The blog post is from June 19th. Google Doc from June 17th.
My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.
That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.
This has little to do with shareable links and everything to do with the trust you put in whoever you share it with.
There's not much difference between them ctrl+v-ing the link to a third party, vs them ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v-ing the contents to another party. If anything, by just sharing a link, you have a chance to disable the sharing and hope the content hasn't yet been copied.
it's typical for googlers to leave a note like this in gdocs when they leave As thats the standard at google. i imagine its the original and google hasnt decided to turn off public sharing on it
i am not american. have no idea what goes on there.
I know talking to europeans that they think they are peers of other 'white nations' like usa. But europeans are now closer to countries they colonized than to usa.
And yet it directly speaks to the comment it was replying to. It makes the point that RSUs are generally multi-year; so if you're getting them with _any_ frequency, you never get to the point of "the last RSU vests".
But does it matter that it is or isn't privileged? Thats the root question. What are you trying to highlight?
I have to assume you aren't trying to shame someone for moral opinion about talking about facts on the table - as that does 0 for any kind of public discourse.
So you agree your comment provides no value to the conversation here except a kind of "check your privileges - shut down the conversation I am greater than thou perspective".
I am asking you what value are you trying to bring here to the thread with this comment? Does one have to have a qualifier statement "I have certain privileges ascribed to my life" and now make a comment? Should I be adding qualifying statements to this comment to make sure the morality police don't come finger wagging?
I think the "last RSU" was more a figure of speech. At some point a person passes above an earnings level where they feel comfortable deactivating the "money making mode" and let their conscience speak.
While transparency is admirable, I don’t find the “why I left Google” blog posts to be particularly interesting content to be posted to HN.
They happen relatively frequently and there are a number of things about them that feel distasteful:
- The authors are in the literal 1%, so for the 99% of us who are doing far worse it feels a bit like a tiny violin exercise.
“Sorry you worked for an unethical company, my company is unethical, too, and I can’t quit over morals or else my family won’t eat.
- Being in the 1% affords many of these individuals more options in life to work for ethical employees or pursue noble causes, and articles like this one makes you question why they just woke up to the reality they were benefitting from for so long. It seems like everyone on the outside has known about those moral quandaries for a while.
- The people who quit Google are one of 100,000 employees, which dilutes the value of hearing an individual story from someone who is leaving the company.
I don’t feel like I was being “snarky.” I also have no problem with the articles being upvoted.
I don’t think it’s very fair to tell people who want to constructively criticize articles to just not engage with them. That feels like a deflection of my points rather than addressing the merit of what I actually said.
Instead of saying “here’s what was wrong with your idea” you said “you’re not supposed to be here.”
I genuinely think the author could read comments like mine and get something out of them.
This is incredibly annoying to see in the real world. People who pontificate values on LinkedIn but work for a company they disagree with, only to see them stay until they hit 4 years and leave. No idea how they think they have any moral high ground.
All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".
Maybe they should not have joined the company in the first place if they had "morals" or "principles". Yet they still joined in 2017 even after knowing that slogan was removed anyway.
Company mottos, principles, slogans and values are all fake fronts to lure in these sort of people alongside the free food with the carrots on those sticks.
Once that all runs out or the company goes south and stops being a daycare, then they start doing silly virtue signalling posts like this.
Now you are seeing who was there for the 'good vibes', free food, rest n' vest and who was there to keep the company alive.
...And finally we know that this is a love letter to get themselves hired at Anthropic. I think you might need more than that honestly.
<rant>
I am so tired of reading these stupid "why I am leaving my job after making millions". One thing I can say about myself: I work for money. That's it. Lots of things the companies that I work for (normally 25,000+ employees) do immoral and unethical things. Still, I stay, earn money, and I don't write stupid fucking self-righteous blog posts after I leave. At this point, blog posts like this look like an "own goal".
</rant>
yep, and happy to make everyone around them feel guilty when they got theirs. i strongly dislike people who do this performative crap while unfortunately believing in their right to say it.
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 mean different things to different people in different contexts. Could easily mean building a software platform with security features that banks will build their apps to require.
The only stated reason for his resignation is that Google is no longer adhering to their promise to not use AI for weapons. I was surprised that the reasoning was so one-dimensional.
While I don't agree with the author exactly, I do admire someone sticking to their guns (no pun intended). Like Oscar Wild said, "Morality, like art requires drawing a line somewhere".
