Google Protest Leader Leaves
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1. These people are rabble-rousers who will never be happy and are disrupting the work environment at Google.
2. These people are highlighting legitimate problems within the company and are trying to enact positive change.
Take your pick. But be aware of both narratives. And be aware that neither of them is unreasonable.
With that said, I have not followed this closely. For all I know, that evidence does exist and/or Google leadership has chosen not make said evidence publicly available.
Seems reasonable to me.
On the other hand if the situations you mentioned are unrelated to the Women’s March, which it seems they are, then I really don’t see them as being relevant to whether or not the people in question were rabble rousers. Protestors are not a constant set of people and each protest and the organizers of said protest have to be looked at individually, at least in terms of determining whether 1. or 2. is most reasonable.
Otherwise, it’s a broad generalization of “protestors”, which would inadvertently make 2. the more reasonable narrative as well because 1. would be moot to the specifics of the particular situation.
Companies don't have thoughts or emotions. A company's actions are a result of the individuals that make it up. When you see controversy like the China thing or military contracts, that's just how decisions get made in big companies. Someone wants to get money from the military. Some other people don't. They discuss it and the company makes a decision by individuals taking action. People inside Google that wanted to do military contracts heard the counterarguments and didn't carry on. That's all.
Maybe Larry Page thought "hey, this is bad for our brand" and fired all in charge. But that seems very unlikely. What seems likely to me is that the people that wanted to do the project heard the controversy and decided on their own that it wasn't a good idea.
As the company gets bigger, there are certainly more and more of these controversies. It does get hard to manage when you feel personally responsible for what others have done and your voice is not heard. That is why people are leaving.
Furthermore, I specifically mean the leadership at Google when I simply say Google. I’m referring directly to the people deciding resolution or retaliation. Whether that’s a single person or a group of people, it doesn’t matter. By enacting a change that’s protested for, they’re legitimizing the concerns set forth by the protest (aka supporting the notion that they’re real moral issues and the opposite of rabble-rousing)
This statement alone should be enough to reverse Citizens United vs FEC.
No, this one is unreasonable. It's this weird narcissistic thing that people do where they define a person's identity by how that person feels about them.
Just because I hate you doesn't mean I'm a hater. I also like things, just not you. Just because I'm unhappy with you doesn't mean that I am not happy, it means I'm not happy with you.
More broadly, you seem to be saying that the only reason anyone is skeptical of the Google protestors is that that the protestors don't like that person. That's quite an assumption. In reality, people simply disagree about things. And there's room for reasonable disagreement.
The difference is that once you establish that it's "defining someone's identity", then disagreement with that person is "denying their right to exist", and so basically violence, from which the person you disagreed with deserve protection. These are the lines along which this kind of conversations typically proceeded inside Google.
Hyperbole doesn't even begin to describe this.
The tech echo-chamber is fostering unrealistic opinions about life and liberty.
In your example, the co-worker may be "your disagreeable co-worker" (definition), or they might simply be "your agreeable co-worker" who momentarily disagrees with you or your ideas.
If your opinion about someone is right enough, often enough, that it serves as a workable summary of that person, that (ideally) a lot of people agree on, who have no vested interest in agreeing, then you could start to be objectively convinced there was no difference between your opinion of that person, and the definition of that person. But no simple definition of a person is ever going to capture the whole story - people are too complex.
Majority of googlers wanted maven. They wanted search in China.
Biggest change to culture is people getting tired of SJW outrage. And a focus back on our users and business
Genuinely curious about this - was there a poll or something?
Now, in many places, where there was one fascinating discussion, one sees only find a few remaining lonely activists talking with each other and the void. There's a certain hypersensitivity to perceived offense. Large areas of the company are now in information silos. Live questions at TGIF no longer happen. Internal social media is no longer funny or interesting. Ever discuso forum of meaningful size is getting "community standards moderation".
Yes, it looks like the activists are slowly and steadily losing the war. I wish they'd admit defeat. At this point, they're prolonging the inevitable. But still, they're going to lose, one exercise of soft power at a time.
