That's a really strong statement. If you stood up and did the right thing, that's awesome. But if your opinion on every situation 'ever' is that you're not going to do the wrong thing, step back and ask whether things are so simple.

I'm not saying moral absolutes don't exist, but striving toward 'the right thing' is seldom so clear. For instance, you quit on the spot. What about the wonderful engineers who now have to pick up the slack? I'm not saying you made the wrong choice, but there are consequences to be weighed in every situation. If your method of decision-making rests on the idea that you don't have a choice, I think you're limiting yourself.

And finally - I thought a lot about writing this, because I generally hate comments about commenting - you responded to a really interesting post regarding privacy and hiring in an era of easily accessible sensitive personal information to point out how ethical you are - in your words 'not going to do the wrong thing. Ever.' It's not immediately clear why this applies to raganwald's post, except that both involve company bureaucracy and a protagonist resigning.

Doing unskillful things is part of being human.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685

He knew, writing it, that people would call him out on the relevance of the comment so he threw in that little flourish at the end of the comment to establish some kind of a weak link between the content of the submission and his comment. None of the same wording here, just a completely irrelevant comment that's not even loosely related to the submission.

Just look how far you have to scroll in this comments section to get to the discussion about the SUBMISSION ITSELF. Seriously. In all seriousness, I have no idea who michaelochurch is, nor do I really care about his escapades against Google or his honesty or quality as a person. I just want to read discussion about the topic at hand on Hacker News.

(edit: strongly edited)

Web boards: reinventing Usenet every 3 years since 1996.

It lives at: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027

One comment: the triangle gets a bit confused with the upvote/downvote buttons. Maybe it'd be clearer if it was something like [-] / [+]... it would also enlarge the clickable area a bit, probably.

This latest version of Hacker News Comment Hiding is available at the same URL as before, https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027 .

Link to a bookmarklet which folds all child comments when you click on a top-level parent. (top level parents only sorry!)

Last week a close friend of mine who is out of a job right now, told me he was interviewing at a consulting firm and they had given him an Architectural Case study.

He called me up and explained the problem statement - having worked together he knew that it was complex system with multiple scalability & performance traps- and that I had spent a long time building exactly such systems. He nicely asked me to design a pseudo system for him....

I had to refuse as it was clearly an interview question he was meant to work on alone (the wording implied this). Felt bad as I know he really wanted the job...and it is going to put a big strain on our friendship.

I am still wondering if throwing him a few pointers might have been the better move...

I will agree up front that if the wording explicitly said it was a solo deal, then at minimum you made a safe choice/morally defensible choice, and you can at sleep well at night.

But I think you should have been allowed to give him pointers. And by "allowed" I mean to say that the general standards and expectations of our society should be that people's capabilities include their ability to locate, comprehend and apply new information. An important sub-case of "locate" should (and in practice often does) include maintaining a social graph of people with varied skill sets, and from whom you can get initial pointers in the right direction.

As of late people are more accepting of the general premise of "find and use new information" as a skill unto itself, especially with regards to the internet. Much of you find via Google is written by a human, but when you describe where you got initial direction from, and replace "Google" with "a friend", suddenly it's a different package entirely.

My suspicion is that it is because it does not conform to the "school exam" model that is ingrained into us all. What we are capable of is too often reduced to what we have memorized at any particular moment, and that can be a little misguided.

I obviously don't have full understanding of the prompt your friend was given, nor do I discount the utility of having a huge mental repository of information in many spheres of life (e.g. time sensitive or emergency scenarios). I just think that the "only what you know this very second" examination model is often extended in situations where it isn't a good measure of or doesn't reflect the actual circumstances you can expect to face.

That said I'd probably put together a rough sketch of my own design and then send it to my friends for a sanity check rather than asking them to build it for me from scratch.

Something like "I tell you what, I'll give you half the answer to that question if you give me half of your salary after you get hired...". Of course, its entirely possible for someone to take that the wrong way, and just assume you are being a jerk.

I'm curious, how will you present this situation to prospective employers in the future? Will you mention that you left because you refused to do something unethical or will you skirt the subject? I'm trying to think what the best course of action would be.

