Ask HN: As a Facebook or Google engineer, do you consider your company evil?
Googler: Not with the company for long (~1 year), so I don&#x27;t have a good handle on the internal politics yet. From what I heard, it takes a few years to get disillusioned&#x2F;cynical here. With that said: In general, I&#x27;m fairly impressed with how Google behaves internally and how much emphasis there still is on being nice and good. I mean, one thing that seems obvious to me is that the Google of 2020s will always be held to the standard of the Google of the 2000s or the 2010s, and that is a comparison that it just cannot win. It&#x27;s very different to run a company of thousands of employees vs one of 100k people. Trying to not be evil just doesn&#x27;t scale so easily: there is definitely going to be internal politics, and you are confronted with harder choices. You _are_ going to be hiring some bad apples, even if you try your hardest and manage to achieve that 99,9% of your hires are nice, exceptional people. The numbers are against you, and so is public scrutiny, so anything bad that happens will get reported anyways. And you can&#x27;t be honest to your employees all the time if all your internal communication is going to be published on bloomberg, and has to be written with that in mind. You have multiple, sometimes conflicting interests that you need to handle. So in general: I think the Google of 2020 is less Good than the company it was 10 years ago. But overall it&#x27;s still a very, very good company: I am very impressed with the general quality of people that surround me. Both on the grunt level as well as higher up the totem pole. Obviously no-one&#x27;s flawless, and I definitely am unhappy with a lot of internal and external choices, decisions, strategies and communications. But I still feel that people (all the way up to leadership) are trying to do the right thing. Not to just do right for large stakeholders or themselves, but to actually figure out what the Right Thing is, and follow through on it. I don&#x27;t see a lot of greedy behavior in leadership, or people who don&#x27;t care or are doing a bad job. They seem to care to keep Google a &quot;good&quot; company, both to its users and internally. There were enough scandals, but I still feel like leadership is trying to sort stuff out and improving internal policies to make sure bad incidents don&#x27;t repeat themselves. I think most people in the company know that in the long term, it&#x27;s better to work with users, and put user&#x27;s interests (including privacy) first.<p>The general backlash against Google is the obvious one that Google collects a ton of data about you. Google is an ad company, and it makes as much money as it does BECAUSE it can put the ads in front of those users where it will be most effective. It can only do that because it knows a lot about users. It&#x27;s google&#x27;s core business. The trade-off makes a lot of sense to me: users get to use a really good product for free (It is hard to impossible to compete with google search), and in return Google gets to serve them targeted ads that it sells to other businesses. That&#x27;s a fairly obvious and IMO very good deal, and it&#x27;s easy to see how this happened historically, and it&#x27;s likely not going to change -- people are too used to getting good search for free, you simply can&#x27;t charge money for a search engine these days. I think the issue is that users aren&#x27;t always conscious of this transaction taking place (you get free search-results and emails, and google gets to use the data it collects when you use the services).
But the good news is that as far as I can tell, Google takes privacy concerns very, very serious. It&#x27;s mind boggling (but technically obvious) how much Google _could_ know about you, since it has your location data, search results, and theoretically even your emails (as far as I know, gmail data is fairly sacred and not exploited to better sell you ads). The mean reason I think google is still a good company (and doesn&#x27;t deserve the backslash) is that, simply, Google doesn&#x27;t exploit all the data it could collect about people for nefarious purposes, AFAICT. Now granted, I&#x27;m working in a role that is far away from those decisions, but it seems to me that a whole, Google tries to be nice and fair, and the protocols and technical solutions appear sensible and carefully designed to put user&#x27;s privacy first. Given the position google is in, I think it is trying very hard to do the right thing and protect its users rights and data, and does not exploit them in any &quot;evil&quot; way, as far as I can tell.<p>Like I said, I think this is a decision that makes economical sense: even as it is Google faces enough scrutiny, it&#x27;s in their interests to not exploit all the data it could collect. I&#x27;m sure all the scandals that Facebook has hurt its bottom line. At Google, I trust leadership to not fuck this up.