I respect the motivation of the people behind this but I disagree with the logic here. It seems to be a zero or none type of logic. Are Chinese better off with not having google search engine as a choice, even if censored and having only local options, or are they better off having at least some choice, even if that choice is censored? I think it's the second, not the first.
We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
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Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#42Why are there 3 threads in the top 10 relating to this topic but 0 have comments?
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Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#43Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.
It's a big company, perhaps the best at one or many things that are NOT the one project that someone opposes
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#44It might be interesting to hear the answer Eric Schmidt himself gave to the question: "Is Google willing to accept internet censorship to enter China?" here: https://youtu.be/3tNpYpcU5s4?t=4296.
TL;DR: He said no.
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#45Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.
Try to do that at Oracle or IBM. This is the culture fostered by Google executives, so they shouldn't be surprised if employees are publicly outspoken about their business decision. Is it a good or bad thing? If the higher ups are OK with employees publicly voicing their opinion then I don't see a problem. Management doesn't seem to be fighting this and Google does seem to work that way. The only issue I'd see is if a public petition was created and employee were coerced into signing it by their fellow workers under threat of being put "on the list".
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#46Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.
Agitating would be step 1. If enough employees speak up, perhaps the plans get changed or the practice stops.
Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.
For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#47Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years - should they move forward with Dragonfly. Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are mostly "Software Engineers" and not a lot of them. Google can kick them out and replace within a month. Unfortunetly I dont think executives will give a slightest heck about this article..
> Google can kick them out and replace within a month. Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases. Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
The typical ramp up time for a new Google engineer is roughly 3-6 months. So it's more like replace them within 3mo at a generous estimate. Also a few of those were staff You can replace those in 2-3yrs maybe.
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#49If I was in China and had to choose between having a choice between censored baidu and censored google vs just censored baidu, I'd rather have both baidu and google. It's easy for us here in the western world as we have access to both and more uncensored sources to take the moral high ground and subject the Chinese to a "let them eat cake" attitude. Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google…
I think the situation should be looked at more holistically. Here are some other factors to consider: - Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it? - Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it? - Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal…
Google is already censoring specific searches all over the world, in the EU for example, the right to be forgotten and many "hate speech" laws already force google to censor many sites that are filtered out.
Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
#50> Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.
You mean Google's effort to break into a market that it's currently frozen out of.