On Resigning from Google
alphabetworkers.org
alphabetworkers.org
1. I applaud the fact that they are actually quitting the company to voice their disapproval of these policies. In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.
2. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.
i.e. the world ought to look more like the leader, not the average; regression to the mean is not desirable.
> In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.
Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not. Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for. They are well within their rights and should be encouraged to voice their honest opinions.
> 2. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.
So you would have them STFU, because the rest of the country sucks? This sounds completely backwards and doesn't make any sense to me.
how? can you justify what makes these people (you) so special? IN all honesty, they are probably overvalued in every sense.
>Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not
You are right because they already made their money and can afford to quit over whatever. Of course it has to do with money. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves. If money did not matter, they would have not worked at Google, there are other ways to make the world a better place than add snow effect on photos.
How do we know that employees provide more value than their compensation? Because Google makes profit.
How does a software engineer at Google worth more value than one at timbuktu? No, they are not. They just are not in the right place at the right time.
Do you think selling ads is changing the world? Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else? Wake up and smell the coffee.
The gas station down the street isn't paying its employees six figure salaries. That employee might be making $7.25 an hour, which is the federal limit. Assuming 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year (no time off!), that's 15k before taxes. Is that gas station clerk a better/more worthwhile person than a gas station clerk in timbuktu?
> Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else?
Getting paid more than someone else doesn't make you a better person than someone else. It just means you're earning more income, and that company is willing to pay you that income for any multitude of reasons. That's it.
Programmers can provide immense value to companies, and companies make handsome profits despite paying their engineers immense salaries. This also has to do with cost of living in some areas: chicago is more expensive than many places in the world, so if you want to base a company in chicago and pay someone who lives in chicago to work for you, you need more money. It's not rocket science.
I think many companies don't need to be based in SF or Seattle, etc, but that's another discussion.
But there's another function to high pay: sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere. They basically hire a significant chunk of systems (and nowadays also AI) programmers available in the industry, and keep them for as long as they like. Left to their own devices, those programmers would be able to start companies, or help Google's competitors compete with Google. As things stand, everyone else (including the likes of Microsoft) gets the folks who have failed the FAANG interviews. They still sometimes get good people, but not as good as to show them the way from the corners they've painted themselves into.
Where it all goes wrong though is when they actively attract "activists". From direct observation, few, if any, of those activists actually pull their weight once hired. In fact they often prevent others from focusing on their work, so their productivity contribution is often negative. They mostly spend their days on activism on the internal Google+ and do little else. You can actually see everyone's commits at Google, as well as graphs of how much code they contribute. When I was there, I'd check those dashboards from time to time only to confirm my suspicions, without fail.
This is because of the ethics those same employees are complaining about. An ethical Google makes less money, employees will necessarily have to be paid less, they will then go on to the next unethical company that can pay them more. It is completely ridiculous to bring home a huge paycheck and complain about the very thing that enables that huge paycheck.
They want a world where they make the same $$ at ethical as non-ethical companies. It doesn't work that way. If they can't give a shit enough about their own beliefs to sacrifice something - $$ vs ethics -- then how can they expect a faceless corporation to give a shit enough about that person's beliefs to make that sacrifice? It's a completely, ridiculously, unrealistic expectation.
The very reason Google is paying employees is that they are contributing to the company's goals, either directly or indirectly. So it isn't really Google the abstract entity that is causing climate change, it is all the employees working under the "Google" banner — including the people complaining about climate change. That is what is hypocritical.
For the second part — "have them STFU" is a bit extreme, but I think Google does have the right to be held to a similar standard than the companies they are competing with and the rest of the country/world. If the response every time they make some progress is "you aren't going far enough!" - even though they are miles ahead of everyone else - eventually they'll just stop making the effort altogether.
You're wrong. You have an opinion; not a fact. This is no different to the original commenter, but at least (s)he made that very clear.
I think utilizing one's power as a worker and aligning other workers to increase workers' power is far from hypocritical. It's a great way (perhaps the only reliable way) to hold companies accountable for their actions and improve companies' treatment of workers and society.
This is in fact the quickest way to ensure that this behavior immediately stops
Your analysis seems to assume that there's some fixed percentage of employees who think some action from their employer is bad, and if that percentage is high enough, then all those employees could quit, which would either somehow signal to the employer that their action was bad or would damage the company so much that they would need to change their actions.
I think that's wishful thinking, and of course the percentage of employees with a complaint is not fixed and can be directly increased by internal efforts to organize. That applies not just to internal awareness, but also public awareness: note that we're only having discussions about cases where employees attempted to organize other employees.
If a company knows you will return to work no matter how much you complain, they are not going to take you seriously. (This was the Walkout's mistake.) And if, as an individual, you make too much noise, you'll just get fired. (See numerous individual examples.) Decisive collective action works, and that's what unions figured out a long time ago.
More recently McDonalds workers went on a mass strike in the UK for a living wage, and got a pay rise:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/mcdonalds-w...
One of Google's biggest assets is their huge army of talented techies. I'd go so far as to say losing that would be an existential threat to the business.
Techies make a lot of money compared to other professions because we genuinely produce a disproportionate amount of value, but that doesn't imply we're in a seller's market.
One way you can tell that there's no dearth of labor is that most companies round an "unsure" in the interview process to "no," not "yes."
Somebody who's thought more and more clearly about this could write something better about it, but I felt like pointing out what I think is overlooked.
I sugggest you ask a non-tech friend about their experience getting a new job: how many applications they've sent out, how many responses they've received and how many interviews they've actually been to. Then compare that to a software dev's hit rates.
I submit to you that a halfway decent software dev will have a hard time being unemployed: they might not get hired by FAANG and they might have to code in $LANGUAGE_I_HATE, but they'll be able to get a job at a reasonable salary.
Also, consider the fact that there's been a large number of businesses focused on recruitment specifically in the tech area. That's because everyone wants to hire devs and they're willing to pay recruiters to channel the funnel their way.
