Google Engineers Organizing a Walk Out to Protest the Protection of Andy Rubin
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
"A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home – having spent a very pleasant evening."
Kierkegaard's alternative was an armed rebellion. Are you seriously advocating for civil war, and dismissing all peaceful methods of achieving change?
That gets to the heart of what's wrong with the concept as it is used by the 4chan crowd these days: The success of democracy is exactly the possibility to effect change without shouldering grave personal risks. Trying to reframe this accomplishment as ineffective, weak, or lazy runs the danger of provoking exactly the sort of dramatic, self-sacrificing gestures that have been in the news recently.
In the specific case, maybe quitting would be slightly less dramatic but more forceful form of protest. But it's quite obvious that exists a gray area where it's perfectly legitimate to try to change an organisation, while still being convinced of its overall benefit. Recruitment & retainment are also huge factors for Google's future prospect, making a walk-out with the implied threat of quitting, an effective tool.
True. In effect, we have a civil war every 4 years. During these civil wars there is zero personal risk to the participants. And even still, the largest bloc of us chooses not to participate.
Unless Google employees are addressing one of the elephants in their house, can any internal criticism of the company be seen as more than showmanship?
Andy Rubin is safe to target. He's already gone, and accused of something uncontroversial to hate.
Show me a walkout over Dragonfly and I'll show you a news story.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this sentence, because it so succinctly expresses something I find absolutely immoral. The gamble without a downside.
At their best these movements make people feel the hurt/injustice and need for safety being expressed underneath all the noise/reactions/counter reactions.
Once a majority in the room feel it the movement has succeeded. This entire process ofcourse doesn't align neatly with our cultural conditioning that change happens through confrontation and punishment.
Wow, that quote is breathtakingly beautiful...and it’s so relavent today. Many have this self righteous feverish belief that their side is good and the other evil. When we as a society begin taking for granted the benefits of democracy and start truly believing we can’t enact change, the number of nut jobs committing violence will absolutely increase. Tribalism today is insane, and our ability to enact change peaceful,h keeps the violence and the bad acting to an extreme minimum. It’s easy to get lost in the chaos.
Honestly, I’m completly blown away by that quote and I’m using it as a rebuttal when these topics come up.
But what happened was that Google only said how awesome everything is and hence in fact protected and worse, basically endorsed, his behavior.
I find it good that Google employees stand up here. I'm already wondering what will Google do about that other guy who gives back rubs in interviews? He got similar support and is still at Google as far as I understood.
Probably not; mutual non-disparagement clauses are extremely common in executive contracts. Breaking that would have been the same, in terms of kind of litigation risk, as not paying the $90 million.
For some examples of how non-disparagement clauses are commonly worded: https://www.contractstandards.com/public/clauses/non-dispara...
If the facts can reasonably be expected to damage the reputation of the other party to the agreement, yes, generally (subject to any specific exception in the agreement, such as the common one for accurate testimony in court proceedings when legally mandated.)
> Rubin has also pulled together a group of high-rolling financiers; the endeavor is supported by a $300 million venture capital fund, whose investors include Google, HP, Foxconn, Redpoint Ventures, and Tencent, the Chinese Internet-services company.
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/android-inventor-andy-rubin-pl...
Not directly.
It is a reason that he details of the separation would be tightly held, and thus may not have known to those in whatever of Google's investment subsidiaries was making the decision on that investment.
The question is whether it's enforceable. For my NDA it doesn't matter because I don't want to go to court, but for this situation it's much more likely to go there and probably end up with an even larger settlement.
Then maybe that's what they should have done. Not everything about running a company is about not taking risks that you can afford. Sometimes you just make a stand because you feel something is important enough to warrant the risk, even when you feel that calculus of the risk works out against you.
Can you post some more details, a simple google search does not return anything meaningful.
> During the job interview, she said he told her that he and his wife were “polyamorous,”.
> She said he invited her to Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert, the following week.
> she thought it was an opportunity to talk to Mr. DeVaul about the job. She said she brought conservative clothes suitable for a professional meeting.
> At Mr. DeVaul’s encampment, Ms. Simpson said, he asked her to remove her shirt and offered a back rub.
We need a shared public consensus around the truth about particular situations, such as whether someone has done something bad or not. One way to do that is with a trial, that has long-established traditions for admissible evidence and due process. And it has a definite and timely conclusion.
