4 ms·

It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willi

It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen. When I moved to the bay area working at FB/Google was something I held in high regard and was a career goal of mine. Now I get hit up by recruiters from them often... and I don't message them back. It hurts thinking about how much money I leave on the table by not working there, but I just don't think if I could live with myself if I became a contributing member of their dystopian nightmare machine. It all starts with the people who work there. If you work at google or facebook, you're part of it. You're culpable. It's not like I don't understand the calculus and not like the right dollar amount wouldn't corrupt my position as well, but I wish more people were honest/forthright about it. You're a storm trooper.

acomar 5y ago
> It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen. symbolic action is always easy. but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, in an industry that views union activity with - at best - suspicion or outright derision. we all like to fancy that we'd be the ones to refuse to play along but the reality is that when it's you and your job and you're facing the possibility of not paying rent or eating food after being blacklisted from the industry in response to your actions... don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Bullshit. How many minimum wage employees does Google have in the Bay Area? We’re talking about a class of six figure employees here. Like he said, you’re a storm trooper, just own it.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  > but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, We are not talking about some poor sod blue collar worker here. We are talking about techworkers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job anywhere. No one is asking them to start some movement. They can simply think: "I don't want to be a part of this", leave the job and get a new job that same day. > don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people. Tech workers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job pretty much anywhere they like are doing these things to survive? Seriously...? Google had leverage over these people? How?
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  They're creating an infrastructure of manipulation because of the collective impact of the industry within the current legal context of international privacy protections. Any individual project or feature can look trivial or harmless, like manipulating the order of articles in a feed, but the systems used to do it are mechanisms implicitly susceptible to bad incentives. They're collectively pressing buttons and breaking things in the global psychology, influencing the zeitgeist in a way that no one person or company intends. Obama's campaign was the first major successful political use of that infrastructure and there's an argument to be made that Trump's election was enabled by it. Cambridge Anallytica exposed some of the controls and showed a portion of what can be done, but we haven't seen the worst yet. International troll farms, the recent infiltration of Christian and BLM Twitter and reddit, and so on. When people are profiled by advanced algorithms, and access to people given based on those profiles, that access can be made completely transparent using deanonymizing methods through data from other sources. Any and every platform, forum, and community becomes exposed to hostile, unintended influence. We need outsized fines that protect private data as if it were sacred such that a trillion dollar company would fear even a single violation. Such that violating privacy would result in individuals going bankrupt or prison time. Such that physically bombing a foreign datacenter would be seen as reasonable recourse if they were uncooperative. There are things that no government or private organization should have absent the informed consent of users because of the implicit danger to society's basic functioning.
nkingsy 5y ago
I work in big tech I selected all my previous companies because they seemed to have a worthy mission from the outside. Each disappointed me immensely. At startup scale you have to see the sausage be made or at least sit next to it. I know big tech companies have too much power because every other company I’ve worked at would be most accurately described as an unscrupulous Rube Goldberg machine for moving money from VCs to ads+cloud. Do what works for you, but don’t be so sure you’re engaging in a “better” way with this late-capitalist hellscape. I feel so much better aligned getting paid by big tech to build cool tools for engineers than I did getting paid to knife fight for their scraps.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The problem is that "worthy mission" is incompatible with being a public company for the most part. Once your mandate is not profitability but growth, some cohort of people at the company will push for that growth in ways that others think is unacceptable, and they will hide these programs because they know some will objects and those that would object are incentivized from all sides and from themselves to not want to see them. Private companies have a much better chance of actually following those missions(at least if not struggling). At a minimum, not as many incentives are aligned against you.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  > than I did getting paid to knife fight for their scraps. Seriously, cut the drama. Amazon fulfillment workers can say they are "getting paid to knife fight for their scraps.". There is no way that statement needs to apply to tech workers. It sounds as if you are forgetting there is a world outside silicon valley, startups and fortune 500 companies. In most countries SMB's account for almost 50% of the economy. > I feel so much better aligned getting paid by big tech to build cool tools for engineers Well thats actually an honest statement; You want money, cool toys and these outweigh any moral concerns with big tech.
  - nkingsy 5y ago
    At one company I was asked to make demos of things that didn’t work and never would. I listened to the ceo lie to the faces of law enforcement and gov bigwig potential customers as they paraded themselves around the room behind us, watching the tech geniuses work their magic. I witnessed junior employees get screamed at routinely, more or less for being junior. The company before that overrode all engineering complaints and implemented call to cancel because it made money. My boss had to do it himself. Both companies competed in a way not unlike a knife fight, meaning throw ethics out the window and pull every lever you can think of. Both had very few happy customers, and rolled every penny into ads and cloud spend, operating at a sickening loss despite locking b2b customers into large monthly contracts. This is my experience in the industry. The company before that didn’t even pay me and jerked me around about options that weren’t worth anything anyway. Your response seems quite uncharitable. I mentioned getting paid on both sides, so yes it’s important. I would like to retire some day and live in modest comfort until then. I have young children and happily live in the sf bay. I said nothing about cool toys. I like that I get to work on a passion project that will likely be open source some day. I like that my customers are engineers and that they chat with me directly. Generally speaking, if a company isn’t doing every legal (and possibly illegal but unlikely to be enforced) thing to gain competitive advantage, it will be out competed. It is the responsibility of the government to keep the laws up to date. Companies are not good. They can sometimes be owned by people who are willing to sacrifice profits for warm fuzzy feelings, but that’s an unstable position that will be corrected when ownership changes. I feel secure knowing I work for a company that turns a large profit and has already pulled all the levers available to them to make more. Less nasty surprises that way.

acomar 5y ago

> It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen. symbolic action is always easy. but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, in an industry that views union activity with - at best - suspicion or outright derision. we all like to fancy that we'd be the ones to refuse to play along but the reality is that when it's you and your job and you're facing the possibility of not paying rent or eating food after being blacklisted from the industry in response to your actions... don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people.