Few other industries have that luxury.
Most (white collar) employees are not as fungible as people assume, first of all. Two "Senior Back-end Developers" might have such different work experience that one would ramp up on a project in 5 days, and the other would take a couple of weeks.
Second, all turnover is expensive. For a large company like Google, turnover of 100 people could easily cost millions.
Unfortunately, unless those people worked on ads, Google's investors (and therefore C-suite) probably wouldn't miss them much.
When say, the teachers go on strike in Chicago, it's not that it's impossible to hire new teachers, it's that someone in the meantime of negotiation has to watch over (and ideally educate) all of the kids that those teachers are responsible for teaching.
Wherever you work, try to imagine a random 1 out of every 5 employees missing one day. How likely are you (and everyone else still there) likely to run into problems conducting your general work. And imagine that that is going to continue until your company manages to interview, vet, hire, onboard, and train all of those people back.
...Or, the corporation could just capitulate to demands. Collective action is incredibly powerful.
If you do not have that critical mass, and resignation is the only moral choice, then all you achieve is eliminating that voice from the inside and eliminate any inside power to influence.
It's great when someone who quits has the resources to also try to bring some attention to the reasons why.
I think the political power can only be regained by pooling your labor with your peers.
https://mobile.twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1172279395035...
I wish there was another way, but I can't really think of one that's within our control... Unions are certainly not above corruption either. I see Republicans / Democrats as two opposing unions; instead of making rational decisions on each issue independently everything gets encoded into a binary choice. Red or blue and all the good / bad that comes with either choice.
The real solution is smaller companies. Local businesses that you can simply stop using / move away from. That seems like a pipe dream though; it's more convenient to buy your internet from Comcast and support a monopoly than start your own ISP - even if you do and it gains traction, Comcast will come knocking and you'll take the money and retire.
I think its likely hard to hire smart people who don't rock the boat; and thus it takes a long time to hire. It's of course possible (and reasonably likely) that there are only a handful of people that can do the work, but I dunno... with the kind of money that Google has you just open a school and start grooming people specifically for the roles that you have open. Build a pipeline of qualified workers, don't wait for them to come to you.
You may "voice your concerns" all you like, but while you're an employee, it is your duty to ACT in accordance with the directions you're given, and in the absence of explicit direction, in the interests of the company.
If you're an employee of a company you are contractually obligated to fulfill the terms of your contract, but there is no legal -- or if you prefer, LEGAL -- requirement for you to do so. You may be reprimanded or even fired for spending too much time on Hacker News at the office, but you are not breaking any law by doing so. More to the point in this case, you are absolutely not breaking any law by telling your employer that you don't agree with their decisions, or even by trying to organize fellow employees to put pressure on management to change their behavior. If your employer fires you because of your speaking out or organizing, in fact, the law may very well be on your side, not theirs.
If you are flexible enough about what "maximizing shareholder value" means, then it's not an endorsement of any behavior anyone disapproves of. You could say the real issue is just that people do bad stuff and say that it is maximizing value.
Corporations often say they have to do stuff to maximize shareholder value, but they also often say they have to act in the worst possible way permitted by law, because that is the standard the law sets. That is, without referencing shareholder value. Maybe it's all just nonsense excuses by people who do bad stuff?
Bondholders (as well as employees and others) come before shareholders in bankruptcy, so it seems like in a very concrete way, maximizing shareholder value is not a feature of it and never has been.
There are certainly some economists who might argue that indeed it's become nonsense excuses, including The Economist, which wrote in 2016 that shareholder value theory had become "a license for bad conduct, including skimping on investment, exorbitant pay, high leverage, silly takeovers, accounting shenanigans and a craze for share buy-backs."
(Also, apparently I had the year wrong -- Friedman wrote in 1970, not 1975.)
I think whether that is a sufficient qualification depends on whether you are trying to break down or eliminate most of the "rules of the game" or instead make them better.
Lots of ideas make sense by themselves and then become toxic when combined with others.
This is a myth. The only time this applies is if there's an actual written contract of fiduciary duty. Running a company or having investors does not magically enact some federal law.
Whenever Homer gives out advice the odds are its bad advice.
This sounds terrible. You're not increasing worker power as a whole you're just increasing the power of workers with similar political agendas. If successful, the unaligned workers don't even get the material benefit of a raise or added employee benefits like they would from a real union. The unaligned are basically just expected to roll with whatever mayhem the preachy workers cause.
Holocaust would not happen. Modernity and the Holocaust by Z. Bauman should be obligatory read for corporate workers.
Why is it that you think that the people who see the sausage being made are exactly the ones most unqualified to criticize it?
Ultimately, I think hypocrisy is the wrong lens to look at this through. Activists are not seeking purity or moral perfection, we're seeking change. Change requires organizing, which has to start within the company. An individual employee does fuck-all if they leave by themselves.
No, that's not it at all.
He's saying you get together and tell the boss "Hey, there's some rat shit in this sausage, but I'm gonna go ahead and keep making it."
That's why it's perceived as illegitimate. You're expecting other people to sacrifice but not yourself.
Absolutely no one at Google is doing that. What is happening is that these employees are telling their bosses "we would prefer not to shove rat shit into sausages" and the bosses are saying "no". Then these employees are going home and posting about it on social media and going back to work making the same sausage the next day.
This is a particularly subversive brand of whataboutism.
"Company has participated in Bad Thing."
"Ah, but Other Company also participates in Bad Thing! Your criticism of Company is therefore invalid!"
"Company took $1,000,000,000 from Bad Industry! We should scold that behavior!"
"Ah, but Other Company took $2,000,000,000 from Bad Industry! Company therefore shouldn't be criticized!"
One action can be bad without negating the badness of another action.
I respect when people stay, too... they’re trying to make change from within where they have some power, rather than outside where they have none.
