1. is a bit presumptuous though if you’re going to jump to the conclusion that they’ll never be happy and that this would be a continuous issue after the enacted change that they were protesting for. It’s a rather baseless assumption if the only thing to go off of was an organized protest with well-defined ethical motivations. Unless there’s evidence of rabble rousing intention, it seems that 1. is unreasonable.
With that said, I have not followed this closely. For all I know, that evidence does exist and/or Google leadership has chosen not make said evidence publicly available.
People who tend toward 1. would say that Google has bent over backwards to accomodate protesters and has acceded to their demands multiple times, e.g. canceling their project in China and dropping their contract with the US military.
That’s a very good point. As I mentioned in my previous comment, I haven’t followed the situation (or other Google situations like the ones you mentioned) closely. However, I feel a just-as-reasonable explanation is that Google did those things to save face because if they truly felt those were the right things to do, there would be no retaliation and there would be an implicit agreement that the intention was morally motivated and not intended rabble-rousery.
On the other hand if the situations you mentioned are unrelated to the Women’s March, which it seems they are, then I really don’t see them as being relevant to whether or not the people in question were rabble rousers. Protestors are not a constant set of people and each protest and the organizers of said protest have to be looked at individually, at least in terms of determining whether 1. or 2. is most reasonable.
Otherwise, it’s a broad generalization of “protestors”, which would inadvertently make 2. the more reasonable narrative as well because 1. would be moot to the specifics of the particular situation.
Companies don't have thoughts or emotions. A company's actions are a result of the individuals that make it up. When you see controversy like the China thing or military contracts, that's just how decisions get made in big companies. Someone wants to get money from the military. Some other people don't. They discuss it and the company makes a decision by individuals taking action. People inside Google that wanted to do military contracts heard the counterarguments and didn't carry on. That's all.
Maybe Larry Page thought "hey, this is bad for our brand" and fired all in charge. But that seems very unlikely. What seems likely to me is that the people that wanted to do the project heard the controversy and decided on their own that it wasn't a good idea.
As the company gets bigger, there are certainly more and more of these controversies. It does get hard to manage when you feel personally responsible for what others have done and your voice is not heard. That is why people are leaving.
This all simply supports my point then: it’s an irrelevant argument in the current discussion. If the Woman’s March protest had zero influence, then the point is simply moot.
Furthermore, I specifically mean the leadership at Google when I simply say Google. I’m referring directly to the people deciding resolution or retaliation. Whether that’s a single person or a group of people, it doesn’t matter. By enacting a change that’s protested for, they’re legitimizing the concerns set forth by the protest (aka supporting the notion that they’re real moral issues and the opposite of rabble-rousing)
> These people are rabble-rousers who will never be happy
No, this one is unreasonable. It's this weird narcissistic thing that people do where they define a person's identity by how that person feels about them.
Just because I hate you doesn't mean I'm a hater. I also like things, just not you. Just because I'm unhappy with you doesn't mean that I am not happy, it means I'm not happy with you.
If I think my coworker is disagreeable and is preventing me from being productive and my coworker disagrees, am I "defining his/her identity"? That language seems very odd to me. What's the difference between "defining someone's identity" and "having an opinion about someone that is contrary to how they view themselves"?
More broadly, you seem to be saying that the only reason anyone is skeptical of the Google protestors is that that the protestors don't like that person. That's quite an assumption. In reality, people simply disagree about things. And there's room for reasonable disagreement.
That language seems very odd to me. What's the difference between "defining someone's identity" and "having an opinion about someone that is contrary to how they view themselves"?
The difference is that once you establish that it's "defining someone's identity", then disagreement with that person is "denying their right to exist", and so basically violence, from which the person you disagreed with deserve protection. These are the lines along which this kind of conversations typically proceeded inside Google.
> once you establish that it's "defining someone's identity", then disagreement with that person is "denying their right to exist", and so basically violence
The part about defining identity is, I think, referring to the fallacy of seeing someone in a context, and then thinking that they "are" that. Like meeting someone who is angry and storing them in your memory bank as "that angry person," as if they were angry all the time (they may indeed be, but you don't know). Add to that, the errors inherent in the act of perception: Are they really angry or did you misperceive it that way?
In your example, the co-worker may be "your disagreeable co-worker" (definition), or they might simply be "your agreeable co-worker" who momentarily disagrees with you or your ideas.
If your opinion about someone is right enough, often enough, that it serves as a workable summary of that person, that (ideally) a lot of people agree on, who have no vested interest in agreeing, then you could start to be objectively convinced there was no difference between your opinion of that person, and the definition of that person. But no simple definition of a person is ever going to capture the whole story - people are too complex.
Googlers haven’t realised yet that they have different leadership now. The open culture of discussing and opposing things that Google does is slowly degrading.
Rephrased slightly differently: The majority want opportunities that will advance their careers, increase their stock values, and keep the company doing well (which usually means bigger bonuses)
Rephrasing even more: there is a number of rats that are capable of doing anything to advance their careers and to make more money. When a few people appear that value their conscience more than money, these rats will fight them.
The trouble is that Google's internal culture war did tremendous damage to the company's norms, especially after both sides developed rhetorical "nukes" like targeted press leaks.
Now, in many places, where there was one fascinating discussion, one sees only find a few remaining lonely activists talking with each other and the void. There's a certain hypersensitivity to perceived offense. Large areas of the company are now in information silos. Live questions at TGIF no longer happen. Internal social media is no longer funny or interesting. Ever discuso forum of meaningful size is getting "community standards moderation".
Yes, it looks like the activists are slowly and steadily losing the war. I wish they'd admit defeat. At this point, they're prolonging the inevitable. But still, they're going to lose, one exercise of soft power at a time.
But what's left behin? A waste. Silence. A desert where nothing grows. It's unfortunate. It's sad. But it had to be done.
It hardly "had to be done", and in this process that you've claimed had to be done, many of the best and brightest have escaped the large adtech behemoth.
The organization is a husk of itself, unable to maintain services for more than a few dozen months, with a disinterest in improving anything that doesn't make PR headlines (eg: Google Fi RMAs, IPv6 support inside GCP, worsening search results, etc). Eventually this will cause Google to join AOL & Yahoo, though Android & Search should provide sizable staying power.
You may be right about the husk-ness. Sometimes companies can recover from this kind of cultural damage --- look at Microsoft's renaissance. But this kind of damage frequently causes talent flight and a death spiral.
I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable
No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.
It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.
Not abusing workers and not turning Google into an extension of the DoD & Chinese Surveillance Infrastructure is a fringe political agenda? That seems fundamentally baked into Google's old motto, "Do no evil".
Microsoft's still playing their old games FYI, they have not shaken their prior reputation (esp. with their abhorent behaviour at Linuxfest Northwest 3 or 4 years ago), and they've essentially scuttled QA (hence certain Win10 updates deleting your files, among other recent bugs). There was a recent push to gut the MS Partner program's benefits, which had predictable results. IMO they are using Oracle's business model currently, albeit with a few thousand extra developers.
The 64% against includes entire blind community. Of those working at Google who replied it was majority for it.
Put another way, even though the macro blind community was against. Googlers in said group were for it. Showing googlers are more likely to be for than against
“Whittaker also publicly denounced some Google decisions, including the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative think tank leader, to an AI ethics board. Google soon nixed the board.”
Many people hold strong beliefs that conflict with the strong beliefs of others and engage in open debate rather than walk-outs. I can only assume Whittaker realized that her views would not prevail, but felt that she was nonetheless in the right, and therefore resorted to alternative means of pressing her point.
Rowboat politics. If one of the rowers decides that she doesn't like the direction the coxswain is steering and starts to row in the other direction, it tends to annoy the other rowers. This is true whether she is right or not. If she can't change the coxswain's mind it's better for both her and the rest of the crew for her to find another rowboat.
Your analogy fails right away with a simple example: if the renegade rower realizes that the team is rowing towards a waterfall, then it is indeed not in the team’s best interest to push him or her out.
Pioneers are seldom welcomed with open arms and often made into pariahs. Not picking a side here, just stating a fact.
The fact is also such that most pioneers would not end up having chosen a better direction than status quo.
The harder some people try and toe the line, the harder some other people will try to rebel, and then the system starts trending more towards extremes.
I don't really understand why it's surprising to anyone that they would face "internal retaliation" after exposing their employer as evil and boycott worthy to the entire world. By publicizing it to the degree that they did and attaching their name to it, they were putting their interests over the company. If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize. I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
I think it’s actually a very savvy strategy to protest from
within. It’s too easy for Google to shrug off or ignore public criticism. They’ve done this for decades with virtually no repercussions because they hold a monopoly on their core business - very few people are going to ‘delete Google’ no matter how much you disagree with their policies.
