[HN Gopher] An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
___________________________________________________________________
An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
Author : choppaface
Score : 656 points
Date : 2021-10-23 05:14 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > Because "we can," executive said in 2016. "Smaller pubs don't
| have alternative revenue sources."
|
| And 90% of publishers and small websites suffer because of this.
|
| These are more damning than anything that has been said about
| these companies, because it affects their real business, not the
| antisocial apps they give for free. Is it even called a monopoly
| when you control so much of both the Supply and the Demand? It's
| like a black box telling advertisers "give us your money and we
| will tell you we did what you think we did".
| xuki wrote:
| According to the thread, they're the biggest seller, the
| biggest buyer and they own the biggest exchange. I can't see
| anything would go wrong with that.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Sad thing is, this is well known for a decade and more, the
| new thing here is the confirmation of collusion with facebook
| polytely wrote:
| Google seriously needs to be broken up into small pieces or
| disolved entirely. Their leadership just cannot be be trusted and
| the internet would be better off without them around.
| EastSmith wrote:
| Hope they broke FAAG and MS out of things like this.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Unlike Microsoft, where at least some of the business units
| could do pretty well on their own, if the company was broken
| up, I doubt the same would be true for Google.
|
| Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do
| particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of
| people losing their job.
|
| I'm not arguing that you're wrong in the idea of breaking up
| Google, but I doubt it will happen.
| [deleted]
| awild wrote:
| Wouldn't this be eventually a good thing? I imagine less free
| online services, which would condition people to also pay
| online more often. It would be a bumpy road, but I can see
| how online magazines could make more money that way, since
| I'm already used to paying for my online office suite, mail
| etc.
|
| It could also just lead to weird tie-in with a central ad
| service sharing anonymized data between all participating
| companies, basically spreading the data Google monopolizes
| further.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I can see at least five entirely separate units with very
| little synergy:
|
| 1. Search + Maps
|
| 2. GSuite + Gmail
|
| 3. GCP
|
| 4. YouTube
|
| 5. Android + Chrome
|
| Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than
| perhaps the last (not sure about that one).
|
| Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can't see these
| smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development,
| although if TPU is under Search it would continue), but
| increase competition, especially in the ad market.
| emn13 wrote:
| Though this isn't is a bad idea, if we really want to avoid
| the inefficiencies stemming from monopolies, we need to not
| just break up by business unit, but even more so ensure
| those business units are not themselves little monopolies.
| That would likely mean breaking up the units too; i.e. not
| just 1 search provider, but at least two; not just 1
| android but at least two, etc.
|
| Having each smaller niche served by its own monopoly is
| perhaps better than having just 1 monopoly with a larger
| niche, but it'll still just converge towards today's ever
| more feudal society.
|
| There is 0 polical interest in dealing with that though,
| and it would be a really tricky issue - after all, if
| you're serious about wanting to support capitalism, google
| is by no means the only company that needs to go. It would
| mean a fairly dramatic restructuring of the corporate
| landscape, and you'd need to have answers for scenarios
| where economies of scale are so lucrative, they outweigh
| the benefits of competition (would those be non-profits
| with multiple competing clients?) Also, the laws around
| intangible value (i.e. intellectual property) are pretty
| much designed for monopolization. Finally, we don't live in
| a vacuum; how will you deal with transnational
| corporations, and specifically with overseas monopolies
| that can play off the now smaller intra-national non-
| monopolists against each other? As tax-avoidance schemes
| have shown, corporate structures can get quite complex, so
| it's quite possible some kind of mutually dependent
| franchise system might develop with the true ownership
| still centralized and monopolistic - but external.
|
| All in all, the path towards the idealized capitalist
| system seems implausibly long. We're going to want ways of
| mitigating the damage before we get there, and that implies
| ways of dealing with these kind of non-capitalist entities
| in non-capitalist ways; perhaps a special huge-size tax and
| a more interventionist state. And even that seems like
| wishful thinking in today's political climate...
| tradertef wrote:
| How about admob/adsense? The whole point of the article was
| about those units..
| capableweb wrote:
| > Such a move would surely limit innovation [...] but
| increase competition
|
| Wouldn't increasing competition also increase innovation as
| more companies can actually enter the market with new
| ideas? Sure, the innovation at Google itself might go down,
| but that should hardly be an argument against solving their
| anti-competitive behavior.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| There are some things requiring capital investment at a
| scale that wouldn't be feasible for a company outside the
| 100bn market cap club. Data centers, intercontinental
| data links, high end VLSI development, high end
| smartphone hardware and things like Waymo all come to
| mind. It's more than cash alone, it's low cost nature of
| their mistakes (because everything is paid for by Search
| anyway) that enables that.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| With more companies competing, there will be more
| innovation overall.
| xmprt wrote:
| I think Chrome being the largest browser provider could
| make big profits from partnering with other search
| providers to make one the default search engine.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The only two of those I'm pretty sure could survive on
| their own is search and YouTube.
|
| Android and Chrome pretty much doesn't have a business
| case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still
| just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but
| can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have
| to cribble the free tier.
| numair wrote:
| Here, let me help you out with ways to find hard data
| that disprove these conjectures.
|
| > Android
|
| Take a look at recent court documents about the size of
| the Play Store revenues. It's a multi-billion-dollar cash
| cow _after_ paying off the carriers and device makers to
| keep their spyware loaded.
|
| > Chrome
|
| Google single handedly kept Mozilla running for over a
| decade with their search deal. The deal for iOS is worth
| billions. Chrome will manage just fine.
|
| > GCP
|
| They don't exactly run that thing as a charity. Anyone
| familiar with their pricing knows that this is a super-
| high-margin business. Plus, as a spin-off, it would
| immediately have a couple gigantic customers: Google
| spin-offs.
|
| > GSuite/GMail
|
| There's only two main options for email and productivity
| SaaS (sorry Zoho). They're printing money on this one
| too.
|
| I should disclose that I would rather see Google stay
| intact, so whoever kneecaps their ad business can kneecap
| the whole empire in one go and make the whole company and
| all of its shareholders suffer at the same time.
| Companies don't have a right to live if they are
| generating negative social impact.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's hard to say how a split would happen. I guess I
| would assume a different split, which would force Android
| and Chrome out of any type of ad business, meaning that
| Chrome could not take money from search and where Android
| would be forced out of any user tracking.
|
| Other than GCP, which I still think would fail, if split
| out in the next year or do, you make a good point.
| iamevn wrote:
| I worked on GCP until recently. I remember celebrating
| (in-office) our product within GCP surpassing one million
| dollars of revenue per day. GCP would be fine.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Revenue can be made easily enough, profit is harder. The
| latest number I saw online suggest that GCP lose more
| than one billion dollar per year.
|
| Edit: losing $1.2B on a revenue of just under $4B. That
| only work because ads are paying for the construction of
| datacenter and infrastructur.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| How are the services provided to Alphabet subsidiaries
| taken into account? I'd bet that the cloud bill for
| YouTube alone would exceed GCP revenue numbers.
|
| In other words, if GCP is spun out, and Google services
| keep using it (with realistic pricing) it's going to have
| a revenue far exceeding $4bn.
| mrweasel wrote:
| How many Google service actually run on GCP?
| goalieca wrote:
| It's very common practice that internal customers count
| as revenue for project. Especially ones that aren't
| profitable.
| [deleted]
| xuki wrote:
| Android and Chrome can get a lot of money from search
| companies to be the default search option. Currently
| Google is paying nothing for that, maybe another search
| company would emerge.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I'd bet that Gsuite could compete is they actually
| invested in improving the product. After all, office is
| still one of Microsoft's major money spinners.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I'd guess GSuite is already a cash cow, just for
| corporate emails and user management for SMBs.
| goalieca wrote:
| Gsuite isn't a very good experience compared to office365
| with its high quality native apps. I don't the costs but
| I imagine Gsuite has to be a lot cheaper because of its
| offering.
| csomar wrote:
| > Android and Chrome pretty much doesn't have a business
| case.
|
| Seriously? The most used browser and mobile operating
| system in the world can't finance their operations? If
| that's the case, then there could be no browser.
|
| Firefox is still able to finance its operations and so
| does many other browsers. Google can still contribute to
| WebKit as an open source project.
|
| Android can start charging a fee for every mobile device
| (not sure if they already do that?) and cover its
| development expense. It'll be a saner world where you pay
| for the services you are using.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Android and Chrome pretty much doesn't have a business
| case.
|
| The 30% fee on everything Play Store seems a good enough
| business case to me.
| emn13 wrote:
| But it's also fragile; that fee might not turn out to be
| sustainable.
| darkwater wrote:
| How come? Also they already have a dominant position,
| producer licensing can go a long way. Nobody is gonna
| make Android _suddenly_ irrelevant in the next 10 years.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Android has its Play Store and could probably pick a few
| bucks out of each handset sold, although the long term
| implications of Android without its daddy around aren't
| clear.
|
| GSuite is incredibly ubiquitous and has no free tier
| anymore (other than customers grandfathered in), and
| GMail can still do ads. I have no doubt they'll be
| printing money, relatively speaking.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Technically GSuite is Google Workspace, which doesn't
| have a free tier, but Gmail, Google Docs, Drive and so on
| can still be used for free.
|
| It would be interesting to know how much of Gmail value
| is standalone ads, and how much is from the integration
| into Google overall ad platform.
| 7952 wrote:
| That broadly equates to...
|
| 1. Ads
|
| 2. Corporate
|
| 3. Cloud infrastructure
|
| 4. Ads
|
| 5. Retail app sales and hardware.
|
| Maybe things get messy when those different models are
| mixed.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do
| particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of
| people losing their job.
|
| This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can
| currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just
| because another department is profitable while the anti-
| competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose
| their job shouldn't be a consideration as they can surely
| find jobs elsewhere that won't exploit the public like Google
| have been proven to do here.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| Companies should be allowed to dabble in unprofitable
| things as they wish.
|
| The need for everything to be profitable is why Google got
| into selling Ads and also why they keep killing projects.
| Many things in the world worth doing don't nearly fit into
| a nice profitable business but in many ways, bring some
| positivity to the world.
|
| Android gave many people a chance at a modern smartphone
| and connected future. Chrome would never be profitable on
| its own but for a time, it forced web standards to move
| forward and freed many people from the mess of 1000 virus-
| laden toolbars in I.E.
| [deleted]
| Closi wrote:
| Chrome and Android aren't really about giving users a
| better experience, that's just a side effect - they are a
| way of solidifying their domination of search and ads by
| owning the full stack.
|
| It's just a big risk-mitigation technique so they can
| further cement their monopoly for search and ads.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That means Google is strangling innovation and market
| efficiency by offering unsustainable products that prevent
| profitable businesses from entering those markets.
|
| Some people might lose their jobs at Google, but a healthier
| market will allow competition to hire for actually
| sustainable businesses. The benefits of increased innovation
| and competition for consumers makes breaking companies like
| this up worthwhile on their own.