Is this shared public consensus always right? No, and it doesn't have to be. We just have to have a process that everyone has enough faith in. Do the particular parties always need to agree with that public consensus? No, they and their friends, family, etc. may still proclaim the innocence of a convict and there's nothing wrong with that.
The problem is when the public is called to be a huge jury on all kinds of issues; informed by whatever evidence makes it in the news (with no standards of admission). That leads to different people coming to different judgements, and those judgements build up into different sets of facts.
There's a saying "you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts". That is a noble idea: that we can share facts and disagree, and that allows us to ultimately compromise and work together. But it depends on a shared consensus of what the facts are.
For better or worse (I believe better), when evidence is inconclusive, the shared public consensus is to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused. One-sided "credibility" is not conclusive and doesn't belong in the set of shared public facts.
Or maybe this was just a calculated risk assessment, thinking more about PR and avoiding internal drama than a search for truth?
The truth came out eventually, although unfortunately four years later looking at the dates. Google tried to hide it, that's why people are upset.
The article is almost scrupulous in painting the walkout as out-of-control employees rather than the precursors of organised labour.
In any case, the article describes this particular walkout as part of an ongoing/emerging movement:
> Employees participating in this movement for increased transparency and ethics within Google have presented management with petitions, made demands for greater employee oversight into product decisions made by management, and even quit their jobs in protest of Google’s decisions. Increasingly, employees have been signing their names to a spreadsheet, refusing to participate in screening interviews for potential new hires at Google as a form of protest.
That last seems particularly counterproductive.
In general protests involve some amount of inflicting inconvenience or pain. Google is short on interviewer bandwidth, so bottlenecking it more is certainly a way to get management to feel the pain.
I do see your point it this is a real resource constraint, but though.
Google's process is engineered in such a way that individuals will not be able to individually skew cultural selection for new hires, so I don't think they would even see hiring as such an opportunity.
Or were you talking about the more classic issue of whether it's more effective to be an insider vs. an outsider to affect change?
'Greater employee oversight into product decisions' is particularly .. what is that? The employees have veto power by majority vote? An individual employee can delay the project for a 3 month review? The project team chooses their own manager?
If they want a measurable change they need an articulation of what that change is that a corporate structure can handle. The boys and girls of Google are usually pretty clever, they 'll have figured that out.
I don't like their chances either way, management will persist in making management decisions even if they need to fire people to do so, but having a walk out to raise awareness would be silly. Google has internal message boards and isn't that big a company - they can talk to people directly.
I'm not sure this is true - Google's legendarily high salaries and retention incentives are high because management has high demand for good people and specifically for people who have been at the company for a while. They might fire people, yes, but they won't do so casually. They might give in to the protesters out of rational self-interest. So I think the protestors' chances are better with this approach than with politely trying to change management's mind by debate.
(I also suspect that there are plenty of other Rubins in management, and rational debate that Google was too nice to Rubin is not ever going to be convincing to other rich abusers.)
This could be an existential challenge to the company's owners being in control. The reason employees don't get % share of the profits is literally because they don't control what the company does.
If employees seriously can control what the company does, like turning down military projects for moral reasons or circumstances around making hiring/firing decisions, they become something like shareholders and the question becomes why aren't they exposed to the financial implications of their decisions in the same way shareholders are. Ie, why are they being paid a wage if not to have their decisions subsumed by a management structure?
(Also I'm pretty sure literally every employee involved is a shareholder with personal finances exposed to the state of the company. Stock is a serious form of compensation at Google.)
yes, but, in another sense, as a tech company, Google hires high-powered individuals precisely because they will control what the company does. i mean Google management knows it doesn't have all the answers itself and truly needs such high-powered employees to discover new markets and create technology to successfully exploit those markets and push the company in new directions.
Facebook, famously, publishes its HR guidelines, procedures, and the steps that it has pledged to take to deal with reports of misconduct, harassment, as well as how disciplinary actions will be carried out against at-fault employees.
This costs the company nothing, and makes it clear to employees where they stand, what steps will be taken if they bring up an issue/are the subject of disciplinary action. It makes it crystal-clear what behaviour is appropriate, what is inappropriate, what is a dangerous grey area, and how it will be dealt with.
Unions are rather weak when they can't prevent employers from hiring strikebreakers.
The common factor is that it's not enough to refuse to work, unions must be able to ensure that no one does the work.
