A year after 20k Googlers walked off the job, they’re madder than ever | Hacker News Reader

A year after 20k Googlers walked off the job, they’re madder than ever

vox.com

28 pointsclaudeganon13 comments

This is a pretty long article that just states Googlers are talking about a lot of things while actually doing nothing.

This is basically the "thoughts and prayers" equivalent for the tech world.

Heh. Big Companies have always had these BS slogans from values, community, "we are all big family", workers are our most important resource, we listen, and nobody was supposed to take them seriously.

Apparently leadership in Google thought these ideas are genuinely good and created way for the workers to organize and talk freely. They created microsociety with politics outside the company organization and now they are trying to walk it back.

If they are so unhappy, why don’t they quit? It isn’t like they don’t have other companies hungry for their skills. I’m not defending Google since I don’t know enough of what’s going on, but if people are that unhappy, then quit. If Google starts to struggle to find workers and they are seeing an exodus, then naturally they’d have to correct course. That’s how markets work.

It feels sometimes like Google is a kindergarten for grown ups and now is the part of the day when the kids threaten to hold their breath until they get what they want.

I think a better question is why not unionize? If unionized they can start getting their demands met. It's better then quitting, because you still get to keep your job, and you don't have to risk ending up at another company that's no better. It's a way for the average worker to get some say in the way Google is ran.

> If unionized they can start getting their demands met. It's better then quitting, because you still get to keep your job

The power of any union comes from threats to quit en masse i.e. strike. A union strike isn't better than quitting in absolute; it's better than quitting alone.

The power comes from the threat of quitting en masse, not from actually quitting.

despite what you've heard, it's actually the employer, not the employees who have all the power. this is simply due to the oversupply of labor. when you have 1000s of people line up to take any one person's job, then if that 1 person quits it doesn't make any impact at all.

Except this has adequately changed labor policies exactly zero times ever. When large companies can exploit labor (by being the ones with all of the money and power), it doesn’t matter how many people quit. Why haven’t the masses left Walmart? Because people need jobs to survive, and realistically some people have no better options.

The “free” market for labor isn’t. I recommend reading up about the labor movement in the US at the turn of the 20th century and onward. You might be surprised by a few things, including what it does and doesn’t take to get your employer to change their behavior.

If you’re an engineer working for Google, I’m certain that there are more options available to you than to the average Walmart worker. That’s something the grandparent comment addressed.

What says they're all engineers?

You have to live in a complete fantasy world to assert Google has some sort of monopsony power over labor markets.

There are literally 100 companies that would hire a Google employee within walking distance of Google's MV HQ.

Well, also pretty much every company not within walking distance looking for a software engineer would probably consider hiring a Google employee. Of which there are even more than a hundred.

Agreed. Going into a fit every 3-6 months doesn't do anything if quitting isn't on the table.

This storyline is just hilarious to me now.

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