Google Fires Four Workers, Including Staffer Tied to Protest
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Yikes - this seems to go beyond labor organizing within the company.
Yeah, the policy should be "employees are not allowed to stalk other employees". Sounds like that's what the policy actually was; I don't see any incompetency.
If you need to schedule around someone’s times, all you need to know is if they’re busy or free. At my office this is what is displayed if you look at others’ calendars, but not details unless you’ve been invited yourself.
> No sharing — Calendars aren't shared unless users share their own calendars. Note: If you choose No sharing, your mobile app users can't use the Find a time feature. > Only free/busy information (hide event details)—Only free/busy information displays. >Share all information — All information is public unless users change their own settings. Users can also make individual events private.
Then you can manually override these settings as a user.
My teammates calendar topics are visible to me so that I can notice if they're getting pulled into meetings on topics that I should be meeting with them also. My boss's calendar topics are visible to me so that I'm empowered to ballpark the relevance of my project in context of other things my boss is managing (and so I can notice if my boss is working on something that should be relevant to my project that nobody has noticed is relevant yet).
At our 80k multinational mega corp, we don't see each other's calendars, and we do those meetings with staff around whole globe. No real issues with this.
All this looks very much like google trying to paint leavers in as bad light as possible. This vengeful approach is very unprofessional and casts bad light on google and individual managers involved.
But is there a compelling reason not to have it? Can you think of any circumstances where having access to someone's event details would make scheduling and communication with them easier? I agree with your second point, of course, and while I have never worked at google I'm pretty confident nobody would bat an eye if you just blocked the equivalent time slot with "personal".
But this person didn't do that, and they were open about some of their personal information on their calendar. Probably because they didn't expect one of their coworkers to be a stalker. I guess that was naivety on their part, but this is victim blaming.
If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway"
Unless they are your subordinate, so that you are empowered to judge and direct their priorities, it doesn't. Nothing prevents you from sending them a message (or meeting request) acknowledging that you know they have som thing scheduled but you have an urgent need (and explaining the need) and allowing them to make a decision, or Maki g a similar request of their superior if organizationally appropriate. Your urgent need doesn't transform you into their boss.
Critical stuff shouldn't get a reaction like "gee, he has something in his calendar, well we just skip this 10 mil deal because disturbing him is a no-no and he would be mean to us". Critical stuff is critical, take people out of their meetings, life is about priorities.
But I understand the appeal to control freaks out there, everything is plain and visible (or not, depends how you set it up)
Just don't put your personal activities in your work calendar, I guess? Whenever I had a personal appointment (e.g. doctor), I'd just book a block of "Busy" or "Gabriel OOO" in my work calendar.
I would associate that with an email account that wasn't the work account, a printed page that was taken off-premises, a non-work cloud-hosted storage service, or to a computer that wasn't a work computer. It does not say that the place the information was sent to was any third party.
It could turn out that the information was sent to a third party, but that has not (yet) been claimed.
2. The fact that this kind of information made it outside of the company. I believe this is the consequence of making such info available to all and in a company with so many thousand employees like it or not there are some bad apples that will take advantage of everything
You can decide whether everyone can see the details or whether they just see "busy" everywhere.
I think it's good to see the title, for example if I have a meeting about the feature Foobar and a coworker sees that, he might want to reach out to say he's got some insight about it.
There is no reason to have your full calendar visible by all by default.
Also, "public" here means only the time & title, not detailed description, participants, attachments etc. You can easily set individual events to private, or default everything to private if you wish.
Google's corporate culture is to make it as easy as possible to have that happen.
It's ultimately the individual employee that knows whether or not a meeting is relevant to them. And they can only know that if they have information on the meeting.
Sounds like an entirely toxic environment.
Proper etiquette would be to ping the meeting organizer and ask if they mind if you sit in. If they don't, no problem. If they do, you work something out relevant to the reason you wanted to sit in. But one can't even start that conversation without knowledge of relevant meeting topics.
The fact I know what meetings my coworkers are having doesn't imply I should be crashing them any more than the fact I can see when my coworkers are at their desks implies I should be continuously bothering them.
Maybe that is why google screws up its data security outside too. Such things shouldnt be allowed in the first place.
Outlook is great comparing to this.
> received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all without those employees’ knowledge or consent.
Except that that is how Google has designed its calendar system. If you put your medical appointments into your calendar without marking them private then yes, they're going to be public.
So basically, Google seems to have managed to take a feature in its own Calendar App, and the default behaviour of meetings on Google and dressed it up like stalking.
Signing up for email alerts about somebody else's calendar is definitely weird. But the information you'd get is the same as someone would get if they checked your calendar manually, which is an expected and normal part of Google's culture.
The underlying part here is that these employees were using the notion of "unions" to organize _politically_.
...and their willingness to act against fellow employees and leak company documents demonstrates just how dirty they would have become had they been allowed to continue.
Personally, I don't think they cared at all about worker rights beyond their desire to advocate their politics.