Often the barrier is natural, such as with folks at Google who built the systems and are (collectively) the only ones who can keep them running without significant interruption. By what authority, for what compelling reason, would you abridge their freedom of association (or in this case non-association)?
But earlier you claimed they were "the only ones" capable, and that I wanted to abridge their freedom of association. I disagreed with both those statements.
Now that you've restricted your position to acknowledging a reasonable cost/benefit tradeoff for Google, I agree.
No, I claimed that they were the only ones capable of running the systems without significant interruption. Others can be trained up, but it would take months and there would be some failures along the way. You're the one whose argument has been changing, since you started with the presumption that strikes' effectiveness relies on explicitly excluding others (e.g. via law or force).
But from what I read it sounds as if Google had to pay him the $90MM+, else be sued by him right? Because if they didn't pay him, he'd sue, then they [Google] would have to prove that he [Rubin] acted maliciously (or whatever), which would've been hard (if not impossible) to do, given that the accuser said they were coerced (not forced).
So it seems as if Google's hands were tied legally on this.
From what I'm reading, Google paid Rubin the amount he was entitled to in his contract. Some people point out that Google could have paid him next to nothing for firing him with cause - but Rubin could have sued Google, and almost certainly would have made the claim that the harassment allegations we're Google's way of trying to avoid paying him - and from what I read, Google probably wanted to avoid this, because it would inevitably involve the details of the alleged assault going public. I assume that the alleged victim doesn't want this, we don't have good reports of how much proof there is for these allegations, and there's also the possibility of Google losing the suit and looking like they're the ones in the wrong.
The reasons for his ouster weren't disclosed. I would be curious if Essential's investors (Redpoint, Altimeter, Amazon Alexa Fund) were aware of why Rubin left Google.
Moreover, this is a pattern at Google. Amit Singhal[1] was fired (also with a send-off and goodbye party and settled outstanding grants) after accusations of harassment were found credible.
He then landed as SVP of engineering at Uber, where he was forced to resign because he hadn't disclosed the prior HR complaint at Google. Now, obviously, the lack of disclosure is what did him in -- but why did Google not tell Uber that he was asked to leave during his background check?
Yes, Rubin likely would have sued. Yes, it likely would have been messy and very public. No, I do not believe for a second that Google settled to "protect" the victim; Google's settlement with the the alleged victim was certainly less than $90m.
Google settled b/c in 2014, the drama of fighting with someone like Rubin seemed more risky than just paying him off -- even with the risk that the reasons why might become public later. The climate of 2018 makes me believe that was a fundamental mistake and the company should have fought back to not pay money that a labor attorney could argue was not owed.
[1]: https://www.recode.net/2017/2/27/14745360/amit-singhal-googl...
You're ignoring the damage cause by the optics of such a lawsuit. Google being known as the company that used an allegation of harassment to try and cheat an exec out of his outstanding compensation would be atrocious for the company's image - and not to mention attach huge negative stigma around people who come forward with harassment campaigns against powerful people. It's easy to be idealistic when you're not the person or group who is at stake.
“Credible” isn't the same as “true” or even “more likely than not to be true”, even though it has recently become popular for credible allegations of certain wrongs to be treated as if they were proven true.
> Are you saying that companies should still pay severance to employees fired for sexual assault?
If a contract requires payment unless a certain wrong has been done, a party finding it credible that the wrong has been done that would relieve it of it's obligations, even if it would get a trier of fact to the same conclusion, hasn't actually established that it is free of the obligation.
Contract vs. at-will employment presents different considerations.
The point is, while Google itself determined that they had enough evidence to conclude that Rubin harassed someone, they probably didn't think they had enough evidence to convince a jury. All I'm saying is that the company should choose the least harmful option. Sometimes, being inflexible does more harm than good. For all we know, bringing this to trial would have made Google and the victim look like the bad guys, while the harasser looks like a hero standing up to a deceitful corporation. Instead, Google played it safe and chose not to risk it's reputation (which is an act of self interest) but also to avoid risking the reputation of the alleged victim (which is a benefit). Was this the right decision? Ultimately we'll never know short of inventing a time machine, but saying that Google unambiguously chose the worse of two options is short sighted.