| mola wrote:
| I think the products are great, but users are trained to
| not to pay for them.
| newshorts wrote:
| I really like their cloud office suite for personal use,
| however I would not rely on them for an enterprise
| solution.
|
| Probably less about training the users and more about
| sales/support, feature set and ecosystem as barriers to
| getting paid.
| jjulius wrote:
| Fine, break it up and let the chips fall where they may. So
| many people on HN like to tout that if businesses don't have
| a market, or a product people want, or whatever, then they
| should fail. Why should Alphabet's numerous companies be any
| different?
|
| There would be a net benefit to the world that would
| absolutely outweigh the collateral damage of that relatively
| small handful of people losing their jobs.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Not just Google. The entire adtech, social media, and
| personal data surveillance industry.
|
| Effectively it's already one giant company operating under
| multiple nominal mega-brands.
| blntechie wrote:
| From a staunch opposer to government regulation in tech 4-5
| years back, I have turned into someone who will cheer a break
| up of these big tech companies.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Everyone needs time to grow up. I too started out thinking it
| was all so simple and the "free market" would take care of
| everything etc. Then your world view grows. Your list of
| "known unknowns" dwarfs your list of knowns. You become more
| pragmatic. It is clear to me now that some level of top-down
| coordination is necessary for success. Even national-level
| coordination is not going to be enough, though. It now needs
| to be at a global level.
| feanaro wrote:
| Free market is still a good idea, it's just not enough.
| What's missing is that we somehow need to ensure all market
| actors are at most 2-3 orders of magnitude in size/power of
| each other.
|
| Google (and other FAANG type companies) are becoming
| comfortable in power to whole states. The "free" market
| just becomes a tyranny of the powerful in this situation.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Can we trust the leadership of "smaller versions" of Google ?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Is the current Google leadership a shining beacon of
| trustability?
| nosianu wrote:
| The point is that we won't need to nearly as much because
| they don't have that overwhelming power.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| i humbly disagree, if i understand you correctly, a smaller
| google will not be evil because 'they couldnt'. Maybe not
| the best example but i dont steal(do crime) because of
| opportunity. I dont steal because of my 'good moral
| compass' (thank you parents).
|
| If we start chopping-up companies because we want to remove
| their 'ability' to be evil. It becomes a arbitrary
| target/moving goal posts ? What size will stop/prevent evil
| ?
|
| Will a 'better'(moral compass) not work better ? More
| accountability for managers and their decisions ?
|
| Not saying there are not other valid/good reasons to chop
| up companies but to prevent evil ?
| kubb wrote:
| No need to break them up, just regulate te shit out of how
| they're allowed to use user data and to advertise online. They
| will shrink to a medium sized company within a quarter.
| pyrale wrote:
| I wonder how many such scandals before people in office accept
| the logical conclusion that the only way to deal with this is to
| use the Standard Oil method.
| bserge wrote:
| GMail's mark as spam feature has become "report spam". Meaning,
| you just report something as spam to Google. They decide what it
| actually is.
|
| And indeed, it works perfectly. I've marked
| Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/Freelancer/YouTube as spam and they
| always come back to the Inbox.
| bawolff wrote:
| Or you know you could just undubscribe from those. Its not like
| major tech companies are ignoring unsubscribe requests.
| caskstrength wrote:
| It is 2021 and people are still fearlessly clicking on links
| in random spam emails?
| bserge wrote:
| Yeah, so every unsubscribe link I tried led to a page that's
| convoluted (likely on purpose, like GDPR cookies) and it was
| hard to actually unsubscribe.
|
| That was quite a while ago tbf. Since then, I just mark
| everything as spam.
|
| I just tried to unsubscribe from Twitter and... I need to
| login to my account. That I never used. To unsubscribe to
| spam I never signed up for (Twitter did _not_ send these
| kinds of "come back" emails before).
|
| Also Gmail for Android doesn't let me search through specific
| folders anymore. It's just "Search in mail". Idiocracy.
| [deleted]
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| there's an option to "Block" instead.. works perfectly.
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| This is pretty damning stuff. Here's the question I have: there
| are a ton of quotes in here from employees. In what context were
| these statements made? In depositions? I would guess not. I'd
| guess they were made in emails, Google docs and presentations
| that were a result of discovery (or a whistleblower I guess).
|
| If so, I really want to find these people and ask them "what were
| you thinking?" Any big company has required training on
| communicating with care. So who are these people who seem to be
| so careless or oblivious to how those statements might be viewed
| when exposed? Leadership? Product? Engineering? ICs? Managers?
|
| I'd be interested to know more about the allegation that Google
| declared itself the winner of an auction even if there were
| higher bids. If that has any substance, that's... a problem. I
| really wonder how such a thing could be implemented by engineers
| without someone raising eyebrows.
|
| Oh and once again can we just kill the meme of Twitter threads? I
| mean seriously.
| belter wrote:
| Maybe inverting binary trees and real intelligence are not
| related?
| ctvo wrote:
| Tell us you bombed the on-site without telling us.
| bfrog wrote:
| The best part of consulting/doing your own thing? People
| only look at your portfolio of work, you know, like every
| other profession
| mysterydip wrote:
| When I started a new job, one thing in orientation was "the 'e'
| in 'e-mail' stands for 'evidence'."
| roland35 wrote:
| That's a good way of thinking about it. When I was a kid I
| remember hearing "imagine reading everything you write down
| to grandma" or "read on the morning news". I try to keep that
| in mind to this day.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Isn't that a huge red flag as an employee for that to be in
| orientation? It would make me want to put everything in
| writing in case they did sketchy shit.
| bseidensticker wrote:
| Yeah I got that feeling as well, but it's not the main
| reason that is presented in the training.
|
| The main issue is that your words will be taken out of
| context and used against the company. If you say "we are
| going to dominate the market" instead of "our product is
| going to be really well received" that can be used as
| evidence of anticompetitive behavior. Nevermind the fact
| that you're an IC and not a lawyer qualified to comment on
| if you are truly dominating the market.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Accountability is half the point, actually. For example, if
| there's a coworker you know promises verbally then later
| says that never happend or they don't remember, get it in
| email. Likewise if you want to be sure you're on the record
| of "I don't agree with this idea."
| olegious wrote:
| The dropping of higher bids is the biggest revelation here. I
| would guess that higher bids would be dropped if they didn't
| meet a max response time, maybe bids from Google were given a
| speed advantage to get under this max time.
| aj3 wrote:
| I'm not the company I work for. If they're doing unethical
| stuff, fuck them.
|
| Never understood, why others are so keen to protect employer
| given company will throw under the bus any of us in a blink of
| an eye.
| cletus wrote:
| Tell that to James Robert Liang [1].
|
| This isn't about protecting the company. It's about
| protecting yourself. You're opening yourself to be a witness
| in a suit (nobody wants that), thrown to the wolves by the
| company (who will attempt to portray you as a rogue actor) or
| criminal prosecution.
|
| Now if the company is doing something unethical and it's why
| you're leaving, then sure write that down as long as you're
| not admitting personal culpability of any sort.
|
| Likewise, if you feel like you're being set up to take the
| fall for something, a paper trail can help you.
|
| But otherwise, if you're in an ethical grey area and decide
| you want to continue to earn an income to, you know, live
| then there are such things as "inside thoughts".
|
| [1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/volkswagen-engineer-
| sentenced...
| aj3 wrote:
| Pardon my French, but you're either a coward or bootlicker.
| There won't be any criminal prosecution for raising
| legitimate issues internally & putting those in writing, no
| matter what company lawyers tell you.
|
| And if the most privileged and job-secure people on the
| planet can't take the risk of undermining their FAANG
| overlords for the sake of humanity, who will?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| History suggests otherwise. The legal protections exist
| because they've been repeatedly proved necessary.
|
| https://whistleblowersblog.org/opinion/a-history-of-
| corporat...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood
| FabHK wrote:
| Wow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits over
| people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and here's
| Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose profit...
|
| > Google was frustrated @Facebook was not aligning with it to
| reduce users' privacy.
|
| "We've had difficulty getting FB to align on our privacy goals
| and strategy, as they have at time[s] prioritized winning on
| reputation over its business interest in legislative debates."
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Personally, I don't care that FB puts profits over people.
| That's what I expect. They are a public corporation. FB's board
| has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money
| for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it's the law.
|
| Speaking of the law, Google's abuses listed in this thread are
| what gall me. In Gulliver's travels, the Lilliputians don't
| strongly punish a common thief. You can just build a higher
| fence to thwart them. They severely punish "white collar"
| crimes. Outsmarting those criminals may prove impossible. We
| now have some of the greatest minds of our generation figuring
| out how to enrich Google even if it means breaking anti-
| trust/anti-collusion laws and even just basic breach of
| contract.
|
| I get that Google is a huge company and not all bad, but its
| primary revenue model is so morally bankrupt, I question how
| anyone can justify working there.
| saxonww wrote:
| > FB's board has a legal obligation (fiduciary
| responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism
| may suck, but it's the law.
|
| This is often repeated but is (generally) incorrect. There's
| a lot of writing out there about how this is bs, e.g. [0].
|
| People certainly think and act like this is the case, so the
| end result is often the same, but this is not good-natured
| corporate governors being helpless before the law, it's
| profit-motivated people being ruthless.
|
| [0] https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-
| dumbest-i...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Well google needs to not complain then when the government
| comes looking around for anti-competitive practices or when
| they get broken up. Of the FAANG companies they could all
| pretty easily be split up easily into 3+ companies to compete
| in the social/advertising spectrum.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits is a myth. It's
| something that businesses hide their unethical behavior
| behind, but there's no law that requires it according to the
| US Supreme Court.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-
| co...
| hcurtiss wrote:
| True, but there definitely is a fiduciary duty, and
| shareholder derivative lawsuits for breach of that duty are
| definitely a thing. They are usually substantiated by
| irresponsible decisions producing low returns. The analysis
| is complicated, but in the end, the more poorly the company
| you are managing performs due to your deliberate decisions,
| the more likely you are to elicit a shareholder derivative
| suit. Generally speaking, the best way to keep your
| shareholders happy is to make them money. In my view, this
| is as it should be. I'd rather executives in public
| companies not use my money to pursue their own personal
| moral crusades. They can use their own money to do that. As
| can I.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The shareholder lawsuits will go nowhere according to the
| business judgment rule, unless the board is engaged in
| illegal behavior. If Google chose not to collude with
| Facebook or lie to their customers about providing the
| best price, shareholders would have no cause to sue.
|
| Now that this has come to light, they may be more likely
| to sue if it's deemed that information about project Jedi
| was withheld from shareholder reports and that
| information was important to understanding Google's
| returns in banner ad auctions.
| lancesells wrote:
| > FB's board has a legal obligation (fiduciary
| responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism
| may suck, but it's the law.
|
| What US law states that the board of any company has to make
| money for shareholders? I've tried finding it but haven't
| been able to. So what happens when a company fails? Does the
| board get prosecuted?
|
| Facebooks - Board of Directors - Mark Zuckerberg - Sheryl
| Sandberg - Peggy Alford - Marc L. Andreessen - Andrew W.
| Houston - Nancy Killefer - Robert M. Kimmitt - Peter A. Thiel
| - Tracey T. Travis
|
| Alphabet - Board of Directors - Larry Page - Sergey Brin -
| Sundar Pichai - John L. Hennessy - Frances Arnold - L. John
| Doerr - Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. - Ann Mather - Alan R. Mulally
| - K. Ram Shriram - Robin L. Washington
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Note that for business, governing law is virtually always
| _state_ law, both legislation and common (case) law.
|
| The most relevant law will be in Delaware (overwhelmingly
| popular for incorporation for its "business-favourable"
| climate), New York, and California.
|
| Semi-related tangent: in going through US Library of
| Congress classifications, under US case law, by an extreme
| margin the most detailed classifications of state law are
| for New York and California (I forget offhand which leads).
| I believe Pennsylvania and Florida are also among the
| larger.
|
| To an extent this is a synthetic artefact (classification
| schemas are created by librarians), though it probably
| reflects underlying complexity within the respective
| domains.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > Wow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits
| over people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and
| here's Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose
| profit...
|
| These are not incompatible statements. Any corporation, once it
| gets large enough, inevitably veers toward "profits over
| people," if only in the more benign sense of "if it doesn't
| make money, it doesn't make sense." Yes, I know, "goodwill" is
| a thing that corporations strive to cultivate, but, even the
| concept of "goodwill" has been financialized in modern
| corporate finance.
| jacob55555 wrote:
| There's no such thing as people: just "users".
| pverghese wrote:
| Are we going to trial on Twitter nowadays? What is this nonsense
| comex wrote:
| No, a Twitter user is quoting a document from a court case that
| will (unless it's settled) go to actual trial.
| heartbreak wrote:
| A court case brought by a corrupt, indicted attorney general
| whose own senior staff publicly accused him of more
| corruption last year before he fired them.
| ryan93 wrote:
| People claiming its hard to read twitter threads has gotten
| cliche on hacker news.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Are there any publicly traded competitors to the ad exchanges
| Google and Facebook run?
| p49k wrote:
| Yes, but you can't effectively use them unless you run them
| through Google Ad Manager, which gives Google special
| privileges/rights for their own ad inventory versus the
| competitor. For example, Google gets to look at the ad
| impression before anyone else, Google is required to win all
| tie-breakers, etc.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| You can't use another ad exchange without Google? Why?
|
| Can you give an example?
| p49k wrote:
| > Why?
|
| Because Google requires it. Google is the only major ad
| network that requires that you use their own ad serving
| product (GAM) in order to have full access to their
| inventory.
|
| So your options are to use GAM and have Google inventory
| plus those of all other companies, or use any other ad
| server and have access to inventory of all companies except
| Google. The latter is essentially financial suicide since
| Google controls more than 50% of publisher demand.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| It seems you are looking at it from the perspective of an
| advertiser?
|
| Why would it be financial suicide to only advertise on
| non-google inventory? Isn't that like saying advertising
| only on certain media and not on other media (say only
| newspapers but not billboards) is suicide?
|
| I am sure there are companies out there who never
| advertised on Google property but did not die?
| p49k wrote:
| No, I'm discussing from the point of view of the
| publisher.
|
| It's financial suicide to lose 50% or more of your
| revenue because you don't want to use GAM to manage your
| ad inventory.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| It seems most small publishers just put the Adsense code
| on their website. Is that equivalent with using GAM?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Is this what caused the big sell off in the sector Friday? If
| half of what is alleged is true, it will be enough to bring down
| big companies (but perhaps maybe not as big and powerful as
| Google).
| sseagull wrote:
| I think that was more Snapchat's earnings and realization that
| Apple's privacy changes can actually cause significant problems
| for these companies.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I can understand Snapchat getting stuffed by Apple and having
| trouble against tiktok but Google and Facebook are either not
| big on apps or require the user to be logged in and thus have
| enough id on the user not to be effected by apple's measures.
| rossmohax wrote:
| How exactly Google killed header bidding (routing of inventory to
| multiple exchanges)? Is it because publishers don't interact with
| exchange directly, but engage via sell side brokers, which google
| bought and changed they way the route orders?
| [deleted]
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Nothing will happen ... These tech giants have been misbehaving
| for years nobody is doing nothing
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Online advertising is enormous. Google's Exchange process
| processes 11bn online ad spaces / day.
|
| We can now understand the motivation behind Google's wish to move
| the whole internet ecosystem (QUIC, BBR, AMP et al) into a huge
| optimized and abstracted Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system.
|
| From the outside people will see this as something new, shiny and
| as an improvement (which it is!) but at the same time they'd
| profit off of it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Oh no, God forbid anyone would profit from faster software!
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| There's no problem with profiting from (faster) software.
| However, there's clearly a HUGE problem profiting from
| monopolizing the market the way Google is doing.
|
| Moreover, it shows that Google's motives were clearly never
| about the end user but their ad exchange instead.
|
| Two birds, one stone. (But leave out the ugly and shameful
| details to the public until now.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| You think an open standard TCP congestion control algorithm
| is part of a big conspiracy? Listen to yourself.
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| No, I don't. I think Google invested heavily in those
| technologies to profit from its ad exchange monopoly.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| These companies need to be broken up, and regulated as utilities
| where they are not broken up. This particular collusion isn't the
| only issue. The real issue is that collusion is a symptom of
| extreme market power that distorts society in many different
| ways. It prevents competition, hurts customers (for example
| undermining privacy laws), and undermines our basic values (for
| example most of societal speech takes place on their private
| platforms). Clarence Thomas and others were right about applying
| common carrier regulation to social media. But for things like
| ads collusion or illegal hiring agreements or whatever, the fix
| is simply to break them up due to their size. Companies that are
| worth hundreds of billions of dollars are simply too big.
| greatgib wrote:
| Best part for me:
|
| <<In 2015, Google signed agreement with WhatsApp to give users
| option of backing up their messages.
|
| Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not.
| @MikeIsaac
|
| Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why is that the best part? Isn't that 100% the fault of
| WhatsApp and has more or less nothing at all to do with google?
| greatgib wrote:
| No 50% whatsapp fault and 50% Google.
|
| As an user, all claim to defend users and privacy, and users
| think that they have some features because it is in their
| interest. But in fact, they only care about their business
| objectives and would usually screw you if that can be in
| there interest. But with a very nice sugar coating.
|
| For example, this kind of things explain why there was no
| backup alternatives except google.
| josu wrote:
| Wow, I was sure they were encrypted. I just checked and
| encryption is turned off by default. I just turned it on,
| thanks for the heads up.
| mips313 wrote:
| Regarding companies putting profits above all else, which
| companies are doing things better, and how we create better
| cultures, I thought I might have something valuable to add to the
| discussion:
|
| I work at one of Elon's companies and, yes, he cares about
| profitability, but I really appreciate the way he frames it,
| which is to use profitability as a forcing function for getting
| things done and as a feedback signal about whether you are
| working on and doing the right things. If you aren't profitable
| you should ask yourself, "Why don't other people find value in
| what I'm producing?" Additionally, we view profitability as a
| mechanism for allowing us to keep working on the ambitious ideas
| that we care about.
|
| In part because of the people who are attracted to his companies,
| and his particularly strong influence on company culture compared
| to most founders, I think his companies have a pretty healthy
| (thought not perfect) perspective on profitability in the grand
| scheme of things.
| sanderjd wrote:
| In my experience this is always the framing. The hard part is
| figuring out when you're being BS'd.
|
| I agree that a strong founder personality impressing their
| personal philosophy on the company leads to very different
| outcomes. I think Google's slow loss of its founders' day to
| day impact over time is very relevant to this conversation.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Time to abolish all corporations for the greater good or prepare
| for a new age of corporate serfdom.
| captainmuon wrote:
| If the margins are so high for an ad exchange (~20%), I don't
| understand why nobody opens a new independent one. Sure, such a
| thing is hard to get off the ground, but if you have VC backing
| or contacts with a few classical media sites and industry
| associations, it seems definitely possible.
|
| Also, I don't think the advantages of targeted advertising and ad
| auctions are as big as people think. Maybe people should start
| placing ads via the sites' thematical context instead of the
| users' browsing history.
|
| Finally, I would also look into serving ads first-party, that is
| embedded in the page and from the same domain. A lot harder to
| block, more performant, and you might be able to get rid of the
| stupid cookie banners.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I looked into this a long time ago and here's what I realized.
|
| 1. You need to be really well capitalized. AdOps engineers work
| for the most lucrative business model in these companies and
| you need large scale to convince publishers to integrate with
| you. While you are building this out you are burning money so
| you need to convince VCs to pour millions to fight the darlings
| of SVs.
|
| 2. The publishers don't have any choice and are already
| struggling. Not many of them are going to take a chance
| integrating a new platform that might make them less money so
| you need to have sellers ready to go. Ultimately it's in
| Googles best interest that publishers struggle because it
| prevents them from experimenting with other exchanges.
|
| 3. Sellers are largely unsophisticated. They might have a hunch
| that GOOG/FB might be bordering on useless but nobody has been
| fired for spending 10MM on Facebook ads. Trying to get a piece
| of that spend so you have something to give publishers leads to
| a chicken and egg problem.
|
| Ultimately, GOOG has a massive moat that lets them protect that
| 20%
| ibn-python wrote:
| I believe The Trade Desk is the alternative ads exchange
| platform to Google and Facebook. But I agree, we need more.
| DLA wrote:
| Twitter threads suck so bad from a UX perspective. Long form
| "article" in a zillion tiny chunks with all the UI control cruft
| repeated over and over and over and over providing no value
| whatsoever. An enormous post, page, or article would be so much
| better. So over threads.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The UI is the least of the problems with this thread. The
| author is freely mixing cherry-picked statements quoted from
| google documents with statements made by the other side of a
| law suit. It looks like a pile of smoking guns but that's
| because most of it is misleadingly attributed, intentionally.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The bits about the ad auction are all what I expected as a
| user...
|
| Obviously they can adjust their fee up or down to further their
| interests. Obviously they have the right to set the 'floor'
| auction price, and can set it to maximize profits. Obviously they
| can take on business from Facebook, and limit how much they take
| on if they like.
|
| It doesn't include stuff about their recent switch to first price
| auctions, which make many of these complaints moot. It's really
| hard to make a first price auction unfair.
|
| Why was any of this a surprise?
| secondcoming wrote:
| They rejected bids with higher bid prices to prefer their own
| inventory. The auction was rigged.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would
| know...
|
| Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid.
| Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was
| $0.90".
|
| You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to
| this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the
| auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are
| 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If
| you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly
| written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of
| time.
