> The culture was transparent and open to diverse discourse, and from the start it was made clear that, as Googlers, we were not only welcome but expected to bring our own identity and values into the job.
Google management lost its moral compass in 2017 when they fired James Damore for writing a memo critiquing their gender diversity efforts. They were never serious that employees were expected to bring their own identity and values into the job, they only thought this with respect to identities and values they were already mostly-aligned-with.
That was a crazy period when Google first fired him, then fired people criticising him, and then fired people criticising the people that just got fired.
But let's be honest, the guy was kind of unhinged. I would not have fired him, but neither would I have kept him in my team.
I agree, internally, looking at a fuller picture of his activity, he was off. Constantly bringing the subject up out of context, starting fights, etc. but they should have just warned him.
I'm sure he's just overjoyed to be tried without representation or evidence in the court of public opinion, a big step up from being punished with no process at all.
He wasn't unhinged, he somewhat clumsily posted evolutionary biology literature fragments on a channel where it would offend parts of the readers.
In response to a "let a thousand flowers bloom and speak your mind" request from Google management snakes. The problem is that some tech people take these requests seriously.
Google of course has identified itself as Trump sycophants and hypocrites by now. Maybe they should invite Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Elon Musk to give keynote speeches.
There's a difference between bringing your own identity, and publicly condemning others because of theirs. James Damore was intolerant of women in the workplace.
I'm very open to arguments like the author of this post, but they are completely different to preventing intolerance spreading.
In my experience, Big Tech's billboard to "bring your best self" was just to get super eager people with great skills into their ranks to help accelerate business. Once you're on the inside, it's quite clear that's a farce and in fact, you should keep your mouth shut and your head down.
Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
> Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
I suspect the previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The Supreme Court's decision in SFFA banning race-conscious practices likely led to a lot of panicked meetings between companies like Google and their employment lawyers about Title VII exposure. That was more than a year before Trump was reelected.
It’s the cost of buying goodwill and lower regulatory burden from the administration in power at the time of implementation. DEI? Non DEI? Like an umbrella, just depends on the weather, its business as usual regardless.
And it didn't even stop the antitrust suite so they threw in with Trump and then started sucking up to him. He's giving big tech everything they want so there is pretty much nothing he can do that will upset them.
Google exists to make money and is happy to change their opinions to suit the current force in power.
But that “critique” of gender diversity efforts said that the lack of women in CS was due to some innate difference in women (rather than a social division that is neither innate nor universal across time or cultures) While also decrying the lack of affirmative action for conservatives.
It’s neither the tipping point for Google, nor is it a hill worth dying on
All of my stock has finally vested, and I am independently wealthy enough to signal that I'm quitting purely based on my morals, since there's no way anyone could have known Google wasn't some ethical bastion of hope in 2017.
"being financially independent" is a state and a "moral compass" is a function or tool. Two different concepts like red and tomato or yesterday and cold.
But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit.
Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs.
Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their moral compass, is being a hypocrite.
Same for me. It is the spectral signal of LLM writing. I'm a writer and last week I re-read one of my own books, that was written a few years before LLMs appeared. And I saw I used the "It's not X; it's Y" construction and I cringed, and now I have a moral dilemma: it feels so painful LLM robot speak that I want to rewrite that sentence for the next edition. But on the other hand, I want to keep it in because it is what I wrote and it was me talking not an LLM. Oh the moral dilemmas one must face!!!
What’s painful is that you’re thinking of letting robots suppress your authentic voice. Also, they got that way by copying humans, and if you continue to cede to them everything they copy, you’ll have no place left to be.
Surely there are times when using that pattern is a great way to communicate the point to be made. The problem is LLMs over-use it and apply it in lots of cases when it's not appropriate.
My low-confidence theory is that it's an artifact of making the LLMs better at coding.
My two cents: think carefully if that pattern is a really great way to say what you want to say in your book. If it is, leave it, if you could say it better, change it.
How LLMs write and how people feel about them is evolving and the current dynamic will pass...
Chatbots can be prompted to write into all kinds of styles, this is just their default "help me with the homework" presentation. It doesn't make sense to drop some construct where it is appropriate just because bots overuse it.
That example flowed well and didn't stand out to me.
But what happens when you no longer feel that you have a decent chance of being able to determine that something might have been created with LLM assistance? Do you not mind because you can't tell anyway, or do you refuse to read anything at all for fear of potentially consuming some LLM assisted work?
I'm fine with it as long as it's not full of the usual signals, because that's just bad writing that I don't enjoy.
The author might be human, but used an LLM to help them draft the letter. Something I do sometimes is brain dump into an LLM and have it help me organize it, and then I iteratively refine what I want to say.
