Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

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This (my) generation has been culturally conditioned against the idea of quitting a job... peers in struggling circumstances create a feeling of looming "economic uncertainty", there's a perception that forcing issues against employers means getting blacklisted, and social media placing wealth over values.

It's also a disseminate problem. Striking against long working hours is easy. Striking against corporate values that enable seemingly distant problems (surveillance states) while working on a friendly low-stress high-pay team... that's hard. Unless you actually care.

Maybe some people are learning they don't actually care... that their "values" were just shallow social posturing, worth less than their stable high-income...

Hopefully, though, some also realize tech is one of the few areas where workers still truly have the freedom to actually demand an ethical employer - which may involve looking elsewhere. Follow-through is always scary, but no worse than uprooting our lives moving to college and then again moving to big-tech cities.

This reads very strangely to me.

> This (my) generation has been culturally conditioned against the idea of quitting a job

This is a super bizarre claim. Wealthy Googlers are afraid to quit their job because of their peers who make a fraction of their pay? We're talking about Silicon Valley workers and somehow they are more afraid to quit their job than the previous generations? A common job strategy is to change jobs every two to three years.

Yes, exactly - it is bizarre. Tech pays very well with no culture of corporate allegiance, yet this generation of skilled in-demand labor with (hopefully) sizable bank accounts does not exercise their economic freedom.

Why?

Maybe fear of radical change and lacking support from peers, or maybe unawareness of what labor resistance actually entails... or, cynically, that their beliefs are spineless social posturing... but I couldn't think of any flattering reasons to walk-out then stay.

Sure, but I mean, if you have Google on your resume, you can work pretty close to anywhere, and a lot of other tech companies will pay competitively for you, right down the street. People should never just... quit without a plan, but six months later, it's hard to imagine that anyone who wanted to leave couldn't have found a new job by now if they were actively looking.

I wonder how participating in a walkout affects that reputation with hiring managers. Actually curious

For the named people organizing it, it probably does reduce their options a fair bit, though there are also companies who would hire for these kind of employees: As long as your company is on the straight and narrow, they're very engaged, enthusiastic, and public people.

Enough unnamed Googlers walked out that most probably would see no ill effects in their options due to having walked out.

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