Remember, the so-called stalking was looking at information that the owner chose to share with the company and didn't mark the "private" flag on (which is available as a default to apply to all meetings).
Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?
Probably because it represents time that are unavailable for work and, in many cases, because their are people at work (including their boss) entitled to know the reason, and who probably established that as the workflow for sharing the information.
So that coworkers don't schedule you for meetings during your doctor appointments.
Somewhere along the line, people started scheduling me for events in conflict with other events. Why? My online visible calender was free and clear into eternity so obviously I have nothing going on at 2pm. Explaining not being able to be in three places at once got old fast.
So now I have an eye toward using the calendar "defensively". Here's when I usually come in, here's when I usually clock out, here's when I usually take lunch, here's that weekly meeting I have to attend for someone else's giggles, here's when I'm helping Jimmy with this thing, here's when Samantha is helping me with the other thing. You want a meeting? Now the calendar begins a negotiation.
I may or may not like it, but the tipping point has come and gone for me.
A window on your friend’s house can be used to peek in to see if they’re home when you’ve popped by to visit.
It can also be used to stare into all day to monitor what someone you don’t know is doing.
What the terminated employees are accused of doing is a lot more like the second example.
Nobody signed up for their coworkers monitoring your calendar and then you find you beign doxed externally. Company investigated, gave out warnings, and yet the hostile behavior continued and here is the result
Google designed their calendar this way to support work. It doesn’t sound like these people were using resources for work purposes. That’s almost certainly a violation of the work rules. Pushing blame on the employee being tracked is ridiculous.
Companies are not democracies, and unless you are an executive with a contract or are in a collective bargaining agreement, you serve at the pleasure of your management. If you’re irritating your management for reasons and want to stick around, you need to work in the rules.
Also, it might be legal for me to follow a person around in public and film them, but doing that is still incredibly creepy and indicative of mal intent.
Different groups may follow you. PI trying to determine marriage issues, health issues for insurance reasons, etc
If you are famous or have something to add to the news cycle reporters or people trying to sell your picture may follow you around.
Most people post where they have been publically to create their personal brand that they share with others.
These have no mal intent. The overused word creepy is subjective.. and doesn't make it wrong. I know someone who feels creepy going outside at night. We shouldn't morally make a judgement for everyone based on someone's feelings. I don't think going outside is creepy.
From my perspective, either of those have ill intent towards me.
If insurance companies could not investigate your insurance would cost 10 times as much.
The marriage investigation is a mixed bag. If you are running a drug running operation I should get the kids and you need some proof to make that claim.
I’ve never worked at Google, so while I can’t say for certain, I doubt the calendar has a “notify me about the juicy bits” checkbox. It’s certainly useful for me to know when my manager will be in the office or in some meeting, and if my manager marks the meeting “private,” I can know that he won’t be available at a particular time even if I don’t know what he’ll be busy doing.
If he finds it creepy that I know when he’ll be at the dentist, or be in a 1:1 with his boss, he needs to make sure the appointment is marked as private; I can’t do anything about it.
So, yes, I believe in this case, it makes sense to blame the people being tracked for publicity posting information that they didn’t want others to know.
Following your manager's calendar makes sense. Doing the same for people outside of your group is suspicious imo, unless you're working with that team/person.
Who are these people? Managers? Would the union organisers have been tracking calendars to find times the managers are not walking the aisles so the unionists could talk to the staff about unionising?
In such a circumstance I imagine I as a hypothetical manager being coerced into a union-busting exercise could arrange to feel threatened by this calendar-monitoring behaviour.
As for the copies outside the office: we want to bring the union lawyers and membership folks around to talk about joining the union, here’s the manager’s schedule for the next week.
Believe nothing of what you read and only half of what you see.
It is every aggrieved party’s interest to claim they thought the world was going to end, because the only negotiating direction is away from that extreme.
Unionizing and protest organizing is just a background noise at this point
We have them configured to be public by default because it makes it much easier to book meetings, particularly when you need to find a slot that works for several people.
With that being said it does assume that you have the common-sense to make appointments that should be private, private. I tend to do this for any personal matters, along with any meetings that involve discussing sensitive work-related matters.
(I also use private appointments to ensure I get a lunch break if a day is looking particularly full of meetings. If I don't eat something at lunchtime I tend to be bad-tempered in the afternoon, which doesn't really help anyone.)
Worth pointing out that we've clearly communicated that calendars are public by default, which hopefully helps people to know they need to make appointments explicitly private if that's what they want.
The fact that you can do it doesn't mean it is proper for you to do it other than as reasonable for legitimate job duties.
There is no system in place physically preventing me from doing lots of illegitimate things in my workplace, but that doesn't mean that if I do them I get a free pass merely because it was possible to do them.
The calendar doesn't distinguish between medical work or a meeting with union Busters. Google is deliberately muddying waters. Slimy
To extend your analogy, the screenshots would be someone taking photos of you in the shower or sleeping, and distributing them. While they might not have been able to avoid glacing in your open door, they could certainly have avoided taking a photo of the room and sending it to someone else.
