"Visiting Google felt similar to being approached by kids from the Hillsong church, who ask you to come along to just “an event” with other young people . . . until you turn up with them and realise that, not only is it church, but a bloody well organised and extremely rich church."
This is a great quote, and brings up the issue of groupthink. I saw a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar a couple weeks ago where he talked about how once an idea can be reduced to a slogan, you don't need the idea anymore, just the slogan. His example was architects saying they are designing buildings "from the inside-out," and how it was a good idea for a few years, until he was working with an architect who designed a shitty building and used the phrase "designed from the inside-out" to dismiss criticism.
For Google, if employees get to the point where "do no evil" is a just a slogan that helps them get to sleep at night and they stop constantly questioning their actions, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, it's worse than had it never existed at all, because it's used as a justification for things of questionable evil-ness. "Google stores everything they can about what you do online without asking your permission, but it doesn't matter, because they would never do anything evil with all that information." They can tell themselves that, but it doesn't mean it isn't evil.
Just a correction: Google's slogan is not "do no evil", but "don't be evil". The first evaluates only the actions of the company, but the second evaluates the company itself.
For one to not be evil, does that entail the exclusion of all actions that can be construed as evil, even if it is perceived that doing so is for a greater good?
I'm going to say yes that not being evil means at no time doing evil, no matter what the expected outcome.
No, it means that Google maintains a non-evil identity. As a corporation they may do evil things with good intentions, as you mentioned, or even unknowingly, accidentally, out of ignorance or within other human limitations.
The point is that it's an existential judgment -- that they would seek to have the question "Is Google evil?" answered negatively in consideration of all things, not that they need to avoid any blame or transgression.
I think the "DBE" topic has been rehashed about 10^6 times more than necessary, so I think I'll just leave it at that.
I absolutely disagree that the topic has been rehashed more than necessary. In fact, I think for it to remain relevant and more than just a PR slogan, the topic should be discussed and challenged continuously.
Journalists and a good number of non-programmer types always seem to focus purely on the surface perks of Google and always miss the real reason it is a good place to work.
The culture, the people, and the company are focused completely on providing an environment where brains and hard work pay off. Smart people always want to be around people smarter then them, to me that is a hallmark of intelligence. Working at Google you are guaranteed to be working with or around several of the smartest people in the industry.
Furthermore the practices of engineering and product development do not work like a standard corporate software shop. I mean just reading this article from Steve http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... is likely to get your mouth watering if you are a Software Guy, especially if you are into the sort of startup scene.
The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks and all that was left was the engineering structure I would still want to work there if only to be around the smart people and to avoid(they are everywhere) the politics of corporate software development.*
> The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks ...
But, of course, that engineering culture would inherently earn obscene amounts of money and re-invest that money in its talent, thus re-introducing the perks. They're just an emergent behavior of Google-like companies.
It’s really not that far from “be perfect in everyone’s eyes”.
It reminds me of “what would Jesus do?” – it’s not a formula at all, just a reminder to put things in moral terms. It doesn’t say much about what the speaker’s terms actually are.
I fail to understand why someting that is totally reasonable to expect from any indevisual suddenly becomes "amazingly hard" when the indeviduals are grouped together.
Watch "The Corporation" if you get the chance (although it's 4 hours long). Essentially, corporations have the legal rights of a person, but none of the incentives to "be good". Their sole imperative is to maximise value for shareholders, leading to behaviour -- as characterised in the documentary -- that would be classified as sociopathic in an actual person.
I wonder if there were more and better fair trade organizations, then investors and customers would be more picky as to who to associate, and corporations comply as a result. Who'd bear the cost of compliance? How successful has corporate social responsibility actually been? Will it ever reach China?
If large numbers of investors made decisions based on reasons other than profitability, other investors would buy more so-called "evil" companies' stock until the prices are back to what they would have been.
That's not necessarily true. Investor psychology shifts the demand curve for the company's stock - if large numbers of investors made decisions based on reasons other than profitability, then they'd demand more shares of "good" companies and fewer shares of "evil" companies. Some of that price difference would get arbitraged away by amoral opportunists just looking to make a buck, but the equilibrium price is less than the "evil" companies would get otherwise.
We see some of this effect in actual stock market data, today, where "sinful" companies like Altria or defense contractors tend to trade at lower P/E ratios than "good" companies like Google or Merck. Of course, this means that sinful companies tend to pay higher dividend yields, and evil investors end up with more money in their pocket. This is the price of not being evil.
Got it. Evil companies will exist so long as there are evil customers and evil investors who associate. As such, evil would have to be legislated out of existence if it can't be shamed: both of which impossible.
btw, how do you know that you're evil? does the evilness change? how so?
Simple human nature. For a single human being to do something evil, there's relatively little means of escape--that person has to feel justified in what they're doing, or at least have very strong personal motivations. But mobs will readily do things individual humans will not, and the delegation of responsibility inherent in following authority figures will short-circuit people's moral reasoning (Milgram experiment).
