Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass

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.

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.

Personally, I don't get why people blindly reject any collaboration with the military. I understand that they are pacifists, but I still don't get it. When I look at history, I see so many tragedies caused by being weak. Both Germany and the Soviet Union were able to invade Poland, for instance, and the Katyn massacre is a national scar. And who wouldn't want to defeat invaders like Genghis Khan? Have you ever heard of the Yangzhou massacre or the Three Massacres of Jiading? Why would we let civilization succumb to barbarism?

Don't get me wrong. I hate war. And never-ending wars like the Iraq War anger me to no end (and for that matter, I think G.W. Bush and his cabinet were truly evil). Of course, the danger is real; a military built for defense can easily become an instrument of tyranny or empire if left unchecked. That is why we must maintain rigorous civilian oversight and strict checks and balances over its power. But that does not mean the military, by default, is always evil, right?

>“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.

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.

I’m not in the minority anymore it seems. The general attitude in this thread, “negative” though it may be, represents a far more grounded and blunt truth of the matter.

I’d just like to add, as always: this person should give back all the money Google paid them. Of course, that has not once happened in the history of these pious pieces, and so the meme endures.

I don't understand the negativity here.

He is a top expert on a security topic. Running Android platform security gives him an opportunity to have incredible positive impact for many people---which he did for a decade.

People weigh trade-offs.

At the beginning, he may have had high ambitions to deploy interesting, research-forward ideas to Android; at this point, he has accomplished a lot of that. Maybe now, he is considering other factors.

Guessing that people are only money-driven or have made some decision because of threshold personal wealth is awful, especially if you do not know them.

Almost all academics I know (I am one also) are driven by personal curiosity, intellectual ambitions, a need to identify and solve problems, and a strong desire for positive contribution. I know Rene and believe this to be true of him.

The majority of carbon offsetting efforts are called non-additional assets. A forest that was never going to be cut down or an unusable field in the middle of some rural area sells credits to companies to "offset" their carbon emissions. This doesn't actually create any net benefit to the environment. The industry also experiences fraud with double counting the same assets as some vendors will sell the same offset credits to multiple corporations.

I see everyone coming up with an arbitrary date of when Google lost their moral compass that aligns with their own moral compass. In that vein, I feel like when Brin and Page released a paper stating how PageRank could never be beneficial to a consumer with ads and then launched an ad company powered by page rank is when Google became evil.

"I am also a European academic. That means the current US government has become hostile to me"

Such a bizarre claim. EU academics seem under mass psychosis lately.

It's great to follow your own moral compass, whatever the cost.

Much harder than taking the money and blindly following management decisions.

> Makes bank for 9 years > Quits > Takes the moral high ground on the way out despite highly profiting from all the things he's decrying

Pretty nice life if you ask me.

> Director of Android Platform Security

Is this the person I have to complain about for the removal of fulldisk encryption in Android 13?

Google management never had a moral compass. They just pretended they did until it was no longer convenient.

Do people forget Eric Schmidt ran this company for how long?

> 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.

I do find it amusing when I see these LinkedIn fodder posts saying “I left [Meta/Google/OtherGiantCorp] because the company I joined 10 years ago doesn’t hold the same values anymore” as if these companies weren’t already fucked up evil pieces of shit many years before you joined. People are always trying to justify that they aren’t working for something purely evil. I guess you have to try to feel like that giant pile of cash on offer isn’t dirty money and you need validation from others to sleep at night

Companies do not have moralities. They have revenue targets.

Any statement to the idea of a moral compass is just a form of marketing when the politics of the day align with it.

The best we can to is have independent moralities, while balancing that with the need to eat.

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.

Virtue signal noted

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".

" 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

Is he a canary in the coal mine, announcing things that are coming?

Google's entire "do no evil" bring your own identity to the job and all of that was pure marketing to hire better engineering talent.

Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.

Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.

Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.

So much bitterness in these comments, looking at the world in black and white. With 200,000 employees, google is a complex set of humans, where many will have different experiences. People doing really good work, and people doing the opposite.

Good for you. Us. I always wondered what being pacifist means specifically in this space. Thank you!

I think what is being lost is that despite Google having lost its morals at various points, and Don't Be Evil being burried, this man's resignation does signal yet another dark turning point in the future of the Google organization.

They are now openly partnering with war industries and the government to assist them in doing things like bombing a school full of girls, killing hundreds in an entirely indefensible war of aggression.* This is a very dark red line to cross and despite Googlers being wealthy and privilaged, it is nonetheless a significant protest that deserves to be heard on its own terms. Ideally, a protest would change policy at the company.

Google management: Stop cooperating with the immoral and illegally operating War Department!

* I don't have evidence Google directly participated in the Minab school bombing, but this is the side they are supporting.

This is exhausting.

> 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.

So the guy was Google's planted ~expert~ lobbyist for the European Commission and now he's rich enough to quit, and makes a blogpost about it because people are rightfully skeptical about his motives?

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"

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. 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?