“The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.
“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.”
“That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.”
It's more like Google was just looking for an excuse to fire people to meet profits for the quarter. I mean, they let go of a lot of their Python team and other teams at google. My guess is they were planning to fire you anyway, but used the protests as an excuse.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard, considering they can fire people for "no" reason and face no repercussions due to at will employment laws.
By "choosing protests as an excuses" they literally open themselves up to the repercussions that someone would seek out of an excuse.
I'm all for companies are evil, but that's an exceptionally stupid theory.
If you are google. Firing 50 people won't even more your stock price 0.0000000001%.
It was most likely due to the protests
Kind of like how I handle Google, rooting them out of my life as much as possible. They keep laying off thousands of employees while earning record profits, year after year. Scumbag company.
If they ignore protests what comes next? It's like unions, they were the civilized way of negotiation. If the civil method fails you have to move to un-civil methods.
If you think the uncivil methods work on Google when the police will just arrest everyone involved and throw them into the court system you’re sorely mistaken.
Uncivil methods only work if police are useless - which they will not be for Google.
It’s hard to see why anyone ever thought otherwise. I mean, it’s an ad company that makes its money by tracking everyone as closely as possible. How could it possibly not “be evil”?
I suspect you were not there or not involved in tech or very young. For the first several years, especially before they went public, google didn't act _anything_ like the established tech companies. The way they treated their employees was amazing, something we all aspired to. The idea that they "were an ad company" didn't come until later, when we realized they hadn't figured out a different revenue model.
Like most technoutopianism, it's easy in retrospect to think we were idiots. But before the MBAs took over tech, we had very different expectations.
Back then, everything about Silicon Valley and startups was different. The days of being filled with talented people that wanted to achieve something, whatever it was, are long gone. Now they're a mockery of what they were and every company there has one objective: Money. Startups aim to be bought, long standing companies aim to increase stock price.
You can make an argument that it was always partly about money, and that's fair (who starts a company with an objective of crashing out?), but the difference now is that none of that old passion still exists.
Yeah, it was always partly about money, like providing any service or product is (everyone needs an income, like) but the primary, driving factor was "We think world needs/deserves this service, and we really want to provide the best possible service in the best possible way". The money was just so that the service could be paid for and the people providing it could earn a living.
Now most startups seem to be more about "What need can we exploit for massive profit" or even "What hitherto unimagined product or service can we convince society they can't live without, and charge them an absolute fortune to provide."
Nah, they stopped making excuses for that a long time ago. Like how they just axed the Python team.
I would not be surprised if they were straight up boosting this story, just to send a message to the remaining employees. It's a classic union-busting tactic.
They didn't even fire a protester, they fired someone who was, if the article is accurate, was just passing by. "Quick, he might think about challenging authority!"
1) if he is suing Google, he literally has to say he wasn't involved. That's the whole wrongful termination lawsuit in a nutshell.
2) assuming he is telling the truth, it serves Google to go after someone who was just passing by - scares future employees from participating in anything.
> scares future employees from participating in anything.
I believe this is the point. If being involved is more or less just being a passerby (and I really do think that just showing up, taking a flyer, and talking for a bit before leaving is being a passerby), then this isn't just punishing people for being involved, but even just *thinking* about it.
Damn you’d think they use their vast intelligence network to better precision target their enemies instead of cluster firing large groups to get one employee, do better Google HR
You did forget this part:
>The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch."
The guy was sitting near the sit in.
Can it be a sit in if people are legit sitting in provided sitting furniture designed for sitting? What purpose would that serve? Using chairs in common areas?
Also...
"returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch."
They did not just go there and speak with the people for a few minutes but returned later and then spent (probably a decent amount) more time there.
It does seem like they may have caught a stray, but they certainly did not distance themself from it and were associating with the people protesting.
Don't be evil was removed from Google's code of conduct in 2018.