But what's left behin? A waste. Silence. A desert where nothing grows. It's unfortunate. It's sad. But it had to be done.
The organization is a husk of itself, unable to maintain services for more than a few dozen months, with a disinterest in improving anything that doesn't make PR headlines (eg: Google Fi RMAs, IPv6 support inside GCP, worsening search results, etc). Eventually this will cause Google to join AOL & Yahoo, though Android & Search should provide sizable staying power.
I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.
It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.
Microsoft's still playing their old games FYI, they have not shaken their prior reputation (esp. with their abhorent behaviour at Linuxfest Northwest 3 or 4 years ago), and they've essentially scuttled QA (hence certain Win10 updates deleting your files, among other recent bugs). There was a recent push to gut the MS Partner program's benefits, which had predictable results. IMO they are using Oracle's business model currently, albeit with a few thousand extra developers.
Source, please.
Of those 7k a smaller number were Google employees (it does not say the number) and among them 65% approved of censored search.
Put another way, even though the macro blind community was against. Googlers in said group were for it. Showing googlers are more likely to be for than against
Many people hold strong beliefs that conflict with the strong beliefs of others and engage in open debate rather than walk-outs. I can only assume Whittaker realized that her views would not prevail, but felt that she was nonetheless in the right, and therefore resorted to alternative means of pressing her point.
The fact is also such that most pioneers would not end up having chosen a better direction than status quo.
The harder some people try and toe the line, the harder some other people will try to rebel, and then the system starts trending more towards extremes.
They do not have a monopoly on talent and they are actually fearful of being no longer seen as the #1 workplace option for top candidates. Protesting as a Google employee gives you much more leverage than an outsider will ever have (unless you have the $$ to buy off a handful of senators).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
For example, I left my country 20 years ago because I wanted a better future and I had no desire nor conviction to stay and try to make that future happen there. Of those who stayed, most had no other choice. However, there's a non-negligible number of people who stayed despite having opportunities to leave, precisely because they are willing to fight to make things better.
> I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.
I don't think that objecting to your company's AI work for DoD or plans to comply with Chinese internet search regulations fall under any of them.
What did the "Open Research Group" at Google actually build?
"Protected concerted activity".
If you want a good primer, "Labor Law for the Rank and Filer" is a good one.
How is an outside ethics panel going to affect their working conditions? The people on the panel don't have any say on employees' pay, promotions, disciplinary actions, assignments, or anything else that might affect their working conditions.
The idea was to have some people from outside the company look at the tech and its potential hazards and provide some input on the ethics of developing and deploying it. People inside the company said, No, we don't want that particular viewpoint to have a seat at the table on this outside committee. The ethics panel had nothing at all to do with their working conditions.
The employees of google would then be expected to produce and maintain these projects. That's their work. At the least, they're expected to share a roof with these projects, and profits from the work they do could be spent on these other projects, or vice-versa.
'Working conditions' includes those things I mentioned: pay, promotions, hours, etc.
The AI ethics panel may or may not have led to a change in the scope of 'work.' We'll never know, because the panel was disbanded. Presumably Google is now making decisions about future AI work without the benefit of the ethics panel.
In any event, organizing a protest against the composition of this outside panel that had exactly zero power to change Google employees' working conditions does not fall under the NLRA. Apparently Meredith Whittaker was counseled along the same lines, which is why she resigned after trying to pressure Google into changing their decision by using publicity via the press, rather than suing under the NLRA.
29 U.S.C. Sec. 157
Do you think that objecting to a business model or alleged risks thereof falls under the category of "mutual aid and protection" of other workers?
Have you made any effort to investigate who Meredith Whittaker is on your own?
Her work on AI ethics was much appreciated and celebrated precisely because she was a distinguished contributor. The cultural aversion to building weapons is not novel thing in that culture.
