Lets not forget that Google is not controlled by its shareholders. Due to its multi-class stock structure Sergey and Larry control the majority of the voting rights, what makes the "Dont be evil" slogan more to a personal motto of these to founders than to a company policy.
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
121–130 of 188 posts
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#122Earlier 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…
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt…
"Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?"
Yes their lives are much better, just like the Zimbabweans.
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
My theory is that one of the FAAN +M companies is using social media to make Google's reputation go down.
I felt slighted by their interview process and experience a little schadenfreude. From what I gather a lot of other people have the same salt.
It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.
There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#124This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black. ...
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#125I 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…
My strong objection to this is actually the precedent it sets for non-Chinese governments, not for the Chinese people. Today, it’s China, tomorrow it’s a different government watchdog in every country.
And before you ask, there were large technical and ethical differences in my opinion with the censorship of nazi results in germnny vs the censorship that China demands- for one thing, the Chinese government needed real-time control and could have been involved in the process of putting the results together. That kind of product compromise isn’t anything I want to work on personally. I’m not going to work on something that lies in real time to people about the quality of the air they are breathing, using the google brand, for example.
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back when I lived in China, I used to think that having Google in China even with censorship was better than not having Google at all. But, this was also because back then, they did have a notice saying that some of the results had been censored. Back then, it felt to me to be an interesting compromise. What does scare me though, is that by accepting censorship, it normalizes it and weakens the position of any compan…
Do the majority of people living in China know about / care about censorship? Curious if information was being censored how you'd even know.
Also: how much of that opinion is an actually informed one, versus an opinion shaped by censorship itself?
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#127Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.) The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth a…
I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
Microsoft does not know nearly as much about people as Google does. Microsoft does not have the insane Orwellian mission to "organize the world's information".
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#128Never 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.
But trust the person who's writing a medium post just as they're about to run for senate and need to boost their name id?
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#129It 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…
The whole thing sounds just so ridiculous that I kind wonder if we're getting the true story here. Isn't it at least possible that something has gotten distorted along the way?
Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
#130I 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…
> I think the answer is obvious.
ahem...
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement