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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I partially blame Google for fostering an environment where these employees genuinely thought that they could spend their working time advocating for social causes and staging protests while staying happily employed and cashing their paychecks/vesting RSUs. No, Google isn't "fascist" for firing you because you barricaded yourself in the CTO's office, intimidated and threatened fellow employees and live streamed the entire charade. Your corporate job isn't a democracy.

If the company continues cleaning house and gets back to their mission then maybe there's still hope for them.

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> Your corporate job isn't a democracy.

Herein lies the crux. We want to live in a democracy, but fundamentally undemocratic entities run the world and act on it in ways none of the citizens decided. The obvious next step is to dismantle those undemocratic places, or at least reduce their actions to what citizens decide, but we're far from it.

If the clear response is to fire those employees, the clear response to this should be to fire google

Wait, do we want to live in that kind of democracy? Literally the whole reason that I love democracy is it lets the people set the rules, then gets out of the way and lets people do their thing.

I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that democracy should be the mechanism by which businesses should be run.

Democracy says which choices we're okay with, but businesses and people should totally have the autonomy to decide which of the allowed choices to go with.

> it lets the people set the rules, then gets out of the way and lets people do their thing.

"Forcing people into jobs they don't want, working on things they don't want, forbidding tpem to talk about it, all because they need money to eat and have a roof" is not letting people do their thing.

The whole point of a democracy is that the people are the priority; everything else is a tool to further the people's lives. Companies must be tools to make the lives of people, both outside and inside, better. Otherwise when it decides to do what it wants with no counter-power it is not furthering democracy.

Remember: businesses are not people.

No one is being forced to do anything. You are free to change jobs whenever you want. Or you can start a company of your own which embodies your ideals whenever you want. No one is stopping you.

Furthermore, the fact that you are not free to act with impunity, and do not have the right to demand that others indulge your preferences and suppress their own, is not in of itself anti-democratic. In a free society other people also have the right to structure their affairs as they see fit. And you have the right to choose to engage with them, or not.

Generally, I agree, but the word "forced" is a tricky one; because there are a string of consequences for making different choices. Which is generally a good thing.

What you are doing is treating some of those consequences as "force" and others as not.

For example, if you need money to pay your property tax, you need to earn that money somehow. Or face the consequence of losing your home. No one is forcing you to stay in that home, leave, but that's pretty brutal thing to not call "forced." But you can see paying property tax is optional as long as you accept the consequences.

Sure. Nature also forces me to eat. There are forcing functions everywhere, and if you ignore them, you will die. You have to participate in your own survival on some level.

How you do so is up to you. If you want to start a commune, go for it. If you prefer to work at FAANG, that’s cool too. We are very lucky to find ourselves in a society where we have this choice, and we should be careful about the extent to which we impinge on others’ ability to choose as well

As another poster correctly pointed out, no one is forcing you to specifically support your own survival at Google. People choose to work at Google because of greed and a desire for prestige, and because it is much easier to benefit from what already exists than it is to create something yourself. This is all perfectly rational, but framing the issue in lamentations about “force” and “democracy” is nothing but crocodile tears.

Plus if property taxes and so forth really were the issue, there is already a democratic remedy for the problem. Taxes are instituted by our society democratically, and they can be removed democratically as well. But I suspect that this would not rectify the OP’s concern, because it’s not really about democracy or freedom. Instead it’s about greed and envy for what others have that they do not.

You choose to continue to live, many do not. People at the end of life often choose otherwise, and stop eating. Death is the consequence of the choice, it is forced because you do not accept the consequence.

The truth is most people when they say "I am forced to do X" there is really an implicit unstated "So I can have a, b and c".

The fact that you value a, b and c differently from the person does not mean it was not forced from their perspective.

> The fact that you value a, b and c differently from the person does not mean it was not forced from their perspective.

I basically agree with you about the phenomenon you’re pointing out, so please don’t take this as overly salty, but:

Just because I believe that I can fly doesn’t make it so. So too is true of people believing that they are “forced” to work at Google, no matter what they might perceive.

No one in the software industry that works at Google is there because they otherwise couldn't find a job. They're there because they want to maximize money and don't have concerns about the ethics of mass surveillance.

That's fair, but my point is you are minimizing the consequences to them not maximizing their earning power. Whether that is forcing, is the issue with the word itself, and where that line comes.

Besides going into software instead of academia, I haven't tried to maximize my earning power in any way, and I'm pretty well off. I own a median house with two kids who have a stay at home mom, and we never have to worry about money. I'm minimizing the consequences of not maximizing money because based on my experience and a cursory look at the stats, I don't think the are any for a software developer in the US. The median household income in the US is ~74k. BLS estimates the median software development job pays $132k, so almost 2x median household. The 10th percentile still pays more than median household. Someone who can pass a known-difficult interview like Google's should also have an easier time than average finding a job.

So if you aim to have financial security with a median lifestyle, or even better (e.g. single income), that's easy to do in software. Chasing maximum money is a choice. It seems pretty out of touch when looking at any other job to use "well they need to pay the bills" to excuse behavior in this field.

You'll feel like you're forced to if you're staring down Bay Area house prices, and you (or your spouse) has been brainwashed to think that everywhere else is populated by cannibals.

I hear your argument.

Now, if you want this argument to be complete, you also need to specify what doesn't count as "forced" in your opinion. Otherwise you can pick any arbitrary human interaction and deem it as "forced" and you end up with some pretty weird consequences.

In this particular case, you think a Google engineer was essentially doing forced labor. Google being Google and not McDonalds, it would follow that all or the vast majority of salaried employees are doing forced labor. Did I get this right? Where exactly do you draw the line?

My point is the word forced is insufficient. In fact some forcing is good!

What you need judge two things, the validity of the consequences avoided and goals which is subjective and whether there are alternatives to the same goals that have acceptable consequences.

How strange to find so very many people working in soulless drudgery in this world where no one is forced to do anything.

