And this one doesn't even link to the Medium article, it's some other site that "sources" from it and doesn't even show the author's name. What's the point of write.as?
write.as can be used as a blog platform, or be used to write one-off, anonymous pieces of text.
In this case, I think OP was trying to improve the readability of the original article by using write.as as opposed to linking directly to Medium (which is notorious for its intrusiveness).
I think outline is better suited for these purposes, though, I typically just use Pocket or Firefox's built-in readability feature: https://outline.com/Xbykpn
I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press.
People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first two controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)
> "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money"
Back in 2010 there were many other opportunities to grow the company. The bigger you get the harder it is to grow.
Playing ball with China becomes one of the easier ways to keep growing once you reach a certain size. The NBA did the same thing after they saturated the US market.
I'm sure many execs have performance incentives / stock options that caused the shift in policy.
The interesting thing about the NBA growing into China was that not only were they playing ball with China but went a step further and we're playing ball _in_ China.
Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.
People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
While it's obvious that some information is numerically greater than no information, it's not obvious that a censored flow of information makes anyone's life better than the alternatives.
When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the ball is in the citizens' court as to whether they want to advocate for a reform of that censorship.
When censorship is selective (e.g. "You can read all of Wikipedia, except for whichever articles the government doesn't currently like this week/year"), citizens are mostly going to be unaware of what they're missing and how selective their worldview might actually be. This is very insidious, stealthy, and difficult for a citizenry to be aware of and politically revolt against, especially given there will commonly be no transparency or oversight as to the banned-topic list at any given moment.
Personally, one of my stronger meta-values is that any state which stands on the side of forcibly hiding information from its citizens is on the wrong side of history and ethics. If you can only defend your government to its citizens by lying to them, there's clearly something wrong with what you're doing.
But such actions may end up punishing/restricting the individual citizens than the particular states.
Also I don't think that posturing that may lead up to another Cold War is good for the world. Perhaps there can be greater understanding between peoples through a process of engagement, rather than standing-off.
There is a famous commencement speech by Solzentzyn at Harvard, that laments why the West, esp Americans haven't shown understanding of other cultures, and seem to think and act from a position of moral superiority, whose basis is not so sound as they think.
States are generally set up in such a way that it's very difficult/impossible to harm the authorities without also also harming a lot of other people.
Personally, I think Google is in an awkward position here. The Wikipedia can take a solid and principled stance because it has clear and transparent policy on what it censors (basically anything original, not NPOV, and not of general interest). The Wikipedia can do this, because it's edited by humans, and while humans are pretty bad at agreeing at these things, they're way better at it than computers.
Basically, Google wants to filter its results, but if it doesn't let the Chinese government control the filter in China, it runs the risk of appearing to be western propaganda.
There is an important distinction between Chinese culture and the policies of its unelected government. Since they are unelected, the policies of the CCP don't always represent the will of the people or Chinese culture.
When a government is unelected, it needs to show its legitimacy through strength. This means censoring anything that would make it look weak. Censorship is simply a political tool by the CCP, not a cultural practice that deserves respect.
In fact, you could argue that political censorship is the actual enemy of Chinese culture. Historically, China has had a rich history of political theory and thought, but now any views that go against the party line are repressed.
Back when I lived in China, I used to think that having Google in China even with censorship was better than not having Google at all. But, this was also because back then, they did have a notice saying that some of the results had been censored. Back then, it felt to me to be an interesting compromise.
What does scare me though, is that by accepting censorship, it normalizes it and weakens the position of any company protesting against it even in countries that traditionally are more pro-human rights like European countries and the US. So it is a complex question...
Of course. It's condescending to think otherwise, you can't pretend youtube or twitter doesn't exist (especially with a substantial portion who use VPN to evade censorship anyways), it's just accepted as a fact of life.
Really? China's a huge country with huge differences in income and education. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are some people who aren't aware of the censorship or others even outside of the government that feel like it's a good policy. Mainly curious how small that population is.