Typically when you see someone engaged in "technology ethics" their professional career is based on limiting or stopping the technology, rather than building or advancing the technology. See, for example, stem cell ethics. Companies don't typically set up adversarial organizations within themselves. A more usual approach is to set up temporary "red teams" to address specific issues.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/compliancedepartment.as...
Another organization is the quality control department of a manufacturer. They also tend to report independently to top management, and they function similarly.
What exactly was that?
Just looking at the titles I expect something similar in quality to articles debunked here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09866
The question is not why would you publicly protest actions of your employer. The question is why would you expect, or even want, to work there while you do.
Also, do whistleblower laws protect you from retaliation if what you're blowing the whistle on isn't illegal?
The claims of retaliation fell shortly after that.
I don't really understand this, the people accused of retaliation against Claire Stapleton are women as well. Why would they retaliate?
You cannot be "retaliated against" if you aren't engaging in revelations of illegal behaviour. These people were not doing the latter, when you look at the details. They were merely protesting against things they didn't like, but which aren't illegal, and in one case, didn't exist at all (Google underpaid men, not women).
If there's no illegal behaviour, there's no whistleblowing, and if there's no whistleblowing, then reducing "job opportunity" (which is of course not a right) is just ordinary corporate performance management in response to an employee behaving badly.
Is that generally illegal in the US? if not then what specifically does the retaliation have to in response to to become illegal?
e.g I would expect negative retaliation in response to poor quality work or slacking off etc, and would expect it to be legal. This person's actions would be considered intentional bad PR, so what specifically about retaliating to it is illegal?
(Genuine question)
This is basic compliance training for any US employment, and the EU has similar laws. Where do you live and work that you don't know this?
But, I'd imagine, exceptionally difficult for a complainant to prove.
There are many ways around the law. It happens everyday: "oopsie your team has to work on something else, double oopsie you're no working on AI anymore you'll just work on our CSV parser, that's were the money is these days. Ah ? What are you saying ? You don't want to work on that ? Well feel free to resign, we'll sign you a $200k check if you forget about it", &c.
It's completely expected for a company to get rid of individuals on the payroll who are badmouthing the company they work for.
Why would anyone willfully employ people to work against the company's interest?
It's the same old discussion about whether something is right just because it's legal or allowed. Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.
In my opinion, what Whittaker is doing is, in a way, analogous to civil disobedience. And, just like with civil disobedience, reprisals are expected. It's worth keeping in mind that those reprisals aren't automatically right by virtue of being expected, just as her actions aren't automatically right by virtue of being similar to civil disobedience.
In other words, some of us feel we can't afford to, as another commenter put it, "leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace". I believe this attitude -- that science and engineering should somehow remain orthogonal to and decoupled from ethics and morality -- to be downright pernicious to the society.
It's actually not about legality. I didn't even suggest that.
>Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.
As I said, it is expected to do it. Because companies have their own interests. The interests of the shareholders in Google's case. And Google is expected to act to protect them.
This includes getting rid of employees that act to sabotage the company, in this case by publicly badmouthing it.
Thing is, part of Googles identity is "don't be evil". A vital part of this is stopping whenever you (unintentionally) do something evil. This should not be a problem for Google at all or reason to loose trust in an employee. Unless, of cause, the company has changed. And that's what those story's area about and why we need them: To make sure the public image of google actually reflects what the company now actually is.
Btw: To those saying "why don't you just quit as protest"? For one that makes it easy to be dismissed as disgruntled ex-employee. But more important is the same reason you don't just leave your country of family whenever you disagree or have a problem with those. Cutting ties is a last resort that shouldn't be necessary.
I definitely don't. I definitely applaud efforts to improve things (relationships, companies, ...).
But going public ("airing your dirty laundry") is a kind of an ultimatum - "I have no other option to enforce what I want than to public shame" - and, while potentially effective, it's also damaging for the other party (and, ultimately, the "whistle-blower").
And at that point, it seems that the values are already so misaligned (whether the employee, or the company, changed is ultimately not relevant) that "divorce" seems like the only option. I definitely wouldn't want to stay in a relationship with someone if they intentionally hurt me (regardless if it was "my fault" or not).