Quitting one's job is disruptive enough that it's reasonable for one to make several good faith attempts to make changes from the inside before pulling the trigger. And that includes making public critiques as people from every industry do all the time.
There are of course cases where one only gives lip service in order to gain social karma points while continuing to rake in the dough. But separating those cases from the actions of reasonable, ethical people takes more than setting a "one bit" Manichean flag for hypocrisy.
Don't get me wrong-- skepticism should be used when assessing any critique by someone still collecting a paycheck. But rejecting all such claims out of hand strikes me as flip and extreme. Or at least doing so requires a persuasive argument, and you did not provide one.
leaving a job early is already tough, leaving a big profile name over politics even more so
2. didn't their datacenter carbon neutral though ? or is this Apple ?
I frequently run in to people who are: 1) always been at Google and enjoyed the fruits of its rise or at another similar environment 2) never had to deal with frugality or lack of funding for anything 3) see themselves are superior to everyone else - in terms of how enlightened they are, how they know whats best for everyone 4) feel that they have an absolute say in anything Google does
These people do not know the realities of the world. Plain and simple. They had a good life and think that is it.
One thing they dont seem to realize is that almost everyone else has had to deal with growth challenges, lack of capital and access to resources. No one exists to only make the world better. Contrary to their disbelief, most people and organizations, including themselves and Google, have the first priority to survive, to grow, to flourish and to abide by all applicable laws. Once this is satisfied, they move on to grander things like charity, investing in the well being of others etc.
The very reason these people have the capability to leave their jobs for whatever reason is that they already took care of the first priority - to survive and thrive, courtesy Google.
Google is a business, and as a business it has the fiduciary duty to serve itself and its interests first.
If these people have any conscience that they claim to have, they need to stop pointing at Google, stop riding in their luxury SUVs, stop eating in insanely expensive restaurants, stop vacationing in luxury resorts, stop purchasing multi million dollar homes, and first go try to serve in the government to change the laws and society in which we all live and abide by.
Stop trying to tell a large corporation to stop doing business and make profits, go change the society in which it operates. Then we will talk.
Enough of the BS.
You dont like working here, move on. Let us have the opportunity to contribute and grow and be successful.
Sure "it's a business" but does that give it a green card to act how it pleases?
We're getting into the philosophy of what we want businesses to be in our society. More and more people are realizing that the inhumane structure a business operates in isn't acceptable to them, and would like to have a say in what they're doing.
This person left Google because Google was getting into the business of killing people - sure you might be comfortable with that. But your opinion isn't any more valid than someone who doesn't work in Google.
So please, stop telling people how to behave and act and protest. We're not putting in 100 hour weeks because someone before you had the audacity to go say the current system is inhumane.
You don't have to be that person, but you also don't have to be the person who stands in their way.
of course, yes! As long as it stays within the boundaries set by the law. Do you not act as you please? Do you not eat a $40 meal while a homeless person is lying outside in the cold? DO you not send your kid to a private school at $100k/year while the kid down the street (down the highway) struggles for school supplies?
> So please, stop telling people how to behave and act and protest. We're not putting in 100 hour weeks because someone before you had the audacity to go say the current system is inhumane.
I am not tell you how to behave, I am tell you to not tell the company how to behave. You are free to leave and go do what you think is right.
That's telling me how to behave. The company is just an entity that needs to follow the set of guidelines set by people living in that society.
But your lectures while driving past the homeless in a $100K tesla on your way to swank vacations are tiresome - particularly as you build that money off the status quo you are so eager to say is terrible.
1. Work in the current system and try to slowly impact it and change how it behaves.
2. Start a violent revolution and start a civil war which will end in millions dead.
Which one do you prefer I do?
I also HAVE to participate in this system if I want to live. That's one of the reasons I want to change the system.
My participation in this system isn't consensual.
False dichotomy. You don't need to quit your job to work to change the status quo. Indeed, you can often effect change much better from inside an important organization than from outside it.
You don't need to change your job - but if you are getting paid very well to do a job, then posting long internet postings about how terrible it is to work at an "important organization" risks getting you some eye-rolls.
Go change the guidelines. No need to tell anyone anything at that point.
Go change the guidelines. No need to tell anyone anything at that point.
Those guidelines are the laws. We elect congress and a president who passes laws, and what those are comes back to us.
Within those laws, we have capitalism. If company A goes beyond that, and company B doesn't, guess who survives?
Pressuring an employer to act outside of those bounds isn't helpful. What is helpful is realigning incentive structures at a system level. Radical proposals -- like eliminating NDAs, mandating open source for firmware, right-to-repair, and so on -- feel oppressive when one looks through the lens of private right to contract. When one looks at a systemic level, they result in much greater freedom for everyone.
Most executives would like to be good, but they're between a rock and a hard place, and walk a thin line. Laws are what determine where that line is.
This, it's even mandated by law to appease shareholders by making as much money as possible. Google changing their ways might just increase the number of shareholder x company lawsuits their legal team has to sort out.
https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...
"modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." --Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby (US Supreme Court, 2014) [0]
This comment posits that companies act in a closed system. Companies don't just act within the boundaries set by the law, they actively seek to directly change laws by lobbying and to change the interpretation of laws through litigation in order to best suit their interests. They are political agents as are their workers.
It might bring more gray area into your life but like it or not what you do for your day job can have moral implications. You may have taken this post as a personal attack because you work at Google, which may be why you are so vociferously arguing against it. But even if one disagrees with where this person drew the line I think it behooves everybody to at least occasionally reflect on the ethical implications of how they spend their time, especially in tech where what you work on can easily affect millions or billions of people.
I'd hope this discussion would be more about the merit of where this line was drawn in this case rather than whether or not one is even justified in taking a moral stance instead of just putting their head down and shutting up or quitting.
This is true for the author as well. He worked at google for 15 years, he is probably a multi-millionaire. It's easy to take a stance once they money has been raked in.
