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I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared and willing to sell everyone else out so they can pay their mortgage? Are there efforts internally to try and stop them from centralizing everything? What's going on here? I know only a couple of people who don't think Google is a real problem today.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
You can make an argument that Google is a threat, but it's certainly not obvious. It requires a complex analysis to explain why Google leaning on AMP is different than Oracle and IBM leaning on ANSI SQL.
sverige 7y ago
You might be amazed how easy it is to rationalize such concerns away for $250k (or more) per year. The first sentence of the internal response of a Googler will be, "You don't understand."
- ptconroy 7y ago
  . . . and the marketability and prestige of having Google on your resume.
  - dentemple 7y ago
    ANY sort of relevant engineering experience is good enough to get a great job in this industry. Going out of your way to work for a mega-corp like Google is unnecessary.
  - zelphirkalt 7y ago
    Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired. To work at Google has to be an ethical decision by now. If you are not at Google internally working against its evil tactics subverting it wherever you can and work against its taking over the web, then you are probably working for the evil machinery. For an entity spying on people wherever it gets the chance, seducing uneducated people into helping them to track as many people as they can online and shred their privacy, while trying to come up with "new standards" all the time, trying to make others jump on the bandwagon to unfree Internet. So in general, a person with ethical concerns should avoid working for Google, no matter how good the pay.
    - pgcj_poster 7y ago
      I largely agree, so I'd like to ask: do you hire people?
wysifnwyg 7y ago
They're people who value the rewards reaped by working there more. The prestige from working at a business like this can make positive impacts far beyond the period of your employment there. Heck, just getting to in person interviews are statistically rare and an indication of exceptional ability.
- dylan604 7y ago
  When the morals of a company with a supposed high value of prestige becomes bankrupt (morally), when does the prestige of working there diminish? Ever?
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    Well, essentially, once Google either: A) Runs out of funds B) Ruins its prestige by accepting lower quality people I personally wouldn't bet on B), however once ad money dries up, it's possible Google we know will just be a Yahoo of future era.
buboard 7y ago
> Google is a threat Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot. > engineers still sign up i A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.
matz1 7y ago
It should be obvious that everyone has their own interest, everyone ideals are different, maybe for google it make sense to increase centralization.
bsimpson 7y ago
I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it. I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa... --- Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too. The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too. That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  I'm sorry but you are being naive. > I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP). Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less. I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them. For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.
JoshMnem 7y ago
It's possible to get otherwise ethical people to write unethical code by telling them that "it's to make the Web faster" and "it's 'open'" (even if it isn't truly open technology). It also seems like parts of Google are starting to rot from group think.
m463 7y ago
I think you have to look deeper at the draws people have to work certain places. I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.
grillvogel 7y ago
i think most people just like money
oneepic 7y ago
It's very possible they genuinely think they're doing the right thing and helping the world. Meanwhile, many, many people outside of that bubble think they're doing the wrong thing. (If only they talked to their users... but I say the same thing about every tech co in general.) It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off. I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions. How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?
dentemple 7y ago
> I really wonder about the people who work at Google Engineers $till $ign up at Google in drove$ for many valid reason$, not the lea$t of it i$ the quality of their practice$$$$$$$$$$$$
BeetleB 7y ago
Disclaimer: I do not work at FAANG. Having said that, if you are sincere in trying to understand, consider the following: 1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy. (I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more). 2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this. From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace. The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades. I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees. Local effects matter more. Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.
carapace 7y ago
I worked there for about two years. Afterward I described it as, "It felt like I was kidnapped by aliens and have just returned to Earth." The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people. Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy: One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left. No one mentioned it. He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work. I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

You can make an argument that Google is a threat, but it's certainly not obvious. It requires a complex analysis to explain why Google leaning on AMP is different than Oracle and IBM leaning on ANSI SQL.

sverige 7y ago

You might be amazed how easy it is to rationalize such concerns away for $250k (or more) per year. The first sentence of the internal response of a Googler will be, "You don't understand."

ptconroy 7y ago
. . . and the marketability and prestige of having Google on your resume.
- dentemple 7y ago
  ANY sort of relevant engineering experience is good enough to get a great job in this industry. Going out of your way to work for a mega-corp like Google is unnecessary.
- zelphirkalt 7y ago
  Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired. To work at Google has to be an ethical decision by now. If you are not at Google internally working against its evil tactics subverting it wherever you can and work against its taking over the web, then you are probably working for the evil machinery. For an entity spying on people wherever it gets the chance, seducing uneducated people into helping them to track as many people as they can online and shred their privacy, while trying to come up with "new standards" all the time, trying to make others jump on the bandwagon to unfree Internet. So in general, a person with ethical concerns should avoid working for Google, no matter how good the pay.
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    I largely agree, so I'd like to ask: do you hire people?

wysifnwyg 7y ago

They're people who value the rewards reaped by working there more. The prestige from working at a business like this can make positive impacts far beyond the period of your employment there. Heck, just getting to in person interviews are statistically rare and an indication of exceptional ability.

dylan604 7y ago
When the morals of a company with a supposed high value of prestige becomes bankrupt (morally), when does the prestige of working there diminish? Ever?
- Ygg2 7y ago
  Well, essentially, once Google either: A) Runs out of funds B) Ruins its prestige by accepting lower quality people I personally wouldn't bet on B), however once ad money dries up, it's possible Google we know will just be a Yahoo of future era.

buboard 7y ago

> Google is a threat Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot. > engineers still sign up i A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.

matz1 7y ago

It should be obvious that everyone has their own interest, everyone ideals are different, maybe for google it make sense to increase centralization.

bsimpson 7y ago

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it. I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/ https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa... --- Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too. The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too. That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.

malvosenior 7y ago
I'm sorry but you are being naive. > I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP). Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less. I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them. For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.

JoshMnem 7y ago

It's possible to get otherwise ethical people to write unethical code by telling them that "it's to make the Web faster" and "it's 'open'" (even if it isn't truly open technology). It also seems like parts of Google are starting to rot from group think.

m463 7y ago

I think you have to look deeper at the draws people have to work certain places. I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.

grillvogel 7y ago

i think most people just like money

oneepic 7y ago

It's very possible they genuinely think they're doing the right thing and helping the world. Meanwhile, many, many people outside of that bubble think they're doing the wrong thing. (If only they talked to their users... but I say the same thing about every tech co in general.) It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off. I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions. How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?

dentemple 7y ago

> I really wonder about the people who work at Google Engineers $till $ign up at Google in drove$ for many valid reason$, not the lea$t of it i$ the quality of their practice$$$$$$$$$$$$

BeetleB 7y ago

Disclaimer: I do not work at FAANG. Having said that, if you are sincere in trying to understand, consider the following: 1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy. (I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more). 2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this. From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace. The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades. I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees. Local effects matter more. Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.

carapace 7y ago

I worked there for about two years. Afterward I described it as, "It felt like I was kidnapped by aliens and have just returned to Earth." The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people. Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy: One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left. No one mentioned it. He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work. I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.