Google for "golden parachute" and "termination clause", e.g. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/golden-parachute-2276017. Yes, when you're valuable enough, you can actually require as part of your employment agreement that your employer pay you massive amounts of money for being terminated, even if it's for cause. Had they tried not to pay out the golden parachute, it would have been an open and shut case ending in a loss for them. (And, believe me, they wouldn't have been even remotely tempted to try because every executive there also has their own personal golden parachute.)
That's not the case with Matt Lauer at NBC. Lauer sued and NBC has continued to fight back. It's also not the case with Les Moonves at CBS (the CBS situation is much more complicated because of the broader disputes between CBS, Viacom, and the infighting on the board of directors) -- in fact, CBS has been roundly criticized for potentially paying out $100m to Moonves (even if they withheld $80m in stock). CBS' business reputation is in the shitter b/c they have paid out.
>- and not to mention attach huge negative stigma around people who come forward with harassment campaigns against powerful people. It's easy to be idealistic when you're not the person or group who is at stake.
This stigma already exists. Refusing to settle doesn't make it go away or make it any better. Any person who goes forward against a powerful executive -- no matter how much proof they have -- is almost always fucked over. Going forward doesn't lead to someone winning. Financial settlements mostly exist b/c it's understood that the complainant will have an incredibly difficult time finding future employment.
And you're also forgetting that the person who is the alleged victim in this case could and would be protected in filings by shield laws (it's possible that someone on the other side would leak the identity, but that's legally not supposed to happen). This would be a civil complaint, not criminal. Moreover, I feel certain that there was already a settlement with a very strict NDA in place (and if either party were to violate the NDA, there would be substantial consequences).
The person who brought the claims against Rubin already has a stigma around her neck. Her life was already torn apart in an investigation by HR and presumably in whatever settlement was achieved. Please don't use the fact that those that come forward are often re-victimized as an excuse to PAY PEOPLE WITH CREDIBLE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THEM $90 MILLION AND GIVE A HERO'S SENDOFF.
People who come forward almost always lose in very tangible ways -- even if they win. That's why coming forward is so difficult and why those that do are so incredibly brave.
I agree. The point is, refusing to pay Rubin and going to trial would have made the victim lose even more. She'd lose her privacy, for one. And if the case is lost she may lose her reputation and live the rest of her life branded as a false accuser.
Do you know if the accuser wanted to go to trial? If not then we have no business talking about how Google didn't act with the victim's interest in mind.
Likely, because his contract (executives are almost never at-will employees) included a mutual non-disparagement clause, which literally prevents either party from ever saying anything negative about the other.
> No, I do not believe for a second that Google settled to "protect" the victim
No, they did it to protect themselves. The fact that the route to Rubin winning would—as it always is in harassment cases—been destroying the victim further was probably incidental to Google, but no less true for that.
> The climate of 2018 makes me believe that was a fundamental mistake and the company should have fought back to not pay money that a labor attorney could argue was not owed.
I'm not sure even in 2018 it would look better for Google to have fought, lost, and left the accuser as collateral damage. Oh, it would be better optics if they fought and won without the victim's life being further destroyed, but whether that actually was the rational expectation at the time seems far from clear.
If you have a serial harasser, who is just paid off to leave quietly, then you just ensure that he gets to go off and do the same thing again. And be richer.
How about instead of giving him $90 million, you give that to his victims in exchange for them not making claims against him? The result is approximately the same, but at least you're giving money to the victim rather than the criminal.
To verify my reading (oh text communication :D)
Companies often say "court is more expensive than Y" because that's a directly measurable thing, and simply ignore the actual long term costs. Much like elected officials :-O
[edit: wtf typing :D)
Except Rubin was never accused of being a serial harasser that I've seen. He was terminated for having sexual relations with a subordinate.
> Google gave Rubin a reported $90 million exit package in 2014, following an investigation into an allegation that he had coerced another employee to perform oral sex on him. That investigation reportedly found that allegation to be credible.
I'm not following if that's all correct.
I doubt Rubin would have had the same behaviour with male subordinates, so that's a difference in treatment based on gender (woman who have to sleep with him to get equal treatment, or super devil advocate here, against men unable to "sleep to the top").
The reason companies have clear rules against this - which should be super easy to enforce - is because if you are in a position of power over someone, even if it was a hypothetical case of not abusing power, the subordinate can't tell so may feel coerced. If your underling feels coerced, they are. That it was unintentional is not relevant. Note, this is distinct from consent, which may or may not apply. Certainly if it's consent related the company should be forwarding to police.