Overall, the author is right in trying to promote people to leave Google, as remaining quiet weakens the whole point of them leaving.
Basically, Google paid them enough to retire early, and they cashed all those checks and now want to bite the hand that fed them. Must be nice.
All employees, contractors and business partners who are working with or for Google have had those or similar pitches thrown at them. They are hopefully part of the reasons why they chose Google and each has a right to complain when they don't get what they signed up for.
If people apply their conscience anywhere then great, but surely one step at a time, maybe the author will run for president one day, fix homelessness and buy everyone SUVs, but we can only do one battle at a time and it seems like he's got some good domain knowledge about Google to tackle this one.
I mean, I think you have...on literally every post I make...saying people like me aren't smart so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> If you don't like your current job
I like it fine, I just don't like people implying I'm lesser.
As an LGBT person (who does her fair share of activism), I'm not clear what the LGBTQ angle is here other than if the people involved happened to be LGBTQ. It seems like even if they are being retaliated against for their activism, it's not LGBTQ activism.
Did I miss something?
even amazon, was pretty equal about minorities and LGBTQ folks as they treated everyone equally crap....
As a minority LGBTQ person, let me say it's almost never in a visible way, but trust me, it is there.
It's usually called something different, or dressed up as something else, just like how it is treated in political discourse.
The fact that it's not obvious only makes it worse and more unnerving for the gaslit target.
I "get" that it's not visible (sort of), but I don't get how to be on guard for it, prevent it or deal with it if we can't see it. How does a manager see the signs of it, somehow, well enough, to deal with it?
First, I'd just make sure that people are happy. If people are honestly happy and enjoying their job, they probably aren't having a problem. Talk to them and figure it out is the most direct way. Indirect ways I would say include:
Social dynamics: Does a team try to exclude a person from meetings, social discussions at work, social activities, etc? Is one person always alone? This is a bit fuzzier since it's about association, and you can't force people to be friends, but it can show a lot about team cohesion.
Work dynamics: I've worked with people who I was almost sure had it out for me, and they would purposefully drag their feet doing work or responding to issues. While this should reflect poorly on the person sandbagging, it's more common that the recipient is blamed for "not getting enough done." Especially with ramping up or helping out, by excluding certain members of the team, coworkers can basically set that person up to fail, while technically doing nothing wrong.
Reviews: Also look out for when people are punished or otherwise told they aren't doing good enough. The measuring stick for this can change based on the person being measured.
Opportunity. Are minority team members given the same opportunities for leadership and growth? Or does a team always give the best work to one or two people that the boss likes, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess? It's hard to prove that you can do the job if they won't let you. This seems to happen a lot in my experience.
I guess I've been fortunate in that, all of the people being excluded were truly not pulling their own (traditional) weight because they were going through family trauma and on anti-depressants or something. (Divorce, loss of a child, etc.). People were pretty forgiving, but definitely didn't want them in critical path.
The handful (let me say, 5 G, 2L and 2T across 10 small teams over 5 years that I am going to use as a sample, circa 1995~2000) of alphabet people (is that phrase offensive?), were objectively AWESOME in terms of personality and group engagement and work performance. It really was never a problem. Maybe we hired well. Maybe we were lucky. I guess I haven't seen the passive-aggressive exclusionary thing you are talking about, but I will keep an eye out for it in the future.
Again: Thank you.
I know don't know where you've worked, but I would maybe reach out to some current or former LGBTQ coworkers and ask them if that's in line with their evaluation. In my experience, that discrimination _isn't_ very visible
There is a simple, well-established way for society to discourage certain activities without damaging the shared infrastructure for other activities. It’s called a tax. If the externalities you (we) are concerned about were reflected in a carbon tax, it would not be up to individual employees to disproportionately risk their livelihoods and families like this. The project spreadsheet would come out differently for a reason that directly corresponds to the societal problem.
So to me the moral imperative is to make sure that tax comes into existence, rather than making a not-very-impactful personal sacrifice that you may or not be able to afford.
Second of all, the relevant point here is that cloud computing capabilities are by default available to any purchaser, just as encryption is available to any user of products that contain it. From a utilitarian standpoint, I think most would agree that encryption and cloud computing are of overall benefit to the world. One might believe that, from a utilitarian standpoint, it would be better to not provide material assistance to oil and gas companies, since they do result in a lot of damage to the planet (although I personally believe the more effective route is to instead actively favor the development and deployment of renewable energy). But that argument is the same in principle as one favoring restrictions on the use of encryption by child pornographers for utilitarian purposes, to say nothing about restrictions on the use of encryption by enemies of your nation (which was the basic argument by the US government in the 1990s about restricting the use of encryption by non-Americans).
However, your ordinary political vote as 1 of 300,000,000 Americans is probably less impactful than your job as 1 of 100,000 Googlers. And you still get to vote regardless of your job status. Heck, this post is on the frontpage of hn getting viewed by thousands of people in relevant industries.
Certainly most ex-FAANG employees can afford more financial sacrifice than your typical person. I think there is a tradeoff here, and at certain levels it can make sense.
This reminds me of arguments about protests vs. legislation (e.g. "why are you making a protest instead of trying to change the law?"). You aren't a legislator. You can't just write a bill and conduct a vote on it tomorrow. Instead, you make public protests to bring attention to your cause and build support.
E.g. if Google can't get its employees to work for oil and gas companies, maybe they should lobby for a carbon tax so that they become acceptable companies again.
So if you’re making a sacrifice like this to send a message, let it be “support a carbon tax”, not “don’t work for oil companies”.
If I'm understanding correctly, the argument with regard to "physical security" is that if you try to get someone fired, which would result in them losing their employer-provided health insurance, that they would have less security in their physical body.
Is there some other linkage to physical security that I'm missing? Because if this is the only connection, then anytime someone tries to get anyone fired, it would be deemed "an attack on the physical security" of that person. That seems a bit of a stretch (and overlooks the fact that there are other ways to get health insurance, either via another job or via the health care exchanges).
