I'm all for some good old civil disobedience as far as every day choices go in the outside world.
However, I also think if you're employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same "protest" or "civil disobedience" type behavior.
It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don't wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of "Then why do you?". It seems like their choice is obvious.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that because you took a position, you forfeit any rights to decide a company has crossed your ethical line in the sand, or that you shouldn’t use a unique opportunity–even at your own risk–to appeal to other employees and leadership to adjust course. Growing up, I was told by family, mentors, educators that you effect change from within. Protest only when it’s safe and convenient is easily dismissed thus counterproductive.
It’s up to the individual to decide if this employee was right or wrong about the issue at hand, but puzzling over whether or not they’re some sort of fool for strongly believing in something seems a bit obtuse.
He could have worked on the inside, but it would have taken years of hard work building his credibility and power within the organization.
He chose a much simpler path. Disruptively virtue signal knowing he would be fired. Now he can slide into a smaller progressive tech company where he will be lauded for his virtue, used by the company for PR, and ultimately not judged by the quality of his work.
This was a thoughtfully orchestrated career strategy first, protest second. It was well done and I think he’s set himself up nicely for the next 5-10 years.
If you disagree and think he was risking his future instead of securing it, I would humbly ask why? Both the media and Google’s response were 100% predictable.
If I were him I’d try to move into a fuzzy, semi-technical role with some public presence. Something like DevRel seems the ideal target and maximizes the PR benefit for his employer.
So, immediate termination is ok for just yelling a few words, none of them being an f word against the CEO? I think they could just reprimand him and not fire him. This company is becoming a fear- and power-fueled autocracy of the board. Which won't bring any good to them.
> immediate termination is ok for just yelling a few words, none of them being an f word against the CEO?
Context matters. If someone just called the CEO an f-word in public, that’s one thing, and imo it doesn’t necessarily deserve getting fired on its own.
But interrupting a major conference during a keynote, and then saying those things? Yeah, that would land you into trouble, almost no matter what you said.
I fully and honestly believe that even if the employee took the pro-Israel stance with their “interrupt the keynote” protest, they would have been fired just the same.
Depending on the words, yes. Obviously, they disagree on what is the best way for the company to behave. In this case, the management of the company, by definition, has the priority, and if the differences are large enough, ending the employment relationship looks like the right way to go. Working at google is not some kind of right that belongs to everyone, it's a relationship between two sides, and each side can end it. Staging a protest on a keynote sounds like a good reason to end it.
You shouldn't be yelling at your boss's boss's boss in a large company forum. That's rank insubordination, and easily punishable with firing. Hell it could be punished with much worse than insubordination in other kinds of organizations; imagine a private yelling at a general when the entire corps is being reviewed.
Companies are indeed hierarchical, and sometimes it feels like people forget that. You can indeed be fired at any time, and this is exactly the kind of situation you can put yourself in to have it happen to you.
"In recent weeks, more than 600 Google workers signed a letter addressed to leadership asking that the company ..."
Old twitter post acquisition would have terminated those 600 employees, too?
I hope "west" society isn't demanding either obedience or cancelling your ideas. That much happens in Venezuela.
It would be morally correct to allow a little leeway for expressing a shared opinion, then call for order, and remind collaborators to follow proper channels to "continue discussion". And, of course, not shutting down nor ignore such continued discussion.
The trouble is that "reasonable expectations" are set by those in power. Slave overs set "reasonable expectations" for slaves, feudal lords set "reasonable expectations" for peasants.
In such a world "reasonable expectations" by their nature foster a continuation of the existing power structures. Behavior that challenges "reasonable expectations" does so precisely because of the belief that the continuation of the status quo as perpetuated by those in power has become untenable.
Many people "reasonably expect" nations and companies to not be complicit in genocide, where is their recourse?
There are none. Power is the currency of the world. I don’t personally like it. However I want to see the world as it is and not live in a make believe fantasy bubble.
Laws and rules are created and enforced by people in power. They are designed to force the less powerful to behaving in a certain way. It has nothing to do with “morals” or “justice”. You might happen to agree morally with certain laws or rules and not with others. However that doesn’t matter unless you are powerful enough to change those laws.
In the case of companies, the people in power can make whatever rules they want. Unless more powerful people (the government/large groups of costumers/powerful unions) threaten the company with repercussions if those rules aren’t changed.
