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Comment by zartar | Hacker News Reader

I find the semi-regular condemnations from employees of big tech companies hollow. If you work for one of these companies and find their behavior unsavory, go work somewhere else - this is actually what might cause executives at these companies to reflect on how they might change course.

The fact that most of these employees could easily get well paying (just not as _ridiculously well paying_) jobs elsewhere to me feels like they are not staying out of necessity, rather they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these, and continue collecting their exorbitant pay.

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The Facebook “walkout” was a particularly hilarious example of this when you consider the second step of the walkout: walking back in.

If you look at trade unions, you see that walkouts, work slow downs and temporary strikes are commonly used.

The goal is never to destroy the company but to simply force them to the bargaining table by reminding them of the economic power workers provide.

A total strike or worse a union quitting a company all together is a nuclear option.

It may work with physical work, but at FANG companies software engineers will just make up for it on the weekends at nights. Stack ranking works wonderfully at making engineers to compete in working as much as they can (which is not a bad thing, just how the system works).

Stack ranking causes political backstabbers to rise to the top and filters out the conscientious. It probably functions well enough in companies that are fundamentally extractive, but it will put a company that is supposed to innovate on a self destructive spiral.

Microsoft improved a lot ever since it dumped stack ranking.

Microsoft was using per team stack ranking, Google global stack ranking. That's a huge difference I think. The problem is that the managers go to the promotion commitees and started exchanging promotions with eachother, so the system that was working before doesn't work anymore.

All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce.

The problem of the effectiveness of Facebook employee walkouts stems from the fact that they aren’t a real union, so the employer can just force them to make it up without providing for any additional compensation.

Any protest is a null option until the whole thing catalyzes and they form a union to address the repeated disregard the company shows them.

The only way for the company to avoid this is to self regulate or at least pay lip service to buy more time.

,,All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce.''

It doesn't always feel like it when you get an above average salary. Also it really depends on the team, how much the tech lead and the manager can push back to external requests...I don't see how adding even more politics can solve political issues. The fact that it's super easy to move between teams is much more important than anything the union could achieve.

This wasn’t a labor dispute about being treated fairly but a position employees were taking on principles. The truly principled walked out and didn’t come back.

If your job is an ethicist, your company hires you to demonstrate that they are ethical.

If they truly aren't then you either have to sacrifice your integrity or kick up a fuss. Additionally once her integrity is lost she loses market value.

Her market (whitewashing/signaling of ethical behavior of a large company) is an odd one but she behaved it the most rational manner given the circumstances.

Moreover by kicking up a fuss she probably has sacrificed an non disparagement termination bonus. Real $$$. So she's probably not talking shit.

I agree with all of this, except you miss that she started playing those ultimatum games with her boss, this particular act, let’s be real, is something that gets you fired from most places. There would be a lot of merit to what you’re saying and a lot more sympathy for this woman if she hadn’t made these missteps.

It’s true that ultimatums usually get you fired.

However it’s also true that they can simply be a reflection of an otherwise unworkable situation.

In a regular employment situation, I think that if you get to the point of wanting to issue an ultimatums, it is just an indication that the company is not a good fit for you any longer. On an individual level it’s better to recognize the signal and leave without burning bridges.

However if you role is ‘ethicist’, it is fundamentally your responsibility not to turn a blind eye to or be complicit in unethical processes, so giving an ultimatum may have been the only option available to retain integrity.

I don’t think we can declare these to be ‘missteps’ given her role. Perhaps Google is simply not capable of being ethical, and is going to fire people who challenge that. What would not be a ‘misstep’ under these circumstances?

"she started playing those ultimatum games with her boss"

Is it a game or is it just a negotiation?

My comment was about the 1200 workers who condemned the firing.

There have been similar recent public statements such as MS workers about use of AI for the pentagon, FB employees on content, etc..

Simply I mean the best way to support a wrongfully ousted ethicist would be to leave yourself, rather than keep getting paid by the execs who wronged her.

The work of AI ethics - especially in the vein of Timnit Gebru - is essential. My statement, was one of support for her.