That was the moral of The Man in the High Castle when it was written -- that every totalitarian state's wet dream is that a new generation can be enculturated to not believe alternatives are possible.
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.
What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns.
> I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?
> Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns
Not GP, but that seems a bit unfair. Utilitarianism in various flavours is a popular ethical framework; for those who subscribe to it, ethical concerns are properly calibrated and measured in utility.
I suspect your argument (especially the SA comparison) would be better expressed as a tension between long- and short-term utility, but don't want to put words into your mouth.
> What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns.
Some would argue that denying people the ability to access information easily is unethically harming them. It preserves your own privilege instead of extending it to the less well off.
There are real ethical questions here that can be weighed. It's perhaps not quite as simple for some people as money on one side and every single possible ethical factor on the other.
"Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?"
Yes their lives are much better, just like the Zimbabweans.
It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it.
The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese user data.
Just a bit of a side note, but I was in China last fall, and using Bing there were many search results that you could not click through. However the few sentence description below the search link often had information that would be censored elsewhere.
It's true that users wouldn't be able to go to censored sites. But then they'd know that the highest-ranking site for their search was censored and might ask why, which seems like a net positive.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that is still a terrible user experience, which is why Microsoft and every other search engine in China do not attempt to do that.
That's why this is a red herring. The problem you want to solve is Chinese citizen awareness when Google is just trying to provide the information that's available.
My strong objection to this is actually the precedent it sets for non-Chinese governments, not for the Chinese people. Today, it’s China, tomorrow it’s a different government watchdog in every country.
And before you ask, there were large technical and ethical differences in my opinion with the censorship of nazi results in germnny vs the censorship that China demands- for one thing, the Chinese government needed real-time control and could have been involved in the process of putting the results together. That kind of product compromise isn’t anything I want to work on personally. I’m not going to work on something that lies in real time to people about the quality of the air they are breathing, using the google brand, for example.
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better?
I don't think so. If Chinese people want to use Google, then they have to use a VPN. And if Chinese people use a VPN, their search results won't be censored.
If Google releases a censored search engine in China, then people will have less incentive to access an uncensored one.
The problem is that it is becoming harder and harder to just use a VPN to the point where a lot of people no longer bother. There's value in information being easily accessible
That's only one concern. Another concern is not normalizing such policies to propagate back over here. When you as a decisionmaker make excuses as to why it's okay to cooperate with information suppression in another country, then there are no principles stopping you from doing the same things back home--just precedent and personal incentives.
For a cartoonish example let's say Adolf Hitler approaches you to buy large quantities of morphine as a substitute for Zyklon B. Surely this is an improvement for the victims of extermination over their current situation, but you're still participating in the Holocaust.
I think utilitarianism has a big problem with myopia. It's extremely hard to do a real global calculation for outcomes so faithful practitioners inevitably end up following local gradients. I think a solid ethical equilibrium requires a certain amount of deontology, a framework of things that We Do Not Do.
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst.
Sometimes I think this is a result of information explosion. People gets overwhelmed by the amount of available information, so as a self-protection mechanism, they subscribe to the simplest binary thought process.
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst.
And other people might think that since it adds a tiny positive in one area that it can't possible add a huge negative in another area--like normalizing censorship for profit (whoops, the horse already left that barn) and massively increasing the surveillance capabilities of a murderous oppressive regime. You're engaging in simplistic thinking too.
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? ... I think the answer is obvious.
I think the answer is obvious, but in the opposite sense you imply. Google acts as a window into the universe. Not the only one, of course. But if you have a window into the universe that lies to you about the universe (and of course, assuring you that I will tell you everything that is important, and then omitting certain important things, is lying), it is best for you to be without it, and rely on whatever windows you have left.
It won't improve the flow of information. It'll improve the flow of a huge amount of disinformation and help the Chinese government direct it more efficiently, while being able to claim nothing is censored because "See? Google is working now!".
Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.
> Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.
