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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Why does this exact same objection come up again and again? Why do we have to leave our companies instead of trying to make positive change from within? Why is the only prescribed solution to take flight to new lands, like locusts, staying ahead of the flood? What do we do when there are no more companies to which to flee, and the effects of that which we are fleeing is harming society?

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It's a another version of the argument "If you don't like our country behaving the way I think it should behave, you should leave the country".

Absolutely sometimes the best thing for an individual to do is take their marbles and go home. But equally, sometimes the best thing to do is put your shoulder to pushing the wheels in [what you perceive as] a better direction. Companies (and countries) after all are not stand-alone entities; they are an expression of their constituent parts. Some of this is history/momentum, but a lot of it is just people.

[edit] of course I think the bar for "when should I leave my company" is an awful lot lower than "when should I leave my country".

I'm not sure I agree. At least not completely.

A person is within their rights to try and change the company from within before leaving. But, that will likely come with personal costs (right or wrong).

If those costs get to be too high, the correct action might be to leave. At a company, the impact of leaving could be much higher than the impact of moving to a different country on politics...

Google very much relies on "smart people" to earn money. If enough leave in protest, Google will eventually suffer. It would take a LOT of people leaving the US for there to be any noticeable impact.

Google will suffer a lot more if it continually takes big PR hits over crap like this.

I don’t see people stop using Gmail, Maps, and Search over little PR problems only a small minority care about.

I don't see them doing so over a small amount of "smart people quitting" either.

Because those products are unrelated to AI.

Big players will not (and are not) touching GCP's AI solutions for this exact reason: it's only a matter of time before the virtue signalers are no longer content with policing the decisions of their own company and start targeting customer workloads.

No one outside of the HN crowd and a couple of bubbles on twitter has heard a single thing about this, or cares in the slightest. There was no PR hit.

We are talking about the realm of "Google being a place people want to work"

Demonstrating that management takes petty actions like this is far more convincing than people silently quitting.

I'd be more willing to work for Google if they had a history of not caving in to lynch mobs and punishing the leaders, instead of the other way around.

I'm confused. Are you likening people who are upset about mishandled sexual misconduct allegations to lynch mobs?

I currently work for Google and share your sentiment. There is a small minority of employee activists that really drag the place down and their voices are unfortunately the ones that seem to get amplified. I don't get how they aren't put on PIPs or told to hit the road.

I'd like to say, clearly: I worked at Google and really felt uncomfortable with how a small fraction of the employees dominated the inner communication channels and pretended like everybody agreed with them. Many of us were afraid to speak up after a number of incidents due to the climate. However, over team it really became clear that a small number of people were repeatedly dominating the discourse in an unreasonable way.

I don't think the management is just gonna toss the protestors on PIPs without strong evidence they aren't getting their daily jobs done.

A small group of the most outspoken people always dominates discourse in any group of reasonable scale. It's how group dynamics work. The question that matters is if those attitudes reflect wider attitudes at the company. And I think the answer is yes.

The dominant speakers spoke popular opinions.

Maybe for MTV and NYC...but go out to Google's DCs and you'll find 80%+ conservatives who don't agree with all the anti-military and demonization of the right that goes on internally.

Which is different than what you said before. That there are some who disagree with those views is obvious. But you're claiming a large majority dissent. Even if every DC employee shared your views, which they don't, it wouldn't back your claim

What did I say before that conflicts with the regional and office differences I pointed out?

I never claimed that a large portion dissent.

I'm making statements about absolute numbers. If something like 80% of google employees as a whole are democratic, and 80% of DC techs are conservative, then what you said about regional differences is true, however your claims about the ideas you dislike being held by a small but vocal minority would not be true.

The specific claim I'm addressing is the one that you made and that dekhn echoed, that these are the views of only a minority. To give an extreme example, extrapolating from the opinions of DC techs wouldn't make sense if google employed only a single DC tech.

>And I think the answer is yes.

>The dominant speakers spoke popular opinions.

I'm not sure this is actually the case. There was a survey a year or so back that listed 'Libertarian' as the most common political leaning among SV tech workers [0]. People who reported being 'Very Liberal' were far more comfortable sharing their political opinions at work, though. And judging from the lynch mobs we've seen in the past few years... Well, there's a few good reasons to avoid mentioning libertarian or conservative political views in SV.

0: https://joinlincoln.org/viewpoint-diversity

I don't generally find surveys by libertarian think-tanks that don't provide any methodology information (beyond hinting that respondents were self-selected) to be that representative of reality.

While probably better than the similar survey on blind a year ago, I wouldn't put much trust in it. Nor should you.