They do not have a monopoly on talent and they are actually fearful of being no longer seen as the #1 workplace option for top candidates. Protesting as a Google employee gives you much more leverage than an outsider will ever have (unless you have the $$ to buy off a handful of senators).
It certainly helps that they've protected themselves from the ability to "delete Google" with an embrace, extend (or buy), extinguish[0] strategy when it comes to the technologies at the core of the modern web.
Why must that -- and nothing else -- be the signal they're sending? People have a variety of motivations.
For example, I left my country 20 years ago because I wanted a better future and I had no desire nor conviction to stay and try to make that future happen there. Of those who stayed, most had no other choice. However, there's a non-negligible number of people who stayed despite having opportunities to leave, precisely because they are willing to fight to make things better.
Moving in general is difficult, but leaving a country and permanently moving to another one is infinitely more difficult than finding another job for someone who works at Google.
That's precisely why I wrote "of those who stayed, most had no other choice". I understand the difficulties inherent in moving from one country to another, as I've done it twice now. The difference between changing jobs and changing countries does nothing to invalidate my claim that people can have different motivations and that one of them is "I wish to stay and fight for this cause in this place."
It's literally illegal. There are laws against retaliation against whistleblowers. That is why it is surprising.
> I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.
I'm not clear on what Whittaker's role was with regard to the Chinese project, but the final straw appears to have been her protest regarding the composition of the AI ethics panel.
How is an outside ethics panel going to affect their working conditions? The people on the panel don't have any say on employees' pay, promotions, disciplinary actions, assignments, or anything else that might affect their working conditions.
The idea was to have some people from outside the company look at the tech and its potential hazards and provide some input on the ethics of developing and deploying it. People inside the company said, No, we don't want that particular viewpoint to have a seat at the table on this outside committee. The ethics panel had nothing at all to do with their working conditions.
Are you trying to make a fine distinction between "working conditions" and "work"? You just said that this panel that she was protesting the composition of would look at what the company was doing and plans for what the company wished to do, and have input into the ethics of developing and deploying them (and I'm assuming changing them or ending them, otherwise this panel's only job was to kiss paper.)
The employees of google would then be expected to produce and maintain these projects. That's their work. At the least, they're expected to share a roof with these projects, and profits from the work they do could be spent on these other projects, or vice-versa.
'Working conditions' includes those things I mentioned: pay, promotions, hours, etc.
The AI ethics panel may or may not have led to a change in the scope of 'work.' We'll never know, because the panel was disbanded. Presumably Google is now making decisions about future AI work without the benefit of the ethics panel.
In any event, organizing a protest against the composition of this outside panel that had exactly zero power to change Google employees' working conditions does not fall under the NLRA. Apparently Meredith Whittaker was counseled along the same lines, which is why she resigned after trying to pressure Google into changing their decision by using publicity via the press, rather than suing under the NLRA.
Isn't a "protected concerted activity" an activity that is done for "mutual aid and protection"? It may be closer, but I don't see a case being made under NLRA either.
> What did the "Open Research Group" at Google actually build?
Have you made any effort to investigate who Meredith Whittaker is on your own?
Her work on AI ethics was much appreciated and celebrated precisely because she was a distinguished contributor. The cultural aversion to building weapons is not novel thing in that culture.
Yes, I googled Meredith Whittaker before commenting. She joined Google in 2006 after getting a bachelor's degree from Berkeley, apparently in literature and psychoanalytic theory. By 2012 she appears to have been a program manager in initiatives regarding internet measurements. So far I haven't found any references to products or reports from the Open Research Group, which she appears to have founded sometime prior to the 2016 White House conference where she met the other co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU.
Typically when you see someone engaged in "technology ethics" their professional career is based on limiting or stopping the technology, rather than building or advancing the technology. See, for example, stem cell ethics. Companies don't typically set up adversarial organizations within themselves. A more usual approach is to set up temporary "red teams" to address specific issues.
This is true, but the function of the compliance department is to ensure that the company operates within the boundaries set by law and regulation. They typically operate with the authority and access to top management. They would report incidents of non-compliance to management and much more rarely to a regulator, very rarely to the media. If members of the compliance department report to the regulators or public they are covered by the relevant whistleblower statutes. I can't recall members of the compliance department organizing other employees to demonstrate.
Another organization is the quality control department of a manufacturer. They also tend to report independently to top management, and they function similarly.
Please don't cross into personal attack and snark, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. That only makes this place worse. Your comment would be just fine without the first sentence.
I clicked on the first one with her name, and the main conclusion was that AI needs more workplace diversity.
I clicked on the second one with her name, and the main conclusion was that AI needs more government regulation, labor unionization, and yes, you guessed correctly, workplace diversity.
I begin to feel that AI is only a red herring here.
So is the insinuation here that if she doesn't meet some arbitrary series of qualifications you put forth, it's okay for her to be illegally harassed out of her job?
I'm reluctant to engage further because it seems like an absurd line of reasoning.
Nope, you've made yourself a straw man. I hope you did not do it intentionally because it's plainly disgusting. Please don't do that again.
You've said that she didn't just leave Google instead of protesting because she didn't 'want to see the thing you [she] worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"'.
You was asked what she actually did at Google and you've come up with 'her work on AI ethics was much appreciated and celebrated' as a response.
Looks like she was not working 'so hard' on anything that can be of any use for building 'killer robots and war "minds"'. In fact, for building anything.
You crossed into personal attack and name-calling in this thread. Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them when posting here? Note particularly: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
> Looks like she was not working 'so hard' on anything that can be of any use for building 'killer robots and war "minds"'. In fact, for building anything.
This looks like you've subtly dodged the complaint I raised by trying to insinuate that she doesn't have a right to express opinions aboht functions of Google she herself did not personally participate in. This leverages the information asymmetry in disclosure; we can't publicly discuss the bulk of her work and therefore you can suggest that there was none.
I find this to be no different from suggesting that she has no right to protest and therefore deserves to be run out. You're just trying to run the standard "she wasn't that important and therefore doesn't have credibility" playbook. Gross.
But despite the disingenuous argument, I'll accept it head on. I challenge the entire premise. I certainly can and do express opinions about my employer's involvement in weapons development and I am glad they are not doing it. I'd fight to avoid doing any more of it, and I'd be willing to resign over it. I don't work in AI, but my work supports any such system at Google and therefore I'd feel responsible to help prevent building killer robots in any capacity.
I, like many such employees, am both a shareholder and an employee in a company that claims to have an interest in a transparent and egalitarian corporate culture. This practice will naturally introduce friction between different parties and I expect us to work through them as fairly as possible. So I will not simply eject at the first sign of something I don't like. But if I feel that there is a line crossed while I was there strenuously objecting to that line and I haven't been given adequate reason to change my mind, I won't hesitate to resign.
I make these facts clear to folks when they hire me. If they don't like it, they shouldn't hire me. Hopefully you respect your own agency and intellect enough to give yourself similar license in your own life.
>Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.
The question is not why would you publicly protest actions of your employer. The question is why would you expect, or even want, to work there while you do.
Also, do whistleblower laws protect you from retaliation if what you're blowing the whistle on isn't illegal?
I looked it up myself when it happened, not a single male in her entire reporting chain below Sundar. Marketing is female dominated so it isn't really that strange, but I wonder how a male could get enough influence to bully her in that position.
You cannot be "retaliated against" if you aren't engaging in revelations of illegal behaviour. These people were not doing the latter, when you look at the details. They were merely protesting against things they didn't like, but which aren't illegal, and in one case, didn't exist at all (Google underpaid men, not women).
If there's no illegal behaviour, there's no whistleblowing, and if there's no whistleblowing, then reducing "job opportunity" (which is of course not a right) is just ordinary corporate performance management in response to an employee behaving badly.
Please see the other half of this thread where a real lawyer explains the specifics. Given her involvement in the women's march, there are legal considerations.
> Radical reduction in job responsibility and opportunity IS retaliation.
Is that generally illegal in the US? if not then what specifically does the retaliation have to in response to to become illegal?
e.g I would expect negative retaliation in response to poor quality work or slacking off etc, and would expect it to be legal. This person's actions would be considered intentional bad PR, so what specifically about retaliating to it is illegal?
Are you perhaps forgetting that this person was involved in organizing the women's march? Do I actually need to find a source for US law suggesting that retaliation against women reporting sexism is in fact illegal?
This is basic compliance training for any US employment, and the EU has similar laws. Where do you live and work that you don't know this?
> It's literally illegal. There are laws against retaliation against whistleblowers. That is why it is surprising.
There are many ways around the law. It happens everyday: "oopsie your team has to work on something else, double oopsie you're no working on AI anymore you'll just work on our CSV parser, that's were the money is these days. Ah ? What are you saying ? You don't want to work on that ? Well feel free to resign, we'll sign you a $200k check if you forget about it", &c.
I don't think people are having trouble understanding it. I would rather say some of us have a broader view of it.