It takes years in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don't come up often that they may not even realize.
For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embass.... The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn't fit the narrative so it wasn't reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?
I don't understand this philosophy of "if only they could change their minds"
The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people?
Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can/would mesh well in Chinese society.
I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
I live and work in mainland China, and the government here pisses me off. Yeah, i am a foreigner, but this is my home. I pay taxes here. I deserve to have my voice heard. The Chinese government is trash.
Because i am a foreigner the worst that could happen from me voicing such an opinion is the government doesn't renew my work visa. For Han, it could affect their social credit rating. For ethnic minorities it could land them or their families in "reeducation camps".
That's the trick of authoritarian regimes. If you just shut up and do whatever the government says, they won't bother you (unless you are rich enough to bother extorting). But if you make a noise, you are screwed. That's the reason why everyone you talk to is allegedly happy with the regime. It's not in their interests to be anything else.
I travel to mainland China very frequently for my company, however I don't pay taxes there so maybe my opinion should be weighed a little differently.
The people I talk generally genuinely are really happy with the regime though. People respect the hell out of Xi, and faith in the central government combined with the Maoist nationalism that still prevails as the dominant form of identity for most mainland Chinese you see the average citizen that really has no criticisms of the government.
I've had conversations with Chinese people before about the American bipartisan system and free speech vs the Chinese counterparts and usually they come to this conclusion: "Americas system works for America, Chinas system works for China. If people could say whatever they want here there would be much more trouble, if there were multiple competing political parties they would be at each others throats in a way that makes Americas current polarization look like a beautiful political climate".
Let what works for China continue to work for China, and what works for us continue to work for us. People, cultures, and ideas are different depending on where and how you were raised. The ideas that made the west great don't necessarily work for everyone.
I am not sure what class of people you tend to speak to when you visit, but in my experience the mindset you are describing is something mostly held by a subset of upper middle class Chinese who have enjoyed prosperity under Xi and don't want to rock the boat.
While living here i have spoken to plenty of people who do not parrot the party line. Even in the middle class there are a lot who don't like it when the government censors their shows or deletes well-loved memes. In fact, that is one of the more common grievances i've heard from the middle class here. This is a group of people who can comfortably afford VPN, but they'd still prefer not to have to.
In the working class people seem less concerned about censorship as a moral issue, but it still negatively impacts their lives. There is a real resentment of the corruption that is rife in the party and amongst the elites. Censorship means the working class can't talk about it outside the dinner table and they can't mobilize. Rural people get a raw deal on education and they know it. The poor are upset about rising income inequality and gentrification.
Migrant workers in many larger cities still don't get hukou (residence), so they cannot get healthcare, their kids can't attend public schools, they do not qualify for public housing and so on. Their lives are precarious. Entire neighborhoods can be marked for demolition and there is no avenue for protest because the tenants don't count as residents anyway.
Meanwhile the government constantly crack down on the lower class - shutting down food stalls, kicking out street vendors, fining delivery drivers and so on. I can assure you that people on the receiving end of this aren't as thrilled with the regime as the ones who can afford an iPhone and an apartment in a gated community.
Still, let's address the "Chinese exceptionalism" argument. The idea that China needs socialism "with Chinese characteristics" is CPC propaganda, not some innate truth. It can be debunked simply by looking across the strait at Taiwan, where there is a majority (Han) Chinese country that operates perfectly fine with a democracy and no censorship. For sure, the whole island has less people in it than Shanghai, but the proof is there: Chinese people can thrive in a free state. Tens of millions of ethnic Chinese live in democratic countries all over the world and don't pine for the days of living under authoritarianism.
There is no doubt that East Asian culture is different to western culture, but it's not that much different. People still like to be able to talk about things they care about, read about what's actually happening in their neighborhood, and express grievances when they see injustice. Although most Chinese tolerate the current situation, i think it's misleading to imply that there is full-throated support of the status quo. My personal feeling is people would be very pleased if the government were to become more transparent and less authoritarian.
