That feels like whitewashing part of the blame that applies to engineers and product developers. We don't get to say "oh it's those pesky money people, how dare they", while drawing a salary from the same pockets.
Engineers losing control to money types and bureaucrats is a gradual process. It is not that one day Google strikes out the second word from its unofficial motto ("do not be evil"). Engineers might dislike each small step in that direction, but it is not enough to make them pack up and move (house, family, kids, etc.). Pretty quickly they are tamed by both money people and the bureaucrats -- still appreciated and paid, but as brains to be tasked, with no ability to influence company policy.
People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product.
I bought a surface pad for my dad. Setting up was a pain, my dad had constant issues where he’d do something and didn’t know how to get out of it. UX was inconsistent. Bing ads everywhere. Yuck! It still very much felt like features were created for someone to get a promo.
Google at the moment feels like a ruthless data driven company. “Our charts show that with this change people use more google services. It invades user’s privacy and pisses off a bunch of HN users but who cares? This will make us a trillion dollar company, and it is working!”
And this is why everyone should fear Google. If they are willing to do this, as their AI capabilities advance, their actions show they value their stock price far above their users privacy. God knows what they’ll do next. It’s not the first time they’ve done something like this.
On the other hand. The current US govt is in bed with Google. They lobby like crazy. The govt will not do anything. Gogo is a behemoth that can pretty much get away with anything now. May be the EU will. I really hope they get fined for this.
> Google at the moment feels like a ruthless data driven company. “Our charts show that with this change people use more google services. It invades user’s privacy and pisses off a bunch of HN users but who cares? This will make us a trillion dollar company, and it is working!”
Despite my familiarity with the Paperclip Maximizer, it has still been instructive to think it through in real time. It's a nice way to think about priorities in life.
> I wouldn’t call Microsoft as a company returning control to Engineers and product.
I would not either, but this just reinforces the opinion that it is very hard for a company to get out of this state. Once engineers are domesticated even if the leadership wants to reinvigorate the company (and I think Microsoft's would like), empowering tame engineers is unlikely to produce earth-shattering results. Product improvements, sure; new technologies, probably not. My 2c.
Yes, right after they got caught helping drug pushers and had to pay a $500,000,000 fine.[1]
"Google executives, including CEO Larry Page, knew about this stuff and condoned it":
"Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement… “Suffice to say this was not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this on their own,” said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney. “This was corporate decision to engage in this conduct.”"
This is way, way beyond most company scandals. It made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Page could have ended up doing federal prison time.
They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?
I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
That’s how values work. You VALUE them, meaning—objectively—you are willing to make some sacrifice for them.
Same goes for working for a predatory financial institution, a manufacturer who makes dangerous products, or for that matter, a company with a toxic culture.
How is this different from working for a tobacco company? Decades ago we had the same conversation about people who ”were just following orders.”
If you aren’t able to change your organization, change organizations. If not, fine, but you cannot escape having proven that you don’t actually value consumer privacy or what-have-you more than your hot supper. You just consider it a nice ideal to bandy about in conversation.
Summary: Those who are complicit certainly deserve their share of the blame. At the very least, you can say of them, “they value money more than privacy.”
If you don’t think so, maybe YOU don’t value these things that much, which is why you won't hold anyone else accountable for them.
If you take the engineer off the hook because “they can’t change things,” you know what inevitably happens? You discover that the product and eng managers can’t change things either. In theory, maybe, but in practice they are given accountability for revenue and growth targets, so what choice do they have?
Let’s move up the ladder. Can we blame the directors and ELT. No, the markets hold them accountable for growth, and every company plays dirty, so what choice do THEY have?
Pretty soon everyone is shrugging, and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable because no one person can make change without sacrifice, and sometimes not even then, it would take mass walkouts or protests , and each person is but a drop in the bucket.
This mechanism of not holding people accountable because they don’t have sufficient authority or power to make unilateral change is how all systemic injustices persist. Racism, sexism, class distinctions, corruption in government, predatory corporations, all of them.
They persist because individuals say, “What can I do? Nothing, so I might as well go along with it.” And if everyone accepts this...
The next thing you know, they’re writing software to assist opressive regimes oppress their citizens.
Agree in spirit, but in the case of Google/Alphabet there is somewhere for the buck to stop: AFAIK Larry + Sergei (+ maybe Eric?) control more than half of the equity in terms of voting power, so if they want too promote their principles at the expense of revenue growth they can do that regardless of the feelings of other shareholders.
