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People working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the

People working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.

sebleon 9y ago
They're not ignorant. They either don't care, or don't see source of revenue as the defining quality of their work.
- tendo6 9y ago
  I used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company line. It was after all delivered by nice respectable people and we were getting paid well. Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem. Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island. Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.
  - dhcode 9y ago
    > Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth. One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy
    - sdoering 9y ago
      Great link. Reminded me of the - in German - Concept of the 'Räterepublik'. Often called Soviet System without actually referring to the real Soviet State. Sadly the English Wikipedia isn't that great on this topic. But it actually describes the same concept.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Another real problem is the willful ignorance of all things political. As if there isn't a political dimension to almost everything we do. Engineers as a rule have a lot of leverage, small changes in what we make have huge consequences in the real world and a bit of understanding about how the two are coupled would go a long way towards making this a better world. It would also at times require engineers to take a stand and I suspect that that is what drives the willful ignorance. After all it is much easier to do something inherently bad if you can pretend there are no real world consequences.
    - akavel 9y ago
      Um, could you give some specific/concrete examples of what you mean, when speaking of this leverage? I honestly have no slightest idea of what you may have in your mind here, and am totally curious - at least as long as we're talking, I assume, about legit/ethical/morally acceptable actions? (Also please note I'm not in US, though I presume it's not relevant to this discussion.)
      - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        Web developers of today are like the early printing press owners/operators.
      - drvdevd 9y ago
        I would say it depends on your position in your place of work, but there are multiple examples of this. I prefer historical ones, say for example NANP (the North American Numbering Plan). I'm not sure what country you're in, but here, these 10 digit numbers and their various prefixes (NPAs AKA "area codes") are literally burned into the consciousness of most citizens, without them even realizing it. Additionally, all modern cellular services here are still following it in some sense or other, making it an example of highly entrenched technical debt. I'm pretty sure that the design of this system bled heavily into most other countries' telephone networks as well. A small number of engineers probably drew up this plan on a chalkboard in the 1940s at AT&T, without a clue as to the magnitude of future ramifications.
      - dmos62 9y ago
- longesthunt 9y ago
  It is more than the source of revenue. For starters, it is the gathering of everyone's private conversations. They are working at an exceptionally disturbing place. I imagine they just convince themselves they are doing good. Humans easily convince themselves of things that benefit them.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Or, like me, they just don't find the idea of making money from advertisements to be unethical in the slightest. (To be clear, I don't work for either Facebook or Google.)
  - Gustomaximus 9y ago
    I dont get the hate on standard advertisements. I'd prefer to be targeted with ads relevant to me like camping gear rather than things irrelevant like kids toys. As long as we avoid physiological tricks like the flashing of frames you can't consciously see type thing (I know that is questionable to having an effect) its a good thing. I get shown products/services I might like to buy, in return I get free emails, news and videos etc. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      I would prefer to be targeted with ads relevant to me but I have yet to see that happen. The closest I've seen to that goal is seeing Amazon ads for stuff I just bought.
      - Gustomaximus 9y ago
        A marketer that knows their business will place exclusions via order confirmation pages but people often seem to forgo this. Such a waste of budget!
AznHisoka 9y ago
Yep its cognitive dissonance. We can easily believe anything if it makes us feel better about ourselves.
danellis 9y ago
Putting Facebook aside, how can you possibly not think Google is doing important things?
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  If Google wasn't there, other companies would be doing those things. Arguably, I think most of Google's competitors, doing those things as well, have more ethical business models. I also think the amount of important things Google is doing has decreasing drastically. Chrome is the last major completely-in-house product I recall Google has released, that wasn't sourced from an acquisition. (That isn't to say acquisitions don't count for anything, but clearly they were able to develop their special sauce outside of Google, so Google is not required to do that thing.)
- ben_jones 9y ago
  I don't think that point can be contested. But I do think Google is hoarding information in an irresponsible way. The bottom line is they do not have ultimate control of that data, the government does. Maybe not today but look what happened in Turkey, what is the integrity of every good meaning tech company in Turkey? There is not much you can do to protect your customers data when tanks roll up at the door. We might not use tanks in the US like that but we certainly have men in suits.
  - pas 9y ago
    Okay, let's look at the alternative, let's assume groups of 10-20 people run a "private" server for themselves and so on. Then the government can easily target those, just go and hack, or confiscate the server that has the stuff of key opposition people. And no one will even know. Sure, those people, that 10 people will. But that's it. No one else will notice. Yes, a newspaper might write about it, and what? Now, if Gmail disappears, people notice. And Google has a very competent security team. Small groups don't and won't.
    - ben_jones 9y ago
      So you're arguing Google is better then the alternative smaller search provider that would likely exist in its absence? If so I agree with you. My point is in support of the idea that engineers at Facebook and Google have a false sense of altruism towards their employer. I wanted to dispute the idea that Google's work is so important that they are excused of the largest role they play in our society: as data miners.
settsu 9y ago
Money's a helluva drug.
droopyEyelids 9y ago
I don't work at either company but I MUST disagree. I can't imagine something that has had the positive impact on my education and entertainment like google. Take youtube alone- if google did nothing else, they've enabled a infinite compendium of how-tos on almost every topic imaginable to everyone on the planet, free of charge. That is _amazing_.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Bear in mind, Google did not develop YouTube, and YouTube was incredibly popular long before Google got involved. Google purchased YouTube. Their own video posting service, Google Video, is barely remembered today.
  - deelowe 9y ago
    How quickly we forget... Youtube would have gone bankrupt if Google hadn't purchased them. The company was derided for the purchase and YT bled money for several years before it was made profitable. Maybe someone else would have come along and built the copyright detection algorithms, advertising platform, edge caching solutions, and so on, but the list of companies that could possibly do that was incredibly short at the time.
mseebach 9y ago
People working at New York Times and Washington Post lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" news company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.
sidcool 9y ago
Barring this incident, is it wrong to earn revenue from advertisements?
danderino 9y ago
Advertisements run the entire modern industry.