Publicly badmouthing the company you work for is indeed sabotage.
These are not the same thing at all.
In the US, talking about improving working conditions is also protected, but it's also not whistleblowing, either.
As a lawyer, i can tell you a lot of people badly misunderstand what "protected concerted activity" covers. It is not about your individual complaints. Explicitly not.
See, e.g., https://www.employerlaborrelations.com/2019/04/30/nlrb-publi...
"Charging Party 2 posted a 23-minute live video on Facebook during work hours and while in uniform talking about the discipline for wearing improper shoes and the confidentiality provision in the disciplinary notice, referencing the wage-and-hour lawsuits, making crude and disparaging jokes and comments about a supervisor, and stating that by asking Charging Party 2 to sign something interfering with free speech, the conduct of the company’s officials was “against the United States Constitution and you need to be shot on sight.”
As far as i can discern, hacker news would consider this protected because it complains, somewhere, about their working condition, and was in fact done as a direct response to being disciplined.
However, NLRB says
"The Division of Advice found that although Charging Party 2 referred to subjects in the video that could have been relevant to employees’ mutual aid or protection, the comments were entirely individual complaints and there was no indication that Charging Party 2 was speaking for other employees or seeking to act in concert with others. ... "
(They found it okay to fire this person)
In fact, the company had filed defamation lawsuits against the charging parties over the facebook videos, and the NLRB found that was okay too, because they weren't for protected activity.
It's obvious why you would fire someone for trying to start a union, or for turning down your sexual advances.
I do not understand why it should be preferable to say "oh well, nothing to be done, time to quit" rather than be a force for change. The former is easy, but it does little to correct systemic problems that affect many of your peers.
Also, you make "accept paychecks" sound like you're accepting some sort of favor. Paychecks are not charity; they are compensation. You produce something of value, and you receive something of value in return.
Not everyone has the freedom to instantly change jobs. The world might be a better place if employees had the right to whistle blow without being threatened with homelessness or fleeing to Russia.
Unions striking and protesting against their companies for better wages seems acceptable. Why is protesting for ethical reasons without quitting faux pas?
Ethics protests aren't so enshrined for one. The views of ethics are often personal and ideologically entangled to some degree. Self selection has been more favored and the protests bring to mind the "obvious" but assailable objection "Why not just quit and associate with others more like-minded." It gets into messy areas of rights of association in ideal vs practice. Ideology isn't protected and is explicitly trumped by other areas like anti-discrimination laws.
Many can see "strawman" can of worms being opened (they may be reasonable in this case but what of successors) accepted as a norm without a sensible defined law or doctrine. There were the whole clerks refusing shall issue marriage licenses and nobody wants a situation disrupted by free rider "do nothing vegans in the slaughterhouse" or similar absurdities.
This isn't saying the current situation is ideal at all but that changes are non-trivial and there are reasons to suspect the precedent would be preferrable to most.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
Source: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
If you don't like something the US government is doing, you generally aren't going to leave. You are either going to ignore it, or try to change it. Even if your employer is the Federal government, few people would expect you to quit. If your problem is with the exact portion of the government where you are working, then some might expect you to quit but few would bat an eye if your next job happened to also be with the federal government.
What is happening here is akin to being forced out of government work for critizing the government; and we do not accept that behaviour.
I don't think anyone is that surprised, but that doesn't mean that it's right.
> I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize. I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
Good for you, but they decided to do something else. I don't think they were denouncing Google as heartily as you seem to suggest. They obviously had hope that they could change things. We're also talking about old veterans of the company. How do you know that they didn't do everything that they could internally before escalating things publicly?
When the somewhat immoral nature of that intrudes on people's thoughts, they can sort of silence it by finding fault with the person who IS following their conscience.
