Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit

Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by bjourne on Thursday July 15, 2021 @04:34AM (#27842569)

It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger. He may have had good reasons to prefer Twitter over Google, these reasons may have been clearly explained, and they may have been glossed over by you.

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by Aunche on Thursday July 15, 2021 @04:55AM (#27842667)

>It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger.

Ironically, these are the exact same objections I have with the Goomics. They take complicated issues and reduces them to "DAE think corporations evil?"

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by thinkingemote on Thursday July 15, 2021 @06:36AM (#27843265)

> these reasons may have been clearly explained

they were not. the "zinger" was a quote from the article

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by Mentoio on Thursday July 15, 2021 @04:47AM (#27842637)

From an ethical point of few, twitter doesn't matter and didn't add anything real to our socieity.

Google did: Maps, Android, gmail (yes gmail gave free https email accounts when others not even enforced https), skin cancer research, Alphafold, co2 neutral datacenters, pushing now for 24/7 reneweable.

Google literally changed the world.

In my personal opinion, Google would be worth to stay and try to change google 'back' or whatever is going wrong.

What has twitter changed for anyone? Srsly? The reacted when Trump became president they didn't forsee or work on mechanism to fix sharing and multiplying fake news. Other companies like Facebook for example are a global net negative as well. I'm seeing much more fakenewes and uneducated people on facebook commenting as antivaxer than anything else.

I can't understand why you would go to twitter and rant about ethical and moral workplace questions.

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by afavour on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:30AM (#27843970)

From the other point of view: through Maps, Android and Gmail Google has absolutely dominated the ad marketplace to a point where only Facebook can compete (and even then, weakly). They’ve built out incredible, unprecedented datasets of user activity online. If Twitter is polarising then YouTube is hyper-polarising.

Twitter, I agree, is too insignificant to have done any of those things. So I can see how working there would feel a lot less morally compromising.

> stay and try to change Google

They’ve been at Google for 14 years. I think at that point you probably have a pretty clear idea what you, as an individual, are going to be able to change in the place.

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by Mentoio on Friday July 16, 2021 @09:25AM (#27855976)

My argument was and still is, that Google as a company has and had such a positive impact, that in my opinion it is worth to stay at Google while there is no real sence of pride or anything beeing part of Twitter in comparison.

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by Apocryphon on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:44AM (#27844599)

Didn’t Twitter invent Bootstrap?

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by Mentoio on Friday July 16, 2021 @09:19AM (#27855916)

I personally wouldn't put something like bootstrap in the same category as all the things i wrote down.

Android is not 'just' an mobile os ;its a free globally used mobile operating system used activly by over 3 billion people with an easy way to incorporate your own app market.

I have not mentioned something like googles material design or angular.

Google maps gave everyone a free few on the earth in a time where you had to pay for maps on your expensive navigation system. It took OpenStreetMap a while to do the same.

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by habi on Friday July 23, 2021 @10:11AM (#27930835)

> Google maps gave everyone a free [view] on the earth in a time where you had to pay for maps on your expensive navigation system. It took OpenStreetMap a while to do the same.

Comparing the [history of OSM](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/History_of_OpenStreetMap) with the [history of Google Maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History) I'm not entirely sure about that statement. OSM started in 2004, Google Maps was announced in 2005. No information on quality at that time, though :)

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Re:Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on... by blub on Thursday July 15, 2021 @04:53AM (#27842662)

If took them years to figure that out, perhaps they weren't interested in finding it out in the first place. A good paycheck, plenty of perks and the thrill of working on products with hundreds of millions of customers at global scale can go a long way towards suppressing moral qualms.

But one can't dismiss the fact that Twitter and Google are cut from the same mass surveillance cloth, with the former just being smaller.

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