It's not called "moral no-shit-sherlock-easy-choice." It's called moral courage because of people like you.

(full disclosure: I don't know the grandparent poster, I don't know his situation. But I do know how bad you can be made to look when making the right choice, usually by callow jackanapes.)

What's moral courage again? It's saying what's unpopular, because it's right. And it's right to note that the holier-than-thou who seek to lecture the world on all their sins (real and imagined) are generally self-important jackasses rather than people to be respected, let alone imitated.

This drew a lot of attention to me. Positive attention from everyone who cared about games or the actual success of G+. Negative attention from the higher-ups because they were afraid of another RNCH.

Googlers don't talk about it for fear of losing their jobs, but the engineers hate the Real Names policy. It's probably 80 to 90 percent opposition. Here was another mini-RN (even titled "Real Games") that I inadvertently started in my first 3 months by pointing out that the direction we were taking with games was going to set a historical record for missed opportunities. A weird and harrowing experience. I really did not anticipate that positing a good idea and getting a lot of popular support would lead to adversity. I underestimated the degree (and I still do) to which people would entrench themselves with bad ideas.

I still stand by the fact that I was completely and utterly right. The only way I can see a general-purpose social network beating Facebook is by having great games, and by having a very high average quality (a "we won't waste your time" ideology). This requires being extremely editorial about what you accept. This is hard for Google because it made its name by being non-editorial, which is admirable and stately for web search but inappropriate for games, especially because those shitty Zynga games were (in 2011) the #1 cited cause of social network fatigue.

I didn't get fired, because I don't think Google knows how to fire people. (If it did, there'd be boxes at the desks of most of their executives.) I left in good standing when I realized that (a) I had years of C++ legacy maintenance ahead of me, because that's what most of the work at Google is, and (b) it would take several years before I'd actually be able to really contribute. Not being able to save the Games product was pretty discouraging.

This is what people keep talking about here on HN with regard to me and Google. That, and the fact that I got mixed up with one of the most ineffective means of communication (an internal mailing list that rhymes with henge-risk) I've ever encountered.

Sometimes businesses, large or small, make questionable or even outright stupid decisions. But past a certain point it's time to bury the "I told you so"s and work to get something done. If what's being done is illegal or unethical, then that's one thing, but you're talking about setting a strategy for a game site. People get their say, and things go up the chain of command until it reaches the person whose job it is to make the decision. Then they make the decision, and everybody moves on and does the best job they can at trying to make the business successful based on the decision that was made.

When something's been shipped and/or new information is available, there may come another time when that decision is revisited or further strategic direction is necessary. At that point, making a case for a different direction is, once again, entirely appropriate. Until then, people who are on the team should be working to accomplish the team's goals, even if you fear they might be wrong.

If you disagree strongly enough with a decision, it may be appropriate to say to your management, "I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you on your strategic direction for the product" and either ask to be reassigned to something else or seek employment elsewhere. That's perfectly reasonable, and a professional way to handle a disagreement.

But if I read your post correctly, you were inciting open insurrection on a team after key decisions had been made. That's categorically inappropriate. Even if everything you said makes you look like Nostradamus in retrospect, that still makes you a bad team player.

Having people who can work as a team to accomplish a common goal is at least as important as having the right goal. There are many, many stories of teams who built the wrong thing, then adapted accordingly to produce something better. I can think of virtually no stories where a product succeeded despite a divided team that could not work toward a common goal.

I must ask: You're a motivated and (probably) skilled developer. Why keep working at big bureaucratic businesses? It sounds really frustrating, and there's never been an easier time to set out on your own.

Btw, the high-quality games strategy would have been interesting. I think it's impossible to say that any particular strategy will allow Google to beat Facebook. But I do agree that would have been much more interesting than what they're doing now. Better to attack a niche and grow from there than to go for everyone and remain stagnant. My G+ network is a ghost town, and has been since about a week after they opened it up. What's weird about it is that Google doesn't seem to be doing anything to change that. From my limited perspective, they only seem to care about achieving feature parity with FB.