These people were using the notion of unions to further their desire to push their POLITICS. They didnt care about safety or pay. They wanted to force the company to stop working with the US government on various contracts.
As for Andy Rubin, you seem to have assumed that accusation is the same as guilt. But Rubin was being accused by a former girlfriend he dumped: hardly a neutral party. You never heard his side of the story, but I'll give you a hint: he denied it. A senior exec being accused of some sort of sexual misbehaviour happens every day, women know these accusations are frequently treated as true-by-default without anyone caring about the details and use it. Just look at the FBI's own stats on false rape claims as proven by DNA tests. False accusations by women against men with regards to sex crimes is way more common than for any other kind of crime, like an order of magnitude more common. You can't make any assumptions Google or Rubin did anything wrong here, none of us have enough information.
But finally, the complainants weren't limiting themselves to wage fixing that for many predated their employment, or Andy Rubin's bedroom habits. They're moaning about enforcement of immigration laws. They know they can't convince the general public to vote for totally open borders because it's an extreme policy that would create massive problems, as is abolition of the Department of Defence. So they've decided to try and get what they want by pressuring firms that act as component suppliers. Organising to make democratically chosen policies unimplementable is not what union protections were meant to be about.
Not true, the reason they where trying to organise a union was because they did not feel safe with their employer spying on them [1].
Ironicly they where fired because other employees did not feel safe being spied on. So google obviously recognising that spying on employees is a legitimate safety concern.
https://www.hldataprotection.com/2017/08/articles/internatio...
GDPR also applies to the employer and employee. You can’t log without consent, and „we might monitor stuff“ in your contract won’t hold up in court in Europe if you start invasively logging.
My contract with a German company, specifically had clauses saying that anything on their systems is something that can inspect and/or look at.
We aren't talking a small company here, but one with multiple large sites; which means multiple large workers councils ( basically a union for a specific company location ).
Remember hiring in Germany has to be approved by a Worker's Council and the company has to pay for the council to receive independent legal advice as well.
From the GDPR training I did for working as a software engineer in DE, this is all OK as long as its legitimately required for compliance, explicitly disclosed to the full requirements of BDSG/GDPR and not used for anything other than the stated reasons.
This is a huge contrast to the US where it would likely be completely legal to look at this kind of monitoring and then fire someone under at-will employment law for reading too much news.ycombinator.
- Someone (possibly a group of people) is trying to organize a time for maximum attendance for some meeting or protest.
- They are checking peoples "public for internal" calendars, maybe sharing between themselves.
- "Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, __subsequently__ made their way outside the company." This means they are not leaking the screenshots to outside from my understanding.
As google has access to all data, reason why this calendar screenshots shared etc, and never mentioned here, making me suspect google is at fault here.
Additionally they're publicly traded so statements on the matter that could be construed as market-relevant must not be false or the SEC starts to take a hard look.
Not really if they do something wrong they will get a fine of tens of millions but thats a tiny percentage of their profit, its an operating cost not a punishment.
> Lying and retaliating by big companies tends to be rare because it can affect the bottom line much, much more than a bit of internal dissent.
Not really again because they have so much money if anything affects their bottom line they create a pr campaign to change public opinion, its super effective even for something thats very easy to prove is dangerous like smoking.
And lying gains them a benefit in excess of tens of millions?
It's all too easy as a large company to use non-specific (and SEC-approved) language to dismiss the claims: "At Google we have a non-retaliation policy and take all such concerns seriously. We are investigating these claims and will cooperate...."
When instead they go out of their way to provide a specific response and claim to have evidence to back it up-- publicly and to the media-- it is thus very credible; they have much to lose if they are lying and very little to gain.
On the flip side, the terminated users have zero incentive not to lie if it benefits them; there are no laws against doing so, and there is much to gain in terms of reputation and potential settlements.
Lets keep in mind as well that SEC sanctions can be much more significant than simply a fine. Musk made a tweet and was forced to step down. You think Google's going to take action that could piss off both labor boards AND the SEC AND any courts that end up handling potential litigation?
In a company with thousands of employees, what are the odds.
Gee I wonder if there is any self-reflection that they work for a company whose primary purpose is to gather this information about everyone...yet when its their information in the hands of employees working for their own company they feel "scared or unsafe".
Anything you can do with that is how our internal Gmail and calendar works. With lots of use of Groups.
I don't want to give too much details but my company allow you to subscribe to people's PTO calendar. By default, you can see your teammates but you can search other people and add their calendar to your dashboard.
To me it seemed like a logical thing to do to add all those people who I interact with to my dashboard. Also I added some of my friends and some higher ups. Just to help me with planning my vacations and sure a bit of curiosity.
Now I wonder if my company can use this against me.
This is a revisionist explanation.
> Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company.
They disclosed other people's internal calendars publicly. That's a clear violation of employer policy and not intended employer use.
