Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct (gizmodo.com)

Kate Conger, reporting for Gizmodo: Google's unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase "don't be evil." But that's over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

"Don't be evil" has been part of the company's corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, "do the right thing." However, Google retained its original "don't be evil" language until the past several weeks. The phrase has been deeply incorporated into Google's company culture -- so much so that a version of the phrase has served as the wifi password on the shuttles that Google uses to ferry its employees to its Mountain View headquarters, sources told Gizmodo.

Comments

OMG, FINALLY!

[gdonald]

Finally, now I can get a job there! w0oh0o!

Re:OMG, FINALLY!

[MrKaos]

Finally, now I can get a job there! MU-HAHAHA!

FTFY!

Re:OMG, FINALLY!

[antdude]

Dr. Evil, is that you?

Four legs good, two legs better!

[JoeyRox]

Pretty much describes the life cycle of every country and corporation, from its idealized conception to its fall into the corrupt and greedy abyss.

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[ShanghaiBill]

Pretty much describes the life cycle of every country and corporation, from its idealized conception to its fall into the corrupt and greedy abyss.

This is not true. Plenty of corporations start in the corrupt and greedy abyss right from the beginning. For instance, Microsoft never went through an "idealistic" phase. Oracle is another example of primordial slime.

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[thomst]

ShanghaiBill observed:

Plenty of corporations start in the corrupt and greedy abyss right from the beginning. For instance, Microsoft never went through an "idealistic" phase. Oracle is another example of primordial slime.

I've never worked for Microsoft. It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS, for mucho dinero. In spring of 1992, he screwed IBM, too, by buying up every floppy disk he could find, to delay OS/2 2.0's rollout, while Microsoft vacuumed up all the PR oxygen with Windows 3.1's much-ballyhooed release. On floppies. (Yes, OS/2 2.0 was released on 17 3/5" floppies - and you could get it in 5.25", as well. Eventually. But, from February 1992 through mid-July, you couldn't buy a box of floppies for love, money, or marbles, because Microsoft had purchased every manufacturer's entire output. And it was rare, in those days, for PC's to have CD drives, believe it or not.)

And it was interesting - in the ghoulish way passing a really bad accident on the freeway is interesing - to watch the collapse of IBM's otherwise-carefully-planned rollout of their vastly-superior OS. The panic in the IBM guys who came by our lab space at Wells steadily mounted, as the weeks since the official release date ticked by, and the continuing floppy shortage kept anyone but major potential customers (like Wells Fargo, where I was a senior technology analyst) from being able to get their hands on the darned thing anywhere but at IBM authorized dealers. And then only to kick the demo version around on the store's computers, not to buy a copy themselves. (In late March, our sales rep gave us an advance copy to evaluate, with the exhortation, "Take care of that. You probably won't see another one for quite a while." When I asked him if we could make a backup copy, he said, "Officially speaking, I should say 'No.' Unofficially, though, it's probably a good idea.")

Once upon a time, however, I did work for Orace. (As a contractor, rather than as a FTE.)

I had recently left Wells (this was at the end of 1992, before the swine who ran NationsBank ate them, jettisoned all the top execs I'd known, and assumed the Wells identity, even though it was a considerably smaller entity, because their own brand was absolute poison), and I naively believed that place had been a shark tank. I swiftly found out that Wells was full of mere guppies, instead. Oracle, by comparison, was a freakin' piranha swarm.

As just one example of the work environment at Oracle: I had set up a shared, $10,000 Tektronix Phaserjet, wax-transfer color printer for an Oracle sales department. (Cost of consumables? About two bucks a page, depending. Even the special, clay-surface paper was expensive. And the four, separate, rolls of wax-surface, color printing medium? Yikes!) One day they called me to say that it had stopped working, and one of their employees needed to be on a flight to Europe pronto, with color printouts of his Powerpoint deck in hand an absolute priority.

So I drove to Redwood Shores (which took nearly an hour), and, after visually inspecting the printer, determined that its power cable was missing. I substituted one from a nearby workstation (whose user was on a marketing trip to Asia, which meant he had no immediate need for it), and the marketing guy easily made his flight, 4-color printout in hand. Then I went looking for the missing power cable from the printer (which, with the Tektronix logo stamped on it, was pretty distinctive). I found it, too.

Some guy from another department (in a different silo on that same floor) had filched it to supply power to his personal laser printer - and then walked away, without replacing it, leaving an entire department that depended on the Phaserjet with no way to print its slides.

