Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech

But I also have a sense that lots of things that were considered positives in the early days of the Internet have become negatives, or are simply taken for granted. For example, growth was once considered good, but now it's bad. Giving services away for free is ho-hum at best and maybe suspicious. Trying to fix Internet problems is greeted with deep suspicion based solely on who is doing it. Personalization was once good, but now it's bad. And so on.

That's inevitably going to result in a different internal culture at an Internet company than back in the days when Google's search engine first appeared on the Internet and got near-universal respect.

But remember that Google+ was a company-wide initiative intended to compete with Facebook, which is kind of a big deal. Yes, they had lots of money to throw at it, but it was for a purpose.

The internal version was originally for testing. (Also, the business version of Google+ is still a product as part of G suite.)

I have a colleague who ran into a software design problem lately. He is looking at all of the apparent possible options and none of them seem like they will result in good code. He's gone on the internet to see if someone else knows the solution to the problem, with no luck. Then he's spent time to see if anyone has written any frameworks that solve this problem. While some claim to have solved the problem, a purusal of the code show the cure to be at least as bad as the the disease. What can he do?

To me, this is the same kind of problem with the same kind of result. When we first see a problem, or instinct is to go and look for a solution. We go to experts to find out what the answer is. We look at proven best practices in order to find out what we need to do. Strangely, though, the advice of the experts and the best practices often lead to situations that are at least as bad as our original problem. Why?

The reason is that we are taking an internal problem and looking for external answers. Buddha said that life is suffering. This is not to say that we should give up and have a defeatist attitude, I think. It's more that you just can't escape it: life is suffering. And code is bad. (In case you are wondering just how crazy I can be, I once gave a talk in public about how code is literally karma ;-) ).

We have to accept the suffering first (or bad code) and then start "acting skillfully". There isn't an external answer that will solve our problems. The guru on the mountain doesn't have the answer because they don't know what the question is. The carefully built system does not work for our issue, because our issue never existed when the system was built.

One of the things I've found about people pursuing social justice is that, on average, they tend to be intelligent people. The more they pursue the justice, and the more the society gives them leeway to do so, the more unhappy they get -- because they discover that their answer is not matched with the problem they are trying to solve. All of that energy has been put forward to solve the problem and they very slowly learn that they might not have the correct problem. Of course some people are always blind and they keep burning the witches, even finding new witches to burn after they run out of the first ones. However, I have found that the majority get really unhappy the farther they progress down this road.

Since I just asked you not to do this and explained why at length, it seems clear that you don't want to use this site as intended. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Notably absent on their list of demands was the dissolution of most of anyone's fundamental rights.