| secondcoming wrote:
| There are caveats. From Google's protobuf file itself [0]
| // If the bid won the auction, this is the price paid in
| your account // currency. If the bid participated
| in the auction but was out-bid, this // is the CPM
| that should have been exceeded in order to win. This is not
| // set if the bid was filtered prior to the auction, if the
| publisher or // winning bidder has opted out of
| price feedback or if your account has // opted out
| of sharing winning prices with other bidders. For first-
| price // auctions, minimum_bid_to_win is populated
| instead of this field. optional int64 cpm_micros =
| 4;
|
| I don't know if Google's bidder will populate this field.
| Even if they do send this data, there's no way you can tell
| if it's faked or not.
|
| They could also maybe get around this by setting up a PMP
| for Google's own inventory thereby allowing them to accept
| bids that are lower than Open Market bids.
|
| [0] https://developers.google.com/authorized-
| buyers/rtb/download...
| p49k wrote:
| You only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it
| impossible to have enough information to know if the
| auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad
| gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's
| the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not
| improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the
| complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner
|
| Citation needed.
|
| See https://developers.google.com/authorized-
| buyers/rtb/download...
|
| The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message
| contains this info for all first price auctions.
| p49k wrote:
| This protobuf spec is in no way relevant to the situation
| outlined in the anti-competitive behavior complaint.
|
| The protobuf spec is related to using the Authorized
| Buyers RTB protocol within AdX. That's an ecosystem that
| lives entirely within Google itself, so there's no reason
| Google would want to disadvantage anyone since people
| using this are already essentially paying Google for the
| privilege.
|
| What the lawsuit is referring to is header-bidding, where
| an auction occurs client-side (or server-side using an
| O/O server endpoint) and the result is passed to GAM for
| competition via Dynamic Allocation.
|
| Google is being accused of trying to kill header bidding
| (because data is shared and profits are earned outside of
| Google's ecosystem), not their own RTB products.
| richardfey wrote:
| The biggest findings in this thread are (for me) these two:
|
| - gTrade and Bernanke program
|
| - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive
| capableweb wrote:
| > - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive
|
| Hasn't this been clear since long time ago? For as long as I
| can remember, the message on the backup screen for Whatsapp on
| iOS has said that backups are not encrypted.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I don't remember it was the case on Android at least.
| capableweb wrote:
| Here are two articles with screenshots that show both times
| that the statement existed there too:
|
| - 2017 - https://www.recovery-android.com/back-up-restore-
| whatsapp-me...
|
| - 2020 - https://www.androidcentral.com/how-restore-your-
| whatsapp-cha...
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's not been secret but hardly common knowledge either.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not sure what more you can ask for than Whatsapp
| putting a descriptive text about encryption not being
| applied if use the export functionality, right next to the
| button to enable export functionality.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I didn't ask for anything. I just don't think most people
| know.
| colordrops wrote:
| I just can't get worked up over this. Advertising is at best
| amoral, and inherently a shady activity. I've always assumed that
| advertising is a cut throat industry full of sharks. This doesn't
| really come as a surprise that google, the king of advertising,
| would partake in cutthroat activities in a cutthroat industry
| full of sharks to dominate and extract maximum value. So they
| acted like sociopaths among a society of sociopaths, so what.
| curiousgal wrote:
| It's silly but the only reason I can't get worked up over this
| is because it was presented in a Twitter thread. I just can't
| take anything presented in batches of x characters seriously.
| heisenbit wrote:
| In a world where R&D is now often dwarfed by ad spend it is
| really a threat to progress.
| google234123 wrote:
| So what? Humans also spend almost 400 billion a year on
| cosmetics. Progress is being made anyway. Obviously the ad
| spend brings some value to those companies.
| izacus wrote:
| Don't worry, USA will continue investing orders of magnitude
| more money into R&D for killing people so progress won't
| stop.
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| Thread
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451619916994396164.html
| [deleted]
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Thank you! Why DO people insist on posting essays as 1,001
| tweets!? The mind boggles.
| zffr wrote:
| I think because Twitter is where their audience is. As
| annoying as it is to read on Twitter, posting it as multiple
| tweets also allows people to like/retweet individual and
| multiple parts of the essay which probably increases the
| essay's overall reach/engagement.
| raydev wrote:
| Yep, people who are interested can immediately and directly
| engage with the author of the thread on any single point.
|
| Medium had the right idea allowing people to highlight
| specific items in a post and comment on them, but I think
| people prefer a forum over long form articles.
| [deleted]
| twic wrote:
| It's the only popular publishing platform that permits true
| hypertext features such as nonlinear text, and comments on
| and transclusion of individual paragraphs of a post.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Ironically enough, Google Docs would allow that :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 1. It's where the audience is.
|
| 2. Sometimes ... tootstorms just happen.
|
| 3. It is ... remarkably like posting a public Zettelkasten.
| In particular, there are often responses to specific items on
| a thread and those themselves can prove revealing.
|
| A huge issue with traditional "single entity" documents
| (books, essays, even longish HN comments as I'm wont to
| produce...) is that responses tend to be either to the thing-
| as-a-whole or some irrelevant point. One of the hardest
| things to get as an author is _specific_ feedback to a given
| passage of writing, and for all its many, many faults, the
| tootstream format cracks open that shell.
|
| That feedback may highlight well-written bits, poorly-written
| ones (where readers repeatedly misinterpret authors' intent),
| salient or poorly-supported facts and logic, etc.
|
| My usual platform for this is Mastodon, and I've posted a
| number of longer tootstorms (using the Mastodon nomenclature
| rather than "tweets"), searchable via hashtag from my present
| and previous instance homes at
|
| https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/tootstorm
|
| I thought there were a few here as well though they're not
| appearing:
|
| https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/tootstorm
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Collusion? Conspiracy theories? Etc.? All are completely
| irrelevant. Simply because even a proven absence of them creates
| a false sense of security. It doesn't make us any safer. It
| doesn't take nefarious off the table.
|
| Entities with common means and ends don't have to collude or
| conspire. Their shared means and ends will force them to
| gravitate together. Starlings are a great example:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY
|
| For starlings I believe it's call murmuration.
|
| https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-murmuration
|
| There's also a more scientific name / area of study, tho' that
| name escapes me atm.
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That is it. Cheers!
| rStar wrote:
| if we had a functioning government, and if all the rich
| republicans in california weren't pretending to be democrats, we
| wouldn't have this problem.
| smoldesu wrote:
| We have a functioning government, it just so happens to hate us
| and let companies accrue trillions of dollars without social
| recompense.
| berkes wrote:
| Or, differently put: "In a democracy people get the leaders
| they deserve."
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| If a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin'
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
| andygrd wrote:
| No surprises there at all, it's all about the doh ray mee for
| that crowd.
| willvarfar wrote:
| I remember when google was the shining light of "be nice company"
| that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that
| was M$crosoft.
|
| And, from reading all the "why I left google" posts and hearing
| about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10
| years ago was the good or even just a better google.
|
| With how google went from "do no evil" to this, with how Facebook
| has always been profits over ethics, with how Amazon treats
| employees generally, etc:
|
| Which employers are the "nice company making nice things and
| you'll be able to sleep at night" tech companies nowadays?
|
| Who should we safely not feel bad about wanting to work for?
| alaeraky wrote:
| There is no safety in Corporate America.
|
| Exploiting the weaknesses of the largest group possible has
| been the name of the game for such a long time, that for many
| well meaning corporate robots it has become automatic
| behaviour.
|
| They defend, justify and most importantly have no roadmap to
| how corporate america can reduce exploitating knowledge gaps,
| info assymetry, biases, weaknesses at scale.
| kypro wrote:
| Company policies like "don't be evil" probably need to be
| directed by founders.
|
| You can't expect others in a company to put their morals over
| profits because at the end of the day no one gets fired for
| making money, but you can if your morals get in the way of
| profit. The incentives always pushes on the side of profit.
|
| As a company grows the founders who originally directed the
| company's ethics either step down or have less influence in the
| day to day decision making at every level of the company.
|
| I think this is why we see companies like Tesla (and startups
| more generally) making so many "out there" decisions in terms
| of design and how they run their business. No one's going to
| risk their job on pitching the cyber truck at Ford or spending
| $0 on advertisement. These things really need to be pushed by a
| founder who isn't worried about being fired for doing something
| that seems crazy on paper.
|
| Generally I think the world would be better off with less super
| massive companies who no longer have a founder with morals and
| a vision to guide the company away from a purely profit
| motivated future.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| > Generally I think the world would be better off with less
| super massive companies who no longer have a founder with
| morals and a vision to guide the company away from a purely
| profit motivated future.
|
| I think that's the crux of what Google got caught doing here.
| You don't need an Ivy League law degree to understand that
| what is laid out here is a slam-dunk case on
| collusion/anticompetitive grounds. I hope they have to face
| some kind of accountability for it. I hope these attorneys in
| Texas can deliver that for all of us at a level above "slap
| on the wrist".
| matsemann wrote:
| Being a xoogler used to be something to put in your profile
| bio, and basically an instant hire if in your CV.
|
| Now it almost carries a stigma.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| Man, I don't know, if you need some binary trees inverted on
| a whiteboard, they are still the go-to folks.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Inverting a binary tree isn't particularly hard.
| ctvo wrote:
| Can we stop with this meme? I've seen it now twice in this
| thread and across the boarder Google threads today.
|
| The hiring process is this way for the entire industry.
| Multiple startups have failed trying to move it away from
| its current incarnation of technical phone screen ->
| technical on-site, where the majority of technical
| questions asked are data structures, algorithms, and system
| design based.
|
| Implying that the people at Google are only good at
| whiteboard interviews, and not much else, in terms of both
| intelligence and technical ability is laughable. Google's
| influence on software engineering is broad and deep. Their
| papers moved the industry, their open source projects power
| the industry, their internal tools influence shifts in the
| industry.
|
| There's something wrong with _you_ when you let their
| signal / data gathering for their hiring process impair
| your ability to see what they contribute clearly, and what
| obviously works for them in terms of hiring able engineers.
|
| Using this issue, which is clearly not related to
| engineering ability (it's a systemic management issue as
| far as I can tell), as a data point to demonstrate that
| their interview process is flawed, and that the engineers
| that made it through it aren't able says more about your
| own emotional state.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Binary trees during the hiring process for software
| engineers is not a part of the entire industry. I'd be
| surprised if it was even the majority. But it is
| prevalent, and posts pop up here regularly disparaging
| it.
|
| Places lean into Google's way of doing things by default
| without demonstrating that it leads to positive outcomes
| _for their business_. Google themselves do it due to no
| small part to compensate for the pitfalls of getting as
| big as they have. Pointing out that what they do is
| ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating scale
| with success.
