Speak up, and you're punished, claims ex-Google worker | Hacker News Reader

Speak up, and you're punished, claims ex-Google worker

thetimes.co.uk

37 pointsOJFord12 comments

Apparently HR did an internal audit and found no evidence of retaliation. Which isn't surprising. It just means that for every decision made by a manager in this case, they had a reasonable business justification that wasn't simply a desire to retaliate.

And that's the rub, because this cuts both ways. On the one hand, it's easy enough to come up with a non-retalitory justification for just about any decision. But on the other hand, when an employee puts themselves in this position by speaking out so visibly, then any negative eventuality is going to feel like retaliation. I honestly doubt there would be a distinguishable difference between retaliation and just the normal churn of business. It'd be impossible to tease out the underlying causality. Especially in a company where projects involving hundreds of people are regularly spun up or torn down with only a few weeks notice.

Certainly Google has a disproportionate number of people speaking out internally about the company, either opposing or in favor too any particular outcome. The company culture encourages and rewards this sort bottom-up decision making, to the point that it's relatively common to see the company change course on one decision or another based on the kind of vocal dissent that at most companies would get you fired.

Certainly plenty of people who speak out in dissent continue their careers as normal. Others leave in frustration. If there's a pattern here I certainly don't know what it is.

> Apparently HR did an internal audit and found no evidence of retaliation. Which isn't surprising. It just means that for every decision made by a manager in this case, they had a reasonable business justification that wasn't simply a desire to retaliate.

I'm not sure why you believe that. HR exists to protect the company from its staff. This just screams to me that they were in damage control mode.

I'm not sure anyone should be surprised that after staging a mass protest against a company that that the company no longer thinks highly of them...

No judgement on that action itself, I just think surely she didn't believe it would be without consequence.

With the article behind a paywall I'm wondering if you can tell me what the walkout was staged over?

Firefox reader mode shows more text. It was a "walk out in response to how the company handles allegations of sexual assault."

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google%20walkout&sort=byPopula... shows previous stories on the topic, including "Google Walkout Organizer Claire Stapleton Resigns" with HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125371 . (That article is from The Guardian.)

Stapleton is the ex-Google worker in this linked-to piece.

This extension seems to work well with this and other paywalled sites. There's a Chrome version too by the same author.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

I have a Times login. The article says:

"She claimed that she was surprised Google decided to punish her. “I had really felt the management and executives embraced the walkout,” she said. She further alleged: “People had said to expect retaliation and I thought, ‘Not at Google, not here, this place is different, they embrace people who want to make the world a better place.’”

If that’s the case then the walkout shouldn’t have been necessary.

There's a big difference between the voices that get heard in tech companies and the majority opinion. It's socially unacceptable not to voice support for the walkout (at least it was at my workplace at the time, and we didn't even do any business with Google) so plenty of people feigned support when they really didn't care. And the the minority that really are invested are surprised when there's a lot less support than they thought.

So do I, I made the HN submission, I just find the second part unbelievable.

No entity 'embraces' people acting against it, even if in the interest of a cause it claims to be all for.

It's basically union strike action without a capital-U union. I'm sure no company's ever honestly 'thought', or perhaps even said, 'Yes, you're right, thank you' in the face of union strikes.

It's entirely possible that she believed it would be without consequence. It just doesn't speak highly of her thinking process. It takes an extreme kind of blindness to not think there would be any retaliation for picketing.

I hate Google with a passion, but this article seems a little thin on substance. One person resigning after having some crummy stuff happen isn’t really news.

Also, regardless of the merits of her cause, how did she think her managers would be behind her rallying 20K people to walk out?

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