20 some odd years ago I read zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, and it made the point that writing is hard when trying to decide what to say and how to say it at the same time. Just stuck with me. Brain dumping into an LLM is one way to get some momentum.
That said, the negation parallel pattern LLMs overuse drives me nuts and I'm always having to manually edit those out. I can't help but wonder if there is an advantage to thinking like that that helps with coding. E.g. defensive negation in coding probably improves code quality, but it dilutes good writing when over used.
As someone who worked at Google, it is absolutely ridiculous to claim Google only lost its moral compass in this decade, let alone suggest it HAD its moral compass in 2017 when the guy was wired.
Why do you consider yourself such an important person to put your career decision on HN? BTW – you are overreacting and will regret it soon. Good luck and take yourself easier.
Google will want him terminated immediately and will probably make him some settlement (combined with a threat) to keep his mouth shut, going forward. Meanwhile, the media will be clamoring for interviews and more sound bites.
I refused an interview from google in 2010ish, because it was already dubious with all the tracking and advertising they were doing, as well as the rising censorship.
So if you decided to go in 2017 with all that happened since, your moral compass was already broken with google's. Snowden already revealed what all that data was used for with program like PRISM. You already seen the total lack of interest in preventing scams in their ads as long as it brings money. You've seen the antitrust fines. The tax avoidance schemes. The election influence concerns over youtube content.
What I read is "I know have made enough money from Google immorality, I can virtue signal by taking an early retirement and pretend I'm a great person".
The PRISM stuff about google was mostly BS. The only thing was the non-encrypted traffic on “dark” fiber between data centers. And some may have been a reference to systems to comply with court orders via the DOJ which everyone of any scale does (eg a “wiretap” on a Gmail account).
This take I can get behind. Google's leadership has been total garbage for at least 15 years. My experience as an employee of one of Google's closest business partners was that it started going south in 2008-ish and was certifiable by 2010.
These people who act like it's all suddenly gone down hill weren't there or weren't paying attention. If someone believes Goog's only turned to shit since about 2017, they were mislead, probably by the paychecks that kept them from looking too closely.
Save me from the selective moral outrage while a so called privacy advocate works for a company that is a pillar of surveillance capitalism having numerous privacy scandals & heavy censorship
>Algorithms for ads and mass surveillance were always at the core of Google model.
You may not have been around back then, but we had half a decade of Google before that model, and it was quite nice, nice enough to get us to leave our other search providers--and to hand them the keys to our inboxes.
well at least the TC and stock appreciation was worth it right?
sorry not being a jerk but many of these kinds of posts just come off as performative and attention seeking. you could have just quit, literally everyone knows how FAANG operates.
These are the most successful companies in the history of the world. What do you expect? DO you need a PhD to figure this out?
. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
So if our enemies had no qualms at all about doing this, wouldn't it make sense that we have weapons that can at least counter, and potentially fight back? Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
> "Don't be evil"
Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
I'm not a pacifist, but I wouldn't work in any place related to the US military for the simple reason that it is mostly used to wage wars of aggression these days, or provide materiel to other countries that do. Stop doing that and then we can seriously talk about defensive military tech. I left NVIDIA in part because it is too heavily involved in these things (and Palantir and Anduril specifically).
Regarding this specifically:
> Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
it again depends on what exactly said AI does. If it's used to surveil most people most of the time, for example, then that probably does reduce the odds of an ISIS-linked attack on US, but the surveillance itself would be a greater injury at that scale.
He has, and has had, a specific moral philosophy he follows. When he took the job the public (and once he started, internal) words and actions of the company fit within that philosophy (or closely enough). Now the company has changed and they don’t fit. Further, the obvious changes happened without any real notice or explanation.
It seems reasonable in that situation to leave. FWIW; I was in the same situation, and left.
Do you fault him for his personal moral code? He is not telling you how you should act.
I have met pacifists who say all war is bad* and thus the Russia Ukraine war should immediately end, without any ideas on how to get that to happen except a few who imply Ukraine should roll over and be consumed.
Describe that scenario to me. What precisely is the language model going to do? To defeat a _terrorist_ organization? I feel like this is way to asymmetric of a philosophy to actually work, but, I'm curious to know what your imagination holds on this one.
> Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
The government _is_ impotent in protecting you. If they weren't we wouldn't need courts. Or a constitution. Or the revolution which started it.
Finally, there is an argument to be made, that our government, and it's imperious ways, were the primary force which led to the creation of ISIS in the first place. Perhaps if we weren't telling lies about yellow cake and mobile chemical labs while indiscriminately bombing innocent civilians we wouldn't be facing such a ridiculous world security posture.
>Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
When they rename "Department of Defense" to "Department of War", there can be no mistake about the intention of the government. They aren't "protecting" us, they are actively starting unnecessary wars, because cruelty has always been the point for them.
Did you just realize this now? The name "Department of Defense" has always been a euphemism. The last time we were in a defensive war was World War II--ironically, when the DoD was still called the "Department of War."
If you actually read the article you'd know that the Googles government isn't friendly with the author's government, which makes your nitpicking nonsensical.
I don't know, it seems like being a pacifist is harder, since it exposes you to violence to which you cannot retaliate while alienating you from your peers with less stringent moral opinions. Doesn't seem like it really makes anything easier. You don't have to look hard to find that history is replete with pacifists who paid social and legal penalties for their moral stance.
He also said that "defense" was "different", so he's not that principled.
I assume if he actually felt threatened personally he wouldn't have any issues with developing weapons (through full-disk encryption or unbreakable DRM or locking people out of their devices or whatever).
> The culture was transparent and open to diverse discourse, and from the start it was made clear that, as Googlers, we were not only welcome but expected to bring our own identity and values into the job.
Google management lost its moral compass in 2017 when they fired James Damore for writing a memo critiquing their gender diversity efforts. They were never serious that employees were expected to bring their own identity and values into the job, they only thought this with respect to identities and values they were already mostly-aligned-with.
That was a crazy period when Google first fired him, then fired people criticising him, and then fired people criticising the people that just got fired.
But let's be honest, the guy was kind of unhinged. I would not have fired him, but neither would I have kept him in my team.
I agree, internally, looking at a fuller picture of his activity, he was off. Constantly bringing the subject up out of context, starting fights, etc. but they should have just warned him.
I'm sure he's just overjoyed to be tried without representation or evidence in the court of public opinion, a big step up from being punished with no process at all.
He wasn't unhinged, he somewhat clumsily posted evolutionary biology literature fragments on a channel where it would offend parts of the readers.
In response to a "let a thousand flowers bloom and speak your mind" request from Google management snakes. The problem is that some tech people take these requests seriously.
Google of course has identified itself as Trump sycophants and hypocrites by now. Maybe they should invite Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Elon Musk to give keynote speeches.
There's a difference between bringing your own identity, and publicly condemning others because of theirs. James Damore was intolerant of women in the workplace.
I'm very open to arguments like the author of this post, but they are completely different to preventing intolerance spreading.
In my experience, Big Tech's billboard to "bring your best self" was just to get super eager people with great skills into their ranks to help accelerate business. Once you're on the inside, it's quite clear that's a farce and in fact, you should keep your mouth shut and your head down.
Alas.
Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
> Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
I suspect the previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The Supreme Court's decision in SFFA banning race-conscious practices likely led to a lot of panicked meetings between companies like Google and their employment lawyers about Title VII exposure. That was more than a year before Trump was reelected.
It’s the cost of buying goodwill and lower regulatory burden from the administration in power at the time of implementation. DEI? Non DEI? Like an umbrella, just depends on the weather, its business as usual regardless.
And it didn't even stop the antitrust suite so they threw in with Trump and then started sucking up to him. He's giving big tech everything they want so there is pretty much nothing he can do that will upset them.
Google management lost its spine back in 2008/9/10 and its soul soon followed. It was over long before your pet issue showed up.
Google exists to make money and is happy to change their opinions to suit the current force in power.
But that “critique” of gender diversity efforts said that the lack of women in CS was due to some innate difference in women (rather than a social division that is neither innate nor universal across time or cultures) While also decrying the lack of affirmative action for conservatives.
It’s neither the tipping point for Google, nor is it a hill worth dying on
In other words:
All of my stock has finally vested, and I am independently wealthy enough to signal that I'm quitting purely based on my morals, since there's no way anyone could have known Google wasn't some ethical bastion of hope in 2017.
there are plenty of people who are financially independent but who don't choose to follow their moral compass.
Being financially independent is the moral compass of the financially independent.
"being financially independent" is a state and a "moral compass" is a function or tool. Two different concepts like red and tomato or yesterday and cold.
Back in 2017, I had this theory that Google was run from the Vatican and the Pope himself was the CEO.
You really haven't ever encountered someone who believed in anything, have you?
Not that I care in particular
But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit.
Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs.
Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their moral compass, is being a hypocrite.
>“Don’t Be Evil” wasn’t just a slogan (...) —it was a north star for teams making hard calls
I've developed an involuntary, muscle-level reflex that forces me to close the tab immediately when I read these "not just X -- it was Y" LLMisms.