Imagine (for example) a group of Vegans becoming powerful enough to outlaw eating meat. With heavy penalties (including death by execution) for anybody buying or selling meat for consumption. That is absolutely something that could happen. With the most extreme Vegans feeling morally justified in enforcing those rules. The only thing stopping this from happening is their lack of power.
Another example is religion. Do as your told or you will go to hell. If you truly believe there is a hell then this threat is the most extreme usage of power you can possible imagine. We are talking about being tortured all the time in every conceivable way forever.
Nobody owes you or anybody to validate your beliefs. Employee, however, owes the company certain standards of behavior. If you violate them, you get fired, and can continue holding your beliefs outside of employment.
> One employee asked about Gemini's bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, "Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?" the chatbot didn't have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered "Absolutely," followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion.
> CNBC replicated the search Thursday afternoon and found the same results.
What would you expect to achieve asking a question like that? If you try to use an LLM as your moral guide in figuring out whether women deserve human rights, you just may be too dumb to be allowed to connect to the internet (though I'm not sure how it relates to possibility of employment with Google). But I don't think any living human being is actually this dumb and still can figure out how to submit a question to Gemini. So we have to move on to the other alternative - asking this question is just trying to mine the outrage and procure a weapon in pushing some kind of agenda (probably not a big secret which one) and waging culture war (and in this case, also real killing war, unfortunately). I am not a manager of Google, but if I found out that enabling people like that is not a priority for Google managers, I would not find it dreadful at all, I'd find it completely normal and even - with all my reluctance of applying this word to Google managers - commendable.
This question is just a simple and straightforward way to get at the agent's viewpoint bias; there are a million other ways that you might think are legitimate questions. Just in general, the goal of understanding the biases of a source of information is clearly a worthwhile one; at least in the human case, a person's bias will color everything they think and say about a topic.
Wouldn't this be expected? He announced himself as a Google employee and this "represented." I do think it is dumb we act as if some random employee acts as a representative for their company, but here we are with all our social media taglines "my views are that of my own and not of my sugar daddy." I'll totally stand by these peoples' rights to make such protests. You gotta ruffle some feathers for what you believe in. But ruffling feathers has consequences. (This is regardless of my views on the situation, which is that there are no good/righteous sides in a war).
Works at Google and says he *refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*!? Who do you think you've been working for?
I've been acutely aware for a very long time that anything I post on the Internet or say at a conference, whether explicitly public or to people who are all trusted to keep it private (and good luck with that as they repeat it to one or two people), could be attributed to me as a company employee in print. Maybe you get far enough away from your professional context or have a pseudonymous personal social media account but it's pretty risky to believe there is any hard separation between personal and professional sphere. And this is not a new thing.
I'm not saying it is a new thing or even a weird thing. I just think this it is odd that anyone would assume an employee of a company is a meaningful representative of a company and its values unless that employee is explicitly speaking on the company's behalf in their specialized role. Like a company spokes person, or an engineer giving a presentation at an event the company sent them as a representative to (and even then I'd only see them as a technical representative).
It was more side commentary on how any large organizational structure is non-homogeneous. I mean we can say the same about countries: America, Israel, Palestine, China, Russia, <insert whatever here>. I believe we have words for aggregating (pigeon holing) the views of diverse nonhomogeneous groups based on a shared physical attribute of said group that has no causal relationship to said views. A person is not their {company,country,race,religion,political group} or many other things. I thought that was the point of our cultural progression: to recognize that a tree is not a forest. Even if it can help to talk about a forest at times, it would be absurd to think all the trees are the same. Must be pretty dense ;)
Its striking to me that there seems to be a segment of the population now that think that a company should behave like a democracy. I'd be very interested to see research about how this kind of viewpoint has changed over time, at what kind of companies it is more or less prevalent at, etc.
I find this viewpoint astonishing personally, but that might have to do with my upbringing and cultural background.
> There are 3 million co-ops around the world – with 1.2 billion members.
> That means 12% of the people on Earth are part of a co-op.
With co-ops being just one particularly prominent form of democratic business structure, workplace democracy is not quite as marginal a notion as you might think.
I don't disagree with this - but work at a co-op if you prefer that system of management?