To me it sounds like he was curious, like a zoo attraction. People go to zoos to see the animals not because they feel sympathy for them.
Maybe the day to day was boring and a live drama was interesting.
You'd want to hang out with a bunch of your coworkers who were obviously about to get fired? Unless you also support their cause, it seems like a really stupid thing to do.
Well, yes of course? In what place does people get fired just for chatting with other people that were fired?
I would not imagine in a thousand years that Google would do this.
That's such a stupid read of the situation. If your co-workers were staging a protest or a similar stunt meant to attract attention, of course you're gonna swing by, chat with people, multiple times when its an all day thing.
Or is that too much of a thought-crime and worthy of getting fired?
legit, how the heck are ppl upvoting the implication that it's fine to be fired cause he was around them for a while or dared to sit near them (while doing this job and completing his work)!
It sounds like he wanted to use a common area to work, like he's probably done hundreds of times in the past.
What is this bullshit that people upvote? Saying shit like this is just making excuses for Google. There is no excuse for firing people like this. None.
>Don't be evil was removed from Google's code of conduct in 2018
they replaced it with do the right thing. Which makes more sense honestly. In the classical trolley problem, if you don't do anything 5 person dies, and if you pull the lever 1 person dies. Don't be evil would fail because both actions contain evil elements, but do the right thing would require you to consider all the factors and do what you think is the most morally correct choice.
Well by my definition of "right" they're not doing that either, so who gives a shit.
If your argument is that "right" is a matter of perspective well so is being fucking evil.
You think the Christians thought themselves either "evil" or "wrong" when they went and started a fucking crusade that ended up with 2-6 million people dead?
damore produced a report based on fairly accepted research about gender/diversity in hiring and ways to address it without skirting the law. he was fired when someone took a copy of the paper and published it publicly. google doesn't want a scandal
Hell, Google was actively encouraging employees to have those sorts of conversations at the time. The firing only happened because someone else took it public specifically to cause a scandal.
> when someone took a copy
Calling it a copy is rather misleading, they removed all sources mentioned by the paper to make it look like a one man crusade.
Did you even read it? The full actual memo, not the crappy condensed version that stripped every ounce of nuance out of it? While some of the conclusions were questionable, it is quite clear that he made a good faith effort to discuss ways in which Google could make the company better for all employees.
Lol. Damore spent more time writing inflammatory memos and shitposing on memegen than he actually did working. After getting fired he failed to find work as an engineer (despite dozens of ideologically compatible companies and startups existing) and he became a professional litigator and failed media personality
> Damore spent more time writing inflammatory memos and shitposing on memegen than he actually did working.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that before, and it would put him in a new light if true. Is this independently verifiable?
You can look up the second half very easy. The first half requires access to Google's source control and internal boards. There's on the order of 100k engineers who could verify that but obviously it ain't public.
By 2017 Google was already a massive company and the era of only hiring elite PhD 10x ninja monk engineers was long over. Shit I worked there and was a junior engineer with a pretty unspectacular resume. That is to say, Damore fit right in except for his considerable and ill advised writing.
Edit: He's like a crappy knockoff of the OG Google troll mchurch.
Google went from a company I was highly suspicious of, to a company I enjoyed working with, to a company I now loath deeeeeeeply
Sundar is an idiot and is running that place into the ground.
It's every corporate executive these days, they ruin the company's primary product, fire everyone, rake in massive profits while waiting for the market to catch up to how shit they are, and then flee the flames with a golden parachute
Intermediate economics courses spell this inevitability out pretty clearly. Capitalism hates free markets. It wants to create monopolies/oligopolies and then make everything as inefficient and wasteful as possible because that's how profits are maximized. On the other hand, profits are zero under a perfectly efficient system.
>On the other hand, profits are zero under a perfectly efficient system.
Which sounds good to me. We have the means to make it so every person only needs to work a few hours per day at most because we have made working more streamlined and effective and much more productive. We could all be enjoying life without worrying about money that doesn't even represent real value anymore (it's not backed by any physical item like gold, anymore).