| ctvo wrote:
| > _Binary trees during the hiring process for software
| engineers is not a part of the entire industry. I 'd be
| surprised if it was even the majority. But it is
| prevalent, and posts pop up here regularly disparaging
| it._
|
| Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Apple,
| LinkedIn, Microsoft, Snap, RobinHood, Walmart, Twilio,
| Uber, DoorDash, ... (we can continue down the list of US
| / western technology companies here for quite some time),
| all ask technical questions following the standard data
| structures, algorithms and system design format. They
| don't specifically ask for binary trees, but Google
| doesn't specifically ask that question either. There is
| no standard for the entire industry, but this method is
| common, to pretend otherwise is disingenuous .
|
| > _Places lean into Google 's way of doing things by
| default without demonstrating that it leads to positive
| outcomes _for their business_. Google themselves do it
| due to no small part to compensate for the pitfalls of
| getting as big as they have. Pointing out that what they
| do is ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating
| scale with success._
|
| There are multiple assumptions here on your part. One is
| that this is something that occurs due to scale. Please
| prove it. The on-site process outlined takes engineering
| time, and is costly. It's multiple hours long, brings in
| multiple engineers, and requires lengthy discussions
| afterwards. Surely there's something that scales better
| if that were the motivation here?
|
| The second assumption is places blindly follow Google's
| lead, with no further analysis on their own if it'
| beneficial to their business. This is mindbogglingly
| presumptuous considering the million / billion / trillion
| dollar companies with highly capable engineering / HR
| leaders on that list. You obviously know better than them
| with the data they've collected?
|
| The above is outside my original point: This thread is
| not a question of engineering ability. It's a systemic
| management failure. Latching on to anything negative re:
| Google / Big Tech to vent your frustrated at the hiring
| process, and how see! it lets in those who aren't
| intelligent, capable, etc. is a reflection of your own
| emotional state.
| LandR wrote:
| These sort of silly interview questions seems to be a US
| thing. Never been asked to whiteboard anything in
| interviews, I'm in Scotland. Also never been asked
| anything ds&a related.
| playpause wrote:
| I think this is over-imaginative. It's still an instant hire
| almost anywhere. People still talk about ex-googlers like
| they're celebrities when they join your company. They can
| write a book and the first thing the publisher will say on
| the back is "Since working at Google...". I'm not saying this
| won't ever change, but it will take a while.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Where does it carry a stigma to have worked for google? Lots
| of interesting tech and lots of open source projects come
| from inside google.
| oth001 wrote:
| Epic Games seems like one of the good guys for the most part at
| least.
| pjmlp wrote:
| None of them, I am quite old to have learned in a capitalist
| society it is always about the money.
|
| Company mottos, cultural values, we are family, and all the
| marketing garbage that they sell for new hires to feel good is
| just that, plain marketing.
|
| When things get though, the "values" hardly matter to get deals
| or fire people.
| okusername wrote:
| Yeah and communist society is about who has the best
| connections to the people in the party who decide who gets
| what. And socialist societies are about not making too much
| money because you'll lose the subsidies.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Communism is not the only alternative. It still implies an
| economy and endless human work to sustain it. Capitalism is
| automating everything and if this continues we'll either
| end up in a post scarcity society like Star Trek or some
| dystopian hell where corporations create artificial
| economies just to maintain their power and wealth.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apparently I touched a nerve....
| mola wrote:
| Strawman... The alternative to purely profit driven society
| is not a communist society. It's social democratic where
| values of freedom rights and wellfare actually matters and
| are not just axes to grind on.
|
| The US internal anti socialist propoganda is so strong that
| it makes people believe that this middle ground doesn't
| exist.
| Tarsul wrote:
| it's similar with governments actually: All the talk about
| human rights, social justice etc. are usually way less
| important to the government than the GDP and hence
| capitalism/profits. BUT, this is not only good for the top x%
| but good for everyone usually. With profitable businesses you
| can pay everyone and everyone is getting richer, thus
| everyone wins. At least unless the top x% keep the riches to
| themselves, that's when the government should intervene. If
| they don't, it's up to the voters. So the system has quite a
| few fail safes. (although I agree it's not enough nowadays,
| especially regarding those oligopolies and climate change.)
| bbarnett wrote:
| And now you know the true reason for age discrimination. It
| takes time, no matter how intelligent, to see through such
| dogma.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I work for one of the big companies that you would think (from
| the vocal minority) everyone hates. Only one of their business
| units is "not well liked", another is ambivalent, and another
| creates health care products for students and doctors. They try
| hard to provide opportunities for minority groups in the
| company, they organize charity events for local groups doing
| things like fighting hunger or childhood cancer, and they try
| hard to be one of the best employers wherever they have
| offices. Their leadership promote the idea of always trying to
| do the right thing and have an open door policy, and have
| changed company decisions because of concerns gathered via
| petition. I'm very frustrated at the poor organization and
| execution of this company, but it does genuinely try to live
| good values, and all the people I've ever talked to here
| (including leadership) genuinely care about other people. And I
| know for a fact that their products have pushed forward
| advances in science, technology, medicine, even giving away
| product for people fighting the pandemic.
|
| I have the feeling that all large companies, regardless of how
| ethical their mission, can make you feel bad. But just because
| you feel bad doesn't mean the majority of outcomes of the
| company are bad. I mean, shit, our _country as a whole_
| produces some pretty bad outcomes, but not necessarily the
| majority. At some point we need to be more rational than
| emotional and do as much good as we can while still collecting
| a paycheck. But of course we should be willing to leave and
| work for good if we can no longer justify the bad.
|
| I don't think there is any safe math for that. What if staying
| provides a better opportunity to create necessary change? At
| what point do we choose between the easy and the right, and how
| do we even find that line?
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Since google is as a publicly traded company, they are under
| enormous pressure to produce steady growth figures, just to
| please the stock market. Sure that survival has priority over
| playing it nice.
| davedx wrote:
| I mean yes and no. Blue chips can also just pay out their
| gigantic profits as dividends to shareholders - the growth
| pressure is more from VCs
| lazyeye wrote:
| Yep...in a very short amount of time they went from "dont be
| evil" to "hide your evil".
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| "See no evil"?
| [deleted]
| blackandsqueaky wrote:
| All that changed is a breakdown in perception management.
| Google definitely had positive and idealistic beginnings, but
| through growth eventually innate properties of the species will
| express and become difficult to centrally control. This is a
| feature Google has in common with any other large organization,
| be it IBM, Amazon or the Catholic church.
|
| Your solution is finding a good employer who you know and vet
| personally, and avoiding working entirely for large companies.
| Managing human rot at scale is an unsolved problem, and few
| seem to survive exposure to extraordinary cash flows without
| some aspect or other of their humanity being impacted.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > avoiding working entirely for large companies. Managing
| human rot at scale is an unsolved problem
|
| Isn't it, then, solved? The scalable way is liberalism = the
| ability to change employers and swap companies when they rot.
| It comes at the loss of having to dismantle mature companies
| frequently, but it is one way to solve rot. Like you change
| window frames when they rot.
| ant6n wrote:
| I got a Google Home a couple of years ago, cuz all my friends
| had one, but never got around to set it up. When it came out it
| was a magical box by a cool company that was like star trek had
| turned real.
|
| The other day I unpacked the thing cuz I needed a Bluetooth
| speaker, and was swearing at the thing the whole time cuz I
| couldn't set it up as a speaker without downloading the app,
| hooking the device to WiFi and seemingly giving Google access
| to more of my data (you can turn off the mic, but it keeps
| complaining about it at full volume and u can't turn that off).
|
| It's funny how the personal feelings associated with Google has
| changed. The device is the same, but the perspective, the
| emotion towards the company has changed so much.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Unionize anywhere you work. That's the way not to feel bad.
| paulluuk wrote:
| As much as I like unions, I don't think that they prevent
| companies from doing bad things to the public, just to their
| employees.
| a123b456c wrote:
| Shopify
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The Google from 12 to 16 years ago was found guilty[1] in an
| antitrust suit of colluding with other industry leaders to keep
| tech employee compensation artificially low.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
| staticautomatic wrote:
| They're weren't "found guilty." They settled both the
| criminal and civil cases.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yeah I don't think people understand the extent to which
| public relations influences our beliefs. Google was able to
| maintain a polished image in well known areas while silently
| behaving poorly in others and we believed it for a long time.
| I remember about ten years ago meetings Eric Schmidt had with
| US military generals. That didn't even register on mass media
| so most people probably never heard of it. I wonder how deep
| the connection between Google and the government really goes.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Yea I was just going to say, the only reason you think more
| fondly of Google's than Facebook's image is a clear example
| of one company having a far superior PR department than
| another.
|
| It might be true at the very beginning when Google was
| simply a search engine that they truly were "doing no
| evil." It's also true at the very beginning of Facebook
| that they were truly trying to build a social network that
| made the world more open and connected by bringing
| grandparents closer to their grandkids thousands of miles
| apart.
| germandiago wrote:
| I did not go into details as to what Google misbehaviors
| were.
|
| But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and
| illegal stuff.
|
| Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is
| natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to
| people. It is also natural that people want to be paid
| more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A
| salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say
| this from an ethical point of view, I say how humans act.
|
| Also, with all these regulations, unfortunately,
| government-company collusion is also there, not only among
| companies. I wonder if markets were more free than they are
| if the collusion among companies (given that governments
| cannot regulate as much) would be as effective. I just
| wonder, because I am not sure, but I am confident it would
| be better than what we usually see in the media, which much
| of it is the consequence of disproportionate power for
| regulating.
|
| About behaving "poor" each person has her own ethics.
| Things that look ok to someone can look bad to others. And
| many look bad to most of us, especially when it is someone
| else who does it... which is curious. Companies are greedy,
| when it is not our company. Companies are bad, when it is
| not our company... our neighbor does not deserve what we
| deserve, because we are better.
|
| So the only measure by which we should measure companies is
| by law (even I find some laws absurd, but that is another
| topic). If some laws and regulations give power to make
| excuses that favor corruption via favoring friends, then
| maybe the problem is the capacity to regulate.
|
| I do not think an independent company would work for a
| government in "unethical" terms (as for many of our mostly
| accepted definition of unethical, like helping military
| research or giving surveillance tech to governments) if
| that government cannot give them something in exchange. We
| see the pattern? The problem is that exactly. Do not look
| further.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I promise you both companies have very well defined and
| strongly worded ethical policies against collusion. Plus,
| budgets for things like the OP would involve multiple
| layers of an organization with lots of required sign-off.
| So if true, this would be damning for all those involved.
|
| As to your other point, I'm sure you're aware that
| governments and private companies are afforded different
| rules of engagement. We decided a century ago that
| allowing companies to collude ended up oppressing markets
| in negative ways and should not be tolerated. So not sure
| why you're using one to justify the other.
| germandiago wrote:
| Collusion via regulations still exists today. As long as
| there are rulers it will exist.
|
| Thinking the opposite is being very innocent, in my view.
| But all happens in non-obvious ways and in the
| background, you are going to see a tiny fraction of what
| happens.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| From the very beginning Google's public ethos was "don't
| be evil", not "don't break the law". They essentially
| asked for their behavior to be judged subjectively.
