In some sense this isn't really new. Google has always emphasized the importance of keeping confidential things secret, with the argument that it allows them to share information more widely internally and have robust internal discussions. (In contrast to Apple which is much more secretive internally.) At least at first, employees mostly bought into it. It was always understood that if you get caught leaking you'll be fired and maybe worse, and generally people assumed you deserved it.
But this gradually eroded over the years, as more leaks happened and distrust increased, and now it seems to have mostly broken down.
This article relies on a single former (disgruntled) employee as its source. We should definitely not be making inferences about the top priorities of Google's management based on his claims.
Funny how the word "disgruntled" always appears in attempts to negate unpleasant statements. Must be in some common algorithm...
Ad hominem is not really a good strategy for this these days. While we need to be cautious about veracity of any statement, using "disgruntled" is disqualifying anyone who uses it.
I think the "disgruntled" characterization in this case is quite accurate. I'm not sure how the ad hominem fallacy would apply since Jack Poulson is actually the source and subject of the article and thus the object of discussion.
But the real point of my original comment was that this article is subpar journalism. The implication of the article, at least to my reading, is that there is a trend of declining morale at Google and dissatisfaction amongst the rank-and-file with the company's senior leadership. As evidence we are given... one guy's opinions.
Replies on Facebook articles had the same style of attack on anything negative, go after the source.
They probably do it because it still works. Muddy the waters, suggest there’s another side, play to people’s desire for a middle ground. Then the dust will settle and they’ll get to set the narrative again.
Media coverage really needs to be relentless to get through their tactics.
I won't get into whether they deserve it, but it's quite clear that a lot of people on HN are very happy to hate on Google, because we see lots of perfunctory, low-information comments here. It's mostly not about sharing new evidence, it's about people expressing opinions they already have.
Certain things become popular clichés, such as complaining about Go generics or Atom's alleged slowness, and so they get repeated in the comments about about that entity.
The tipping point seems to be when low-information comments start getting upvoted rather than downvoted. At some point people stop seeing anything wrong with them as long as they're on the same side.
I've been following (and helping organise) the Google+ exodus over the past two months (to the day).
Particularly disheartening has been complete radio silence from Google based on plans, timeline, support, and bugfixes (e.g., on data takeout).
I'm among those who've speculated on an internal gag order. BI's story could be better sourced, but it strongly reinforces impressions of a crackdown on any information disclosure. Google have never been particularly forthcoming, but they're being pointedly antagonistic (or frightened, or both), now.
I was at Google during the time period when they shifted from leaks being rare to "literally every non-public thing told to the wider company got leaked". I can't say there was any particular cause, at least at the time, beyond just getting large enough that the probability of having a few assholes take advantage of management transparency goes up. Note that I'm very much not talking about leaks for perceived moral reasons, like the China search engine, pentagon contracts, etc; these make up a small fraction of the leaks, which are more around things like product and feature launches.
If they had any intention of treating the cause then they would've abandoned the Dragonfly project. It's violating all their own AI principles, and I've never seen Google receive so much backlash by their own employees, human rights organizations, as well as the public as a whole. It's proof that there's no evil they won't stoop to as long as they can make a couple of extra bucks.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO until last year.
Even as a hypocrite he was valuing employees more than any other CEO in his time. Larry has no empathy and it was shown very clearly when he took over.
I'd say it's far more likely that they're concerned with Google's increased evilness becoming a hot topic among current employees as well as the general public. This will no doubt result in many of the brightest engineers choosing to work for competing companies that aren't morally bankrupt.
Working for Google used to be argubly the most prestigious job among software engineers, but they're heading towards the same path as Facebook.
Okay sure, but the biggest leaks of the year were related to the Pixel 3, not due to any of this "they're more evil" nonsense that this site cares about, but almost no one else does.
And working for Google hasn't changed one iota. Stop pretending like HN is a bellweather of anything at all. It's not. Get out of your bubble.
Oh my.. if you think the Pixel leaks were bigger than the Dragonfly leaks, then it's definitely you living in a bubble. Google has been condemned by leaders around the world, including the freaking Vice President. Facebook and Google are being fined for billions for their evil behavior. Literally hundreds of Google engineers and managers has publicly condemned their employer because of the Dragonfly project, risking their job and future promotions. When has that ever happened before? I certainly can't think of another instance.