I confiscated the cable, of course, and took it ba

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS

No, neither Bill Gates nor Microsoft did steal anything from DRI, including CP/M. If CP/M was ever stolen, it was by Tim Paterson, who had nothing to do with MS back then. And BTW, Paterson didn't steal CP/M; he merely created a CP/M work-alike OS, that ran on Intel 8086, and its APIs were designed to be backward-compatible with these of CP/M, which, together with the 8080-to-8086 source code compatibility, made porting software to the new OS almost trivial. Later, Paterson won a lawsuit for defamation against some DRI fanbois, who, just like you, accused him of theft, so, if you want to donate some money to Mr. Paterson, you may continue with your accusations.

Re: Four legs good, two legs better!

[Bing Tsher E]

People like GP commenter cop an attitude like they were even around during the introduction of the PC. At the time, you could buy both PC-DOS and CP/M-86 from IBM to run on their PC. CP/M was about twice as expensive, and wouldn't really run the old programs from 8-bit CP/M anyway.

There was some synergy in buying PC-DOS for the OS. Microsoft produced the built-in BASIC interpreter that booted up from the ROMs in the IBM-PC if you bought one without floppy drives or disk controller (a 180k SSDD floppy drive was north of $500) and ran your PC with cassette BASIC. (the cassette interface cable was standard equipment until the introduction of the PC/XT.) PC-DOS came with the extended Disk BASIC at no cost versus CP/M-86 which was twice the price and didn't have BASIC included. Microsoft BASIC was an additional package you has to purchase for CP/M.

BASIC was important in that era, and Microsoft was mostly a 'language' company in that era, producing thd BASIC interpreter for most computer brands.. A lot of early PC users wrote their own software in BASIC or typed it in from listings in magazines targeted to all the different personal computers like the Atari, Commodore and Apples, etc.

The above details are just some of the wrinkles in the history that are often overlooked. It's far more complex than 'Microsoft stole CP/M' and the history is even interesting (if you're a nerd and not some IT dude reading a 'tech' site who took CS in college to 'make money.')

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[squiggleslash]

It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS, for mucho dinero.

It certainly isn't true, not even remotely.

Microsoft bought MS DOS from Seattle Associates, a seller of 8086 cards for S-100 systems, which had called the OS QDOS. QDOS itself had little to do with CP/M, it had an entirely different filesystem (Microsoft's FAT file system, which was written for early standalone Microsoft BASIC implementations intended to run without needing a seperate operating system), had a different toolset, different CLI, and was only similar to CP/M in one respect: it exported a similar, but not identical, API for applications to use. The latter was to make it easier to port CP/M applications to QDOS.

That part, like the rest of the operating system, was written from scratch, but if it hadn't been, the amount of code Seattle Associates would have "stolen" would have amounted to a tiny percentage of CP/M, literally a few hundred bytes of code, because all the complexity was in the file system and command line tools. I mention this not to suggest that if they did it it wouldn't have been a problem, I mention this to give you some idea of how ludicrous the allegation is: "Let's write a whole new operating system, but for no reason let's illegally copy a few hundred bytes from CP/M when it would be easier for us to write the same code afresh." That's how stupid the allegation is.

Microsoft's first product was BASIC. They bought MSDOS. MSDOS was not a copy of CP/M or based upon it. IBM knew what it was getting into when it bought a license. Compaq, not Microsoft, started the clones movement (Microsoft sold MS DOS to companies like ACT/Apricot before that, who were producing machines completely incompatible with IBM's.)

Microsoft was fairly neutral as a technology company until the Windows vs GEM thing started up. That snowballed into DOS/Windows vs DR DOS, Windows vs OS/2, and all the other slimy things they did. But for the first 10-15 years they were relatively normal.

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[BlackPignouf]

Monsanto, too.

Re: Four legs good, two legs better!

[0xdeaddead]

Crazy but true.

Just like the OS/2 IBM lies we were all fed. Turns out that Microsoft had 386 features ready to go in 1987. Needless to say, they shipped them in Windows/386, and managed to get Xenix 2.2 for the 386 out in 1987.

IBM blocked the 386 OS/2 version until 92, and stopped Microsoft from bringing Windows to OS/2. Naturally they brought it to NT OS/2.

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[Peter P Peters]

Pretty much describes the life cycle of every large country and corporation, from its idealized conception to its fall into the corrupt and greedy abyss.