While others have rightly pointed out that Google's statements about stalking and harassment are vague enough that they could refer to reasonable activities, I have no doubt that people engaging in this kind of political intrigue would have to resort to some kind of harassment at some point.
I'm not saying that Google is right here. But the fired protesters are definitely in the wrong.
There are lot of people in Google deluding themselves that this is not true, while taking decisions that effect millions of people. Who elected them? That contradiction will always create political tensions.
If they don't want to be political they should stick to tech like phones and browsers and sell off Search and YouTube. Until that happens don't call polical objections and resistance wrong.
In what universe should a company let workers organize against fellow employees apart from simply having those workers complain to HR? This is particularly specious when organizing for 'political' reasons.
This is the issue: were they organizing for the purposes of 'resisting' the company or were other employees also apart of what they were 'resisting'? If the former, then what Google did seems questionable. If more like the latter, then the people rightfully were fired.
It is crazy you don't understand that.
Putting aside the contract law side of this, philosophically what you're saying doesn't make sense to me. If Google were to direct some of its employees tomorrow to restrict the flow of information relating to a hot-button political issue, right in the middle of an election cycle, would it be crazy for some of the employees to attempt to "subvert" the company to prevent that from happening?
Yes, it would be. What they should do in that case is resign. Google isn't the military — you can leave any time you want to.
And while it may not be easy for a black janitor to leave Billy Bob's House of Cars if Billy Bob starts airing racist commercials, given Google salaries and Google's technical reputation, I think it's probably incredibly easy for a Googler to leave at any time.
If you cannot support your employer's decisions, you leave. Think what an impact that would make!
The fact that you were disagreeing with their ethics or politics doesn't change a single thing.
It's also completely useless and hurt the conversation to do personal attacks like saying it's "crazy" to not share your opinion.
We aren't talking about termination on that ground though. We wouldn't have this discussion here if it was, I would actually agree with it (though I would still find it sad that the company wouldn't try to improve what an employee see as an issue).
> HR stops you from doing that.
Here's the exact quote from the comment I was answering to:
> You cannot accept a paycheck from a company, while also be trying to subvert it internally.
We weren't talking about "Publicly bad mouthing" but about "subvert it internally", or in a less threatening way "changing how the company works internally". I believe you have all the rights to do this even on its paycheck, it's about improving what the company does, which is pretty much what employees are paid for.
Having not read any of the tweets in question, I can not say what the content is about.
However, according to https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/can-you-fire-someone-for-t..., speech about working conditions and union organising is protected.
I suspect none of us armchair lawyers will come up with a simple way to analyse these tweets with a lot of context that isn't available.
I have a hard time respecting these people for that reason. Hard not to view someone as entitled, or having some form of delusional idealism, when they trash their company on Twitter. Every tweet was made either shortly before or after one their exceptionally large Google paychecks was direct deposited into their account.
Further highlighting this obscure world view, they thought they wouldn’t be fired for these things? Maybe they did know they’d be fired - that would at least be a credible signal of rational thought and motivation.
I'm not saying I know for a fact they're guilty. I have no objections to anyone who wants to withhold judgment. But I don't think it's reasonable to look at a clear, unrefuted accusation of misconduct and say "well I don't trust Google".
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/11/google-ex...
Which only show that Google has more to win by giving a comment than if they didn't. That could show that steering the public opinion is more beneficial to them than what may follow.
> I don't think it's reasonable to look at a clear
They clearly mentioned "including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities". After reading the comment and understanding that they actually just subscribed to the work calendars of theses peoples, that do happens to put personal activities there. They made it seems like their goals was to follow their personal activities, which more likely wasn't. It made me realize how disingenuous their memo was and wasn't made to show the truth but to smear them.
This is why I don't trust them in this situation. Is this reasonable?
I want to add that not trusting Google in this situation doesn't means I do trust the employee that got fired. As you said, they gave no response, thus I have nothing to use to either trust them, or not.
You may have misunderstood the last paragraph, where I say that I don't know if I can trust the employees yet either, I wasn't talking about Google, that was explained in the first part of the comment.
[0] https://twitter.com/Tri_Becca90/status/1187460338784055296
It really does come off as if they are using unionizing as a veil for their political activism.
Shitting all over your employer on social media tends to be symptomatic for a certain character style who was long welcomed at Google, and probably felt empowered to take it further and further, to a point of actively damaging the company's interest. It takes someone pretty tone-deaf to do that and not expect to be fired.
I think such a housecleaning is understandable. I don't force my politics on others, I wouldn't want theirs forced on me. My colleagues do not speak for me in this regard.
Including personal information on your work calendar without using privacy controls is pretty bad practice, though obviously some people occasionally did it. There is no indication that this information was a target of the fired employees. There is also no indication that these personal events were included in screenshots “outside the company”. And that phrase encompasses a wide range of possibilities, I suspect that Google made it so general because the specifics would have sounded more benign.
The statement in general is designed to cast the four in the worst possible light.
This bit?
"The individual set up notifications so that they received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities"
I meant public as in "internally public".