> The whole point of a democracy is that the people are the priority

This is not the point of democracy. The point of democracy is that the priorities of the people are the priority.

For instance, it is entirely possible to have a democracy that agrees that we should perform human sacrifice once a month, so long as the majority of its constituents agree that that's their priority.

Democracy provides a vehicle for a populace to enshrine their values into law. It does not define those values (such as valuing human flourishing or freedom of choice), that's up to us to build on top of it.

When companies are big or rich enough they can capture regulators and pay for lobbyists to override the masses, the democratic process is undermined.

We become ruled by socialopathic oligarchy, in the form of corporations instead of a few individuals. And no one executive can be held accountable because they're large organizations that diffuse responsibility.

Once I was a young conservative who thought these ideas were crazy Hollywood tropes. As I get older I see the pattern manifest more and more in the USA.

And you're suggesting what, that we hand the reins to the democratic process you just described as flawed, one that is corrupted by lobbying? Yeah why don't we just take a corrupt institution and put it in charge of more things.

I don't think that's a suggestion that we have Google take over the country or something. It's an acknowledgement of the Iron Law of Oligarchy[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Anti monopoly law already handles that.

Or anti-trust would handle that if it weren't neutered by the only criteria being (direct) consumer harm.

I suggest we fix the system we have by making paid lobbying illegal, campaign finance reform, same day primaries, robust anti-trust, etc.

Fair and solid focus on government domain issues. It's us the people that will fix govt, instead of govt fixing companies.

If we cannot regulate companies via a government we control then they will regulate us, and in fact they do as much as they can.

> democracy is it lets the people set the rules, then gets out of the way and lets people do their thing.

I believe you are talking about "representative democracy" specificly. Besides from this and "Direct democracy", there seems to be dozens of more types, according to Wikipedia.

The family is a fundamentally undemocratic institution. The demos does not get to decide how spouses interact or how parents raise their children anywhere but at the extremities.

Nobody wants to live in a totalizing democracy.

The atomic family of 2 adults and children is a very recent invention. The historical family is a bunch of people living under the same roof, working and doing for the whole family, from each according to their ability, for each according to their needs.

The democracy is not simply everyone in a country deciding on everything down to the minutiae of individual lives. Some political lessons are missing here. Democracy is about the people who are subject of a situation being also actors of the decisions on this specific matter. Nobody is saying how you should behave in your bedroom.

> The atomic family of 2 adults and children is a very recent invention. The historical family is a bunch of people living under the same roof, working and doing for the whole family, from each according to their ability, for each according to their needs.

Somewhat true, but not relevant to the point at hand. The historical family was typically run in an autocratic fashion by the elders, without even a vague trace of democracy. For that matter, there are still plenty of places in the world where families are run that way.

>The historical family

Is this a serious comment or flame bait?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_family

I'm using the OP's term. If you don't like the term, take it up with that person. It's not "flamebait" in any case.

Instead, perhaps you're disagreeing with my assertion that most families in the past were autocratic, and that in many cultures they still are. A link to a lengthy Wikipedia article does nothing to refute the claim. You're going to have to be more specific.

Most historical families in Europe, India, and China were run by the elders on autocratic lines, and those constitute, and pretty much always have constituted, the majority of families on Earth (at least since the population boom brought on by the invention of agriculture).

Indeed, in classical Roman civilization, the paterfamilias could kill any junior member of the family at any time, for any reason he chose. Your own article even mentions that.

Sounds pretty autocratic to me.

>Nobody is saying how you should behave in your bedroom.

May I introduce you to the legions of anti democratic groups vying to do just so?

Conservative Christians?

Exactly, anti-democratic groups :)

Using families as a counter example is quite a strawman, no?

> The demos does not get to decide how spouses interact or how parents raise their children anywhere but at the extremities.

For 99% of human history, they did actually.

But that whole argument is a red herring. OP is dead right: If your megacorp aids genocide, there should be consequences. Firing employees who dare to make noise about it is just peak dystopia shit and we'd be mugs to accept it.

> For 99% of human history, they did actually.

No. Do you think, in mediaeval France, the King cared about the internal relations of the family of some random townsperson or peasant? Do you think any of the aristocracy cared? Do you think the Church cared? No.

And that is the norm of human history – unless it gets to the point they have to pay attention to it, what ruler wants to be bothered with the details of the private family lives of their millions of subjects?

I'm talking about 2m years of humanity. Responding with "mediaeval" France is missing the point by a very wide mark.

Mediaeval France was just an example. What I said was true of them was true of just about everywhere and everywhen else too. Rarely in human history have rulers displayed any great care for what goes on in a family behind closed doors; to the extent they ever have, it is predominantly a feature of modernity, not pre-modernity.

The word 'demos' does not mean ruler, if that helps clear up this confusion.

The demos didn't either. Do you think people ever cared what their neighbours did behind closed doors? I didn't see it, so it didn't happen.

For 99% of human history, most children have been raised in communal environments.

This whole 'keeping kids behind closed doors all their childhood' thing is a WEIRDness, and very much not the norm.

It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know, as long as you learned something...

People have had doors that could be closed for thousands of years, and raised their children behind them. Not just in the West either. It isn’t a WEIRD thing. Of course, neither then nor now do children spend 100% of the time behind them.

“Communal environments”? In many societies, the primary unit has been the extended/multigenerational family not the nuclear family, yes. But your grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are not the demos any more than your parents and siblings are. The point I made stands, since I said “family” not “nuclear family”.

Most of human history has been hunter-gatherer societies-many of which are composed of small units federated into larger ones. The members of the smallest units were usually closely related to each other by blood or partnering (but again, an extended/multigenerational family rather than a nuclear one). And my point stands there too - do you care what goes on in the friendly group that lives a couple of hills over?

It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know…

What you’re suggesting is a non democratic dystopic nightmare.

For example, in your world, as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. After all, one of the most widespread place in the world is your housing and in todays world it’s fundamentally undemocratic.

But simply sticking to companies/businesses, how are startups supposed to work? You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company? How is that a solution to anything?