I realize the author might be human and am sorry if that's the case, but I can't help it.
Same for me. It is the spectral signal of LLM writing. I'm a writer and last week I re-read one of my own books, that was written a few years before LLMs appeared. And I saw I used the "It's not X; it's Y" construction and I cringed, and now I have a moral dilemma: it feels so painful LLM robot speak that I want to rewrite that sentence for the next edition. But on the other hand, I want to keep it in because it is what I wrote and it was me talking not an LLM. Oh the moral dilemmas one must face!!!
What’s painful is that you’re thinking of letting robots suppress your authentic voice. Also, they got that way by copying humans, and if you continue to cede to them everything they copy, you’ll have no place left to be.
Surely there are times when using that pattern is a great way to communicate the point to be made. The problem is LLMs over-use it and apply it in lots of cases when it's not appropriate.
My low-confidence theory is that it's an artifact of making the LLMs better at coding.
My two cents: think carefully if that pattern is a really great way to say what you want to say in your book. If it is, leave it, if you could say it better, change it.
How LLMs write and how people feel about them is evolving and the current dynamic will pass...
Chatbots can be prompted to write into all kinds of styles, this is just their default "help me with the homework" presentation. It doesn't make sense to drop some construct where it is appropriate just because bots overuse it.
That example flowed well and didn't stand out to me.
But what happens when you no longer feel that you have a decent chance of being able to determine that something might have been created with LLM assistance? Do you not mind because you can't tell anyway, or do you refuse to read anything at all for fear of potentially consuming some LLM assisted work?
I'm fine with it as long as it's not full of the usual signals, because that's just bad writing that I don't enjoy.
The author might be human, but used an LLM to help them draft the letter. Something I do sometimes is brain dump into an LLM and have it help me organize it, and then I iteratively refine what I want to say.
20 some odd years ago I read zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, and it made the point that writing is hard when trying to decide what to say and how to say it at the same time. Just stuck with me. Brain dumping into an LLM is one way to get some momentum.
That said, the negation parallel pattern LLMs overuse drives me nuts and I'm always having to manually edit those out. I can't help but wonder if there is an advantage to thinking like that that helps with coding. E.g. defensive negation in coding probably improves code quality, but it dilutes good writing when over used.
As someone who worked at Google, it is absolutely ridiculous to claim Google only lost its moral compass in this decade, let alone suggest it HAD its moral compass in 2017 when the guy was wired.
Complete joke, do some introspection.
Why do you consider yourself such an important person to put your career decision on HN? BTW – you are overreacting and will regret it soon. Good luck and take yourself easier.
It's great to follow your own moral compass, whatever the cost.
Much harder than taking the money and blindly following management decisions.
Its easier once he vested his director level stock compensation since 2017.
Right, because I'm sure that's not what he's been doing this entire time. Everyone knows Google has been a shining beacon of goodwill since 2017.
Do people forget Eric Schmidt ran this company for how long?
Is he a canary in the coal mine, announcing things that are coming?
Google management never had a moral compass. They just pretended they did until it was no longer convenient.
If the founders had no moral compass it is rather naive to believe that management or the company as a whole would have one
Virtual signaling final boss over here.
Google will want him terminated immediately and will probably make him some settlement (combined with a threat) to keep his mouth shut, going forward. Meanwhile, the media will be clamoring for interviews and more sound bites.
He’s from the EU. I think that Google can’t terminate him immediately.
Unless they send in their fully automated war drones.
" Don't be evil"
The slogans are on the walls because they are not in our hearts.
Google has not changed its moral compass in 20 years. You just didn't want to admit it
I refused an interview from google in 2010ish, because it was already dubious with all the tracking and advertising they were doing, as well as the rising censorship.
So if you decided to go in 2017 with all that happened since, your moral compass was already broken with google's. Snowden already revealed what all that data was used for with program like PRISM. You already seen the total lack of interest in preventing scams in their ads as long as it brings money. You've seen the antitrust fines. The tax avoidance schemes. The election influence concerns over youtube content.
What I read is "I know have made enough money from Google immorality, I can virtue signal by taking an early retirement and pretend I'm a great person".
The PRISM stuff about google was mostly BS. The only thing was the non-encrypted traffic on “dark” fiber between data centers. And some may have been a reference to systems to comply with court orders via the DOJ which everyone of any scale does (eg a “wiretap” on a Gmail account).
The military work came out in 2018
This take I can get behind. Google's leadership has been total garbage for at least 15 years. My experience as an employee of one of Google's closest business partners was that it started going south in 2008-ish and was certifiable by 2010.