Which could mean simply:
1) individual subscribed to other employee's work calendars, which are visible to everyone within Google,
2) individual had calendar notifications turned on, and
3) other employees posted personal matters on their work calendars.
There isn’t a way to separate out personal events — which shouldn’t be there, or at least should be marked private.
That this information was included, does not indicate that it was a target; it does indicate that it was a useful way for Google to attack their actions.
You can then blend the 2 calendars either in the mobile app, or by importing one to the other account.
I'm a bit surprised to hear some people would use their work calendar for personal activities, I don't see why you would do that.
There are obvious ways for calendar owners to separate the information (which was not done in the instances that Google refer to).
When you are back to back most days (common at Google) you can't be juggling multiple calendar accounts all the time, not least because a personal event doesn't show on your professional cal meaning someone can try to double book that slot.
Usually the personal details are pretty sparse -- just containing the minimum I'd normally share in person eg "dentist", "doctors", "kids school performance" / "parents evening". These would be days where I'm technically working but organising my work hours around a personal appointment (otherwise I'd just put "annual leave" if I'm taking a full or half day off).
This would be enough to fall in line with Google's statement even though I'm technically not using work's calendar for personal appointments.
>"Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company."
There is no reason to be sharing a work calendar with others outside the company, and without that person's permission.
Does Google allege that the fired workers were responsible for that?
The quote clearly suggests that, but if Google won't make a clear allegation (in a statement containing other clear allegations), they must not have much evidence, if any.
Meanwhile the individuals in question have zero reason NOT to lie to reporters; they're under no legal obligations and can say what they want.
Is that so? When faced with unions in their infancy, often the companies come out with all guns blazing. They might even face fines after an incredibly lengthy court battle, but putting down that organizing effort down while it hasn't taken roots is more important to them.
Once a company becomes big enough, claims that they're lying to persecute a handful of users become implausible because the potential liability for doing so vastly outweighs the minor benefits they might gain. And this isnt the 1920s, you can't just fire people for trying to unionize and realistically think that it will solve the problem or that no one will notice.
Ignore the names of the companies / individuals involved, their histories, etc-- just look at the incentives that each party has around lying vs telling the truth-- and it's not hard to accept that Google is more likely to be truthful about this than a terminated employee.
I suspect they have evidence of exactly what they said, that the screenshots were obtained by people outside Google, but don't have evidence that the fired workers were responsible for that.
Given the other contents of the statement, I think if Google had evidence that a fired worker sent a screenshot outside the company, they would say so.
The potential lying from Google is also done by individuals who have no obligations to tell the truth. To me it seems incredibly rare that a human being (the person(s) doing the lying) gets any significant punishment for actions credited to a company. In my observation the more common scenarios are that the company and employees either fully get away with blatant lies or the company has to pay a small fine in relation to its profits.
They're representing the company in their official capacities, and as such the company will bear any consequences. There can also be individual sanctions, such as happened with Elon Musk who is now individually forbidden from being CEO because of a tweet he made.
> In my observation the more common scenarios are that the company and employees either fully get away with blatant lies
Then you're not paying attention. Public companies lying to shareholders open themselves up to massive liability, including SEC action and civil suits from those shareholders.
If so, it might suggest a wish to share with people in future, e.g. in a court case, etc., but it doesn't necessarily mean that this information _has been_ shared.
It could also mean that the information _was_ shared with others, just pointing out that it isn't exactly what the statement says.
Details around medical, family etc. are only visible if the employee adds that information to their work calendar.
Likewise, if you saw me put "Get kidney transplant" on my calendar and decided to subscribe to my calendar, then that's pretty fucking weird. I wouldn't buy "that's bad practice so I was allowed to stalk you". I'd be like "this dude is a fucking weirdo, can I go work elsewhere?".
My calendar at every place I've worked has been public with private events for sensitive stuff but any time I put some private stuff public I'd expect someone to ask me if I meant to do that if they noticed.
So this information on sharing was provided to particular people, and they were asked, "do you feel scared?". Presentation is everything, and if presented in terms of how their personal information was included, it can feel different compared to when shown in neutral terms. In addition, if these people were told that the four employees were dangerous or a threat, this will also colour their viewpoints.
Bluetooth and kidney transplant arguments are about two hypothetical stories, and pointing out that if these had happened, it would be weird (well, yes it would, but that's not this story, they are very different).
I mean if the recently fired folks tried to pressure some other group, that's bad, and it seems it has nothing to do with unionizing. But if they were trying to catch some elusive exec to have a statement from, that could be different.
But there are no specifics anywhere, just "Google bad, union good" or "stalkers bad"
I currently perceive Google's note as if it were a press release; treat with appropriate scepticism. We'll have to see if more information comes to light.
Example of employees feeling targeted:
Given the attitude Google itself has towards privacy in general, I'm not at all surprised by this... if I remember correctly, employees are even expected (obliged?) to use their personal Google account for work.