While the details are different, it's interesting how many of these criticisms can be applied to the United States as well.
The government here also has significant problems with management of immigration and with ownership of neighborhoods; the words used are different, Americans call it "gentrification," but the effect is the same when an entire population in a city is displaced from the place they live because they cannot afford the housing. Cities also kick out street vendors, fine delivery drivers, and so on via the network of laws around zoning, habitation, and usage. And the poor in the US are also concerned about rising income inequality and gentrification.
I think I'm inclined to agree that the cultures are not that much different. And many Americans accept or advocate for this status quo also.
This is exactly my feeling after having lived here a few years. There are a small number of true believers who legitimately believe the CPC propaganda, but i think a far greater proportion of society is more like those who in the west consider themselves to be centrists or "small-c conservatives". That is, people who prefer not to rock the boat, stay out of politics, keep things going how they are etc. Usually those are people who already have an okay (if not great) life, so i can see their motivation for not advocating for change.
> Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs?
Nobody is advocating overthrowing Xi Jinping. But if you're in America, benefiting from the freedoms afforded to Americans (and their fruits), it's fair to ask you don't undermine those values at home or abroad.
> ...I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well.
The topic of this subthread is not the attitudes of mainland Chinese, it's the attitudes of mainland Chinese who have immigrated to work at Google for economic reasons. I have friends who came from mainland China, and have talked to them about how their attitudes have changed over time. They don't all stay fixed in the officially-sanctioned mainland mindset.
> Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
So you're saying if someone is happy with something at least in part because they've been lied to, it's wrong for someone to interfere with their attitudes by trying to tell them the truth?
I find China's productivity impressive. We can observe that wealth is increasing for a big part of the population and that is a good thing!
Still the test for me is how a society treats its weakest members. And in China, one is severely restricted to even talk about its weakest members! That hampers everybody in knowing how they're doing. In light of the information we outsiders have, the censorship is hurting these people. I'm not willing to accept this oppression as a matter Chinese citizens are best equipped to decide when they are not allowed to learn the facts.
They moved for primarily financial reasons. When your apolitical and not actively discriminated against, it would be hard to leave china for 'political' reasons when your primary reason is financial.
> Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants.
Status seeking. Google has become the safe, secure job for people with low risk tolerance. That personality has predictable effects in any bureaucracy.
To be more generous, they hire fantastically bright people, but they do not give candidates an ethics quiz, nor would it even be possible to construct a non-gameable filter.
This likely goes for any company that grows from small to giant: early on, you hire people you know and trust, or that your (trustworthy) employees know and trust. But when you're deluged with applicants, you hire people who can solve leetcode hards in 30 minutes.
> who don't give a damn about human rights in China
I don't think this is limited to China. Google has no qualms surveilling on behalf of the US government either.
But it's not really a matter of ethical sense. Google is big enough that everyone has a bone to pick with something Google does. Conversely, people can find a way to justify anything. So when anything you do is ethically wrong (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Wrong), and anything you do is also ethically justifiable (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Right), ethics isn't really how you make decisions anymore. It's just a matter of how much money will we make, will we get sued, and who's gonna manage PR.
Agreed and it's what I've been saying all along. This is what you get when your hiring is based solely on puzzles and algorithms. In all of the engineering interviews I've undertaken in the Bay Area in the last 10 years (a LOT), none focused on any aspect other than raw technical skill. Very little if any on soft skills, communication, ethics, etc. What happens when these guys get promoted into higher leadership roles over the years, you get a slow poisoning of company values and culture because many of these people don't know about anything other than coding.
I find it very strange in the logic of these Google employees. A censored Google in China will still be miles better than the next alternative, Baidu. Wouldn't it be true that a better search engine will keep people better informed, for which people will have better chance of improving their lives, even their political systems?
And now Google employees, with their all righteousness, are claiming that Chinese people don't deserve a much better product, because they need to suffer for these employees' political ideal? If this is not hypocrisy, I don't know what is.
