority. But it is prevalent, and posts pop up here regularly disparaging it. Places lean into Google's way of doing things by default without demonstrating that it leads to positive outcomes _for their business_. Google themselves do it due to no small part to compensate for the pitfalls of getting as big as they have. Pointing out that what they do is ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating scale with success.
• ant6n 5y ago
  I got a Google Home a couple of years ago, cuz all my friends had one, but never got around to set it up. When it came out it was a magical box by a cool company that was like star trek had turned real. The other day I unpacked the thing cuz I needed a Bluetooth speaker, and was swearing at the thing the whole time cuz I couldn't set it up as a speaker without downloading the app, hooking the device to WiFi and seemingly giving Google access to more of my data (you can turn off the mic, but it keeps complaining about it at full volume and u can't turn that off). It's funny how the personal feelings associated with Google has changed. The device is the same, but the perspective, the emotion towards the company has changed so much.
• aaaaaaaaa5432 5y ago
  > Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays? Atlassian.
  • eclipxe 5y ago
    Ugh have you ever USED Jira?
• rakoo 5y ago
  Go for a non-capitalist org. The very idea of profits over anything else is what drove Google, Facebook, Twitter and friends to where they are.
• melomal 5y ago
  It's amazing that when you consider most tech companies based their entire perks strategy off the back of free food, beers, playgrounds, sleeping pods etc all in the name of keeping workings in the build at all times a la Facebook and Google. A little like the casinos tricks where you will never see a clock or the time inside one. There's a slight tilt on all pavements in Las Vegas that slowly push you towards the building, all without you knowing that it's happening. Brainwashing at it's finest.
  • andrei_says_ 5y ago
    See mike Monteiro’s Broken by Design for a fascinating expose of the workings of SV tech giants and the complete lack of ethics driving them.
  • tdeck 5y ago
    People always being this up and I think they're right to be skeptical, but the Google office I worked in (SF) was practically dead before 10 AM and after 7 PM. I never saw much evidence that any sizable group was working extra long hours. Some people hung around for dinner at 6:30 but most left before or right after grabbing food. I didn't spend enough time in Mountain View to form an informed opinion but there was definitely a big group leaving between 5 and 6:30.
    • paxys 5y ago
      People made this up because everyone needed a reason to put down the Google engineers who were suddenly getting better salaries and perks than the rest of the industry at the time. There was never any truth to the whole "employees stay at work all the time". Google has consistently had fantastic work life balance, as do most other similar large companies. It's the mid-tier ones that are sweatshops.
      • dralley 5y ago
        Of course, it helps that Google is, if these documents are accurate, literally stealing from basically everyone else (what company doesn't use Google adsense / AdWords)
• PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Anything with no shareholders.. Maybe that business model needs a revisit by the law. As in, if you hold share, you also hold liability (beyond loss of value). As in, you are open to a lawsuit if a company you invested in engages in unethical behavior and your votes did go towards that behavior. Strangle the socio-pathic plant at its root forever.
• globular-toast 5y ago
  It's almost like there is nothing special about Microsoft. The thing Google and Microsoft have in common is they are large organisations of humans. So maybe the answer is to work for yourself or a small organisation.
  • tdeck 5y ago
    Specifically they are large hierarchical organizations designed to extract wealth from value created by employees, within a context of constant competition with other such organizations. The specific incentives matter a lot when examining these effects and it's important to not just chalk it all up to human nature.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  Since google is as a publicly traded company, they are under enormous pressure to produce steady growth figures, just to please the stock market. Sure that survival has priority over playing it nice.
  • davedx 5y ago
    I mean yes and no. Blue chips can also just pay out their gigantic profits as dividends to shareholders - the growth pressure is more from VCs
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I don't know if it's been studied or written but I'd bet solid money that every group / company starts nice, trying to differentiate from old rusty and corrupt only to become what they despised because that's just survival instinct and "efficiency" (short term, lazy). Same for people, new ones come fresh with ideals only to become sleazy when their spot is secured. It's a balance between knowledge of the old versus naiveness of the new.
  • bostik 5y ago
    > I don't know if it's been studied or written Yes, it has been written. And you almost certain will have heard the condensed version. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      come on, i need longer than this :) there must be finer / wiser analysis about these antagonism. I have a tendency to be a naive hero wannabee but I recognize when I become dark or complacent. Most probably people managed to do better and write about this in a social context.
  • revscat 5y ago
    The universal emergent behavior of capitalism. It may not be by design, but is as certain as gravity. Capitalism is wholly incompatible with morality, unless you definite morality itself to be capitalism.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      I don't think capitalism is root here, it's an amplifier but humans have the same problem. Maybe any complex ~intelligent system even ?
