I used to work at Google. I still know many people who work there and am still a shareholder.
If 1000 good engineers quit the users wouldn't even notice. Google is grossly overstaffed and pointless rewrites that achieve nothing at all are rampant. Promotion-oriented development is the order of the day.
Google reached a fork in the road with this event. The Google I remember being a part of many years ago had strong, firm commitments to freedom of speech. It left China rather than continue to accept the PRCs bullshit, despite the business consensus being that leaving the world's largest market was commercial suicide. That sort of action defined who the company was. It led to a globally trusted brand.
Pichai is clearly nothing like the men Brin and Page were. He just set fire to the trust of the Google brand to avoid pissing off a bunch of staff who are very likely mostly recent grads churning crap from C++ to Go somewhere deep inside the bowels of an undifferentiated product, and thus the least experienced and most trivially expendable. Losing a bunch of engineers who throw a hissy fit because someone wrote a blog post with lots of references to scientific research would, if anything, do Google a world of good.
The consequences of this will be felt for a long time. Who can really trust Google's results for political queries now? There will always be a nagging suspicion that certain results ("lies") liberals would rather people not see might have quietly gone missing.
If 1000 good engineers quit the users wouldn't even notice. Google is grossly overstaffed and pointless rewrites that achieve nothing at all are rampant. Promotion-oriented development is the order of the day.
Google reached a fork in the road with this event. The Google I remember being a part of many years ago had strong, firm commitments to freedom of speech. It left China rather than continue to accept the PRCs bullshit, despite the business consensus being that leaving the world's largest market was commercial suicide. That sort of action defined who the company was. It led to a globally trusted brand.
Pichai is clearly nothing like the men Brin and Page were. He just set fire to the trust of the Google brand to avoid pissing off a bunch of staff who are very likely mostly recent grads churning crap from C++ to Go somewhere deep inside the bowels of an undifferentiated product, and thus the least experienced and most trivially expendable. Losing a bunch of engineers who throw a hissy fit because someone wrote a blog post with lots of references to scientific research would, if anything, do Google a world of good.
The consequences of this will be felt for a long time. Who can really trust Google's results for political queries now? There will always be a nagging suspicion that certain results ("lies") liberals would rather people not see might have quietly gone missing.