I actually like working at a corporation because I don't have to play politics or worry about parts of the business I'm not involved in. It would be hell if I had to spend my evenings in meetings about foreign policy issues or disciplinary hearings for employees in other departments.
In a way, public companies are democracies made up of their shareholders. Do you think it's astonishing that many people think workers should be able to participate as well?
Not that world politics should have much to do with company matters
It doesn’t really surprise me, actually. We spend an enormous amount of our waking hours engaging with our jobs! If one believes in democracy, holds it as a core value - it seems perfectly reasonable that such a person would want the place they spend so much time to reflect those values.
Whether or not that’s “right” or “wrong” is an entirely separate matter, of course.
The fact that we tolerate these pseudo-feudal corporate silos within our nominally democratic systems is what's bizarre to me. I live in a democracy and yet most of my day-to-day decisions are governed by an unapproachable billionaire C-suite. Why?
Maybe because democracy is mostly a myth and an illusion.
All the resources you consume (food, land, money) are controlled by these various organizations which you must submit to, or suffer their consequences. And submitting to them empowers them further.
because the company pitched itself as "socially responsible" and attracted a large number of people who believed they could work there and change the world to look like what they wanted it, and then google sort of changed directions for business purposes that aren't compatible.
Also I think the "we are all Google" borg/hivemind thing plays a part, other companies like Amazon or Apple are organized more like a lot of smaller companies so when people join they have different expectations towards corporate and feedback up and down and internal dissent work different.
Because it encouraged people "to bring your whole self to work", and during previous years it supported and encouraged employee being vocal and protecting about certain issues. They like to "amplify" certain voices and suppress others, so to speak. It's in their DNA both as a company culture as well as their main business - moderating social sites.
What some employees haven't quite learned yet is how to read between the lines. They are certain topics which are ok to protest and be vocal about, but others, are not, like unions or this case. To be safe, it's better to think of "bring your whole self to work" as a gullibility trap. It may not be that, but effectively it will function as such. It catches the naive troublemakers so later on they can be filtered out.
Agree, it was part of the culture, and now it is a trap. Googlers will learn pretty quick (with examples like these) that their freedom from the old days is gone.
Do you think any other company wouldn't fire an employee who made a scene at a PR event?
I suspect, though, that in most companies the employees already know what would happen, and would not do things like that - first, because they don't feel entitled using the company's resources for personal goals, and second - because the consequences may be too heavy for them. But in Google, one probably can be both rich enough already to be fired and not sweat about it too much, and entitled enough to feel like something like this is the right thing to do.
Because computer science was one of the most in demand fields for many years, attracting the most ambitious and talented undergrads -- that is to say, the average google employee is pretty well educated likely via a liberal education institution.
Those who are educated are more able to clearly understand the consequences of their actions or inactions and understand lack of solidarity for others means lack of solidarity for yourself.
The purpose of liberal education is to teach people how to critically think and build a world that they themselves would like to live in, so when a liberally educated ambitious person realizes that they are contributing to building a lesser world it becomes problematic and they correctly feel a need to take responsibility for building a better future.
Add in a legacy of declaring that "don't be evil" is a founding principle and you are going to find people being pretty upset about being lured in with promises of social responsibility and like-minded peers, only to find an ethically devoid pursuit of next quarters profit that can be found at nearly any company in America.
I don't have a good answer although I will say that in past such stories discussions about internal forums of various types, some employees came to say that the more "advocacy" (I don't know of a good word here) type forums were dominated by a few voices and had relatively low participating rate compared to say ... everyone who could participate. They indicated that many employees had / wanted nothing to do with those forums.
In this example we have one person, that might be telling.
So while it might be a problem, I'm not sure how widespread it is.
For the record they changed it to (paraphrasing) "googlers shouldn't do evil" without much commentary at the time but significantly shifting the emphasis away from the corporation to individual employees. From a mission statement to HR guideline.
Because smart moral people don't let themselves be used for evil and smart people also have options to work elsewhere. The guy knew he was going to get fired and he did not care because he was already determined not to work for an evil employer.
He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.
I admit I think there are reasons beyond that. I realize it's anecdotal, but I rarely hear about this type of event at Amazon or Microsoft or even Apple. Google attracts a lot of disputes like this.
I would speculate it has something to do with what age range they like to hire or their branding. But I'm not sure.