It's the same old discussion about whether something is right just because it's legal or allowed. Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.
In my opinion, what Whittaker is doing is, in a way, analogous to civil disobedience. And, just like with civil disobedience, reprisals are expected. It's worth keeping in mind that those reprisals aren't automatically right by virtue of being expected, just as her actions aren't automatically right by virtue of being similar to civil disobedience.
In other words, some of us feel we can't afford to, as another commenter put it, "leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace". I believe this attitude -- that science and engineering should somehow remain orthogonal to and decoupled from ethics and morality -- to be downright pernicious to the society.
>It's the same old discussion about whether something is right just because it's legal or allowed.
It's actually not about legality. I didn't even suggest that.
>Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.
As I said, it is expected to do it. Because companies have their own interests. The interests of the shareholders in Google's case. And Google is expected to act to protect them.
This includes getting rid of employees that act to sabotage the company, in this case by publicly badmouthing it.
Money (paying someone) is not even the biggest issue... How can you trust such an employee (their work output, and that they won't attempt to internally sabotage the company)? I mean, noone is entirely trustwortht ("trust but verify") but when the probability rises from a few percentage points to nearly 100%, maybe it's time to part ways...
It's kind of funny how wanting to improve the company you work for is equated with "sabotage".
Thing is, part of Googles identity is "don't be evil". A vital part of this is stopping whenever you (unintentionally) do something evil. This should not be a problem for Google at all or reason to loose trust in an employee. Unless, of cause, the company has changed. And that's what those story's area about and why we need them: To make sure the public image of google actually reflects what the company now actually is.
Btw: To those saying "why don't you just quit as protest"? For one that makes it easy to be dismissed as disgruntled ex-employee. But more important is the same reason you don't just leave your country of family whenever you disagree or have a problem with those. Cutting ties is a last resort that shouldn't be necessary.
> It's kind of funny how wanting to improve the company you work for is equated with "sabotage".
I definitely don't. I definitely applaud efforts to improve things (relationships, companies, ...).
But going public ("airing your dirty laundry") is a kind of an ultimatum - "I have no other option to enforce what I want than to public shame" - and, while potentially effective, it's also damaging for the other party (and, ultimately, the "whistle-blower").
And at that point, it seems that the values are already so misaligned (whether the employee, or the company, changed is ultimately not relevant) that "divorce" seems like the only option. I definitely wouldn't want to stay in a relationship with someone if they intentionally hurt me (regardless if it was "my fault" or not).
The company doesn't need to be deliberate about it, publicly attack the company for its faults and many of your peers will see you as a pariah, even if they agree with the underlying reason. Work internally and you're seen as a leader.
So, just to point out - the person is talking about badmouthing, you are talking about whistleblowing.
These are not the same thing at all.
In the US, talking about improving working conditions is also protected, but it's also not whistleblowing, either.
As a lawyer, i can tell you a lot of people badly misunderstand what "protected concerted activity" covers. It is not about your individual complaints. Explicitly not.
"Charging Party 2 posted a 23-minute live video on Facebook during work hours and while in uniform talking about the discipline for wearing improper shoes and the confidentiality provision in the disciplinary notice, referencing the wage-and-hour lawsuits, making crude and disparaging jokes and comments about a supervisor, and stating that by asking Charging Party 2 to sign something interfering with free speech, the conduct of the company’s officials was “against the United States Constitution and you need to be shot on sight.”
As far as i can discern, hacker news would consider this protected because it complains, somewhere, about their working condition, and was in fact done as a direct response to being disciplined.
However, NLRB says
"The Division of Advice found that although Charging Party 2 referred to subjects in the video that could have been relevant to employees’ mutual aid or protection, the comments were entirely individual complaints and there was no indication that Charging Party 2 was speaking for other employees or seeking to act in concert with others.
...
"
(They found it okay to fire this person)
In fact, the company had filed defamation lawsuits against the charging parties over the facebook videos, and the NLRB found that was okay too, because they weren't for protected activity.
Is really illegal? I think, at least in the US, you will be surprised by the answer if you look into what legal protections are available whistleblowers at private employers.
Explaining it is an uninteresting answer to an unasked question. The reason whistleblowers *(edit: or protestors) are protected is because everybody already understands why. Justifying it interesting.
It's obvious why you would fire someone for trying to start a union, or for turning down your sexual advances.
> I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
I do not understand why it should be preferable to say "oh well, nothing to be done, time to quit" rather than be a force for change. The former is easy, but it does little to correct systemic problems that affect many of your peers.
Also, you make "accept paychecks" sound like you're accepting some sort of favor. Paychecks are not charity; they are compensation. You produce something of value, and you receive something of value in return.
You can influence change from the outside. And in tech where talent acquisition is a fierce game, employees leaving due to ethics would be the greatest show of force.
I believe the strong term "evil" is only used because Google's motto is "don't be evil".
Not everyone has the freedom to instantly change jobs. The world might be a better place if employees had the right to whistle blow without being threatened with homelessness or fleeing to Russia.
Unions striking and protesting against their companies for better wages seems acceptable. Why is protesting for ethical reasons without quitting faux pas?
Well the Unionization has received explicit protections in being fought for and even then it isn't liked in US companies at the corporate level to put it mildly - seen only as unmitigated downsides and something to avoid. But workers can all agree on wanting more wages or better working conditions even if they may argue on how they are distributed (fixed paygrades vs performancel.
Ethics protests aren't so enshrined for one. The views of ethics are often personal and ideologically entangled to some degree. Self selection has been more favored and the protests bring to mind the "obvious" but assailable objection "Why not just quit and associate with others more like-minded." It gets into messy areas of rights of association in ideal vs practice. Ideology isn't protected and is explicitly trumped by other areas like anti-discrimination laws.
Many can see "strawman" can of worms being opened (they may be reasonable in this case but what of successors) accepted as a norm without a sensible defined law or doctrine. There were the whole clerks refusing shall issue marriage licenses and nobody wants a situation disrupted by free rider "do nothing vegans in the slaughterhouse" or similar absurdities.
This isn't saying the current situation is ideal at all but that changes are non-trivial and there are reasons to suspect the precedent would be preferrable to most.
Google doesn’t really have a “motto” or “corporate philosophy” publicly available anymore. It’s just the Code of Conduct now. “Don’t be evil” used to be in the preface, but it was moved to the end of their Code of Conduct. However, it does feel less salient and it kinda feels inconsequential now though.
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Large coorporations look a lot like governments. Normally, I bring this up from the perspective of regulations (eg. we should be willing to restrict the power of large private actors in the same ways we restrict the power of governments). However, I think it is applicable here too.
If you don't like something the US government is doing, you generally aren't going to leave. You are either going to ignore it, or try to change it. Even if your employer is the Federal government, few people would expect you to quit. If your problem is with the exact portion of the government where you are working, then some might expect you to quit but few would bat an eye if your next job happened to also be with the federal government.
What is happening here is akin to being forced out of government work for critizing the government; and we do not accept that behaviour.
One issue is that while internal behaviors may mirror the situation isn't that comparable. Starting a new government in competition with your own another's borders is generally known sedition. Governments are defined by their monopoly on the use of force. Not so for even large corporations.
I don't think anyone is that surprised, but that doesn't mean that it's right.
> I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize. I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
Good for you, but they decided to do something else. I don't think they were denouncing Google as heartily as you seem to suggest. They obviously had hope that they could change things. We're also talking about old veterans of the company. How do you know that they didn't do everything that they could internally before escalating things publicly?
It sounds like she did step 1 (try to change from the inside, first privately, then through employee protest), and now she's doing step 2 in your program. What would you do differently?
Most people would keep taking the check while convincing themselves they're not responsible.
When the somewhat immoral nature of that intrudes on people's thoughts, they can sort of silence it by finding fault with the person who IS following their conscience.
So if the company were you are working at, treats you badly, you would resign over going on strike to force a change and then stay at the company, for example?
I would (and have). Trying to change the company hurts you and helps the company (that was treating you bad). Just leave. Save your energy, don't put any information public that will make you look like a bad employee and find a better job. The best revenge is living well.
Yep, and doing the "right thing" doesn't mean everyone will be cool with it (Snowden &c.), especially in highly hierarchical institutions like google. You don't get to light a dumpster fire in your own office without inhaling some of the smoke. At that scale any move outside of what you're allowed to think/do is a workplace suicide. I wouldn't be surprised if these people end up in other renowned tech companies though, google is losing on all fronts.
The things is, those paychecks are very large. A Program Manager (Meredith's role) averages about $125k/year, and one with Meredith's tenure might make as much as double with stock and bonus. Google has been paying her salary the last two years even though most of her work is at AI Now.
Going forward as an NYU employee, as a university researcher without an advanced degree, she will be lucky to clear $60k/year. In New York. Doing the exact same work she has been doing for the last two years
The question how surprising something is is useless. Ask what makes a good person, not what makes a person a good predictor of the human potential to be rotten.
