>I do agree though that the ability to protest and boycott is an entitlement. How many security, facilities, janitorial, or vendor staff have that freedom at the Google campus? In that consideration it does not sound like such a campus achieves equal opportunity employment in theory, but perhaps might by contracting other those positions to service providers.
I believe you are correct about all of that.
>If that is true and those service providers were to boycott a Google business priority it should be no surprise when Google would refuse to continue services from such vendors. Again, this is a horrible way to do business.
What's good business is very much opinion, many people would work for less money to keep their dignity. It's not exactly a Silicon Valley secret that Google is not the highest paying employer, after all.
>To make the assumption that other areas are likely reflective of one's own is a form of ethnocentricity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism
When I said "anywhere" I meant "in the United States." Personally, I believe culture in the U.S. is more similar than it is different. This point could be debated but there's not much of a point since I doubt there's an agreement to come to with that.
I also was not intentionally referring to all types of jobs, just software developers. It obviously doesn't make as much sense with the power dynamics of jobs that are seen as unimportant. Programmers also take months to get ramped up in a company, and carry a lot of trade secrets and knowledge that they will take with them when they leave, making it very different from a line cook for example. Therefore, you probably don't want to fire a programmer if you don't have to, and you especially don't want a bunch of programmers with important domain knowledge to all leave at the same time.
So quite a bit less broad than "anywhere."
Still, I do not have as much life experience as you, and I do not know why Silicon Valley was different in the 80s. If I had to guess, I'd guess it's because there was no Internet, and the job market was insanely different. Today most software companies have standardized on things, but in the 80s there were plenty of different microarchitectures and programming languages you might need to know on top of other mandatory skills that are not so common anymore. Nowadays for most software developers you don't need to care about microarchitectures and everyone uses languages that look like C or JavaScript. The big tech companies were definitely a lot smaller. Employees sometimes even had more direct say than they do now. Reading old stories about Apple on Folklore.org or Quora paint a picture of an employer that employees respected, but disobeyed frequently. But if they wanted to protest, would anyone hear them? Apple wasn't the massive company it is today in the 80s. Without the Internet, their message might've gone unheard entirely. And, without the Internet, a lot of employees might not have even known about a DoD deal or the implications, positive or negative, that it might have.
Basically, comparing the tech industry of the 80s to the tech industry of today feels a bit strange. Today the tech industry is one of the world's largest. In the 80s, it was very impressive if you shipped 1000 computers.