[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Compared with what came before and what was competing with it in those days google search was terrific. Finding more of what you wanted faster. Clean interface. Ads off to the side clearly identified. People just felt good about using google product. That's a great place to start any PR. People's affection for polish of Apple Product compared with horrible machines most have been forced to use in pod farms etc worked the same way for Steve Jobs.

Assange has been claiming for a decade that Google is now "big and bad." Not sure if I believed him then. He was also claiming the US desperately wanted to put in him in jail while being dismissed by Hilary Clinton. He was right there. And that many people in the US govt and military industrial complex wanted to kill him and it was a lot more than just an idle thought. Right there too. His PR is shockingly bad.

It's insane! I would not have believed any of this a decade ago and yet here we are.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lon...

It's exactly because I never had any serious doubt, that I identify anyone promoting a narrative about it being revealed by a hero as someone's propaganda.

There are lots of competing conspiracy theories. That might be because there are lots of competing conspiracies.

Nothing people say is true or reliable, but the act of saying it is a kind of truth that seeps through about the PR operation behind it.

All my life, people have been blaming the CIA for everything. Regardless of how much is true, that propaganda can't exist without a source. You know who likes to blame the CIA, and who likes to blame Russians and who likes to blame "Zionists" and so on. I mean, you can guess.

"The sky is blue in Moscow" might be true or might not be. But if someone says that to me, then it expresses some truth about them, that they want me to believe it is true, or they are using reverse psychology, or something. But it represents a truth that can be relied on no matter how dishonest the speaker.

"Actions speak louder than words" including when the actions are speaking words.

But yeah, that's the next go to smear that you're identifying there. Can't make "Bernie or Tulsi works for putin" stick because it's false? Go with he's anti-semitic. It's nuts.

I think we've got to hold anti-semitism smears without evidence backing them in about the same regard as disparaging people for being Jewish. Both are actually promotion of anti-semitism. When anti-semitism is a go-to smear it loses meaning and the real thing, the vile thing, the thing that is actually violent and dangerous that must be opposed draws strength far more so than some hideous human goose stepping in the ugliest fancy dress, for example.

Maybe you should look at individual claims about the CIA and what evidence supports them before deciding if an individual claim is justified or garbage.

Pompeo has said the leakers of the yahoo story should be jailed. Not something you say if there isn't rather a lot of truth behind it. Isikoff isn't known for being friendly to russia in his reporting. He's recanted much of it now but was pushing the Trump is compromised by Putin line based on the ridiculous Steele dossier. May have been first cab off the rank there, I don't recall.

Something else that surprised the hell out of me recently was that the FBI never saw the Democrat party servers claimed to have been hacked by Russia. Only private contractors saw the evidence, contractors hired by the same crook-lawyer who fabricated the Trump has a private server connected to alpha bank insanity. Everyone has been repeating the democrats were hacked by the russkies and wikileaks published it with very, very scant evidence in support of it.

It'd be easy to weave conspiracy theories about it but waiting for more evidence to hold people to account is fine. And maybe I'm getting conspiracy minded in my old age because I'm not completely convinced that Epstein committed suicide either, I'd like more evidence for that before accepting it as fact as well. Has anyone actually asked Bill Gates about his story that he hung out with Epstein because Epstein had access to donors? Like "Who on this planet can you not get a meeting with given you're the richest guy in the world for the past 2? 3? decades? Seriously who can Epstein introduce you to who won't take your phone call Bill?" [1] Why has no interviewer asked him that? Why hasn't the media reporting on Bill's excuses for hanging with Epstein pointed out that this question is unanswered whenever they write about it? It just doesn't seem like quality journalism does it?

[1] There may be a good answer. Bill may have done nothing at all wrong. It's just hard to understand how it makes sense and needs further explanation at the minimum.

There is a huge difference between those two. Would be interesting to know how much was “forged.” At one point I thought they tried to vet the dumps pretty well to maintain credibility.

You can't publish what nobody has leaked to you. They don't investigate, they don't hack phones, they don't "go looking" they sit and wait with their secure drop boxes for someone to send them documents. They then try to verify them and publish them.

There is also zero accusation that I have ever seen that they've published anything forged. Which is remarkable given how controversial they are and how many people are desperate to make something stick.

