Hacker News Reader

It’s not so much hiring people more interested in activism than their jobs, it’s that Google positioned themselves as something better than all the others. A company determined to do the right thing.

This naturally attracts people who are interested in making a difference and want to work somewhere that aligns with their values. You don’t go and work for somewhere like Phillip Morris or Oracle if you care about making the world a better place - and neither company would claim they’re trying to do so.

But Google said they were different, and it’s disillusioning to discover that somewhere you love and have worked hard for is just as evil as everywhere else - moreso as it wasn’t up-front about it.

And then you’re going to want to do something about it.

Except, most companies make the world a better place. On the whole, private enterprise is almost entirely responsible for humanity's rise out of impoverished suffering over the past 200 years. The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.

I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.

> The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.

That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.

That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely.

But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919.

Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise.

Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?

This is a completely backwards and incorrect perspective on history. Funds from taxing private enterprises were not what funded the war and the postwar boom; on the contrary massive Government deficit spending sustained both the war and the postwar economic boom.

On the contrary, the idea the US government created this money from nothing is the backwards perspective. How does government deficit spending happen? Via the sale of debt (ie. Treasury bonds).

The reason people are willing to buy US government debt is because they are confident the US government will be able to pay them back, with interest. Why are people confident in the US government's ability to pay...and where does this money come from? The strength of the growing US economy and the money the government will derive from taxes on this growth.

Or conversely, let's look at what the US government spent that money on: supplying the war machine via US industrial capacity. That industrial capacity wasn't created out of thin air. Take a look at Detroit for example. Absent the existing industrial capacity enabled by the automotive industry, the allies would likely have not won the war.

Both the ability of the US government to deficit spend, and the things they spent that money on, were a direct result of the strength of the US's private enterprise.

There is absolutely nothing about private enterprise that enabled deficit spending or confidence in US’s future. The War Department collaborated very closely to retool existing industries and also help create entirely new ones by sharing technology and designs with the private contractors; it could have simply nationalized them and there would literally be 0 change in confidence in US treasury bonds. Fundamentally, the distinction on how you choose to organize your means of production doesn’t really matter all that much, and certainly doesn’t matter as much as you seem to believe.

The fact that USSR was able to ramp up its industrial output, maybe not as high as USA but much higher than most other countries, refutes your point that private enterprise was not really needed for war effort. Because USSR, due to communism, had no private industry.

The USSR was a one trick pony: narrowly specializing in warfare. When this specialization became less relevant due to MAD, it fell apart.

It had slave labour though.

Have you ever read about the history of the USSR?

If you include the millions who died in various famines as well as those that were executed directly by Stalin, the number of victims of the USSR has been estimated to be anywhere between 6 and 15 million people.

The Soviet Union has to be the worst counterpoint to anybody arguing against private enterprise.

>My favorite example is Google Books.

It is sad that we could have millions of books searchable and publicly available, but it got shot down in publishers and authors guilds litigation crossfire :(

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

I didn't expect to read that so thoroughly, thanks for the interesting article. =) Sad indeed that is how it turned out to be.

And why authors would object their works being copied if they were out of print already? They weren't exactly making money in the first place. And wouldn't it have been easy to ask Google to delist their books if they wanted? I can see why Google was so eager to digest yet another big lump of information but the authors wouldn't have been left empty-handed. Now they got nothing, and I guess Google saved a lot of money too.

I am of two minds about Google Books.

On the one hand, it would be great to have some sort (any sort) of online access to millions and millions of books that would otherwise require a physical trip to a library or a slow, painful hunt through used book stores to obtain and would otherwise not be searchable online at all.

On the other hand, I'm very reluctant to have Google be my gateway to that data.

Take a look at what it did with the Usenet archive it acquired. In order to access those archives, I'm forced to use Google's awful web interface instead of a sane, capable standalone news reader of my choice, and I'm unable to download their archive to use for my own purposes. All access is through Google. Their way or the highway.

This is not to mention all of the tracking and privacy concerns that giving Google access to my reading history would entail. Nor all the ads I'd have to swallow to read books through them.

A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to.

I'd much rather this information reside in the hands of public organizations like the Library of Congress, whose mission is to be a steward of such information for the public good rather than its own profit.

The NNTP protocol was never written for archival purposes. These clients downloads either all headers ... or all data. That would never work to consult an archive.

It'd be like having patrons choose a book from a library by delivering every last book to their house and have them pick one. It's not going to work for any large archive.

> A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to.

Necessity ? You still have all access to books you had before. Google is providing more and better information about books, and is in fact NOT providing access to the books, except for excerpts.

The internet archive also has a usenet archive, FWIW.

Splitting people into good and evil, or just binary thinking in general, is all around us. "Good" people have done bad things, "bad" people often have good intentions. And Good and Bad can be vastly different in different places in the world or different time periods.