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
right, I don't see the connection between being _forced_ to resign and his his pacifist principles + as EU academic he sees himself as target of likely mass surveillance
> Then there were the people. Larry and Sergey were still answering some tough leadership questions every week, and “Don’t Be Evil” wasn’t just a slogan of often-referenced Googliness—it was a north star for teams making hard calls.
I'm sorry, but this is very hard to believe. I get 9 years is a lot of time, but Google has been awful for much longer thant that. In fact, 2018 was the year the motto was removed from the handbook, which certainly indicates it wasn't anything like a "North Star":
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 having social class be a limiting factor like it is with paid services. Litterally anyone with internet can access and use the same youtube and office suite that a billionaire on his yacht is using (perhaps the billionaire has yt premium though).
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered one of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anything (and a large subset of those never loading one of their ads either).
From a high level POV, its an incredibly perplexing outcome. Compared to someone like Apple, who charges money, has zero openness, and prices to align with first world upper class, still being largely beloved.
You know, Google hinders competition. They are so powerful, they dictate the rules. If you do not play by Google's rules and align to their algorithms, you are allowed to consume, but not to provide. You have to pay them and others to even gain a small amount of visibility in their search results. The Google and YouTube algos are unfair as f*ck and promote the already successful.
This makes no sense.
These priviledge souls going through the world as if they matter is weird. Go back to the dark room, stare at the screen and shut up please.
Translation: “My GSUs that I received at $35 and upwards for the last 10 years have made me enough money such that I can now finally make the “moral” decision that I’ve always wanted to do but was willing to swallow until I made enough money. Now I can pretend I was always the moral person that I purport to be, even though not much has actually changed except my financially-improved courage.”
This is needlessly cynical. Everyone has thresholds, and it may not be tied (at least exclusively) to money. Those that _assume_ that the morals of others are always at whim of financial gain are those that I trust the least.
He is worth well over $20M given his title and the skyrocketing of Google stock since 2017. He could have left years ago if he were really so morally outraged.
There’s nothing more useless than a multi-millionaire “finally” taking a moral stand on something. I guarantee that this same person without the money would not have posted this ridiculous manifesto declaring his moral piety.
If he donates all his wealth away because it was made “immorally” then I will change my stance. We both know he won’t and that’s how we know his courage is really just because he’s rich.
I worked at Google for a similar span. It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring, which I and many other Googlers would confirm are true.
Was it different or are the people who voluntarily started working for Google around that period unable to admit to themselves and others that it was always questionable to work for a entity like Google?
To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.
What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?
Holy cow dude, I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp, nor am I "only now beginning to admit" anything in your imaginary personal history about me that you made up now.
This entire thread makes me sad. A handful of people, the original writer and some other commenters, are saying "this corporation has changed for the worse in some ways" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why didn't you specifically say the opinion that I want, and why didn't you say it sooner than this post I just became aware of?
9 years ago was 2017-- and by that time Google was already doing sleazy SEO shit, scanning peoples emails to who them ads, trying to make ads seem like general search results etc etc
Most people that one would describe as evil do not see themselves as evil, but rather see what they're doing as justified. Saying you're not going to be evil means literally nothing.
Don't be the bad guy, ok, but if you think your goals are noble enough then crossing lines becomes acceptable. Google sold everyone on the "we're going to change the world for good and improve everyone's lives and make all information accessible and free" line, and in doing so justified everything else they did - privacy invasion, monopolistic behavior, etc.
The fact that they said "don't be evil" should have been a massive red flag for everyone, not a green one.
Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).
Very convenient to suddenly decide it's enough after collecting a massive paycheck for 10 years.
It is worse now than it was 9 years ago, but it even then it was clearly moving in the wrong direction. And the current google is the result of trends that started long before 2017.
When one of those ways is supporting mass killing, I'd say even one way would be enough to make it a completely different company. Your post is asinine.
I think a big difference is the majority of developers knew they could find employment relatively easily elsewhere, so they felt comfortable protesting things they didn't feel comfortable with, and google leadership had some level of accountability to employees. Now though, if you speak up you might get targeted for the next round of layoffs, and the current job market is a lot tougher, so you could end up unemployed for quite a while.
Exactly. Google's "don't be evil policy" was never applied on Google itself.
It was enforced on users, advertisers and publishers.
Roughly 15 years ago, it no longer applied to advertisers. 50% of ads (if not more) are utter scams.
Jup! From day 2, the moment when they discover that customer data (yours, mine, everyone's) is more valuable than gold.
Also the interaction with government and defense and intelligence is well documented: from google docs to maps and clouds.
I wish people will read "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine and stop feigning ignorance.
