This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of “do not be evil” motto baked into thier company culture.
It doesn’t matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company’s dogma
After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.
Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.
When I first heard Google’s “don’t be evil”, all I could think is a not-evil person doesn’t need to say this.
I feel like a big part of the change was also due to the US mass surveillance, which became broadly known with the Snowden revelations in 2013.
Before 2013, you could genuinely claim that collecting as much data as possible, might be done with good intentions. Afterwards, collecting more data than necessary for a given task turned into a moral failure. Their whole business model, while it should have felt sketchy beforehand, turned evil over night.
And of course, Google employees weren’t forced to reflect on that. The spotlight was on the US government. Everyone expected the US government to just stop with that shit, after they got caught. And well, they didn’t. Obama even doubled down on it, Trump certainly didn’t drain the swamp either and Biden probably wouldn’t even think about it anymore, if the EU didn’t constantly get its ass sued for exchanging data with US companies.
The more it became apparent that the US government wouldn’t go back on that, and as people had ever more critical data of themselves online, the more the public perception of Google fell down a hole, even if as a Google employee you could still be doing the same things you did in 2005.
It’s definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver value to users.
Why would this happen though? The change the author is describing came from the company’s shareholders and their desire for profit. Shareholders who have no connection to the core domains of Google, who vote for directors on the board that further profit extraction, who then maintain executive leadership who implements that. You have to convince those shareholders that they should want Google to focus on something other than profit maximization. But they don’t understand you. They can dump Google’s stock at a moment’s notice. Why care about some long term profit when they can make it now and dump the stock as soon as it stops making it? And then, you can’t even talk to them because you’re sitting behind the exec layer and the board layer, both of which are shareholder creations. So you have to tightrope your exec team into believing you, then they have to tightrope the board, and then the board has to tightrope the shareholders. The odds are stacked against reversing course. If on the other hand you’re not acting alone but you are the head of the union that can shutdown Google at a moment’s notice, then not only you can talk to the exec layer, you don’t have to tightrope while doing it. Better yet, you can simply broadcast your message and it’s gonna hit the board and the shareholders directly. That’s why I don’t think Google can reverse course without a strong union. I think the incentives are simply not there.
Why would a union help at all? Organized workers won’t change the financial and legal obligations at the top. It won’t drive the focus away from quarterly earnings. Unions protect the workers, they don’t drive company culture.
There is no saving Google. The only way out of the hole they’re in is to have the integrity not to fall in in the first place.
creators made too much money and aren’t involved in the work beyond demanding more money. MBAs just do what they do. Hire and fire isn’t concerned with not being evil. They were always about indexing the internet. If you are on the internet you will be indexed, categorized and sold as data.
Google removed their “do no evil” slogan. That says a lot.
Thank you so much for sharing. I found the rest of this persons web content equally interesting, e.g. their CV. https://hixie.ch/
Crazy how the declination in the office culture translates to such an obvious downturn from a public perspective as well.
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Key word “was.” The teams may not have had that intention, but they sure as fuck do now.
I don’t know if I agree.
A lot of of this article is in a very familiar tone for “are we the baddies” corporate employees, and it’s less a deterioration of conditions than a realization of ongoing facts.
The language is everywhere. “We made data-driven decisions” is a big red flag for me, for instance. It often translates to “we obsessed over a maximizing a single data point because we confirmation-biased it into a justification for the thing we wanted to do”. Real data driven decisions are called science, and nobody in corporations has the time to do actual science, outside of hard research funding, which is not the case of building a UX toolset.
Likewise for his passing defense of tracking cookies or the lack of firewalls between search and ads. And how telling is it that he at one point defines the essence of “don’t be evil” as “long term success at the cost of short term losses”. That’s not what that means.
It really does sound like the culture had convinced itself that it was working for “the greater good” as a strategy for long term success, but you hear the same thing from a lot of other large corporations. It mostly sounds like what actually changed for this guy to dislike Google is management style and working conditions. Which hey, sure, it’s a part of it. But not what lies at the core of the issues. If you take short term losses for long term success you’re just a corporation with a long term plan for growth, not a nice corporation. It’s techbro speak and the attitude that has driven startups through the entirety of the VC-dominated era of business.
The degradation we see in Google is not triggered by a change of ethos, it’s the chickens coming home to roost now that tech businesses are switching from a focus on growth to a focus on profit as the tech business ecosystem matures and free money goes away for a while.
Amazes how can one “love a company”. It’s just a job. Do it, do it well and get your paycheck. That’s it. The company will never love you back anyway.
I disagree. Imagine any club or group of people getting together to tackle a problem, with a common vision, a culture, and social values. It can be more than just liking the people, as the group-ideals can kept even as the people cycle in and out.
You can like club/organization for what actions it encourages, what it stands for, the benefit it provides people with, and the lines it collectively agrees not to cross.
Some good organizations have revenue, and we call them businesses.
I agree 99.9% of companies “won’t love you back” but it’s not 100%.