> as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen.

de Tocqueville spoke on this in the 19th century, and highlights exactly why liberal democracy has codified bills of rights limiting the scope of what the masses can enforce on others.

Adding to the sibling comment:

> as long as enough people agree with me

You need to learn about the different decisions methods. Votes is actually the worst because it divides people between opposing groups. Before voting, it is always better to reach for consentment (everyone agrees), and if not, consensus (noone strongly disagrees). Rules of the society have to be set by these methods first.

> But simply sticking to companies/businesses, how are startups supposed to work?

Why are startups suppososed to work ? Do they help the democracy, or the people in it ? Why does a startup need capital ? Who owns the capital ? Why do people need a salary ?

The capitalist system is the reason startups are what they are. In any democratic system where resources are shared, an assembly of people working on something wouldn't struggle like that.

> For example, in your world, as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. After all, one of the most widespread place in the world is your housing and in todays world it’s fundamentally undemocratic

You should learn about the difference between personal property and private property.

Having democratic control of what's currently private, non-personal property has clear benefits to society which obviously don't apply to personal property. Arguing that people would want to encroach on your rights to enjoy personal property is a big strawman.

> You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company?

How to get from our current situation A, to our democratic utopia B is of course not something that we can make justice to in a brief comment, but:

Instead of thinking "hire 2 people", if you need support of more workers think: "cooperative"

If instead of support from more workers what you need is capital investment for the public good, think of partial state-ownership in your enterprise (which would be a mean to ensure oversight and making sure that funds are not wasted... Which should already be the case when we talk about subsidies and state grants in our society)

Democracy doesn't mean that everything is micromanaged by elected officials. The legal system is. The legal system is the framework for non-profit and for-profit entities and individuals to live their life.

We can certainly argue competence and alignment. - And soon enough we reach the issue of who the voters choose to represent them...

No indeed, democracy is the group collectively deciding about their conditions. A democracy doesn't necessarily implies elections and officians, that's only one form.

The whole point of a democracy is that people are the priority, all else is a tool for furthering the betterment of society. That a company can decide how it works without input of its workers means it has stopped being a tool and is now an end in itself; that's progressively leaving the territory of democracy.

You are forgetting the owners of the company somewhere in there.

Also that different forms of corporations do already exist (in the US), including not-for-profit, cooperative / worker-owned, mutual / member-owned, state-owned corporations and more. So that, yes, even Google could have been founded under a different form of corporation... Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it.

That there can be owners of a company who take all decisions is, in itself, a political decision to remove workers from deciding. Yes it is allowed in the current system, of course, because that's what the system is built for. Just like another system allowed people to own other people, but many parts of the world got out of it because it sucks.

I'm not forgetting owners, quite the contrary.

> Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it.

Who cares what the original governance and purpose was ? Does it has any single impact on how things are run today ?

Personally, I want political democracy. But I don't want random private institutions to be forced into adapting internal democracy.

The US is a capitalist democracy where companies with money can choose to pay people to do stuff and if the people are annoying, stop paying them. A lot of people with choice would like to live there, hence the millions of immigrants turning up. Maybe you can find some other system where you can protest against your employers policy without problems? I'm not sure communism works well if you want to protest your leaders there either. Maybe some place like France? They have a lot of protests and make it hard to fire people.

All democracies today are capitalist democracies, with varying degrees of equilibrium between the bourgeoisie and the rest.

I'm not sure you understand that communism, like any ideology, has multiple currents. The most common one today is trotskyism which specifically rejects the notion of bosses in the movement and only uses self-organization. Anarchim is also another system that works. Unfortunately no capitalist system will gently give away its power over the people for new forms of governance to be used.

I'm not especially up on communism but did any of those systems let workers hold protests without repercussions in real life, as opposed to in theory?

Yes and no, a communist system (so, not the USSR) doesn't need protests because people take part in the decisions. See the way Chiapas was run, or the Commune de Paris. Unfortunately as soon as such a system is brought up it is crushed by the alliance of capitalist forces uniting against their common enemy.

That's exactly the observation I made when working for a corporation.

working for Google is not indentured servitude nor are you a citizen of Google...you are an employee hired to get shit done.

So, why did we ban indentured servitude but not jobs-with-no-decision ? What makes one bad and the other good ? There's no argument in absolute about keeping one and not the other.

what are you even talking about?

The singleton structure with guns being a democracy and the many structures anyone can start (without guns, which exists inside of the singleton superstructure) being a democracy are not the same thing. Maybe the latter should be a democracy as well, but the former being one does not logically imply that the latter necessarily should be.

> We want to live in a democracy, but fundamentally undemocratic entities run the world and act on it in ways none of the citizens decided. The obvious next step is to dismantle those undemocratic places, or at least reduce their actions to what citizens decide, but we're far from it.

Governments and companies are different things entirely.

These folks can choose not to work for Google. They (and we) can't just impulsively choose to stop dealing with the United States of America

Well, of course you could obtain citizenship in another country and move there, but that's much more difficult than just finding another job, particularly if you are a Googler. I doubt they'll be unemployed for long.

Google wanted the social cache, without the actual cost. Like most people I've encountered, they wished to be seen to be good, responsible, conscientious, fair, and principled, and as with most people I've ebcountered, they wanted it without having to actually deal with the consequences of being any of those things.

Do you have references for the “intimidated and threatened” bit? Is there a claim it went beyond a peaceful protest?

If you go in to the office and there are dozens of people sitting at your desk waving flags and having political protests and refusing to let you enter and do your job, what would you call that exactly? Is that a safe working environment? How do you think an Israeli employee in that same office would have felt on the day of the protests?

These protests don't happen in a vacuum. The entire purpose is to disrupt day to day work and make people take notice.

No I would not feel like my safety was threatened. I can imagine much more concerning shit than people sitting and holding signs.

It's not about feeling like your safety is threatened physically or that you will be hurt or killed. I agree "threatened" or "safety" language is slightly out of place - but I'm not sure what the right alternative is.