Is it reasonable that these things are rarely at the top of the list of facts in this discussion of wikileaks good or bad? Is it reasonable to ask why the "Why don't you leak on Putin" comes up so often when its such obvious garbage for a publisher? [1]

[1] If wikileaks had not published something that makes Putin or Hilary or Donald or whoever you think they're in league with look bad when it was clear that it was leaked to them that's a very serious charge and one we would all take notice of. I'm pretty sure I'd cross the road to avoid Assange as a person myself. I don't know if I'd consider him worse than George Bush Jnr, the late Colin Powell, Hilary, Donald, Blair. Do you really /like/ these people more than Assange after what they have done? It's not necessary to like Assange to take an interest in the story and the evidence. And fwiw I don't particularly /like/ him at all.

It might be true at the very beginning when Google was simply a search engine that they truly were "doing no evil." It's also true at the very beginning of Facebook that they were truly trying to build a social network that made the world more open and connected by bringing grandparents closer to their grandkids thousands of miles apart.

Is this really true about Facebook?

But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and illegal stuff.

Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to people. It is also natural that people want to be paid more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say this from an ethical point of view, I say how humans act.

Also, with all these regulations, unfortunately, government-company collusion is also there, not only among companies. I wonder if markets were more free than they are if the collusion among companies (given that governments cannot regulate as much) would be as effective. I just wonder, because I am not sure, but I am confident it would be better than what we usually see in the media, which much of it is the consequence of disproportionate power for regulating.

About behaving "poor" each person has her own ethics. Things that look ok to someone can look bad to others. And many look bad to most of us, especially when it is someone else who does it... which is curious. Companies are greedy, when it is not our company. Companies are bad, when it is not our company... our neighbor does not deserve what we deserve, because we are better.

So the only measure by which we should measure companies is by law (even I find some laws absurd, but that is another topic). If some laws and regulations give power to make excuses that favor corruption via favoring friends, then maybe the problem is the capacity to regulate.

I do not think an independent company would work for a government in "unethical" terms (as for many of our mostly accepted definition of unethical, like helping military research or giving surveillance tech to governments) if that government cannot give them something in exchange. We see the pattern? The problem is that exactly. Do not look further.

As to your other point, I'm sure you're aware that governments and private companies are afforded different rules of engagement. We decided a century ago that allowing companies to collude ended up oppressing markets in negative ways and should not be tolerated. So not sure why you're using one to justify the other.

Thinking the opposite is being very innocent, in my view. But all happens in non-obvious ways and in the background, you are going to see a tiny fraction of what happens.

But the fact of creating laws in large sectors of people's lives creates evil incentives and dependence on people who did not take part in creating wealth for others.

I just find it contradicting.

Having your company put billions into the bank every year because they "don't know what to do with it" while you're not even a millionaire is disheartening.

I mean, if they were still paying us all handsomely like stock brokers then I bet popular opinion would be on their side.

A high-growth company will, by definition, be a short-tenure company. Ironically, it's at shrinking companies that relative tenures often increase, especially as those who cannot (or feel they cannot) compete elsewhere remain.

For a company increasing headcount by 35%/yr, half of all employees will have been hired within the past two years, even with no attrition.

Statistics under conditions of rapid change are ... counterintuitive. And you'd probably want measures that better indicate length against hire date, or at departure date, or similar factors. In some ways this is similar to the challenge of identifying disease mortality during early phases of emergence as not all cases will have reached conclusion and identification of all infections or instances is likely to be incomplete.

Not that I can think of any phenomena where this might be exhibited in the past few years....

Aren't FAANG salaries still absurd?

After say twenty years, my friends on Wall Street are mysteriously richer than I am. Of course the ones who didn’t survive the early treadmill aren’t included, but I guess that’s the trade off. Engineering is fairly stable and well paying, but you don’t get million dollar payouts unless you are a founder.

After all, if I wanted to be paid for stock performance I would’ve been a stockbroker (and like I pointed out up there, gotten paid way more after 20 year survivorship).

Also, I didn’t think it needed to be said but apart from Apple all the FAANG companies are really young, Google is only 23 years old. Back in 2001, they had less than 500 employees. I’m not one of the golden era. If I were, you’d already know my name and I of course would be a multimillionaire.

Multimillionaires are not people who joined Google 20 years ago. That's a different league altogether.

