It's not just a fun quip: it's a moral principle that I really think more people in our industry should come around to.
What we do has consequences. Often times, profound consequences on vast numbers of lives. We have a responsibility, as individual contributors, managers, leaders, and "founders", for the outcomes of our work.
If Google is as smart as they'd like us all to believe, they can find a way to make their business work. Sure, the margins might not be quite as fantastic, but society doesn't owe them maximum return to its own detriment.
It's not my job to solve Google's scalability problems, that's their job. It's my job to hold them just as accountable as my local coal power plant for the choices they make. If Google wants me to love their brand, and support their work, then they should stop being a social and intellectual polluter. It's a lot easier to see and sense the danger of toxic fumes from a power plant than to see and sense the toxic danger of massive social media and tech companies, but they are no less real and no less lethal.
"It's not just a fun quip: it's a moral principle that I really think more people in our industry should come around to."
Which i actually buy into, and have lived for many years, but it also just seems a bit silly applied to this case.
The usual answer is "it's not my job", which you use here.
That's great - throwing rocks from the sidelines is real easy, but it's not clear exactly what you want to happen, so let's instead actually be clear and concrete about that.
So again, concretely: Is your suggestion that someone should review every single web page crawled by a search engine, Google or anyone else?
If not, can we move past the silly quips and try to get to a better place constructively?
What we do has consequences. Often times, profound consequences on vast numbers of lives. We have a responsibility, as individual contributors, managers, leaders, and "founders", for the outcomes of our work.
If Google is as smart as they'd like us all to believe, they can find a way to make their business work. Sure, the margins might not be quite as fantastic, but society doesn't owe them maximum return to its own detriment.
It's not my job to solve Google's scalability problems, that's their job. It's my job to hold them just as accountable as my local coal power plant for the choices they make. If Google wants me to love their brand, and support their work, then they should stop being a social and intellectual polluter. It's a lot easier to see and sense the danger of toxic fumes from a power plant than to see and sense the toxic danger of massive social media and tech companies, but they are no less real and no less lethal.