I even expect that minimal level of awareness about the real business culture and inherent nature of these internet mega-corps for people in top positions.
"Don't Be Evil" is a psychological machination for people working at google to ease their life in work related cognitive dissonance and marketing speak to the rest of us.
If I were an angel (actual, not fallen yet) I will not tell my self: "Don’t Be Evil".
My motto will be "keep being holy" or "be holier" or something that keep me in my angelic state or better.
So even the “Don’t Be Evil” motto by itself already spill the beans!
Why is this a Google doc and not just an HTML page? I was super-confused when the links didn't behave like normal links. This is like when people post a screenshot of an Apple note.
This mirrors my own experience as a European that worked at FAANG in the Bay Area.
It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
It's an interesting time window you chose. Why would there be an anomaly during that window (if there is one)?
Perhaps it is due to the outward-facing, civic-oriented values coming out of WW2?
There was a lot of reflection in America on what went wrong in German pre-war thinking and culture coming out of that period.
The WW2 men in their 20s in 1940 were in their 40s in 1960s and their political power would have kept growing through peer older politicians into the 90s.
I don't think there's a big risk the European startup I work for now is involved in bombing brown people in the Middle East, actively accelerating climate change or dividing society for engagement.
Seems like a much better bet for my values, at least.
Luckily, we've gone through that phase around ninety years ago in Europe. We've been trying to avoid it happening again ever since, though right now is a dangerous time here as well. But hey, at least Europe hasn't fallen yet.
If you think you've "gone through that phase", you're not paying much attention.
European companies exist to extract profit without regard to decency, same as American companies. BP filling up the Gulf of Mexico with oil? European. Wirecard's fraud? European. HSBC money laundering? European. Dieselgate? European.
I'm sure I could find more.
Hell, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and raised by Soviet parents.
The US was founded mainly as an experiment in European mercantile colonialism. This is just a continuation of that.
The downside of there not being any American exceptionalism is that everything you see in America is not an exception.
BIT of a broad brush there but we can take the critique.
While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
> While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
I obviously don't know who you voted for, but anyone who voted for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somewhat complicit (Clinton, Biden, etc).
And I'm not speaking just about those running for presidency, but all the Congressmen who got re-elected over and over again.
OK, but what about the open stuff? Like the current and previous president being publicly genocidal? Like the health care system being used as a weapon against the domestic population, or the US armed forces destroying the planet by just existing and spewing so much carbon oxides and pollutants into the global environment?
Either those votes are worth something, and it implicates US voters, or they're not worth something and the US political system is basically a sham deserving of revolution, which also implicates US voters who do not organise to this end. Arguably every state on friendly terms with the US is similarly morally implicated as well.
I came to Google via acquisition end of 2011 and left end of 2021. Google bought my employer so it could further cement its display ads monopoly. They never had a moral compass, they just wore one in a costume so that nobody would dig too closely into their business practices.
We got to wave pitchforks and ask tough questions at TGIF for a while, and march in pride parades under a Google banner, and get fed nice treats and the like but under it all was still just an old fashioned railway monopoly.
A huge fire hose of cash that let it play in all sorts of domains and espouse some vaguely California Ideology liberal/libertarian ideals while doing it.
But the moment that monopoly came under threat and the moment they felt they no longer needed the costume, it came off.
Google never had a moral compass. Anybody who thought it did was naive. It's not possible for a corporate entity to have one.
Surely, there is a spectrum between "founders doing whatever they want with the company" and "the market entirely dictating the company's every action."
I could see some of that in 2011 (I started before the ipo), but it was almost all from ads. People in other parts of the company had a very different experience.
It's a systemic issue unfortunately. When some of these unethical CEOs say that they feel like they have no control and that if they didn't do it, someone else would, I believe them and it makes sense. That's why they should try to reform the system.
Can anyone in this industry really say goodbye without posting it? We act like artists, believing our ideals will illuminate the world with our moral compass.
Not until tech companies stop pretending tech jobs are special. It’s part of the entire industry culture at this point that you join certain positions to “make a big difference.”
Yet most startups are just b2b AI sass or whatever.
>" I still believe in Android as the (currently) best end-user facing operating system for mobile devices, with its balance between openness, flexibility, and security."
I do not give a shit whether it is the best. If one can be cut off instantly by whims of some algo with no recourse - thank you but I'll pass. Yes I still use Android phone but mostly as phone, GPS and camera all of which can be replaced.
I do not develop for Android or iOS exactly for the reason of not being in control. Stick to desktops, servers and browsers as deployment platforms
> 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.