| elgfare wrote:
| This whole explanation smells of "late capitalism". But
| even so, we have to judge companies ethically, because
| how else would new regulation be conceived of?
| germandiago wrote:
| My point here (I got a rain of negatives, but I got used
| to, my opinions seem to be very particular) is that we
| need objetive law to judge.
|
| But the fact of creating laws in large sectors of
| people's lives creates evil incentives and dependence on
| people who did not take part in creating wealth for
| others.
|
| I just find it contradicting.
| harry8 wrote:
| Not only PR.
|
| Compared with what came before and what was competing with
| it in those days google search was terrific. Finding more
| of what you wanted faster. Clean interface. Ads off to the
| side clearly identified. People just felt good about using
| google product. That's a great place to start any PR.
| People's affection for polish of Apple Product compared
| with horrible machines most have been forced to use in pod
| farms etc worked the same way for Steve Jobs.
|
| Assange has been claiming for a decade that Google is now
| "big and bad." Not sure if I believed him then. He was also
| claiming the US desperately wanted to put in him in jail
| while being dismissed by Hilary Clinton. He was right
| there. And that many people in the US govt and military
| industrial complex wanted to kill him and it was a lot more
| than just an idle thought. Right there too. His PR is
| shockingly bad.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| US intel community assessed that Wikileaks was a thin
| front/wrapper for Russian intelligence operations
| intended to harm the US and allies. A kind of "launderer"
| at best for docs that Russian hackers or agents would
| steal or forge. Assange was the key guy behind Wikileaks.
| Therefore, Assange is... neither credible or honorable.
| _dain_ wrote:
| And you just believe everything the "US intel community"
| says?
| rileymat2 wrote:
| "steal or forge"
|
| There is a huge difference between those two. Would be
| interesting to know how much was "forged." At one point I
| thought they tried to vet the dumps pretty well to
| maintain credibility.
| lovecg wrote:
| Even assuming it's 100% legit documents. In an
| environment where all parties do bad things, but country
| A selectively exposes parts of country B's dirty laundry
| in a way that would benefit country A and uses Wikileaks
| as the tool to achieve that - well it's hard to see
| Wikileaks as this neutral party that does unequivocal
| good for the world. I'll change my mind when Wikileaks
| publishes oh I don't know, details on Putin's palace
| maybe.
| gukov wrote:
| So a whistleblower from company A should wait until
| company B has a whistleblower, otherwise it will look
| bad?
| lovecg wrote:
| No. But if an entity C keeps publishing whistleblower
| documents from company A but not B, it's reasonable to
| wonder if C is in fact not a neutral actor.
| dls2016 wrote:
| Also they were giving employees haircuts. Having been in the
| military and watched enough documentaries on the subject...
| any group that gives you a haircut is probably a cult.
| rajup wrote:
| This is false: they have vendors come onsite to give
| haircuts, but employees still pay for it. Had to point this
| out, since you jump from one false statement to a
| completely absurd conclusion.
| true_religion wrote:
| Wasn't that the beginning of the end of FAANG's reputation?
|
| Having your company put billions into the bank every year
| because they "don't know what to do with it" while you're not
| even a millionaire is disheartening.
|
| I mean, if they were still paying us all handsomely like
| stock brokers then I bet popular opinion would be on their
| side.
| scarmig wrote:
| If you work for Google as a SWE for a decade and aren't
| well over a million in net assets, you're doing something
| wrong.
| paulpauper wrote:
| a decade...how many ppl work at google for so long?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Note that longevity statistics are also affected by
| growth.
|
| A high-growth company will, by definition, be a _short-
| tenure_ company. Ironically, it 's at _shrinking_
| companies that relative tenures often increase,
| especially as those who cannot (or feel they cannot)
| compete elsewhere remain.
|
| For a company increasing headcount by 35%/yr, half of all
| employees will have been hired within the past two years,
| _even with no attrition_.
|
| Statistics under conditions of rapid change are ...
| counterintuitive. And you'd probably want measures that
| better indicate length against hire date, or at departure
| date, or similar factors. In some ways this is similar to
| the challenge of identifying disease mortality during
| early phases of emergence as not all cases will have
| reached conclusion and identification of all infections
| or instances is likely to be incomplete.
|
| Not that I can think of any phenomena where this might be
| exhibited in the past few years....
| mattzito wrote:
| A surprising number - sure, google has turnover like
| everyone else, but in general I am always surprised at
| how many people have 5+ years of tenure. I work with a
| number of people where google is the only place they have
| ever worked, which is downright odd to me.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They take very good care of their staff.
| angelzen wrote:
| We'll soon all be millionaires, nothing to worry about.
| adflux wrote:
| > while you're not even a millionare
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >I mean, if they were still paying us all handsomely like
| stock brokers then I bet popular opinion would be on their
| side.
|
| Aren't FAANG salaries still absurd?
| true_religion wrote:
| Faang salaries are pretty good when you are starting out,
| but they level of pretty quickly.
|
| After say twenty years, my friends on Wall Street are
| mysteriously richer than I am. Of course the ones who
| didn't survive the early treadmill aren't included, but I
| guess that's the trade off. Engineering is fairly stable
| and well paying, but you don't get million dollar payouts
| unless you are a founder.
| mrhands556 wrote:
| 20 years working at FAANG your equity should be
| outrageous compared to other industry SWE.
| kilbuz wrote:
| My mid-career rank-and-file friends at FAANG have W2
| income of $700k-1m a year. These are not high-powered
| individuals within their org, not even close.
| bluedevilzn wrote:
| If you worked at FAANG and survived the treadmill for 20
| years, you should be a Principal Engineer/Engineering
| Director at least. L8 compensation starts at a million
| dollars per year.
| true_religion wrote:
| I'm not really a big fan of total compensation numbers
| when it comes heavily weighted into stock.
|
| After all, if I wanted to be paid for stock performance I
| would've been a stockbroker (and like I pointed out up
| there, gotten paid way more after 20 year survivorship).
|
| Also, I didn't think it needed to be said but apart from
| Apple all the FAANG companies are really young, Google is
| only 23 years old. Back in 2001, they had less than 500
| employees. I'm not one of the golden era. If I were,
| you'd already know my name and I of course would be a
| multimillionaire.
| kilbuz wrote:
| https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/13437225822063779
| 84
|
| Multimillionaires are not people who joined Google 20
| years ago. That's a different league altogether.
|
| Multimillionaires are just normal people you've never
| heard of who work 9-5 and drink beer on the weekends with
| their friends and have a normal house in South Bay.
|
| They joined Snowflake, Square, Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, or
| any other of the hundreds of SV companies like those in
| the last decade, even the last few years.
|
| They are the average homebuyers for 1500-2000 sq foot
| ranch houses in Bay Area right now.
| eclipxe wrote:
| That isn't true.
| [deleted]
| moneywoes wrote:
| Yep senior engineer is a terminal level
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is wrong, many employees rich with stock options and
| other compensation, plus large salaries
| lovecg wrote:
| Funny how the salaries suddenly exploded after this
| collusion scheme was brought to light.
| kodah wrote:
| That's not the majority. It mainly applies to a
| privileged sector of tech from what I've seen.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Of FAANG I've still got a soft spot for Netflix. Even if
| they're selling my data there's less potential for harm given
| that they're not a glorified advertising company.
| rambambram wrote:
| > given that they're not a glorified advertising company
|
| They're still an advertising company, just on a level people
| are less aware of. And they might not 'advertise' the usual
| products.
| davedx wrote:
| No they're not. Customers pay Netflix subscriptions.
| christophilus wrote:
| There is certainly product placement. But I'd agree
| Netflix doesn't feel as egregious as GOOG or FB.
| izacus wrote:
| > There is certainly product placement. But I'd agree
| Netflix doesn't feel as egregious as GOOG or FB.
|
| Keyword being "feel". Google and FB "felt" nice for a
| long time. Now, after old media smearing blitz, they
| don't "feel" as nice anymore.
|
| Key takeaway: "feeling" about a corporation has very
| little to do with their practices and everything to do
| with the PR budget and loudness of screaming about them.
| They're all sociopathic by design.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >And they might not 'advertise' the usual products.
|
| Based on my recent viewing history (mostly old Star Trek,
| first season of Blacklist and the Inspiration Four
| documentary) I'm struggling to see what those might be.
| fullshark wrote:
| Well they advertise their own shows to keep you
| subscribed, and they also have product placement. I
| remember Lagavulin scotch showing up in the TV show Lost
| in Space for example, an incredibly out of place product
| placement.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I think the content of the things Netflix produces might be
| the most harmful to our society overall. Thinking of things
| like Cuties, etc.
| stevage wrote:
| I think any tech company that is growing, and has not achieved
| profitability by a clear mechanism that you're ok with is a
| risk.
| feanaro wrote:
| > Which employers are the "nice company making nice things and
| you'll be able to sleep at night" tech companies nowadays?
|
| The smaller ones.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| And consequently the ones where employees make a smaller
| salary.
| microtherion wrote:
| I would argue that
|
| * There are plenty of evil small companies as well.
|
| * Small companies can turn evil more quickly than big ones
| can.
|
| * The evil things big companies do is more likely to be a
| matter of public record already than the evils of a small
| company.
|
| * Big companies sometimes have the scale to make a bigger
| impact at the "nice" things they do than small companies.
|
| That's not to say that there aren't some impactful, ethical
| small companies out there. I'm just saying that the choice is
| not as clear cut as it's made out to be.
|
| Sincerely, your BigCo Corporate Drone
| bsenftner wrote:
| The moment I saw "Don't be evil" as their motto/slogan back in
| the 90's. I rolled my eyes and said out loud "What a load of
| shit, I bet they are evil incarnate."
| MandieD wrote:
| As my (devout but quietly Baptist) boss at my childhood
| town's local ISP told me, "if you ever run into a businessman
| who is eager to tell you what a strong [Christian] believer
| he is, or has a [Jesus] fish on his signs or business cards,
| watch your wallet!"
|
| (Things in [square braces] as added context for people who
| didn't grow up as Evangelicals in the South)
| sonofhans wrote:
| William S Burroughs: "When doing business with a religious
| son of a bitch, get it in writing. He's word isn't worth
| shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on
| the deal."
| aaaaaaaaa5432 wrote:
| > Which employers are the "nice company making nice things and
| you'll be able to sleep at night" tech companies nowadays?
|
| Atlassian.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Ugh have you ever USED Jira?
| eclipxe wrote:
| Work where you want and don't feel bad because of HN opinions.
| HN hates everything eventually, except RSS.
| joedevon wrote:
| That comment gave me the biggest smile @eclipxe.
| api wrote:
| It stands for Hater News. Good info here but the bias is
| negative.
|
| Oh, and don't forget Wireguard. Put Wireguard and RSS in the
| same headline and get the highest upvotes ever.
|
| Of course HN will probably hate Wireguard in a year.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Interesting and a little funny to read the question this way.
