4 ms·

Although there were some rough areas, Google has been considered to have pretty advanced software engineering for 20 years or more. There was plenty for a new e

Although there were some rough areas, Google has been considered to have pretty advanced software engineering for 20 years or more. There was plenty for a new engineer to boggle at even then. On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in general (rather than specific companies like Microsoft).

ethbr1 2y ago
> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.
- zrobotics 2y ago
  Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products. Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    > I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion. Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)
    - skybrian 2y ago
      I don't think people understand what manifest v3 is trying to solve. It's a good example of how a worthwhile effort to make the Internet less terrible can be misinterpreted.
      - jorams 2y ago
        Manifest v3 is an effort to make a browser slightly better at its core feature, that it is importantly already fine at, at the cost of making it worse at serving the user. The internet is increasingly user-hostile, and manifest v3 makes it harder to fight back.
        skybrian 2y ago
        Ironically the stricter permissions are because browser extensions sometimes have crap security and the Internet is a hostile place. The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.
        justinclift 2y ago
        How co-incidental that Google chose a model that somehow reduces one of their significant revenue risks, that of ad blockers. Clearly there was no other way... /s
      - 2y ago
tinco 2y ago
No, that culture started turning against big tech when Microsoft and Oracle started very brazenly abusing their market domination in the late 90s. The culture turned on Google around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause (note the dropping of that clause was not the cause, just one of the symptoms).
- ben_w 2y ago
  Back in the 90s, at least in the UK, it wasn't called "big tech"; and it wasn't a major part of our direct culture as a family home might have one personal computer if they were well off but it wasn't all that important. I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause When did that happen? It's still there.
  - pfsalter 2y ago
    Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well [1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Again, the phrase was not dropped. You might notice that your link is titled "Google removes nearly all mentions of don't be evil from its code of conduct". (By which they mean 3 mentions.) But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.

ethbr1 2y ago

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

zrobotics 2y ago
Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products. Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion. Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)
  - skybrian 2y ago
    I don't think people understand what manifest v3 is trying to solve. It's a good example of how a worthwhile effort to make the Internet less terrible can be misinterpreted.
    - jorams 2y ago
      Manifest v3 is an effort to make a browser slightly better at its core feature, that it is importantly already fine at, at the cost of making it worse at serving the user. The internet is increasingly user-hostile, and manifest v3 makes it harder to fight back.
      - skybrian 2y ago
        Ironically the stricter permissions are because browser extensions sometimes have crap security and the Internet is a hostile place. The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.
        justinclift 2y ago
        How co-incidental that Google chose a model that somehow reduces one of their significant revenue risks, that of ad blockers. Clearly there was no other way... /s
    - 2y ago

tinco 2y ago

No, that culture started turning against big tech when Microsoft and Oracle started very brazenly abusing their market domination in the late 90s. The culture turned on Google around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause (note the dropping of that clause was not the cause, just one of the symptoms).

ben_w 2y ago
Back in the 90s, at least in the UK, it wasn't called "big tech"; and it wasn't a major part of our direct culture as a family home might have one personal computer if they were well off but it wasn't all that important. I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause When did that happen? It's still there.
- pfsalter 2y ago
  Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well [1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Again, the phrase was not dropped. You might notice that your link is titled "Google removes nearly all mentions of don't be evil from its code of conduct". (By which they mean 3 mentions.) But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.