I really believed that Google culture was still alive, and not just a bunch of marketing drivel.

By the way, most startups aren't much better. The best startups are great, but there's a major survivorship bias in what we think of as "startup culture". The ones that implement shitty MBA culture don't get off the ground because people leave.

I think it's impossible to say that any particular strategy will allow Google to beat Facebook.

Sure, and "beat Facebook" was bad word choice on my part. I don't think "beating" Facebook would even be desirable. Right now, though, G+ would do well to have 1% the relevance of Facebook in the social space.

People have short memories. In mid-2011, a lot of people hated Facebook. That was a selling point of G+: we're like Facebook, but we're not Facebook. Ok, cool. Except... no one uses it yet, and there's a major critical-mass effect to social networking sites. Also, in mid-2012, I think the hatred for Facebook (a consequence of those shitty Zynga games, which Facebook has seriously curtailed) has waned and people like it again. As I said, short memories. Google+ was perfectly timed to take advantage of Facebook fatigue by providing something more... qualitative is, I guess, the word... but they blew it.

My thought on games was that getting a few very high quality games would give people an incentive to use G+ even if they were the first ones on it. We wouldn't make money on the games, but that would get people into and comfortable with the system and give G+, at the least, a fighting chance.

Instead, they put huge amounts of money and gambled internal engineer morale for... a "Me, too" product that will probably be shuttered in 5 years.

Totally untrue. I have almost 10K users who have circled me, and my G+ network is very active. The quality of engagement I get at G+ is leagues higher than Facebook. A lot of the people I interact with on G+ are engineers, programmers, artists, designers, scientists, and other "knowledge workers", whereas while I've tried to grow out my Facebook network, it appears to be mentally challenged. Hey, a lot of users I know on G+ have deleted their Facebook accounts and aren't coming back.

Now, that's a personal data point, and by no means a scientific poll. But it's clear to me that Google+ is very much here to stay. Even if you only look at the design and UI side of it, G+ is considerably more advanced than Facebook. You can see the influence of Edward Tufte on the Google+ DNA.

Also, design/UI isn't really all that different than Facebook, especially after the changes made by Facebook after Google+'s release.

Edit: Google+'s real advantages right now are that 1) it is not Facebook (so if Facebook's perception worsens a lot, people have a choice and Google+ growth could increase a lot), 2) you automatically become a member if you have a Google account and content is present in various Google properties (including message notifications) 3) hangouts, and 4) many of the people you wish weren't your Facebook friends aren't on Google+ yet (although this would likely change if Google+ became popular)

That said, I don't think programmers are a particularly great niche for eventual viral growth. We're sort of the default niche for every new product in the valley. Whether we can sustain a product until it becomes mainstream is a complete toss-up. It happened with Twitter, but even then, the main catalysts were celebrities like Ashton Kutcher creating profiles.

Compare that to Pinterest, which strongly appeals to women of all ages and locations. Or to early Facebook, which targeted college students. These groups are almost defined by their social behavior and their "mainstream-ness". College students get older, leave college, and become hair stylists/grocery baggers/whatever kids are going to school for these days, where they make even more social connections.

So I'm curious how G+ can exploit the particular niche(s) they've had success with. I doubt they'll be able to do it well by simply parroting Facebook's features.

If G+ had Events, I would stop posting events to FB, as would a large number of my friends. This would rapidly cause our remaining friends to join G+ in order to see/RSVP our events.

If G+ had Groups, I could migrate my FB groups over, and this would also lead to a rapid spike in new users.

Google already has Calendar and Groups, so we are just waiting for integration at this point.

I think that there are a couple important reasons for this. Google+, a big alternative to Facebook, wasn't a viable option for most people, so they recognized the comfort of Facebook's features. Also, Facebook implemented a bunch of new features that made Facebook more lively (friend lists, timeline, ticker, etc.).

