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Comment by manlobster | Hacker News Reader

Googler protests in the past have typically been walk-outs and other outdoor gatherings. This protest took place within the offices. Some of the protestors occupied senior executives' offices for many hours, and had to be removed by the police. Some of the protestors also streamed their protest from within the offices of the notoriously confidentiality-obsessed company.

I don't buy the narrative that Google is cracking down on employee activism. It seems more like the activists in this instance went too far and were dealt with accordingly.

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I think it's fair to say that Google is cracking down. They did tolerate activities like this previously, but came down like a hammer on this. It seems like they are setting a precedent and giving fair warning to anyone else thinking of doing something similar. Things like this can be viral, as seen with the college protests. And the more enabled they are, the worse they get, as seen with Columbia.

And to be fair there has been a big shift in the market for tech workers. There was a sort of indispensable aura that protected tech employees before that just isn't there any more. People who think this sort of thing wouldn't yield a rapid firing are living in the past.

There is a video from the participants-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiWHO71fOU&lc=

I find it rather incredible. They end it by announcing that they should all be reinstated because they "did nothing wrong". They repeatedly talk as if they expected just to have their "concerns heard", to get a warning, etc.

As an aside, what is with the insane, anti-HN moderation in here? Rational, constructive comments are greyed out because someone's raging bias is countered.

> I find it rather incredible. They end it by announcing that they should all be reinstated because they "did nothing wrong". They repeatedly talk as if they expected just to have their "concerns heard", to get a warning, etc.

Yeah. This is true "privilege" speaking -- they don't seem to realize how fortunate they were to be in their positions in the first place.

Companies employ you because it's a good deal for them. If you're lucky, you find a place where it is a good deal for you too. Protesting and disrupting work changes that calculus for the company. It's no longer a good deal for them, and the unsurprising result is that they don't want to employ such people or hire them back.

> This is true "privilege" speaking -- they don't seem to realize how fortunate they were to be in their positions in the first place.

This is an extreme assumption on your part.

> Companies employ you because it's a good deal for them. If you're lucky, you find a place where it is a good deal for you too. Protesting and disrupting work changes that calculus for the company. It's no longer a good deal for them, and the unsurprising result is that they won't want to hire such people back.

Everytime workers do something collectively there's a dozen people in these threads saying the same thing, as if it's some sort of revelation.

Sometimes people do things regardless of what's "expected" to be done to them, hoping for reason and empathy to prevail. That's not a sin and being snide about it isn't helpful.

How much reason and empathy were the protesters offering to the people whose offices they occupied?

An extremely reasonable amount, by all counts, what a strange question.

> This is an extreme assumption on your part.

It's not. As I said, that's what I take from a video where a string of people had some of the best paying jobs available to any kind of worker, and at one of the most significant companies in the world right now, but don't seem to appreciate how fortunate they were to be in that situation or that they are replaceable.

> hoping for reason and empathy to prevail

"Reason" is what will get them in trouble here. A reasonable company is unlikely to keep or re-hire disruptive employees when it has other options, and boy does it have other options right now in this tech labor market.

> being snide about it isn't helpful.

I'm not being snide. They have every right to stand up for what they believe in, and there is something noble in that regardless of whether you agree with their view. I'm just remarking on how these individuals don't seem to realize what they had and what they've likely lost.

> I'm just remarking on how these individuals don't seem to realize what they had and what they've likely lost.

Why do you keep doing this?

The person you are responding to has provide supporting arguments in their comment. If you have a response to those arguments, make it.

Thanks forum moderator, I appreciate you guiding us to the right way to make a discussion. Your input in this thread is invaluable.

> Sometimes people do things regardless of what's "expected" to be done to them, hoping for reason and empathy to prevail. That's not a sin and being snide about it isn't helpful.

Of course its not a sin, I think the point here is that people need to be really clear of the risks before taking such an aggressive moral stance. Depending on empathy and reason to prevail while protesting on personal opinion is a crap shoot, chances are the people on the other side could have different moral views or different goals to reason about.