They don’t really mean love, they mean identity, but we don’t have good ways to talk about this stuff.
Obviously you can’t love an abstract entity. But you can let it come to be part of how you see yourself, which also happens when you’re in a relationship. So often we talk about that feeling of love when we’re talking about parts of our identity - jobs, hobbies, music interests, etc.
I disagree with your notion that a person is not or cannot love an abstract entity however I do not care enough to explain or elaborate in this comment, feel free to enquire if you’re curious
Find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. I believe that was Churchill.
I enjoy the line of work I’m in. I don’t always enjoy the companies that I do it in. Some are much better than others. It’s fine to like or even love where you work as long as you realize that you’re in what could easily become an abusive relationship at any time. Do your time and do it well but don’t go out of your way to do it. That’s what I strive for.
You nailed it at the end. Loving a company, especially these days, is exactly how you end up overworked and underpaid. Like a job/company, don’t love it.
Indeed, loving the line of work that you’re in is different from loving the company that you’re in. It’s a very important distinction to make.
Your company doesn’t love you back. Someday they may find themselves needing to balance some numbers in a spreadsheet and out you go, regardless of how many years you’ve spent there and how much you love doing what they’re asking you to do. In the meantime, they’re using you how they see fit, not necessarily in the way that’s best for you. You need to watch out for yourself.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to get a job that you love, just make very sure that you’re not misdirecting the love of your job to loving your company. It’ll hurt when you find out it’s not mutual and you may not be properly prepared for the subsequent job search.
Indeed, loving the line of work that you’re in is different from loving the company that you’re in. It’s a very important distinction to make.
That’s what I meant.
Lost me completely at
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Both are ad delivery services that sometimes do something slightly resembling benefiting the end user.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and “optimised” for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and “optimised” for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
I also think you’re underestimating the number of people who couldn’t care less if a company harvests their data for ad personalisation - by this point the majority of people understand Facebook’s business strategy, but they still have over a billion users. The preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
Yes, by making the best product. Then once they’d achieved the market donination necessary to not lose everyone, they changed that product from optimised for best user experience to optimised for maximum ad revenue.
I also think you’re underestimating the number of people who couldn’t care less
No, I am aware that they’re sadly the majority. Hence why I specifically said “anyone who cares enough to know better”
preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
You don’t have to be “terminally online” (which is a slur invented by the wilfully ignorant to denigrate people with different interests and priorities than them, no matter how much you try to reclaim it) to care about basic privacy rights, but yeah, that sentence is otherwise correct, as I said earlier.
Removed by mod
“There are still great people at Google”
A mind-plague of our time to call mediocrity greatness, as being exceptionally intelligent and being a tech wizard has absolutely nothing to do with being a great person. That is the same as saying the top %1 of Plumbers are great people. When faced with tough life choices, these Plumbers may show negligible character. Stop devaluing greatness.
It’s a serious overvaluation of self and commodization of the term, a weakening of the term, so as to devalue it. It’s a mind virus to say flippantly, “that person is great” when in reality they are average. The meaning of the word is being dilluted.
- Greatness is doing the right thing without being compensated or even recognized for it!
- Greatness is doing great things on your own (person). Group goodness is good people, action.
- Greatness is not involved in any way with Corporations. Corporations are profit above all else.
- Greatness is achieving what others could not achieve. Many awesome search engines were bought out and ruined by Big Tech, as they do with any competing technology.
- Greatness is not involved with violating the privacy of the whole world in any manner.
Silicon Valley is an immense perspective bubble that is equivalent to personality re-write. That anyone at Google can be thought of as a “great person” is a total and complete failure of perspective. Super smart, great Programmers, great Engineers, sure.
Being a great person almost always involves hardship, perserverance, and success against all odds. Read any classical book. Having a Billion dollar company pay you to turn a digital wrench has not one basis for “greatness” in any way, shape or form.
Think about all the “Great” people in the History of Earth. What did they have in commmon? How many people can be “Great”? Hundreds or even dozens at one Corporation? Gimme a break, that doesn’t even fit the definition of greatness, unless your cognitive dissonance is confusing it with mediocrity and that is a societal mind virus.
So, let’s be precise with our life terms like an actual programmer would be with technical terms except applied to your own life. So, you follow rules, you get along well with others, you don’t hurt anyone physically, verbally or emotionally, you donate and work for causes, you create great stuff. This is expected of all people so that makes you average. You are an average person.
Making a comparative judgement against failed people does not make you great. In fact, that brings you down a notch.
Maybe along with all those other traits instead of creating great stuff you create exceptional stuff. The term applied to you is now "an exceptional ‘job title’ ".
so you don’t like people using the word “great” to mean “very capable”? and that’s a “mind-plague”?
and we’re suppose to go with your definition because why?
Great, people are gatekeeping the adjective “great” now.
Honestly this is a very good perspective, it’s unfortunate that I mostly see this as a poignant reminder that people have only gotten dumber over time that stuff like this needs to be said.