This is more speculative, but I think public markets don't really react adversely to visionary CEOs / founders putting principles over growth, so it's not like they would make all their paid-in-equity engineers take a pay cut for their principles either.
All participants are equally complicit, but some are more equally complicit than others :-)
p.s. I know the market seems to like Apple’s perspective on privacy, but unless we can examine an altrnate universe where iPhones aren’t selling like hotcakes, it’s tough to know whether the market values the eithics involved, or just thinks it’s a fine strategy.
If the latter, the market doesnkt really value their values, but rther their ability to make money. Which is mot the same thing.
We can examine an alternate universe where iPhones aren’t selling like hotcakes actually.
> With only seven million iPhones sold in China during the second quarter of 2018, Apple's market share in the country dropped by 12.5 percent year on year to 6.7 percent, according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC)
Apple have some very particular values in China though, storing iCloud data and encryption keys on state-owned servers. But the trend to decline started a long before that recent Apple decision.
> If you head over to Xiaomi China’s official store (via XDA-Developers) you’ll see three new bundles unsubtly named the XS, XS Max, and XR sets. Included in each bundle is a new Xiaomi phone — either the Mi Mix 2S, Mi 8, or Mi 8 SE, respectively — a Xiaomi Notebook, a Mi Band 3, and a Bluetooth earpiece/earphones, all for the same price as their namesake iPhones.
Apple could already make tons of money off of user data right now. Do you not think people have suggested this within Apple? It'd be ridiculous to assume so.
They are leaving a ton of money on the table taking their privacy stance right now.
Well as a consumer, I value their perspective on privacy, and am willing to throw money at them to protect it. Sadly, I don't think most other consumers factor in privacy to that extent.
To be fair, the OP was complaining about short-term biases from management. The entire ethical discussion is pushed way over its actual relevance (really, how big an ethical flaw is not deleting a cookie? Google will identify you anyway, cookie or not).
That said, about this:
> and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable
It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system. You are probably thinking about goal misalignment problems, and yet, just going after the individuals is still counterproductive if the system won't support the ones that do the right thing.
> > and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable
> It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system.
That's a fascinating exchange. I find myself siding more with you than with braythwayt, but still uncertain because the idea is new to me. Is there a good writeup of arguments for both sides?
I don't think these two ideas are as opposed as you're implying. They're describing two different perspectives on the same process. To wit:
1. Individuals have values and ethics that they'll make a reasonable effort to comply with. Society recognizes this and rewards and punishes individuals for the ethical bent of the projects they are clearly responsible for.
2. As the size and complexity of a project grows responsibility becomes diffuse until there's no single individual to hold responsible for any given decision. Once this happens the informal, personalized ethical safeguards begin to break down.
3. Once the informal individual scale safeguards have dissolved they usually can't be rebuilt. Instead they need to be replaced with formal safeguard mechanisms that operate at the project scale.
I don't know of any good writeup on the side of blaming the individual. On the side of fixing the system, I think the canon would be to look at systems theory (at the more human centered flank, like Meadows). You can get to the same conclusion on administration theory from Deming and his following, or any of the X-safety groups, like work-safety, aviation-safety, nuclear-safety, etc.
What really confuses the discussion is that a well working system that deals with ethical failures does necessarily hold people personally accountable. But you can't fix it by focusing on the "holding people accountable" part, it never works. You have to focus on the "system" part.
Putting yourself in a weaker position due to your views doesn't scale and thus doesn't work. For one hero there are ten conformists at the same level of skill, waiting for him/her to leave. While it's brave, it is also pointless. The problem as you state it can be solved only by explicit consensus, being it a law or just a manifesto. Modern privacy has no professional and power-y organization under it, except for few self-distanced like GNU, FSF, etc. Moreover, by staying at google engineers who have an opinion probably can influence much more than those who left.
Citation needed. How do you know that? Maybe it's more like this: For every conscientious person deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless, there are ten conscientious persons also deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless.
Maybe when one person speaks up, others will be emboldened.
It is called a hunger strike and for that you must be literally hungry anyway. All other strikes are solved by dealing with few instigators. I doubt that it really requires any citation, since it is a manager’s textbook case.
If your argument is that they can do more good by staying, fine. I say the exact same thing about staying in Ontario despite the recent election of a wannabe Trump populist.
But if you say, “Ontario made this stupid decision,” I can’t tell you, “I didn’t vote for this, I can’t change it, I’m not responsible.”
I have to tell you, “It sucks, and as a citizen I bear some of the responsibility, and here’s what I’m doing in the hopes of fixing it.”