FTFY. And it's an important distinction because there are a lot of small countries and corporations that are neither corrupt nor greedy. Norway, Finland, Denmark New Zealand etc all do well in the quality of life/low corruption indexes and they each only have population around 5 million. Maybe the solution is a physical hard limit to the amount of people any one organisation/country can grow to?

Someone smarter than me describes the problem here: http://www.cracked.com/article...

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[DarthVain]

As an aside when I first started working back in 2000 I actually had one of those ancient Tektronic Phaserjet wax-transfer printers. It was pretty massive for printers of the day and weighed a metric ton I think. It was pretty cool however, I used it pretty exclusively for everything. The little wax blocks were surprisingly convenient way to supply colour, and the waste bucket I recall with all the leftover wax. It printed great colour in comparison to other technologies even at that time. One of the things I really thought was nice about it, was all the lines were slightly raised with wax, so you could run your hand over it and feel the texture of it, almost like braille. About the only thing that wasn't so great about it (which I found out years later), is the wax didn't really hold up to sunlight very well over time, and would fade pretty dramatically. That said I limped that thing along for as long as I could, I had it on a Windows NT workstation, and I believe it used a parallel port (or it may have been SCSI). Eventually it had issues, where the print drivers got so outdated, that we had issues, and then moving to other computers even more, and having to try and convert ports, etc... became too much to try to keep going, but I was sad to see it go... It could do a Tabloid size page which was nice also as many newer printers at the time could not particularity in colour. Anyway it was pretty ancient when I got my hands on it, but it was a pretty neat piece of technology...

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[thomst]

DarthVain confided:

I believe it used a parallel port (or it may have been SCSI).

Definitely a parallel port.

And you're right - it produced excellent color printouts ...

Back in 2015 they dropped it

[0xdeaddead]

as part of fucking over their employees out of stock, as they became the 'alphabet company' aka the play on 'alphabet agency'.

Google is VERY VERY Evil.

Re:Back in 2015 they dropped it

[BeauHD (54)]

That is only half the story. Google was planning an expansion so huge, employees had nothing to do with it. Therefore those doing the expansion (the guys at the top) needed a way to trim all the fat of giving employees something they didn't earn/deserve.

They finally realized

[SuperKendall]

Someone at Google read through all of the things Google has been in the news for in recent years, and it hit them: Hey, we're the baddies

Re: They finally realized

[Bing Tsher E]

How could they be the 'baddies' when a top Google executive made personal visits to the White House averaging more than once a week while Obama was president? Weren't they just spreading their pure-good ethos to the government?

Re:They finally realized

[Peter P Peters]

Hey, we're the baddies

I knew what this was going to be before I even clicked it. It's strange how comedians can absolutely nail political issues so accurately.

Warrant Canary

[Anonymous Coward]

You all may joke, but I'd wager something really nefarious happened at Google and this is the warrant canary.

Re:Warrant Canary

[Anonymous Coward]

Get ready to see what evil Google can do with all the data they collected from everyone over the past 20 years or so.

This will be perfect demonstration of why we need laws to prohibit companies from using your data for other purpose without your explicit agreement.

Re:Warrant Canary

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty unlikely, because we know from the Snowden revelations that Google had a direct line to the NSA. They claimed they didn't know about the 'wiretap', but that seems fairly implausible. You don't let NSA technicians lay fiber optics connections to your data streams without knowing anything about it. So in a nutshell, for all we know from public information, Google used to be evil in the past, too. (If you want to look at it that way, obviously it's a matter of perspective.)

Does this matter?

[larryjoe]

In most companies, the code of conduct is a reflection of existing culture. It is rarely a template for conduct. When's the last time an employee thought, "I was going to act in a certain way, but since that action is contrary to our code of conduct, I decided on a different course of action."

One reason the code of conduct is rarely useful for directing conduct is that the language is so abstract. Often the entire verbiage could be replaced with "Let's be good!" Due to this abstractness, code of conduct terms can mean different things to different readers. Don't be evil. Do the right thing. Everyone agrees with those words, but they mean nothing because they mean different things to different people.

Re:Does this matter?

[joe_frisch]

I thought the "code of conduct" was usually something managers thought sounded good, and which had as much use as vision statements and lists of core values.

Re:Does this matter?

[h33t l4x0r]

Yes but, importantly, it means that Google can no longer fire employees for being evil. This is a big civil rights win for Satan-worshipping coders.

Re:Does this matter?

[serviscope_minor]

Don't be evil. Do the right thing. Everyone agrees with those words

clearly you've never done business with Oracle.