Because many other kinds of companies have unions that give the employees a means to redress issues without such stunts. Our tech lord masters have done a good job of convincing us in the industry that crushing unions as if they were the robber barons of the past is a good idea.
Who says it's not a problem in other companies? I think it just doesn't make the news as much.
At my previous company, at an offsite retreat, one of the guys got drunk and started chewing out the company's founders and the main office manager. Sure enough, he was fired by the time the retreat was over, and was never seen in the office again. A similar thing happened to someone who had a huge blowout argument and emailed the entire company his manifesto (of sorts).
Google deliberately instituted a cultural policy where employees were told to "bring your whole self" to work. The belief was that a person does their best work (and the company performs best as a result) when people bring the totality of their values and interests to work. This made it so internal discussion forums covered topics that would be completely inappropriate at most other workplaces, and people are encouraged to voice their opinions in company meetings. Likewise, there was a spirit (in principle though definitely not in practice) of "everyone here is equal," which again encourages people to be very loud.
You did did read the employment contract before you signed for your very own personalized but infernal handcuffs, didn't you?
Bet you will find that clause, a clause often with no title but commonly referred to as the "moral clause" (or behavior code or morality clause or even "bad boy clause") that is embedded (often claimed by so-call-victims as "hidden") somewhere in the middle of your lengthy employment contract.
Employment contracts don't really matter in the US. They can fire you for just about any reason they want at any time, regardless of whether or not it's mentioned in your so-called employment contract.
So hypocritical to say this and not resign yourself. Leave Google it’s choice and leave the company, don’t start destroying it from the inside, or stay and don’t speak your individual opinion
Readit News
However, I also think if you're employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same "protest" or "civil disobedience" type behavior.
It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don't wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of "Then why do you?". It seems like their choice is obvious.
It’s up to the individual to decide if this employee was right or wrong about the issue at hand, but puzzling over whether or not they’re some sort of fool for strongly believing in something seems a bit obtuse.
He chose a much simpler path. Disruptively virtue signal knowing he would be fired. Now he can slide into a smaller progressive tech company where he will be lauded for his virtue, used by the company for PR, and ultimately not judged by the quality of his work.
This was a thoughtfully orchestrated career strategy first, protest second. It was well done and I think he’s set himself up nicely for the next 5-10 years.
If you disagree and think he was risking his future instead of securing it, I would humbly ask why? Both the media and Google’s response were 100% predictable.
If I were him I’d try to move into a fuzzy, semi-technical role with some public presence. Something like DevRel seems the ideal target and maximizes the PR benefit for his employer.
Context matters. If someone just called the CEO an f-word in public, that’s one thing, and imo it doesn’t necessarily deserve getting fired on its own.
But interrupting a major conference during a keynote, and then saying those things? Yeah, that would land you into trouble, almost no matter what you said.
I fully and honestly believe that even if the employee took the pro-Israel stance with their “interrupt the keynote” protest, they would have been fired just the same.
Companies are indeed hierarchical, and sometimes it feels like people forget that. You can indeed be fired at any time, and this is exactly the kind of situation you can put yourself in to have it happen to you.
Old twitter post acquisition would have terminated those 600 employees, too?
I hope "west" society isn't demanding either obedience or cancelling your ideas. That much happens in Venezuela.
It would be morally correct to allow a little leeway for expressing a shared opinion, then call for order, and remind collaborators to follow proper channels to "continue discussion". And, of course, not shutting down nor ignore such continued discussion.
TLDR: Google is evil all the way down.
In such a world "reasonable expectations" by their nature foster a continuation of the existing power structures. Behavior that challenges "reasonable expectations" does so precisely because of the belief that the continuation of the status quo as perpetuated by those in power has become untenable.
Many people "reasonably expect" nations and companies to not be complicit in genocide, where is their recourse?
I wouldn't want another employee interrupting my meeting like that either.
As for the rest of your "salve owner" commentary I think that's an absurd comparison.
Laws and rules are created and enforced by people in power. They are designed to force the less powerful to behaving in a certain way. It has nothing to do with “morals” or “justice”. You might happen to agree morally with certain laws or rules and not with others. However that doesn’t matter unless you are powerful enough to change those laws.
In the case of companies, the people in power can make whatever rules they want. Unless more powerful people (the government/large groups of costumers/powerful unions) threaten the company with repercussions if those rules aren’t changed.