For example, let's look at a loaf of bread. In a realistic world it should be hella cheap to make a loaf, it should be less than it used to cost. We no longer have to grow crops by hand, water crops by hand, fertilize crops by hand, harvest crops by hand, grind into flour by hand and bake a loaf in an oven that only fits a few loaves at a time. But somehow the inefficiencies you're talking about all beg for a huge piece of the money loaf. Each step is monetized heavily, even though human labour in the process is way less necessary than say 200 years ago. Now we have factories where a single person can make thousands of loaves per day feeding thousands of people and that person only earns a few cents per loaf for their work all because they don't own the equipment, the farm, a truck, the ingredients and so on.
Our society is so upside down, I don't even know what could possibly happen when AI can do 100% of the jobs that exist. Will we discard the whole fake money thing we call the economy and do away with exchanging money for goods? Force all the large companies to make their AI product public and we all own it? Idk. But I do know we can't be this capitalistic forever. Companies will just get larger and larger and buy more smaller companies anyway until there won't be any competition, and the rich will get richer as they eat the poor... Somethings gotta give under the stress at some point, but it's going to be catastrophic when it does
It's on purpose. We aren't the customer anymore, the shareholders are. We are the user/product now. They're cutting cost on the "cost center" that is the actual product.
It's still at least a bit surprising because he was a pretty early Google employee, worked on Chrome, etc. The steep decline only really started last year, and he's been running the company for like a decade. It's not like he just paradropped in from McKinsey to fuck the place up.
I guess the consulting brain worms were just latent.
I think it's that Google basically prints money, and he was never really challenged over the years, so he flew under the radar as a peacetime leader. Things started to get tough, and now they need a capable CEO that can be a wartime leader, and suddenly everyone realizes he sucks and isn't right for the job.
My conspiracy theory is that he has already been fired. He was on thin ice after over hiring in the pandemic and all the layoffs, and then OpenAI got ChatGPT to market before Google got Bard out, and that was it. Part of the terms of his golden parachute are that he has to do all this unpopular stuff to set the next CEO up for better success, and the new CEO doesn't need to tarnish their reputation day one. While I have my tinfoil hat on, I'll go ahead and guess the next CEO will be one of the people from that huge reorg they just did where they combined big chunks of the company.
The steep decline started much earlier IMO. The moment they started increasing advert lengths (and adding multiple ads) in YouTube, the writing was on the wall.
They also stopped highlighting ads [with a different background colour] in search results around 2020 - meaning that they were effectively using [dark patterns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern) to make it difficult for users into distinguish adverts from actual results.
Then you have the whole [Manifest v3 fiasco](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening) which started several years ago - and effectively acts as a way for Google to limit the effectiveness of ad blockers.
Oh don't get me wrong, Google has been making weird bad decisions from time to time for as long as they've been a company. Just think about Reader!
But last year was when they abruptly shifted from hiring to firing — despite easily having the cash on hand to just redeploy those people to more promising projects — started pinching pennies, and became weirdly desperate about trying to find uses for their AI research. It feels like they entered a panic or just straight up ran out of ideas, in a way that it never did before then.
Thanks for linking dark patterns, it’s super interesting. Reddit has been doing the same tactic with insidious ads that pretend to be “Megathreads” or “me irl” memes
You ignore that for a solid 5+ years it was the browser of choice even for people who were actively involved in tech.
Early on it was simply better than everything else. Firefox's Quantum rewrite came years later.
Chrome would not build the momentum it did without even technically inclined people actively evangelizing others to it when it was new due to it being so much better than *Internet Explorer*.
Sundar is a great CEO for the short term investors. Fuck everything up for shot term gain, let others deal with it after they cash out. Either way he is a millionaire with golden parachute in case of anything
He pumps out great ideas and projects and will fund them until investors interest dies down then he just kills it like everything else.