> If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize
Or maybe you'd stay, and maybe you'd retaliate against whistleblowers. There is no way to know, it's moot speculation. What we do know is that if the people who retaliated against the whistleblower had acted like you say you would have acted, they wouldn't have been around to retaliate.
I don't know, this seems like a pretty weak article. Sometimes people just change jobs and there's nothing nefarious about it. If Whittaker had been fired for her activism, or even just felt forced out, wouldn't she herself be talking about it? She wasn't afraid to tell the media about Google mistreating her in the past.
Google works like crazy to hire all of the smartest and the best people, but do they really need them? Billions and billions in shareholder value could be extracted by hiring a bunch of mid-tier Java programmers and having them farm Ad Words for the next decade, until the first competition shows up.
Their worry is that competition will be started by the people they've not hired and kept on the bench. I'd imagine a large amount of their top-level hiring is driven by taking minds off of the market, more than optimising their output.
So make it not bullshit. It may feel bullshit because it's bullshit or because the exec deciding your project had bad info and you have good info, or you have bad info and not getting the context...
go out there, talk to people, find if it's really bullshit, and if it is, change it. there are so many interesting problems to fix that nobody should have time to do bullshit jobs
Some people are brilliant but just want to be financially comfortable enough to do the things they actually want to do. Ask some CS majors why they are trying to get into the field and a huge swath with frankly say it's because they can bust ass now and get six figures at 22 years old and coast the rest of their lives. Not exactly the reality, but that's what freshman CS majors are thinking about when they hand their resume to the google rep during the career fair.
It has worked, perhaps not for long, but outweighted sums of cash to play with a nice side project or work on an actual "at scale" thing whilst you vest some shares probably appeals to a lot more smart people than we might imagine.
Salaries are also deductible, so they get the talent in their pool, off the market, adding a small % of value, whilst also being able to offset taxes on record profits.
Real != profitable. Google can offer academic style oppurtunities at industry style salaries.
Eg. Fuchsia OS might have been started because Google saw a bussines oppurtunity in writing an open source capabilities OS. Or, it might have been started to keep smart OS engineers from leaving the company.
Not just Linux, but ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux (originally Ubuntu); which is to say, much of the userspace stack was pre-exsting as well. The core of the operating system is the Chrome web browser, which was also a pre-exsting project, which a relatively clear business interest to Google (influence over the web platform).
Android has a bit of a better claim, as more of the userspace stack was written for it. It also wasn't started by Google (although they bought Android Inc. years before it was released publicly).
I don't work at a FAANG company, nor have I ever been to SV, nor do I know anyone who works at one of the many enormous tech companies around SV.
In the TV show Silicon Valley they have characters who sit around unassigned doing nothing at the Google-like company in the show. Does this actually happen? Are there people hired at these companies who just don't have a project? Its entirely feasible that Google could afford to do this just to create a dearth of engineers in the area.
What happens is that some people work on projects that never see the light of day because they’re not fully thought through or fully staffed or really as important enough. But they can still spend years working on them.
The show is (by design) over the top. But there is a piece of truth in it. That’s why it’s funny for everyone who has been at these companies because everyone can see real-life resemblances.
Before someone downvotes me: I am implying that SOME people are like this. By no means the majority or god-forbid everyone. Resting till vesting is a real thing though.
I have, in the last year, twice been hired then found myself way under-utilized because the company wasn't really ready to do anything with me, or the thing they hired me for fell through, or whatever. A few years ago I was brought on to a mid-sized business software company as part of an acquisition, and in the short time before I ran away was used at maybe 1/8 capacity in the most anti-productivity low-wall-cubicle open-floorplan office I've ever experienced.
Organizational/planning/managerial waste of expensive developer time is real and huge. I'd be surprised if companies the size of Google didn't do similar things some of the time, and if their management's a little more clueful than average they might even make such light-weight or non-assignments official and highly visible to make them easier to account for.
Replace Java with Go (not much of a change, all things considered!) and that's exactly what Google seems to be doing. It's a big problem for them in the long run because it does mean accruing a mass of technical debt that will not necessarily be easy to get rid of. You'd expect "smart" folks in a tech-oriented enterprise to do better than that, especially if they're unutilized otherwise, but it can't be easy to do that sort of management at Google scale.
Google's stock price would drop sharply if they went into maintenance mode right now. One of the main reasons they command the crazy high valuation they do today is because they remain on the cutting edge of the latest technology, which demonstrates an ability to adapt to the ever changing winds in their sector.
Google does not have a crazy high valuation. They trade at a forward PE of around 24 which is well within a normal valuation for a maturing growth company.
And what happens when the competition shows up? IBM, Oracle, VMWare, Cisco, RIM, ebay etc. were all where Google is now, and by the time they realized they couldn't compete any more it was too late. Google can only counter these threats by keeping the smartest people in the industry employed and happy.
They're not hiring these people because they need them, but because they want to avoid other companies from hiring them and doing something big and disruptive.
Wrong fit. You should always recognize who is your paymaster.
She would be better off as an independent activist, a face for other disgruntled employees who have to remain anonymous because they have responsibilities to family etc.
The early moment seemed to have support but it seemed to sort of fizzle later on... but the media attention remained making it really hard to get a feel for the real scope of these issues / how many google folks shared their views.
I've worked long enough to encounter management who would retaliate, and employees that once they find a cause are willing / do everything they can to die on it. I don't know if ANY of what happened at google is one or the other or both or none.
I thought this story had already been reported a month ago. But no, I was wrong, that was the other organizer of the Google Protests, Claire Stapleton:
So to clarify, both of the female Google employees who lead/organized the protests have now left because they say they faced retaliation. That looks very bad for Google.
On the other hand, if you're organizing a walkout, you're probably pretty fed up already. How far are you from quitting at that point? Probably not very. If you organize the walkout and nothing changes, even if there is zero retaliation, do you quit?
At a minimum, this probably indicates that there was not enough improvement, fast enough, at Google.
Note well: I am not saying that there was not retaliation. I am saying that this, by itself, does not prove retaliation.
I actually think organizing a walkout is something you do if you don't want to leave. I mean, if they were really just fed up, they could have just left like you said. I think these people (as a couple have said publicly) really did want to help change Google for the better because they love at least some parts of it.
I agree that they don't want to leave, that they want to fix it. And yet, they have to be dissatisfied with current conditions, or they would not have organized the walkout in the first place.
How dissatisfied? I'd guess pretty bad. Dissatisfied to the point that you're willing to do something that has some possibility of costing you your job. So they want to stay, and yet they're not that far from being fed up enough to leave. (Or so it seems to me, someone who is not at all in that situation...)
I mean, the honest truth is: They walked out, made clear demands. Google refused to enact all but one of them. If they stuck around, it wouldn't suggest they were very committed to their goals.
I guess my biggest surprise was that there wasn't a second, more severe "walkout" or "strike" after Google declined to respond adequately. The Walkout made news but it wasn't nearly a strong enough action to really say it was all they could do. Most of the people who walked out went right back to their desks after work and kept working.
I actually got on Liz's block list for suggesting that Google the company "wasn't worth saving", when Liz was still at Google organizing employee action to try and "fix" it.
I get the impression we'd agree on that point much more today than we did then.
>In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
>Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote.
There was separate protests that the ethics council was inappropriately scoped and those on the council not fit to be there. The protests Meredith was on was regarding the letting go with generous severance packages of employees found to have been sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources within Google for those victims of sexual harassment/assault.
There was protest involving the AI ethics council, but it was due to the inclusion of a homophobic and transphobic person on the board, not of the council itself.
> My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick.
I'm sure there is another side to this story. Nobody has an infinite amount of time or effort. If you're spending your time organizing protests rather than doing the job you're actually paid to do, you shouldn't be surprised that your coworkers and manager would be upset that they have to pick up the slack and try to replace you.
I worked at Google. My project was cancelled and I quickly found a new one. I didn't like it, and wanted to have the same 3-6 months to find a new project that everyone else on my old team had. After much back and forth with HR, I was told that I was sick and to go on medical leave.
When I got back I was on the performance improvement plan, told any attempt to transfer would be blocked, and so I just stopped showing up. Never heard from them again. (I was there for 6 years and my last performance review was "Superb". Probably not the type of person they want to drive away. But it was time.)
I don't really understand what the point of your anecdote is. You aren't entitled to switch teams after you've already chosen one just because you're a strong preformer. They understandably don't want some teams to be stacked and other teams to be understaffed. If you don't want to wait a year before you switch teams again, you can quit or get yourself fired, which you did.
The only trace I can find of that group/team/whatever is that she leads^Wled it. What does it do?
> in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
So side gigs need approval, and if there's a conflict of interest (such as: preventing your employer from building something that looks similar to your side gig) you'll be asked which side you're on. Sounds pretty normal to me.