|
| A certain peculiarity of our time I think is a constant
| ambiguation (or confusion) between moral conscience and
| social impressions, social consequences even. social media
| gives us the illusion sometimes that they are one in the
| same, leading to confusions like this.
| lucasverra wrote:
| The ones that do not pay FAANG(M) salaries
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't know if it's been studied or written but I'd bet solid
| money that every group / company starts nice, trying to
| differentiate from old rusty and corrupt only to become what
| they despised because that's just survival instinct and
| "efficiency" (short term, lazy).
|
| Same for people, new ones come fresh with ideals only to become
| sleazy when their spot is secured. It's a balance between
| knowledge of the old versus naiveness of the new.
| bostik wrote:
| > _I don 't know if it's been studied or written_
|
| Yes, it has been written. And you almost certain will have
| heard the condensed version.
|
| You either die a hero or live long enough to become the
| villain.
| agumonkey wrote:
| come on, i need longer than this :)
|
| there must be finer / wiser analysis about these
| antagonism.
|
| I have a tendency to be a naive hero wannabee but I
| recognize when I become dark or complacent. Most probably
| people managed to do better and write about this in a
| social context.
| revscat wrote:
| The universal emergent behavior of capitalism. It may not be
| by design, but is as certain as gravity. Capitalism is wholly
| incompatible with morality, unless you definite morality
| itself to be capitalism.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't think capitalism is root here, it's an amplifier
| but humans have the same problem. Maybe any complex
| ~intelligent system even ?
| rakoo wrote:
| Go for a non-capitalist org. The very idea of profits over
| anything else is what drove Google, Facebook, Twitter and
| friends to where they are.
| melomal wrote:
| It's amazing that when you consider most tech companies based
| their entire perks strategy off the back of free food, beers,
| playgrounds, sleeping pods etc all in the name of keeping
| workings in the build at all times a la Facebook and Google.
|
| A little like the casinos tricks where you will never see a
| clock or the time inside one. There's a slight tilt on all
| pavements in Las Vegas that slowly push you towards the
| building, all without you knowing that it's happening.
|
| Brainwashing at it's finest.
| tdeck wrote:
| People always being this up and I think they're right to be
| skeptical, but the Google office I worked in (SF) was
| practically dead before 10 AM and after 7 PM. I never saw
| much evidence that any sizable group was working extra long
| hours. Some people hung around for dinner at 6:30 but most
| left before or right after grabbing food. I didn't spend
| enough time in Mountain View to form an informed opinion but
| there was definitely a big group leaving between 5 and 6:30.
| paxys wrote:
| People made this up because everyone needed a reason to put
| down the Google engineers who were suddenly getting better
| salaries and perks than the rest of the industry at the
| time. There was never any truth to the whole "employees
| stay at work all the time". Google has consistently had
| fantastic work life balance, as do most other similar large
| companies. It's the mid-tier ones that are sweatshops.
| dralley wrote:
| Of course, it helps that Google is, if these documents
| are accurate, literally stealing from basically everyone
| else (what company doesn't use Google adsense / AdWords)
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| See mike Monteiro's Broken by Design for a fascinating expose
| of the workings of SV tech giants and the complete lack of
| ethics driving them.
| worrycue wrote:
| > There's a slight tilt on all pavements in Las Vegas that
| slowly push you towards the building,
|
| Wouldn't that cause rain water to flow into the casinos?
| zksmk wrote:
| I don't know if what that person wrote is true, but drains
| exist and it's not like Vegas gets a lot of rain, it's
| literally in a desert, floods aren't really a big concern.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Floods are a huge concern in Vegas.
| worrycue wrote:
| Drains are typically between the pavement and the road to
| drain water from both of them no? Hence roads have a
| slight convex curve to them and pavements slope towards
| the road.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Anything with no shareholders.. Maybe that business model needs
| a revisit by the law. As in, if you hold share, you also hold
| liability (beyond loss of value). As in, you are open to a
| lawsuit if a company you invested in engages in unethical
| behavior and your votes did go towards that behavior.
|
| Strangle the socio-pathic plant at its root forever.
| mrintegrity wrote:
| Grafana labs seems like a company worth supporting, great
| products, agpl code, good community involvement. I help in
| their slack sometimes, I like their business model.
| OOPMan wrote:
| The smaller the company you work for, the less likely there is
| to be nasty shit going on you're not aware of...
| zdragnar wrote:
| I have an unofficial policy of only working for small
| companies. I broke that rule once, and I was consistently
| miserable. Completing features consistently took 3x longer
| than they should have, and the team was too big to be able to
| make the necessary changes to fix the accumulating problems
| that caused it.
|
| Additionally, people I hadn't met during the interviews but
| were in my direct chain of command were obnoxiously
| political. I am pretty much done with working at places where
| I dont have a direct line to the owners, and meet the owners
| before I accept the job.
| grappler wrote:
| I don't know about a big company, but my answer would be "the
| companies building decentralized and privacy-friendly tech".
| The ones pushing toward solutions to the problems now
| associated with 'big tech'.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Answering my own question,
|
| What about the timescales and starbursts and small tech
| startups that we like to see crop up on HN?
|
| My list above is tainted by my own interest in data; what is
| there in other spaces?
|
| Impressions and anecdotes?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I remember when google was the shining light of "be nice
| company" that we all dreamed of working for
|
| Yeah. I remember their "don't be evil" bullshit. It was all
| just marketing. You can perpetrate all kinds of dishonest acts
| when you have a reputation for honesty.
| kace91 wrote:
| I wonder if the behavior of the largest tech companies is a
| cause or an effect of their size.
|
| Is unethical behavior pushing companies to the top of the food
| chain?
|
| Or is it that other companies feel more ethical simply because
| they don't have as many chances to engage in unethical
| behavior?
|
| If it's the latter, all the push to split the companies is for
| nothing and we should just consider "ethics at scale" to be an
| unsolved problem I guess.
| wetmore wrote:
| Perhaps when they are large enough to have significant power,
| they attract more employees with looser morals who see them
| as places where they can profit.
| bawolff wrote:
| I suspect its less size then being at or near the top.
|
| If you're up and coming, the best strategy is to just make a
| better product. You know whose at the top and you can adapt
| your product to where they are weak.
|
| If you're at the top, i suspect the optimal strategy is to
| try and cut your competition off at the knees before its a
| threat.
|
| I think we see this across many things. Just look at all the
| messed up things states do when they're super powers vs
| middle power states.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| It's cartel behavior, they are trying to control every
| facet of the environments they live in. Hence why there are
| no competitors and all the upcoming platforms get acquired
| and absorbed.
| akomtu wrote:
| Criminal business is the most profitable business and
| "unethical" just means "white collar crime". If the law
| allowed drug trafficking and kidnappings, the biggest corp in
| the US would be a drug cartel and the only reason they are
| outlawed is because even people at the top agree that such
| cartels are bad. Things are different for white collar crime:
| most people believe that its OK to do shady things if
| nobody's obviously hurt. This is why senators brazengly trade
| stocks influenced by the laws they pass. They don't believe
| its a crime. So unsurprisingly, the biggest corps in the US
| exploit this weakness at scale. It may take centuries before
| the collective agreement will equate such business practices
| with drug cartels.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| > the biggest corp in the US would be a drug cartel
|
| This is besides the point you're making, but I disagree
| with this. Disregarding the ones who make drugs for medical
| use, we already have recreational drug companies operating
| legally, namely those selling alcohol and tobacco (and
| coffee I guess). They are not the biggest corporations in
| the US (although some are still huge and powerful, of
| course).
|
| The reason it's currently so insanely profitable dealing in
| some of the other drugs is their prohibition, which makes
| prices skyrocket (and of course, when you're already on the
| wrong side of the law, you might as well cut corners and
| utilize harmful practices to the extreme, even further
| increasing the profits).
| bostik wrote:
| > _If the law allowed drug trafficking and kidnappings, the
| biggest corp [anywhere] would be ..._
|
| History proves you right.
|
| The entire British empire, a fabulously wealthy system, was
| founded on slave trade (think: kidnapping, trafficking) and
| when that became too risky to maintain either the trade or
| profit margins, they moved over to global drug trade. The
| opium wars.
| agumonkey wrote:
| this has a few diagrams
| https://historyindoors.co.uk/britains-dark-past-the-
| atrociti...
|
| some are telling
| nabajour wrote:
| It might be both, some sort of feedback loop.
|
| My take on this is that in a small company, the individual
| with his morals and values can still have an impact on the
| behaviour of a company. Above a certain size, when the
| company is public, the individual has less impact on the
| company, and there is an emergent behaviour that is only
| driven by the incentive to "enhance shareholder value", and
| all moral values that the company could follow, and that come
| from individuals in the company, disappears.
|
| A company's social role is to provide jobs and goods for the
| society to work well. But this is not aligned with the
| survival incentive of the company, to "enhance shareholder
| value", which becomes it's only role.
| prox wrote:
| It's partly the Peter Principle, and another issue is maybe
| Google buying "management talent" from other companies. Just
| a guess though. Perhaps at that scale you have to be cut
| throat to be noticed and rise in the ranks (as it displays
| authority, which some people are especially fawned by)
| csee wrote:
| I think it's just that there's more scrutiny and the cases we
| hear about are more in the news. Smaller companies, and
| especially individuals who run businesses, do plenty of dodgy
| crap that nobody hears about and it never makes the news.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Humans don't scale: we get big egos, we exploit size
| advantages far in excess of ethics, and we believe our own
| PR. Humans do not scale. We need to philosophically admit
| that with greater influence only fictional heroes can remain
| ethically honest. Self deception typically ruins a wealthy
| person's honesty; it is natural human nature. Until we
| recognize this innate fact of human nature, we will
| continually create large disasters, over and over again.
| ttiurani wrote:
| It's about shareholder value added. A public company or a VC-
| backed private company can focus on making creative nice
| widgets and services for only a limited time before growth
| inevitably stalls. After that (unless the management can and
| wants to screw over their owners) they will need to look
| elsewhere for more profits.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's about capitalism, which rots the spirit of everything
| it touches.
|
| Money is the most dangerous behaviour-altering drug.
|
| It shouldn't be a surprise that a system which rewards
| sociopathy and discourages kindness and empathy keeps
| generating sociopathic behaviours.
| zo1 wrote:
| Capitalism has always been about greed, and I say that as
| a profound advocate of it. Its very convenient to blame
| capitalism now for stuff we don't like when I'd argue we
| knew all along about greed being a core part of
| capitalism. Convenient in that it somehow absolves
| government out of it, and hides how we as the supposed
| democratic participants have been utterly powerless to
| direct the state towards reigning in these supposedly
| greedy/evil capitalist companies.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Greed is good.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I don't quite get why capitalism would reward sociopathy
| more than any other system in history
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Your ethics are my opportunity.