>Simply I mean the best way to support a wrongfully ousted ethicist would be to leave yourself

What are you basing this on? I can think of at least one example where this pressure actually worked (caused google management to reverse course). ICE contracts, I think?

Your strategy would seem to be more in Google management's favor - clearing out all the people who might kick up a fuss when they try to engage in unethical behavior.

A typical recruiting fee is 30 percent of an employees annual salary.

A typical onboarding process takes weeks or months of paid employee time.

Employees value to a company increases substantially over time due to knowledge of culture, process, etc.

Executives care a lot when company actions cause employees to leave. Human capital is one of the essential ingredients to a successful company.

These things are real money and execs care about the impact on bottom line.

This is typically the most important aspect of an exit interview. In my experience, the employee's reason for leaving is thoroughly examined.

Does "condemning an action" have the same impact?

It’s just another example of the “participation culture” that modern parenting and social media have made commonplace. Who needs to do anything real when you can just upvote or retweet? You get the same sort of participation trophy that you’ve been taught to aim for since childhood.

This is such a bad-faith, shallow take. Ascribing the act of bringing awareness to “participation trophies” is nonsense.

I also disagree with the parent. Bringing change is almost always easiest from within. “Don’t like it? Leave.” stances aim to do more to attack the person involved than it does to take a critical look at whatever problem it is that’s being discussed.

It is not "don't like it? leave.", it is "stop working for immoral organizations". Would you consider a guard of a concentration camp ethical if they "condemned" the actions of the government but continued to support them via their work? I wouldn't.

The fact that they're working at Google in the first place shows they're not that ethical to begin with.

But nearly everyone has limits, and the petition signing limit was reached for these 1200 Google employees.

We'll see if the quitting limit is ever reached for any of them.

You don't need to leave, you can strike for example. "Condemning" does nothing.

It's a moral problem. If the organization you work for is immoral, by knowingly continuing to work for them you are materially cooperating in the evil they are doing and are morally culpable yourself. Sure, you can refuse to materially cooperate, but then they will fire you anyhow, as we see here.

What’s the opposite of “participation culture”? Not participating?

I feel like signing a letter of protest is doing something “real”. It’s communicating to leadership of the company that you have concerns about what has transpired. It’s not nothing.

Parent post is probably referring to the relatively new phenomena of issuing "participation prizes" instead of prizes for winning, this insulating the participants who "lost" from the stigma associated with being a "loser".

Ayn Rand's following, probably.

Is there an equivalent to Godwin's Law for Ayn Rand?

>"that modern parenting"

Back in my days we would chop off heads and assisinate politicans! These kids can't do anything right!

> Back in my days we would chop off heads and assisinate politicans!

back in my days, we would unionize and block the factories until the company died or we got what we wanted

The peak of this behavior led to a small war between coal miners and a sheriff and a small airforce that bombed the strikers that only ended when Warren Harding threatened to send in the military.

They ultimately lost but what happened there led to the sympathetic growth of the AFL and CIO and ultimately to the New Deal and the rise of the middle class.

They say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. I wouldn't be surprised if the next series of pitched struggles between American owners and labor result in extreme violence also, before giving way to a system that is slightly more egalitarian.

> Back in my days we would chop off heads

Ironic that guillotine memes are so popular among the kids these days, no?

The 70s are back in fashion.

If you just saw someone get terminated at your employer, and you considered it unfair, wouldn't you fear that speaking up might get you disfavor, perhaps due to whatever element resulted in the earlier unfairness?

Personally, I've been a scaredy-cat about this. I actually didn't go to a different FAANG a couple years ago, partly because I anticipated a dilemma: the company had been in the news for some alleged unfairness, and I decided that I could easily imagine being there, and trapped between wanting to speak up on behalf of a fellow employee facing a similar unfairness in the future, and suspecting that I would be terminated if I did. Had I already been there (rather than merely anticipating the situation with a hypothetical) I don't know whether I'd speak up. (Personally, given past battle scars, I'd probably make quiet and delicate internal inquiries, trying to find a sympathetic person in a position to look into and correct or mitigate what seemed to be unfair, while being clear that I'm still a team player.)