Going forward as an NYU employee, as a university researcher without an advanced degree, she will be lucky to clear $60k/year. In New York. Doing the exact same work she has been doing for the last two years
> If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize
Or maybe you'd stay, and maybe you'd retaliate against whistleblowers. There is no way to know, it's moot speculation. What we do know is that if the people who retaliated against the whistleblower had acted like you say you would have acted, they wouldn't have been around to retaliate.
Their worry is that competition will be started by the people they've not hired and kept on the bench. I'd imagine a large amount of their top-level hiring is driven by taking minds off of the market, more than optimising their output.
Yes. There are entire teams full of such people.
How would person X discover this?
go out there, talk to people, find if it's really bullshit, and if it is, change it. there are so many interesting problems to fix that nobody should have time to do bullshit jobs
Salaries are also deductible, so they get the talent in their pool, off the market, adding a small % of value, whilst also being able to offset taxes on record profits.
It's a pretty nice win-win for them.
Eg. Fuchsia OS might have been started because Google saw a bussines oppurtunity in writing an open source capabilities OS. Or, it might have been started to keep smart OS engineers from leaving the company.
Android has a bit of a better claim, as more of the userspace stack was written for it. It also wasn't started by Google (although they bought Android Inc. years before it was released publicly).
The idea it's just a Linux flavor is sort of like saying iOS is "just a build of OSX". I.e., gross simplification.
I don't work at a FAANG company, nor have I ever been to SV, nor do I know anyone who works at one of the many enormous tech companies around SV.
In the TV show Silicon Valley they have characters who sit around unassigned doing nothing at the Google-like company in the show. Does this actually happen? Are there people hired at these companies who just don't have a project? Its entirely feasible that Google could afford to do this just to create a dearth of engineers in the area.
The show is (by design) over the top. But there is a piece of truth in it. That’s why it’s funny for everyone who has been at these companies because everyone can see real-life resemblances.
Before someone downvotes me: I am implying that SOME people are like this. By no means the majority or god-forbid everyone. Resting till vesting is a real thing though.
Organizational/planning/managerial waste of expensive developer time is real and huge. I'd be surprised if companies the size of Google didn't do similar things some of the time, and if their management's a little more clueful than average they might even make such light-weight or non-assignments official and highly visible to make them easier to account for.
Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146
Replace Java with Go (not much of a change, all things considered!) and that's exactly what Google seems to be doing. It's a big problem for them in the long run because it does mean accruing a mass of technical debt that will not necessarily be easy to get rid of. You'd expect "smart" folks in a tech-oriented enterprise to do better than that, especially if they're unutilized otherwise, but it can't be easy to do that sort of management at Google scale.
She would be better off as an independent activist, a face for other disgruntled employees who have to remain anonymous because they have responsibilities to family etc.
The early moment seemed to have support but it seemed to sort of fizzle later on... but the media attention remained making it really hard to get a feel for the real scope of these issues / how many google folks shared their views.
I've worked long enough to encounter management who would retaliate, and employees that once they find a cause are willing / do everything they can to die on it. I don't know if ANY of what happened at google is one or the other or both or none.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-wa...
So to clarify, both of the female Google employees who lead/organized the protests have now left because they say they faced retaliation. That looks very bad for Google.
Of the walkout organizers alone, four out of seven have now left.
On the other hand, if you're organizing a walkout, you're probably pretty fed up already. How far are you from quitting at that point? Probably not very. If you organize the walkout and nothing changes, even if there is zero retaliation, do you quit?
At a minimum, this probably indicates that there was not enough improvement, fast enough, at Google.
Note well: I am not saying that there was not retaliation. I am saying that this, by itself, does not prove retaliation.
How dissatisfied? I'd guess pretty bad. Dissatisfied to the point that you're willing to do something that has some possibility of costing you your job. So they want to stay, and yet they're not that far from being fed up enough to leave. (Or so it seems to me, someone who is not at all in that situation...)
I get the impression we'd agree on that point much more today than we did then.
>In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
>Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote.
Both are now gone.
Retaliation or not, there would be some change. So any change, not sure I buy is/isn't retaliation.