It's a matter of degree. Everything is shades of grey. Google has become a very dark shade of grey.

In case it wasn't clear my argument is that there is no single shade, there's just a bag of things. And these things are labeled good and bad by the observer.

Good points, this however seems weird:

> My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel?

Definitely. Hard to imagine many better places to sell ads for books.

Built into every Kindle unless you pay extra.

> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job.

So long as Google's recruiters pitch jobs by saying "Change the world, build a better future, don't be evil" and not "Optimize click-through rates on animated ads by a few fractions of a percent," I'm not so sure that there's a difference between activism and doing their job.

> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things

A potent element of Silicon Valley’s filter bubble is casting complaints against highly profitable, breathtakingly damaging behaviour as trivial.

This comment seems to be perfectly emblematic of demonizing a target, rather than even attempting to take a more balanced approach (such as original comment). Does the next comment then deify Google, until the next one demonizes them yet again? That's the problem with binary criticism.

Surely the goal should be to be accurate rather than balanced?

> breathtakingly damaging behaviour

This seems typically hyperbolic. What are examples of Google's "breathtakingly damaging behavior"?

People remember a WWW before ad-words and SEO changed everything.

Yes, me too. It was an internet that only a relative handful of people produced content for because it was not worth the time for the vast majority of people.

It's easy to put the target on Google and ad-words and SEO but literally no one has ever scaled payment for internet content.

The countless people in India, Brazil etc who make livelihoods out of producing content make it out of Youtube ads, not Patreon.

I’m not persuaded there are so many more longform or knowledge content creators today, publishing more of the contentful “fan fact” (as opposed to “fan fic”) content that mattered to them enough to publish.

I find roughly the same amount of useful information now as 20 years ago, buried by the content-mill spam from the “countless people” you mention.

I’d argue peak content may have been 2002 to 2007 or so. The original content mills (HuffPo 2005; Buzzfeed 2006) even had mostly useful content while honing in on the viral content form.

There’s likely more substance now than then, but the signal to noise ratio is so much worse you’d have a better chance of finding the needle in the haystack then.

I’d like to imagine people with something to say can and do still self-publish. Perhaps a reason posts about personal blogs are so popular here.

Conspiracy to cheat workers out of billions of dollars of wages comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

There’s also the project to build a government logged and censored search engine to get back into China.

https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-...

Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez were breathtakingly damaging. Union Carbide was breathtakingly damaging. Enron comes to mind.

I’m not a proponent of wage-fixing, but I wouldn’t call the damage breathtaking.

Google allegedly was planning to re-enter the Chinese market, but Yahoo and Microsoft currently operate search engines there that comply with Chinese government regulation. Where is the outrage?

> it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things

I think that's a reaction against how it's also fashionable to worship whatever Google does. And just cargo culting google practices can be damaging, at least from a selfish perspective. I lose developer hours because our entire 13-person company's (with 2.5-ish developers but 7 years worth of code) is hosted in a monorepo. I've now worked at two out of two companies that have gotten stuck because they built with an Angular stack and management refuses to switch to a stack that I can reliably hire or train juniors out of a bootcamp for, etc.

Also:

* The ridiculous nosql fad that led to a tsunami of databases with horribly invalid data because constraints aren't sexy.

* The ridiculous academic fetish that triggered the leetcode phenomenon and led to a tsunami of developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly.

> developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly.

I don't understand this belief. Where does it come from? Junior engineers don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly, whereas senior engineers do. Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. If they're wrong, companies will outhire and outcompete them eventually.

>Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time.

Exactly. This belief that the two correlate closely enough that you can supplant one kind of test (physically writing code, discussing it and architecting it) with another (leetcode) is massively, horre ndously wrong and damaging. The two do not correlate well. They correlate very badly.

> The two do not correlate well. They correlate very badly.

Do you have any evidence? It seems to be working rather well for the companies that follow these practices.

You may speak derisively of "leetcoding" but it does demonstrate persistence, grit, speed of thought, and/or the ability to learn something difficult (algorithms, data structures, competition-style programming). It's not crazy to posit that people who are able to learn one hard thing well will probably also learn other hard things well. In fact, it should be the other way around. Why in the world would someone hardworking and intelligent not be able to pick up new skills?

To me it's absolutely insane that being good at architecture and good at algorithms and data structures are seen as mutually exclusive skills. They're not skiing and barbecuing.

Now I'll concede that Leetcode-style interviews are a terrible and stupid way for smaller companies to hire, because they don't have the candidate pipeline of a Google or FB or Amazon. But it isn't a wrong approach in and of itself. If that's true, someone should be making bank by hiring all the scores of talented devs that the megacorps reject for not being good "Leetcoders".

