281–290 of 290 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your total comp was ~1.2 mil/year?
About 3x that, actually. Timing wise, I happened to leave after my old grants expired and before my new grants would be in my account. I was a VP of engineering when i left. Google pays VP's quite well. If there's a reason you want more exact numbers, poke me over email.
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I can't imagine ignoring personal ethics in career decisions. I also find it troubling when personal ethics are inaccurately dismissed as "identity politics". Supporting carbon-neutrality and rejecting military applications are clearly matters of personal ethics.
google used to be cool
They should have stuck with the charging money model instead of giving away services for the cost of attention. There is a deep irony in Google becoming one of the greatest corporations ever on the back of an ostensibly socialist utopia business model. Everyone on earth with an internet connection can use the full suite of google products (which pretty much every person reading this chooses to use daily) without havi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not wanting to contribute to war crimes and other violations of international law is "leftist politics"?
I think that is a worse indictment of the American right than I would've been able to write myself. It also utterly proves my point above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree on the second part. It's just that we disagree who the bad guys are, that's the problem, isn't it?
It's clear to me who the bad guys are. Too bad the left calls eliminating them "war crimes" and "genocide" lol
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I can't imagine ignoring personal ethics in career decisions. I also find it troubling when personal ethics are inaccurately dismissed as "identity politics". Supporting carbon-neutrality and rejecting military applications are clearly matters of personal ethics.
nla ------------
You’re eliding two very different things: personal conscience and actual consequence.
The author is obviously free to resign for any reason. But once he publishes a moral indictment of Google and, implicitly, of people who remain there, it is fair to ask what concrete harm his resignation reduces.
The post does not really answer that. In fact, it makes the opposite case. He lists a long set of valuable security and privacy improvements that happened precisely because he was inside Google. Then he concludes that the ethical move is to remove people like himself from the institution.
That may satisfy a personal purity boundary, but it is not obviously harm reduction. It is closer to moral hygiene: “I do not want to be associated, even transitively, with something I dislike.” Fine as a private decision, but not the same thing as improving the world.
That is what I meant by identity politics: career choices framed less around practical impact and more around preserving a morally coherent self-image.
my response ---------------
Practical impact is a useful way to explore ethics, but it's not the only way. I think it's reasonable to refuse to profit from an institution that does harm, even though removing yourself won't change anything. And I think a lot of people would agree if the choice was made stark. For example, suppose someone offered me £1k to go and keep them company while they tortured an innocent person. It's all somehow legal, and if I don't do it they'll just offer the money to someone else who will. Do I take the money? It won't make any difference if it's me or someone else. But I believe most people wouldn't. Or at least they'd duck out as soon as it got real.
> When Google offered me the job of Director of Android Platform Security in 2017, it was impossible to refuse. Yes, Trump was already president—my family and I had qualms—but he seemed contained, even ineffective. Why make this about trump and politics. It’s just a job.
He's Australian. Taking the job meant moving to the US. To do so without considering Trump would have been insane.
Whilst I appreciate the commitment to their values, I wonder where they stand on the 'safety' of their users as it relates to the Android Developer Verification update (currently top of HN, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755965 ). "Security" vs Openness > “make things so secure that we ourselves can’t break them, whether the device costs $1000 or $100, or the user is a celebrity or a refugee“ That can m…
He discussed this briefly in a talk he gave at the Grazer Linuxtage 2026 in April https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-615-what-can-we-learn-from-andr... at around minute 46