So, I do think speaking up in a big-corporate environment, in the public manner these people have done, would tend to come with some personal risk in most companies. When people do it (perhaps) despite a perception of personal risk to themselves in doing so, we should pause and consider what they are saying.

Also, I don't blame people for not anticipating this situation to which they're objecting (based on the information available I've seen at this point). If the concern had instead been "I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find the amassing of intimate personal information of Internet users going on here!", then I'd wonder how they couldn't have realized that before going to that company, but I don't think that's the concern.

I'm not taking a position on the concern itself, since the information I have so far is incomplete and complicated -- only suggesting that, when people are saying something at some personal risk, those people and what they're saying shouldn't be dismissed offhand.

So if the company does something unsavory, just walk away? Not even trying to change it first?

If you don’t like a policy, go live somewhere else?

If you find mold in a fruit, go shopping in a different place?

I mean, it’s a valid strategy. But obviously not the only valid one.

It’s not wrong to like the other aspects of the job and try to change the quality that they disagree with.

The protests against dragonfly and maven seemed to have an effect, which is the opposite of hollow?

They're often meant to be somewhat hollow. The referenced letter (https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-geb...) uses dramatic language to issue pretty anodyne demands: Brain leadership should meet with her former team and explain what went wrong, Google should publicly explain what it was they found objectionable in her paper, and Google Research should confirm they're committed to research integrity and academic freedom. Someone could easily sign this letter without thinking Google's a bad company at all.

The public sphere is very heavily slanted. Few people dare come out under their own name and condemn the bullying behavior of Timnit, for fear of being subjected to that very bullying, which has drastic real life consequences. The letter demands to push the conversation into the public sphere, where one sided Twitter and media pressure can be fully applied. One has to be very naive and sheltered to sign such a letter.

Why not try this first though? You complain, and if complaints aren't met you then quit. It's kind of childish, in a way, to not voice problems you have until you just up and quit one day. It's much more professional to at least try and communicate.

To say the least those employees are misguided. Gebru was hired to research AI, yes she spent all her time being an activist. A pretty lousy one too. Case in point: 1. Her paper's claim on CO2 emission was not scientific in any way (projecting 100% of utilization of hundreds of desktop GPUs, really? Looking at emission without looking at how much would be saved or what other benefits are, really?). 2. Her paper claims that lacking support of all languages in BERT marginalizes minorities, which was similar to how Trofim Lysenko politicizing and moralizing biological science in Soviet. 3. See the quote blow. If this is not activism, I don't know what is. The only remaining questions are, why would Google AI hire her in the first place, and why should she work in a research org? Note it's perfectly for her to work in Google or any other company so choose the companies. I just thought people do real research in a research org.

"Citation: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... Sample comment:

Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.

To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.

The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth."

The problem with this view, though, is imagine if you're in that situation, and you leave, only to be replaced with someone with more amoral views. It's the opposite of a solution imo.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's law....this is exactly Rodolf Hoss' defense at the Nuremberg trails:

"Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; ... somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t"

https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/c...

I would be extremely cauticous about using the argument of "well If I don't do it, someone else will".

But that implies that people protesting are doing bad things themselves, as opposed to just working at the same company.

But notice there is a difference between following orders and staying in a role but using what power you have to enact change. There is a third route.

I really hope someone at Google's PR department is paying attention to comparisons like these, and that they realize there are consequences to allowing Google's brand to get dragged through the mud by their relentless antisocial behavior.

Google went from being a tech darling where their "Don't be evil" motto was taken seriously to "Google employees are like Nazis".

Hope someone in authority at Google is doing some serious soul searching as to why this might be.

> they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these

Statements like these still put pressure on Google. It's possible to care enough to say something, without caring enough to go beyond talk, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's all performative.

How does it put pressure on Google? Where's the leverage?

Because it threatens Google's PR.

Big Corps have always been taken that stance. Google managers must be saying the same thing up and down the food chain.

But the fact that it hasn't stopped walkouts is interesting. It means there are influential people within who back the walkouts.

Or more likely, the corps realize that the walkouts are an ineffective form of virtue signaling and it would be a PR nightmare to do anything about them, so might as well let them happen since they really mean very little.