My only argument is that people who stay have some accountability. Accountability doesn’t mean they are automatically bad people, but it does mean we can ask them, “What are you doing about it?” And they don’t get to shrug and say, “Nothing I can do, so my conscience is clear.”
You are weakening your own case by grandstanding. No sane person would expect you to "take responsibility" for some politician you didn't like (or help) to get elected in Ontario (a place with 14 Million people, but of limited global impact). You staying in Ontario (even without engaging in political activism) is not at all comparable to directly working on products you consider immoral in a company with an engineering workforce roughly one thousands the size of that but vastly bigger global impact. Neither in terms of personal culpability, sacrifices required or plausible positive effect your decisions might have.
I see your point, but personally believe that we shouldn't dismiss high morals of those who realized to work for misbehaving businesses. It is just impractical to think that these grounds are unbreakable in general, so why care at all. Why not give them vote box instead.
Collective action problems are an awful mess. By the time it's clear to everyone that a problem exists, few individuals can get results in return for impoverishing and isolating themselves by taking a stand. The few who can are so dependent on the system that they aren't going to do anything without the threat of a guillotine or FBI raid.
This is a toothless, short-sighted, and self-serving philosophy that does not solve any problem.
I will explain, but first let it be known that I am a scorned Google user. I jumped on board the magic carpet of every Google service as soon as I could and loved it the whole time, but it has become clear to me that Google and my values no longer align. So I'm leaving.
However, telling the workers to "just quit" won't solve anything. In fact, it guarantees that the company will have a higher percentage of people you morally disagree with leading to, by your moral standards and actions, a more evil product.
Additionally, quitting because you disagree with company politics is the least meaningful protest you could levy. Inaction from the sidelines is just as damning as internal complicency. If you want to split moral hairs and feel Superior because you quit, go for it but don't pretend like you're a hero or in any way part of the solution. To be specific, Google won't reverse it's whole company plan and Buck the entire industry trend due to a _temporary_ uptick an employee turnover of a few percentage points (if that).
Change can come from internal activism and external Market pressures. Quitting is neither of those and actively contrary to the former.
“If you can’t change your organization, change organizations.”
If the argument is that by staying they can create change, our views are compatible.
If the argument is that “although they may try, they can’t change anything, but they should still stay,” then my argument is that they have chosen to be complicit, and it is appropriate to hold them to account.
Nobody is really telling anyone to quit, but the argument above is that if they don’t quit, they cannot be held accountable. I reject that notion.
> “If you can’t change your organization, change organizations.”
> Nobody is really telling anyone to quit, but the argument above is that if they don’t quit, they cannot be held accountable. I reject that notion.
This is a false dichotomy.
The world exists in grey areas. Just because you are passionate about security and privacy does not mean joe the google engineer is culpable for the _industry accepted_ practices you disagree with.
People are fallible and so are companies. If everyone had to change-or-quit every company they worked at, no one would work anywhere. Your philosophy is not sustainable, logical, or implementable. In the spectrum of immoralities, fingerprinting users is pretty far down on the list, although it is certainly present.
> However, telling the workers to "just quit" won't solve anything. In fact, it guarantees that the company will have a higher percentage of people you morally disagree with leading to, by your moral standards and actions, a more evil product.
Not necessarily.
Thank God Albert Einstein "just quit" as opposed to returning to Germany to influence it from the inside and change it from within.
Perhaps that engineer could go on to work for companies that care more about privacy and help them succeed, or explain to others why he left and convince others to as well.
Movements are not collections of popular supermen who do extraordinary things. You make it seem as if, unless you can completely change the course of the company, don't bother. Same as "don't vote your vote doesn't matter."
I drew a different conclusion from reading the parent. The issue with "your vote doesn't matter", however true it may be, is that the decision not to vote results in removing yourself from the decision-making process, giving more power to those you oppose. That seems to be specifically what the parent is arguing not to do, as someone who has quit no longer has any power within the organization.
That may be true in a closed system, but Google is not a closed system, and that person can do any number of things outside of that system.
A person leaving is essentially a vote. It says I no longer have faith in the decision makers of this current group of leaders at google. You no longer will offer your value to them - that on its own, is most likely a loss (they would not have kept you if you didn't offer value.) On top of that, you add value to a potential competitor, or the EFF, or here on HN, where many have already switched to Firefox.
On its own, it doesn't mean much. But collectively, it could be devastating.
If not, oh well. My job isn't to ensure Google decides to be good and not evil. But I can determine if I will support something evil or not. And I choose not.