• kypro 5y ago
  Company policies like “don’t be evil” probably need to be directed by founders. You can’t expect others in a company to put their morals over profits because at the end of the day no one gets fired for making money, but you can if your morals get in the way of profit. The incentives always pushes on the side of profit. As a company grows the founders who originally directed the company’s ethics either step down or have less influence in the day to day decision making at every level of the company. I think this is why we see companies like Tesla (and startups more generally) making so many “out there” decisions in terms of design and how they run their business. No one’s going to risk their job on pitching the cyber truck at Ford or spending $0 on advertisement. These things really need to be pushed by a founder who isn’t worried about being fired for doing something that seems crazy on paper. Generally I think the world would be better off with less super massive companies who no longer have a founder with morals and a vision to guide the company away from a purely profit motivated future.
  • dccoolgai 5y ago
    > Generally I think the world would be better off with less super massive companies who no longer have a founder with morals and a vision to guide the company away from a purely profit motivated future. I think that's the crux of what Google got caught doing here. You don't need an Ivy League law degree to understand that what is laid out here is a slam-dunk case on collusion/anticompetitive grounds. I hope they have to face some kind of accountability for it. I hope these attorneys in Texas can deliver that for all of us at a level above "slap on the wrist".
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  I work for one of the big companies that you would think (from the vocal minority) everyone hates. Only one of their business units is "not well liked", another is ambivalent, and another creates health care products for students and doctors. They try hard to provide opportunities for minority groups in the company, they organize charity events for local groups doing things like fighting hunger or childhood cancer, and they try hard to be one of the best employers wherever they have offices. Their leadership promote the idea of always trying to do the right thing and have an open door policy, and have changed company decisions because of concerns gathered via petition. I'm very frustrated at the poor organization and execution of this company, but it does genuinely try to live good values, and all the people I've ever talked to here (including leadership) genuinely care about other people. And I know for a fact that their products have pushed forward advances in science, technology, medicine, even giving away product for people fighting the pandemic. I have the feeling that all large companies, regardless of how ethical their mission, can make you feel bad. But just because you feel bad doesn't mean the majority of outcomes of the company are bad. I mean, shit, our country as a whole produces some pretty bad outcomes, but not necessarily the majority. At some point we need to be more rational than emotional and do as much good as we can while still collecting a paycheck. But of course we should be willing to leave and work for good if we can no longer justify the bad. I don't think there is any safe math for that. What if staying provides a better opportunity to create necessary change? At what point do we choose between the easy and the right, and how do we even find that line?
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for Yeah. I remember their "don't be evil" bullshit. It was all just marketing. You can perpetrate all kinds of dishonest acts when you have a reputation for honesty.
• eclipxe 5y ago
  Work where you want and don’t feel bad because of HN opinions. HN hates everything eventually, except RSS.
  • beepbooptheory 5y ago
    Interesting and a little funny to read the question this way. A certain peculiarity of our time I think is a constant ambiguation (or confusion) between moral conscience and social impressions, social consequences even. social media gives us the illusion sometimes that they are one in the same, leading to confusions like this.
  • joedevon 5y ago
    That comment gave me the biggest smile @eclipxe.
  • api 5y ago
    It stands for Hater News. Good info here but the bias is negative. Oh, and don’t forget Wireguard. Put Wireguard and RSS in the same headline and get the highest upvotes ever. Of course HN will probably hate Wireguard in a year.
• lucasverra 5y ago
  The ones that do not pay FAANG(M) salaries
• aaomidi 5y ago
  Unionize anywhere you work. That's the way not to feel bad.
  • paulluuk 5y ago
    As much as I like unions, I don't think that they prevent companies from doing bad things to the public, just to their employees.
    • aaomidi 5y ago
      It does give more power for employees to protest bad moves. As shown in the recent leaks people have stepped in and tried to stop the shit that's happening.
• OOPMan 5y ago
  The smaller the company you work for, the less likely there is to be nasty shit going on you're not aware of...
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    I have an unofficial policy of only working for small companies. I broke that rule once, and I was consistently miserable. Completing features consistently took 3x longer than they should have, and the team was too big to be able to make the necessary changes to fix the accumulating problems that caused it. Additionally, people I hadn't met during the interviews but were in my direct chain of command were obnoxiously political. I am pretty much done with working at places where I dont have a direct line to the owners, and meet the owners before I accept the job.
• grappler 5y ago
  I don't know about a big company, but my answer would be "the companies building decentralized and privacy-friendly tech". The ones pushing toward solutions to the problems now associated with 'big tech'.
• MildlySerious 5y ago
  > Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays? Stripe, maybe?
  • registeredcorn 5y ago
    To be fair, I've heard that their customer service is pretty abysmal. Hmm...maybe there's a corollary between "goodness" and customer service? The worse the customer service, the "gooder" the company?
  • mmmmkay 5y ago
    for now
  • paulluuk 5y ago
    I've heard good things about Valve
• mrintegrity 5y ago
  Grafana labs seems like a company worth supporting, great products, agpl code, good community involvement. I help in their slack sometimes, I like their business model.
• a123b456c 5y ago
  Shopify