In addition to that it seems like there is a large body of evidence of what is at minimum inappropriate behaviour of any employee, let alone the management and executive tiers. Any of which should have been firable.
This Rubin guy was no doubt a creep. From the NYT article:
"The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”"
Yikes!
As others have already pointed out, any relationship with an employee in that kind of environment is exploitative by nature.
I don't understand why Americans are so concerned with what happens in somebody else's bedroom. I don't give a single flying f about what two consenting adults decide to do in a bedroom. There are all sorts of sexual kinks that I find disgusting and sometimes disturbing - but it turns out it's not really any of my business. The second you introduce a non-consenting adult, or someone not old enough to consent, then we've got a problem.
Otherwise - why do you care? It's none of your business.
When your boss is sleeping with one of your co-workers, how do you know that they are not in a quid-pro-quo relationship?
This isn't an American thing - this is a workplace thing.
If you're a manager, there's seven billion other people in the world, who don't report to you. You'll probably find your soulmate, or whatever the hell you're looking for - outside of your reporting chain.
And as I've said in just about every post I've made, he should've been fired for sleeping with a subordinate. There are countless reasons that's not OK. I was responding to and quite obviously referring to the guy making a big deal about him telling someone he "owns them" - or whatever terminology he used. Do I think that's disgusting? Sure. But that's between him and whomever he has that relationship with. If she's consenting and willing, so be it, not my place to judge.
Unless you've got info beyond what was in the times report, you're making a TON of assumptions about the nature of the relationship.
As I said, it's wrong and he should be fired for having relations with a subordinate no matter what the circumstances were. But to dive Right into "do this if you want to stay employed" when you don't even know which party initiated the relationship is a bit unfair.
Unless Google or the woman in question come forward with more info, I don't think it's at all fair to just assume the worst about everyone involved.
Because that seems to go somewhat beyond the usual standard. And it wouldn't even be helpful, unless you follow it up with a demand of DNA samples and expert witnesses.
FWIW: the parent comment wasn't assuming anything–they just more or less gave you the definition of coercion.
> following an investigation into an allegation that he had coerced another employee to perform oral sex on him.
To not acknowledge these facts clearly stated in every article strikes me as bad faith rather than confusion.
> Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. [...]
> When Google fires lower-level employees, it typically marches them out immediately and pays little, if any, severance. But for senior executives, Google weighs other factors, said former executives. A wrongful termination lawsuit could mean unwanted media attention for Google and the victims of a misconduct case, with a loss resulting in significant damages.
It doesn't say explicitly, but it sounds like they didn't have a legal obligation to pay him; rather, they did so to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit or bad press.
What they definitely didn't have to do was this:
> Afterward, Google invested in Playground Global, a venture firm Mr. Rubin started six months after leaving the company.
It's one thing to pay severance if you don't think you can win an unlawful termination lawsuit, but it's another entirely to invest in that person's next venture after you're absolved of any legal obligation to them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
Quoting myself from upthread
>My gut tells me that at the time of his ouster, Alphabet was worried more about the optics of a protracted lawsuit with Rubin, rather than a cover-up for a harassment claim coming to light. Presumably the other individual in the harassment case settled and signed an NDA, which would preclude public discussion and disclosure.
In 2014, that may have seemed like the "safe" bet. In 2018, it's coming back to bite Alphabet in the ass.
The possibility of the lawsuit indicates there was at least a plausible argument for a legal requirement.
The difference between him and the people that they did fire was his position. Which is entirely backwards - the penalties for criminal behaviour should be higher for people with more power, not less.
Unfortunately, this is also all too common. But that doesn't make it OK and that doesn't mean that when it happens in our backyard (and not in Hollywood or finance or [insert industry here]), we should stand back and not do anything about it or speak up that it's not alright.
“Credible” is a far cry from being likely to meet the civil “preponderance of the evidence” standard, it literally is just “not implausible”.
> The difference between him and the people that they did fire was his position. Which is entirely backwards - the penalties for criminal behaviour should be higher for people with more power, not less.
Google doesn't impose criminal punishment, and I don't think anyone wants that to change.
> Google doesn't impose criminal punishment, and I don't think anyone wants that to change.
GP never suggested that Google hand out jail sentences, just that they shouldn't be giving $90 million severance to Rubin when many employees who got fired for a lot less egregious behavior got nothing.