I'm sure there is another side to this story. Nobody has an infinite amount of time or effort. If you're spending your time organizing protests rather than doing the job you're actually paid to do, you shouldn't be surprised that your coworkers and manager would be upset that they have to pick up the slack and try to replace you.
When I got back I was on the performance improvement plan, told any attempt to transfer would be blocked, and so I just stopped showing up. Never heard from them again. (I was there for 6 years and my last performance review was "Superb". Probably not the type of person they want to drive away. But it was time.)
The only trace I can find of that group/team/whatever is that she leads^Wled it. What does it do?
> in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
So side gigs need approval, and if there's a conflict of interest (such as: preventing your employer from building something that looks similar to your side gig) you'll be asked which side you're on. Sounds pretty normal to me.
The rhetoric in the article actually implies that this was an existing thing that only became a problem once she started protesting about google's generous severance package to an employee who was found to be sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources to the victims of sexual assault/harassment at the google workplace.
That's the thing about retaliation. Unless the retaliator is really bad at this, it is always going to look gray-area, because you're shading available policy to reach a desired outcome.
You want to do it that way precisely because it plays on some peoples' preconceptions, completely aside from not breaking black-letter law.
A lot of folks will see a enviable company, assume the Powers that Be must get most of it right, and assume the person they already knew was a troublemaker (they were contradicting their betters, weren't they?) was also bad at their job.
EDIT: To clarify, Google's reaction isn't the disqualifier, it's that the employee's action of staging a political walkout isn't legally protected since it conflicts with contractual duties and isn't a typical case of utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing illegal activity. That type of channel is typically what's protected from retaliation. Not to mention working with someone accused of a crime isn't illegal. Association is a freedom and lobbying to change it is purely political.
Whether the organizers were covered by the NLRA is another matter; those with direct reports are likely excluded by the 'supervisors' exemption, which has been expanded over the years to cover pretty much anyone in a managerial role. For those who are covered, Google's actions could absolutely meet the legal definition of retaliation.
As an aside, the legal standards for what constitutes 'retaliation' are not the only ones that matter. They may manage to avoid a lawsuit, but they will suffer harm to their reputation regardless. I, for one, could not care less whether the law allows them to retaliate against the protest organizers. To me, this is just one in a long line of reasons why I scratched Google off my "short list" of potential employers.
> In an email to colleagues, Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
From the aforelinked Guardian article:
> In the letters, Stapleton said that two months after the walkout, she was demoted and “told to go on medical leave” despite not being sick. The demotion was reversed after she hired a lawyer, she said.
It said no such thing. manager asked her to focus on her day to day job. Her ai ethics work was not aligned to the job she was hired for.
> Google soon nixed the board.
> Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
Instead demanding a forced transfer.
Could be wrong here, but that's how it was presented internally by Meredith herself.
In the specific case of Meredith Whittaker, she's joining "AI Now Institute" a social policy institute affiliated with NYU.
If anything it sounded like they disagreed with the company's business direction. Leaders listened, made some changes.
They still disagreed...this time with leadership not feeling a change was necessary.
they then quit as they disagreed with the company's direction.
Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?
Organising protests takes management and leadership skill. Regardless of retaliation, multiple people, predominantly women, who publicly demonstrated this skill are opting not to put it to use at Google.
When competent people leave, it’s worth asking why and what further effect those departures might have.
One way to fill the blank is to assume in good faith what the person is saying. And if you do, Google does look bad IMHO. Of course, I've seen people leave and badmouth companies when its their own fault for causing the situation. Its only people who are involved in the situation who can confirm all the specifics. As outsiders we can only assign some kind of probability here.
No, it doesn't. Just read most of the comments here.
Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it.
The Canadian Documentary "The Corporation" is a good example of how corporations behave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw
Dividing Media narratives help to keep people from realizing who's their common enemy.
I appreciate the economic arguments you are hinting at, but they are not incompatible with the notion that sexism was at play. We know, factually, that executives Google broke the law and then we're paid large sums of money to leave.