Re:Does this matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the "code of conduct" was usually something managers thought sounded good, and which had as much use as vision statements and lists of core values.

Just occasionally you get something that you know you should do. That you want to do but might be against immediate profit. Something that you know someone else doesn't want you to do. Let's say, letting Hansel and Gretel* out of their cage. And then along comes the Witch (e.g. project manager) and says in the meeting "why did you do that". And you say 'because our values say "nobody should be kept in a cage"' and so I just wanted to make sure we followed them. And the thing is, the project manager knows that these are the values and is sitting there with all the other managers who "buy into" the corporate values and they know, no matter how much of a psychotic shit they are, there is nothing they can safely say to criticise you. Such moments, as you watch little Hansel and Gretel flee off into the forest and back to their family, are Golden. Especially when you later get to decide the Witches future and not the other way round.

In other words, the values do really matter. Not always, but enough of the time that this change is disturbing.

* the names and situations in this story have been very slightly altered to protect the innocent and guilty. Lets just say there are plenty of people in corporations willing to do bad stuff for their personal bonuses.

That Settles It

[mentil]

Whenever I want to know about the ethics of a megacorporation's activities, I pore over a document on their website. It's all right there in the manual, people! If they pinkie-swear that they'll be the mostest ethicalest conglomerate ever, then goddammit, I believe them!

Obviously, removing a vow to not be evil means they've accepted an ethical continuum where any action taken in a situation containing an ethical problem necessarily involves a certain amount of evil; vowing to do NO evil would necessarily mean taking no action, which is itself an evil action, thereby they are avoiding a double bind.

Partly correct

[mysidia]

They didn't actually remove don't be evil.... Only part of the motto was removed, you see: the only part they actually removed was the word Don't; leaving most of the policy intact.

Re:Partly correct

[93 Escort Wagon]

They didn't actually remove don't be evil.... Only part of the motto was removed, you see: the only part they actually removed was the word Don't; leaving most of the policy intact.

It was even more minor than that - they only removed the “n”, the apostrophe, and the “t”. That’s less than a 25% change!

Defining objective evil.

[RyanFenton]

I've found that the best definition of evil that applies across all culture and times is the following:

Intentionally harming others to benefit yourself.

Whether that benefit is emotional, resources, or a political cause, it's all in the direction of what most cultures would consider more and more evil.

Without harm, it's generally more mischief or taboo, and without any form of benefit from that harm, it's generally considered more madness/confusion or misunderstanding. Without intention, it's considered an accident, though blatant enough recklessness its own intention in many cases.

Discarding the intention to avoid evil, because it might make you more money is definitely going in the evil direction in my book at least.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Defining objective evil.

[RyanFenton]

>Winning honestly at chess is evil by this definition, especially if it is a high-stakes game that will direct significant monetary sums and professional reputation to the winner. You would be intentionally causing a harm to your opponent to benefit yourself.

See: lack of actual harm. If you added perhaps using cruel tricks to give you an unfair advantage, then yeah - you're getting in the direction of evil. But just exchanging moves and winning doesn't connect those dots, for most cultures. I'm just attempting to match common sense for most cultures with this definition of evil.

If the bet were large enough to harm either party to a large extent, then the evil may be more in the act of setting up the bet, more than the game. Like, in many cultures there's stories of devil's contests - fiddling contests and the like aren't the immorality in those stories. It's in settings up the contest with the intent to likely harm.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Defining objective evil.

[ckatko]

Oh man, it's so easy!

>Intentionally harming others to benefit yourself.

I guess Poker and Fight Club are out.

Re:Defining objective evil.

[RyanFenton]

>Defines self-defence as evil.

Not in most cultures. Most tend to define preventing harm to others as not a self gain, more of a selfless act. In cases where folks are 'defending themselves' for gain though... yeah, there's often some perceived evil intention there.

There's a few cultures, like Jains though where even self-defense isn't considered a complete excuse for harm.

It's usually a sliding scale - everyone has some encroachment into potential evil, and it takes a LOT to be considered unable to be part of most societies.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Defining objective evil.

[rodch]

Apologies. Misposted as AC.
I totally agree with your sentiments. My quibble is that your definition states what may be a necessity, but it is insufficient and IMO cannot stand alone as an objective definition. That is a pity, because a terse definition would be useful.

Re:Defining objective evil.

[RyanFenton]

The definition still stands on its own, I'd say - if you're willing to say that harm through self-defense is a socially accepted minimal form of evil, just like many others we've improved over time as society has become more peaceful. That, or extend the definition to also include self-defense. I just don't find it parsimonious as part of my definition.

