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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Unless you think that the company does something so bad that you need to bring more attention to it and can't work there anymore in good conscience. Then, just like these employees, go for it - that's exactly the audience. You have to be prepared for the consequences of course.

Protests don't work if you do them quietly in your corner without affecting anyone in a meaningful way.

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I can guarantee you this made more people adverse to the cause than for it. They did everything wrong, and many of the people who might have had a chance at trying to change things are out of Google and will not be able to do anything.

It's also likely that people who saw this might now not want to be involved at all for fear of losing their job.

This action likely did nothing but make it less likely that anything will change, and been the absolute worst way to attempt to persuade people.

People afraid for their job would be very unlikely to make noise anyway. It's a nice idea about changing things from within a system, but... you have to believe that's possible in the first place. There will be people that do it too, but we won't see articles written about them.

It made me Google what they were protesting. So it brought some attention. Not enough attention that I won't have forgotten by tomorrow though.

A memo to your colleagues on why your conscience requires you to quit.

Personal letters explaining what you gave up, financially and otherwise, because of your beliefs.

These are powerful, powerful things.

“Taking over” an office is not powerful. In fact this entire narrative has been constructed by Google, with almost personal testimony from those involved.

It was easy to silence them because they never really spoke up.

Taking over could be powerful if well prepared. These couragous activists probably lacked experience in efficient protest modes and why they work

A corporate office is not like an administration building at a soft-handed university. There's no way you are going to successfully take over an office for any real amount of time unless you are willing to use real violence and potentially get into some kind of hostage situation.

The police will be called, there will be more of them than of you, and they will remove you.

Protest is a show. You don't need to take over for days, you just need the protest to have maximum reach which in our time could happen in minutes. Obvious things they should have done : Inform their colleagues beforehand, so they be in the know, plan around it, and why not participate in some form. Inform journalists and smuggle them into the buildings. Police intervention is planned for and should be a major part of the show.

Journalists know better than to get involved in something like that. They would be asked to leave immediately (it's super easy to notice people standing around filming what's going on who aren't wearing employee badges), and then they would of course leave immediately as they aren't willing to catch a trespass charge just for one page 17 news article.

depends on which journalist you chose

I would argue that in such a case you should resign and then protest after you resign.

It is immoral to both take money from someone and actively work against them. You should chose one.

When you protest after you resign, you're just a random person without access to the decision-maker's office. Protesting after quitting, away from the office/co-workers would bring about as much attention as me protesting in my home right now.

And let's be serious - they knew they'd be fired. (Or extremely naive)

According to the article, this was effectively a resignation from at least one employee who was quoted as saying he felt wrong to receive a paycheck with money earned from immoral behavior.

You'd have a good point in the case of people working for Bob Everyman, the local grocery store owner.

It's less clear when the "someone" is a nebulous globe spanning transnational with multitudes of projects.

It's moral to work on software that assists humanity while protesting that which does not.

With companies that large your point is akin to claiming it to be immoral to be a citizen of the US while protesting the war in Vietnam.

Such childish actions are derisive.

I think that was supposed to be derisive. When you say "you're helping murder people, we expect change", that's in itself derisive. What specifically is your non-childish idea for protesting your employer taking money to indirectly help murder people?

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