I'd never work for Google, one of the reasons being this "work-life mixing". I personally maintain a very strict "firewall" between personal and employee matters.
You remember completely incorrectly.
I think our attitude should be cautiously skeptical of any Google provided reason for firing these individuals. It could very well be that their alleged behavior was technically against company policy but in line with typical Google employee behavior. It might just be a convenient reason to fire them given their unionizing efforts.
I really wish a jury of peers is used to fire people in this age of disproportionate corporate power.
You mean like a union?
(Or at least how I imagine unions could work, by policing under/non-performing members.)
The power lies with the corporation because that’s where the risk and responsibility is. You don’t risk much driving to your job at a big company and collecting your check every two weeks. You risk everything and take on responsibility for a lot of people when you’re the one who starts the company or who has to lead it or a large portion of it.
There's just one way to prevent the "disproportionate corporate power", its called unions. Wait! Maybe you'll be fired if you try to create one.
That doesn't change that they can easily misrepresent the facts in a way that any person subjected to similar treatment would view it as lying. And given the power differential, they will likely be unable to use the court system to protect themselves against such attacks.
This is a weakness in our current system the strong use to exploit the weak. Isn't that something we should look down upon and punish?
Workers aren't stupid. They see the bullshit and want protection. And the bullshit is so pervasive it's everywhere, so it's not like changing jobs is really going to change anything.
So you can lie to yourself and say 'no this is how it is,' but you're not going to convince anyone by just asserting that your ideas are how reality work, especially when trying to convince people who are already aware of your ideas and rejected them because they do not match reality.
People effectively reviewed the cases, hopefully discussed in details and came to a conclusion.
There was a decision process, it's not outlandish to have a review process coupled with an appeal process as needed. That's what happens for performance evaluations in a lot of companies.
You're forgetting one obvious option that's been repeatedly and successfully used: unionize.
I think unions are the wrong answer in tech. Knowledge workers are not equal, their innovation and uniqueness is valuable and they should not be lumped together into one class where there is little to no incentive to stand out. Frankly, I'm surprised these types of people would be interested in a union in the first place because they are the likeliest beneficiaries of there not being a union and the most equipped to successfully go out on their own.
Highly specialized labor benefits from unionization as well.
Googlers are organizing now because they disagree with actions the company is taking. They want to have a greater say in what kind of stuff the company does and they want safety from retaliation for speaking their mind. A union contract would go a long way towards accomplishing these goals.
Even a year ago the argument that Google didn't need unions was much stronger. Now that employees are actively being fired by management, wanting a union to protect against that makes a lot more sense.
In the grand scheme of things you don't risk much, true. But you do risk the majority of the things that are most important to you. Like your place to live, your spouse, your kids, your stuff, your pets... And if the industry goes under, your community. For some people that would be 'risking everything'.
There's no requirement in the Business Rule Book that says you actually have to give a shit about the welfare of the employees you laid off. Yes, there are people who care a lot, but it's not a requirement, and plenty of companies get along just fine without it.
What is important is that your remaining employees believe that you care about them. And even a sociopath can manage the illusion of that without too much effort. But the people we got rid of? They're not as cool as you are, my friends. Now get back to work or you're next.
Making documents and calendars accessible is one example of Google’s “open culture.” When these features are abused in an attempt to strong arm a company or coworkers into kowtowing to each of your demands, that’s sabotage of the company’s culture at the expense of tens of thousands of your coworkers who may not share your political views on every issue. Say your piece, keep saying it if you feel so compelled, but don’t cross the line into unethical behavior and cry “retaliation!” when you’re caught.
But I'm absolutely sure there's an element of "rules for thee but not for me".
Not ironic at all. I remember seeing a Googler commenting that misusing personal data was one of the most serious violation there.
And it makes sense because of all the data they collect. For now, they have been no significant leaks or incidents of that kind. And people trust them with their data for that reason. A leak would have disastrous effects, with loss of trust and lawsuits costing billions. Considering Google scale, it may even affect politics.
Some people have integrity and have earned their credibility. This exact kind of situation is when that matters.
Now let's look at the people on the other side: a nobody who has been describing her own employer as literally evil in public, to anyone who will listen, but who mysteriously failed to leave of her own accord. Google isn't actually evil or even close to it, only someone seriously mentally unstable could believe that, and would such a person harass political opponents by leaking their private lives onto the internet (presumably to somewhere they hoped would cause those employees problems?). Absolutely they would. Googlers already have form in leaking screenshots of internal sites to highlight political disagreements.
Personally, I think anyone who "trusts" a corporation as large as Google is mentally unstable. There are very clear, well-documented instances of Google being objectively evil, and there's no sign of this changing. Maybe you don't follow that news?
> She isn't some faceless Voice of Google, she has her own reputation to consider and one she has built.
So you're telling me that if her boss instructed her to read a prepared statement or be fired, she'd give up her position atop a mountain of gold just to appease some random fanboys on the internet?
> and would such a person harass political opponents by leaking their private lives onto the internet (presumably to somewhere they hoped would cause those employees problems?). Absolutely they would.
