Google employees are staging a sit-in to protest reported retaliation | Hacker News Reader

Google employees are staging a sit-in to protest reported retaliation

techcrunch.com

Someone posted preliminary sit-in attendance numbers. Attendance ranges from 50-150 per office in the larger offices. Anecdotally, I've seen very little discussion and energy this time compared to the walkout. Back then, one couldn't walk 20 feet without hitting some kind of exhortation to join the walkout. This time, more people might find out about this sit-in through this HN story than through internal channels.

The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue. The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public. It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.

Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

I hope this is a bellwether for the rest of SV, the Bay Area, and the rest of the country.

The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public.

Ditto.

It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.

When "movements" start going around using authoritarian intimidation tactics to keep their own ranks in line, this is a sign that the movement is no longer guided by principles. It's devolved into yet another group which is in a power struggle against a different group.

There were plenty of "movements" within the Google-Intranet using tactics that are at least cognate to authoritarianism - namely bullying, harassment and intimidation - to pursue their politically-skewed goals and drive political opponents out. It's not something that's in serious dispute by now - the reporting, even in court-submitted documents like the James Damore complaint, is way too clear for that. And yes, of course this is severely dysfunctional for any sort of enterprise. We actually have laws on the books that are meant to prevent these things; though the enforcement is quite inconsistent.

SF Googler here.

It may certainly be the case that people are experiencing "outrage fatigue" and that many have evaluated the claims of retaliation and found them unconvincing, but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to support these conclusions. The original walkout simply got way more publicity from the start, fuelled by a massive news story about Andy Rubin. But the biggest thing was it was officially sanctioned and promoted by the company, as far as I was concerned. Nearly everyone got an email from their manager and manager's manager in support of the walkout. Screensavers were changed en-masse to promote the walkout. Lots of people got up and tagged along. However, I didn't get the sense there was much awareness at that time of the specific demands, let alone the internal website that promoted it. Most people were just "along for the ride".

On the other hand, this sit-in wasn't planned as far in advance and details were not firmed up until the absolute last minute. Flyer designs were only sent out the day before for the retaliation event, so there wasn't much time to build awareness and momentum. And there wasn't a major news story about one of the company's execs to fuel conversation, just a few personal stories that trickled out in niche mailing lists. It had a very different feel, and I think it's hard to attribute that to one factor when there are so many in play.

Interesting I did not realize that about the first one!

I can imagine a company thinking they could take the wind out of it by supporting it. An escalation of conflict was probably better for the protestors than the company at that point.

It wasn't officially supported by the company. Note that f7aeb9 said "as far as I am concerned".

Not officially, but the experience of someone there says they perceived them as unofficially supporting it, that managers and others did a variety of things to encourage it in a seemingly coordinated or at least consistent way, which is interesting.

And like I said, I can see why they would do this as a strategic move, I don't think it implies anything about the justness of the cause either way or the actual morality of the company either way, just a strategic move.

> Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

Because the protest is such a matter of indifference at Google that... you need to take extreme measures not to be identified talking about it?

In fairness, they wrote something that could end up in the media. Who wants that kind of attention?

Googler in Bay Area here, non-throwaway account. Don't know enough about the situation to comment on any of the details or form an opinion, but I can attest to the fact that I didn't really notice the sit-in, for better or worse.

Not to detract from or endorse anyone's opinion, I'm just bothered by the weird conspiracy vibe in this thread. I signed the Dragonfly letter so it feels like posting a small anecdote to Hacker News is relatively benign, but maybe I'm naive :)

(My opinions here, not my employers. You know the drill.)

But no media article will be able to identify the poster through their IP address. So unless you re-use your username, Tor or not shouldn't make any difference.

Sure, but Tor is overkill for any real or imagined threat in this case. So frankly, I don’t see the reason to single that aspect out.