>Change can come from internal activism and external Market pressures. Quitting is neither of those and actively contrary to the former.
False. A mass exodus of employees can certainly increase market pressures as it signals instability; it can also be extremely difficult (sometimes impossible) for new hires to understand big legacy code bases -- so quitting can be a form of legal/indirect sabotage
We saw what happened when you try to do that on their mailing-lists.
Between things decided by data and management I'm not sure what a single developer can influence. I guess it sill more than by quitting, because you won't say anything in the exit interview in case you want to come back.
I agree that values are important, but I have a problem with comparing this Google situation to other situations that literally kill people. An engineer who values privacy could reasonably think that staying at Google and fighting the privacy fight is the best way to keep pushing his or her values.
I reckon it´s not only money that they give value. Other intangibles might apply (as all family related issues).
I agree that engineers might also have something to say, but we don´t actually have a clue if some of them actually expressed they concerns for this change, unless you have some insight from inside the company that you may not be able to share.
Even if some of them left as you suggest, I´m pretty sure Google wouldn´t have any problem to find some other engineers that would happily implement anything without questions.
Nevertheless, I agree that concerns should be raised by everyone in the org, but the only ones that might lead to an actual change is stock holders/board of directors.
Sure. If you have the monopoly, you don't need people to love you.
While Google could easily find engineers to implement anything, they can't as easily find people who know what to implement: People with a deep understanding of the web. The power grab we could observe over the last year has alienated a lot of people. In hindsight we will know whether that grab worked for them.
Right now, they are burning through goodwill at a high rate.
I think you're misreading his comment. And your followon comment is showing your assumptions:
>If you take the engineer off the hook because “they can’t change things,”
He never said this, and in my reading is not trying to say this. What I read him trying to say is:
"Quitting is not the only way to handle the problem."
Or the harsher:
"The solution is not to run away from the problems."
More or less the equivalent of:
"If the US is going downhill, the solution isn't to run away from the country, but work to fix it"
As an engineer you're part of the company. And putting a recent unfortunate case aside, Google is relatively open to engineers voicing their opinions. If you're fatalistic or meek, sure, you can leave. But that's the weakest of all options.
The decades I was thinking about referred to the business of tobacco companies. I was very much alive while public opinion swang against them, and I recall lively debate about the ethics of working for tobacco companies, the loss of tax revenue from tobacco companies, the ethics of tobacco companies sponsoring sport, and so on.
As for the Nazis, there are some parallels, just as there are for other social problems like racism. But in my initial comment, I preferred to stick to a more direct comparison involving employment with a fantastically profitable and legal company.
> I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
There are no poor engineers at Google.
That is, ironically, the point people are making: if you make that much money doing something so (arguably) distasteful, you deserve scorn. It's in the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" family.
Are you really comparing a software developer completing tickets based on requirements to Nazis being told to kill? The fact that you need to draw that comparison tells me you are going overboard.
No, I’m not comparing engineers at Google to prison camp guards.
I’m comparing the argument that the Google engineer is just following orders to the argument that camp guards were just following orders.
I’m not the one who brought up the exact same defense. But if that defence is brought up, Perhaps the person emplying that argument should be asked if they meant to make the comparison indirectly by using the same argument.
Your argument is wrong in every regard that matters and this is in no way comparable to the military.
The contract you sign when you get the job tells you to follow those instructions. And you have laws that say that you can be a whistleblower if they are illegal. Well this may be immoral or unethical but it doesn't strike me as illegal. So your only option is to refuse the implementation and quit your job.
Is the problem solved? No. Then that wasn't a solution and the responsibility wasn't on the engineer's shoulders. When you have a leaking pipe staining the wall don't blame and just repair the wall. Fix the pipe.
You're letting some irrational anger/hate cloud your judgement and it shows. You came up with a comparison with Nazis (!!!) and nothing anywhere close to reasonable opinion on who's really to blame and what the solution is. You're the guy who hates the person in the call center for following those questionable and possibly abusive scripts. Obviously it's on them.
That may be but the comparison is obviously a shock and awe type exaggeration. By virtue of Nazis being people that also did normal things you could bring it up in any discussion. But would you? Would you tell someone encouraging "the troops" that they're no different from Nazi supporters? It's the exaggeration that's the problem here. The same kind of exaggeration you hear when certain politicians scream "you are protecting terrorists and pedophiles!" to argue against encryption.
@braythwayt considered an engineer following orders to implement an unethical (illegal?) "feature" is directly comparable to Nazis following orders to commit genocide. Even in principle. But...