"So side gigs need approval, and if there's a conflict of interest (such as: preventing your employer from building something that looks similar to your side gig) you'll be asked which side you're on. Sounds pretty normal to me."
The rhetoric in the article actually implies that this was an existing thing that only became a problem once she started protesting about google's generous severance package to an employee who was found to be sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources to the victims of sexual assault/harassment at the google workplace.
That's the thing about retaliation. Unless the retaliator is really bad at this, it is always going to look gray-area, because you're shading available policy to reach a desired outcome.
You want to do it that way precisely because it plays on some peoples' preconceptions, completely aside from not breaking black-letter law.
A lot of folks will see a enviable company, assume the Powers that Be must get most of it right, and assume the person they already knew was a troublemaker (they were contradicting their betters, weren't they?) was also bad at their job.
IANAL, but nothing I've read in sibling comments and other threads fits the legal definition of retaliation. Realigning priorities in a way that the employee doesn't like, sure, but not technically retaliation from a legal perspective.
EDIT: To clarify, Google's reaction isn't the disqualifier, it's that the employee's action of staging a political walkout isn't legally protected since it conflicts with contractual duties and isn't a typical case of utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing illegal activity. That type of channel is typically what's protected from retaliation. Not to mention working with someone accused of a crime isn't illegal. Association is a freedom and lobbying to change it is purely political.
It depends on which protections you're talking about (note: IANAL either). From what I can gather, it's true that the organizers may not be covered under laws protecting employees who report concerns internally or file EEOC or OSHA complaints. However, any activities related to collective bargaining (which may absolutely include organizing and participating in protests) are legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act, and would not be affected by "contractual duties" or "utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing."
Whether the organizers were covered by the NLRA is another matter; those with direct reports are likely excluded by the 'supervisors' exemption, which has been expanded over the years to cover pretty much anyone in a managerial role. For those who are covered, Google's actions could absolutely meet the legal definition of retaliation.
As an aside, the legal standards for what constitutes 'retaliation' are not the only ones that matter. They may manage to avoid a lawsuit, but they will suffer harm to their reputation regardless. I, for one, could not care less whether the law allows them to retaliate against the protest organizers. To me, this is just one in a long line of reasons why I scratched Google off my "short list" of potential employers.
> In an email to colleagues, Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
From the aforelinked Guardian article:
> In the letters, Stapleton said that two months after the walkout, she was demoted and “told to go on medical leave” despite not being sick. The demotion was reversed after she hired a lawyer, she said.
> Her day to day work is/was in the AI bias and ethics space, even within google.
Her manager apparently disagreed. I can easily imagine that the AI bias work could have been a 20% project which she spent way more than 20% time on, and now the manager decided that enough is enough.
Her manager told her to stop doing it which is why she quit, wasn't that the whole problem? Or wasn't it her manager who told her to stop doing AI ethics things on work time?
My source is the same document that the other poster mentioned.
When did you leave? Because you know, people switch jobs, and her role at Google at the time of leaving was leading the Open Research Institute, which you might imagine has nothing to do with drive.
But no I'm not going to share confidential information just because you don't believe me.
The "Open Research Institute" is a one-person affair that she created on her own. You can put anything you want in your job title in Moma, you know. That's why I was talking about everyone else in her ladder and team.
Before I left Google, I looked her up, and none of her ladder, none of her supervisors, none of the other reportees of her immediate supervisor etc. had anything to do with AI ethics. She was originally hired as a Program Manager on Google Docs. In this light, I view your statement as requiring some backing.
So provide some evidence. I could easily say I worked for XYZ and say the same thing you have.
I worked for the White House as Press Secretary and got an email from Trump drunkenly claiming he ran someone over.
I worked as senior advisor to the Shadow Health Secretary in 2020 and helped leak internal communiques covering numerous malpractice suites.
Blah blah blah. It's all words until you show evidence. It's hypocritical to demand evidence from someone else without showing your own. If you don't have any to show, then that's your problem, not theirs.
I'm not sure. You can't really be a full-time activist and a full-time employee of a tech company. Both women gained a national profile from the initial protests, it looks like they are attracted to activism, so I full expected them to leave the company and pursue activism full-time.
In the specific case of Meredith Whittaker, she's joining "AI Now Institute" a social policy institute affiliated with NYU.
It's bad to retaliate against workers who organize against sexual harassment and gender compensation disparity in the workplace. It looks bad because it is bad.
This is a separate issue now though. Just because something isn't completely proven (yet, anyway) doesn't mean that it doesn't already look bad from the outset.
And if you listen to what they're actually saying, they're alleging retaliation, not merely disagreeing with the direction the company is going on.
Protesting a lack of good general harassment handling shouldn't be considered trouble making behavior. The sexual harassment is trouble making and it was rewarded with hush money.
They are specifically being targeted for forcing google out of China according to the article. It was fine as long as they were merely targeting social issues within google.
Because they were forced out after they publicly called google out on their Chinese stance. They were facing no consequences when it was merely men they were chasing out of google.
The wheels grind slowly. You're expecting too much action too quickly. Also, "when it was merely men they were chasing out of google" is not remotely an accurate description of what the walkout was about. Do better.
> So as long as you have good intentions you should be free to bring whatever politics to work?
(IANAL.) Gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace are against the law in California. I believe the law also protects against retaliation for claims of violations of these things. This is hardly "bringing politics to work".
It's bringing politics to work if you aren't blowing the whistle on illegal behaviour.
These people, regardless of what they thought they were doing, weren't blowing the whistle on anything because they failed to highlight any illegal behaviour.
Remember that Google is the company that initiated a massive review of pay to try and uncover this supposedly widespread sexist underpaying of women. It discovered it was underpaying men and had to adjust men's pay upwards.
Likewise their big walkout was triggered by the fact that Andy Rubin was fired, but also paid money, after a woman he was in a consensual relationship with discovered he was cheating and made an (unverifiable) accusation against him. But this isn't Google tolerating sexual harassment in any legal sense of the term.
So what makes you think the law has anything to do with their protests?
If by "politics" you mean "not being harassed" or "paid the same for the same work", yes, yes you should be free to bring that to work. Every damn day.
Yes, if only there was some news story alleging that Google treated workers poorly after raising harassment concerns. Sounds like you want to see that!
From the actual article: ```She was one of six women who organized massive walkouts after reports that Google paid handsome sums to executives accused of sexual harassment.```
I have no idea why her reporting or not reporting these incidents is relevant. Also not sure why this the protest was 'generic'. Your comment comes off as dismissive without any substance. Please feel free to elaborate.
Because it doesn't make sense to protect anybody who mentions an incident of sexual harassment from being fired. Because then everybody would be protected from being fired, because everybody can tell a story of some incident they read in the news. Presumably the law is supposed to protect people who have been harassed and report it.
So...You shouldn't be able to protest something unless you personally experienced it? Like, if my buddy was sexually harassed, and I wanted to change the culture in my company to reduce the likelihood of this happening again, I shouldn't because I didn't have it happen to me? Your argument seems to be making a lot of assumptions that I don't share.
I can't speak specifically to this case, but yes, that happens all the damn time. Higher-ups are protected in harassment incidents and the victim is retaliated against.
You're composing a bit of a motte-and-bailey argument here. From your replies downthread, it seems clear that you have issues with the underlying concerns of the protests. But your opening bid for the argument is "politics don't belong in the workplace".
If you were up-front about this, you'd say "harassment and discrimination are political issues that shouldn't be organized around". Of course, that argument wouldn't carry well here. But it'd be more intellectually honest.
The fact you're conflating sexual harrassment (which is illegal almost everywhere) with an incredibly politicized concept as "equal compensation" (which even within one's own family there are wide disparities in outcomes, as even siblings from the same house can have widely different career outcomes, let alone in society) says everything...
I also don’t like being told I support sexual harassment because I don’t think highly politicized work environments (note I said work environment not society) are a healthy environment. That’s a dirty tactic.
Way to chop off my sentence at the perfect point for you to counter it, while ignoring the rest of the context it was said. I’ve edited it now so it won’t be.
Well, you edited it a bit now but my point is, you're either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what "equal compensation" is about. If it's the former, the linked page is a good place to start.
I could link you to plenty of politic hot topics that I care about. But I don’t see how that helps explain the role of highly politicized work environments.
Violence on the other hand also has no place in the work environment. Which is why harassment of all forms isn’t tolerated.
It's not a matter of 'hot topics' or 'politicization'. Workers demands for fair compensation in general have a long history and are a central part of the relationship between employer and employee. If you think the fact that siblings might experience different economic outcomes has anything to do with this, you've (most charitably interpreted) misunderstood the topic.