You cannot easily disentangle these power dynamics. Nor should you, because corporations are just large groups of people with special legal permissions from the government. The idea that interpersonal conflict would go away and such an environment seems to contradict the facts and hand.
What's surprising is that now these reprisals are trying to push that back to make Google more like other normal companies and organizational structures.
So far, we've seen quite a bit of the former and very little of the latter. Google's work culture seems to have become politically divisive to a rather surprising extent - if this is what "entitlement" boils down to, surely a more "normal" structure (though I'd settle for just a marginal increase in professionalism, similar to what we see in other "grassroots-led" organizations) can't be all that bad!
It's true that it is not normal for employees to be able to speak against their company (or express strong opinions publicly).
Yet Google has always prided itself on being different in having outspoken employees.
This is why it looks bad for Google when it's just business as usual everywhere else.
This has nothing to do with transparency and speaking out against your employer. The issue is not that they have a voice, it’s how they choose to use it.
This part of Google culture is long dead. It used to exist, but it doesn't anymore. There's no transparency anymore, and large factor of ending it was strategic leaks by employees, who hoped to achieved their goals by getting media attention. The entitlement is also gone in the era of cost-cutting by ruthless Ruth. The company you're thinking about entered senescence somewhere around 2012-2013 and died in 2015-2016.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
She probably was given a nice comp package just so she would leave and STFU about internals.
Unions. SV needs unionizing to give employees stronger voices.
The main thing it seems to me is that if a worker is unhappy with their company and is so unhappy their protest (and organise a walk out) their employer its even more clear they are unhappy working there. The unhappiness or alienation will increase.
I might have got it wrong though .... did these protestors say they were happy working there and just unhappy with other things or people?
It seems like it's a wider issue that's common across all work places. What should be the best way for people happy working with their colleagues or team but concerned about other things with the organisation to continue their good working environment and share their views? Maybe it's just a HR thing.
It's a corporate thing. Profits over ethics, laws, and people. That simple principle cannot be changed from the inside.
These people do not represent the majority of googlers' views or experiences IMO. I am sure there are genuine grievances, but they're representing a tiny-but-vocal minority group that is bringing the company into disrepute over what I think are relatively run of the mill problems that happen everywhere.
For want of a better term, they strike me as "trouble makers". Re-orgs happen all the time in Google - it is quite common for people to arrive at work and discover that their job has been re-orged out of existence and they've got to find a new role for themselves within 60-90 days, or basically get sacked. If you were a manager with spare headcount and literally 100s of qualified applicants (internal and external) for that headcount on your team, would you take on someone who is a known agitator and does a lot of "off piste" work, is divisive, and generally ruffles feathers instead of getting their work done? Or pick one of the other brilliant & experienced people without a history of stirring up shit for social media outrage points?
Meanwhile, Facebook assumes widespread immunity in ethical ontology within Thiel’s (goofy) narrative, all being quite selectively convenient given Thiel sits on FB’s board.
Both stories were initially broken by Bloomberg, which is also charmingly harmonic, temporally. Thiel likely pushed to collate onto Whittaker’s thunder is my (mere) immediate speculation.
Disclaimer: Worked as an engineer at Bloomberg 8+ years (now in academic scientific research), I doubt Bloomberg consciously coordinated the stories but anything’s possible, I suppose. (as mentioned, more likely the stories coordinated themselves in alignment to Bloomberg publication - if anything).
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20695964/google-protest-l...
Of course the external/adversarial approach can generate huge changes quickly by relatively junior folks, but always comes at a huge cost and is not sustainable (see: most of the people who did these protests have left). So you get one shot, and worse, it sends a message to others that this behavior isn't tolerated. So in the long run, could even lead to worse outcomes overall.
On the other hand, the idea that you can change the system before it changes you...well we all know how that usually works out.
Has it? Or is it just less visible because it happens over a decade or two? Germany's left wing and their March Through The Institutions comes to mind as a very successful change from inside.