Insofar as the issue is whether or not he is entitled to things promised in his employment contract, the standard for evaluation the allegation that he violated provisions of the contract which would trigger forfeiture of those things is necessarily ultimately the exact same standard as would apply in a suit over the contract, since whatever initial decision Google attempts to make is subject to potential suit.
> GP never suggested that Google hand out jail sentences,
The response was to the reference to “crimes” which was not otherwisegermane.
> just that they shouldn't be giving $90 million severance to Rubin when many employees who got fired for a lot less egregious behavior got nothing.
At-will employees are less protected than those with specific employment contracts; executives are usually in the latter category, rank and file employees generally not unless unionized.
Expecting treatment of employees to be the same when they are dissimilarly situated in terms of legal relationship is irrational.
It isn't clear if Rubin's actions reached a level that would breach his contracts morality clause (assuming one existed -- and one almost always exists), which would allow them to fire him with cause -- but the fact that an internal investigation found that he acted inappropriately, would at least indicate there was a legal way to fire Rubin without paying him $90m.
(I am not a lawyer, FWIW.)
My gut tells me that at the time of his ouster, Alphabet was worried more about the optics of a protracted lawsuit with Rubin, rather than a cover-up for a harassment claim coming to light. Presumably the other individual in the harassment case settled and signed an NDA, which would preclude public discussion and disclosure.
In retrospect, that was a bad call -- because in 2018, the optics of sweeping credible harassment allegations by a senior executive under the rug and then guiding them out the door with a $90m settlement is something that sickens and angers many individuals.
It's the sort of move that is incredibly common in other parts of business (Hollywood and the media business in general), but that doesn't make it OK. And it is particularly offensive when the industry in which it takes place -- and the company it is taking place at -- have a history of trying to be "better" than the status quo.
And then, not three months later, investing substantially in his next venture...
They aren't really wrong in this - the squeaky wheel gets the grease and always has, and now a much larger portion of the population is willing to squeak.
The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us. I wonder if much of the appeal of the crypto world (where whole organizations are disintermediated in favor of smart contracts) is because people are realizing that an organization is nothing but a target for angry people, and so by getting rid of the organization and making any people behind it anonymous & fungible, you can continue to organize economic activity without painting a target on your face.
Someone will win an Econ Nobel for this.
Crypto is a compelling simulacrum of classical liberalism (free individuals engaging in trade and limited governments using precise laws to protect the commons).
This time we are trusting machines and mathematics to preserve individual rights rather than culture.
But I still think it's a worthwhile endeavor.
hard nod
points to last sentence in profile
I'm one of those "get off my yard types" when someone comes along and (seemingly) blindly proposes blockchain in a discussion because blockchain is very good at what it does but what it doesn't do is 'everything'...
...but I'd take it a step further and say it's simulacra, the dollar became classical liberal econ simulacrum the minute we decided to start printing the things at will and standing well back[1].
---
The end does not justify the means. So what good is a society built on prejudice, harassment, and corruption?
If you can sweep controversy under the rug until such time that it's convenient then good luck ever getting change to occur for the better.
> by getting rid of the organization and making any people behind it anonymous & fungible, you can continue to organize economic activity without painting a target on your face.
Making it anonymous & fungible is only necessary if you're unable or unwilling to stand up for your actions. If you're unwilling to stand up for what's right or are doing something you know is unethical, then what right do you have to the proceeds from your actions?
Spoken like someone who was raised in a culture where airing grievances led to getting what you wanted most of the time.
I mean, it's not illogical. There's a reason why the activist archetype is so respected in our society. It gets results!
But the outlook that fuels activists to push things things until they win: "I'd rather burn everything to the ground than not get what I want" is also an incredibly short sighted and selfish way to look at things.
This is the human condition I guess. We take things for granted. Like the stability we've grown up in, so much that we're willing to sacrifice our inheritance [a stable and mostly fair society] chasing windmills.
Luckily we've amassed so much wealth and institutional inertia that I think it'll be a while before it all comes tumbling down.
The notion that this is a “stable and mostly fair society” is not self-evidently true. And I suspect that if the question were surveyed, the results would differ dramatically across identity groups.
I think people may need to be allowed a vote in the companies they work for/monopolies that service them, and that freedom-of-speech rules for corporations, employees, and customers is likely to follow that of their host nations — not equally free everywhere, but that no-disparagement clauses would be legal in the UK and illegal in the USA, for example.