Now your statements about comfort are spot on. But consider why that is. The people you discuss fear ostracism, but how does one get ostracized if one is in the majority? It's the same reason a more liberal person might not share their views in a company full of conservatives. The whole silent majority idea is wishful thinking.

> I don't generally find surveys by libertarian think-tanks that don't provide any methodology information (beyond hinting that respondents were self-selected) to be that representative of reality.

Yeah, that's fair.

> The people you discuss fear ostracism, but how does one get ostracized if one is in the majority?

Because there has never in history been a case of a small group of people exercising power over a larger group, even when the larger group could, if organized, easily overcome the smaller. Never happened.

But seriously, this is a game of equilibria. If everyone who speaks against X gets lynched, and people who don't enthusiastically support that lynching find themselves next in line, it doesn't matter how many people actually support X or like lynching. Any individual moving against that system gets lynched, including by the people who dislike both X and lynching, because no one wants to be lynched themselves.

Coming back to this, I'd like to suggest [0] - it is possible for things to be both popular, or commonly known to be true, or what have you AND still be impossible to support or acknowledge without consequences. I think [1] feels relevant to the general situation of "X is declared to be true" as well.

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-pop...

1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

It's on the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/technology/google-walkout...

Their readership is certainly outside of the HN crowd.

to be clear, the folks who are subjects of the NY Times article are fairly friendly with the article authors. You may want to take a look at the history of the authors, and see that the same names come up (mcmillen, whittaker) over and over. It's a complicated situation but the Times tend to cover labor relations at Google far in excess of the true impact of these events.

Not as much as you might think.

Yeah, I bet they suffer as much as Equifax did for leaking 100M American adults’ credit information, or Facebook has suffered for literally experimenting with human subjects by manipulating the home feed to see if users’ mood was influenced. I could go on.

There’s only one meaningful punishment a corporation can suffer, and it’s by design: the death penalty.

> A person is within their rights to try and change the company from within before leaving. But, that will likely come with personal costs (right or wrong).

It is generally the opposite. You usually don't have any right to influence, or even sometimes speak about, the company. The right you do have is to suspend your work and go on strike. Companies are free to negotiate collective agreements that prevent worker to go on strike and instead have them complain to their representatives.

Google have opted for another model where there is no agreement. As such it is up to Google to win the trust of their employees.

> If those costs get to be too high, the correct action might be to leave. At a company, the impact of leaving could be much higher than the impact of moving to a different country on politics...

Impact isn't the same as change. If all people who like ice cream leave Google it doesn't make Google (or necessarily any place) better for people who like ice cream. Which is what they would want.

The whole point of taking action is that you think you are right and therefor shouldn't be the one to have to change, or at least not end up worse for it.

I meant “right” in the “it’s not illegal and your employer can’t physically silence you” sense, not the “you’re legally protected from repercussions” sense.

I think we’re generally in agreement.

The analogy doesn't work too well, because employees of a company are distinct from its owners and decision makers. An employee in a private company is more akin to a civil service bureaucrat in a government, hired to perform some function. And we generally expect civil servants to be apolitical - they still get to vote etc, of course, but in their capacity as citizens, not government workers.

Mind you, I don't think that means that employees (or public workers, for that matter) should just shut up. But the argument for "should just leave" is stronger in this case than it is for citizens.

Hence the bar being much lower. It's not an exact parallel, but it works pretty well. No company is it's executives alone, no country is its government alone.

The analogy fails as one can’t simply “start” their own country, as one can start their own company. Further, a corporation isn’t a democratic institution which openly invites discord. There is a word for when one does this however: insubordination. Here’s an analogy that does work: The owner of a home has the right to determine who abodes in it, and by extension what actions they can engage in. You’re essentially arguing that the opposite, i.e. that private property doesn’t exist.

Political institutions exist to provide a forum for discourse. Private property exists so that the individual can be free of the tyranny of the other by not being forced to make a bargain with whomever decides they want in.

Having said all this, I agree with the spirit of your argument. However, going public and or legal makes you an enemy of the organisation and will more than likely result in having to leave the organisation sooner or later.

A lot of it depends if someone likes/respecte the company or not I think. If I don't care about my employer and their vision, I'd just leave. If you care about the company and customers you might want to stay and try to help achieve change.

My very short opinion on this: politics is the process of working within a system; protesting is the process of removing oneself _from_ the system. The story of the Civil Rights protests would have been very different had African Americans continued to ride the bus.

There’s a place for both, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of overlap. If you want to protest your boss, that’s fine. But I’d encourage you to have your resume up-to-date. Very few people take an activist role in a company and stay employed. But heated discussions and debate are a natural part of any board meeting.