To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the specific circumstances of the example — I'm just trying to understand how physical security was implicate, and how the term is being used.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. We declared bankruptcy once when I was young, and I was told to prepare to have "strangers come and take away furniture" (which, thankfully, never materialized). I never went hungry, but we did live paycheck-to-paycheck and frequently relied on the charity of our extended family to make ends meet. In short, money stress was a thing, and it was obvious from a very young age.
So I consider an attack on someone's employment to be a very serious road to go down because:
- Most people don't have savings, and it isn't necessarily their fault.
- Not everyone has a support structure, we were immensely lucky to have wealthy and generous relatives.
- 4 weeks of unemployment is plenty of time for bills to pile up if someone doesn't have savings, I've taken longer than 4 weeks to find a job every time I've looked.
- COBRA is insanely expensive and may be required if, for example, a close relative is very sick. Fighting with an insurance company as an individual is immensely difficult and interrupting someone's care to have that fight can be life-threatening.
- Desperation breeds poor decision making. That individual may take a pay cut or change careers and never recover.
- The various social consequences of being fired can make finding a job extra difficult.
Basically, I've seen my own family one fail-safe away from disaster, so its easy to imagine the bottom. In fact, that money stress from my childhood has haunted me as an adult -- even though I've never needed to worry about it from a factual standpoint.
I don't have any of these concerns if the individual is obviously wealthy, and I wouldn't go so far as to say one should never try to have anyone fired. But I do personally believe the bar to do so is very high.
Note: I'm not interested in convincing anyone of my point of view. Just giving context for why people think like this.
However, if physical security is a concern that is intrinsic to job loss, then I'm not sure what the point is of saying that you're threatening "my job and my physical security", since the latter is solely a subset of the former. I think most people would interpret that statement to mean that you threatened their job and also threatened something else related to their physical security.
Without it we would have substantially less food, travel would be all but impossible, and the technology sector would grind to a halt.
Eliminating the industry would cause harm on a scale the world has never seen. An entirely predictable and preventable catastrophe done in the name of a naive environmental absolutism.
Maybe let’s come up with solutions that don’t require pushing millions of people into poverty because they can no longer heat their homes or grow their food.
Also FWIW, the moral accountability argument here is pretty shaky reasoning. A great many people use Google products for evil. That doesn’t make Google morally responsible for it.
Evidence of this is present in the lobbying efforts funded to the tune of billions of dollars a year (by these industries) to ensure regulations don't get passed, subsidies don't reach green technology, and information is suppressed. This is evil.
No one is contesting the fact that we needed oil and gas to reach where we are today. We're just contesting the fact that we still need to be expanding these industries, which lobbyists are trying to do every single day.
> Maybe let’s come up with solutions that don’t require pushing millions of people into poverty because they can no longer heat their homes or grow their food.
Maybe let's come up with a solution that prevents inevitable mass migrations, famine, and wars. (This statement is just as fallacious as yours -- see, I can do it too.)
> The trouble with deep belief
> The reason it’s unlikely to work is that although you can persecute the prophets
Sounds a bit full of themselves. They worked for a company, they no longer like the company, they quit. Great, move on. No need to make a big deal about it. It's just a job.
I think it is reasonable to make a statement, but wonder who the target audience was in this case.
If you don't like content, great, move on. No need to make a big deal about it. It's just a web page.
To really clarify this, I made the exemplary initial job "janitorial duties".
There was a time where the search ad economy was such a great idea and a net benefit to society, and you could hire idealists to do the right things because hey some of them might end up being win-wins for both the business and society (See: Google Maps, Gmail, News, Android). Now though, the scale has shifted much more towards just squeezing all the juice out of the ad and data economy and keeping competitors out. There's not enough large-scale win-wins. This started when the self-driving car projects started really petering out. Innovation, real innovation in both products and also business plans has slowed down, at least within the big companies.
So where are these idealists supposed to go? Well, imo, on measure they've got PLENTY OF MONEY NOW, so they can and should go IMPROVE SOCIETY. Sure, some can stay within Google to try to hold up the barricade against capitalism and investor demands, but everyone knows the barricade will fall sooner rather than later. Like the original post's blog - thats what those people should be doing.
Arguing vociferously about how that "wasn't such a big deal" would make me wonder what ax you had to grind with people who talk shit about mensa.
If one finds oneself in such a circumstance, it's a correct thing to do to speak out about it.
One could, perhaps, consider "Don't stumble blindly into improving the technology used for automated weapons" an extreme position in the US, but given that it's the country that brought us the atomic bomb, perhaps it is the correct extreme position to take.
If Google disappeared off the face of the earth, every system, server, and employee, mitigations would be in place by the end of the week - and a year later it would be like nothing ever changed.
Let's not overvalue an adserver, free email, etc. These services are important but never life defining outside of the relatively small number of people they have made RICH.
Thats not remotely analogous as the point is about the effects of the magical disappearance of google on humanity. Your analogy wouldnt be how the disappearance of a PotUS would not cripple the US, as that contradicts your view...which I have difficulty grasping.
The sudden disappearance of Gmail would be significantly more catastrophic to communication online (though it would certainly be sorted out in a short amount of time as people sneaker-netted new communication addresses out and re-established the broken lines of communication).
And in a few cases, yeah; HR is shitting bricks because it's losing people who built the underlying fabric of the system (which anyone who has built a large system will tell you increases risk to the entire software company; they're pretty sure the exiting employee has written down all the mission-critical knowledge of how to operate the system riding around in their head, and Google has a corporate culture of minimizing the "bus factor" of key systems, but there's always a risk that the next time something significant catches fire, the employee with 1.5 decades of experience who just walked out the door is the one who could have fixed it fastest).
It'll be interesting to see if quality of product suffers (i.e. if there was actually correlation between technical competence and a care about the fate of the world and fellow employees).