Wikipedia is not a authoritative source. When it work perfectly it is a proportional description of what third-party sources write in regard to a topic, and at worst it is biased opinion based on a few authors. With political topics the most commonly written opinion might not be the most scientifically correct one.
The main criticism of equal compensation is listed in the Wikipedia page in the first sentences under the title Criticism: the methodology by which the gap is measured.
For example, a common argument is that together with a pay gap there is a similar gap in worked hours, about 1hr on average for full time employees in the same workplace for the same job. Then people tend to dip into discussions about gender roles and bit by bit move the discussion further into the realm of politics.
Equal compensation is thus politics. Not because people disagree on the principle, nor because we don't have a data, but because people will disagree on the interpretation and then jump into political topics in order to support their interpretation.
No imperfection in the Wikipedia page supports either of the notions that systemic compensation issues are an inappropriate topic of workplace advocacy or that equal compensation has anything to do with economic outcomes for siblings (???). Both of these are in nigh non-sequitur territory.
When people say they want politics out of something, what they really mean is they want everyone else's politics out. My beliefs are common sense; your beliefs are partisan politics.
If your politics are encouraging or even accepting of sexual harassment and pay discrimination based on gender, then your 'politics' aren't worth acknowledging, honestly.
I just fixed a bug involving a typo in a regular expression. Do you think that was political? If so, I'd like to see how. If not, I'd like to know how to tell what is political apart from what is not political.
Organising protests takes management and leadership skill. Regardless of retaliation, multiple people, predominantly women, who publicly demonstrated this skill are opting not to put it to use at Google.
When competent people leave, it’s worth asking why and what further effect those departures might have.
Having a company culture where _everyone_ feels safe enough to speak up and being heard (instead of getting kicked out) is not democracy. It is smart and crucial, in my opinion.
I am surprised that critizing something at a company equals being a trouble maker to you.
This is an interesting contrast in behavioral ethics. That is, if you ignore the thoughts/emotions/etc and only look at actions. The scale and agency of one set of actions is not even comparable to the other.
Google is a stale big corp that has not innovated in a decade. Expecting it to listen to its workers, who are now a commodity, is at best naive.
Listening to dissenting voices only matters to small companies who will die if they make a mistake. Google could spend 20 years doing nothing but mistakes and it will still have money in the bank.
Given that your other posts are screeching about "stuck up women", perhaps one should surmise that your problem is not "democracy in the workplace." Which, while we're at it, is a misrepresentation of worker representation in company administration--a phenomenon that does work, as countries like Germany demonstrate.
At some level, it looks bad because of bad PR and the manner of how people report on it (clickbait or otherwise). At another level, we can fill the blank in various ways. "it personally looks bad to me because ____".
One way to fill the blank is to assume in good faith what the person is saying. And if you do, Google does look bad IMHO. Of course, I've seen people leave and badmouth companies when its their own fault for causing the situation. Its only people who are involved in the situation who can confirm all the specifics. As outsiders we can only assign some kind of probability here.
It looks bad in so much as there will be angry tweets for a while and maybe some Medium articles written. But it's not bad in the sense that it won't blow over, anything will change, or there will be any real punishment of anybody at Google over it.
Retaliation or not, if you are so publicly vocal about your employer what other path is there? In fact her activism is going to be more legitimate now that she is not getting paid by Google at the same time.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-th...
>In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
Imho it isn't relevant. The implication of OP is that the fact that they are female paints Google in a bad light, not that they were protest leaders.
Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it.
If a set of powerful men use the interests to said corporation to enrich themselves at the expense of women who are there, then it is definitely a sexism issue.
I appreciate the economic arguments you are hinting at, but they are not incompatible with the notion that sexism was at play. We know, factually, that executives Google broke the law and then we're paid large sums of money to leave.
You cannot easily disentangle these power dynamics. Nor should you, because corporations are just large groups of people with special legal permissions from the government. The idea that interpersonal conflict would go away and such an environment seems to contradict the facts and hand.
There is "sexism" on both sides. Powerful women use it against powerless men, and vice versa.
Ignoring one aspect over the other won't lead to lasting solutions. Since more men are leaders than women (men are naturally inclined to be leaders), the percentage of men enriching themselves at the expense of women is accordingly.
Google Protest has also been going on for many things that aren't related to gender, for example AI and their China project.
What precisely are you asking evidence for? I can't work it out.
are you asking for evidence that there was high profile examples of sexism at Google? That essentially went unpunished? That's all the matter public record.
Are you asking for evidence that the people who have been forced out helped organize the women's march?
Why is talking about how women are treated differently in the workplace somehow dividing narratives?
And saying corporations do not care about gender is just wrong. Because corporations protect people who harass women. I'm rather baffled by all of the outrage going on because the article mentioned the person was a woman.
I mean, they can be, but is there any reason to believe they are? Have male leaders of similar protests been treated better? Surely it's not right to infer gender bias just because the victims are women.
> I mean, they can be, but is there any reason to believe they are?
Yes, there is: women stepped forward.
> Have male leaders of similar protests been treated better?
Men either haven't experienced the same, or they are keeping their mouth shut.
In both scenarios, women should be supported. If men step forward, so should they. They didn't so far (or at least, not in large enough numbers for such a protest to be reported), so based on the data we have available to us, the problem affects women way more than it affects men.
I don’t really understand the response. Is your claim that, if something bad happens to a woman without simultaneously happening to a man, that automatically makes it a gender bias issue?
You do understand it, you just refuse to understand it.
But to answer your question, yes. If enough women were affected that they felt compelled to step out, and men didn't, that's clearly a gender bias issue.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've done that repeatedly in this thread, including crossing into personal attack. That helps nothing and only makes this place worse, regardless of how bad another comment is or how right you feel you are.
Yeah, it's almost as if I lived in that "but what about men's issues?" bullshit a few years previously. The only difference between us two is that I snapped out of it.
Here's an article[0] from October. Relevant quote:
> After publication of this article, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and Ms. Naughton wrote in an email to employees that the company had fired 48 people for sexual harassment over the last two years and that none of them received an exit package.
Unless you believe that 48 people were fired for sexually abusing the exact same woman, the problem is a bit more... shall we say widespread?
Google has over 100k employees or even more if you count temps. 24 per year means that around 0.024% gets fired for harassment per year which is extremely low, many cities have higher murder rate than that. So it is not a sign that there is a huge problem, on the contrary the number is so low that I'd suspect that they cover up a lot of things,
You don't understand Google culture if you think this line would fly with anyone there. Entitlement for full time employees is baked into the charter, along with transparency. That's a good thing and a bad thing, in different ways. It gave bad actors a lot of autonomy, but it also exposed them to scrutiny and pushback from good actors.
What's surprising is that now these reprisals are trying to push that back to make Google more like other normal companies and organizational structures.
> It gave bad actors a lot of autonomy, but it also exposed them to scrutiny and pushback from good actors.
So far, we've seen quite a bit of the former and very little of the latter. Google's work culture seems to have become politically divisive to a rather surprising extent - if this is what "entitlement" boils down to, surely a more "normal" structure (though I'd settle for just a marginal increase in professionalism, similar to what we see in other "grassroots-led" organizations) can't be all that bad!
The victories are small and recent. The exposure of executive sexism, The push back against military contractors, and the recent pride petitions are modest victories at best, and they've come with a heavy price.
Still, many other major tech companies lack a list at all, despite every indication of facing similar issues.
Everyone I know at Google hates these “protests” and can’t stand the entitlement. It sounds to me like they are a vocal minority.
This has nothing to do with transparency and speaking out against your employer. The issue is not that they have a voice, it’s how they choose to use it.
You seem to know weird subsets of people at different companies. If we weren't ostensibly in the same field, I wouldn't comment (because of course two random people on HN would know different people at Google). But we are, and the Google security people I talk to are more supportive of the protests; several are now on the job market because of it.
I feel pretty comfortable with how representative the people I talk to are of Google product security and vulnerability research, for whatever that's worth to you.
Yes, it’s definitely me that knows “weird subsets” of people, whatever that is supposed to mean. You’re immune to bubbles, and I am in one, right? Or is that a sneaky way of saying, “The people I know don’t think that, so I suspect you made that up”?
This is a silly thread, but for what it’s worth, I have not talked to anyone at Google in a security role about this issue.
I’ll be more blunt. I am highly skeptical that anyone in security there quit their job over the protests. But, I have no reason to doubt that your sample supports the protests.
Do keep in mind though that most people who don’t support them are keenly aware that going near any activism topic, especially at Google, is personal and professional jeopardy. Many people think they can’t even debate these things without running the risk of being on the receiving end of the scorched earth tactics employed by activists. And I’m not even talking about conservatives (of whom I know very few in tech, if any).
It’s not that they think it’s great that Rubin got dumptrucks of money, but the mentality is that if you take any issue with any of the demands or tactics, or the frequency with which they dominate the focus of employees trying to do their work, you’re suddenly a misogynistic transphobic racist enemy of the people.