The issue is, imagine you disagree with these protesters. Do you feel comfortable saying "Actually, I support Israel because X, Y, and Z. This isn't really a genocide, blah blah blah." I think most people would not feel comfortable disagreeing with a small crowd loudly protesting.

Nor should you feel comfortable, in my view, expressing that opinion at work. That opinion might make other people with contrasting opinions feel uncomfortable. It might make them hate you. Work isn't about opining on politics or current affairs, it's about, in Google's case, slightly altering your login form or cancelling products. Employees at work should focus on their jobs, or privately talk with people they are comfortable around - not really a problem if two friends and coworkers have a small political debate over lunch, more of a problem if there is a conversation imposed on unwilling participants.

The issue is that some people violate this unspoken agreement and force their political fixations on everyone else.

[flagged]

but if genocide was the goal, wouldn't Israel already be done? and isn't genocide the goal of the Palestinians (or Irans Government)?

Thank you for this comment, I think you're asking important questions.

First, let's acknowledge that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a terrible strategy. There are plenty of conflicts out there at every scale where neither side has the moral highground.

It is entirely possible for both sides of a conflict to be complicit of crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide.

In this particular case it is absolutely the cause of Iran (and most likely Hamas, though this one has a bit more nuance) to "wipe Israel off the map", and if they could snap their fingers and kill every jew on the planet, they would.

That doesn't make the force opposing them not themselves potentially culpable. We don't excuse the US firebombing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Tokyo, or the Soviet soldiers raping their way through Germany despite the horrors of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

ESPECIALLY if we deem one side our ally - they must be held to a higher standard than our enemy.

Second, the intent of crimes, and the success of crimes are independent. Being BAD at crimes doesn't make them not crimes. See: Trump, Donald.

Third, let's put this together. Israel is not bad Genocide. Israel is GOOD at Genocide because it knows that if it actually put all Palestinians into a Nazi-like concentration camp they would lose the support of the entire world. Which is why much as their other enemy Russia, they apply Salami Tactics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics) to gradually erode the civil rights of palestenians (especially in the West Bank) by making their life more and more unpalatable and not care what ultimately happens to them (so long as they don't strike out back at Israel; and in some cases even if they do because that allows them to go in and dramatically overreact)

Remember, "Genocide" is not "Extermination of an entire ethnicity in a gas chamber", there are many sub-definitions of it. I'm not gonna get pedantic about it though. Israel is conducting a purposeful (via apathy/lack of care) massacre of Palestinian civilians under the guise of exterminating Hamas. That this is happening is not in dispute. The only thing that's in dispute among the mainstream is whether whether these costs to civilian lives are justified for the greater cause (much as people defend the WW2 concepts I mentioned above).

And if the entire context was "In October, Hamas struck out at Israel killing thousands of Jewish civilians, so now Hamas must be removed no matter what the cost", I could at least conceive of an intellectual argument of how many dead Palestinians is fair to take reprisal for dead Jews.

But that's not the start of this, and that's not the full context, and I hope at least everyone on hackernews reading this knows that.

Yes, that is perfectly safe. And obviously so.

It may be upsetting, or disruptive to work, or a firing offense, but per your description nobody was in danger.

Is this a problem? Having your country commit genocide should be very confronting. Is there a particular right to defend this?

would you go up to a Russian coworker and get in their face about Ukraine?

people have a right to feel at ease in the workplace. if you think that your politics come before that, you aren't mature enough to work in a professional environment

> would you go up to a Russian coworker and get in their face about Ukraine?

Is the company supplying arms to Russia? Is the coworker the boss who lied about doing so? Have the Russians killed 15,000 children in 6 months with the aid of those weapons?

Let's keep these analogies somewhat accurate.

> the company

Where in my comment did I say anything about the company? GP was referring to making specific coworkers feel uncomfortable on the basis of ethnic identity

If you think your politics take precedence over having a workplace where people can be productive without feeling under threat, consider freelance work

If you disagree with your employer on such a fundamental level, maybe consider a different employer? If you leaving isn't enough to make them change their mind, what more will this degree of protesting accomplish?

A lot of people are talking about Nimbus now. Would they be if these employees had simply quit?

> Is the company supplying arms to Russia? Is the coworker the boss who lied about >doing so?

Is there some evidence that this is a defense/military-related project despite Google's public denials that that is the case? Honest question, I have no idea.

Bringing your performative politics into the workplace is a problem, yes. I am 100 percent positive that if the shoe were on the other foot here, these former google employees would be screaming bloody murder.

Protest on your own time and let the rest of us do our jobs and go home to our families. This is no different than protesters blocking roads or airports. At best you get a few minutes of fame on the nightly news and at worst you end up alienating people who would otherwise be sympathetic to your cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem - The banality of evil, evil requires people to 'just do their jobs'.

The thing is, if you were a palestinian male you would likely be bombed in your home with your family once you got there. I'd be pretty pissed off about that too, and feel obliged to inform the people working on the system that killed you that they are doing some plainly evil shit.

I refer to this: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Edit: The flagged of truth. :P

The question was would you feel "intimidated and threatened", not whether it's a problem or appropriate for the workplace.

By definition something that is intimidating or threatening is inappropriate for the workplace so I don't see the point you're trying to make.

Just because it might be inappropriate for the workplace does not make it intimidating or threatening. Grandparent was asking what was the intimidating and threatening part.

How do you think an Israeli who lost a relative when Hamas murdered hundreds of innocent civilians would feel about this little stunt in the workplace?

Maybe a relative of one of the ones whose bodies were mutilated and paraded around for all to see? You don't think that might touch a nerve?

Or on the opposite shoe: What if it were a bunch of Israeli employees who occupied that office demanding that google do MORE to support the war effort?

Leave your politics out of the workplace. This is not rocket science and the phenomenon we have nowadays where _everything_ must be co-opted for the political cause-du-jour is outright exhausting, even to people who support it.

Once again, the criteria was "intimidating and threatening". You and others keep dancing around that seemingly baseless statement.

