6 ms·

As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this

As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this. It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.

liveoneggs 3y ago
Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.
- pkasting 3y ago
  Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms. Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be. If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice. Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
  - liveoneggs 3y ago
    the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
    - pkasting 3y ago
      Having been in the room on a number of these occasions, a don't think this description is remotely accurate.
      - liveoneggs 3y ago
        What's the mood in the room when- "I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!" or "I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!" or "Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?" Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
        pkasting 3y ago
        I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
        3y ago
stephenr 3y ago
> genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck. Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733
- surajrmal 3y ago
  Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it's silly to paint it that way. It's not simple about intent, but premature judgment.
  - stephenr 3y ago
    Conversely it feels like Google could say "hey we've found a cure for cancer, we just transplant the brain into a healthy 'donor' body" and Google apologists would insist that there's no possible way that could ever be misused.
jorvi 3y ago
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. This sentence is an oxymoron. How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
- akprasad 3y ago
  > How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"? I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It's institutional misalignment.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"? Only the first was a description of the work, the other was a description of the culture to which those doing the work are subjected to from above.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation to the point of maliciousness.
spdif899 3y ago
I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here. From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible. The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted. Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism
- debatem1 3y ago
  The point being made is exactly that your inference about Google's motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    "Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a quote.
    - debatem1 3y ago
      The inference you made is that Google actually was evil all along.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        I haven't made any inference at all. You seem to be telling the GP that they made a (common) mistake in thinking that early Google had non-evil motives.
        debatem1 3y ago
        Well, given that you aren't who I thought I was talking with at least one of us is confused, but I suspect both of us are now. The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in their opinion Google had always been evil and only the timescales had changed. My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to believe otherwise.
JohnFen 3y ago
> the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives. This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.
- darig 3y ago
  [dead]
- fgsfds028374 3y ago
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- kibwen 3y ago
  Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run by its executives, not by its engineers. We don't have the luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to ultramegacorporations.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
piva00 3y ago
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious. How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore. Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.
trout11 3y ago
Her linkedin profile is 'winner' if it helps provide any backstory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/
chubot 3y ago
What projects you would you say the public has been unfairly/viciously critical of the motives of? I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion. For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one. --- I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for. The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page. Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database. A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-william-tong-392-million-settlement/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w... Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted? I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now. There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct. If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly. That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair. (There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.) Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything. --- When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 ) But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall. Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top. Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc. There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see anyone argue otherwise. What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly. In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.
vasilipupkin 3y ago
is this criticism reasonable though? Look at Waymo, for example. Investing in that is very visionary. I mean, someone has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right? Or, what about Bard? Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat gpt 4, but it's really at worst number 2 in the most exciting current field?
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
I think what's been said, and the description of the general ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on. Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner and generally less technically capable since 2018.
ThrowawayB7 3y ago
> "It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..." It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it. That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.
eh_why_not 3y ago
> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term... If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"? Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?

liveoneggs 3y ago

Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.

pkasting 3y ago
Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms. Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be. If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice. Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
  - pkasting 3y ago
    Having been in the room on a number of these occasions, a don't think this description is remotely accurate.
    - liveoneggs 3y ago
      What's the mood in the room when- "I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!" or "I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!" or "Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?" Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
      - pkasting 3y ago
        I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
        3y ago

stephenr 3y ago

> genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck. Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733

surajrmal 3y ago
Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it's silly to paint it that way. It's not simple about intent, but premature judgment.
- stephenr 3y ago
  Conversely it feels like Google could say "hey we've found a cure for cancer, we just transplant the brain into a healthy 'donor' body" and Google apologists would insist that there's no possible way that could ever be misused.

jorvi 3y ago

akprasad 3y ago
> How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"? I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It's institutional misalignment.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"? Only the first was a description of the work, the other was a description of the culture to which those doing the work are subjected to from above.
LargeTomato 3y ago
It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation to the point of maliciousness.

spdif899 3y ago

I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here. From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible. The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted. Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism

debatem1 3y ago
The point being made is exactly that your inference about Google's motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  "Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a quote.
  - debatem1 3y ago
    The inference you made is that Google actually was evil all along.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      I haven't made any inference at all. You seem to be telling the GP that they made a (common) mistake in thinking that early Google had non-evil motives.
      - debatem1 3y ago
        Well, given that you aren't who I thought I was talking with at least one of us is confused, but I suspect both of us are now. The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in their opinion Google had always been evil and only the timescales had changed. My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to believe otherwise.

JohnFen 3y ago

> the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives. This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.

darig 3y ago
[dead]
fgsfds028374 3y ago
[dead]
kibwen 3y ago
Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run by its executives, not by its engineers. We don't have the luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to ultramegacorporations.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

piva00 3y ago

> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious. How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore. Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.

trout11 3y ago

Her linkedin profile is 'winner' if it helps provide any backstory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/

chubot 3y ago

What projects you would you say the public has been unfairly/viciously critical of the motives of? I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion. For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one. --- I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for. The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page. Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database. A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-william-tong-392-million-settlement/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w... Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted? I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now. There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct. If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly. That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair. (There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.) Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything. --- When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 ) But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall. Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top. Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc. There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see anyone argue otherwise. What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly. In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.

vasilipupkin 3y ago

is this criticism reasonable though? Look at Waymo, for example. Investing in that is very visionary. I mean, someone has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right? Or, what about Bard? Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat gpt 4, but it's really at worst number 2 in the most exciting current field?

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

I think what's been said, and the description of the general ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on. Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner and generally less technically capable since 2018.

ThrowawayB7 3y ago

> "It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..." It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it. That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.

eh_why_not 3y ago

> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term... If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"? Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?