Does anyone have a suggestion of how I can donate it to whoever needs it?
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/onward-another-googlewalko...
Has that happened before in history?
I wouldn't mind a seperate conservative google and a liberal google. Let the quality of the product offered decide which is better.
Happens naturally.
It is actually sort of surprising to me that cities are tech hubs - you should be able to deliver fantastic products while working remotely and never meeting anyone in person. (And the free software/open source movement is an existence proof of that.) So there must be something else about cities that makes them better at not just the success of tech companies but the success of groups of tech companies.
Left-wing policies like urban exclusionary zoning? Yeah right. Look at how Texas and other Sunbelt states are doing, despite them being in inherently more challenging parts of the country than CA.
Now ofcourse the corporate robots managing things are more interested in keeping the factory running than in anything else. So their natural instinct is to deny conservative/liberal fault lines.
But I think it will just increase the fault lines. We have conservative and liberal newspapers. There is a reason they bifurcated.
Search tech these days is really commoditized. Look at Elastic Search sure not as good as Google but it will do the job for most cases. On top of that adding a conservative or liberal layer might actually benefit people. It feels more natural anyway. Now there is a lot of cognitive dissonance. Which is not going to go away.
Citation needed.
I imagine that since the protests started they've already begun filtering out the people with a higher level of ethics in their interviews - but the new class of people they hire are not going to give them the same results in the long-term, especially if they are no the type of employees to question the addition or removal of a feature, etc, but just do as they are told. Google's current leaders are slowly but surely killing Google's spirit.
I wonder how much that contributed. No matter the personal political leanings of the employees, most companies try to stay on the good side of both sides of the political aisle. When the president of Heritage Foundation (which is about as close to establishment conservatism as possible) was opposed so vehemently, it really created a rift with conservatives and now there are Republican Senators who now are calling for Google to get reigned in. The business leadership can’t be too happy about that.
Will you, in your capacity as a moderator for one of the most influential forums on the internet, actively care about justice, or will you just protect the status quo? Pick a side.
(Keep in mind that Scott Alexander made the exact same mistake of trying to be neutral rather than choosing to be on the side of justice. Now his blog is overrun by fascist trolls. Hacker News is not far behind.)
Ah yes, let's generalize ~50% of the country as bigots. That surely will lead to quality discussion.
Where do you draw the line at bigotry and perversion?
Homosexuality, transexuals, polyamory, eating meat, necrophilia, cannibalism, bestiality, pedophilia?
There's people who non-ironically believe that each of the above is no worse than any of the others and should be treated as such. Unless you take a live and let live approach that I have never met anyone in real life admit to you will want at least some of those criminalized.
For instance, you've said "why people feel" instead of "why this person felt." Additionally, you're broadly referring to "companies" and not just "Google."
Whether or not protesting was the correct course of action in this particular case, I'm not sure. But please don't broadly imply that all whistle-blowers are entitled reward-seekers.
I don’t see why Google cant just keep it apolitical in the work environment while being open to critiques externally and not caring what their employees do politically in their spare time.
If I was google, I'd allow it. For a while. Then get rid of everybody in there. Good riddance.
Weird as it is, I don't think there's a half-open position with the free-thought floodgate.
Accept the responsibility of being an adult who participates in society.
for(const i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ... }
If you want politics out of your workplace, stop working for the company that spends more on political lobbying than any other tech company.
Is there a way to do interviews and promote only persons with unethical & immoral attributes to keep their business from running into issues like these repeatedly?
We ask HN users every day not to accuse others of astroturfing or shillage, but the other side of the contract is that when we find real evidence of it, we crack down.
Edit: I should add, for those who are worried about bias, that we have nothing against Google and are only interested in protecting HN against abuse. People do that for other companies too, not just Google, and we're just as against it in those cases.
I was reading the Amazon protest thread and it seems that the capitalists/free market guys would be fine with sexual harassment too because free markets would fix it and you have the choice to resign, too bad some communist made it illegal /s