Google fires 28 workers in indiscriminate act of mass retaliation | Hacker News Reader

Google fires 28 workers in indiscriminate act of mass retaliation

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35 pointskome35 comments

These workers had no moral high-ground to start with.

Google is ad sales business and monopolistic one. Apparently workers are not concerned about the ethics of the core business model. They just wanted to grandstand without any cost.

Even without politics, if you work for Google, you are not making the world better place. Companies are fundamentally amoral money making entities.

Do not cry for people being fired from an ad business.

In the other hand that ad business model allows them to provide services without charging money to the entire world, and that means a lot of people which otherwise wouldn't have a chance to access. Google made the web a much better place without any doubt, at least for a long time. But of course sometimes they also deserve valid criticism.

I'm with you.

Companies are fundamentally amoral, and should be amoral. Demanding morality from them is not the right way.

Youtube algorithm actively harms the society, but it's not the Google's job to care. The job to care is withing people as political actors first and as workers and consumers second.

In that case, then companies need tight restrictions so they don't go all skynet on us. Environmental standards, fairness and equity, interest rate limits, restrictions on fees and so on.

If that's what was meant, then I could get behind that 'amoral corporation' idea. Otherwise it's just carte blanche to pillage.

It’s complicated.

There are some amazing people at Google genuinely and passionately working to make the web better and more open.

I personally could not work there, but I don’t question the ethics of someone just because they are at Google. I’m trying to think in my head what other organization they could be employed at still doing the same high-quality work.

I for one don't believe working for Google is fundamentally unethical.

Neither do I.

It's not very ethical, but its not fundamentally unethical. If you care about ethics, find something else than Google.

If you want the money, put your head down and work.

Because they've done so much for the human experience? Nonsense, they're an ad company and you're signing away your ethical credibility however you enable them.

Not everyone works at Google on ads. Google makes money from lots of areas.

>> Google makes money from lots of areas.

Around 80% of Google's revenue is from ads:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/633651/alphabet-annual-g...

They are primarily an ads business.

Most of the employees are not working on ads though.

Exactly. 80% of the ads I see are downright scams.

On YouTube I think maybe 50% are scams and 98% are just plain irrelevant - I've come to the conclusion its really just a way of harassing me to sign up for YouTube Premium.

I recently reported an ad for an obvious "get rich quick scheme", apparently advertising scams is okay with Google though...

I tried to report many times. It's not easy at all where I live. I instead intentionally install scamy apps to burn their ad budget

So, if you work for a company, any company, you can't express concern or protest in any way, because having your income depend on things like ad revenue invalidates you to protest against things like a genocide.

Sounds like a healthy mentality /s

No.

People can and should. Even hypocrites like these people should be able to expresses concern.

We should not put much value for their expression of concern, because their standing is shaky.

It's like working for tobacco firm and voicing concern about working with oil firms, but staying silent about tobacco.

If you're working for a company that does something bad, let's say 50% bad, and now the company participates in something 90% bad, you're an hypocrite for raising concern?

People have to balance their morality, their personal goals and their income. It's obvious that a shift in the company morality raises concerns.

This pretends that no gray areas exists, and that participating any slightly unethical activity invalidates your opinion about greater problems.

"They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers". (from the New York Post article)

That should get you fired.

So no, you don't get to 'express your concerns' in that manner.

If protesting isn't annoying, it's not protesting.

You get to protest in public, not on private property.

One of those protesting employees was advocating the rape of all Jewish women. Making other employees fear for their safety (also mentioned in the news articles) is not just "annoying."

The messaging on this is not very well crafted.

Google has fired people for protesting something called Project Nimbus. I read the tweet, the referenced tweet, and the Medium blog post that was supposed to give the information.

I still do not know what Project Nimbus is. I just know that it has something vaguely to do with some kind of government intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nimbus

TL;DR: Google Cloud (and AWS!) won a large contract to provide the Israeli government with cloud services. People are concerned that this can be used to further attack Palestine.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072295

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40060532

"Bring your whole self to work" meets "no, not like that"

I just feel bad for the people entering the job market believing the lies.

Yeah they're dummies if they thought anything else would happen. But all my scorn is reserved for the people who duped them.

Are there any jobs where you can publicly accuse your employer of "genocide for profit", hold a protest on company property and keep your job?

I mean, I'm all for workers' right to protest about things like Andy Rubin's $128 million golden parachute when he was fired for sexism - that sort of thing directly impacts working conditions. Problems which might have to be aired publicly, lest they be swept under the rug.

And I'm all for workers' right to engage in politics publicly outside of work, on their own time - I don't think anyone should face firing because their presence at a protest 'might reflect badly on the company' when they haven't brought the company into it.

And I'm in favour of employees being allowed to move between projects when they object to certain work and there's other work available. If an engineer at Boeing wants to work on passenger planes and space rockets but not fighter jets or ICBMs I think that's reasonable. If a Muslim working at a supermarket doesn't want to stock the alcohol shelves, and there's enough shelf-stocking work they can just swap with someone else, accommodating them is only reasonable.

But accusing your employer of genocide for profit? In public?

That's several steps beyond what I'd expect to get away with.

How is the surprising at all? You work for a company which provides IT services to the Israeli government. Of course protesting that project will get you fired.

Don't be evil

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