That's absolutely not to say that people shouldn't protest, only that purposely protesting in a disruptive way should be expected to have a bad outcome and push back from the other side. When the other side is on the winning side of the power imbalance that likely means you lose. If the goal is to draw a line in the sand that can still be a win, but if the goal is to make a show out of it with no consequences, well that probably won't work out.

> I think the point here is that people need to be really clear of the risks before taking such an aggressive moral stance

Every thread like this, from now to the first time I visited HN so long ago, is filled with a hundred of the same comment that gets some weird satisfaction off presuming that people haven't thought out their actions. It's not unique, it's not interesting, it's not helpful, and frankly it's kind of insulting.

Its a reasonable assumption that the person in question here didn't think it through if they're filing complaints over the firing. If you disagree with the company you work for and choose to protest disruptively at the office, and know that could lead to being fired, why file a complaint when that happens? And when filing the complaint, is the goal really to get your job back?

At least for me, I can't speak for others here, its a combination of either not thinking it through or purposely making a spectacle out of themselves just to make a spectacle. For better or worse, I don't have much patience for people making a loud show of themselves and appearing to act irrationally (ex: protesting the company you work for, acknowledging you may get fired, getting fired, then filing a complaint presumably to get your job back?).

In the video I link at the base of this thread multiple participants declare that they did not expect to get fired.

They don't call their firing consequences, they call it retaliation. They end the video by declaring that they should all be reinstated because they did nothing wrong.

Loads of internet posters very strongly and emotionally declared that they all knew that they'd be fired, including in this thread. That they were professional martyrs who heroically gave extremely desirable jobs for a cause with eyes wide open, and of course they knew what would happen. But every bit of evidence from the actual participants betrays the opposite.

And we're going to see the same sort of rhetoric as college students start getting expelled, their academic careers ruined. You'll have the former students on one side crying and gnashing about how unfair and unearned the consequences are, and on the other side third-parties cheering on their self-sabotage as heroic.

I don't have any direct connection to Google to really know what happened, only going off what I've seen online. If some protesters were disrupting the office, and those just trying to do their jobs, they should have expected repercussions. Its on them if they believed themselves powerful enough to do that with no repercussions.

A huge challenge in general is that a vast majority of us, myself included, only get fed headlines online and assume we know the whole story. I try to caveat it with "if this is true, ..." to try and help control that unknown.

> They don't call their firing consequences, they call it retaliation.

Well, it is retaliation. The consequences were retaliation by Google. It's maybe just not prohibited retaliation under the law.

What's the difference in retaliation and consequences?

IMO it'd have to be something related to whether the response from Google could have reasonably been expected given the rules, employee agreement, etc. If the protests were disrupting others from getting their job done, that seems pretty reasonable to me personally. Otherwise I guess it would come down to how strict Google has historically been for people ducking out of work without notice (that's the best I could see Google claiming if it really was a peaceful protest / sit-in).

> Companies employ you because it's a good deal for them. If you're lucky, you find a place where it is a good deal for you too.

Toe the line for being underpaid, having bad healthcare, and working for overpaid execs... be grateful you get the chance!

Or it can be seen as an extension of the protest, continuing to lash out at Google for making sociopathic decisions (from their perspective) and using all the tools at their disposal to continue to make being evil less attractive.

> I don't buy the narrative that Google is cracking down on employee activism.

Seriously? As somebody who's followed this stuff closely there's loads of historical precedent here for assuming exactly that. Including with NLRB and retaliation from other "good kinds of protests".

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/02/google-la...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23624631/alphabet-cognizan...

Either way, they're not coming back into the building, and Google would probably rather fight a law suit than dealing with these people personally ever again.

Why do you say that google would rather not deal with them personally?

Because they proved they are toxic. No company would like to deal with them again unless there’s something to be gained from the PR aspect.

The company is toxic, not the people.

Also, sucks for Google that future hires are gonna look a lot more like these "unacceptable people".

Toxic? How so?

The idea that live streaming the protests was going to leak corporate secrets is also laughable.

This idea that projects are "confidential" is a classic for keeping employees on their toes and preventing them from asking questions.

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