Why shouldnt companies be treated the same way by their employees?
and
(2) Google went on to invest in his new venture, which I highly doubt was in the contract no matter when the whole thing went down.
As it is one arm of Google decided to let the man go for cause and give him a golden parachute, and another arm of the company decided to invest in his next venture.
Neither of those read like something bad happening to Andy Rubin. You could fire me any day for any reason you'd like to pick if you gave me 90 million.
Doesn’t this presuppose “good” people are in charge?
Google will have a few bad days of PR, nobody will be able to identify this event in Google's stock price or quarterly reports, and in about three weeks everyone will have forgotten completely about this and gone on to the next series of things to be bothered about.
This much simpler explanation allows the world to keep stumbling along about like it always has, and cryptocurrency gets to continue to be a solution in search of a problem.
What do you mean by that? I know only a few Googlers, mostly new grads. They don't seem to be worked to the bone or mistreated (9-5, high comp, benefits etc.) and have excellent working conditions (ergonomic workflow, offices with natural light, mentoring, good internal tooling).
In fact, I don't know if I would enjoy it. Since I like intense environments... they have it good though.
It's pretty messed up that we look at a situation like that now and say, "well the employees only have to work 9 to 5 and they get great health benefits, so I don't see why anybody would be upset."
Maybe pushback against google is appropriate, maybe it's effective, but I am sure fatigued by this kind of stuff.
Because if, as professed, have no opinion one way or the other, I fail to see how you can be annoyed by something you only read about (after clicking on links presumably informing you what to expect). Are you also annoyed by the weather report? Because that seems to have become a daily staple.
Conflict likes workers peaceful protests, union negotiations, and various acts of civil disobedience against the government are in a broad category of "conflict."
Corruption, violence, harassment, threats of violence, libel, literally burning parts of the world to the ground, incitements to violence, swatting, disinformation campaigns, and genocide are in another very broad category of conflict.
If your use of the word "conflicts" mixes anything freely from both two categories then the sentence I quoted is meaningless.
> The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us.
If you are talking mainly about any of the things I mentioned in my first category of "conflict," then this sentence isn't persuasive.
If you are talking about the second category only, I don't understand the relationship to the article.
Has it ever occurred to you that if people are willing to burn it to the ground, the "modern world" might not be quite as good for them as it is for you?
What we are seeing today are people who have long felt grievances talking to each other and discovering that they're not alone, and that the civil institutions which are supposed to address those grievances systematically do not do so.
And when people are given no other options to correct injustice, conflict is all that's left to them.
If you want to stop the world from burning, don't blame the people for fighting, blame the system for making it necessary.
my understanding (IANAL) is that sexual coercion is illegal under CA labor laws. And it would definitely be a clear violation of a policy in any corp i've worked at and i suppose Google has a similar policy as well.
I get the scale of capital and everything, but the internet is still a changing place and could be so much more if people just said no.
In the previous protests, Google employees had their demands penned in open letters which I believe also contributed to concrete actions taken or responses given by Google. A generic protest is bound to only draw vague assurances such as those given in their all-hands meeting as reported in the article.
That's a rather delightful image! But I think you meant "exorbitant".
In addition to that, while a walk out does not "move the needle" for executives or investors in any significant sense, if any even statistically significant number of engineers were to leave, it would likely force them to reevaluate their executives and whether they should still be employed there. If they want true change, the executives at the very top have to go.
As another commenter said, what are they hoping a walk out will accomplish? What are they asking for? Andy Rubin already has his $90 million.
But beyond embarrassment, what these types of walkouts do is signal to management that discontent is brewing and that employees are willing to fight back and stand-up. And as people are arguing upthread, tech workers have a certain amount of power in deciding where they work. Recruiting is competitive as it is -- it certainly doesn't make it any easier if you have employees walking out en mass because of policies that protected senior executives.
Do walkouts work without mass buy-in, no -- not usually. The bad publicity/embarrassment factor could force some corporations to make changes, but just as many won't care.
This is why unions are typically successful with threats of work stoppage, and also why the hardest part of unionizing is getting enough employees to sign cards (not to mention fighting against the mistruths management usually puts out about the union itself).
