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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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