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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, reading all of these comments, it's really striking to me how Google has basically no consumer goodwill left. Obviously this is a biased sample, but it's kind of amazing to me how a company that was admired and beloved not too long ago is just reviled now: by governments, by their users, by their customers (i.e. advertisers).

I really have to wonder what morale is like in Google-land. So much of their corporate ethos was built on what great things they do for the world, and now with this constant drumbeat of basically everyone saying "we hate you, you suck, I can't wait until you get broken up" has to be weighing on employees.

And note this is not just a "people hate all big companies" thing. Sure, people have tons of gripes about Apple and Netflix for example but nowhere near the level of broken trust/expectations that has happened at Google.

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Please don't mix loud yellers of HN with reality. If you look at any independent consumer reports the picture is very different. And

Yeah, there's plenty of people liking Google and even Facebook still.

Please never never mix up the sentiment of a site with a voting system (which while design will drown out certain ideas) with the general reality. This leads into very nasty surprises - both when releasing products in your company or when expecting election results. To be honest it's very bizzare that supposedly smart people on HN say dumb things like "who's still using Google products" and other silly sentiment in this very thread.

(Having said that, YTM is a pretty awful product which seems to be born from some very awful corporate decisionmaking. Everything YouTube is really.)

I mean, on one hand, sure, it's no surprise that your average person doesn't have as much hate toward Google as your average HNer. My point is Google used to be absolutely admired and beloved by the types of folks who frequent HN, and now, even if you don't look at them with distain, I think most HNers at least look at them with some sense of regret.

I hope you are kidding.

When you are getting money the amounts Google pays their employees, you couldn't care less if everyone in the world says "we hate you, you suck"

Plus, once you have Google on your resume, it's hard to imagine a company that will reject you so ... again, no one cares if they are hated.

Internal resistance led to (allegedly) discontinuing that Chinese search surveillance engine (dragonfly was it?). Google employees care a lot more than typical ones it seems and we should give them more credit than “I hope your kidding”

This is an incredibly naive view of how morale works. Money is only temporarily protective against the psychological effects of a bad job.

> When you are getting money the amounts Google pays their employees, you couldn't care less if everyone in the world says "we hate you, you suck"

That kind of exquisitely proves my point. Back 15-20 years ago, the pitch was "if you're really smart and want to make gobs of money, but don't mind selling your soul, go to Wall Street. If you want to change the world (for the better) go to Silicon Valley."

Yes, of course that was always somewhat marketing speak, but it was also fairly representative of how people thought. This idea that people are just in it for the money, or just in it to "build your resume", are the kind of behaviors Googlers from an earlier era would have looked at with utter distain.

Last time I looked, their median retention for employees was painfully low, like 1.1 years low. So I doubt morale is good. But it doesn’t matter if you have buckets of cash to throw around, you can trivially replace burnt out engineers with new ones, since recruiting is made much easier with big numbers.

I know someone who couldn’t code a FizzBuzz who, through a couple of acquisitions, became a $500k+ middle manager at Google. I hope they saved money, because I don’t think anyone would possibly hire them post-Google lay-off. I wonder how many jabronies are farting around Google’s offices, reorganizing meetings and timelines all day and producing nothing of value.

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