Also, note, that there's a distinction between evil and monstrous. Normal people do lots of little evil things in most societies with this definition- especially as children. This kind of evil isn't something that can be controlled in beings who who have to experience to learn, so much as minimized as being required or helpful as a system of interactions by a society.

That's why it's a decent definition for me - I find it the best match - but I can see how others might be motivated to only define evil by rare factors, to avoid calling 'normal' people's actions even infinitesimally evil. Usually because they just want evil to be something they don't like, and good to be something they like.

Ryan Fenton

Re: Defining objective evil.

[Bing Tsher E]

Both the Communists and the NAZIs thought, or at least pretended, that what they promoted was scientifically correct and the 'next evolution' of humankind. People with big ideas and the will to enforce them on other people tend to be that way.

Re:hello 2015?

[msmash]

No, they did not kill it. They had a new motto for Alphabet, but Google's CoC continued to have instances of "don't be evil." Here's a version of its CoC, captured in January this year by Internet Archive.

Don't do the right thing then?

[aleck7]

So now they won't do the right thing, correct?

Re:Don't do the right thing then?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Well, you see, they can’t - Spike Lee sued them over the use of that phrase.

For sale

[LordHighExecutioner]

Android smartphone. Never worn.

Re: For sale

[Bing Tsher E]

So you never logged onto it with a Google Account? (actually a practical approach. You can run Android and even add apps without ever 'logging onto Google'.)

Re: hello 2015?

[MachineShedFred]

It may have still been on paper, but that practice was not followed for years. Now the code of conduct is more aligned with what the organization actually does.

The tail wagging the dog, so to speak.

Re:OMG, CoC

[bobstreo]

Google has replaced already obsolete don't be evil with be politically correct, progressivist and mandatory neo-marxsist-leninist-feminist.

I think you mean, don't bother applying if you are a white hetero male aka the bane of silicon Valley and the cause of all mankind's problems. /s

Well that or their new motto is:

Don't be evil (if you think you may be caught)

Or maybe there are a bunch of executives sitting in their lairs/offices stroking their white cats and buying islands.

Re: hello 2015?

[msmash]

Good point.

It's still at the bottom, you absolute twats.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And remember don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Literally, literally fake news.

Re:It's still at the bottom, you absolute twats.

[novakyu]

Unless the Gizmodo article was updated since its publication without notice, they note that in the article.

The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

It's called "burying the lede," and quite common in the news business. So, business as usual---also, I guess you are right, literal fake news.

Re:It's still at the bottom, you absolute twats.

[ayesnymous]

They should have voting on posts, not just comments. This post should be downvoted to oblivion.

"All your attention are belong to us!"

[shanen]

A couple of years ago, before my old friends who had joined google started ghosting me, we used to meet for a few beers from time to time. It was becoming pretty obvious that the evil thing was moot, and I realized the new motto was:

"All your attention are belong to the google."

Details at 11.

Capitalism is dead. Long live corporate cancerism

[shanen]

Good comment and deserves the insightful mod, even though you didn't address the underlying religious issue:

"There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."

Right now Apple holds the title (according to Fortune), but they are evil and cancerous in different ways. The noncancerous corporations have mostly been crushed out of the market or bought out and merged.

It amuses me to imagine there could be solution approaches. My current favorite would be a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the rate increases with market share. NOT a penalty to success, but rather an incentive to reproduce by fission, providing more competition, more choices, and more freedom for the human beings. The REAL human beings, not the legal fictions like corporate persons.

Re:Google is Evil

[superwiz]

Shut up, Hillary!

Look forward to the future

[Daralantan]

Exciting news coming from the new Evil Google. Their chains have been broken and they are free to do their darkest desires!

Google, 2018

[MrKaos]

Do know evil.

Re:Capitalism is dead. Long live corporate canceri

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution would be easy but far-reaching. Get rid of most of the stock market. Enterprises become evil once they go on the stock market. It's also not very surprising, they get tons of money to strategically buy competitors, destroy previously healthy markets, and in return need to do everything they can to increase stock value or maximize profits. The product line doesn't even really count any more, companies like Google or Apple could just as well make their money with crude oil,trading producing soap, or cutting down rainforests. Whatever pleases the stock holders.

Get back to the real trading of real goods by companies who innovate instead of buying patents and intellectual properties from the real innovators. Replace stock markets with good old entrepreneurship, make sure competition cannot be destroyed before it has time to grow, and the problem is solved. If you sell a real product, you cannot disregard your customers. That's only possible if your company is mostly based on virtual intellectual property rights, marketing to create artificial demand, and the advertisement business.