Google had a great opportunity, but they really missed out. Games could have been a great factor in getting more users, but I think that the fundamental issue lies with the actual sharing and interaction mechanisms! Not being able to write on someone's profile was a huge mistake for familiarizing Facebook users with the site, and getting new users. The circling and filtering behaviors still haven't changed. Pinterest came along and did sharing the right way: users posting categories of posts that other people can choose to voluntarily follow. Google+ isn't useful to me because the signal/noise ratio is through the roof because of this fundamental flaw. And there is still no way to exclude individuals from seeing a post.

In many ways, Pinterest is wiping the floor with Google+... an actual content-sharing network, with a well-designed intuitive sharing mechanism. An actual companion to Facebook rather than competitor. Making people choose between the two (Google+/Facebook) was far too large of a challenge.

Not just that. Remember the privacy fiascos?

I could do these as Flash of course (did do so with one game a couple years ago), but I can't say I'm interested in putting in library after library of ads and optimizing Actionscript to support a shrinking audience.

It seems Kongregate supports HTML5 games. Perhaps you could try hosting them there?

I am hopeful they, or Mochi, or someone like them will come along and provide a true HTML5 solution like the Flash folks already have. But I suspect we are getting rather off-topic here :-)

http://slashdot.org/submission/1778830/google-is-gagging-use...

It would be like buying a PS3 to play Call of Duty, when you already own an Xbox 360.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars

And private employers might or might not be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as far as civil damages.

For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness).

I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.

I worked in the california mortgage industry before going to college. These guys would convince families living paycheck to paycheck to buy/refinance REALLY expensive homes. If they were on a 30 year fixed, we get them on an option-arm. If they are on an option-arm, we get them on a 30-year fixed.

This is all typical finance stuff. But here comes the kicker--they would actually outright LIE about interest rates and had a few shady notaries to back them. They would say you have a 1% interest rate (for 30 years) when it was really a 5 year option-arm and screw people. The worst part is, CA has some sort of law that protects mortgage lenders from unhappy customers after 5 years time (exactly when the 1% interest rate would fly to the market rate). Needless to say, several people left the company when we found out. Some folks reported them to the BBB--I don't know what happened to those scumbags though. I really hope people like that stay out of science.

Unlike the S&L crisis, exactly none of them got indicted and all of them got bailed out, except Bernie Madoff whose schemes were totally orthogonal to the financial crisis.

I work in finance software (specifically regulatory compliance) and it's arguably one of the most supportive and communicative industries to be on the engineering side of.

Until you start having to deal with compliance regulations, then it becomes a chore.

Real-estate people (not including architects) are scummy. All of them. It's the filthiest business around. Real-estate finance people are bound to be scummy. I agree.

I wasn't saying, "There are no slimeballs in finance". I just think that, from a boots on the ground perspective, there isn't much difference between Wall Street and the hottest startups of VC-istan.

Perhaps it's still on life support and E is still funding H's lifestyle, but I'll stand by "failed for nontechnical reasons".

Guys, whether or not someone might or might not be lying about their own personal life is strictly their business, and not yours -- and certainly not a public matter!

Whalliburton directly called him a liar.

Those without inside information may not know what is true and what is not true.

Then email him.

There's really no way anyone can say "everything michaelochurch says is wrong".

It's incredibly creepy that HN is fact-checking a personal anecdote about a nameless company; an anecdote which he clearly wanted to share with us in order to simply chill with us and be happy with us. He wasn't even hurting anyone or saying anything about anyone. You all chose to dig for no reason at all.

Let me put it another way. His original story did not whistleblow anything. It was just a story without a particular purpose. It doesn't matter why he wrote it, nor does it matter whether it was true. He wrote it in order to feel happy. HN went out of its way to check whether it could ruin that happiness, for no reason whatsoever.

As someone with no stake in either condemning or defending Google, I'll just say that while I admire Google as a company, and have many friends who work there, this kind of reflexive attacking of anyone who criticizes Google's internal heirarchy, or thinks some of its decisions were wrong etc, and constant defense and glorification of everything it does, is grating. And people talk about Apple fanboys.

It doesn't matter if everything m_o_c says is exactly true or not. It doesn't matter if what went down when he was at Google is entirely his fault. Just give it a rest already.

