2. I think that is because they love working there, they hold their employer to a very high standard, and they don't want to take a pay cut to work for another (perhaps US-only) company with morals more aligned to theirs.
Doing (or even thinking about) ethical business, puts you at a disadvantage over those that care more about profit and increasing their power. Losing prospective profits by doing the right thing is not a popular choice for a commercial business, so the incentives are there to just sell out your soul and go along with censorship (or spying on your users). For Facebook, this went on for years, until they found themselves in a mess. This mess was the result of 1000s of decisions made by all employees (not just upper management). I commend Google's employees for standing up for their beliefs and vision for the company. Only in a very Ayn Rand world is this sabotage. I am sure the big chief in charge of foreign markets views it as sabotage, but luckily Google is not run by only Eric Schmidt's.
I would love to hear from more native Chinese people, but from what I've seen so far, most of them would much rather have access to limited services than nothing at all. Not being able to make Duo calls, access Play Store, access AppEngine, access Youtube, etc is far more of an issue to them than not being able to Google about tiananmen square.
People are hyper moralizing because Google is hyper powerful.
"With great power comes great responsibility".
>google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
Perhaps they are doing so because they see these as attemts to sabotage Google's mission:
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Remember this is HN. That saying has been warped to read:
"With great power comes great piles of cash"
In their hay days, they crafted that hippy/liberal/sensible young alpha image to win customer approval, reducing government regulation and eat market shares against those faceless corporates.
Now they are the new baddies in town, the image no longer does them any good. They will retire it by then and be a normal company.
China, et al, will get a pass.
> google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
So having concerns about people getting killed for their opinions and whatnot is "hyper-moralising", but having concerns about "backstabbing" your employer isn't. Gotcha.
And it's not even backstabbing. When a friend of yours has a really horrible idea -- and that is putting it hyper-mildly in this context -- you are being more of a friend to them when you try to stop them.
1. the hyper-moralising over google's business decisions, they're not the only company that modifies its business to access the chinese market nor is the chinese government the only one that demands censorship.
2. google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.