I don't work for Google. My company has strict policies to discourage employees talking to the public about internal affairs. That was the case with my previous two employers too. Frankly, it makes sense from their POV to not have their dirty laundry made public. And I take similar precautions as a matter of self-preservation anyway. I don't want anything I write here to be used against me either by my current employer or any of my future employers.

Google could be keeping track of which of their internal IPs visited which HN pages, etc.

How would they do this? HN is served over https, which would make this a massive and deliberate undertaking. The only possibilities I know of would be an intercepting proxy (don't know whether Google uses this, I doubt it) or tracking the size of payloads (which would require infrastructure explicitly and only for this purpose).

Payload size would be very helpful, but they don't need that to shortlist candidates. Correlating the timestamps of when the comment appeared on HN and when the domain name was accessed from an internal IP may be enough, subject to luck. Considering that Google is already tracking (crawling) the entire web for its core business, adding a few tweaks should not make much of a difference to their system load.

There's no reason for them to even tell us that they're using Tor, except to raise the specter of some retaliatory bogeyman.

Social media is hardly rational on topics like this.

You know they've lost hearts when memegen ain't lit

The whole point of the sit-in is that people are retaliated against for participating. If you believe this is the case, that's a strong disincentive against participating in the sit-in.

So in your opinion, whats a good outcome here?

Even 5 years ago if you had said there would be a protest kind of thing with even 50-150 people per Google office protesting... that would have seemed like an unlikely thing.

It's still news worthy enough that's on techcrunch.

I've enough friends working at Google to know that they have a pretty strong mandated daily dose of kool-aid, where you are elite and only valuable if you work at google and adopt the one true Googler world view.

Certain factions at Google demanded and ensured that anyone not in conformance at Google no longer work there. Then they are shocked and surprised when the same executives use the same mechanisms to hurt them, for the exact same reason - business reasons.

Google abandoned "Don't be evil" a long time ago. It's time for people to realize that making corporations all-powerful is a really bad thing, even when they seem to be doing your bidding.... for now.

I managed to interact with lots of people who work for Google daily. The culture "The Circle" illustrated is spot on but I guess making 4x or 5x federal median wage would do it.

4-5x federal median wage is new grad level at Google.

I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee pressure. I can’t imagine Bell Lab employees had all that much leverage against Ma Bell.

That's not true. The majority of google employees are in areas that directly impact the bottom line such search, ads, sales, technical infrastructure.

I believe ads, but search core search stuff can't be that many people.

Why not? Search is an incredibly complex problem.

search is complex, but google spend well over a decade building infrastructure to enable search to scale without massive people count. it's a modest number of very productive people.

I’ve often wondered this myself. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on search alone. I can’t even fathom what they’re all doing. And then what is everyone filling their time with?

Google builds a lot more of its own infrastructure than other companies can afford to do, all the way down to the hardware. They also change things more often internally than you will see with public-facing API's.

What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to slow down. Where does it end?

https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-...

The new headcount is coming from cloud. Lots of sales people in particular.

Rewriting code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378

> Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years.

Worked there, It might be that I was in a wrong place (and folks I know), but high quality standards, sometimes vague deadlines that can be moved desire to do the best thing result in a very slow dev process.

I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing

> I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing

I disagree. I feel AWS definitely has more options, functionality, and better enterprise support, but in many areas GCP is much easier to manage for smaller teams. For example, if I were starting a startup, I would definitely favor GCP over AWS right now.

They're not working for the competition.

Posting to HN via Tor.

Developing Thanos snap gimmicks and other region specific Easter eggs?

As much as we joke about this, a google doodle is such a great sticky "come back and see what's new tomorrow, and while you are here, maybe search which will make us money" tactic.

I kind of suspect that the eight or ten people that made Bell Labs influential might have had some kind of leverage.

The original walk out had an estimated count of 20,000. Any estimated counts for the sit-in yet? Or just anecdotal...is it a lot of employees?

Aren't people worried that they'll all be fired for protesting?