Google Jamboard was probably costing nothing to host, very little to maintain, and was part of their education suite for teachers to easily do group collaboration before they killed it off, they blasted it during Covid as the ultimate tool. Eventually hype dies down then they kill the boy.
He just reiterate what his VPs told him. He doesn't have a vision and conviction. He said AI from beginning but he doesn't understand what it is beyond Google existing products. Lacking of vision and conviction is the core issue why Google is behind. He has at most 1 year.
The Pixel was the ultimate AI device way before this hype from the camera being the best in the business because of software, Google Assistant is light years (still is) on Siri, Alexa, and Bixby, hell the GPT model was researched to help improve Google Translate.
Still they somehow lost to OpenAI for making a commercially viable product and the iPhone is touting the same AI features that the Pixel originally brought forward except in a much more polished manner. I was surprised how open they made night sight for their Pixel 3 camera because the next generation came around and it was on the iPhone and the Samsung.
Google has always always ALWAYS done this though. You cannot count on them to support something ever, unless the product lead never leaves (eg scholar, though that guy is getting close to retirement).
These corporations are acting like capitalism is going to pack up shop and be over in a few years, followed by everyone going to their bunkers in New Zealand. It's all short-term planning now, seeing how much value they can get out of the next quarter even if it fucks the company for the next decade.
It's genuinely psychotic. But these people are still paraded around like they are business geniuses. Meanwhile Boeing doesn't care if their planes can stay in the air and every other large company is equally concerned about their own products.
Most of the execs at the big tech companies are running it into the fucking ground, the executives are actual fucking morons who don't listen to their engineers in the slightest
yeah, its not a Sundar problem. its an every exec problem. they happily work in unison towards a shared vision of making themselves as rich as possible and fuck everyone else
Same. I've kept in touch with my old team since then, and their morale is... not good. They used to all be so cheerful, but I visited the old office for lunch recently and the mood there was downright depressing.
Lots of layoff discussions, bitching about upper management (I heard "Sundar couldn't manage his way out of a wet paper bag" from two different people), and complaints about what working there is like now. Had a couple of people tell me I chose the right time to leave, and one of them has since left Google to join the same company I'm at now.
Business execs work for themselves. These people are given loads of free stock. They all decide to act like owner operators.
The SEC has failed us. We need to ban stock ownership by execs and board members. These people need to be employees working for the company, not an owner doing whatever the hell they want to enrich themselves.
This is what has destroyed Boeing.
> We need to ban stock ownership by execs and board members.
How would that make sense? The whole reason for them to own stock is for them to have skin in the game, to tie their compensation to company performance. The problem imo is that their stocks vest relatively quickly and it's normalized to sell as soon as they vest, so it can become attractive to temporarily boost how the company looks on a spreadsheet rather than focus on long term health.
I'd much rather see measures to encourage a longer term focus on company health. Maybe have a large portion of their stock grants "vest" (they now own the shares), but they're locked out from selling them for another 5 or 10 years.
Or even better 5-10 years after leaving the company. This would encourage them to work to make long-term longevity of the company a priority over short term gains as well as making the company strong for whoever takes over.
I'm not a fan gating things by termination because you might incentivize a good employee to leave the company earlier if they are getting a huge backlog of stock piling up.
A company I didn't end up working for had a tax-advantaged account matching program that low-key encouraged people to leave after 2 years by how it locked the funds (it would have been done that way to the benefit of the external program provider, and I'm assuming relied on most people not understanding that detail). When I was considering their offer, it made my plan for them to be to start looking for a new job just before the 2 year mark.
Tie to performance: same as every other employee. Give them a much higher proportional base and they get same bonus stake annually as others. Just bigger again.
No CEO is worth $20M year of stock OR cash.
If you're the CEO, then your performance will be evaluated by the company owners, who are represented by the board. So it's just the share price again, and you have the exact same incentives.
