If all the Google programmers who're here at HN started working elsewhere nothing significant would really happen. Google would continue to operate the same way. Except maybe making it to the front page of HN would stop functioning as an ad hoc appeals process for Google decisions.
That's what everyone says about bad places. That's what they always say when asked to do terrible things.
There will be people they could hire, but it wouldn't be anyone that would get invited to conferences, and so on. Nobody that would make Stanford proud.
People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things (there are plenty of those...) but those programmers, every single one of them, is able to easiliy work somewhere else. It isn't like they are warehouse workers slaving for Amazon.
Just got banned by a dozen of "thought leaders" on Twitter for saying the same things about people working for Facebook and all these "poor souls" who just got fired by Apple after it was leaked that they were listening in on Siri conversations.
If you can get hired at a software division in Google, Facebook, or Apple, you can get hired anywhere else.
Be honest. You just care more about money and prestige more than you care about doing scummy work.
Google has a new policy to not rock the boat, including snitchin on anyone who might be.
Probably not that large of a group of people that both read hacker news, read this exact article, even care about such things, and work at google. At a company of that size, they are maybe fancy cogs, but still replaceable.
Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there. Amazon is not forcing them to be there and Amazon does not owe someone a job any more than any other business owes jobs to random people.
>Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there.
A, the evergreen, "since nobody puts a gun on your head, you're free to work elsewhere".
Some people don't understand that limited job options, lack of skills (or money to increase them), need to feed a family, etc, are also "guns on the head".
To understand how much, consider than people can sell their bodies (for sex), or even get into slave-like servitude with no pay, just to get something to eat. Heck, in poorer societies (and even western countries, not more than a century ago) people would even sell one or more of their kids to help feed the others (and of course, would send their 8-14 year old kids to work).
Just because something is better than dying of hunger doesn't mean it's a "free choice" option. It's just, like avoiding getting shot from someone "holding a gun to your head" the best of shitty options.
I basically agree with you, but it's not Amazon's duty to solve that problem.
In fact, by providing one more job option, they are helping slightly.
It's the same as this old classic: Nike builds a shoe factory on a small island with subsistence agriculture and pays people almost nothing to make shoes. And people castigate Nike for that. But Nike hasn't done anything evil. They have given people one more option. If subsistence agriculture is better, people can go back to doing that instead of working in the shoe factory.
I have family members who literally have to take whatever job they can find because their options are severely limited, even if those jobs are really bad and no job at all would probably result in homelessness. Some people really don't have the option to "not work there" and it seems rather callous to suggest that.
> People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things
I work at Google, and I don't think it's terrible. Neither do most of my coworkers. There are things I wish were better, and things I'm working on improving, but overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
> overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
I think the exact opposite, which is why I've went to great lengths in an attempt to de-google my life, but google still forces itself on me through stuff like recaptcha.
Maybe google once had a positive impact once, but not anymore. Now google just kills products, forces tracking on people who don't even use google themselves and pushes adverts in front of us, while de-monitizing Youtubers and pushing its political/social justice agendas.
The fact that you and your coworkers don't see the problem just highlights what the people up-thread were saying and is the big part of the problem.
> Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
I couldn't disagree more. Google doesn't make bazillions of dollars because they provide us with live traffic on maps. Google has significantly enabled and actively driven the mindless consume-everything-all-the-time culture with all the horrible consequences for our mental-health and the environment.
The world would be a much better place without the ones like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
I work at Google because they pay me money that I can donate [1] and I wouldn't work here if I thought that was making the world worse. [2] I left Google in 2017 to work for a startup I thought was more positive than earning to give [3] and then I rejoined later that year after the startup didn't pan out. [4] I'm open to arguments that I should be doing something else with my time!
If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google.
This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.
>If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google.
Parent poster isn't advocating the "fix it from the inside" route, he's advocating you leave.
>This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way.
It's so "seriously hard" that you had to use a different example that's more favorable to google's position (identifying a bot user without data access) in a thread about a different topic (your distaste for manual, thoughtful app reviews)?
I had an on-site with Google last year and didn't quite make it in.
Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet.
But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes.
If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it? I get the impression these sort of projects would be underprioritized.
> If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it?
Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates privacy terms).
For issues that are purely technical (for example, the automated spam detection system has a false positive on an obscure but legit library), any Google employee can send a pull request to fix it, and in general your pull request will be accepted and deployed.