The Nuremberg Principles define War Crimes. It's quite literally what they're for. Do you not understand this massive difference? All laws take magnitude into consideration. Look at the jurisprudence. It's all related to acts far above what's being discussed here. But if you really really want to draw the parallel between a "regular" act and a the kind of crimes that see this principle applied then keep this in mind [0]:
> An individual must be involved at the policy-making level to be culpable for a crime against peace ... the ordinary foot soldier is not expected to make his or her own personal assessment as to the legality of a conflict. Similarly, such an individual cannot be held criminally responsible for fighting in support of an illegal war, assuming that his or her personal war-time conduct is otherwise proper
You're both conveniently ignoring the fact that this defense was attempted mostly by generals, captains, field marshals. Foot soldiers were never on the same footing as the superiors. Not in the execution of their duties, not in taking responsibility.
> At some point they will find an engineer to do it anyway.
And at some point when <future Google mostly comprised of scum> is thoroughly obviously malicious, we can expect/hope/encourage them to lose customers until they collapse.
The rats will move on as well, but at least the more virtuous employees can be elsewhere before the end implosion.
That's just addressing the issue in a really tangential way. You want to fix it, go for the people who come up with the idea. Even a company that employs almost exclusively ethical engineers will still have a few willing to compromise. Go for the head and the body will follow. Change starts at the top.
Most people working at Google don't work on these things. They work on products that genuinely help users. Should they quit just because someone else at the company is doing stupid things? Wouldn't that just leave the idiots in control of the massive resources of the company, unrestrained by internal pressure from good employees?
If you're not willing to do that then it means you don't care. That's what values and principles are: you have to make sacrifices, it's not enough to say you have them.
I'm not necessarily making any judgement here, I'm not saying "those assholes, why don't they quit?". I'm just saying that you cannot be unwilling to make a sacrifice for your "values" and then claim you have "values". Pick one.
Sure you can. If Value A (some given ethic or aesthetic) is sufficiently less valued than Value Set B (family, personal happiness, financial security, career success), then most likely the hypothetical holder of these values will make no attempt to protect Value A when Value Set B would be negatively affected as a direct result.
Come on, Google offices are only in tech hubs where these engineers can easily find a decent job. Not necessarily as highly paid as Google (applying to other tech giants is always a lottery) but they can still make a very good living in the same city.
> They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?
Not all job changes are so drastic. Refusing to implement this behavior might be as simple as just requesting to switch teams within Google. If one chooses to leave, finding another high paying job in the same area is not typically a great challenge for a Google engineer. No uprooting necessary...
> I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
I frankly can't disagree more with this statement. That's how you get VW's defeat devices etc. Engineering ethics matter. And engineers are not "poor". Maybe not everyone realises it but we, engineers, have substantial powers. We need to exercise them.
> They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?
Why do they have to uproot their family? Why can't they just work from home? I don't understand why we still insist on making people physically show up for jobs that can be done from home in someone's PJ's.
They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?
Google isn't the only tech company in Silicon Valley.
It’s actually very simple: anyone who makes a living from working on this product owns a share of the blame. Nobody in this industry can claim to have their hands tied; it’s not difficult for folks talented enough to land a job at Google to instead find work that doesn’t involve violating privacy at web scale. If you write code or participate in meetings intended to execute on a corrupt vision then you are tainted.
I disagree. Specifications require implementation, and the implementation literally comes out of the engineers' fingers - if none of the engineers agreed to implement something they thought was unethical, then it's mostly irrelevant what the product definition says.
Yeah, they do. That's exactly how it works with real (certified, legally-enforced labeling of) engineering. That is, civil engineers push back against (excessive) safety-cutting to save money while drawing a salary from the same companies that want to implement such design changes. They only differ in how effectively they have organized to prevent being overruled.
Exactly, there are plenty of other companies to go working for. People working for Google at best accept a compromise, at worst are actively working against their customers (should I say users?)
That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
Having play services (https://github.com/opengapps) on LineageOS is not like that. You can go to Privacy Guard and deny any permissions from Play Services.
Yes we do. Just like Tesla employees get to critizise Musk for his Twitter market manipulation while still working their day job and drawing a sallery, and Americans can criticize Trump whithout moving out of the country.
Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
Twitter market manipulation is entirely Elon Musk's fault, not something Tesla and its employees are responsible for (except, perhaps, for some inner circle who might have stopped him). On the other hand, the newly revised Chrome is a core product: disagreeing with management but allowing it to be distributed isn't enough.