sebleon 9y ago

They're not ignorant. They either don't care, or don't see source of revenue as the defining quality of their work.

tendo6 9y ago
I used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company line. It was after all delivered by nice respectable people and we were getting paid well. Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem. Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island. Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.
- dhcode 9y ago
  > Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth. One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy
  - sdoering 9y ago
    Great link. Reminded me of the - in German - Concept of the 'Räterepublik'. Often called Soviet System without actually referring to the real Soviet State. Sadly the English Wikipedia isn't that great on this topic. But it actually describes the same concept.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Another real problem is the willful ignorance of all things political. As if there isn't a political dimension to almost everything we do. Engineers as a rule have a lot of leverage, small changes in what we make have huge consequences in the real world and a bit of understanding about how the two are coupled would go a long way towards making this a better world. It would also at times require engineers to take a stand and I suspect that that is what drives the willful ignorance. After all it is much easier to do something inherently bad if you can pretend there are no real world consequences.
  - akavel 9y ago
    Um, could you give some specific/concrete examples of what you mean, when speaking of this leverage? I honestly have no slightest idea of what you may have in your mind here, and am totally curious - at least as long as we're talking, I assume, about legit/ethical/morally acceptable actions? (Also please note I'm not in US, though I presume it's not relevant to this discussion.)
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      Web developers of today are like the early printing press owners/operators.
    - drvdevd 9y ago
      I would say it depends on your position in your place of work, but there are multiple examples of this. I prefer historical ones, say for example NANP (the North American Numbering Plan). I'm not sure what country you're in, but here, these 10 digit numbers and their various prefixes (NPAs AKA "area codes") are literally burned into the consciousness of most citizens, without them even realizing it. Additionally, all modern cellular services here are still following it in some sense or other, making it an example of highly entrenched technical debt. I'm pretty sure that the design of this system bled heavily into most other countries' telephone networks as well. A small number of engineers probably drew up this plan on a chalkboard in the 1940s at AT&T, without a clue as to the magnitude of future ramifications.
    - dmos62 9y ago
longesthunt 9y ago
It is more than the source of revenue. For starters, it is the gathering of everyone's private conversations. They are working at an exceptionally disturbing place. I imagine they just convince themselves they are doing good. Humans easily convince themselves of things that benefit them.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
Ajedi32 9y ago
Or, like me, they just don't find the idea of making money from advertisements to be unethical in the slightest. (To be clear, I don't work for either Facebook or Google.)
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  I dont get the hate on standard advertisements. I'd prefer to be targeted with ads relevant to me like camping gear rather than things irrelevant like kids toys. As long as we avoid physiological tricks like the flashing of frames you can't consciously see type thing (I know that is questionable to having an effect) its a good thing. I get shown products/services I might like to buy, in return I get free emails, news and videos etc. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    I would prefer to be targeted with ads relevant to me but I have yet to see that happen. The closest I've seen to that goal is seeing Amazon ads for stuff I just bought.
    - Gustomaximus 9y ago
      A marketer that knows their business will place exclusions via order confirmation pages but people often seem to forgo this. Such a waste of budget!