Agreed that the comparison is extreme; I wouldn't have made it myself.
But it's also not harmless to work at a company which makes tools/components/software for killing people. It wouldn't be "just an office job". Sometimes it's hard to make the call, e.g. a spreadsheet can be used to tally inventory or prisoners at a work camp, but when your company is directly involved e.g. in enabling surveillance by a nation whose actions you consider immoral, then it's probably time to quit.
If the mention of the US or Trump as the motive for quitting makes anyone irritated, consider the same situation if it was a guy saying he won't work for a company which is developing AI to enable Putin to better identify dissenters or bomb Ukraine.
I actually think “just a job” is a justification in the following ways.
- Soldiers and police are a thing in society. They use violence in ways deemed just by society. I do not think their role is immoral.
- From experience I know that the number of people who can look at the incentive structure they are in and decide to operate outside it is basically 1%. Humans just aren’t wired that way.
So I do not know in what ways a Nazi soldier could stop doing what they were doing - except in the same way you are free to escape industrial society and capitalism, by moving into a cabin in the woods in isolation.
This is why leadership is so essential. The leaders we choose and the systems we build around them determine what people will actually do.
Individual moral failure is self-inflicted not systematic.
Your comments are full of nonsense hyperbole. The comparison isn’t remotely close. I’m glad this guy left Google - dragging down his company and teammates with his insufferable leftist politics.
Uh, its a company. It never had a "moral compass". And if companies had any attributes at all, it would be a Psychopath.
Maaaaaybe when Dunbar's lower number was 13, the people working did. When Dunbar's 150 was hit, sure they had " do no evil" but that was just marketing spiel.
When they bought Doubleclick, that coffin was welded shut and thrown in the ocean. Only the rubes believed the adtech marketing shit.
tl;dr : Android head of security has quit on principl as he is a pacifist and Google are now working with USA department of war. And also as they scrapped the carbon neutral promise due to the AI Datacentre race.
I find it laughable how when all of these platforms were aligned with the Dems the same behavior was ok (and it was those darned russians that were the problem on facebook and other platforms), whereas now that the tables have turned (for now...), it's all the end of the world.
Whereas the feature of these platforms - their incredible power - was always the same. The outrage is then just a function of a person's preferences.
The censorship, the injection of government-approved standpoints, the shadow-banning, the organised campaigns to throttle dissenting voices and more similar activities. This all happened under the Biden regime with nary a peep from the media and those who pointed it out were labelled and called names. Then Trump returned and 'Big Tech' just followed along but this time around they're called out for being shills to the orange man.
The criticism of Google and their abandoning of their "Don't Be Evil" motto has been a constant here since before Trump's first term. There's no correlation with Dems being in government.
If anything, what Google (and Meta, etc) show during Trump is how hypocritical their "values" were at their core. When it paid them to pursue carbon neutral policies, and being seen as "inclusive" or whatever, being seen as against violence, they did so. Now that those in power are against all of that, it pays to quietly or not so quietly abandon those policies. They can do this because they were never their core values, they were just convenient for business at the time.
yes -- the author’s rhetoric makes the piece feel less like sober whistleblowing and more like an exit narrative designed to preserve moral self-image after benefiting from Google.
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.
I think very often people are not looking and cause and effect (impact on those issues you care about), but rather brand identification. How does the image of this job match with my stated values? In that sense it does seem shallow, as it’s really a concern for your own PR and not harm reduction.
For example I know people in mining who 1. Work on safety for people in mines. 2. Work on reducing environmental impact. But many of their friends say “I could never work for mining”. And what I hear is “I don’t want that brand”.
They're resigning because Google is complicit in killing people. How is that "identity politics"? Do you just throw the word "identity" in there for no reason?
You sound like someone who has never been poor. Or whose family has never been poor. Easy to have “spine” when you can depend on someone else for money.
identity pol: "people organize and advocate based on shared demographic characteristics"
What in this post is possibly identity politics? It sounds like personal ethics to me. I don't appreciate identity politics, and when you muddy the term with having a spine and anything you don't like you make it harder to debate the actual problems the term is normally associated with.
TDS, like BDS (ODS never really caught on), is typically known to be <President's Name> Derangement Syndrome, targeted at people who the commenter thinks to be unreasonably upset about the politician in question.
When did m'lord permit you to use that serf mind to imagine? Ethics are for brains but your lot are for grains.
When you view someone's choices for purpose & ethical boundaries through a lens that presents as identity politics, you are revealing your alienation from civilization. Talent with basic freedoms can be selective about their pursuits. If you hold a idea that you are a mercenary or machinery, consider how useful that is to ambitious sociopaths that have abandoned civilization.