> The story of the Civil Rights protests would have been very different had African Americans continued to ride the bus.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. Most of the most famous actions during the civil rights movement were African Americans doing things that were only illegal because of racist laws supported by cultural white supremacy (lunch-counter sit-ins; pubic buses; sometimes merely existing in certain areas at certain times). Metaphorically, they did "continue to ride the bus", if that means they continued to engage in the same actions involved in the protests, because those actions were eventually made legal. For those interested in learning more about the movement, I recommend "The Children" by David Halberstam. He makes clear just how dangerous being a civil rights protestor was.

As another comment points out, I was referring to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I live in Alabama and that is a lesson we teach our kids (there’s a wonderful book introducing these very harsh themes at a level even young kids can understand: “I Am Rosa Parks”).

Those involved were willing to take incredible personal risks in forms of protest until their voices were represented in politics.

Here’s a pretty solid write up. The emergence of MLK on the national scene even had its origin in this boycott. There isn’t a figurative interpretation here: the black community in Montgomery refused to ride the bus until it was desegregated. They kept this up for over a year until the Supreme Court forced the city to integrate its busing.

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-...

Uh the bus protest was them riding the bus and continuing to ride the bus. You missed literally the entire events and purpose of one of the most well documented protest in history.

I think you're missing part of the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

> What do we do when there are no more companies to which to flee

A more interesting conversation for sure. There are lots of ways to make software besides companies. Lots of great software that got made before there was a corporate entity supporting it, even indirectly. Some great software written entirely in opposition to a corporate entity.

Don't obsess too narrowly on "GPL" or "open source" or whatever. A lot of software is artisanal, all the way from making websites to make firmwares for space devices, bought and sold on the digital equivalent of a fleamarket and not by the concentration of some corporate entity. Some software is bought/sold at auction, like government contracts.

No one is objecting to corporations generally. There's a reaction against (1) the conformity of it all and (2) the pedigree of the people who work there.

How do supposedly smart people, with their liberal arts and STEM educations, represent a shareholder group that is most likely going to treat the ordinary person unjustly?

For example, it's possible to research AI at universities. No one is going to pressure you into making target-acquisition image recognition or person-of-interest mass-surveillance tech at a university. But these are exactly the sorts of things Google was selling in its Maven contract. They want to sell fucking weapons dude.

We have this intuitive idea that a lot of people are okay with selling the weapons basically because the pay is really fucking good. The controversy is that the Northrup Grumman employees are the "other," and Google engineers were like soft kids from Ivy League schools who are friendly and nice and watch lots of animal videos and crack good jokes.

It just turns out they want money too sometimes, a lot of it. The line has finally been crossed where people have to either quit or shut up.

>> For example, it's possible to research AI at universities. No one is going to pressure you into making target-acquisition image recognition or person-of-interest mass-surveillance tech at a university

You might want to look into the vast amount of military tech that was developed at research universities, often indirectly driven via availability of grants. Academia isn't really a safe haven here.

> There are lots of ways to make software besides companies.

I know you’re interpreting “what happens when there are no more companies to flee to” with respect to software engineers, but I have to ask: how would you make software if there were no companies making computers?

It's the same line as when people complain about the direction of politics and get a "well then move to a different country" response.

At least in politics you can vote. As a worker, you have very little control in direction of a large employer.

I believe the idea is that employees should be seen but not heard.

Democracy is all well and good, as long as it knows its proper place in the corporate hierarchy.

I certainly agree with the notion of trying to affect change from within but how viable is that at a company like Google? In looking at just the recent past for example we see sexual harassment mishandling, work on censorship-enabled search, Pentagon contracts, double Dutch tax avoidance schemes etc.

At some point don't you conclude that the distance between your own value system and that of the corporation you work is just too great?

if you want a say in the policies of your workplace, a traditional corporation isn't the kind of company you should be working for. you explicitly don't have a say unless the structure of the organization gives you that power, which is explicitly the case for cooperative corporations only.

if you want real change, start a cooperative.

Voice versus exit: this is pretty much an open question, but it's central to really-really discussing political change.

At the very least you need to be aware that those are options and not be surprised when someone argues that exit >> voice.

> What do we do when there are no more companies to which to flee, and the effects of that which we are fleeing is harming society?

Start your own company...or destroy those that are trying to destroy you

A public protest is not advocating change from within.

Companies like Google encouraged a continuation of a college like atmosphere, but it is not college. It's a job. If you're not there to work and add value to the company, the what are you doing?

In college it may be ok to demonstrate against the EVIL THING, but work is not college. In college you're paying to be there. At work, you're getting paid to add value.

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