It's not just corporations--street gangs, government agencies, churches, political organizations, and other groups have a much harder time than individuals maintaining a moral compass. As much as you want to pin institutional evil on individuals--be it mafia dons, dictators, CEO's, or crooked cops--at the very least, the institutions these people are part of are a necessary element in what happens.
The Milgram experiment goes a long way in explaining the amorality of groups, but I think I have a simpler argument:
Even if all people have equally strong consciences, some of them will worry more about proximate responsibility ("clean hands") and others about ultimate responsibility ("clear conscience"). In other words, some people would be more okay with ordering a man shot as long as they don't have to pull the trigger, and others would be more okay with joining a firing squad as long as they don't give the orders. Once the former start giving orders to the latter, the group will be able to do worse things than any individual member was capable of, but everyone still feels morally okay.
To put it yet another way, for each morally questionable task that arises, a large group will probably contain someone who doesn't object to that specific task. Division of labor ensures that group morality sinks to the lowest common denominator.
A corporation is typically considered evil if any of its employees are evil. If you're feeling generous, maybe you'd relax that to a small group of employees, say 0.1%. For example, AIG employs close to 100,000 people, yet I doubt that more than a few hundred were involved in the mortgage derivative mess. Yet we still pretty much universally revile AIG.
Say that 1% of people are evil. It's totally reasonable to expect an individual to be non-evil; after all, 99 out of 100 (in this model) are.
But then extend that out to a large corporation. The probability that you'll find at least one evil person in a startup of 10 is (1 - .99^10) = 0.095, or about 10%. The probability that you'll find at least 100 evil people in a corporation of 20,000 is (1 - .99^19900), which according to Google calculator is 1, i.e. virtually certain (there's some round-off error there, but you get the point). In order to have any fighting chance at being non-evil, a large organization has to actively seek out evil and eject it from the organization, simply because the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math." - PG
the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
I would qualify that by pointing out that it's only true if the worst members are in positions of power. If the evil members of an organization are its janitors, our problem is minimal. Unfortunately, your argument mostly holds true because in any broth, the scum always rises to the top.
That's not really the opposite, though, because the natural state is "doing nothing", and by your quote, that leads to evil prevailing. I did say that companies that want to remain non-evil have to actively seek out and expel evil from the organization...
Is it really reasonable to expect individuals to always not be evil? I think it would be very hard to find individuals who were never evil and who were always consistent in what they do. It’s just that when I lie, I don’t have the power to cause harm that’s even comparable to what Google can cause.
No one person has to take the blame for any action. When you are only 1/1,000,000th responsible for something, it becomes easier to justify bad decisions.
I do horrible things to bacteria. I don’t consider myself evil. If Google does horrible things to entities 1/100,000th its size, it’s considered to be doing evil.
Hahah, of course not. I’m saying that large things that are net good can still do a lot of harm in absolute terms. The Google-to-person comparison is kind of iffy because the normal harm that a good person does is mostly below the threshold we care about. nostrademons makes this argument clearer in a sibling comment.
This article is a journalist painting the glass that is 3/4 full at Google as 3/4 empty. There's nothing creepy about Google except that they try and make the lives of their employees easier. It's not an isolated cult with barbed wire fences.
They have a dinosaur as a leftover of the previous tenant. So what. They won't talk about China on the record because they're just on a tour. Expect anything different?
I would have preferred the journalist ask some interesting questions to the Google staff and then give those answers to the reader.
After reading this I can't get the imagine of the Google campus being just like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of my head... with Sergey being more like the Johnny Depp Wonka and Schmidt the Gene Wilder version.
So Google has a slightly reticient and secretive culture.. They also cannot get anyone to comment on serious international matters in which the company is the accusar. And the journalist does not like it........big deal!
I always wondered how journalists and publishers could complain about the short extracts that Google News shows us (linking to the original article anyway). How can that be stealing I asked myself. I'm beginning to understand. It's that 99% of the "content" journalists produce is just like this article. It can easily be replaced by a one liner without any loss of information.
This is a great quote, and brings up the issue of groupthink. I saw a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar a couple weeks ago where he talked about how once an idea can be reduced to a slogan, you don't need the idea anymore, just the slogan. His example was architects saying they are designing buildings "from the inside-out," and how it was a good idea for a few years, until he was working with an architect who designed a shitty building and used the phrase "designed from the inside-out" to dismiss criticism.
For Google, if employees get to the point where "do no evil" is a just a slogan that helps them get to sleep at night and they stop constantly questioning their actions, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, it's worse than had it never existed at all, because it's used as a justification for things of questionable evil-ness. "Google stores everything they can about what you do online without asking your permission, but it doesn't matter, because they would never do anything evil with all that information." They can tell themselves that, but it doesn't mean it isn't evil.