These tech-bro public resignations are so tedious. Ostensibly he seems fine with the existence of AI mass surveillance and AI powered murderbots but he just never envisioned a scenario where they would get used that wasn't congruent with his politics.
That doesn't appear to be stopping the current administration. That's why I think you should be more concerned about the tools of oppression existing rather than the laws that govern them.
Pathetic whining. He's upset that Google abandoned their carbon-neutral goal? Welcome to the real world, adults deal in trade-offs, and Google must play in AI or resign itself from the future of technology. And similarly, America has military interests that demand the involvement of the private sector. You'd think that after four years of war a few hundred miles from Austria's borders, this man would start to get it. But he's still living in the ivory tower of luxury beliefs.
This comment make a couple assumptions I don't agree with:
1. That technological development and a "carbon neutral goal" are incompatible. Carbon neutrality is precisely a problem of technological development, with green energy, battery technology, and improving the grid all on the vanguard of modern technological development. The problems caused by global warming will only get more severe (even if they don't cause the apocalypse) and these technological issues will be correspondingly more important for the survival of any other tech that depends on energy.
2. That America's military interests and private sector involvement are inevitable. I think that Google could influence an overly militaristic policy precisely by withholding support. We are _not_ a dictatorship where everyone and every institution must bend their will to the leader, and changes are in fact sometimes made through a show of resistance. This may be a somewhat naive view, but I think it's more correct than one that sees US politics as so inevitable that even Google has no choice but to fall in line. Sure, it would probably cost them to resist, but as another commenter pointed out: ethical decisions typically have a cost.
Like a slap in the face from a psychopath. It's not about "good", "bad", "honest", etc. It's literally the world EVIL that they no longer want to swear off. Astronomically monumentally fucked up psycho shit.
Dictionary:
*EVIL*
: morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked
an evil impulse
an evil tyrant
evil deeds
the evil institution of slavery
: arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct
a person of evil reputation
The last time I worked for someone else was 1992 so one didn't really use personal sites like this where one would whine about why they left their job for all the world to see. We all have our reasons for quitting but something like this just gathers the "Yeah!!" crowd but no one gains anything from it and it's quickly forgotten.
You've already forgotten the content of his post now. Right?
Good for you, just try to remember those old days when you complained about bosses and "whine" about things to your friends and some work colleges about day to day stuff. Now think what you would say about a situation when you were fed up and had to quit because you couldn't take it anymore and every day you had these tasks going against your values ( doesn't matter if they are "right" or "wrong", they are yours ).
Also, Google is a multi-billion dreadnought with hundreds of millions of dollars for PR, lawyers and lobbying every year. I'm sure they can take a post about someone "whining" and quitting their job in disagreement. Something tells me Google be fine...
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.
That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.
There's not much difference between them ctrl+v-ing the link to a third party, vs them ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v-ing the contents to another party. If anything, by just sharing a link, you have a chance to disable the sharing and hope the content hasn't yet been copied.
There is also a great reminder next to the button you click to get a shareable link in Google Docs.
As per design.
Google gives you sufficient control over access permissions. If you make it public, you have to know anyone anywhere can see it once they get the URL.
I frequently share Google docs and sheets links widely and to entirely unknown readers. That is part of the utility of the tool.
The blog post now also contains a second addendum that the Google doc doesn't have.
Now they are coping hard with "atleast we are not evil" when they literally building offsite detention camps for their own immigrants .
Whatever you think you have going over there, all things considered, you can keep it.
I know talking to europeans that they think they are peers of other 'white nations' like usa. But europeans are now closer to countries they colonized than to usa.
Sometimes not.
I left with more than 4 million in RSU's left.
Pretty much any Googler who leaves will be leaving lots of money on the table.
This is because they are usually 3/4 year grants, so it's pretty much impossible to leave without lots of unvested RSU.
There are some 1 year grants, but those are much more uncommon (~1%)
Not just the facts but the frame. Amazing.
I have to assume you aren't trying to shame someone for moral opinion about talking about facts on the table - as that does 0 for any kind of public discourse.
I am asking you what value are you trying to bring here to the thread with this comment? Does one have to have a qualifier statement "I have certain privileges ascribed to my life" and now make a comment? Should I be adding qualifying statements to this comment to make sure the morality police don't come finger wagging?
I assume (maybe incorrectly) that you are just reacting without thinking about the deeper level of what you are trying to express.