And apparently that mindset drove an enormous amount of profit and, at least in the beginning, gave the company some sort of social conscience.
It's amazing that you can be so against these things
Why are you calling “caring about people” a “proclivity” as if it was distasteful compared to the pure and high minded pursuit of profit at all costs?
This is kind of why I expected some people to make a big deal out of how this isn't a big deal. Tech unionisation is genuinely threatening to many here and this Google walkout stuff is a potential sign of things to come in this industry.
If they aren’t, what is?
Besides, the protests over the last year or so have always attracted dozens of why-dont-you-quit-hot takes on HN, and seems only fair to let people know when their demands are met.
There is nothing that I do at my job that could potentially disrupt the live of many; hence I don't feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility.
Now if I would be part of an enterprise whose name is said, typed or thought by billions every day, yeah maybe my sense of responsibility would be heighten and yes, maybe I would think it warrant a greater tribune or more sensational language.
Overall, that the essay was quite constructive, no?
Ultimately, two thirds of their complaints involve taking a position counter to the stated national interest of the United States. Sure, maybe they believe that national interest is wrong, morally objectionable, or whatever, but the inference you draw from the writing is that it clearly is. That everyone at Google knows this is wrong, should be stopped, but isn't because of the monetary gains of doing these things.
> 2. Google Cloud sales to the oil and gas industry
I mean, if Google Cloud makes the extraction of natural gas more efficient then that strikes me as a net good for the planet. A large part of the emissions decrease in the U.S. over the past decade is from the economic viability of natural gas relative to coal. Dream of a bucolic lifestyle all you want, but reality should be confronted in these matters.
3. Expansion into the weapons industry and the business of killing
The business of killing terrorists - with increasing levels of precision - strikes me (and every administration in memory) as clearly being in the national best interest. The better targeting capacity available, the less collateral damage and need for U.S. boots on the ground abroad there will be.
You can, of course, find drone strikes morally objectionable. You can find killing what are deemed threats to the homeland as objectionable. That's fine. But to state this as an objective truth is to find yourself holding a position at odds with nearly all elected law makers.
If you, as a company, agree or disagree with U.S. domestic and national security policy, fill your boots. But Google working in concert with the U.S. domestic and national security policies isn't choosing money over morality per se.
People have different perspectives and these people clearly have perspectives unaligned with their former employers. Good on them for leaving. However, I have to say reading this screed makes it seem like the adults in the room are the executives they lambast.
Secondly, even if you take a US centric view of things, just because someone at the Pentagon claims something is the US best interests doesn't mean it is. People say, "oh we need these dangerous AI based weapons or other countries will win an arms race". Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them. The USA does not build nuclear weapons anymore, instead it invests heavily in diplomacy to prevent other countries from building nuclear weapons. For some reason, few people seem to consider that we could take the same approach to AI weaponry.
People simply underestimate the dangers of AI weaponry. Suppose you are an evil dictator who wants to oppress and enslave a group of people, and you can choose between a nuclear bomb, or a drone that has enough intelligence to hunt down journalists, political opponents, and any other dissidents that dare defy you. Which weapon would this hypothetical tyrant pick?
Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.
U.S. domestic and national security policy is certainly refined by unelected folks within various departments and agencies, but the overarching direction comes via elected representatives selected by the people.
Senator Warren and Senator Sanders - if elected president - would likely make the contracts in question (related to oil/gas and AI in the military) obsolete. If the American people feel aligned with their views on these issues - among others - and elect them and folks like them to the house and senate then you'll see a fundamentally different set of domestic and foreign policy objectives.
> However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.
Thanks very much.
Because it didn't work with nuclear weapons. Just look at North Korea to name the most recent example.
> Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.
And your reflexive attitude towards "authority figures" strikes me as extremely adolescent.
Extremely intelligent people developing sophisticated technology for military applications is not an inherently bad thing.
> Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them.
Indeed, but I don't think you've learned those lessons yourself. During the Second World War, if it weren't for the countless Allied scientists and engineers who designed weapons, broke codes, designed manufacturing processes, invented such things as the Mulberry harbors--the war would have, at minimum, lasted much longer than it did, and may have reached a much worse conclusion than it did.
I agree that evil dictators would probably find some profitable uses for AI technology. That's exactly why evil dictatorships are going to develop that technology anyway, regardless of whether we do or not. Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Feynman, and others refusing to help with the Manhattan Project wouldn't have made a whit of difference to whether or not Heisenberg was going to develop an atomic bomb for the Germans. And if Turing, Browning, Garand, Mitchell, and others refused to build weapons for the Allies, Heisenberg might have had the time and resources necessary to complete that bomb.
Instead, the Tesla model is the way to go. Build products that are 10x better than their fossil fuel reliant competitors. This way, consumers benefit as well.
The government can impose a cost on carbon somehow, so the market is forced to consider the societal cost of carbon. Also, it can incentivize clean energy by providing loans, lower taxes, etc to companies. It can increase R&D spending on clean energy.
Until carbon taxes become ubiquitous, this seems like the only viable option to combat climate change. The current model is functionally subsidizing goods and energy at the cost of future and current environmental damage. While I certainly agree that government solutions (carbon taxes, subsidies for clean energy) are optimal, they are not currently in place - that they may someday does not excuse inaction (or actively damaging action) in the present day.
Improving alternatives and choosing not to support fossil fuel companies are not mutually exclusive.
The solution is finding viable replacements for these companies, whether it's solar, wind, nuclear, or something else, and then scaling them so they can serve everyone.
Finding viable replacements that people _want_ to use, along with carbon taxes, subsidies, etc should be sufficient to force some oil and gas companies to pivot to clean energy and make the rest die out or become substantially smaller.
And, this way, we would avoid a massive decrease in our quality of life, it would actually be practical, and consumers would benefit.
They're going to go out of business in several decades because there won't be any more oil and gas to extract (or rather, there will be a lot less and it'll be difficult and expensive to extract).