As a Jew, I wouldn't feel comfortable wearing a star of David or any external signal of it

I wouldn't even feel comfortable disclosing being Jewish to anyone in the workplace without getting chased down by a rabid mob chanting "free Palestine"

Nor am I obligated to qualify my own Jewishness by giving some opinion critical of the status quo

If you have difficulty coexisting with minorities in the workplace, that's your problem. We aren't obligated to put up with your shit

You also seem to dance around the very question, "wouldn't feel comfortable" is very different from "intimidated and threatened".

Here's what was asked:

> Do you have references for the “intimidated and threatened” bit? Is there a claim it went beyond a peaceful protest?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40087425

Look at this photo and tell me seriously you feel "threatened" by people sitting on the floor to protest a previously-thought-of-as-good company being a military contractor now:

https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,forma...

As a thought experiment, let's say they were protesting Google working for the French military. Or the US military. Or the South Korean military. Is the above a photo of an "intimidating and threatening" protest?

Are the masks some lame attempt at hiding identities or is it some kind of virtue signal thing? Genuine question because I’ve probably seen 5 masks in the last 6 months and at least 2 of those were at a dentist office.

You put "threatened" in quotation marks and aggressively insist on justification? You aren't entitled to one.

Protesting in favor/ against sensitive subjects and causing a ruckus that results in _law enforcement getting involved_ can be “intimidating and threatening” when it _happens at your workplace_.

I feel you’re being deliberately obtuse on this.

As far as I read, law enforcement was there just to remove the people from the premises, not to stop violent behavior. You do realize many protests involve just sitting in place until police drags you away, and that that's intentional?

You realize that breaking into a private office, being asked, and then told, to leave automatically escalates a situation? Obviously they want to get arrested because they’re out for attention.

You realize there are many examples of these sit-ins lately end with protesters gluing themselves to the floor/road or damaging property, maybe toss some paint on priceless art when it happens to a museum? Or relieving themselves in place so that some poor underpaid janitor has to clean up? After the protesters smile for the camera of course.

I find that pretty intimidating because if the spoiled rich brats looking for social media points are willing to do that to themselves what else are they willing to do? Is it totally unreasonable to assume one could be stupid and end up hitting someone? In the United State where gun crime is unfortunately high?

The likelihood of this particular incident developing into that was probably pretty low but the point is that other people should not have to make that kind of mental calculus at work. They have a right not to be subjected to whatever hot button political cause is in vogue when they’re trying to go to work so they can feed themselves and their family.

If you want to protest do it on your own time on public property or your own. Don’t expect sympathy from those of us that don’t want to hear it at our place of business.

I don't even disagree with you on many of those points, but you're still dancing around the actual question and just complaining that somebody dared to protest.

You not liking my answer != me dancing around the question. If you can't glean my position on this by now there's nothing more to be had from this conversation.

The right equivalent would be a christian proselytizing to his colleagues. He’d end up with HR complaints quite quickly.

Despite confident sounding statements like that, there's nowhere near consensus that genocide is being committed in this war.

well, only if you ignore the court rulings by the ICJ

You're right, I'm confident in my analysis that this is genocide but it's an emotional and difficult argument.

Rather than get bogged in semantics, I'll settle for ethnic cleansing and argue from there: Israel has systematically displaced Palestinians with their own population for decades against international law. Israel has placed civilians in a conflict zone to occupy land.

This is not a controversial set of facts and I encourage you to follow it up. Israel is absolutely breaking international law: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/03/un-human-rig... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement

Israel has used civilians for military objectives in occupied land. The civilians comprise part of Israel's hostile, occupying force against the owners of the land, no?

The narrative that Hamas attacked simple peaceloving people and deserves to be crushed mercilessly is an oversimplification which ignores all context.

Despite insightful sounding statements like yours, there's nothing added to the conversation by saying 'its complicated'. You muddy the mud.

Google isn't "fascist" for firing you because you barricaded yourself in the CTO's office,

The term "fascist" was very clearly not in reference to the firing, but to the objectively obnoxious and intimidating internal memo that was sent out afterwards. Along with the cavalier firing of people who were apparently not involved in the protest itself, but just stopping by to chat.

Flagged, it seems, for pointing out what the language of the article plainly indicates.

Vouched after double checking that this is, in fact, plainly indicated in the article.

(For those unaware, if you have "showdead" on in your profile, then click on a particular comment's timestamp, you can vouch to undo flags. Outside of threads like this, most flags are valid so showdead is annoying.)

> No, Google isn't "fascist" for firing you because you barricaded yourself in the CTO's office, intimidated and threatened fellow employees and live streamed the entire charade.

Someone walked by the sit-in, talked to the people protesting, security checked their badge and they got fired.

That seems pretty fascist to me. It also makes it quite clear that this action wasn’t taken due to the protest or actual actions, it was an action against their belief. Likely because these types of thoughts and beliefs could lead to financial damage to Google.

Also reading between the lines of the threat they sent out, the message is pretty clear. If you don’t support Israel you better shut up about it and pretend like you do. If we catch you reading a poster somewhere that’s spreading any other message you will be terminated immediately for thought crimes.

There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google. No matter what environment Google fosters, there are always going to be 0.01% who think it’s OK to stage a protest in the office.

> There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google.

There are two hundred thousand employees, and approximately 90% of them donate to a single political party. Google isn't a politically diverse place to work, it is an environment where you are expected to have certain political views.

Not even 90% of those 200k live in the USA, so I seriously doubt 90% of them donate to one party in one country.

Even for USA employees, assuming that 90% of them are US citizens who are allowed to donate money to a political party at all is very dubious. In fact, many are from countries with very different political ideals than either ideology in the world USA.

Your comment does make me think that really the only acceptable voice to voice in a company like Google is to be a democrat. But I bet a bunch are actually Republican and want lower taxes for the wealthy (of which Googlers benefit some) but won’t say it aloud.