AznHisoka 9y ago

Yep its cognitive dissonance. We can easily believe anything if it makes us feel better about ourselves.

danellis 9y ago

Putting Facebook aside, how can you possibly not think Google is doing important things?

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
If Google wasn't there, other companies would be doing those things. Arguably, I think most of Google's competitors, doing those things as well, have more ethical business models. I also think the amount of important things Google is doing has decreasing drastically. Chrome is the last major completely-in-house product I recall Google has released, that wasn't sourced from an acquisition. (That isn't to say acquisitions don't count for anything, but clearly they were able to develop their special sauce outside of Google, so Google is not required to do that thing.)
ben_jones 9y ago
I don't think that point can be contested. But I do think Google is hoarding information in an irresponsible way. The bottom line is they do not have ultimate control of that data, the government does. Maybe not today but look what happened in Turkey, what is the integrity of every good meaning tech company in Turkey? There is not much you can do to protect your customers data when tanks roll up at the door. We might not use tanks in the US like that but we certainly have men in suits.
- pas 9y ago
  Okay, let's look at the alternative, let's assume groups of 10-20 people run a "private" server for themselves and so on. Then the government can easily target those, just go and hack, or confiscate the server that has the stuff of key opposition people. And no one will even know. Sure, those people, that 10 people will. But that's it. No one else will notice. Yes, a newspaper might write about it, and what? Now, if Gmail disappears, people notice. And Google has a very competent security team. Small groups don't and won't.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    So you're arguing Google is better then the alternative smaller search provider that would likely exist in its absence? If so I agree with you. My point is in support of the idea that engineers at Facebook and Google have a false sense of altruism towards their employer. I wanted to dispute the idea that Google's work is so important that they are excused of the largest role they play in our society: as data miners.

settsu 9y ago

Money's a helluva drug.

droopyEyelids 9y ago

I don't work at either company but I MUST disagree. I can't imagine something that has had the positive impact on my education and entertainment like google. Take youtube alone- if google did nothing else, they've enabled a infinite compendium of how-tos on almost every topic imaginable to everyone on the planet, free of charge. That is _amazing_.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Bear in mind, Google did not develop YouTube, and YouTube was incredibly popular long before Google got involved. Google purchased YouTube. Their own video posting service, Google Video, is barely remembered today.
- deelowe 9y ago
  How quickly we forget... Youtube would have gone bankrupt if Google hadn't purchased them. The company was derided for the purchase and YT bled money for several years before it was made profitable. Maybe someone else would have come along and built the copyright detection algorithms, advertising platform, edge caching solutions, and so on, but the list of companies that could possibly do that was incredibly short at the time.

mseebach 9y ago

People working at New York Times and Washington Post lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" news company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.

sidcool 9y ago

Barring this incident, is it wrong to earn revenue from advertisements?

danderino 9y ago

Advertisements run the entire modern industry.