People are within their rights to protest in public places, of course, but not on private property and certainly not on the clock.

I'm not sure how it works from the business's perspective, but couldn't Google just get rid of all those people at once? Is that legal to do?

From Google's perspective, if they just fired all these people, there would be some blowback but there would be no future walkouts/protests/disruptions at work. There are plenty of smart people who would take those jobs at Google in a heartbeat.

Can someone explain this to me? Like if I did this at any place I've ever worked, I'd be gone in an instant.

Many Google employees are basically the most sought after people in their respective fields. Google spends obscene amounts to recruit and then retain the best possible workforce. Many of these engineers could barly raise their hand and would get hundreds of offers from competitors. As such they have much more leverage and get paid a lot more than employees at even other tech companies outside FAANG.

It is in Google‘s interest to generally retain a maximum possible number of employees. Because there‘s a limited supply and also because you don‘t want them working at your competitor. In the weirdest scenarios you might end up in some really kafkaesque situatuon where you earn like 300 to 500k a year for basically not doing that much. The main thing is that you stay put and don’t go work for someone else. Maybe you’ve seen HBO’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like Big Head on the roof.

The implicit unionization benefits of being too smart to readily fire. Interesting.

This is likely the only segment of the labor market outside of executives that are highly valued by Corporations. Naturally, they have to be coddled and not abused like most of the rest of the American workforce.

I wouldn't be easily fooled. Companies try as hard as they can to turn engineering talent into a commodity, and they're relatively successful. The High-Tech Employee Antitrust suit is an example of this.

If you need to work for a living, employers will commodify your role to the best of their abilities.

Sure, but those are the competing forces at work, right?

Employees: get the most money for their labor. Employers: get the labor for the least possible money.

It may not be ethical in your viewpoint, but those are the natural forces at play. It follows that employers will commodify my role as part of their strategy to pay me less. So I take other actions to make myself more valuable. As long as those actions are strictly technical (learning new technology, rather than management), I am quite happy to play this natural game driven entirely by reason.

Companies are vehicles for accumulated wealth and power for the ownership class.

Labor, on the other hand, has very few vehicles to accumulate their wealth and power. In fact one such vehicle, the union, is often legally neutered such that private contracts made between unions and employers can be nullified in favor of the ownership class (see: right-to-work laws and union security agreements).

There's an inherent asymmetry of power between labor and the ownership class enshrined in both law and contemporary markets. We live in a nation started by the wealthy merchant class, for the wealthy merchant class, and it shows in our labor history.

So, yes, there are competing forces that are very unequal. You as an individual engineer will have little clout against, say, an industry-wide anti-poaching agreement like we saw in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust case.

There are other "not quickly replaceable" folks. Pilot and police unions, for example, still seem to have a fair amount of power.

But they're generally unionized. Google employees are not.

Ah, okay. Nurses then. Though they haven't chosen to do much en masse yet.

Nurses are unionized and politically active: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2019/04/...

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/apr/02/washington-nur...

Pretty much the only high-paying job that isn't unionized are doctors, but they use the American Medical Association to limit supply.

Thé AMA is more like a medieval guild than a union.

It's around 20% of nurses.

They could just quit then organize together and form a competing company with stronger ethics. Would be good to see this happen to a lot of near monopolies.

Google employees should unionize. They should set the example.

How does a sit in work?

I had a post about how generic the signs were in that link and it got modded to oblivion and "flagged" so I guess no one had to be made uncomfortable by constructive criticism. What a great little microcosm of the larger issues with google.

Sounds like a normal day at work.

A big company is difficult to manage. Why aren't these employees being more effective by targeting the abusers instead?

how did the managers doing the alleged retaliating get hired at google in the first place? I thought the crazy I interview process existed to get the right people?

Getting downvoted here but really not sure why - don't live in Silicon Valley (or the States for that matter) and it was a genuine question.

Haaa.. thanks for the laugh.

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