Google's annual diversity report shows that Asian+ representation in Tech has gone from 38.6% in 2014 to 51.8% in 2018. (Note: this includes both mainland Chinese and other Asians.)
In my personal opinion, it has become more common for me to see groups of software engineers informally discuss an issue (say, at someone's desk, or walking down the hallway) entirely in Mandarin instead of English.
What I don't understand about the outrage surrounding Dragonfly is that Google didn't leave China because of the need to censor its search engine, it conducted business in that way in the late 2000s. It left China because of the cyber attacks in Operation Aurora.
It seems the Googlers of today are holding Google to a higher ethical standard than the Googlers of 2009, since Google offered a censored search engine in china at that time and this did not produce the sort of outrage we see today.
And the change is probably for the better. I loved what the US ideals used to stand for but how ethical is to impose US ethics or laws on other countries even if it was possible? The Internet is no longer this network of bright individuals, it's part of society's fabric.
In a few years, the US understanding of morality might change to Christian fundamentalism, gun culture, anti-vaxxing, respect to the authority, anti-euro and so on and the US might differentiate even from the UK in many aspects and fall in odds even with Western Europe.
Would it be expected that the employee's rally for these causes too and try to overcome some German vaccination laws? If the new cool becomes Mormonism, should employees make sure that the message of the Mormons must be delivered in Turkey?
Sure, my examples are extremely exaggregated but winds are blowing in different directions in every part of the world and I would prefer if the companies don't pick sides here. Not censoring Google doesn't change a thing in China because the problem is not that the locals in China are looking into these things but couldn't find info due to the censorship.
For these tech giants, I think, is enough if they don't turn into a tool for control and surveillance. Serve the censored search results, show your ads and make your money, obey the local laws and Just don't be enablers for oppression. There's a difference between limiting your product to obey the law and gathering list of people for persecution.
Our country literally once deposed a democratic government over the business interests of a banana company. My only hope is that historians are unbiased enough in the future to clearly mark the United States of America as the bad guys.
I’m not sure the hiring really changed so much as a the supply of people.
Google hires heavily from universities and the popularity of free speech amongst university students has been down over the last decade. The title 9 inquisitions and general climate has completely changed the tone to the point that many adults exiting college don’t really have any problem with suppression of “harmful speech”.
The same applies to their employees abroad, most of which also view “freedom of speech” as a strange American obsession rather than a right worth trying to impose on the Chinese.
Perhaps a better way to express this is to say there are far more Chinese students in American universities than just ten years ago. Statistics that show this are abundant. Since Google likes to hire people straight out of college, we now see a higher proportion of these Chinese students, who are apolitical or in fact support the Chinese government.
Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story.
(To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.)
The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)
I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
I think a lot of this has to do with how much self-congratulating google has engaged in over the years around ethics. They set very high expectations, boasted about it, then fell very short.
What you're seeing in people's reactions is disappointment. No one's ever seen Microsoft as an ethical company, so no one bats an eye when they enter the Chinese market and embrace the questionable ethics of the Chinese government.
That doesn't make it right, but it certainly gets less attention.
The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie.
They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
Apple at least somewhat tries to put up an image of caring about environmental issues[1] and privacy (e.g. in the aftermath of San Bernardino attack). (Of course they still have Chinese sweatshops, and who knows how much raw materials comes from child labour in the Congo so of course it's mostly a smokescreen.)
>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up
okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?
>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time
i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
Doing good for the world and getting rich are by no means mutually exclusive. People pay money for products and services that make their lives better and history has shown that economic growth is not a zero-sum game.
Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.
economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.
some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.
you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.
edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).
I didn't downvote, but I agree with GP that growth isn't a zero sum game. If you create the right product, then you and the people who pay for your growth all end up better off than you were before.
In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.
It's viewed as a betrayal of whatever ethical/moral core Google claimed to have originally, at least by employees and customers who bought into the hype early on and didn't realize that Google is ultimately just another big tech company with shareholders.