Multimillionaires are just normal people you've never heard of who work 9-5 and drink beer on the weekends with their friends and have a normal house in South Bay.

They joined Snowflake, Square, Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, or any other of the hundreds of SV companies like those in the last decade, even the last few years.

They are the average homebuyers for 1500-2000 sq foot ranch houses in Bay Area right now.

Sure I was being hyperbolic, but the point is legitimate. They used benefits to get people willingly to sign up for a lifestyle, then used hierarchy to efficiently accomplish a bunch of insidious tasks.

You have an entire generation of students majoring in computer science and "grinding leetcode" to get a high paying job and never once stop to think about the consequences. The job is just like another homework set and the employees want those good grades (a PIP... oh no!). And like the military, you're a "professional" which means you aren't allowed to talk politics. (I know the Damore's of the world will complain that Google is run by "SJWs"... but that's only because that line of corpo-liberal talk is good for attracting people who don't think too hard about the actual mission.) I mean... they even had PIPs in the military (though had a different name)!

Is unethical behavior pushing companies to the top of the food chain?

Or is it that other companies feel more ethical simply because they don't have as many chances to engage in unethical behavior?

If it's the latter, all the push to split the companies is for nothing and we should just consider "ethics at scale" to be an unsolved problem I guess.

If you're up and coming, the best strategy is to just make a better product. You know whose at the top and you can adapt your product to where they are weak.

If you're at the top, i suspect the optimal strategy is to try and cut your competition off at the knees before its a threat.

I think we see this across many things. Just look at all the messed up things states do when they're super powers vs middle power states.

History proves you right.

The entire British empire, a fabulously wealthy system, was founded on slave trade (think: kidnapping, trafficking) and when that became too risky to maintain either the trade or profit margins, they moved over to global drug trade. The opium wars.

some are telling

This is besides the point you’re making, but I disagree with this. Disregarding the ones who make drugs for medical use, we already have recreational drug companies operating legally, namely those selling alcohol and tobacco (and coffee I guess). They are not the biggest corporations in the US (although some are still huge and powerful, of course).

The reason it’s currently so insanely profitable dealing in some of the other drugs is their prohibition, which makes prices skyrocket (and of course, when you’re already on the wrong side of the law, you might as well cut corners and utilize harmful practices to the extreme, even further increasing the profits).

Money is the most dangerous behaviour-altering drug.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a system which rewards sociopathy and discourages kindness and empathy keeps generating sociopathic behaviours.

How is this unfair?

There’s absolutely no requirement that a capitalist (either the same one that stands to profit or a different one) control the flow of information in order to profit, lots of (probably most) capital funds the production of highly competitive and price-transparent goods, and all public stock companies disclose their expenses publicly. Even Google and Facebook provide clear prices to their customers, the issue with surveillance companies in particular is that their users aren’t the customers, but that’s totally orthogonal to the conflict you’re describing.

I also don't think it's really relevant here, since Google and Facebook employees are about the least coerced labor there is, considering that virtually all of them could another job earning an order of magnitude more than the minimal living wage in their area at the drop of a hat.

It is.

It is also a feature, to a greater or lesser extent, of many systems that are downstream descendants of capitalism and haven’t replaced the elements that produce that feature.

It is also a feature of the upstream immediate predecessor of capitalism (feudalism, in which control of the means of production is unified with land ownership and typically executive, and often judicial and legislative, power over those on it) in an even starker form.

> even in a market socialist system

“even”? Market socialism is a very close relative and (conceptually) descendant of capitalism, not some distant and opposed system.

> in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.

In market socialism, the employer is an agent of the employees, who (in many versions) each individually hold guaranteed rights with respect to it much the same as citizens of a liberal democratic regime do against the State. Both the universal elimination of the employer fundamentally serving an interest outside of its employees and also the common (but not universal, “market socialism” is a broad category with lots of variations) guarantees of individual rights to employees exist specifically to mitigate the adverse effects of the employer/employee power balance that it retains from capitalism.

My take on this is that in a small company, the individual with his morals and values can still have an impact on the behaviour of a company. Above a certain size, when the company is public, the individual has less impact on the company, and there is an emergent behaviour that is only driven by the incentive to "enhance shareholder value", and all moral values that the company could follow, and that come from individuals in the company, disappears.

