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Do you know what puzzles me most? How can software engineers work on something like this? Don't those paid engineers or involved ones have the balls or dignity
by liendolucas 3y ago
Do you know what puzzles me most? How can software engineers work on something like this? Don't those paid engineers or involved ones have the balls or dignity to walk away? I'm just wondering how they would feel about this (if they feel anything at all). I mean, if I'd be in such a position and asked to push something like this I'd have walked away on the spot, no matter what you offer me. No one at Google is standing up against this? I really hope that if this ever sees the light of the day, somehow in the end this backfires badly on them.
- o1y32 3y agoJust look around in this thread you can find people defending Google. It is not hard to think an engineer would actually want to work on this themselves.
- tekla 3y agoThey get paid lots of money.
- liendolucas 3y agoBut surely those folks can walk away and put in their CV that they quit because they were in charge of implementing one of the worst ideas the history of internet has seen so far. Wouldn't you hire someone that puts that in their resume?
- gabereiser 3y agoPeople don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck. As long as people are willing to pay others more for doing this than saving the internet, it will continue the trend. Lashings will continue until morale improves.
- liendolucas 3y ago> People don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck. I'm sorry but I don't believe that. I do understand that line of thought if you are in a very complicated personal/financial situation but you're stating that the only driver is money, which is clearly wrong...
- gabereiser 3y agoit may not be your experience, but 95% of us work because we need the money.
- liendolucas 3y agoI do need an income too. I do pay rent, every single month. I do pay a loan, every single month. Bills? You guessed it: every single month. What's your point, really?
- slowmovintarget 3y agoPeople are going to take their pay and do their job because to do otherwise could mean they can't maintain their lifestyle or keep their family provided to the same standard they're currently living at. Altruism is not a default position, and is unusual in the real world. I'm not saying that's how it should be, or that people shouldn't work to make it otherwise. But you say why don't all those people walk away from that? How far would you go? What if you had children depending on you? It's very easy to condemn other people as "greedy" but you show a lack of understanding, of empathy, perhaps, for how people in general function in the world if you assume they should just do what you say because "obviously, my moral stance trumps their concerns." Edit: I upvoted your other comment, by the way, where you lay out the very scenario I speak of. Many people are "screwed" because their lifestyle has expanded to their current circumstance. Few people realize that progress in some dimension rarely rules out regress back along the same path. Liberty requires maintenance, because there will always be societal forces aimed at eroding it.
- allarm 3y agoThe good thing is that there are multiple sources of getting money.
- Moldoteck 3y agothose will walk away, others will come and to them money would be absolute motivator. If there's a thing humans can invent/implement, without any regulation, it'll be implemented (and often even with regulation it may be implemented)
- wildrhythms 3y agoIf only there was some form of labor organizing that could allow workers to keep their job while collectively opposing building horrific things like this.
- tekla 3y agoWhy would the labor oppose building this? This makes their members tons of money.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago>Wouldn't you hire someone that puts that in their resume? To most employers, that would read as "prone to insubordination", and be an immediate red flag. Because each and every one of them will inevitably ask you to do something at some point that will be fucked up.
- michelb 3y agoThey won't need to be hired again. Work a few years, retire without a care in the world.
- nikanj 3y agoTell me you don't have a mortgage and kids without telling me
- tjpnz 3y agoI've got a mortgage and two kids, I don't have a FAANG job and live very comfortably thanks. Stop spreading BS, you don't need to work for one of them to have a high paying tech job.
- keonbrown1 3y ago[dead]
- liendolucas 3y agoBut my point is that you do have plenty options in the industry! For sure if you're in charge of something like this you can have a pretty decent job elsewhere. You sound as if those people have nowhere else to continue their careers... Am I wrong?
- systems_glitch 3y agoYeah, you're kind of a little wrong. Sure, there are options. They don't pay like FAANG, like order of magnitude difference.
- pmlnr 3y agoYeah. But those often don't take your soul.
- rationalist 3y agoLots of people get by fine with less-than-FAANG pay. (FAANG salaries are not an "order of magnitude" higher than salaries at other U.S.-based companies for similar jobs.) FAANG salaries are just at the level at which those companies discovered people are willing to sell their souls, or that is high enough to attract naive people who won't question why it pays more.
- systems_glitch 3y agoYup, we've lost, what, two or three generations of developers to an industry that'd do better work by digging holes and filling them in? It's my guess that this is also why so much programming nowadays looks like it's being done by the bottom 10% of talent. They do it because the money, though. I turned down a FAANG job partly because I'd have to relocate across the US and partly because I didn't think I could sleep at night working for them. Total compensation package for first year was $250-350K depending on performance, and there was a signing bonus. This was 2015 or so. I often half regret that decision, because it hurts to know I could've ticked that income box rather than fighting month after month to keep work coming in (self employed/contractor).
