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I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

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Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#111

Post by hinkley »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #28
Haul4ss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores. If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special. I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.

Costco has done a really good job of maintaining their values in the face of pressure from shareholders, so I'd argue it is definitely possible.

New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership).

They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#112

Post by thrownaway954 »

as i get older, i find myself more and more saying... it's just a job. i have no "moral code" anymore when it comes to what company i work for. i know they exist to make money and that what i do there... i just do my work, get my pay check and go home. i don't care what the company stands for or "making a difference" there. if i want to "make a difference" in my life, i'll do outside of work with my community. when i was young i wanted "change the world" at the place i worked at, that's no longer true.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#113

Post by throwlaplace »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #80
throwlaplace wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too? >do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, but e.g. how did Sal Khan do net evil rather than net good with his Khan Academy project?

Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and sal khan consequently isn't "stinking rich".

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#114

Post by billfruit »

ff317 wrote: post #82
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

While it's obvious that some information is numerically greater than no information, it's not obvious that a censored flow of information makes anyone's life better than the alternatives. When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the b…

But such actions may end up punishing/restricting the individual citizens than the particular states.

Also I don't think that posturing that may lead up to another Cold War is good for the world. Perhaps there can be greater understanding between peoples through a process of engagement, rather than standing-off.

There is a famous commencement speech by Solzentzyn at Harvard, that laments why the West, esp Americans haven't shown understanding of other cultures, and seem to think and act from a position of moral superiority, whose basis is not so sound as they think.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#115

Post by mpiedrav »

Never trust a large company. Big money always trumps ethics in the long run, as "ethics" is just a PR stunt at FAANG scale.

The big concern here is how Google, etc. are becoming an oligopoly with a very effective lobbying arm in any form of actual regulation.

While the Western world holds democratic-ish values in public institutions, its large private companies are indeed totalitarian regimes.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#116

Post by atom_enger »

olalonde wrote: post #29
sriram_sun wrote: post #20

It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a…

That tops Michael Scott's Diversity Day. Life is stranger than fiction...

This exact scene played out in my mind as I was reading the article. Couldn't believe what I was reading and here I was wondering if the show would age well..

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#117

Post by cabaalis »

sounds wrote: post #33
sk55 wrote: post #19

The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt. He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.

I disagree. Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the project was exploratory and it was subse…

> No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight.

It seems to me that if the actions you take are legal, it doesn't matter your size. Who is the government to decide what's too big to operate without their input?

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#118

Post by titzer »

Aperocky wrote: post #43
virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst.

And other people might think that since it adds a tiny positive in one area that it can't possible add a huge negative in another area--like normalizing censorship for profit (whoops, the horse already left that barn) and massively increasing the surveillance capabilities of a murderous oppressive regime. You're engaging in simplistic thinking too.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#119

Post by ganstyles »

awb wrote: post #104
virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

> "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money" Back in 2010 there were many other opportunities to grow the company. The bigger you get the harder it is to grow. Playing ball with China becomes one of the easier ways to keep growing once you reach a certain size. The NBA did the same thing after they saturated the US market. I'm sure many execs have performance incentives / stock options that cau…

The interesting thing about the NBA growing into China was that not only were they playing ball with China but went a step further and we're playing ball _in_ China.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#120

Post by andrewmutz »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

What I don't understand about the outrage surrounding Dragonfly is that Google didn't leave China because of the need to censor its search engine, it conducted business in that way in the late 2000s. It left China because of the cyber attacks in Operation Aurora.

It seems the Googlers of today are holding Google to a higher ethical standard than the Googlers of 2009, since Google offered a censored search engine in china at that time and this did not produce the sort of outrage we see today.

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