If you think Facebook and Google hasn't been affected by the evil "nonsense" then I suspect you greatly underestimate the quantity and quality of the HN engineers, as well as how big the topic of privacy has become outside HN/Reddit/etc as well. The ivy league school I went to certainly discussed the evil practices of Facebook very often, and several would be ashamed of working there.. I graduated long before the Dragonfly project came to light, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's a hot topic at all the top universities, as well as workplaces around the world.
A) The Vice President's condemnations ought to be worn with a badge of pride, B) Google is being fined billions because the EU wants money, not because they've done anything amoral, C) employees protest the actions of their employer all the time (see every single labor dispute ever), D) I don't underestimate anything, I accurately estimate how small of a topic privacy is to everyone outside of Internet forums, E) "several" is hardly a movement; I know "several" people who would be ashamed to work at WHO because of how "under-prepared" they are for a zombie apocalypse, and finally F) your comment absolutely confirms your status in the HN "pretend to be concerned while actually doing nothing and continuing to use/benefit from the very people/organizations you claim to dislike" bubble that you and so many other people on HN seem to live in.
You're not grounded in reality, so your opinions as you've expressed them so far are not even remotely accurate, for the reasons I've listed above, as well as many others. You're going to continue to be surprised and confused about why things happen, and it's not going to get better until you figure out a way to hop off your cloud and come join us in the real world, because here no one gives a shit about Dragonfly (many down here, including at least one Chinese citizen, think it's better to have Google at all), and everyone is laughing at Google for their inability to keep the Pixel 3 under wraps.
A) Ah yes, they should take great pride in developing software that will assist the world's most evil and dangerous country rewrite history, spread propaganda and help them imprison and murder citizens who dare to seek change.
B) Don't be ridiculous. They're going to be fined for violating people's privacy and engaging in evil behaviour. European companies won't get a free pass.
C) I was obviously referring to tech companies, whom in this case happen to be among the best paid in the world. I'd love for you to find a single other instance.
D) It's not a small topic among software engineers, especially the brightest ones.. you know, the kind of people Google wish to employ.
E) I obviously don't know how every engineer feel. I just know that a significant percentage of the software engineers I've known would never want to work for them. It's difficult to tell to which degree Facebooks downfall can be attributed to the employees they've lost and the people they've failed to attract.
F) I am doing something. With regard to privacy I use every opportunity to recommend everyone to use Signal, Firefox, Duckduckgo, NetGuard, Cookie Autodelete extensions, etc.
>You really can't even fathom any possible other meaning behind what I wrote than that?
In context, no.
But rather than reiterate the last few posts in this thread, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Please explain to me how Googlers should wear Pence's accusation that they're "abetting Beijing’s oppression" with pride.
How is it a willful misunderstanding? The only way not to view your statements in a terrible light would be to take everything you said out of context.
All the churn around Google's other products and services have ~zero impact on their revenue stream. What matters is ensuring Google maintains goodwill so that governments won't do anything to harm their money mill - so it makes sense that controlling information would be management's priority.
People react strongly to these things because it feels like a stab in the back.
I worked at a place where a small group of people angry about certain things started selectively leaking things in a way that painted a few people with an air of scandal and incompetence.
When I react to stuff like
this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the other party. I don’t know anything about Google internals or people, but remember that humans react to things in a certain way.
On the technical side, this is the price we pay for weakening software patents. With strong patents, everyone knows what the proprietary technology is, and after 20 years, it's public. Without strong patents, we've seen companies get much more secretive. Trade secret laws are being used against employees routinely now. That used to be very rare.
We know how Google worked originally, because that's patented and you can read the patent. Today, nobody outside Google really knows.
The anti-patent lobby made a horrible mistake.
If software patents had similar effectiveness to hardware patents, sure. But rather what we've observed with software patents is that they don't actually work for the kind of things that should be protected, while encouraging a myriad of Foo-but-over-a-network and linked-list-for-Bar.
But that is moot - today's high margins don't seem to be based around novel software, or even software execution, but marketing and hence public image. Google isn't worried that somebody is going to clone the additional censorship techniques they've developed for China, but about controlling the public narrative to avoid disrupting their current marketshare/mindshare.
I haven't heard the argument that software patents are weaker than 20 years ago before. And this run scounter to a lot of others things that I've read. Do you have anything you can link to?
> Trade secret laws are being used against employees routinely now.
Assuming this is true and that trade secret laws are being abused, isn't the solution to make trade secret laws less abusable? I don't quite understand the logic behind fixing this by making patents stronger.