My 2 cents.

More seriously, this affects my ability to hire people I want to work with. When I have to start by explaining away random falsehoods about Google, that wastes time I could have spent talking about projects or programming or something. You only get one first impression. It's better if the first impression is reality instead of a contrived fantasy world.

Also, I take exception with the statement that I'm "coming out of the woodwork" to post. I am in the top 10 highest reputation users here. I'm already out of the woodwork :)

Right now (and please take this as constructive feed back, because that is the intention) in your posts here you come across as someone who has totally drunk the Google koolaid and can see no wrong in anything Google does, and attacks anyone who says anything negative about Google or any of its products, with a special grudge against michaelochurch.[1]

I am not sure that helps you hire the right kind of people. But hey, you know better.

[1] please note: I am not saying you are a fanatic. just saying you come across as someone who sees Google as some kind of Immaculate Workplace, that can never do wrong. Just feedback. I could be totally wrong.

Even with a little bias, I I really think I get it mostly right. Here's another perspective:

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/UgCL6YRw...

Steve writes: ``One day I started getting jealous of this digital piano that people were playing every day. So I sent a nice email to someone in facilities asking if there was any chance we might be able to get a guitar. She said it sounded like a good idea and she promised to look into it.

A month went by, and I started to get a little sad, because I thought they were just not interested. But I sent her a little email and asked if there was any update. Just hoping, you know, against hope.

She told me: "Oh yeah, I'm sorry -- I forgot to tell you. We talked it over with the directors, and we all decided the best thing to do was to build a music studio."

So now we have Soundgarden over in Building A. It has two rooms: one with soundproofing and two electric guitars and a bass and a keyboard and a drum set and a jam hub and amps and all kinds of other crap that I can't identify except to say that it's really popular. The other room has a ukulele and some sort of musical drum and a jazz guitar and some other classical instruments.''

My experience is the same. Any opportunity that Google has to spend a lot of money on me, they take. And yup, that makes me pretty darn happy, especially coming from Bank of America!

Steve Yegge says Google is a cool place to work. Peter Norvig thinks it is a great place to work. m_o_c thinks differently. All good.

If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN that gives a different impression to neutral onlookers, even when the underlying facts haven't changed. That was my only point.

And yes, as someone who has worked at "Bank of America" type companies, I get exactly what you are trying to say. Good for you.

If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN that gives a different impression to neutral onlookers. That was my only point.

His post is the top-rated comment on the top-rated article. Yes, I read HN and reply to comments frequently. While we await some form of therapy for this obvious mental defect, we will just have to accept the more-than-occasional comment from me :)

But to be fair, I didn't go out of my way to look for michaelochurch, and, in fact, I was just defending someone else who was being blasted for being critical of Michael. If Google was brought up and nobody corrected Michael, I wasn't going to. Like you say, it's been covered again and again and it is probably not worth rehashing. Oh well.

I have run into other comments from Michael, and I treat them at face value:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780793

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780879

Ultimately, I don't think I'm a crazy person. Bring up programming, we'll talk about programming. Bring up Google, we'll talk about Google :)

(Oh, and one more things: I do complain about Google on HN. I think Wallet being blocked on Verizon is dumb. I think the lack of the Android trackball is dumb. I think the whole fake-open-source process around Android is dumb. But seeing as how we live in an imperfect world, I'm willing to live with this. As time improves, things will get better.)

It's a shame you're happy to allow him to say whatever he likes about a company (and I'm not talking about Google) yet you're unhappy when people calmly correct him; even though you don't know the company, or who works there, or what the situation is, and the people correcting him do know the company, and the people working there, and what the situation is.

A huge chunk of this thread is taken up with pointless responses to m_o_c's comments. He flamebaits Google; Googlers cannot respond fully because stuff is still private; a bunch of people who don't know the truth either side pile on; useful discussion is pushed further down the page.

> If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN

When m_o_c's comment is the first in thread on the first thread on HN there's no stalking needed. m_o_c is deliberately choosing to push the buttons of Googlers knowing that they'll really want to respond (and I'm grateful to them for showing some restraint).