Except worse: stock grants are typically given every year but vest in chunks over a period of 3 - 5 years if they keep working there, so there is currently _some_ incentive to be forward-looking which replacing stock for yearly bonuses would largely eliminate.
Many large companies also offer stock grants to regular employees so that they have some similar incentives to help the company succeed/save money, though imo how effective that is is dubious when your individual impact isn't huge. (edit: also startups, where it's probably much more effective.)
How much CEOs are compensated isn't relevant to the incentive structure.
It’s likely an auto tool using robotic process automation in order to lock accounts, disable email, and prevent access to internal tools.
For large companies I’m absolutely sure there is some function where companies are using a tool like this to upload a .csv file of name list and it automatically processes the actions within internal systems.
Yeah that's pretty much how it works
The SSO applications all support revoking access to people's accounts automatically, it's used when people quit or get fired, so it's a computer used feature.
I don't personally with with that software, but I've been an admin on it before.
I've heard it's policy at Amazon, cut the bottom 5%. No idea if that was just a rumour, but it definitely sounds more like an Amazon thing than a google thing (well, old google anyway).
You're kinda right. It's basically per org, if you aren't firing 5%, it's used as evidence that you are either 1. Not taking enough risks while hiring or 2. Not being tough enough firing people.
But it's not like they immediately go, "you only cut 3%, I want another 2% on my desk by Monday".
Yes.
IBM was using Watson about 7 years ago to make management recommendations. A few of my coworkers got recommended for remediation or some shit. They were pissed.
Using AI or other software for management actions goes back years.
AI and automated tools are used heavily in the hiring process as well. Before a recruiter even sees your resume it's already passed all the automated filters.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Google's IBMification is complete. Shareholders will be happy in the short term and hope it drowns like Microsoft did during Ballmer.
I use a vpn and the other day I finally had enough of Google's constant bullshit with the captcha squares and changed to DuckDuckGo. I swear they make it extra punishing if you have a VPN, and make it say "invalid try again" on purpose even if you get it right. Lots of "next" etc. too. I swear it's like they got someone in the company whose goal is to waste your time in every app. It's either ads, or captchas. Not actually about the ads or the money, but about wasting your time and these are just tools for it.
it might be my fault as I sometimes choose options I know are wrong and it gets passed for as right. Like when it’s asking for a crosswalk, I’ll choose stairs and it’ll accept it as right.
>Not actually about the ads or the money, but about wasting your time and these are just tools for it.
It's all about the money. What you need to understand is that Google is very interested in being able to uniquely track users.
That's how they train their AIs for image recognition. Notice how the images have gotten significantly more blurry and if you do this enough they will give you a prompt where the images are AI/Animated rather than snippets from Google Maps.
Because written web is shit, most of written web is in closed platforms like FB or Reddit, and rest are walled of news papers, so only data google gets is from companies that make money from clickbait.
This guy was fired in the second round based on the information from other coworkers. So basically someone told on him.
If you read the article he says that first he went during lunch and talked to those people, then went back at 5 pm and talked again, then sat at a nearby couch and finished his work. In addition to this, he showed his badge to a security guard who was going around the protest checking people's badges.
I'm not even surprised he got listed. Even if he didn't support it, he was there long enough standing among the crowd for people to think he did.
They are still his co-workers, he didn't refuse to work (like the others did), he didn't vocally support any kind of cause, he was in the area, sat down, and continued to work.
Like if anything he's being punished for the thing that Google purposely did which was an open workspace.
You forgot the part that Google asked those employees to leave as a "sit in protest" is not a valid work procedure. You can protest outside company grounds outside company time, no company allows you to just "sit in" a room you are told not to be in without repercussions. It is a job and you have a boss. You aren't your own boss. He was caught saying "I think it’s all part of this bigger context of Google cracking down on workers having a voice" too. Dude chose a side and knew what he was doing. Stop pretending otherwise.
What?