| bsenftner wrote:
| To a Capitalist, the only possible deal is a profitable
| one. However, to be profitable, the arangement between
| participants has to be unfair. It is only through an
| unfair exchange of goods and services is a profit
| produced. So it imperative the other parties believe they
| are getting a fair deal, otherwise they would not
| participate. So, it is unmentioned while required that
| the Capitalist control the information of the
| participants such that they will believe they are getting
| a fair deal, while the Capitalist is in fact always
| getting the unfair advantage, or they would not
| participate. This is the nature of the corruption that is
| Capitalism.
| mrhands556 wrote:
| I pay an electrician a slight premium for knowledge and
| experience that won't burn my house down. Sure, I could
| look it up on YouTube but the probability that I do
| something wrong probably outweighs the premium I would
| pay for a qualified electrician.
|
| How is this unfair?
| lovecg wrote:
| It's completely fair and it's also not quite what people
| who critique capitalism are talking about. Imagine you're
| hiring a company that has electricians on payroll, then
| by definition the electrician you hired will get less
| than the labor he performed, and the company will pocket
| the difference as profit - or it won't stay in business
| long. Electricians have the option of going alone, many
| other industries not so much.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Another profession where freelance is a common option is
| coding. So if going alone should always better, is the
| implication that all the employed electricians and coders
| are irrational or want to be exploited?
| lovecg wrote:
| There are clearly advantages when working for someone
| else. Is the negotiation between the employee and the
| employer always fair when an industry has a few
| established incumbents? That depends and there's a large
| spectrum of possibilities.
| tfehring wrote:
| Unfair in the sense that the buyer pays more than the
| cost of goods sold, but trade often increases utility for
| both parties anyway. People happily pay $1,000/year for
| homeowners insurance even though the expected losses and
| expenses are only $970 or whatever, because they don't
| want to be on the hook for a new home if theirs burns
| down, and they're generally better off for doing so. And
| they may buy it from for-profit insurers, even though
| those for-profit insurers are in direct competition with
| mutuals (basically co-ops) and there's full price
| transparency, because despite the capitalist making an
| expected profit of $30 or whatever the stock insurer
| provides a better price or service.
|
| There's absolutely no requirement that a capitalist
| (either the same one that stands to profit or a different
| one) control the flow of information in order to profit,
| lots of (probably most) capital funds the production of
| highly competitive and price-transparent goods, and all
| public stock companies disclose their expenses publicly.
| Even Google and Facebook provide clear prices to their
| customers, the issue with surveillance companies in
| particular is that their users aren't the customers, but
| that's totally orthogonal to the conflict you're
| describing.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I am talking about the relationship between the employer
| and the employee. That is the unfair relationship which
| Capitalism is dependent and is imperative they control
| the information of their participants.
| tfehring wrote:
| I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer
| and employee is a feature of capitalism per se - even in
| a market socialist system in which labor receives all
| that it produces, any individual worker depends on their
| employer more heavily than their employer depends on
| them, so you still have an imbalance of power.
|
| I also don't think it's really relevant here, since
| Google and Facebook employees are about the least coerced
| labor there is, considering that virtually all of them
| could another job earning an order of magnitude more than
| the minimal living wage in their area at the drop of a
| hat.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer
| and employee is a feature of capitalism per se
|
| It is.
|
| It is also a feature, to a greater or lesser extent, of
| many systems that are downstream descendants of
| capitalism and haven't replaced the elements that produce
| that feature.
|
| It is also a feature of the upstream immediate
| predecessor of capitalism (feudalism, in which control of
| the means of production is unified with land ownership
| and typically executive, and often judicial and
| legislative, power over those on it) in an even starker
| form.
|
| > even in a market socialist system
|
| "even"? Market socialism is a very close relative and
| (conceptually) descendant of capitalism, not some distant
| and opposed system.
|
| > in which labor receives all that it produces, any
| individual worker depends on their employer more heavily
| than their employer depends on them, so you still have an
| imbalance of power.
|
| In market socialism, the employer is an agent of the
| employees, who (in many versions) each individually hold
| guaranteed rights with respect to it much the same as
| citizens of a liberal democratic regime do against the
| State. Both the universal elimination of the employer
| fundamentally serving an interest outside of its
| employees and also the common (but not universal, "market
| socialism" is a broad category with lots of variations)
| guarantees of individual rights to employees exist
| specifically to mitigate the adverse effects of the
| employer/employee power balance that it retains from
| capitalism.
| truffdog wrote:
| I mean, the Soviet Nomenklatura had a reputation for
| similar behavior. Pre-capitalist societies also had
| plenty of corruption, graft, corruption, and destructive
| avarice.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's almost like there is nothing special about Microsoft. The
| thing Google and Microsoft have in common is they are large
| organisations of humans.
|
| So maybe the answer is to work for yourself or a small
| organisation.
| tdeck wrote:
| Specifically they are large hierarchical organizations
| designed to extract wealth from value created by employees,
| within a context of constant competition with other such
| organizations. The specific incentives matter a lot when
| examining these effects and it's important to not just chalk
| it all up to human nature.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| > Which employers are the "nice company making nice things and
| you'll be able to sleep at night" tech companies nowadays?
|
| Stripe, maybe?
| mmmmkay wrote:
| for now
| paulluuk wrote:
| I've heard good things about Valve
| registeredcorn wrote:
| To be fair, I've heard that their customer service is pretty
| abysmal.
|
| Hmm...maybe there's a corollary between "goodness" and
| customer service? The worse the customer service, the
| "gooder" the company?
| danbmil99 wrote:
| A startup, perhaps?
| latchkey wrote:
| Imagine being paid to write code for all that.
| eecc wrote:
| I wonder how that code managed to stay secret so many years.
|
| How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user
| stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get
| publicly dressed down?
|
| I guess that's the one single major threat to effectively WHF:
| the need for maximum security secrecy and infrastructure
| control.
| fishnchips wrote:
| The really interesting stuff is only accessible by a handful
| of employees. The rest is frankly pretty boring.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Because the code itself is much simpler than you would think.
| eecc wrote:
| What about the rest; the presentations the executive
| summaries... all the paperwork that suits babble around...
| it takes some serious "terrorist organization" opsec to
| perform like this
| heurist wrote:
| They have to do that whether they are being evil or not
| just to prevent competitive intelligence and other
| damaging info from leaking. So the systems are there
| bob1029 wrote:
| > How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the
| user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and
| get publicly dressed down?
|
| Legal agreements and extremely valuable employment contracts,
| most likely.
|
| My understanding is that some (most?) of the developers out
| there today are in it for the money. If someone promised you
| enough income to retire by age 31, and all you had to do was
| keep your mouth shut for the interim, I think you may comply
| and even go out of your way a bit to protect your employer.
| This all explains it in my head. Its not that there is some
| vast, elaborate conspiracy, its that everyone involved is
| being heavily-incentivized to do the wrong thing.
| secondcoming wrote:
| _everybody_ in adtech is in it for the money! Nobody loves
| ads.
| eclipxe wrote:
| I actually do enjoy ads. Especially relevant and targeted
| ones. I enjoy finding out about new and interesting
| products related to my hobbies (music production).
| latchkey wrote:
| "Don't be evil"
| thedailymail wrote:
| "Don't get caught."
| onion2k wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton
| Sinclair
| p2t2p wrote:
| Well, look at me. I'm an immigrant. My wife's useful skills
| would probably give her salary of about 5th of what we need,
| so she doesn't work and takes care of the kid, house and
| engages in her hobbies, like making custom teddy bears.
|
| If I were put on a project like that I can easily imagine
| being quiet about it as I put well being of my family waaaay
| above any ethics. I can imagine that a lot of people do.
|
| So the only real way to solve it is robust regulation and
| good channels for whistleblowers.
| awild wrote:
| > So the only real way to solve it is robust regulation and
| good channels for whistleblowers.
|
| And probably some sort of minimal unconditional financial
| security denying corporations to practically take people
| hostage.
| MandieD wrote:
| Decoupling health insurance contracts from employment is
| absolutely necessary, though not sufficient. Do it like
| the UK, do it like Germany, or do something else, but as
| long as the health insurance contract itself (not just
| the payment of some or all of it) is through one's
| employer, a lot of otherwise financially stable people in
| the US are utterly at their employers' mercy.
| bagacrap wrote:
| above _any_ ethics? You 'd kill someone to support your
| family? Surely not. So there's somewhere you draw the line,
| you just don't think what Google's doing is that bad.
| p2t2p wrote:
| Define "kill". Is coding drones that do military strikes
| considered killing?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _You 'd kill someone to support your family? Surely
| not._
|
| I mean, this is America we are talking about. There are
| thousands if not millions of people who have done the
| calculus and decided to build systems that kill people
| overseas everyday
| eecc wrote:
| Clarification: I'm not wondering how they managed to keep the
| human ethics in check, that's pretty obvious: paying the
| price for corruption and wrapping it up in legal threats of
| economically violent retribution.
|
| I'm referring to the technological aspect. The amount of air-
| gapping, leak prevention, no-more-than-need-to-know protocol,
| opsec is impressive if they managed so far so long.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Google is known to develop stuff in an RPC-first kind of way.
| Makes me wonder if higher-ups are able to just write a quick
| script to do this, without lower level employees even
| knowing.
| vadfa wrote:
| Imagine imagining everybody shares your morals and values.
| swat535 wrote:
| The truth is that the majority of people on this website get
| handsomely paid to maintain and grow these companies. I don't
| think it's too difficult to leave all your sense of ethics out
| of the window if your compensation is high enough and the FAANG
| executives know this too well.
|
| I'm not going to take a moral high ground here because I
| acknowledge that it's difficult to look yourself in the mirror
| with rigor and question one's decisions when you can live a
| very comfortable life if you simply turn a blind eye.
|
| Just read the comments and you will some great mental gymnastic
| to justify immoral actions. This is why we need strong laws and
| regulation in society because without them, there is no limit
| in ethics for these companies and their employees.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > Google's response - "secretly made its own exchange win, even
| when another exchange submitted a higher bid," complaint alleges.
|
| Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to
| see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google
| header bidding for a publisher you also control.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Google being on both the sell and buy sides and the
| "advantages" of using Google for both were things practitioners
| just sort of knew and had to live with, like "npm is a mess"
| and "A/B testing is often more storytelling than rigor".
|
| I suspect the reason it wasn't a bigger bombshell is that ad
| exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level "it's
| an exchange for ads", and other ad exchanges were also dirty.
| Google wasn't the only one doing questionable things being on
| both sell and buy sides of transactions:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-...
|
| One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad
| tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the
| advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It's one
| to two _orders of magnitude_ difference, mostly made up in fees
| for all of the platforms and data and other value add in
| between.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > and other ad exchanges were also dirty
|
| Bingo.
|
| I'm glad to be out, tbh. I built some cool stuff, but Jesus.
| whoevercares wrote:
| There are always always enough people who are willing to do
| anything dark/illegal with a 500k+ salary, let alone gray
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