I've never walked-out, but in my last job (which was union (WGA-E), we did very seriously consider a work stoppage because of changes that undermined our editorial independence, Even then, the walk-out is the last-resort, but to management's credit, once it was clear that we were willing to walk out, our demand (written indemnity protecting us from personal lawsuits based on things we wrote for the publication -- this is almost always provided by major news organizations but isn't always in writing. The circumstances of our company and the reason why we now had new ownership made it crucial that we get written indemnity and not merely a verbal promise that if sued, the company would pay legal bills if we were named personally) was met.
Smart people can be moral, they can also be amoral. Google can continue to execute with either. What you're suggesting could lead to a 'morality drain' equivalent to 'brain drain'
Previous internal protests have gotten Google to give up the DOD contract, and may convince them to give up on Dragonfly, without having the loudest voices -- who organize other people in the company -- from all leaving.
Leaving is a last resort protest, and often, if you get that far, you've reached a tipping point and there's no going back. You can bring economic pressure and harm to a company by striking, that's how unions work.
I see you constantly make this 'love it or leave it' suggestion on HN, but this could lead to a worsening of Google's behavior, not an improvement.
I've been in the industry since the early 90s, and have worked for several startups, as well as IBM, Oracle, and Google, and in every case, I've encountered more sexism and sexual harassment behavior elsewhere. Good lord, Oracle would take engineers to strip clubs on business trips. You're asking someone to quit a company which might be persuadable to change its behavior, and join other companies of tech-bros who don't have sexual harassment training, and often don't even have an internal mechanisms to report abuse. To what, walk out and quit again?
Sexual harassment and sexism in the tech industry is wide spread, and worse in many other companies. You can't run from it, you should organize collective action where you are and make them fire you. Quitting is the easy way out for a lot of companies.
Perhaps you have less respect for Google engineers than I do! If Google is hiring the best, and many of them leave because of moral issues, then Google is left with hiring the second best. You seem to treat all Google engineers as replaceable cogs which are easily swapped out. But just because there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google doesn't mean there won't be a shortage of people of the caliber Google needs to continue at their current level.
Sure, the last few moral people leaving could lead to Google's behavior getting worse, but it would arguably also lead to Google being less successful. Even less people would trust Google as their behavior became "worse".
Perhaps you believe other places are worse because you remember them being worse a number of years ago. But things like sexual harassment training are pretty much nationwide standard these days. I've never been to a workplace that didn't mandate it, and every one of them has a process to report abuse. I am curious how you believe you can work for somewhere that's better than elsewhere when nearly every Alphabet executive has some sort of sexual misconduct that can be associated with them, and it's hard to see what way forward there is for remedying this.
Is Larry Page and Sergey Brin resigning a possible endgoal here? It's hard for me to see an end to the culture of sexual exploitation at a company where it starts at the very top and those people face no penalty.
Oracle was a worse environment than Google in many ways, this is not nostalgia. Political infighting between teams was far worse, to the point that you’d have people yelling in meetings and then deliberately backstabbing and undermining other teams.
On a trip I went to Helsinki, they arranged naked Finnish sauna with beer and made no provision for the females with us, some who were from traditionally conservative cultures. After the sauna, they took the men to a strip club with Estonian and Russian strippers. I walked the female team members back to the hotel.
Startup companies in the Bay Area of course don’t have these processes, many of them don’t even have a legal or HR department if they have less than 50 people.
The toxic bro culture of SV startups has been well documented by female journalists, a lot of it stemming from the VCs themselves.
Google has 90000 people now, no one is irreplaceable, except maybe Jeff Dean :).
Also some people would rather try to use their power to change things they don't like about a company from within rather than assume they have no power to affect change and just leave.
I'm none of those things (well, I'm married but we're child-free by choice and that's not changing), and even if tech employees do have more power than employees in other industries, that doesn't make "quitting" so easy.
And my past work in organized labor certainly gives me a bias here, but I'm of the opinion that if you like the place you work and you enjoy your job -- the appropriate response to bad things happening isn't always to quit (sometimes it is. Sometimes things are too egregious and you walk out. I did this once when I worked retail in college and saw blatant racism targeted at an employee by a regional manager and I walked out), the appropriate response is to fight internally to change things to make them better.
And Amazon will host the Pentagon cloud, and no one really cares, employees aren't derailing things and they sure aren't protesting.
Meanwhile at Google there is one employee driven mess after another, they leak everything to the press, and have no regard for company image or reputation, maybe Google should just show the door to those threatening to quit and start incorporating these lessons into their hiring process.