The people I'm talking about aren't reserving their true feelings about the protests so as to avoid triggering the libs. They're DM'ing me unbidden about how unhappy they are with Google.
Unfortunately I cannot reveal real numbers to reveal the breakdown, but even a cursory modeling of this with Bayesian techniques suggests more than a tiny minority of people hold the sentiment in question.
You don't understand Google culture if you think this line would fly with anyone there. Entitlement for full time employees is baked into the charter, along with transparency.
This part of Google culture is long dead. It used to exist, but it doesn't anymore. There's no transparency anymore, and large factor of ending it was strategic leaks by employees, who hoped to achieved their goals by getting media attention. The entitlement is also gone in the era of cost-cutting by ruthless Ruth. The company you're thinking about entered senescence somewhere around 2012-2013 and died in 2015-2016.
And Google employees do the work that keeps the company going. There's no law that says that people can't refuse to do certain kinds of work. You take a job that you expect to give you work that you find acceptable and if that expectation is violated, you resist.
That would be senseless. Neither employees nor management would like that. Why do you think you should be able to tell them how to deal with each other?
Some people think the leaders of Google are entitled to unilaterally decide what people at Google work on, and if you resist that sense of entitlement, people call you entitled.
If you're the one paying for the work, you're entitled to say what the work will be. In this case 'you' is Google shareholders, through their representatives.
Nobody is entitled to be paid to do what they choose. If you want to do something for your own personal reasons, do it off the clock.
There's no good reason to think like this. If you're the one doing the work, you're entitled to say collectively with your fellow employees what it should be.
You are completely in your rights to get together with your fellow employees - or anyone else - to do anything you want.
And others are entitled not to pay you to do things they don't want you to do.
Nobody is forced to do things they don't want.
Nobody is forced to pay money to others.
But employment is an agreement between people. The employer agrees to pay, and the other agrees to follow directions of the employer (within the limits of their specific agreement).
If you go to a restaurant and order a burger, and they instead bring you a cake, you'd be well within your rights to refuse payment and complain. The fact that the chef wanted to make a cake is irrelevant, because the chef is being paid by you. (In contrast, if you were to go to friend's house, and he gave you a cake, you could not complain because you're not paying for it.)
The value created by employees rightfully belongs to employees and should be created on their terms. It isn't employees who are hired by managers, it's managers who are hired by employees to manage and sell the things they create. Employees ought to have the right to dictate the terms that their managers are being hired on.
If you want an equal relationship then go work for shares in a startup with no salary, however most workers favors certain money. Employment agreements as they look today fundamentally favors the employee over the employer, you are trading certain value "an exact amount of $$$ per month" for uncertain value "some unspecified amount work might get produced which maybe can get transformed to money in the future". If the uncertain value produced is too low then the company has no reason to continue betting on your future, so they end the agreement.
Each person has the right to dictate what economic arrangements they will participate in. This does not mean they have the right to dictate what arrangements other people will participate in.
Its a shame this submission might be flag killed as there continues to be important issues to discuss.
The main thing it seems to me is that if a worker is unhappy with their company and is so unhappy their protest (and organise a walk out) their employer its even more clear they are unhappy working there. The unhappiness or alienation will increase.
I might have got it wrong though .... did these protestors say they were happy working there and just unhappy with other things or people?
It seems like it's a wider issue that's common across all work places. What should be the best way for people happy working with their colleagues or team but concerned about other things with the organisation to continue their good working environment and share their views? Maybe it's just a HR thing.
>What should be the best way for people happy working with their colleagues or team but concerned about other things with the organisation to continue their good working environment and share their views? Maybe it's just a HR thing.
It's a corporate thing. Profits over ethics, laws, and people. That simple principle cannot be changed from the inside.
Do we have any real information regarding if this is as a result of retaliation? The article provides evidence that at least one of the organizers claim they're being retaliated against; do we know how widespread this may be?
Throw-away account. Personal opinion, and I don't want any shit from it.
These people do not represent the majority of googlers' views or experiences IMO. I am sure there are genuine grievances, but they're representing a tiny-but-vocal minority group that is bringing the company into disrepute over what I think are relatively run of the mill problems that happen everywhere.
For want of a better term, they strike me as "trouble makers". Re-orgs happen all the time in Google - it is quite common for people to arrive at work and discover that their job has been re-orged out of existence and they've got to find a new role for themselves within 60-90 days, or basically get sacked. If you were a manager with spare headcount and literally 100s of qualified applicants (internal and external) for that headcount on your team, would you take on someone who is a known agitator and does a lot of "off piste" work, is divisive, and generally ruffles feathers instead of getting their work done? Or pick one of the other brilliant & experienced people without a history of stirring up shit for social media outrage points?
Cute timing wrt Whittaker’s departure, considering Peter Thiel’s diatribe against Google just yesterday regarding Google’s involvement in proceedings with China. [1]
Meanwhile, Facebook assumes widespread immunity in ethical ontology within Thiel’s (goofy) narrative, all being quite selectively convenient given Thiel sits on FB’s board.
Both stories were initially broken by Bloomberg, which is also charmingly harmonic, temporally. Thiel likely pushed to collate onto Whittaker’s thunder is my (mere) immediate speculation.
Disclaimer: Worked as an engineer at Bloomberg 8+ years (now in academic scientific research), I doubt Bloomberg consciously coordinated the stories but anything’s possible, I suppose. (as mentioned, more likely the stories coordinated themselves in alignment to Bloomberg publication - if anything).
It stories like these that make me wonder, is it better to take an adversarial/external approach to change (like Meredith) or to work slowly inside an org and change it from the inside?
Of course the external/adversarial approach can generate huge changes quickly by relatively junior folks, but always comes at a huge cost and is not sustainable (see: most of the people who did these protests have left). So you get one shot, and worse, it sends a message to others that this behavior isn't tolerated. So in the long run, could even lead to worse outcomes overall.
On the other hand, the idea that you can change the system before it changes you...well we all know how that usually works out.
Change from inside has a very poor track record. People who say that are usually rationalizing their involvement. Even non-violent protests are adversarial. The history of the world seems to suggest that is the one tried and known method for change is adversarial confrontation. If you look at it from a game theory/economics point of view, there is little incentive for people to change unless you change the landscape and the factors that compel their behavior. Change from inside really doesn't have that because organizations/organisms/nature are resistant to change -- if it is working why risk it? Very few organizations have the ability to disrupt itself.
> Change from inside has a very poor track record.
Has it? Or is it just less visible because it happens over a decade or two? Germany's left wing and their March Through The Institutions comes to mind as a very successful change from inside.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Comments like this lead to train wrecks. Presumably the trains are shipping tires because after they wreck we get tire fires.
Correlation != causation. Could be that, because cities become tech hubs, and because cities tend to lean left, that anyone who wants to work in tech will move to a city and be influenced by the left-leaning culture. I've known people who were farther right, went into tech, moved to cities, and are now farther left.
Sure, but the effect is the same. A "right-wing Google" won't succeed because left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities, which are beneficial to the success of organizations like Google.
It is actually sort of surprising to me that cities are tech hubs - you should be able to deliver fantastic products while working remotely and never meeting anyone in person. (And the free software/open source movement is an existence proof of that.) So there must be something else about cities that makes them better at not just the success of tech companies but the success of groups of tech companies.
> left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities
Left-wing policies like urban exclusionary zoning? Yeah right. Look at how Texas and other Sunbelt states are doing, despite them being in inherently more challenging parts of the country than CA.
Texas cities are doing good in spite of the state's political culture, not because of it. All the cities except maybe DFW are in a constant struggle with the conservative state government.
Or maybe the intellectual capacity required to do well in tech also makes it more likely one would recognize instances of social injustice. It's just pattern matching after all.
Until recently Silicon Valley was very libertarian (and before that conservative due to high levels of defense contracting). It wasn't until ~2010 that things started becoming overtly left wing/democrat. I can't say that period has given us a lot of technological innovation compared to the previous period.
idk...their political opinions can deeply effect the product. At Intel or Microsoft for example it doesn't matter as much, what anyone's political views are. Their products can't start riots tomorrow morning.
Now ofcourse the corporate robots managing things are more interested in keeping the factory running than in anything else. So their natural instinct is to deny conservative/liberal fault lines.
But I think it will just increase the fault lines. We have conservative and liberal newspapers. There is a reason they bifurcated.
Search tech these days is really commoditized. Look at Elastic Search sure not as good as Google but it will do the job for most cases.
On top of that adding a conservative or liberal layer might actually benefit people. It feels more natural anyway. Now there is a lot of cognitive dissonance. Which is not going to go away.
Google is going to shoot itself in the foot over the long term with the type of decisions it has been making lately both against its users and against its employees.
