I genuinly wonder - what does go through the heads of those 100,000 very smart people that work at Google, many of them reading this forum, when they read a thread like this? Do they think 'oh it is HN again', do they discard this as irrelevant noise, do they know something that all the people posting here don't, do they still strongly believe in their mission, or do they get a gut-wrenching feeling that one day it may be all over? If you work at Google, please throw in your 2c.
I’ll be honest, mostly I just think that this is a very idealistic and naive reaction.
The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.
There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.
Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.
I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.
That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.
I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.
Don't know what you meant when you divided "people" into those two categories, but it's either truism or irrelevant.
Google is just a name, the point is it has a lot of power and even if a lot of people are "good" that doesn't mean they won't change, fuck up or be replaced at some point with a team that is less ethical. It's like it is with nukes. No one should have a weapon capable of such destruction.
I used to work there a couple years ago and honestly this seems a bit silly. People are at Google are pretty product focused.
Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.
Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.
Usually irrelevant noise, I'm a realist - the company I work for is big, there will be people who oppose what it does, how it operates, even it's very existance. Granted there are genuine reasons why you'd want to cut bigtech out your life, it isn't an ambition I share.
To answer another part of your question - I strongly believe in my mission, I consider what I do at Google helps people, that said I'm not deluded, I'm partly helping to sell ads, but that doesn't detract from my primary objectives or the beneficial impact of my work.
At a minimum, I'm sure the the big paycheck and prestige would be enough to keep people's heads down and working, so they can focus on family and other things in life after work.
Not working at Google, but I guess many Google employees share my perspective:
1. I find most criticism of Google on HN either wrong or overblown. To clarify this point, I suggest you name the 5 worst things that come to mind about Google; I'll be happy to explain how I feel about them.
There is one significant moral issue I see with Google: they like to collect and hoard massive amounts of user data, and they have a lot of users so the resulting centralization of data creates a big risk. Note that the issue I see is "only" a risk. I'm not even sure what the concrete bad scenarios are that would make Google specially bad when the risk is realized, but I'm sure they exist.
2. I think they do a lot of good, which far outweighs the issue mentioned in point 1. Here are the 5 best things that come to mind right now:
- They do amazing good for open source. I have seen Google criticized for "paying lip service to open source" or worst, which I find laughable. They have published 3 open source operating systems (Chromium OS, AOSP, Fuchsia). They have created a huge number of very useful open source libraries I have been using for personal and professional project, from big ones like Flutter and gRPC to small ones like libyuv.
- Related: they do a lot of good for open standards. Case in point: their work on open, royalty-free video codecs, which has been a boon for open source. I have seen Google called evil on HN for this, which again harms the credibility of their detractors in my eyes. Even for Google Chat / Hangout / whatever, for which they got criticized a lot, I think it's fair to say they tried harder than all the other big players to make it work with an open standard before giving up.
- They have been a driving force for a more secure Internet: early use of https for webmail, 2-factor authentication, lately ubiquitous https...
- They have been leaders in giving users access to all their data, with the Data Liberation Front / Takeout.
- They are the most transparent when it comes to the privacy policies and collected data (for example I get prompts to check the policy whenever I do something in Incognito mode). And relaed to the previous point: the My Activity page is awesome! It helps realize what they collect on me, and it makes the collected data actually useful to the user. For example I used it to find a place I knew I had visited on a given day, though I had forgotten the name and location.
does it ever bother you to be building the next skynet? no hate, but I wonder if people @ google really think about what kind of world and future they are building with their actions...
Nothing really goes thru their heads. They are rational, not emotional and strongly believing in missions is an emotional response. They are estimating probabilities of how this is going affect the market, Google and them personally, and plan their moves accordingly. I doubt they have any emotional attachment to the company, and given how much they are in demand, they would barely notice if the company folds one day. Same story for investors: those are even more detached as they make rational investments often in competing companies. So nobody really cares, as you see.