They happen relatively frequently and there are a number of things about them that feel distasteful:
- The authors are in the literal 1%, so for the 99% of us who are doing far worse it feels a bit like a tiny violin exercise.
“Sorry you worked for an unethical company, my company is unethical, too, and I can’t quit over morals or else my family won’t eat.
- Being in the 1% affords many of these individuals more options in life to work for ethical employees or pursue noble causes, and articles like this one makes you question why they just woke up to the reality they were benefitting from for so long. It seems like everyone on the outside has known about those moral quandaries for a while.
- The people who quit Google are one of 100,000 employees, which dilutes the value of hearing an individual story from someone who is leaving the company.
You don’t have to read and engage with everything on the front page. And you certainly don’t have to come make snarky criticisms of others.
I don’t think it’s very fair to tell people who want to constructively criticize articles to just not engage with them. That feels like a deflection of my points rather than addressing the merit of what I actually said.
Instead of saying “here’s what was wrong with your idea” you said “you’re not supposed to be here.”
I genuinely think the author could read comments like mine and get something out of them.
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
scroll to the bottom
that illustrates the point nicely...
"Yes, it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".
It obviously got promoted by marketing for external consumption as well.
Company mottos, principles, slogans and values are all fake fronts to lure in these sort of people alongside the free food with the carrots on those sticks.
Once that all runs out or the company goes south and stops being a daycare, then they start doing silly virtue signalling posts like this.
Now you are seeing who was there for the 'good vibes', free food, rest n' vest and who was there to keep the company alive.
...And finally we know that this is a love letter to get themselves hired at Anthropic. I think you might need more than that honestly.
<rant> I am so tired of reading these stupid "why I am leaving my job after making millions". One thing I can say about myself: I work for money. That's it. Lots of things the companies that I work for (normally 25,000+ employees) do immoral and unethical things. Still, I stay, earn money, and I don't write stupid fucking self-righteous blog posts after I leave. At this point, blog posts like this look like an "own goal". </rant>
I tell employers I’m clearly a mercenary and I am only here for the money. I do great work, but I’ve been compensated well.
Something. $omething. something. $teinbeck?
>>"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." –Upton Sinclair
"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 mean different things to different people in different contexts. Could easily mean building a software platform with security features that banks will build their apps to require.
This needs a "2004" date.
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
Would the author have left if they didn't have another job lined up? Definitely not. Then, how strong are their principles?
That's not remarkable to many.
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
I'm sorry, but this is very hard to believe. I get 9 years is a lot of time, but Google has been awful for much longer thant that. In fact, 2018 was the year the motto was removed from the handbook, which certainly indicates it wasn't anything like a "North Star":
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
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 having social class be a limiting factor like it is with paid services. Litterally anyone with internet can access and use the same youtube and office suite that a billionaire on his yacht is using (perhaps the billionaire has yt premium though).
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered one of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anything (and a large subset of those never loading one of their ads either).
From a high level POV, its an incredibly perplexing outcome. Compared to someone like Apple, who charges money, has zero openness, and prices to align with first world upper class, still being largely beloved.
Your comment in itself is deeply ironic.
There’s nothing more useless than a multi-millionaire “finally” taking a moral stand on something. I guarantee that this same person without the money would not have posted this ridiculous manifesto declaring his moral piety.
If he donates all his wealth away because it was made “immorally” then I will change my stance. We both know he won’t and that’s how we know his courage is really just because he’s rich.
This is par for the course.
No it wasn’t.
To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.
What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?
This entire thread makes me sad. A handful of people, the original writer and some other commenters, are saying "this corporation has changed for the worse in some ways" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why didn't you specifically say the opinion that I want, and why didn't you say it sooner than this post I just became aware of?
“I’m shocked shocked to find out my pay cheque and stock money came from selling ads.”
“here are your winnings sir”
9 years ago was 2017-- and by that time Google was already doing sleazy SEO shit, scanning peoples emails to who them ads, trying to make ads seem like general search results etc etc
Google was *exactly* this company it is today
Let’s not lump every ethical issue into one. And not conflate SEO sleaze with aiding murder.
> “Don’t Be Evil” wasn’t just a slogan of often-referenced Googliness—it was a north star for teams making hard calls.
It definitely counts for something that at least one senior leader felt the slogan was relevant for decision making.
Don't be the bad guy, ok, but if you think your goals are noble enough then crossing lines becomes acceptable. Google sold everyone on the "we're going to change the world for good and improve everyone's lives and make all information accessible and free" line, and in doing so justified everything else they did - privacy invasion, monopolistic behavior, etc.
