* you decide on a team before you start doesn't seem to be true.

Most of the compliant about Google hiring practice has been along the line of, and I paraphrase "I was promised to be with a team or a position and then I got placed in a totally and differently unrelated position/team"

Unlike most companies you interview for the entire company and not for a specific team at Google. That means you only know what team you are going to be on after you pass the interview. However, you will always know before you start. It mainly depends on what teams have headcount at that time and are a good fit. You can choose to take a pass on a team you are matched with and wait for another match.

>>> Google is trying hard to make it's hiring and promotion process objective and unbiased. That's why they happen by a commission of peers.

How on earth does this follow? I know that peer review is in fashion right now, but without some very strong context, this seems more like a recipe for a Keynesian beauty contest than a useful measure of merit.

It's committee of people from all over the company that don't know the person in question. The candidate prepares a document that shows their contributions with some quantifiable metrics.

There has been research that showed that this kind of decision process decreases bias.

"Being ethical is a core value of the company."

How does it make them stand out? What does it translate to in practice?

It means that Google often passes on opportunities to make more money if that would hurt or mislead users, advertisers or publishers.

Google's search rankings are unbiased. The ads team is separated from the search team. It's business model benefits from and supports an open internet, unlike other companies which lock users into their ecosystem.

Google is very transparent internally for a company it's size.

Google releases large of amounts of open source software and publishes research. For instance Google published a paper that explains in detail how it's Machine Translation system works.

You should get the YouTube developers in on this, because their ContentID system is about the LEAST ethical piece of software in common use.

In my 2 dozen or so ContentID flaggings, maybe two of them have been by parties with a legitimate claim to the material. All the rest have been fraud.

My most recent "pleasant" experience with ContentID was some scam copyright company claiming they owned the soundtrack to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. The beauty of this system is that not only are they fraudulently claiming they own that content, but to get my video published I have to swear that I'm not stealing the content they actually stole.

How do I report this scammer to YouTube? Well you can't. There's no automated way, and there's no support whatsoever. They can just scam in peace for years and years and nobody can do anything about it because nobody at Google cares.

"Ethical". Riiight.

Of course you can DISPUTE the claim. And in fact actual scammers will release the claim right away because they make all their scam-dollars off old videos where people don't check the ContentID status every week.

But there's no way to tell Google, "the guy making this claim doesn't own the content, he's a scammer". That's the feature I need.

I am 100% certain that the company claiming to have owned Morrowind's music: 1) Is not Bethesda (the developer of the game) 2) Is not affiliated with Bethesda in any way 3) Has no right to the music

But I have no way to communicate my research to Google. Because, guess what, those "ethical" Google employees make money off the scam, too! They take a percentage of all ad revenue, even if it's a ContentID scammer's ad revenue.

"Being ethical is a core value of the company."

Google's business model is pervasive surveillance, so that's a pretty odd thing to brag about.

Being ethical? Maybe the engineers need to have some ethics but not all products do.

I am assuming you are talking about privacy issues. Google collects a lot of data, but is very thoughtful about how they use it, who has access to it and gives users options to view and delete it.

Nobody who's been a victim of ContentID scammers (basically, 80% of YouTube Creators) would never say Google is "ethical".

That is what I was referring to. They take measures like you said, but do non-technical people even know about it? It is not advertised as far as I know.

> Being ethical is a core value of the company

> Google is trying hard to make it's hiring and promotion process objective and unbiased

Google tries very hard to appear to be ethical, unbiased, responsible, and generally virtuous. Sometimes this attitude results in good work. Other times, and I think more often, it amounts to empty posturing and counterproductive gestures. In the social sphere, this "be seen as good" attitude manifests itself as annoying virtue signaling, speech policing, and other behavior that you also see on American college campuses. This behavior is annoying, but very common in tech and easy to ignore.

The "be seen as good" attitude also manifests in technical culture, however. There's this weird attitude inside Google that what is painful must therefore be right, as if difficulty were its own reward. While it's true that the right thing is often painful, the converse does not hold, so Google makes some bad decisions.

Google's attitude toward developer friction is, "This process is slowing you down? Too bad. That's how responsible engineers work." This hairshirt-loving attitude leads to large teams, moving slow, and general risk aversion, and I think it leads to bad engineering-cultural choices.

Google: "This language feature causes problems? Let's ban it. We'll add headcount to make up for the productivity drop."

Facebook: "This language feature causes problems? Let's add tooling to warn developers about the dangerous usages and make sure we can quickly find bugs."

I've worked at a lot of tech companies. I don't think the people at Google are actually any more or less ethical than the people at other top-tier tech companies.

> moving fast is not valued as much

It's important not to underestimate how much moving fast makes you happy and how unhappy you become when moving to a slow environment having worked in one that moves fast.

Facebook's elevation of moving fast to a first-class goal goes a long way to slowing the kind of decay that Google has suffered.