Plus, surely you're aware that the megacorps also have system-design interviews for all but entry-level candidates? That's where you're asked about architecture, tradeoffs, and high-level design decisions.

I don't have studies but my experience of those who excel in leetcode is that they suck at system design and good programming practices - largely because they focused on leetcode to the exclusion of all else. They "hacked" the programming interview.

And while hacking the programming interview does demonstrate grit and persistence, it doesn't demonstrate actual programming skills. The worst part though is that it generates a mindset that "good programming skills" means "even more advanced leetcode".

I don't begrudge these people. A set of absurd incentives was put in place and they reacted to them accordingly.

It isn't good for Google either. The hires that came after this philosophy have achieved very little of note. The vast majority of post Gmail abject project failures have been built in house while the successes (maps, android) were bought.

> I don't have studies but my experience

Cool, so anecdotes, not actual data.

> it doesn't demonstrate actual programming skills.

It demonstrates ability to learn difficult things. You still haven't answered why junior devs hired this way are somehow incapable of learning good architectural practices. You also didn't address the fact that most of these companies also interview senior hires for system design and architecture.

> The hires that came after this philosophy have achieved very little of note

Photos. Chrome. Brain. Tensorflow. Kubernetes. Even Android didn't take off until 6 years after its acquisition. I don't have the time to research more but you get the idea.

That is simply a failure of leadership. In web technology, for some reason, there is a school of thought that developers fresh out of school should be ready and proficient in 8 weeks despite having no web development experience. The misguided solution is some magical stack or framework is provided as a drop in replacement for any personal attention, training, or guidance.

The first thing I learned out of school was the developer's triangle. The triangle has three sides: fast, quality, and cheap. From the outside no matter where you stand you can only see three sides. If you want cheap its not going to be both fast and excellent quality. If you want fast its not going to be both cheap and great quality. Finally, if you want excellent quality its not going to be both fast and cheap.

It takes years for a developer to move from beginning through proficiency towards mastery. If you hire junior developers assume you are sacrificing both speed and quality for cheap. If you fail to develop your juniors your code will not achieve quality and your people will not become faster. Frameworks, or any layers of unnecessary abstraction, are not a replacement for training and experience. While this is mostly true for all platforms/technologies it is especially true for web technologies where everything is defined against the same set of standards that work the same cross browser and cross OS.

If your leadership were interested in product quality first then developers would be allowed to fail internally so that they could learn. You learn a lot from failure. It is part of growing, innovation, and making better product decisions. You separate the product from that learning through test automation, continuous integration, performance metrics, and automated complexity analysis.

> That is simply a failure of leadership.

No argument there. You know not everyone gets to work under a 10x leader. Probably the median leader in any sector is -x, because the skillset required to raise money is not necessarily the skillset required to lead.

> The triangle has three sides: fast, quality, and cheap

I think that should not be a universal rule. You can leverage open-source solutions to cheat more than one of those sides, with a little bit of expertise, or by stumbling on the right framework by accident.

> I think that should not be a universal rule. You can leverage open-source solutions to cheat more than one of those sides

Dependency management, or the lack of, is one of those "be careful what you wish for" type scenarios. At my current team we perform a lot of manual copy/pasting of directories they many contain hundreds of not managed dependencies. I really think it would be substantially faster to burn it all down and do it right with few, or no, dependencies and an emphasis on automation at every level. That perceived speed increase takes into account the costs and lost time for reinventing many wheels.

It doesn't sound entirely unreasonable for a 3 developer company to use a monorepo. Most of the problems with monorepos usually happen when there are lots of engineers committing a lot. Either the SCM tool or build tools fail to keep up. I can't imagine either being a problem at your scale. Care to share more details?

>>> Is it an obvious ad-funnel? I doubt it. Or Google Street Maps, for that matter.

Google Street Maps was an incredible tool in dense urban environments before it became overwhelmed with sponsored pins. 2016 was the beginning of the effort to monetize it, and now it's overloaded with sponsored pins/badges that it's nearly nearly useless for most visual search tasks due to the noise.

>>> It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the worst companies out there.

Google's brand/reputation is suffering precisely because they positioned themselves as benevolent unstoppable underdog saviors (remember the whole "do no evil" thing?) who have since failed to live up to their mission.

Hypocrisy is lethal to branding narratives.

>>> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job.

Dissonance poisons culture, and privilege doesn't toil in the mines for the sake of toil.

The density of sponsored pins in Google Maps varies widely by area. In most of the Bay Area it's fine and not noticeably intrusive.

Sounds like you and and I disagree as to what constitutes a dense urban environment.

Doesn't bother me in NYC either. But, if you're not a fan, there are alternatives out there.

Are you really trying to say that the utility of a free map of the entire world that includes street level views of the entire developed world is negated because it has too many sponsored pins?

Alright lol