The fact that they said "don't be evil" should have been a massive red flag for everyone, not a green one.
Do you going around telling people how virtuous you are? No, good people just try and be good.
The slogan was a red flag right from the start.
Which isn't to say cynicism for these sorts of company charters isn't warranted, just not for that reason.
Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).
Very convenient to suddenly decide it's enough after collecting a massive paycheck for 10 years.
Absent a stake in the outcome, it's just virtue signaling.
And when Google was forced to choose between juicing ad revenue and its morals, it chose the former.
im surprised dave is still there too. probably can't let it go...
Noone cares, money talks.
I wish people will read "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine and stop feigning ignorance. I even expect that minimal level of awareness about the real business culture and inherent nature of these internet mega-corps for people in top positions.
"Don't Be Evil" is a psychological machination for people working at google to ease their life in work related cognitive dissonance and marketing speak to the rest of us.
If I were an angel (actual, not fallen yet) I will not tell my self: "Don’t Be Evil". My motto will be "keep being holy" or "be holier" or something that keep me in my angelic state or better.
So even the “Don’t Be Evil” motto by itself already spill the beans!
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
And it worked --- for a while. Until the path became impossible to deny.
It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
Perhaps it is due to the outward-facing, civic-oriented values coming out of WW2?
There was a lot of reflection in America on what went wrong in German pre-war thinking and culture coming out of that period.
The WW2 men in their 20s in 1940 were in their 40s in 1960s and their political power would have kept growing through peer older politicians into the 90s.
Seems like a much better bet for my values, at least.
European companies exist to extract profit without regard to decency, same as American companies. BP filling up the Gulf of Mexico with oil? European. Wirecard's fraud? European. HSBC money laundering? European. Dieselgate? European.
I'm sure I could find more.
Hell, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and raised by Soviet parents.
The US was founded mainly as an experiment in European mercantile colonialism. This is just a continuation of that.
The downside of there not being any American exceptionalism is that everything you see in America is not an exception.
Systemically and structurally? Already on its way there.
Excessive moral policing results in strangling regulations, which is exactly what Europe is facing right now. The opposite of innovation.
Good luck in your endeavors.
While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
I obviously don't know who you voted for, but anyone who voted for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somewhat complicit (Clinton, Biden, etc).
And I'm not speaking just about those running for presidency, but all the Congressmen who got re-elected over and over again.
Either those votes are worth something, and it implicates US voters, or they're not worth something and the US political system is basically a sham deserving of revolution, which also implicates US voters who do not organise to this end. Arguably every state on friendly terms with the US is similarly morally implicated as well.
We got to wave pitchforks and ask tough questions at TGIF for a while, and march in pride parades under a Google banner, and get fed nice treats and the like but under it all was still just an old fashioned railway monopoly.
A huge fire hose of cash that let it play in all sorts of domains and espouse some vaguely California Ideology liberal/libertarian ideals while doing it.
But the moment that monopoly came under threat and the moment they felt they no longer needed the costume, it came off.
Google never had a moral compass. Anybody who thought it did was naive. It's not possible for a corporate entity to have one.
Is it really not possible? Lots of corps are controlled by one or two people. They can decide what the company espouses, no?
The reality is that ads was 95% of the company revenue though, so it was all fantasy.
Working on promo committee I could see how different ads was
But there's also something about a PA being disconnected from its revenue sources to create a sense of unreality and distorted incentives.
This is surreal.
Longtime Googler DannyBee mentioned on this very thread that he left Google several years ago, but he never posted anything.
Most people do mention it to a few friends, because they are friends.
Others post for a larger audience, but don’t really target the general public.
But sometimes people find a personal story and forward it around and it goes viral. Which means thousands of people find it interesting.
Yet most startups are just b2b AI sass or whatever.
Someone else shared it out. Now, calm down. Your acting emotional. Maybe try smiling.
I do not give a shit whether it is the best. If one can be cut off instantly by whims of some algo with no recourse - thank you but I'll pass. Yes I still use Android phone but mostly as phone, GPS and camera all of which can be replaced.
I do not develop for Android or iOS exactly for the reason of not being in control. Stick to desktops, servers and browsers as deployment platforms
Why make this about trump and politics. It’s just a job.
They go on to explain exactly why in the fifth paragraph.
> It’s just a job.
Nobody operates in a vacuum.
Because that's who and what you empower when you work for a company that works with said administration.
> It’s just a job.
So was being a concentration camp guard.
What the hell. We are talking about ads on the computer.