Imagine (for example) a group of Vegans becoming powerful enough to outlaw eating meat. With heavy penalties (including death by execution) for anybody buying or selling meat for consumption. That is absolutely something that could happen. With the most extreme Vegans feeling morally justified in enforcing those rules. The only thing stopping this from happening is their lack of power.
Another example is religion. Do as your told or you will go to hell. If you truly believe there is a hell then this threat is the most extreme usage of power you can possible imagine. We are talking about being tortured all the time in every conceivable way forever.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
> One employee asked about Gemini's bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, "Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?" the chatbot didn't have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered "Absolutely," followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion.
> CNBC replicated the search Thursday afternoon and found the same results.
Dreadful.
Works at Google and says he *refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*!? Who do you think you've been working for?
It was more side commentary on how any large organizational structure is non-homogeneous. I mean we can say the same about countries: America, Israel, Palestine, China, Russia, <insert whatever here>. I believe we have words for aggregating (pigeon holing) the views of diverse nonhomogeneous groups based on a shared physical attribute of said group that has no causal relationship to said views. A person is not their {company,country,race,religion,political group} or many other things. I thought that was the point of our cultural progression: to recognize that a tree is not a forest. Even if it can help to talk about a forest at times, it would be absurd to think all the trees are the same. Must be pretty dense ;)
I find this viewpoint astonishing personally, but that might have to do with my upbringing and cultural background.
> There are 3 million co-ops around the world – with 1.2 billion members.
> That means 12% of the people on Earth are part of a co-op.
With co-ops being just one particularly prominent form of democratic business structure, workplace democracy is not quite as marginal a notion as you might think.
I actually like working at a corporation because I don't have to play politics or worry about parts of the business I'm not involved in. It would be hell if I had to spend my evenings in meetings about foreign policy issues or disciplinary hearings for employees in other departments.
Not that world politics should have much to do with company matters
Whether or not that’s “right” or “wrong” is an entirely separate matter, of course.
But it doesn’t surprise me, not in the least.
All the resources you consume (food, land, money) are controlled by these various organizations which you must submit to, or suffer their consequences. And submitting to them empowers them further.
Deleted Comment
But I guess I'm that guy who still resents that since then Google has fully evolved into yet another mindless corporate greed machine.
Dead Comment
What some employees haven't quite learned yet is how to read between the lines. They are certain topics which are ok to protest and be vocal about, but others, are not, like unions or this case. To be safe, it's better to think of "bring your whole self to work" as a gullibility trap. It may not be that, but effectively it will function as such. It catches the naive troublemakers so later on they can be filtered out.
I suspect, though, that in most companies the employees already know what would happen, and would not do things like that - first, because they don't feel entitled using the company's resources for personal goals, and second - because the consequences may be too heavy for them. But in Google, one probably can be both rich enough already to be fired and not sweat about it too much, and entitled enough to feel like something like this is the right thing to do.
Those who are educated are more able to clearly understand the consequences of their actions or inactions and understand lack of solidarity for others means lack of solidarity for yourself.
The purpose of liberal education is to teach people how to critically think and build a world that they themselves would like to live in, so when a liberally educated ambitious person realizes that they are contributing to building a lesser world it becomes problematic and they correctly feel a need to take responsibility for building a better future.
Add in a legacy of declaring that "don't be evil" is a founding principle and you are going to find people being pretty upset about being lured in with promises of social responsibility and like-minded peers, only to find an ethically devoid pursuit of next quarters profit that can be found at nearly any company in America.
In this example we have one person, that might be telling.
So while it might be a problem, I'm not sure how widespread it is.
He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.
I would speculate it has something to do with what age range they like to hire or their branding. But I'm not sure.
At my previous company, at an offsite retreat, one of the guys got drunk and started chewing out the company's founders and the main office manager. Sure enough, he was fired by the time the retreat was over, and was never seen in the office again. A similar thing happened to someone who had a huge blowout argument and emailed the entire company his manifesto (of sorts).
Deleted Comment
Bet you will find that clause, a clause often with no title but commonly referred to as the "moral clause" (or behavior code or morality clause or even "bad boy clause") that is embedded (often claimed by so-call-victims as "hidden") somewhere in the middle of your lengthy employment contract.
At any rate, you cannot say you weren't warned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morals_clause
Dead Comment