You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of people is like a mental prostitution. Not I only wouldn't work for them but also wouldn't take anyone working for them in past working for me. I value people opinion about their impact to the world and google guys went way off into wrong direction. They are simply emitting the signal "I would do anything for money" and this attitude can be understood for someone working in McDonalds, but for a hi-tech worker that can get job anywhere, this is just unacceptable. It shows moral rottening (or just beeing "simpleminded") and... well sorry, there is more than enough other people I will be far more happy to work with. I am really sorry that people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, which I highly respect, work for them. As developers (Not Google, not Facebook, not Apple, not Microsoft! The Developers! Without them, they aren't worth a dime!) we are at the moment rulling the world, we have to accept some moral obligations instead of just beeing slaves to making money for others stock options.
(How cool, I get multiple downvotes which means that the average non-important people (I could use stronger words, but you do know where you fit) don't agree, which makes me flattered. Thank you.)
(The other guys upvoting me, thank you, you are somehow restoring my faith, that not everyone is a zealot)
To me, it feels like the Facebooks and Googles of the industry (by which I encompass other ad tech firms) are the 'banks' of 10 years ago. A few years ago, and I bet still today, there were/are a lot of new grads and experienced techies saying openly that they'd not want to work for a bank. Hopefully a similar spurning happens here.
Yeah, I lumped that under "engineering culture," but AMP in particular and the nonchalance about centralizing everything on Google servers—and the fact that I knew AMP's PM would be rewarded for the project's success and not questioned on long-term good of the world in his promo meeting—was a concrete reason I wasn't excited about the job. I didn't want to be subject to the same incentives.
You a G! My sentiments exactly. We are at a critical point in our world where we are the "magicians" and just chasing a paycheck isn't good enough. Interesting work isn't good enough. Making a positive impact on the world is the bare minimum....
Ths situation is quite simple, today developers have no clue how data structures work in memory and this is a typical case of it. Any C developer has knowlidge about this, but if you are floating in space and can see actual memory just as a blue planet far away, this is the result. But I bet someone will say that garbage collector would solve the issue :D :D :D
Yeah, it's been quite scary how many novice devs move into space and just copy-paste code. And they charge money for that "expertise". And they actually getting paid…
Also, those who discover those bugs afterwards get paid even more in the end. Sad story.
Yep, I don't believe any industry/science deteriorated during years of "usage" as much as IT did, software development came to the point where I am ashamed to say to the people I am a developer. Not becoase of my knowlidge but due to all the garbage that universities through out to the streets. =/
Google is next. We really need a whistleblower there... Maybe we could start a crowdfounded project to award anyone for revealing provable information about google breaches of privacy.
> I just don't understand why some people see them as any different.
Facebook has been far more careless and scandal prone, and it's business model (ads targeted to a person) requires a much more intimate invasion of privacy. Google may collect more private data, but its use is probably much more peripheral to its business (e.g. search term based ads can be pretty effectively targeted without an individual's profile). IMHO, Google's attempts to "improve" its products with private data has actually made them worse.
There are similarities though. Both companies have massive, concentrated influence over the information people see, and have the ability to make decisions that make all this Cambridge Analytica and fake news stuff look like child's play. There are also the economic distortions they both cause by having massively dominant market positions.
I agree, I would even say that it is a paid article by Facebook to calm down the situation. The point is not that CA got access to our data, CA is just a use case here: point is that Facebook has all those data and can pull the CA stunt at any moment it wants. And I don't see any reason Facebook is more trustworthy than CA, they are both companies dedicated to earning money. And where money talks...