> The way these companies became so successful was by providing something of value at a low cost.
The cost is not low if you consider the decades of suffering by people in the middle east and other oil-producing countries due to oppressive regimes put in place so that oil and gas could be extracted at "low cost".
But even regardless of that - so what?
> Do you really want to pay substantially more for heating/cool, gas, and almost every good?
1. If the alternative is even worse climate change, meters of sea level rise, destruction of huge natural habitats etc. then - yes. 2. If you account for the costs of climate change, it's not more expensive to use renewable energy. And there's the cost and detrimental effects of immediate environmental pollution... 3. Renewable energy is no longer that expensive, and it's getting cheaper. In fact, it's become quite competitive:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/22/solar-costs-wind-costs-...
> The government can impose a cost ... it can incentivize...
Yeah, well, maybe those were relevant solutions 40 or 30 years ago. The time is up for that kind of stuff. Far-reaching action is required immediately, since we are on overtime w.r.t. climate effects, and markets be damned.
Yes, if everyone else does too. It seems like the only way to drive greater efficiency in transportation, construction, housing, and manufacturing.
It absolutely is... Or at least make them change into non-oil and non-gas companies.
Think of the production chain, top to bottom. Where did the steel come from?
It’s hypocritical to quit a company over selling products to oil and gas companies when one is themselves unwilling to completely stop consuming oil and gas.
Modern life is essentially made possible by oil, coal, and gas. Nobody, not even the Amish return 100% to the pre-industrial age. There are alternatives but they aren’t complete solutions, not yet. That’s just the reality.
Similarly, Google was vilified by its employees for bidding on government and defense contracts, while Microsoft and Amazon (and nearly every other tech company) very publicly fight tooth and nail to land these contracts. Again, the difference is that you don't hear Amazon or Microsoft employees complain. They don't stage constant protests. They don't leak internal documents to the press. They don't quit in dramatic fashion and write blog posts about it.
Google doesn't have a worse track record on any of these issues than other tech companies. It just has the loudest, most critical employees, who create a public shitstorm whenever the company steps out of line with their progressive politics. Over time, this has gradually seeped into the public conscious. Now even progressives outside the company rally against Google, while ignoring the tech companies that actively support censorship and the military-industrial war machine.
I go to a PCUSA church and have a different view of this. Churches that did not agree with the changes to PCUSA's position split from the denomination and created the ECO denomination, which retains the prior position on same-sex relationships. So it's not so much that PCUSA "won" as that there is effectively a schism happening, with some of the largest churches from PCUSA departing.
Bruce may agree with homosexuality-affirming theology and argue strongly (or even rightly!) that it should be adopted by his denomination, but denominations exist precisely so that they may create standards of unity in hermeneutics and interpretations. That's the whole purpose of belonging to one.
If you openly defy their positions or teach in opposition to them, you shouldn't expect to remain a part of that denomination—whether you know it or not, you're advocating for a new sect.
I think painting what happened as the work of some wilely, ill-minded lawyer is either extremely naïve or disingenuous.
Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that these "bad" companies use to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also to further their functions. Ford/GM probably supply them with vehicles. Farmers grow crops that get into the the meals that their personnel eat. Pilots and flight attendants probably have knowingly transported their employees.
Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Google employees? Why do Google employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is oil/gas the sector that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
I get tired of people picking and choosing their annual causes to be outraged about. And the LGBT part of the manifesto is ridiculous.
* Worked at Google / FB / blah startup for long enough to put some serious $$ away
* Don't care about working becasue see above
* Pick a fight / select a topic that is niche enough to wrote a blog post about
* Quit (cough , retire,) young and afford to live luxuriously
* Stop working becasue now you are too lazy to give a shit about anything
* Bitch about how everyone attacks you
* Get a shitty rating in perf review becasue you stopped giving a shit
* Whine and whine
* Get a shitty rating again * Quit and make scene about how they were victimized
Here is a thought, * Quit
* thank the gods and Google for making you rich
* live life and relax
They'll certainly compensate you well, and they have flexible hours and treat software engineers and SREs like royalty.
But Googlers who joined up 10 years ago really didn't have to also ask the question of whether their work was directly benefiting military AI projects (or merely providing an agnostic service that everyone was using; search is certainly something that benefited good and bad use alike, but partnering with the military and submitting contract proposals for drone targeting operations is a moderately different can of worms).
Clearly, optimizing targeted advertising on the internet is a higher moral calling.
The socially accepted responsibilities of companies are changing. The more Google goes down this road, the more they transition from being liked to being disliked but having power not to care. Eventually people will remove that power from them by abandoning their services, even if it takes a while.
Companies are groups of people. Those people should be asking what they care about in the world, not what makes the most money that will then be spread to shareholders.
> For engineers still looking for work, GOOGLE is the best place to work
This is a bold claim regardless of ethics and seems to be quite prestige blinded.
The author seems be dispersing anger over a very broad set of issues. That won't work.
The authors also pressing on existing employees that they should feel guilty and take some action. By this logic, when the US does some questionable things abroad, you should renounce citizenship and leave to Canada. When the Canada's gov makes a questionable move, you leave it immediately for Norway. Eventually you discover that humanity is still mostly driven by egoism and retreat to woods.
Why do the think inflating their own believes over the beliefs of others needs to be encouraged, funded and praised by the company they work for?
Did this person object when google fired James Damore Or is 'selective outrage', is the norm? May be it is the norm for Burce Hahne, but then, how this can be this be universally just?
I generally try to give the author the benefit of the doubt. The writer lost me here.
...
>With the recent spate of Google firings of LGBTQ employees for their activism, including Laurence Berland, Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman, and Kathryn Spiers, I see far too many similarities to what we experienced in the PCUSA twenty years ago.
not advocating any specific position, just noting a pure logical difference - being fired from Google doesn't stop you from being software engineer at another tech company.