As a former employee it never really surprised me that the company would want to move back into China, but it did surprise me a bit that they were doing so under heavy secrecy. I suppose in practice they were right to want to keep it secret (employees were unhappy) but on the other hand it's impossible to keep secrets in that company so they should have known it would leak eventually.
Microsoft, Apple, etc. doing business in China is unsurprising in comparison since we all know what big tech companies with 10k+ employees are about: Making money.
Because half of us are just glad Microsoft isn’t in charge anymore. The opposite of hate is apathy, and that you ask the question suggests that you are too young to remember a lot of people used to call Microsoft the Evil Empire - a reference to Star Wars. Of course they’re doing slimy shit. They’ve always been slimy to half of us. If you forget history it will repeat.
You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).
People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.
They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.
Microsoft never had a good rep to begin with. They were always seen as an evil corp. I remember when most of the mentions of Microsoft on the forums used to be spelled as "Micro$hit", "Micro$haft", or something similar. Google didn't have this image problem until later in the game.
that's because google won over hearts and minds with "do no evil" so people feel betrayed because they invested themselves in the ideology of the company. it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.
People might vaguely dislike you for ambiguous reasons if you are an underachiever, but get them excited about things you can’t actually accomplish and they start to know exactly what they don’t like about you.
I’ve had a boss who tried to give out rewards to people and announced them without possessing them, and we had to harass him to get them. By the time they were delivered it felt like we’d earned them a second time, completely undermining whatever message he was trying to send.
The first “idiot” I worked for has the honor of my best anecdote for underestimating work and would pull this stunt where we could “go home early if we get everything done” on random Friday’s. On average we left an hour later on these days than on a typical Friday. The last time he tried this the entire team shot daggers at him and wandered back to their desks.
>> it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.
That's a hard lesson for a lot of people. Unfortunately it comes in different forms as well. I cant tell you how many places I've run across that seem to be paying slightly more than lip service to safety standards.
I felt slighted by their interview process and experience a little schadenfreude. From what I gather a lot of other people have the same salt.
It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.
There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.
It’s also why I strongly discourage 1 on 1 interviews. If I’m in a room with a coworker I know how they treated the candidate and they know how I did. There’s feedback to be given, adjustments to be made. Without that you can’t tell if one interviewer has low success rates due to beig really picky or being a dick.
The second guy I talked to at Google was such an asshole that I doubted my read on the other three people. It shakes you, and me in particular. I have a problem with saying no to all offers on the table, which shows up as self-sabotage in interviews. I don’t want to work with you, so I’m not going to try to convince you to want to work with me. It would be better for me to stick with it and get comfortable just saying no to all bad offers even if that’s all the offers I have. Least objectionable has won out a time or two and I’ve always paid for it in the end.
Microsoft does not know nearly as much about people as Google does. Microsoft does not have the insane Orwellian mission to "organize the world's information".
Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores.
If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special.
I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.
New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership).
They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.
It’s much easier to stay true to your values if you don’t take in as much investor money. Google shares are priced with an exception of rapid growth so management has to chase any profit possible. There are a lot privately held companies where the owners don’t demand continuous growth.
I wanted to point to Etsy, since they were a b-corp, meaning they were held to higher "social and environmental standards" than a typical company, but I just Google'd them to see how their stock is doing and it looks like they gave up their b-corp status sometime in 2017 and their stock price is up 400% since then (price was flat and declining previously).
>> are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured?
Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.
I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.
One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.
Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.
I know I'm biased because I worked there, but I think Netflix is still true to its values.
It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible.
They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will.
I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time.
Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.
The only way I've thought of so far is to create a not-for-profit. Your not-for-profit can still make money. But since no one owns equity, no one has incentive to optimize for profit over values.
The managers paying themselves salary have an incentive. This is how most "charities" work. But that is naturally a lower ceiling than a for-profit corp.
