
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left - dogweather
https://write.as/dsf4khx3r1m1208f.md
======
izacus
This is a repost of an article with 300 comments here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446)

~~~
trevor-e
And this one doesn't even link to the Medium article, it's some other site
that "sources" from it and doesn't even show the author's name. What's the
point of write.as?

~~~
keb_
write.as can be used as a blog platform, or be used to write one-off,
anonymous pieces of text.

In this case, I think OP was trying to improve the readability of the original
article by using write.as as opposed to linking directly to Medium (which is
notorious for its intrusiveness).

I think outline is better suited for these purposes, though, I typically just
use Pocket or Firefox's built-in readability feature:
[https://outline.com/Xbykpn](https://outline.com/Xbykpn)

------
virtuous_signal
I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google
probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't
censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of
years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who
don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead.
The only thing that stopped it was bad press.

People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the
dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the
public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first _two_
controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect
it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)

~~~
Aperocky
> ethical sense

Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with
some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over
existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.

People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect,
it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country
because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living
their life.

~~~
untog
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some
> censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over
> existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.

What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that
utility should outweigh ethical concerns.

> I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of
> government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.

So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid
regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a
better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the
apartheid regime?

~~~
bauerd
>What does that have to do with ethics, really? The argument seems to be that
utility should outweigh ethical concerns.

It's called utilitarianism and here it demonstrates nicely that ethics comes
in various flavors

------
nickv
Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live
Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story.

(To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would
consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it
attracted.)

The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some
cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way
our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This
reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost
out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)

~~~
suddenexample
I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking
about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active
US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad
rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of
dollars in revenue and data.

~~~
hpoe
The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making
centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're
toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that
they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the
ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich
at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be
profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more
importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie.

They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle
first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that
fall more for it.

~~~
throwlaplace
>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle
first for years and it gave them a leg up

okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like
are we all children that believe in santa claus too?

>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time

i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive
because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil
rather than net good).

~~~
tharne
Doing good for the world and getting rich are by no means mutually exclusive.
People pay money for products and services that make their lives better and
history has shown that economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain
exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral.
You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain
exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.

~~~
throwlaplace
>economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of
good and evil.

some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their
mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough.
someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you
underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose
coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.

you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy
increase somewhere along its supply chain.

edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than
that i'm assailing capitalism).

~~~
mkolodny
I didn't downvote, but I agree with GP that growth isn't a zero sum game. If
you create the right product, then you and the people who pay for your growth
all end up better off than you were before.

------
sriram_sun
_It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and
screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands
meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you
don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire
policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a
“diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while
participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.”
Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown
people” in other rooms nearby._

What is this? I have worked in the valley in smaller companies, but this (the
diversity exercises) takes the cake. Was there some context to this that is
missing? Can anyone who participated throw more light?

~~~
dx87
The last time this was posted, someone found that it's an exercise based on a
university study designed to address common stereotypes. The publishers of the
study only tested it in an academic setting with students, though, and
recommended that it not be done without a trained professional to guide the
discussion. Google basically cargo-culted the experiment and assumed it would
work in a corporate setting without the trained professionals.

------
mwnivek
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446)

------
sk55
The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a
lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt.

He doesn’t disclose that he’s running for Congress in the article and it seems
very convenient to share these opinions as soon as he’s running for office.

~~~
sounds
I disagree.

Running for Congress is consistent with his stated goal at the end of the
article: "No longer can massive tech companies like Google be permitted to
operate relatively free from government oversight. As soon as Google
executives were asked by Congress about Project Dragonfly and Google’s
commitment to free expression and human rights, they assured Congress that the
project was exploratory and it was subsequently shut down."

If he ended the article with, "Vote for me! Maine 2020!" It would sound highly
self-serving. I believe he simply doesn't see his campaign as relevant to what
he's writing here.

This is his retrospective on his time at Google.

He may post other things that combine the two, but this one is clearly focused
on the things he experienced while working for one of the largest corporations
in the world.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Let's not fall into the populist trap of painting everything corporations do
with the worst intentions while offering no skepticism to someone trying to
get our vote.

Both need to be evaluated critically.

------
michalu
Yes, Google isn't "don't be evil" anymore. People forget that what's left
without Google is Microsoft, Oracle and the likes whose business strategy is
outright racketeering.

Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the
page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number,
credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have
to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data
I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to
paid if not you're having this account.

At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium
etc etc etc)

~~~
whamlastxmas
I looked at Oracle's page for Datafox and there's no mention of a trial
anywhere. I searched on google for a trial and the only page that exists is
one that is clearly from before Oracle bought Datafox and it doesn't even load
properly.