A company's social role is to provide jobs and goods for the society to work well. But this is not aligned with the survival incentive of the company, to "enhance shareholder value", which becomes it's only role.

Same for people, new ones come fresh with ideals only to become sleazy when their spot is secured. It's a balance between knowledge of the old versus naiveness of the new.

Yes, it has been written. And you almost certain will have heard the condensed version.

You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

there must be finer / wiser analysis about these antagonism.

I have a tendency to be a naive hero wannabee but I recognize when I become dark or complacent. Most probably people managed to do better and write about this in a social context.

A certain peculiarity of our time I think is a constant ambiguation (or confusion) between moral conscience and social impressions, social consequences even. social media gives us the illusion sometimes that they are one in the same, leading to confusions like this.

Oh, and don’t forget Wireguard. Put Wireguard and RSS in the same headline and get the highest upvotes ever.

Of course HN will probably hate Wireguard in a year.

Your solution is finding a good employer who you know and vet personally, and avoiding working entirely for large companies. Managing human rot at scale is an unsolved problem, and few seem to survive exposure to extraordinary cash flows without some aspect or other of their humanity being impacted.

Isn’t it, then, solved? The scalable way is liberalism = the ability to change employers and swap companies when they rot. It comes at the loss of having to dismantle mature companies frequently, but it is one way to solve rot. Like you change window frames when they rot.

The smaller ones.

* There are plenty of evil small companies as well.

* Small companies can turn evil more quickly than big ones can.

* The evil things big companies do is more likely to be a matter of public record already than the evils of a small company.

* Big companies sometimes have the scale to make a bigger impact at the "nice" things they do than small companies.

That's not to say that there aren't some impactful, ethical small companies out there. I'm just saying that the choice is not as clear cut as it's made out to be.

Sincerely, your BigCo Corporate Drone

I have the feeling that all large companies, regardless of how ethical their mission, can make you feel bad. But just because you feel bad doesn't mean the majority of outcomes of the company are bad. I mean, shit, our country as a whole produces some pretty bad outcomes, but not necessarily the majority. At some point we need to be more rational than emotional and do as much good as we can while still collecting a paycheck. But of course we should be willing to leave and work for good if we can no longer justify the bad.

I don't think there is any safe math for that. What if staying provides a better opportunity to create necessary change? At what point do we choose between the easy and the right, and how do we even find that line?

Yeah. I remember their "don't be evil" bullshit. It was all just marketing. You can perpetrate all kinds of dishonest acts when you have a reputation for honesty.

They're still an advertising company, just on a level people are less aware of. And they might not 'advertise' the usual products.

Keyword being "feel". Google and FB "felt" nice for a long time. Now, after old media smearing blitz, they don't "feel" as nice anymore.

Key takeaway: "feeling" about a corporation has very little to do with their practices and everything to do with the PR budget and loudness of screaming about them. They're all sociopathic by design.

Based on my recent viewing history (mostly old Star Trek, first season of Blacklist and the Inspiration Four documentary) I'm struggling to see what those might be.

So maybe the answer is to work for yourself or a small organisation.

A little like the casinos tricks where you will never see a clock or the time inside one. There's a slight tilt on all pavements in Las Vegas that slowly push you towards the building, all without you knowing that it's happening.

Brainwashing at it's finest.

Wouldn’t that cause rain water to flow into the casinos?

(it may have been this book https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-las-vegas-revised-ed...)

You can’t expect others in a company to put their morals over profits because at the end of the day no one gets fired for making money, but you can if your morals get in the way of profit. The incentives always pushes on the side of profit.

As a company grows the founders who originally directed the company’s ethics either step down or have less influence in the day to day decision making at every level of the company.

I think this is why we see companies like Tesla (and startups more generally) making so many “out there” decisions in terms of design and how they run their business. No one’s going to risk their job on pitching the cyber truck at Ford or spending $0 on advertisement. These things really need to be pushed by a founder who isn’t worried about being fired for doing something that seems crazy on paper.

Generally I think the world would be better off with less super massive companies who no longer have a founder with morals and a vision to guide the company away from a purely profit motivated future.

I think that's the crux of what Google got caught doing here. You don't need an Ivy League law degree to understand that what is laid out here is a slam-dunk case on collusion/anticompetitive grounds. I hope they have to face some kind of accountability for it. I hope these attorneys in Texas can deliver that for all of us at a level above "slap on the wrist".