There is an interesting book called Maverick by Ricardo Selemar I think is his name, who took over Brazil's largest steel company in the 80's. One of the points he makes in the book is that we have this obsession with growing business, if the company does $200 million in revenue this year, it has to do $250 million in revenue next year, etc.
That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline.
I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work.
To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.
> The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured?
If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S...
In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination.
[0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.
Google has been an advertising company since when, 2000? I think it was naive for any of us to expect an advertising company to be an ethical company. Live and learn..
The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.
There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it?
Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads?
In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
One way Google, a software company in the broad sense of the term, could have avoided a blog post with such a title is to never hire a “Head of International Relations” in the first place.
Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.
It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.
What is this? I have worked in the valley in smaller companies, but this (the diversity exercises) takes the cake. Was there some context to this that is missing? Can anyone who participated throw more light?
The last time this was posted, someone found that it's an exercise based on a university study designed to address common stereotypes. The publishers of the study only tested it in an academic setting with students, though, and recommended that it not be done without a trained professional to guide the discussion. Google basically cargo-culted the experiment and assumed it would work in a corporate setting without the trained professionals.
This exact scene played out in my mind as I was reading the article. Couldn't believe what I was reading and here I was wondering if the show would age well..
The whole thing sounds just so ridiculous that I kind wonder if we're getting the true story here. Isn't it at least possible that something has gotten distorted along the way?
The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt.
He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.
Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down."
If he ended the article with, "Vote for me! Maine 2020!" It would sound highly self-serving. I believe he simply doesn't see his campaign as relevant to what he's writing here.
This is his retrospective on his time at Google.
He may post other things that combine the two, but this one is clearly focused on the things he experienced while working for one of the largest corporations in the world.
Let's not fall into the populist trap of painting everything corporations do with the worst intentions while offering no skepticism to someone trying to get our vote.
> No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight.
It seems to me that if the actions you take are legal, it doesn't matter your size. Who is the government to decide what's too big to operate without their input?
> The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt.
Nowhere in this article do I see evidence of a "change of heart." He didn't suddenly quit to run for office. He fought for what he believed in, putting human rights above profits, until the culture changed so much as to axe him. It sounds like he's taking his wealth and prestige to the place he thinks he will have the most power: senate
Yes, Google isn't "don't be evil" anymore. People forget that what's left without Google is Microsoft, Oracle and the likes whose business strategy is outright racketeering.
Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number, credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to paid if not you're having this account.
At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium etc etc etc)
I looked at Oracle's page for Datafox and there's no mention of a trial anywhere. I searched on google for a trial and the only page that exists is one that is clearly from before Oracle bought Datafox and it doesn't even load properly.
That post is just one of many anecdata (to some degree of truth) out there about Google and other FAANG companies being "ethically challenged".
I remember having done a "computer and society" assignment about 14 years ago on Google and China. I also remember Microsoft's "Halloween Documents" (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) from early 2000s. And many other scenarios of Big Tech ignoring ethics.
In general, trust (like attention) is a limited resource to be used wisely.
I agree, but things also aren't as black and white as a lot of articles will try to make it. As pointed out in this very article, Google did leave China in 2010, leaving billions of dollar on the table. That is the exact opposite of "big money trumping ethics". Yes I realize they did explore returning to China last year, but it still isn't as cut and dry.
I'm not saying any of these FAANG companies are perfect, but I also don't like grand standing by people like this that really only case about advancing their own image for political reasons.
"there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members."
This is a stark and honest way to put what Google is doing. These are actually fundamental values at stake. Not just 'privacy'.
"Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight."
So FMAGAN companies are weaponzied in the geopolitics. This sounds good when dropped over the wall, but when you try to play this out against the current state of the USA, it seems near certain to me to go horribly wrong.
I would much rather break them up - all the way. Whatever that means.
Lets not forget that Google is not controlled by its shareholders. Due to its multi-class stock structure Sergey and Larry control the majority of the voting rights, what makes the "Dont be evil" slogan more to a personal motto of these to founders than to a company policy.