Walkouts are close enough to strikes that it would be pretty dangerous for a Google executive to try and stop them. (I think some of them may actually be strikes by law - I don't know the exact legal definition.)

>> go work somewhere else

That may play into the company's long term goals to winnow out the people not willing to tow the party line.

Not sure what the best option is, maybe for those that have accrued weeks of PTO they can all take it at the same time.

If their goal is to promote savory behavior, isn't it beneficial to have an internal voice trying to guide the company's direction?

There is no shortage of engineers who would happily take a job at Google. If the folks raising concerns decided to all leave, isn't the net result that Google would operate much as it does today (maybe a little bit slower to get products to market) but without any internal check on its behavior?

And since the issue under dispute here is AI ethics, shouldn't we the non-Googlers want to make sure people willing to voice concern about unethical behavior remain at Google?

"shouldn't we the non-Googlers want to make sure people willing to voice concern about unethical behavior remain at Google?"

That depends on whether they're actually effective. If their concerns are ignored and they're not able to effect change, then their presence at the company is useless as far as moving Google in an ethical direction is concerned.

If they were serious about the strength of collective action, they could unionize. That due process would have protected a fired employee more than any petition.

It’s easy to recommend others to leave their jobs. Do you like absolutely all the aspects of the business you work for?

I absolutely hate my workplace. But I've hated most of the other workplaces I've been at. My ideal situation would be to work at NASA, but I've heard some questionable things about that workplace too. Point is, unless you run the show, you have little control over the culture and something will always suck because humans are individuals and not all of us like conforming. So, I just suck it up and work so I can live. Maybe one day I can do my own thing and establish the culture, but I have to be willing to sacrifice and do what it takes to build a successful business. My guess is that if I do that I might just end up becoming the very thing I hate. It's easy to be morally superior when I have nothing on the line.

No, but I'm not at the point where I'm signing an open letter to condemn my employer for something. However if you are at that point, you may at least consider that you should be working elsewhere.

Why? If the workers can apply pressure and get their employer to change whatever objectionable behavior it's doing, why shouldn't they?

Why shouldn't workplaces be more democratic? We got rid of kings everywhere else, why should we keep them around just because they're signing our paychecks?

I'm in total agreement with you. My response was a criticism of those who sit idly by and collect their massive paycheck, and perhaps signing an open letter from time to time to sleep better at night. It's just paying lip service to the cause.

Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage. It’s unlikely Gebru would have been fired under these circumstances if she had a union contract.

I hope this does encourage more workers in this industry to unionize.

It's unfortunate that people aren't sufficiently concerned that their employer holds a significant amount of power over them - or at least, not enough that they'll do anything much about it - even if they do happen to have a job that pays higher than average.

Unions can be valuable resources for all workers.

> Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage.

Some of the employees involved are in management (as was Gebru), so they don't have that right, nor would that protect people in positions similar to Gebru's.

As a manager, Gebru wouldn't have been allowed into a union.

Is she really a manager? In factories the foreman was considered part of the Union rank and file. PMs and other developer leadership could be integrated into a union.

Basically if you can be promoted up into a position it can be a union job. If you need a business degree to do it though then it’s non union.

I don't know exactly what her job responsibilities were, but it's not the case as a rule that any position you can be promoted to is a union job. Anyone who has independent authority to "hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action" is by law a supervisor, and they can't join an NLRA-protected union because supervisors aren't protected by the NLRA. As far as I know, all Google managers have the power to assign, reward, and discipline their reports.

If they can only do it for specific purposes and their actions are reviewed then it’s possible they could gain union memberships.

For example foremen hire, train, supervise and evaluate workers. Yet they have a union.

I can’t say for certain if it’s a protected union but it is a large and existent one in the US.

> Is she really a manager?

Yes.

> In factories the foreman was considered part of the Union rank and file.

She's not a foreman.

> Basically if you can be promoted up into a position it can be a union job.

That's not how the NLRA works; in plenty of workplaces people can, even if they rarely do, promote without limit and most management positions don't require business degrees, but that doesn't make all those positions NLRA-protected.

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