Not just ads on the computer. TFA also discusses AI for surveillance, weapons, etc.
But it's also not harmless to work at a company which makes tools/components/software for killing people. It wouldn't be "just an office job". Sometimes it's hard to make the call, e.g. a spreadsheet can be used to tally inventory or prisoners at a work camp, but when your company is directly involved e.g. in enabling surveillance by a nation whose actions you consider immoral, then it's probably time to quit.
If the mention of the US or Trump as the motive for quitting makes anyone irritated, consider the same situation if it was a guy saying he won't work for a company which is developing AI to enable Putin to better identify dissenters or bomb Ukraine.
It's just that you draw the line somewhere between enabling mass surveillance and being a concentration camp guard.
- Soldiers and police are a thing in society. They use violence in ways deemed just by society. I do not think their role is immoral.
- From experience I know that the number of people who can look at the incentive structure they are in and decide to operate outside it is basically 1%. Humans just aren’t wired that way.
So I do not know in what ways a Nazi soldier could stop doing what they were doing - except in the same way you are free to escape industrial society and capitalism, by moving into a cabin in the woods in isolation.
This is why leadership is so essential. The leaders we choose and the systems we build around them determine what people will actually do.
Individual moral failure is self-inflicted not systematic.
Maaaaaybe when Dunbar's lower number was 13, the people working did. When Dunbar's 150 was hit, sure they had " do no evil" but that was just marketing spiel.
When they bought Doubleclick, that coffin was welded shut and thrown in the ocean. Only the rubes believed the adtech marketing shit.
Bruh.
Whereas the feature of these platforms - their incredible power - was always the same. The outrage is then just a function of a person's preferences.
If anything, what Google (and Meta, etc) show during Trump is how hypocritical their "values" were at their core. When it paid them to pursue carbon neutral policies, and being seen as "inclusive" or whatever, being seen as against violence, they did so. Now that those in power are against all of that, it pays to quietly or not so quietly abandon those policies. They can do this because they were never their core values, they were just convenient for business at the time.
For example I know people in mining who 1. Work on safety for people in mines. 2. Work on reducing environmental impact. But many of their friends say “I could never work for mining”. And what I hear is “I don’t want that brand”.
It's just regular politics, no identity involved. Everything is political - including our careers.
What in this post is possibly identity politics? It sounds like personal ethics to me. I don't appreciate identity politics, and when you muddy the term with having a spine and anything you don't like you make it harder to debate the actual problems the term is normally associated with.
Muddying waters and making debate impossible are his goals. He hoped to antagonize everyone with his trigger word.
When you view someone's choices for purpose & ethical boundaries through a lens that presents as identity politics, you are revealing your alienation from civilization. Talent with basic freedoms can be selective about their pursuits. If you hold a idea that you are a mercenary or machinery, consider how useful that is to ambitious sociopaths that have abandoned civilization.
1. That technological development and a "carbon neutral goal" are incompatible. Carbon neutrality is precisely a problem of technological development, with green energy, battery technology, and improving the grid all on the vanguard of modern technological development. The problems caused by global warming will only get more severe (even if they don't cause the apocalypse) and these technological issues will be correspondingly more important for the survival of any other tech that depends on energy.
2. That America's military interests and private sector involvement are inevitable. I think that Google could influence an overly militaristic policy precisely by withholding support. We are _not_ a dictatorship where everyone and every institution must bend their will to the leader, and changes are in fact sometimes made through a show of resistance. This may be a somewhat naive view, but I think it's more correct than one that sees US politics as so inevitable that even Google has no choice but to fall in line. Sure, it would probably cost them to resist, but as another commenter pointed out: ethical decisions typically have a cost.
Also, Google, later: No comment.
Like a slap in the face from a psychopath. It's not about "good", "bad", "honest", etc. It's literally the world EVIL that they no longer want to swear off. Astronomically monumentally fucked up psycho shit.
Dictionary:
Google: no comment.You've already forgotten the content of his post now. Right?
Sometimes it’s fine to see a topic and tell yourself “I have no relevant knowledge in this area so I won’t comment”.
venting can be helpful mentally/emotionally.
readers can feel solidarity, comfort in a shared experience, etc.
Also, Google is a multi-billion dreadnought with hundreds of millions of dollars for PR, lawyers and lobbying every year. I'm sure they can take a post about someone "whining" and quitting their job in disagreement. Something tells me Google be fine...
You are getting emotional. Maybe try calming down?
You don't make your own food do you? Build your own car? Make your own git repos?
Seems like you might want to have a better view about who you work for.