I don't know what the policy of Hacker News here, but this article is NOT attributed to its author and is "sourced" from the essay the author had published on Medium a few days prior. To me this suggests that the article might not have been reproduced here either by or with the permission of the author.
To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather than
'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.
as i get older, i find myself more and more saying... it's just a job. i have no "moral code" anymore when it comes to what company i work for. i know they exist to make money and that what i do there... i just do my work, get my pay check and go home. i don't care what the company stands for or "making a difference" there. if i want to "make a difference" in my life, i'll do outside of work with my community. when i was young i wanted "change the world" at the place i worked at, that's no longer true.
Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems like a bad idea.
Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive.
Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them.
If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision.
Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.
Google had this, at least around 2010. Product teams would have to get the go-ahead from a bunch of interested parties like legal, security, internationalization, etc. Each of those parties controlled a "launch bit" (literally a checkbox) for each product launch.
Mat companies have security teams and security review through, as well as web accessibility and the like. It seems to help since without those teams most product groups pay very little attention to either.
Every one of these stories always seems to have the common theme that at some point Google HR seems to step in in a really big-brother/creepy way and start saying the employee has been tagged for poor performance. It always seems to happen as soon as someone starts to get in the way of a "Do some Evil" project.
They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet.
It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not ever ever interview with" list.
I would love to know how you effectively run a 100,000 person company, particularly when they are all knowledge workers as opposed to retail, food service, etc.
"I saw them(Don’t be evil) used to guide product designs that put the company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz"
This guy has actually been a senior member of the organization that he's complaining has done bad things. He didn't prevent those things nor does he have a compelling narrative of working within the organization to change its path.
Mostly he just collected his cash, and is now writing a transparently self serving piece as he begins his run for elected office.
It is sickening but not surprising that these Wall Street & executive types put profits about human suffering & human rights. I wish more countries that claim to have hold human rights as a central value of their county's morality would put their money where their mouth is to regulate these modern day supervillains.
After reading, I can't help but wonder if this dismissive attitude Google (and others) have towards social and political issues such as censorship, privacy, diversity, etc. has something to do with the hiring model. I can't speak for other departments but in terms of engineering, competency in algorithms and system design are the only things that are screened for. These aren't well rounded people. They aren't leaders. They're not screened to think beyond the immediate task at hand which shouldn't leave us surprised when they fail to see beyond the objective. In some ways, it would be akin to colleges looking exclusively at SAT scores instead of the whole person.
In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.
I can't help but think that people are thinking about this the wrong way. Today, activists in China understand that the internet is not a safe place to engage in activist activities without extreme precautions. This was less well understood a decade ago and Yahoo really messed up when they handed over account information for an activist. I think Google entering China makes a lot of sense now, is an interesting technical and linguistic problem (how do you build an incredible search engines
in a radically different language) and a worthwhile business aim (getting a foothold into the most important economy in the world).
Also, to suggest, at this point, that US agencies haven't harmed an incredible number of people by co-opting information from tech companies and service providers would be absurd. Although companies sometimes contemplate how to protect their users (which doubtlessly Google would do in China), this essentially never blocks anyone from starting a company here.
I just want to cite this, for those who have voiced on HN the thesis that conservative opinions will get you fired in tech, but liberal opinions are “safe”:
> Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights — had cost me my career.
I would love if some other conservatives present, who care about free speech, could voice some support for this guy. It would help me feel unified with you, and want to support you more in “James Damore”-type situations.
This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black. ...
So which is better, to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, or to attempt to correct things?
From what I can tell, he continually attempted to steer Google away from business in China, even after things started going downhill. To my mind, that takes quite a bit of bravery.
I get that he could have sued to get some type of fake (reduced role) job back, but.... the blog would be better if he didn't make it sound it was 100% his choice.
>>> Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing?
Has the US federal government suddenly become more corrupt? Is he trying to tie this back to Trump?
