What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?
To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.
It takes a long time for ideas and beliefs to become embedded in your culture - look at racism, look at sexism, look at the LBGT community. Gradually society is becoming more tolerant, more accepting and less judgmental, but we've still got a long road ahead of us before equality for all is anything more than a surface ideal that the younger generations long for.
Many like the status quo, they are truly uncomfortable with what change represents to themselves personally. Getting these people to accept that future generations ideals and beliefs are not their own, and are becoming the norm is a hard pill for them to swallow.
When a tiger is cornered and they perceive they have no place left to run, the only thing they will do is lash out and hurt you.
Yeah, maybe a tiger attacks people when it feels threatened. You still put it down.
Intent can be inferred from circumstances and other actions alongside the prohibited action; and this is particularly true in civil cases where the standard is a mere preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The whole point is that this is illegal and wrong. We discuss it in order to, hopefully, fix a bad thing rather than throw up our hands and say, "oh well, she had it coming!"
Why is that okay in a Employee / Corporation setting? Is that also okay in a rape victim / rapist setting? Where do we draw the line now?
And, naive or no, it is absolutely reasonable to act as though there would be none, knowing that you may receive it, so that you can draw attention to it if it happens, because it is illegal.
This is, at least nominally, a rule-of-law country, and that law's been on the books for a long, long time.
I don't like politics, and stories like this are exactly why - things that may be legal and should not be harmful end up turning into something ugly. You have to worry more about who you are pissing off that what you are doing, whether or not their anger is justified or reasonable.
Sadly, for all but very small companies, politics is the reality in the corporate world.
Politics might appear less evident in smaller companies, because you're more likely intimately familiar with the people at the top. In a larger corporate environment where you really don't know everyone intimately, your perspective of the politics are compounded because you're not necessarily part of the inner circle. The road to the top is all politics though. If you want to get there, you have to know how to play your hand and visibly provide what those at the top need to further their own political agenda.
Absolutely. Which is why I don't understand why everyone is discussing this. Erica Joy apparently doesn't consider it illegal retaliation (and what we know is definitely not enough to warrant such a cunclusion), otherwise she would file a suit. Are we totally sure we didn't just misunderstand her?
You can ignore politics but politics will not ignore you; politics is why tech worker salaries were kept artificially lowered and why Google and others had an anti-poaching arrangement.
She should have prepared a bit better but this was the safe move for her; it's out of her hands and the salary information has appeared on sites like GlassDoor. If she's fired everyone will know it's because of this ugly politics and people will want to avoid working for Google since it's no longer a tech company but a company dominated by managerial power players and sharks. Who wants to work at a place where you have ugly politics like this after all?
Companies can still retaliate against salary sharing in any way they want because it's next to impossible for you to prove in court that they acted in retaliation.
None of this actually says anything about whether she acted correctly, or incorrectly, or whether the company behaved with propriety, or whether information wants to be free, or anything else that--to borrow a phrase from the original HN guidelines--“piques one’s intellectual curiosity."
Here’s my contribution to “she got exactly what she should expect:” Americans got exactly what they should expect when they refused to pay taxes to the King.
What happened next? Why did things turn out that way. What might have happened instead? What could have been done to prevent it from happening? What could have been done to make it happen with less bloodshed?
Those are the interesting questions to ponder.
> exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company
is?
From this reply, it appears that you think Google did nothing wrong - regardless of whether she was 'stirring shit up' or not.
(And I personally think, peer bonuses should be rejected in such cases Because otherwise it becomes a pure popularity-contest. But that's just, like, my opinion :) )
I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal."
Companies are still people working together. They'll probably never be anything but people working together. It does not matter how protected the activity allegedly is; a giant embarrassment campaign run against your company, especially if in pursuit of a particularly feeble branch on the tree of political correctness, means you're out. Or, at least, things won't be pleasant for you. Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company. One can't write a law preventing that.
I for one side with the person who threw together the spreadsheet, not with Google who is trying to sneak by with not paying everyone equally.
Your assertion that the poster above you lives in a fantasy world for thinking that sharing salary information is a protected activity is frankly a nauseating attitude. One that I hope we all in tech can fix.
We call this "civilisation".
Living in a community with other people often requires not impulsively indulging every emotional urge.
The only reason this argument makes sense to you is that you relate to retaliating against employees who exercise their rights in opposition to the employers goals. There isn't a crime that this argument couldn't be cited as a defence of, from double-parking to serial killing.
She does seem like a SJW and, if any discrepancies in compensation were found between gender/race/... , Google would be ultimately screwed.
Plus, with such large dataset, one could fallaciously assume differences without considering different countries,positions,...
Explicitly exposing facts is the attitude I'd expect from this community, instead of ridiculing and wrongly correlating it with ideologies.
Putting that aside, I share pjc50's bemusement that arguing for equal pay qualifies as a "hidden agenda". I also don't find speculation the same as "explicitly exposing facts".