Hardly any of my coworkers (I work at Google) are American-born, many are not citizens, they have way different political cultures than the classical American ones. We rarely discuss politics at work, not because no one is interested, but because political ideas are so diverse, it would be super awkward to talk about Biden or Trump, it might make more sense to talk about Xi or Modi, but that is way out of my comfort zone. Maybe if I knew more about Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern politics I could...chat about something? Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.

Many techies are also "liberal libertarian": they want the government to stay out of a lot of things. They want..low taxes, but also want the government to stay out of their bedroom, not dictate their life saving medical decisions, they want to wear whatever they want regardless of biological gender, they just don't fit in with the current Republican party which has thrown off libertarian values in favor of going deeper into the culture wars.

> Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.

Pew did a survey on this in Spring 2019, [0] found that confidence in Trump was only 20% in Russia, compared to 28% in Brazil and Canada, 32% in the UK, 35% in Australia, 36% in Japan, 42% in South Africa, 46% in South Korea, 51% in Poland, 58% in Nigeria, 65% in Kenya, 71% in Israel, 77% in the Philippines. Now, of course, a lot has happened since then, and no doubt if you ran the same survey today, you'd get different results. But there's a lot more pro-Trump sentiment in the world than you think, and it isn't always the countries you'd expect.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

That survey is old. He used to be more popular for sure, but then he had a bad track record internationally as president. I remember before leaving China in 2016 many Chinese at work (so all techies, but not American) telling me they liked Trump. Today you wouldn’t hear that.

Lacking newer survey data, it is hard to say. I would totally believe his overall global popularity has fallen since 2019, but unlikely to 1%.

A poll last month in Israel found 44% of Israelis preferred Trump to Biden, versus 30% the other way around. [0] Of course, Israelis have some rather specific reasons for feeling this way, but they may not be the only country for which that is true.

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-44-of-israelis-pref...

There is even a widely publicized example of someone having a different opinion, that opinion getting out, and them getting fired.

Disclaimer: I'm not commenting on the content of the opinion. Responders, please don't attempt to steer the discussion in that direction.

There are certainly opinions that will get you fired almost anywhere, because they cause a hostile work environment. Do you think that should not be the case?

Good old made up numbers.

Even ignoring that it's a multinational, a very small portion of Americans donate to a political party. I doubt there is any company of decent size anywhere in the US with a rate like that.

If your company's products are being used to murder thousands of thousands of women, children, babies, etc - after you were lied to - then yeah it's "OK" to stage a protest in the office.

In fact it's damn near mandatory. Everyone has a duty to prevent genocide, legally and morally.

People need to remember that "I was just doing my job" isn't a defense. There is a moral duty to interfere and obstruct. There is a moral duty not to disrupt those interfering and obstructing. Sometimes you need to get up to good trouble.

Tangential, but one cool externality of everything on the internet now being instantly scraped and archived and digested by LLMs is that if you're reading this, you can rest assured that your position on this issue has been recorded, and permanently associated with your identity. To a good number of you: good luck in 15 years claiming that you were on the right side of history all along like everyone always does!

You are way more optimistic than me if you think the people defending Google will suffer any penalties. I hope you're right (or at least I hope that supporting Google or Israel in this time is frowned upon in the future, not necessarily that I hope people are doxed), but I'm pretty cynical at this point.

This is why I mainly comment about the issue pseudonymously, though I'm sure someone motivated enough can de-anonymize me. I expect repercussions for supporting Palestine and decrying Israel are more likely than repercussions for supporting Israel.

Do you have anything constructive to add? I am not going to apologize for not being a moral wet noodle.

It's probably 3 years, not 15, by the way.

Bullshit. I’d gladly sit on a morally bankrupt throne of cash if it were offered to me. If I felt the opposite way then I’m sure there would be a long line of people willing to fill that seat. You exist in a bubble.

Jesus: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God"

Mahatma Gandhi: "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

Dalai Lama: "More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other's well-being, is source of happiness."

... Lotsoweiners: "Bullshit. I’d gladly sit on a morally bankrupt throne of cash".

Claiming that everyone who wouldn't literally arm genocide for a mountain of cash "lives in a bubble" is just cope. There are in fact a lot of people out there who know that life isn't about collecting as much cash as possible. We call them "decent folk", as opposed to "collaborators".

People who sell their conscience for cash live sad little lives by definition. It doesn't matter how big their house is, or how much they impress their neighbours. Their lives are tragic, for themselves and for all of us.

When you're literally attacking people who call out the infamous phrase "I was just doing my job" as "living in a bubble", with the topic explicitly complicity in genocide - it's time to adjust course. Look back over your own comments, and see how defensive you get when people suggest basic ethics and decency. You're at war with yourself; and no amount of money will ever end that struggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7SvtikTkrM

True, but you shouldn't then expect to show up to that same job the next day after protesting.

I mean, perhaps if we had better worker rights, but still even in the most progressive nation I wouldn't expect an office protest not to warrant the company firing the employees doing the protest. When unions strike, they don't do it at their desks.

I'm sympathetic to why these employees protested, but also think it's unreasonable for them to think they could keep working at google after the protest.

No one said the employees expected to keep their jobs. This is a strawman.

And it's not what I'm challenging with the above comment. OP claimed it's "not OK" to protest in the office, even when the protest is against mass murder of innocent people.

> That it seemed a bit much in response to Google employees just sitting-in, in their workspace peacefully, saying, “Hey, drop Project Nimbus or come talk to us about it. Have some sort of conversation with us.” It was a complete overreaction on Google's part to not only fire everyone who was and wasn't involved, but then also threaten everyone else in the company who would dare think to stand up against this. And people are taking notice that it feels like a very fascist environment.

That was from the article.

The truly worrying part of Google's reaction was firing people who just stopped by to talk to the protestors.

The rest was fairly standard operating practice for corps.

So why work for the company in the first place?

Project Nimbus did not exist 3 years ago

Meh. People have been griping about Google/Alphabet and its interaction, cooperation, and business with various problematic governments for over a decade. If you are sensitive to those sorts of things you shouldn’t work for a giant global organization that occasionally swims in murky waters.