------
clSTophEjUdRanu
The easiest way to get to the top of HN seems to be joining Google, quitting,
and writing about it.

------
mpiedrav
Never trust a large company. Big money always trumps ethics in the long run,
as "ethics" is just a PR stunt at FAANG scale.

The big concern here is how Google, etc. are becoming an oligopoly with a very
effective lobbying arm in any form of actual regulation.

While the Western world holds democratic-ish values in public institutions,
its large private companies are indeed totalitarian regimes.

~~~
ehsankia
But trust the person who's writing a medium post just as they're about to run
for senate and need to boost their name id?

~~~
mpiedrav
That post is just one of many anecdata (to some degree of truth) out there
about Google and other FAANG companies being "ethically challenged".

I remember having done a "computer and society" assignment about 14 years ago
on Google and China. I also remember Microsoft's "Halloween Documents"
(Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) from early 2000s. And many other scenarios of
Big Tech ignoring ethics.

In general, trust (like attention) is a limited resource to be used wisely.

~~~
ehsankia
I agree, but things also aren't as black and white as a lot of articles will
try to make it. As pointed out in this very article, Google did leave China in
2010, leaving billions of dollar on the table. That is the exact opposite of
"big money trumping ethics". Yes I realize they did explore returning to China
last year, but it still isn't as cut and dry.

I'm not saying any of these FAANG companies are perfect, but I also don't like
grand standing by people like this that really only case about advancing their
own image for political reasons.

------
imw
These sections really stood out to me:

"there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google
search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence or
hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absher, an
application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female
family members."

This is a stark and honest way to put what Google is doing. These _are_
actually fundamental values at stake. Not just 'privacy'.

"Although the causes and the implications are worth debating, I am certain of
the appropriate response. No longer can massive tech companies like Google be
permitted to operate relatively free from government oversight."

So FMAGAN companies are weaponzied in the geopolitics. This sounds good when
dropped over the wall, but when you try to play this out against the current
state of the USA, it seems near certain to me to go horribly wrong.

I would much rather break them up - all the way. Whatever that means.

------
Toastmx
Lets not forget that Google is not controlled by its shareholders. Due to its
multi-class stock structure Sergey and Larry control the majority of the
voting rights, what makes the "Dont be evil" slogan more to a personal motto
of these to founders than to a company policy.

------
escape_goat
I don't know what the policy of Hacker News here, but this article is NOT
attributed to its author and is "sourced" from the essay the author had
published on Medium a few days prior. To me this suggests that the article
might not have been reproduced here either by or with the permission of the
author.

To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather
than 'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on
the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a
popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.

------
thrownaway954
as i get older, i find myself more and more saying... it's just a job. i have
no "moral code" anymore when it comes to what company i work for. i know they
exist to make money and that what i do there... i just do my work, get my pay
check and go home. i don't care what the company stands for or "making a
difference" there. if i want to "make a difference" in my life, i'll do
outside of work with my community. when i was young i wanted "change the
world" at the place i worked at, that's no longer true.

------
wsetchell
Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems
like a bad idea.

Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it
would be counter productive.

Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions,
since they are the only ones who are making them.

If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able
abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision.

Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky
decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.

~~~
philsnow
Google had this, at least around 2010. Product teams would have to get the go-
ahead from a bunch of interested parties like legal, security,
internationalization, etc. Each of those parties controlled a "launch bit"
(literally a checkbox) for each product launch.

~~~
wsetchell
Yeah I was there during that time too. Chasing down launchcal bits was really
expensive.

------
ben7799
Every one of these stories always seems to have the common theme that at some
point Google HR seems to step in in a really big-brother/creepy way and start
saying the employee has been tagged for poor performance. It always seems to
happen as soon as someone starts to get in the way of a "Do some Evil"
project.

They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a
do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet.

It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not
ever ever interview with" list.

------
Multiplayer
I would love to know how you effectively run a 100,000 person company,
particularly when they are all knowledge workers as opposed to retail, food
service, etc.

Is google well run? How do you tell?

------
warpdrive
"I saw them(Don’t be evil) used to guide product designs that put the
company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of
Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz"

Isn't it ironic that Buzz had major privacy issues -
[https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-
nightmare/](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buzz-privacy-nightmare/)

~~~
apeace
Was that a typo? Did he mean to say "put the user's privacy above the
company's success"?