- (a) righteousness of the process to go about internal activism that's critical of company's business partners, company's internal policies, company's hiring and firing practices. And Company's response.
- (b) the actual position of an individual(s) on the above topics.
Would we have a problem with Google's actions if Bruce Hahne, (hypothetically) advocate bad things (eg polygamy, forced organ donations, child labor and so on) ?...
We would not have problem with Google STFU message to him and his supporters, in that hypothetical case ( a ), right?
Therefore, we should not really have problem with Google's action, if we accept that Bruce Hahne's positions ( b ) are not that good (and not shared by tens of millions of people that live in the country where Alphabet is headquartered), in the first place
About ( b ). Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence. This is not really presented in his writing. Eg. >"... I see far too many similarities to what we experienced in the PCUSA twenty years ago ..."
Is not an extraordinary evidence..
Therefore, I find that this type of high-volume, low-evidence activism is overall bad. They should be told STFU while on company's time, and get out of the company if they do not like it.
Founded in October 2005.
If <insert FAANG company here> doesn’t pay almost double the market salary then majority of people won’t work for that company.
It is futile to ask people not to work for a FAANG company. The reality is, majority of people need (not just want) the money. People who already worked at FAANG long enough to enjoy the benefit of being financially good can afford to quit or don’t work for FAANG, or don’t work at all.
Can non FAANG tech companies follow suit in increasing the salary? I mean, keep your interview DS&A hard and make it harder if you need to avoid bad hire, but increase the compensation too. Otherwise you will keep seeing major brain drain every year.
The free market? Because as we've seen, the free market can easily be distorted through monopolies, lobbying, corruption etc.
The government? Because that's how you get regulations and those seem to be especially hated among those that dislike employees attempting to influence corporate direction.
Ultimately you have to accept someone has to provide a check against uninhibited corporate power and considering how they can rig market economics at scale, that power falls down to either the employees or the government.
There are employee-owned companies and worker cooperatives out there. Alphabet isn't one of them. The cost of buying up all the shares to turn it into such a thing looks fairly large at the current market rate.
The main concerns of the author are:
> 1. Persecution and firing of transgender and gay employees for their efforts to reform the firm > > 2. Google Cloud sales to the oil and gas industry > > 3. Expansion into the weapons industry and the business of killing
But Alphabet is much more problematic to begin with:
* It is a vast spying operation in favor of the US government and corporate and state allies around the world - going through your searches, your mail messages (even if you just send mail _to_ people with GMail), your geo-location.
* It is a significant gate-keeper of visibility of Internet content: It passively and actively promotes and demotes search results (not talking about the ads here) through its ranking algorithms, but also in direct near-censorship of undesirable information sources. This is true not just on platforms such as YouTube but also on Search, and in the US, not just China, and involves Google operatives actively screening search results. If you are not aware of this, see:
https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i...
and
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html
* I would also make the argument that, as a huge US corporation, it has significant responsibility for the maintenance of the current social order, with the ills of exploitation, huge disparity of wealth, high level of violence and violent homicides, poor health and other social services etc., degradation of the natural environment etc. in the US - and of the global order of dominance of the US over a lot of the world. Whether it goes into military products and services itself or just has the US government maintain its property rights and the financial systems on which it relies - is a matter of extent of culpability.
And while the author seems to touch on some of these points through a brief description of Google's nature as a corporation, it's strange that he stayed there for so long, and why those issues are the ones that broke the camel's back, so to speak. I guess there is some sort of a reality-warping bubble around Google somehow.
* Connection #0 to host www.alphabetworkers.org left intact
* Maximum (50) redirects followedI am consistently amazed by the sanctimonious incoherence many people in this candy ass industry feel comfortable espousing.
This industry is where people with no work experience much less life experience are hired at 3-5 times the average American family's salary. This industry is where people who have the OP's 14 years of experience in that level of company can amass wealth that exceeds that of generations of families who didn't have people in the lineage that wrote buggy software for a living. The author worked 14 years in a company that provides the decadence of shit like free food and free dry cleaning. Free food is fucking mind blowing to some people.
Not only that, but the company he's worked for has ALWAYS been about helping others manipulate people. It has always been about taking some of the smartest people the industry has and pointing them at human manipulation because well they are lowly consumer apes and that's OK. Yet, like many on hnn he considers himself worthy of wielding the categorical imperative as if he was a fluffy bunny Thanos because he has joined the club that hates the orange man and supports the approved protected classes while defending the rights of street defecation. I guess 14 years enabling mind fuck INC. has all been cool because he goes to church and is a moral tourist.
The mind numbingly vast majority of techs especially at the major cloud provider level have never ever lived in an environment where physical harm or fatal consequences were the punishment for talking the wrong kind of shit to the wrong person or even being in the wrong area. Their pansy ass, horseshit view of the world is fueled by an existence where they have lived like kings in comparison to many. Yet in their proclamations they are comfortable blithely advocating policies that kill whole industries or leave young soldiers at a disadvantage because well they're good people and some hick who had to go into the military or works on a rig and feeds his family just isn't as noble as someone confused about their gender who would like others to be taxed so they could change it free of charge. Twice.
You can pretty much hear them thinking "Those kinds of people on those rigs vote Republican anyways so fuck them. Pretty sure that's what they said at church right before I took off to get my 6 dollar coffee on the way to spend a couple of hours with the the homeless."
Glad you quit your job. Also glad, you are just another deranged tech who thinks they are on the side of right and justice while being oblivious to their own shoddy and harmful positions instead of someone of consequence who does something like defend our country, farm or roof houses.
So glad I never went there.
People who profess to have "strong beliefs", but are unwilling to back that up with, potentially scary economic, action are big giant hypocrites. And liars and other hypocrites aren't helping anyone.
P.S. I'm pretty sure googles' response starts with "don't let the door", MEH! let them swing.
The damage has already been done, man. You don't magically earn the moral high-ground for "quitting" after 15 years with an angry letter.