RNCTX 5y ago
Bullshit. How many minimum wage employees does Google have in the Bay Area? We’re talking about a class of six figure employees here. Like he said, you’re a storm trooper, just own it.
jsiepkes 5y ago
> but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, We are not talking about some poor sod blue collar worker here. We are talking about techworkers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job anywhere. No one is asking them to start some movement. They can simply think: "I don't want to be a part of this", leave the job and get a new job that same day. > don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people. Tech workers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job pretty much anywhere they like are doing these things to survive? Seriously...? Google had leverage over these people? How?
robbedpeter 5y ago
They're creating an infrastructure of manipulation because of the collective impact of the industry within the current legal context of international privacy protections. Any individual project or feature can look trivial or harmless, like manipulating the order of articles in a feed, but the systems used to do it are mechanisms implicitly susceptible to bad incentives. They're collectively pressing buttons and breaking things in the global psychology, influencing the zeitgeist in a way that no one person or company intends. Obama's campaign was the first major successful political use of that infrastructure and there's an argument to be made that Trump's election was enabled by it. Cambridge Anallytica exposed some of the controls and showed a portion of what can be done, but we haven't seen the worst yet. International troll farms, the recent infiltration of Christian and BLM Twitter and reddit, and so on. When people are profiled by advanced algorithms, and access to people given based on those profiles, that access can be made completely transparent using deanonymizing methods through data from other sources. Any and every platform, forum, and community becomes exposed to hostile, unintended influence. We need outsized fines that protect private data as if it were sacred such that a trillion dollar company would fear even a single violation. Such that violating privacy would result in individuals going bankrupt or prison time. Such that physically bombing a foreign datacenter would be seen as reasonable recourse if they were uncooperative. There are things that no government or private organization should have absent the informed consent of users because of the implicit danger to society's basic functioning.

nkingsy 5y ago

I work in big tech I selected all my previous companies because they seemed to have a worthy mission from the outside. Each disappointed me immensely. At startup scale you have to see the sausage be made or at least sit next to it. I know big tech companies have too much power because every other company I’ve worked at would be most accurately described as an unscrupulous Rube Goldberg machine for moving money from VCs to ads+cloud. Do what works for you, but don’t be so sure you’re engaging in a “better” way with this late-capitalist hellscape. I feel so much better aligned getting paid by big tech to build cool tools for engineers than I did getting paid to knife fight for their scraps.

kbenson 5y ago
The problem is that "worthy mission" is incompatible with being a public company for the most part. Once your mandate is not profitability but growth, some cohort of people at the company will push for that growth in ways that others think is unacceptable, and they will hide these programs because they know some will objects and those that would object are incentivized from all sides and from themselves to not want to see them. Private companies have a much better chance of actually following those missions(at least if not struggling). At a minimum, not as many incentives are aligned against you.
jsiepkes 5y ago
> than I did getting paid to knife fight for their scraps. Seriously, cut the drama. Amazon fulfillment workers can say they are "getting paid to knife fight for their scraps.". There is no way that statement needs to apply to tech workers. It sounds as if you are forgetting there is a world outside silicon valley, startups and fortune 500 companies. In most countries SMB's account for almost 50% of the economy. > I feel so much better aligned getting paid by big tech to build cool tools for engineers Well thats actually an honest statement; You want money, cool toys and these outweigh any moral concerns with big tech.
- nkingsy 5y ago
  At one company I was asked to make demos of things that didn’t work and never would. I listened to the ceo lie to the faces of law enforcement and gov bigwig potential customers as they paraded themselves around the room behind us, watching the tech geniuses work their magic. I witnessed junior employees get screamed at routinely, more or less for being junior. The company before that overrode all engineering complaints and implemented call to cancel because it made money. My boss had to do it himself. Both companies competed in a way not unlike a knife fight, meaning throw ethics out the window and pull every lever you can think of. Both had very few happy customers, and rolled every penny into ads and cloud spend, operating at a sickening loss despite locking b2b customers into large monthly contracts. This is my experience in the industry. The company before that didn’t even pay me and jerked me around about options that weren’t worth anything anyway. Your response seems quite uncharitable. I mentioned getting paid on both sides, so yes it’s important. I would like to retire some day and live in modest comfort until then. I have young children and happily live in the sf bay. I said nothing about cool toys. I like that I get to work on a passion project that will likely be open source some day. I like that my customers are engineers and that they chat with me directly. Generally speaking, if a company isn’t doing every legal (and possibly illegal but unlikely to be enforced) thing to gain competitive advantage, it will be out competed. It is the responsibility of the government to keep the laws up to date. Companies are not good. They can sometimes be owned by people who are willing to sacrifice profits for warm fuzzy feelings, but that’s an unstable position that will be corrected when ownership changes. I feel secure knowing I work for a company that turns a large profit and has already pulled all the levers available to them to make more. Less nasty surprises that way.