<story><title>We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly</title><url>https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megaman8</author><text>I think, what these employees don&amp;#x27;t realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term.  By placing values above profits, it increases it&amp;#x27;s goodwill with customers thus increasing it&amp;#x27;s moat and it&amp;#x27;s retention, as well as it&amp;#x27;s employee retention.  This strategy made sense in the early days.&lt;p&gt;Not anymore.&lt;p&gt;As Google&amp;#x27;s position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it&amp;#x27;s slightly tarnished brand), it doesn&amp;#x27;t need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>The &amp;quot;values over profits&amp;quot; approach was always more of a recruitment tool than a PR tool.  It did give a nice PR boost, but realistically Google&amp;#x27;s been the best choice of search engine since it came out in 1998.  They don&amp;#x27;t need additional customer goodwill for people to keep using them, they just need to continue to give good results for esoteric queries.&lt;p&gt;Since 2005, though, good engineers have had &lt;i&gt;lots&lt;/i&gt; of options for where to work, many of which pay better or have more growth potential than Google.  And &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t Be Evil&amp;quot; was a great way to persuade them to come work for Google rather than Yelp or Facebook or some hedge fund, and keep them there rather than have them go off and found their own startups that potentially could compete with Google.  Because so much of their product moat depends upon technical excellence, keeping the best engineers within the company is critical for them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll predict that if they don&amp;#x27;t reverse course on this, we&amp;#x27;ll see a mini-exodus of Googlers who either end up founding their own startups or start working on political-tech projects.  Ultimately I think that may be good for the world, but it&amp;#x27;s not really in Google&amp;#x27;s long-term interests, although perhaps at this point their moat is entrenched enough and they&amp;#x27;re big enough that it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.</text></comment>
<story><title>We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly</title><url>https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megaman8</author><text>I think, what these employees don&amp;#x27;t realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term.  By placing values above profits, it increases it&amp;#x27;s goodwill with customers thus increasing it&amp;#x27;s moat and it&amp;#x27;s retention, as well as it&amp;#x27;s employee retention.  This strategy made sense in the early days.&lt;p&gt;Not anymore.&lt;p&gt;As Google&amp;#x27;s position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it&amp;#x27;s slightly tarnished brand), it doesn&amp;#x27;t need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whack</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s something you&amp;#x27;ve overlooked: companies are ultimately run by humans. Humans who make decisions at all levels of the hierarchy, in order to further their own personal priorities, even if it dramatically conflicts with the shareholders&amp;#x27; goals of maximizing profits.&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the personal priorities can be personal advancement. We see this all the time when managers hire&amp;#x2F;promote their friends, sexually harass their subordinates, and make decisions on the basis of politics as opposed to technical&amp;#x2F;business merit.&lt;p&gt;And in other cases, the personal priorities can be moral values. Values such as promoting free speech, fighting censorship, protecting consumer rights, and avoiding layoffs.&lt;p&gt;The idea that every single decision taken by a company is perfectly optimized to maximize long term profits, is baseless. There simply does not exist any mechanism to monitor and enforce such a requirement. The shareholders have only one lever to pull: accept the current leadership team, imperfections and all. Or fire them and risk destroying the company in the resulting churn. This gives both the executives and employees tremendous leeway to prioritize values over profits, as long as they are good enough to not get fired.</text></comment>