I imagine that since the protests started they've already begun filtering out the people with a higher level of ethics in their interviews - but the new class of people they hire are not going to give them the same results in the long-term, especially if they are no the type of employees to question the addition or removal of a feature, etc, but just do as they are told. Google's current leaders are slowly but surely killing Google's spirit.
>Whittaker also publicly denounced some Google decisions, including the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative think tank leader, to an AI ethics board. Google soon nixed the board.
I wonder how much that contributed. No matter the personal political leanings of the employees, most companies try to stay on the good side of both sides of the political aisle. When the president of Heritage Foundation (which is about as close to establishment conservatism as possible) was opposed so vehemently, it really created a rift with conservatives and now there are Republican Senators who now are calling for Google to get reigned in. The business leadership can’t be too happy about that.
The fundamental problem of tech companies is that they need to keep two groups of people happy: whoever is in power, which is the bigoted right at the moment, and employees, who are generally not bigoted so on the American political spectrum are overwhelmingly left-wing.
This is an impossible task. My opinion is that Google should support its employees and deliberately position itself against the right. No matter how much ground you concede to them, they're going to act in bad faith anyway, so why listen to them at all?
We just asked you yesterday to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. We have to, because doing that destroys the curiosity this site exists for. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?
I want to understand this fully. You care more about me pointing out the obvious political context we live in than about the person downthread literally comparing being gay to pedophilia.
Will you, in your capacity as a moderator for one of the most influential forums on the internet, actively care about justice, or will you just protect the status quo? Pick a side.
(Keep in mind that Scott Alexander made the exact same mistake of trying to be neutral rather than choosing to be on the side of justice. Now his blog is overrun by fascist trolls. Hacker News is not far behind.)
Other people's violations of the site guidelines don't justify your breaking them as well. That's not only a non sequitur, it's a fatal one. If you see someplace we didn't intervene where we should have, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
We're not trying to be neutral in the sense you describe. I agree that it's impossible, that everything is ultimately political or at least connected to it by one or two hops, etc. But this is a hard problem with no easy answers—actually with no answers, so far as I can tell. I certainly don't have one. In particular, the answer you're offering is not an answer. Picking a side and banning the other side would explode this community. It isn't just people on the banned side who would oppose such an approach; most HN users on all sides would. The rift would kill the community. What good would that do?
Another reason is that political issues are more important than most of what appears on HN. Justice is more important than Rust. Does it follow that no website dedicated to less important things has a right to exist? I don't think so. I think it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, even though justice is more important than Rust. It's fine if you disagree, but then it would be good to make clear that that is what you disagree with. So far I don't think I've ever heard anyone come out and say so. But if you do agree that it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, I think I can argue confidently that the approach we take as moderators follows from that.
> most HN users on all sides would. Such a rift would kill the community. What good would that do?
Who are you excluding today with your actions? How do you know it would kill the community? I actually don't think so — the Rust community, thriving by any metric, has very strict codes of conduct. That's because the Rust community correctly optimizes for the safety of marginalized people over political diversity.
I know plenty of people that do not participate on HN today because of moderation that cares more about tone than content. Why not ban all the fascists and welcome those people? I promise that the sky won't fall.
Yes, I disagree with the premise that HN should be "dedicated to intellectual curiosity". This forum is way too important for that. For example, getting your side project on the front page of HN can have a large material impact on your life. Too many people are excluded from that today — they simply do not feel safe participating here.
You will necessarily make some groups of people feel unsafe and excluded. This is the basic truth about large communities. The question comes down to who you're going to care about: gay people or homophobes, for example. Immigrants or nativists. People affected by the structural injustices in the tech industry, or people that proudly support the same injustices. These are all mutually exclusive choices. Choose carefully.
The leaders? You're quite right, but maybe not the way you think. Trump said plenty of truly outrageous things, but he wasn't the one who generalized 50% of the population as "the basket of deplorables". Maybe Bernie is not overly bigoted, I'll give you that.
There's people who non-ironically believe that each of the above is no worse than any of the others and should be treated as such. Unless you take a live and let live approach that I have never met anyone in real life admit to you will want at least some of those criminalized.
Cool! Does she want a medal or something? I'm not sure why people feel like they should be rewarded by their own company for publicly going against them. Talk about entitlement.
In addition to being somewhat condescending, your language seems to imply that an employee is never justified in questioning their company.
For instance, you've said "why people feel" instead of "why this person felt." Additionally, you're broadly referring to "companies" and not just "Google."
Whether or not protesting was the correct course of action in this particular case, I'm not sure. But please don't broadly imply that all whistle-blowers are entitled reward-seekers.
I was amazed there was even a Resist@Google group within Google. I’m okay with people protesting the companies actions but Google seemed to be internally supporting protests on company time and property. Which has pitted employees against each other across political lines.
I don’t see why Google cant just keep it apolitical in the work environment while being open to critiques externally and not caring what their employees do politically in their spare time.
Because you're paid by Google...to work at Google? And other employees shouldn't have to be fed your politics constantly just because they have to show up at work every day just like you do.
Let's take a step back. When I work somewhere, my job is much larger than 'deliver code'. It includes (and will show up on my Review) things like 'team building' and 'contributing to a non-hostile work environment'. It is everybody's job to make sure that their workplace is non-hostile. This is the cultural version of 'see something? Say something'. If you are in a workplace that makes that impossible, or retaliates against people who agitate for improvement, then that is a real problem.
TBH, the real problem here is people's different views on the Overton window. I suspect that is why you are getting such vigorous blowback on these topics; your window isn't aligned with at least some of the people on this thread.
Employees sign non-moonlighting agreements that makes the employer own all their work related ideas. It would be a violation of contract to withhold those ideas.
It is naive to believe you can avoid politics working at one of the largest corporations on the globe. Isn't the Silicon Valley manifesto to "change the world"? What about that could possibly be apolitical? The effect of "doing your job in peace" is to delegate your political responsibility to the people above you.
Accept the responsibility of being an adult who participates in society.
I'd agree with you, if your employer wasn't spending literally the most money in tech on lobbying in DC. How much money has to be involved before it's ok for your job to get political?
An IBM subsidiary worked on software to tabulate census results in order to classify individuals by degree of Jewishness. Is it alright to godwin in order to directly answer an obvious question?
Hard to tell if your are intentionally or not ignoring the fact that code as a whole serves a specific purpose, and that purpose can itself be very political. Either way, this is an incredibly embarrassing response.
When people say they want politics out of something, what they really mean is they want everyone else's politics out. My beliefs are common sense; your beliefs are partisan politics.
Exactly. The act of working at Google _is_ now a political position itself. The amount of power Google has should be checked, and if internal employee's are able to curb some runaway unethical programs, it is in their best interest of humanity to do so. I personally couldn't imagine staying at a company that was knowingly harming society.
Is there a way to do interviews and promote only persons with unethical & immoral attributes to keep their business from running into issues like these repeatedly?
We've banned this account for serially posting corporate propaganda for Google, which you've been doing on HN for years. Since banning dozens of your accounts hasn't convinced you to stop, I'm going to post about this increasingly loudly until you do stop. You should think about the many Google employees on HN, who overwhelmingly use this site in good faith. They represent Google the right way, by participating honestly in threads and commenting about what they know. They will cringe when they hear what you are doing—which if you keep doing it, they will. The agenda you've been propagating is a way to hurt Google, not help it.
We ask HN users every day not to accuse others of astroturfing or shillage, but the other side of the contract is that when we find real evidence of it, we crack down.
Edit: I should add, for those who are worried about bias, that we have nothing against Google and are only interested in protecting HN against abuse. People do that for other companies too, not just Google, and we're just as against it in those cases.
Imagine someone at Boeing would have generated some negative news about the MAX... I would think that smart people would admire people that speak against bad things like sexual harassment(which is illegal AFAIK) but I seems that we have people here that would prefer not see the dark sports of their favorite company.
I was reading the Amazon protest thread and it seems that the capitalists/free market guys would be fine with sexual harassment too because free markets would fix it and you have the choice to resign, too bad some communist made it illegal /s
Every thread critical of tech now has cynical anti-media comments upvoted near the top, completely ignoring the substance of the article. Is that how afraid we have become of legitimate criticism?
I couldn't care less about google, but Bloomberg has a past of bullshit stories (like the china chip thing) and 3 articles in just 2 days rings the bell
Not even cynical, conspiratorial. Something's going around between a certain type of tech worker where all coverage of tech issues is framed as a conspiracy of old media against new media (as if new media doesn't own massive pieces of old media.)
I think it's to deal with the cognitive dissonance of working on things that are thought of by the majority of the public as bad, but without actually having to confront the specifics.
1. These people are rabble-rousers who will never be happy and are disrupting the work environment at Google.
2. These people are highlighting legitimate problems within the company and are trying to enact positive change.
Take your pick. But be aware of both narratives. And be aware that neither of them is unreasonable.