This is reminding me of IBM selling computing equipment to Nazi Germany.

I don't necessarily blame people for being unwilling to protest, but I respect the fuck out of the employees who did, and I hope for a future where Google is not viewed kindly for this contract (though to be fair, I don't think IBM suffered any actual consequences beyond a reputation hit for their role in aiding the Nazis)

Sort of ironic then people protesting that Hamas is being prevented from committing genocide against Israeli Arabs and Jews.

You have wars of choice and wars of necessity. People that support Hamas's war of choice against Israel I'm not taking seriously when they complain about Israel's war against Hamas.

Maybe today it's more like 0.005%.

The intimidation factor doesn’t get talked about enough. The internal activists are almost universally far left, reflecting the political leanings of the Bay Area. Anyone who speaks up with a different idea on any political topic will get attacked by a mob of these people. That means angry patronizing replies, getting criticized in public (outside of internal discussions), getting complaints sent to HR, etc.

There's at least one company that infiltrate various large companies just to observe, record, and compile lists of these ideologues doing activism in the workplace. I hear they're doing well selling the evidence to other companies that want nothing to do with these people.

As the Overtone window continues to shift back, it would be wise for those captured by idealogical stupidity to earnestly apologize. They've irreparably soured themselves to most people over the last few years, and unlike the past, I think the damage is too great this time to just move on. People have to take responsibility and be held accountable.

For every James Damore, there's 10 nameless people as effected, but without the name recognition. It hasn't been easy for them. I can understand why retribution and vengeance are more important than moving on.

> one company that infiltrate various large companies just to observe, record, and compile lists of these ideologues doing activism in the workplace

Do you have an example? Because one, that's HR's job. And two, I'd be blown away if a large company's HR would outsource such a sensitive assignment.

The poster is alluding to Project Veritas I think.

Aren't they a media firm that publishes exposes? I don't think that quite fits for a business intelligence firm.

> There's at least one company that infiltrate various large companies just to observe, record, and compile lists of these ideologues doing activism in the workplace. I hear they're doing well selling the evidence to other companies that want nothing to do with these people.

I want to believe. But do you have any evidence?

>There's at least one company that infiltrate

Do you mean CIA? Hard to parse your comment.

lmao

Perhaps in the bay area, but in a red state I experience pretty much the opposite atmosphere. I don't tell people I'm a lefty generally because I'm fairly certain most of my coworkers are right to far right (and many express those opinions freely).

We are in a pretty politically charged environment right now. Opinions and temperatures can run hot against the out groups.

There used to be an expectation that one doesn't discuss sex, religion, or politics in the workplace.

Incidents like this make me think there's some wisdom in that.

Totally agree and think it mostly the industries with a heavy population of far leaning individuals (tech, defense, etc) that like to discuss this stuff. I work in local government and very rarely hear any opinions about anything relate to politics or religion.

I think any employer instantly loses the ability to say "don't talk politics" when they decide to build software/services for the military :)

There was a fairly benign protest, from what I can tell.

Whether you agree with the rationale or not, those staging the protest have come to a conclusion that Google, through the services they deliver, is aiding the killing of innocents.

Is that unreasonable to protest? Sure it might make fellow employees uncomfortable, but is that not the point?

It's not disputable that tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed by Israel? Is it?

That your organisations capabilities are likely to have been used to kill those people feels like something that should make all employees think about the company that employs them, it is sort of relevant to all employees, is it not?

Then they should quit if their personal beliefs no longer align with the company. The expectation that they can do anything outside of working for the company on company objectives while on company time and not face consequences is insane to anyone that's worked at a non-SV tech company.

If your recommendation for airing their grievances still results in their unemployment, why on earth should they quit instead of doing what they did?

> why on earth should they quit instead of doing what they did?

Would’ve made them more hireable in the future. Especially given the arrest record for some of them.

Usually, having an arrest on your record isn’t going to result in an automatic rejection of your offer during the background check. You usually get to explain yourself, and it could be salvageable.

However, I see it being rather difficult in their case to explain away “yeah, so i was fired for disrupting my previous workplace with a protest and then got arrested for refusing to leave the company property and, subsequently, trespassing.”

> Would’ve made them more hireable in the future

I think you're overestimating how much this harms their career prospects outside of FAANG.

But that’s the thing, most of them would much rather be employed at a FAANG with high pay and high tolerance for “expressing yourself” in the workplace.

I totally agree with you that they would be unlikely to not be able to get a job at some old school enterprise with a very unsexy product. Those types of employers typically won’t tolerate even a hint of a similar behavior they could get away with at a FAANG though.

Also, I dont automatically stigmatize people for having prior issues with the law. Imo, it all depends on a case by case basis. However, if I was an employer, I would feel just as uneasy hiring someone who was previously fired and arrested for staging a protest that got out of hand at their previous workplace, as I would about hiring someone with prior convictions for wire fraud and embezzling as my CFO.

P.S. Besides FAANG, also good luck to them to be able to get employed by the government or military contractors (which I assume they wouldn’t even apply for in the first place, given their stances).

There are plenty of just-below-FAANG tier high-paying companies that aren't spending time Googling your history outside of LinkedIn. Most of these folks will be fine and getting paid lots of money. If they make this cause their entire online personality then maybe they'll have an issue, but I have a feeling most of them will probably get back to work and move on with their lives.

Probably to avoid being arrested and/or retain the ability to pass a background check while finding alternate employment in the future.

Makes sense to protest and raise hell before you get fired (or quit), in such a context, yes.

What doesn't make much sense is to act surprised and complain that you got fired afterwards.

Getting fired is exactly what one would expect when an employee is not only misusing their working time, but also disrupting everyone else's work, and actively trying to publically undermine the company's image (e.g., by suggesting that Google is supporting literal genocide, without any actual evidence of such).