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoRespect! from random internet nobody...
- rjh29 3y agoGoogle is a big organisation, even if some people don't want to work on it, there are plenty of others who will. It's not as if every software engineer in the world shares your views and your principles.
- Bluecobra 3y agoMaybe there is still some who will fight the good fight and make the software purposely bad. How good is Google QA?
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoFascists code too!
- _blz2 3y agowhat has fascism got to do with ad blocking?
- hcks 3y agoOk but have you considered that making people watch ads to use an optional service is not a war crime
- jeltz 3y agoNo, of course they haven't! Thanks for adding this insightful and revolutionary perspective to the debate. Everything which is less serious than war crimes is obviously morally ok.
- Vermyndax 3y agofound the google mole in this thread
- Y-bar 3y agoIt’s not the ads that are problematic. The corporate panopticon is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- detourdog 3y agoThat is the danger of a fat paycheck.
- liendolucas 3y agoI can't recall where I read it but the biggest danger with having a fat paycheck is that your lifestyle changes drastically. More money? Well, now you can do/afford more expensive things, you can take more luxuries, have a bigger place, a fancier car, and so on. And the problem comes when you have to cut back all that, you need a job that can support that lifestyle. I believe the best thing you can do if you have a fat paycheck is to exactly take the opposite approach: keep living simply, save as much as you can, yes give yourself a treat from time to time, but essentially keep an average lifestyle. The day you need to go elsewhere and you find out that you are against the wall because you need that much money and you can't find a similar income is when you're basically screwed.
- detourdog 3y agoIt is never about how much one makes it is always a matter of how much one spends.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoThat is... a gross simplification. There is a cost of living. If you include people giving you stuff for free in the "how much one makes" category, then you need shelter, food, healthcare, etc. There are plenty of people who struggle to make enough to pay for these necessities. We call this "poverty", and it absolutely is a matter of "how much one makes".
- detourdog 3y agoEven in poverty having to spend more than one makes is a problem. Therefore my statement maybe simple but true. The best kind of truth in my book. I have lots of ideas about poverty but I was actually responding to the trap of high-earners. Careful spending is more critical in impoverished situations.
- bob1029 3y agoI'd go even further. If I was asked to run one of these projects I would subvert & sabotage the entire thing while pretending to be 150% on board. Why not get paid by the devil while fighting his plans? You don't even have to make it obvious that you are cratering it. There are so many shiny things in tech you could make it look entirely incidental. Part of me reserves hope that this is what some of the engineers inside of Google are doing right now.
- liendolucas 3y agoLet's hope that indeed is the case... But as a first reaction I'd expect some friction or resistance to this from within Google. What would be their rationale for exposing their plans on Github and not going silently as (I've recently learned) Apple did?
- systems_glitch 3y agoIf you're listening to this message, you are the resistance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raxxorraxor 3y agoThere wouldn't be anything close to an open internet with the engineers of today. I despise my generation for this. Generalization yes, but the draw of big money to big tech did something. How about being smart for once and think two step ahead the next time...
- Rudism 3y agoFor a while I worked at a company that did arguably worse things than Google does. Regardless of dignity and courage it's hard to just "walk away" from a paycheck when you have mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay, a family who gets sick and needs medical care, pets, hobbies, whatever. There's also the fact that for most of us work is a huge percentage of our time and our social lives can be deeply intertwined with our work lives--it can be a tough decision to walk away from all your colleagues and friends who you enjoy working with even if you don't particularly enjoy the work itself (sometimes shared hardships and commiseration can make those bonds even tougher to break). Expecting engineers to die on this hill for us seems incredibly unfair. To balk at someone not upturning their life and (under the US healthcare system at least) endangering the health and well-being of themselves and their families in the name of dignity or morality when the net result of doing so would be exactly zero because Google can replace them in a heartbeat is, in my opinion, a gross and unnecessary misdirection of blame.
- r00fus 3y agoThose with conscience get filtered out of these kinds of projects. I mean, we are in a climate crisis and massive worldwide inequality and some really competent people both made this happen and prevented the general public from being able to avoid this - because that happens to profit the few. Most of the worldwide economy is predicated on this (capitalism). It's a logical outcome.
- reportgunner 3y ago> How can software engineers work on something like this? Sweet sweet advertisement money.