------
chengiz
> I was told there was no longer a job for me as a result of a
> “reorganization,”

He writes as if his morals made him leave but he basically left only because
he was fired.

------
CPLX
This guy has actually been a senior member of the organization that he's
complaining has done bad things. He didn't prevent those things nor does he
have a compelling narrative of working within the organization to change its
path.

Mostly he just collected his cash, and is now writing a transparently self
serving piece as he begins his run for elected office.

No thanks.

------
ausbah
It is sickening but not surprising that these Wall Street & executive types
put profits about human suffering & human rights. I wish more countries that
claim to have hold human rights as a central value of their county's morality
would put their money where their mouth is to regulate these modern day
supervillains.

------
mycentstoo
After reading, I can't help but wonder if this dismissive attitude Google (and
others) have towards social and political issues such as censorship, privacy,
diversity, etc. has something to do with the hiring model. I can't speak for
other departments but in terms of engineering, competency in algorithms and
system design are the only things that are screened for. These aren't well
rounded people. They aren't leaders. They're not screened to think beyond the
immediate task at hand which shouldn't leave us surprised when they fail to
see beyond the objective. In some ways, it would be akin to colleges looking
exclusively at SAT scores instead of the whole person.

In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of
ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these
companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the
expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those
skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there
isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.

------
leoh
I can't help but think that people are thinking about this the wrong way.
Today, activists in China understand that the internet is not a safe place to
engage in activist activities without extreme precautions. This was less well
understood a decade ago and Yahoo really messed up when they handed over
account information for an activist. I think Google entering China makes a lot
of sense now, is an interesting technical and linguistic problem (how do you
build an incredible search engines in a radically different language) and a
worthwhile business aim (getting a foothold into the most important economy in
the world).

Also, to suggest, at this point, that US agencies haven't harmed an incredible
number of people by co-opting information from tech companies and service
providers would be absurd. Although companies sometimes contemplate how to
protect their users (which doubtlessly Google would do in China), this
essentially never blocks anyone from starting a company here.

------
chvid
What is write.as? As why is the author's name not in the article?

------
SuperSandro2000
"Source from medium".... Medium is also getting worse and worse. After 3
articles or so you are forced to pay or open an incognito tab....

------
bitxbit
I never understand these pieces. To me they read like “I sold my soul to work
for xxxxx, made my ‘f__k you’ money, and now I want my soul back.”

------
methodin
Are there any good companies on the stock market? Seems like inevitably they
either go under or inch further towards evil over time.

------
erikpukinskis
I just want to cite this, for those who have voiced on HN the thesis that
conservative opinions will get you fired in tech, but liberal opinions are
“safe”:

> Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and
> for human rights — had cost me my career.

I would love if some other conservatives present, who care about free speech,
could voice some support for this guy. It would help me feel unified with you,
and want to support you more in “James Damore”-type situations.

------
williamDafoe
This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became
terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the
best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had
all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black.
...

~~~
Varriount
So which is better, to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, or to
attempt to correct things?

From what I can tell, he continually attempted to steer Google away from
business in China, even after things started going downhill. To my mind, that
takes quite a bit of bravery.

------
tomaszs
Its great to hear people inside also seen where Google is going.

------
bytematic
Shared this in my company slack. Everyone should read this

------
ghostbrainalpha
He left.... because he got fired.

I get that he could have sued to get some type of fake (reduced role) job
back, but.... the blog would be better if he didn't make it sound it was 100%
his choice.

~~~
Multiplayer
Headline matters 10x more than the content I have read, as people won’t read
more than a paragraph.

------
meddlin
I'll just say it.

Google you are being run by fools. Godspeed.

------
kkotak
And yet you kept all the drug money.

------
gadders
>>> Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal
government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who
are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong”
are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing?

Has the US federal government suddenly become more corrupt? Is he trying to
tie this back to Trump?

------
uhtred
Who cares why you left.

~~~
wikiman
he's running for senate in Maine. The blog post is probably a part of his
campaign