I don't think that should be the first step. Trying to voice your frustrations is an important first step, maybe leave if you eventually find the organisation impervious to change, but simply leaving as a first step isn't the right way to do things.

Funny how everyone thinks it's not okay for other people to opine on what you do, but still reserve the right of it when it's hypothetically you pulling the strings. Self-referential inconsistency leads only to unrealized madness.

> these employees genuinely thought that they could spend their working time advocating for social causes and staging protests while staying happily employed and cashing their paychecks/vesting RSUs

Reading the interview, there's no indication the organizer thought this.

So, you would fire all of France?

A lot of people, particularly those raised in non democratic countries, or are first generation Americans who grew up in families that came from non democratic countries, have this distorted notion that "democracy" means that every entity in the United States must be governed democratically. They fail to understand that in the United States, "democracy" refers strictly to certain parts of the government. Other entities that exist in society, whether it's for profit companies or non profit entities, can be governed anyway they want as long as they are consistent with government laws -themselves enacted by representatives of the people.

Citizens having a say in deciding who sits at the top of the government is a revolutionary idea. Differentiating government from people is another revolutionary idea. These two ideas triggered America's founding in contraposition to the form of totalitarian governments that had been the norm in Europe until the 1700s.

I fully blame Google for fostering this environment. In fact, Google's two co-founders, particularly Sergey Brin, were very proud of this being in Google's DNA.

Here is the upside. Given Google's power -although its influence to set norms in tech has diminished in recent years- I hope incidents like this set a new normal in which when you go to work for a tech company, you are measured exclusively for your contributions on the technical domain -whether they are technical, sales, or what have you.

I always found the idea of "bringing your whole self to work" complete BS. This example illustrates why.

> I fully blame Google for fostering this environment. In fact, Google's two co-founders, particularly Sergey Brin, were very proud of this being in Google's DNA.

You do know that Brin and Paige both grew up in non-democratic Communist countries, right? Or is this related to your argument?

> Your corporate job isn't a democracy.

If corporate jobs aren't democratic, what kind of political organisation are they under?

The corporations are democratic but the voters are the shareholders/board. It is the employee’s job to execute the orders they are given not decide the direction of the business. It is very odd that this needs to be explained on this site.

But this is not what I asked though.

GP, and you in turn, both contend that the employees are not under a democratic regime within the corporation. I understood that point the first time it was made, and I don't disagree with it, so I didn't really need you to explain it again to me.

Democracy is a form of political organisation, and since GP brought it up to describe the relationship of the employee to the corporation, I infer that they assimilate the corporation to a polis. So what I am asking is what you would call the type of political organisation that describes the relationship of the employee to this "polis" ( the corporation). Feudalism? Monarchy? Theocracy? It's likely none of these three either, but then what describes it best?

Edit: For what it's worth, your description of the corporation as a democracy, where the employees provide labour but are not consulted on decisions sounds like Athenian democracy where the employees play the role of the slaves. I think that this is in tune with the conventional Marxist view of salaried work in capitalist societies. So I guess that's one answer to my question.

idk man there is a small slice of 0.01% engineers that truly move the needle. For the record I am not one of them. How many of these people are focused on a cause rather than adding another 0 to their bank accounts?

Those people are probably long gone from Google but if any are left, why increase the chances of them leaving?

> your corporate job isn’t a democracy

why not? shouldn’t it be?

May be you should open a company hire some of these IT workers and then post the results. (not sarcasm but genuinely to prove)

You can certainly try. Make every employee part owner and then everyone can vote on C-levels. Of course, that buy-in could be a little steep (if its not a early-stage startup) ...

It can be, but this one isn't.

I mean, I don't think corporations should be a democracy.

This said, I don't think they should have any political power whatsoever. A corporation that operates as a fascist entity will demand fascist lobbying and laws and thereby lessen the democratic county it is operating in.

i agree companies shouldn’t have political sway, but why shouldn’t the place you spend so much time and effort for be democratically governed? what’s the argument that government should be, but industry shouldn’t?

that’s the whole basis of Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government”

> why shouldn’t the place you spend so much time and effort for be democratically governed?

It’s inefficient [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Nothing is more _inefficient_ than top-down governance from people who are so many layers removed from the folks who have built up real expertise from doing the work that makes the company's revenue.

> Nothing is more _inefficient_ than top-down governance from people who are so many layers removed

Correct. Those are the information-transaction costs Coase describes in his “Nobel” prize winning write-up [1].

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2626876

good point. why did all these countries become democracies in the first place? we should revert to autocracy /s

The point is valid. Direct Democracies are extremely inefficient, and oscillate policies based on, essentially, vibes. That's why democratic countries abstract decision-making through various structures like layers of representation. Maybe that's what is being implied in this thread, that companies should be run in a republican (small r) model, where employees vote for their managers and directors, who have policies they set and argue for, and so on.

If I'm being honest that sounds absolutely insane, because nothing would ever get done (just look at Congress). Then again, if I have no faith in that model working in a corporation, I'm struggling to articulate why I still have faith in it working in an actual government.

I appreciate this reply - you’re right direct democracy is inefficient, and that our governments aren’t exactly a model of efficiency either.

that being said, and I think you agree this is important when it comes to government, I think we deserve to have a say in decisions that affect us. Whether that’s direct democracy or a republic, not my point, although an important discussion to be had.

First step though, is pointing out that I don’t want to live in a top-down autocratic country, nor do I want to work for a top-down, autocratic company. Then we can talk about how a democratic workplace might work!

I think the difference is that I don't think I deserve, necessarily, a say in the decisions that affect the company. Maybe after a certain point, and under certain conditions I would feel as if I "deserved" a say. Or if it was my own company, or a company I co-founded. But that is an earned privilege. Incidentally I feel similarly about government, albeit the bar is an order of magnitude lower.

Anyway, the whole idea to me is strange since the joint-stock corporation has been around since the 17th century (arguably much earlier if you include economies outside of Europe, and your definition of "joint" and "stock"), so surely if having a "democratic" company was a better way to operate that would be the norm instead.

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