Now it almost carries a stigma.

The hiring process is this way for the entire industry. Multiple startups have failed trying to move it away from its current incarnation of technical phone screen -> technical on-site, where the majority of technical questions asked are data structures, algorithms, and system design based.

Implying that the people at Google are only good at whiteboard interviews, and not much else, in terms of both intelligence and technical ability is laughable. Google's influence on software engineering is broad and deep. Their papers moved the industry, their open source projects power the industry, their internal tools influence shifts in the industry.

There's something wrong with you when you let their signal / data gathering for their hiring process impair your ability to see what they contribute clearly, and what obviously works for them in terms of hiring able engineers.

Using this issue, which is clearly not related to engineering ability (it's a systemic management issue as far as I can tell), as a data point to demonstrate that their interview process is flawed, and that the engineers that made it through it aren't able says more about your own emotional state.

Places lean into Google's way of doing things by default without demonstrating that it leads to positive outcomes _for their business_. Google themselves do it due to no small part to compensate for the pitfalls of getting as big as they have. Pointing out that what they do is ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating scale with success.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Snap, RobinHood, Walmart, Twilio, Uber, DoorDash, ... (we can continue down the list of US / western technology companies here for quite some time), all ask technical questions following the standard data structures, algorithms and system design format. They don't specifically ask for binary trees, but Google doesn't specifically ask that question either. There is no standard for the entire industry, but this method is common, to pretend otherwise is disingenuous .

> Places lean into Google's way of doing things by default without demonstrating that it leads to positive outcomes _for their business_. Google themselves do it due to no small part to compensate for the pitfalls of getting as big as they have. Pointing out that what they do is ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating scale with success.

There are multiple assumptions here on your part. One is that this is something that occurs due to scale. Please prove it. The on-site process outlined takes engineering time, and is costly. It's multiple hours long, brings in multiple engineers, and requires lengthy discussions afterwards. Surely there's something that scales better if that were the motivation here?

The second assumption is places blindly follow Google's lead, with no further analysis on their own if it' beneficial to their business. This is mindbogglingly presumptuous considering the million / billion / trillion dollar companies with highly capable engineering / HR leaders on that list. You obviously know better than them with the data they've collected?

The above is outside my original point: This thread is not a question of engineering ability. It's a systemic management failure. Latching on to anything negative re: Google / Big Tech to vent your frustrated at the hiring process, and how see! it lets in those who aren't intelligent, capable, etc. is a reflection of your own emotional state.

I have never come across this in Europe and I hope I never will, and I certainly don't partake in this circus when I interview people.

Exploiting the weaknesses of the largest group possible has been the name of the game for such a long time, that for many well meaning corporate robots it has become automatic behaviour.

They defend, justify and most importantly have no roadmap to how corporate america can reduce exploitating knowledge gaps, info assymetry, biases, weaknesses at scale.

Stripe, maybe?

Hmm...maybe there's a corollary between "goodness" and customer service? The worse the customer service, the "gooder" the company?

Strangle the socio-pathic plant at its root forever.

Additionally, people I hadn't met during the interviews but were in my direct chain of command were obnoxiously political. I am pretty much done with working at places where I dont have a direct line to the owners, and meet the owners before I accept the job.

Company mottos, cultural values, we are family, and all the marketing garbage that they sell for new hires to feel good is just that, plain marketing.

When things get though, the "values" hardly matter to get deals or fire people.

The US internal anti socialist propoganda is so strong that it makes people believe that this middle ground doesn't exist.

What about the timescales and starbursts and small tech startups that we like to see crop up on HN?

My list above is tainted by my own interest in data; what is there in other spaces?

Impressions and anecdotes?

Atlassian.

The other day I unpacked the thing cuz I needed a Bluetooth speaker, and was swearing at the thing the whole time cuz I couldn't set it up as a speaker without downloading the app, hooking the device to WiFi and seemingly giving Google access to more of my data (you can turn off the mic, but it keeps complaining about it at full volume and u can't turn that off).

It's funny how the personal feelings associated with Google has changed. The device is the same, but the perspective, the emotion towards the company has changed so much.

As shown in the recent leaks people have stepped in and tried to stop the shit that's happening.

(Things in [square braces] as added context for people who didn’t grow up as Evangelicals in the South)