Perhaps you'd like a technical solution to your problem, in which case you can petition PG for a backend solution or you can whip up a quick browser extension to hide comment trees or to ignore Michael.

Also, there's a "blind man and the elephant" thing going on. Google is a huge company. I'm sure Google is a great place to work-- for Peter Norvig. If you're already great, the rewards and environment are fantastic; if you're good and trying to become great, it's a bit sclerotic, because there are 10,000 other people who've been there longer than you and who also want to become great, and most of the work Google thinks it needs to have done won't help you improve or advance.

Google is not some horrible company. It's actually quite good, even if poorly managed. The quality of engineers is very high, and the perks are fantastic. It's just not the best place if you're in your mid-20s, still somewhat green, and want to become great. It takes too much time, and too much irrelevant people-pleasing work, to advance.

Personally, I'm happy to call him a liar, although I typically refrain because I can't really provide any evidence of it externally.

I am just some random hacker half the world away. All I am saying is, as an outsider who knows nothing about what is really going down, when I see a pack of people piling on to someone for saying something which seems like no big deal to me (large companies with tens of thousands of employees have a few unethical managers/political bs happening here and there duh), you give him more credibility than he might otherwise get.

The way people pile on him every time he sticks up his head does far more harm to Google than it does good.

If he's "wrong", then he's wrong. You would hope than anyone capable of working for Google would be capable of sorting through conflicting evidence on their own. Trust them and leave them to it.

M-o-C may or may not be posting stuff that people in the know can parse as a lie. But you, my friend, are saying stuff that anyone with the "scroll up" skill can see is a lie.

Saying an unnamed thing failed for the vague "non-technical reason" is enough for one person to, indeed, really, call him a liar and another person to feel strongly enough about situation to blatantly-lie-about-the-liar-calling-situation...

Yeah Wow, he must have really gotten under some group's collective skin...

These comments on this topic are disturbing.

Google is a public company. It's first priority is to shareholders. Google is also hierarchical despite what anyone claims. So it's more than likely that employees like @michaelochurch claim, are minced up in the bureaucracy. Start here, "Why Google Employees Quit" (2009) ~ http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/

There are a lot of people that I encounter who have never worked anywhere but Google. I feel sorry for them because one day some tiny thing is going to annoy them (oh noes, only two types of M&Ms in the microkitchens!), and then they'll leave. Only then will they realize how fucking miserable the rest of the world is.

Another problem is that people want to work for Google so badly that they accept crap offers, at least people writing to TechCrunch to complain, anyway.

(Also, FWIW, of all the offers I had for jobs in NYC, Google gave me the most money, not to mention benefits, bonus, and stock. And my other offer was an investment bank's on the core software architecture team.)

As I said in another comment, I think this is a "blind man and the elephant" situation.

Your rank, age, and political success (measured in Perf) determine the type of Google you get. If you're Peter Norvig, Google is an awesome place to work. I can imagine few better jobs than Director of Research at Google.

If you're already great, Google is a fine place to work. If you're good and trying to become great, it's not. It's stifling, frustrating, and slow. At least, that's what I saw, but I was only there for 6 months and had already run afoul of multiple seriously unethical people (people who should have been fired). Google's a huge place. I far from got a sense of "the whole thing", but what I saw on the cultural front (7/20 all-hands) was certainly not encouraging.

I feel sorry for them because one day some tiny thing is going to annoy them (oh noes, only two types of M&Ms in the microkitchens!), and then they'll leave.

Yeah, see: I don't care about that stuff either way. The perks are nice, I guess, but I go to work for the work, not for the Xbox.

Google has perks down. Providing interesting work for even half the talent it takes in is an "area for development".

Another problem is that people want to work for Google so badly that they accept crap offers, at least people writing to TechCrunch to complain, anyway.

Actually, I think it goes the other way. Google pays very well, so people look at the numbers and expect more of the job than what they're actually going to get.

Obviously if you were part owner of the business things would change considerably, but not everyone has the risk tolerance for that - it helps to be single with cash in the bank.