These people who act like it's all suddenly gone down hill weren't there or weren't paying attention. If someone believes Goog's only turned to shit since about 2017, they were mislead, probably by the paychecks that kept them from looking too closely.
This read is full of:
- Propagandistic language
- Inconsistent principles
- Moral grandstanding
- Ignoring the dual use paradigm
- He even joined Google after Damore’s firing…
Save me from the selective moral outrage while a so called privacy advocate works for a company that is a pillar of surveillance capitalism having numerous privacy scandals & heavy censorship
> Sundar Pichai in 2018 stated very clearly that “AI applications we will not pursue: …
> 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
Really?
Algorithms for ads and mass surveillance were always at the core of Google model.
And there is not really such thing as "internationally accepted norms", Google, as a pioneer, literally defined them at the time.
>Algorithms for ads and mass surveillance were always at the core of Google model.
You may not have been around back then, but we had half a decade of Google before that model, and it was quite nice, nice enough to get us to leave our other search providers--and to hand them the keys to our inboxes.
Translation: now I can FIRE.
well at least the TC and stock appreciation was worth it right?
sorry not being a jerk but many of these kinds of posts just come off as performative and attention seeking. you could have just quit, literally everyone knows how FAANG operates.
These are the most successful companies in the history of the world. What do you expect? DO you need a PhD to figure this out?
“I got the bag and now have developed a conscience"
. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
So if our enemies had no qualms at all about doing this, wouldn't it make sense that we have weapons that can at least counter, and potentially fight back? Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
> "Don't be evil"
Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
I'm not a pacifist, but I wouldn't work in any place related to the US military for the simple reason that it is mostly used to wage wars of aggression these days, or provide materiel to other countries that do. Stop doing that and then we can seriously talk about defensive military tech. I left NVIDIA in part because it is too heavily involved in these things (and Palantir and Anduril specifically).
Regarding this specifically:
> Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
it again depends on what exactly said AI does. If it's used to surveil most people most of the time, for example, then that probably does reduce the odds of an ISIS-linked attack on US, but the surveillance itself would be a greater injury at that scale.
Your argument is not really responding to his.
He has, and has had, a specific moral philosophy he follows. When he took the job the public (and once he started, internal) words and actions of the company fit within that philosophy (or closely enough). Now the company has changed and they don’t fit. Further, the obvious changes happened without any real notice or explanation.
It seems reasonable in that situation to leave. FWIW; I was in the same situation, and left.
Do you fault him for his personal moral code? He is not telling you how you should act.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of https://enwp.org/Pacifism
I have met pacifists who say all war is bad* and thus the Russia Ukraine war should immediately end, without any ideas on how to get that to happen except a few who imply Ukraine should roll over and be consumed.
*or this is an inter-capitalist war
I once met a horse that could count. That hardly makes horses a good representation of math professors.
Our experiences with a few instances of something is rarely sufficient for us to suggest or imply some kind of universality.
> if the AI is used to stop an ISIS
Describe that scenario to me. What precisely is the language model going to do? To defeat a _terrorist_ organization? I feel like this is way to asymmetric of a philosophy to actually work, but, I'm curious to know what your imagination holds on this one.
> Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
The government _is_ impotent in protecting you. If they weren't we wouldn't need courts. Or a constitution. Or the revolution which started it.
Finally, there is an argument to be made, that our government, and it's imperious ways, were the primary force which led to the creation of ISIS in the first place. Perhaps if we weren't telling lies about yellow cake and mobile chemical labs while indiscriminately bombing innocent civilians we wouldn't be facing such a ridiculous world security posture.
>Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
When they rename "Department of Defense" to "Department of War", there can be no mistake about the intention of the government. They aren't "protecting" us, they are actively starting unnecessary wars, because cruelty has always been the point for them.
Did you just realize this now? The name "Department of Defense" has always been a euphemism. The last time we were in a defensive war was World War II--ironically, when the DoD was still called the "Department of War."
If you actually read the article you'd know that the Googles government isn't friendly with the author's government, which makes your nitpicking nonsensical.
he is a self described pacifist. how nice to be him.
I don't know, it seems like being a pacifist is harder, since it exposes you to violence to which you cannot retaliate while alienating you from your peers with less stringent moral opinions. Doesn't seem like it really makes anything easier. You don't have to look hard to find that history is replete with pacifists who paid social and legal penalties for their moral stance.
He also said that "defense" was "different", so he's not that principled.
I assume if he actually felt threatened personally he wouldn't have any issues with developing weapons (through full-disk encryption or unbreakable DRM or locking people out of their devices or whatever).
Good for you. Us. I always wondered what being pacifist means specifically in this space. Thank you!