Stock markets and patents are the problem, they've gotten way out of hand, to the extent that an honest businessman could not possibly succeed by simply selling good products without getting into bed with some megacorporation that is on the stock market.

Re:It does't fit Google's new morality

[AvitarX]

So you're saying their motto has nothing to do with making money?

They got rid of the don't be evil, but it was just to push a more specific agenda? Not to pursue even more money?

This feels a lot more related to militarized computer vision than an agenda to me.

"deeply incorporated into Google's company culture

[rojash]

Person who posted this is a true Goo-fan Google has been evil under the covers since Day One. Very opinionated software. Just better than what the others have to offer. If they develop an in-house OS it should be called Doors.

Don't be merely evil

[goombah99]

Don't be evil, be heinous.

You know..

[CptLoRes]

It's kinda hard to make an evil AI to take over the world with a clause like that.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!

[i286NiNJA]

I know this is an old story but are we really going to replace her with a better editor? Remember timothy? Maybe we should recruit someone from buzzfeed?

Is this going to ruin your day? Is it hard to ignore a submission you don't like?
Really dude we can live with imperfection in the face of the alternatives.

Re:It does't fit Google's new morality

[yuriklastalov]

It's kind of funny that those researchers only got huffy about their research being used for military purposes but all the social engineering and other fuckery Google does is just fine.

I'm sure they unironically believe the US military exists for the explicit purpose of killing brown people and that Google just wants to "make the world a better place".

Steve Jobs

[DaMattster]

Steve Jobs famously called bullshit on this slogan. Of course that was the pot calling the kettle black.

Re:It does't fit Google's new morality

[AvitarX]

I assume it's because they knew what they were signing up for working for Google. If they thought the fuckery google does is bad, they would never have started working there.

Re:It does't fit Google's new morality

[yuriklastalov]

I'm sure Google just now started doing military contracts, and haven't been an ostensible arm of USMIL all along

My essay

[yuhong]

I have an essay about one problem: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2...

Re:Capitalism is dead. Long live corporate canceri

[slashdot_commentator]

I am so happy that your influence on society is limited to Slashdot. Only the fucking clueless would want to wipe out an institution like the stock market, which has operated for centuries, and is a means to provide transparency to the general public, and allow people that aren't part of the 0.01% to possess wealth that isn't real estate.

The only thing wrong with patents (a means that allows people capable of solving intractable problems to be rewarded for their efforts) has occurred in the past 30 years; which converted a temporary, government enforced monopoly (to reward intellectual "property"), into a monopoly that can last over a century!

At least take a fucking introductory economics course, followed by an introductory finance course, so you'd at least have a grasp at how basic finance works! Stock markets and patents aren't evil; its lazy American voters who are evil, because they allow greedy individuals to corrupt perfectly good laws and regulations.

Google's new motto...

[ConceptJunkie]

Google changed their motto from "Don't Be Evil" to "Don't Be Evil*". They're considering changing it to "Don't Be 'Evil'".

Re:hello 2015?

[mikael]

Could have been worse. They could have just removed the "Don't" part.

Public masturbation of 444053

[shanen]

Z^-1

Re: OMG, CoC

[yndrd1984]

You've clearly never taken an implicit bias test. ... identical resumes with black names get fewer callbacks ...

And you've clearly never read any of the critiques of those kinds of tests. They give you a result you like, so they're right.

But for the sake of argument, I'll assume that racism not only exists, but is common and debilitating.

What if your "anti-racism measures" cause more racism, along with a panoply of other unintended consequences?

You should look at it and then realize that while you're trying to solving a problem, which is admirable, you're actually letting perfect be the enemy of the good, which is one of man's most destructive sins.

What you're asking for isn't the acceptance of sub-optimal solutions, you're asking people to deliberately not look at possible downsides.

As of 4/30/2018 Google has not

[siculars]

As of 4/30/2018 Google has not removed "Don't be Evil" from their CoC. I know cause that's when I saw it right there as the first three words of the CoC. I just started at Google.

Re:hello 2015?

[BoogieChile]

> The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

Is reading even the summary passé these days?

Re: hello 2015?

[bursch-X]

That's what I thought. It's actually a slight improvement. At least they stopped blatantly lying to us and themselves.

Re: hello 2015?

[KingBenny]

slightly funny lol ... like way back in 1830... there once was ...