> “But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.”
The only question remaining for me is why Googlers still enjoy the respect of their peers. It was fine in 2000, nobody knew how it would turn out. Today, we need to start disrespecting the kind of person that would still work for that company.
Google has incredible PR/marketing. And this isn't just a public-facing engagement. Google seems to do an incredible amount of inward marketing. The same high quality rhetoric that sells a large amount of the public on the notion that Google is a good company trying to make the world a better place works even better on Googlers themselves.
Bear in mind, Googlers are provided food and amenities on campus, which keep them surrounded by the Google mindset most of the time. One of the funniest things recently, on another site, was getting a response from someone condemning my post about pay equality by a "Googler with a Googler wife". Many Googlers friends and family are also Googlers... that's where they spend all of their time. So there are plenty of people at Google whose entire social circle comprises of other Googlers. And that's before you talk about the fact that Google is paying them to be there.
That's a huge amount of social pressure, and a huge amount of bias in what information they take in and how they interpret it. If their entire social and financial structure is built around a single entity, I suspect it'd be fairly difficult for the ordinary person in such a situation to leave. I don't fault individual Googlers for the direction of the machine.
Ha, I guarantee you no one at Google remembered this. They talked in 2014, Google did it in Feb 2016.
By that point whoever they originally talked to probably got their promotion and transferred to some other part of the company, or quit for somewhere else. If they're still doing the same thing, the person who made the decision to go ahead and take it was probably on some very similar but rival project.
Or most likely everyone forgot, or didn't have any awareness that it happened. They didn't case out a building, they added a symbol to a list. I'm guess they only asked in the first place because they didn't have the technical means to scrape it all before.
The only question remaining for me is why Googlers still enjoy the respect of their peers. It was fine in 2000, nobody knew how it would turn out. Today, we need to start disrespecting the kind of person that would still work for that company.