Now you're assaulting the character of a person you don't know for no good reason.
Look, the English language has a limited range of words for describing malicious acts. We have simple words like bad, wrong. We have more complex words like criminal, illegal, immoral. We have nuanced words like suboptimal, misguided, psychotic, naive. And at the extreme end we have evil.
Is there a word for something/someone worse than evil? I'm struggling to think of it. You'd have to start saying things like, well, maybe Google is evil but Hitler/Mao/Stalin were really really evil. There just isn't anywhere you can go from there.
Google is not evil in any mature usage of the English language. You may not like its business model, perhaps you think Google should charge you money for its services and dispose of the ads. You may disagree with some of the decisions its executives make. But nothing Google has ever done even begins to justify using the most extreme words in the English language, not even close, not even remotely in the same general area. If you describe Google this way you're saying they're the worst thing that could possibly exist, which is foolish in the extreme. It's just crying wolf: why would anyone pay attention if one day you discover an organisation that is actually doing much worse stuff? Nobody will care because they'll just write you off.
Now you're assaulting the character of a person you don't know for no good reason.
The "assault" is simply me evaluating the likelihood of competing claims, based on (in one case) actually having met and had direct experience of Ms Adkins when I used to work at Google, and in the other case public words and actions of someone I never met. Based on that evidence I judge it likely that Google's claims are true, albeit, this is only a weak judgement as it's ultimately he said/she said.
Ok, maybe Google isn’t as bad as Hitler. I’ll give you that. Maybe that’s why they chose the slogan “don’t be evil” many years ago, since that was the lowest they could possibly set the bar at the time. Can we at least agree then that Google is “very very bad”? Where does that vocabulary fall on your quantitative scale of evil? It should be sufficiently far from Hitler to have a focused discussion, I hope.
> actually having met and had direct experience of Ms Adkins when I used to work at Google
So you’re not only biased in favor of Google, you’re also biased in favor of this lady. Doesn’t seem like anyone is going to change your mind then. Good luck with your less-evil-than-Hitler corporate overlords.
I wonder how it's like working there now a days.
I thought their ml cloud offerings were superior
I do hope Aliyun starts offering in the US soon- would benefit competition.
source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alibaba-vs-tencent-battle-clo...
Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) is doing business in US: https://alibabacloud.com/
Workers LEAVING a company is a sign of worker discontent, especially when they could get a job elsewhere.
My experience is that Google hasn't really changed much over the last 10 years, beyond a few superficial details (mailing lists -> memegen) and growing in size, with the expected difficulties that brings.
I do agree with the right to organize. Troubling times ahead.
Yes, it might be "simpler" to just leave whenever you meet resistance on the job -- but it's also less rewarding.
Finally, I'd add that there are no perfect workplaces. There are also shared problems across entire industries.
Some people resign in protest, and some people stay and challenge the problem. It depends on the person.
Company culture changes. Companies change. The fact that you were told one thing or a company had a particular reputation when you joined doesn’t mean that thing will always hold true.
Union busting and discrimination are illegal. Terminating someone’s at-will employment because they are acting against the company’s interest isn’t.
From what I have read thus far, this situation sounds a lot more like the latter than the former despite some of the people involved claiming it’s the former.
Perhaps more facts will come out to support that position, but in the meantime I am with the grandparent post. These people want to have their cake (i.e. some of the largest total compensation packages in the industry) and eat it too (force policy by protesting management choices expecting no consequences).
It seems odd that you don't dispute that companies change, yet seem to dislike people trying to make a company change. Or do you believe it's only bad when the workers want things to change but find it acceptable when upper management fucks over the company culture?
I don’t “dislike” people trying to make a company change. There are ways to change companies from within, discreetly, by building consensus around those things you would like to change. It isn’t easy, and there is no guarantee of success. Often people trying to do exactly that end up losing their positions, or end up not advancing, as a result of being “out of step” with the culture.
That doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here at all, though. You have employees trying to publicly exert pressure on management. You cannot do that and expect no consequences.
Possibly.
> in the public eye
I seriously doubt that. People are busy and have a lot of things to be concerned about. The general perception of SV employees doesn't seem to be very favorable from what I've seen, either within the Bay Area or beyond. The average worker in middle America is not going to feel much compassion for people making $200k a year who end up out of work because they publicly challenge their employer.
> and with its workforce.
That's the calculus that they (Google management) needs to compute. How do they deal with this situation without angering so many people that they end up losing people they want to retain. The other side of that is of course the absolute disinterest in keeping people who are not key contributors but are likely to be "activist".
FWIW, I know ~50 people at Google, and although I am not in touch with most of them on a very regular basis, of the ones I have been in touch with exactly 0 of them have any sympathy for the positions of the people who are making a public scene.
What they are concerned with is the company being seen as a place where people are running amok and the work isn't seen as the first priority by the employees. That can be demoralizing to the rest of the staff who are interested in having impact and can affect recruiting if potential recruits think the company is a big hot mess.
