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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Strongly disagree.

> In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.

Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not. Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for. They are well within their rights and should be encouraged to voice their honest opinions.

> 2. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.

So you would have them STFU, because the rest of the country sucks? This sounds completely backwards and doesn't make any sense to me.

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> Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for.

This is because of the ethics those same employees are complaining about. An ethical Google makes less money, employees will necessarily have to be paid less, they will then go on to the next unethical company that can pay them more. It is completely ridiculous to bring home a huge paycheck and complain about the very thing that enables that huge paycheck.

They want a world where they make the same $$ at ethical as non-ethical companies. It doesn't work that way. If they can't give a shit enough about their own beliefs to sacrifice something - $$ vs ethics -- then how can they expect a faceless corporation to give a shit enough about that person's beliefs to make that sacrifice? It's a completely, ridiculously, unrealistic expectation.

It's difficult if not impossible to quantify, but I'd suggest that google has lost an enormous amount of goodwill through their departure from 'don't be evil'. It's up there with the goodwill they've lost gaining a reputation for abandoning products. How much that filters down to the adsense coalface is debatable. But it absolutely affects the choices of top talent about where to work. Facebook is notorious among my coder friends for being a place that has to pay a large premium to attract talent, because of the shame of working for such an unethical company. No company is bigger than its reputation - certainly not a company that serves people, rather than industry. Part of what made Google so popular - so desirous as a place to work and research, was a sense that many of their policies, e.g.: the embrace of open source technologies, open standards for the web etc; were actively good. This belief helped google mindshare enormously. It's absence cannot help but hurt the company in the long term, in concrete financial terms. What they stand to gain in short term embrace of military contracts etc, will cost them not only their reputation, but their place as a major innovator. If it hasn't already, that is.

> Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not

The very reason Google is paying employees is that they are contributing to the company's goals, either directly or indirectly. So it isn't really Google the abstract entity that is causing climate change, it is all the employees working under the "Google" banner — including the people complaining about climate change. That is what is hypocritical.

For the second part — "have them STFU" is a bit extreme, but I think Google does have the right to be held to a similar standard than the companies they are competing with and the rest of the country/world. If the response every time they make some progress is "you aren't going far enough!" - even though they are miles ahead of everyone else - eventually they'll just stop making the effort altogether.

Most employees provide much more value to the company than they are compensated for. That's how being an employee generally works.

> Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not. Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for. They are well within their rights and should be encouraged to voice their honest opinions.

You're wrong. You have an opinion; not a fact. This is no different to the original commenter, but at least (s)he made that very clear.

> Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for.

how? can you justify what makes these people (you) so special? IN all honesty, they are probably overvalued in every sense.

>Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not

You are right because they already made their money and can afford to quit over whatever. Of course it has to do with money. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves. If money did not matter, they would have not worked at Google, there are other ways to make the world a better place than add snow effect on photos.

> how?

How do we know that employees provide more value than their compensation? Because Google makes profit.

So? Facebook makes profit, the gas station down the street makes profit.

How does a software engineer at Google worth more value than one at timbuktu? No, they are not. They just are not in the right place at the right time.

Do you think selling ads is changing the world? Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else? Wake up and smell the coffee.

When I say "value" in this context I'm just talking about money. I'm not making a moral value judgement about individuals or the company overall. All I'm saying is that employees are clearly creating more monetary value for the company than what they're being compensated.

> the gas station down the street makes profit

The gas station down the street isn't paying its employees six figure salaries. That employee might be making $7.25 an hour, which is the federal limit. Assuming 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year (no time off!), that's 15k before taxes. Is that gas station clerk a better/more worthwhile person than a gas station clerk in timbuktu?

> Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else?

Getting paid more than someone else doesn't make you a better person than someone else. It just means you're earning more income, and that company is willing to pay you that income for any multitude of reasons. That's it.

Programmers can provide immense value to companies, and companies make handsome profits despite paying their engineers immense salaries. This also has to do with cost of living in some areas: chicago is more expensive than many places in the world, so if you want to base a company in chicago and pay someone who lives in chicago to work for you, you need more money. It's not rocket science.

I think many companies don't need to be based in SF or Seattle, etc, but that's another discussion.

I would be willing to bet that the median employee at google is losing them money. This is true of all big companies.

I think Google believes that it would not be able to maintain its competitive edge with lower quality, lower paid employees. Having worked there, I think they are right on that account. In fact it probably wouldn't even be able to function after a few years after people who don't know what they're doing totally screw up their monorepo and eng processes.

But there's another function to high pay: sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere. They basically hire a significant chunk of systems (and nowadays also AI) programmers available in the industry, and keep them for as long as they like. Left to their own devices, those programmers would be able to start companies, or help Google's competitors compete with Google. As things stand, everyone else (including the likes of Microsoft) gets the folks who have failed the FAANG interviews. They still sometimes get good people, but not as good as to show them the way from the corners they've painted themselves into.

Where it all goes wrong though is when they actively attract "activists". From direct observation, few, if any, of those activists actually pull their weight once hired. In fact they often prevent others from focusing on their work, so their productivity contribution is often negative. They mostly spend their days on activism on the internal Google+ and do little else. You can actually see everyone's commits at Google, as well as graphs of how much code they contribute. When I was there, I'd check those dashboards from time to time only to confirm my suspicions, without fail.

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