Most likely, you aren't agreeing with all what your company does. There has to be some decision, either in management, or in product direction, or anything, that you disagree with and you tried, or will try, to change that. Is the solution simply to quit and get another job? Do you simply quit because improving that part is too complex? Or do you persevere because you believe in the company and think it can become so much better?
First it was tech conferences, then open source communities, now it's IT businesses themselves that need to be in the service of that ideology. These people are trying to turn IT into the same ideological shithole they turned academia into...
The sort of people who would politically oppose them are conservatives, who by their very nature tend to be ... conservative. That is, careful about challenging the status quo and uninterested in activism. So frequently they just stay quiet and don't talk much about their views: that's why the walkouts and Googler activists on Twitter always seem to have the same agenda. It looks like Googlers all agree but they don't, not at all.
But this has an insidious impact in two forms:
1. People whose own convictions aren't that strong can be easily swayed by constant arguments of the form, "if you disagree with me you're evil and bad" because everyone wants to be good and they're not being supplied with intellectual ammo with which to fight back.
2. People who are trying to calculate the cost of resistance look around and don't see any allies, just a big angry mob, so feel they have to fold even if they disagree.
The correct way to handle this sort of situation is for senior managers to have strong and relatively small-c conservative convictions, such that progressive placard-waving activism is swiftly dealt with via firings with everyone being made clear on why those people got fired (political arguments do not belong in the workplace).
Google doesn't have that and we can see the result.
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/googles-next-moonshot-unio...
It's hard to tell from the outside how many people actually there agree with, disagree with, or are indifferent to, the efforts of the people who have been fired.
It’s worse than that though, because I’d be afraid to say anything contrary to the activist’s opinions. I don’t want to be stalked or harassed. The company is extremely tolerant of what employees say, the activists not so much.
Or people aren't fooled by the positive coverage for fired workers and political agitators and know what's really going on, and this has absolutely nothing to do with union busting, just individuals who can't tell a workplace from a culture war battlefield.
It is "don't be evil". It was in their code of conduct, not mission statement. It is not removed from their code of conduct, in fact, it is the final conclusion of the document:
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
The last edit is from 2018, not several years ago. And its updated cousin motto "Do the right thing" became more prominent.
I suspect a journalist had a diff bot running on the code of conduct, created a story around it about removal, because that would actually constitute a story worth paying journalist wages for, and then the media ran with it, without doing checks of their own. And now, here you are. And I am ignoring the fact that an evil company announcing its future plans by removing references to "evil" in their mission statements is downright James Bond-level of ridiculous.
Nothing new under the sun, etc etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/25/google-...
Hard to muster much sympathy for anyone here--whether it be the machine, or its acolytes. These bastards all loved that sweet, sweet institutional power back when it was advancing their own agenda.
People who were idealists, now are turning Machiavellian.
My gut tells me that when the machine went their way, they were obedient little soldiers. When it didn't, they took matters into their own hands.
'Thanksgiving Four' say Google is punishing them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50554931
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If a person puts a personal event in a calendar and leaves the event as public, it's their fault, not mine if I access it.
If I leave the door of my house open, and someone enters and steals my tv, it's my fault.
So, unless these four people hacked the calendars, i.e. systematically searched for and found weaknesses in the software, exploited them to get access to private calendars, they are not guilty of anything.
It's obvious that Google is really scared of unionizing and their moves were done to scare the shit out of the rest of the employees.
EDIT:
Yes, stealing another person's belongings is theft (morally and legally wrong). The 'it's my fault' part goes to the act of getting access to something: if I leave my door open and someone walks in, it's my fault. If they steal my TV, it's their fault as well, but this does not erase my fault of leaving the door open.
Seeing a public calendar is equivalent to seeing into your neighbours house because they left the front door open. Not stealing your damn tv. Stealing the tv is clearly theft. Only your overlords at the insurance company would ever try to claim it’s your fault for someone stealing your stuff.
Then sharing a screenshot of that calendar outside the company is like posting a video of you secretly filming them as you follow them around all day.
No reasonable person would not consider that incredibly creepy behavior.
I don't think so. In fact, I don't know any jurisdiction where taking a TV from someone's house wouldn't be a crime, even if the door had been left wide open.
Still illegal to enter my house, eat my food, etc.
And, at the absolute least, it violates basic notions of decency and autonomy.
After a while, the American workers start to unionize. Some of them wait outside to hand out fliers/info in favor of unionizing, and they called that 'stalking'. While some of the internal union fighting employees said they were not safe because people were watching when they were leaving. The organizing workers were fired.
This seems to be a pretty common tactic to prevent unionization, calling pretty basic human communication even a stalking or scary action, then firing them, mostly as a message to other employees.
An employee gathering information off of company-wide public calendars and then leaking that information outside the company can certainly be held accountable for privacy violations (morally and per company policy, at least).
But if you did this, Id still call you a creep stalker, and if you did this to a co-worker, I think that you should be fired for it.