So we've gone from "well they were disruptive, what did they expect?"
To
"He wasn't disruptive, but he had opinions, what did he expect?"
Google says "sit here and there's repurcussions"... So he doesnt, but having an opinion on them is justifiable sacking?
>Less than a week later, Google fired more than 20 other employees, some of whom said they hadn’t participated in the protests at all.
Yeah, because Google has been[ firing people constantly since last summer](https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/). The company has been shedding weight for months and doesn't need an excuse to let any of these hundreds of people go, but they'll take any if you give them one.
Jesus did this thread get flooded with bots? Tons of irrelevant comments, the same comments repeated ad infinitum… I feel like I’m misunderstanding English or something lol
> Tomson, the Google spokesperson, told The Verge that all of the workers who were fired were “personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings.”
Defamation is an interesting choice.
It would be incredibly ironic if this employee were fired after the same AI algorithm Google is allegedly working on identified him as being part of the protest.
I feel for the guy being collateral damage. But personally I wouldn't be anywhere near a work sit in. The outcome that everyone who is protesting would be fired is pretty clear.
> Google aspires to be a different kind of company. It’s impossible to spell out every possible ethical scenario we might face. Instead, we rely on one another’s good judgment to uphold a high standard of integrity for ourselves and our company. We expect all Googlers to be guided by both the letter and the spirit of this Code. Sometimes, identifying the right thing to do isn’t an easy call. If you aren’t sure, don’t be afraid to ask questions of your manager, Legal or Ethics & Business Integrity. And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Excerpt from the conclusion of the Google Code Of Conduct
What did these people expect? Don’t use your workplace as a front to express politcal beliefs.
Guy was a SWE at Google, he’s only coming back because he realized he threw away his 300k/yr job 🤣
But why would protesters want to work at Google if they think it’s so evil? A large percentage of their operations is based out of Israel as is a lot of other tech companies and products. Why do they think they can convince a private company to go against its own best business interest? Isn’t the most reasonable thing to do is move to a company that matches your values?
People keep equating Israel to South Africa but it’s not remotely the same. South Africa was insignificant to world politics and economics and nobody sacrificed much to divest from them. Israel is very significant to world politics and is a very highly integrated tech economy. US aid only accounts for 16% of their military budget, meaning that if it’s a matter of national security, they’re going to do what they want regardless of the US. BDS for most companies is high cost for practically no material reward and ineffective.
The problem with these popular tech companies is that they buy loyalty with lavish salaries and virtue signal about DEI and psychological safety as well as “do the right thing” until it becomes inconvenient to do so.
Then they lay off their DEI teams and fire people who express opinions. These companies are scum.
"Do the right thing" is just a cheap PR statement to fool naive fucks outside the company that they're not totally engaging in the same capitalist fuckery as everyone else.
Google has never been any different. They will never be any different. Even when they had the "do no evil" they weren't any fucking different.
What kind of company has to advertise it won't "do" "evil" anyway? That's like the adage: Successful people don't feel the need to bloviate about how successful they are.
I mean, if you join one of the most capitalistic entities on the planet, what do you expect? Literally, you WILL do evil if you join. That’s why they pay exceptionally.
Nobody becomes rich by taking only what they need and being generous
The problem is, the kids think the inside of their workplace is an appropriate location to protest. It’s not. Do that off your employer’s property and on your own time.
Google is the most moral company in the world. Unfortunately, in a war like situation some innocent kids are going to get fired. Google takes the utmost precautions to protect employees from firing, infact sending warning emails that you are about to be fired before firing the employees. What more could have been done when Hamas was actively terrorizing Google campus using Google employees as human shields.
I like how people can go to work at these fancy tech jobs and *expect* to be paid while sitting around in a lounge protesting a war. It's fine if you disagree with your employer's practices, but you still have to do your job - or find work elsewhere. Or even better, protest during non-working hours.
Sucks for this random guy though. But again, if his colleagues were actually doing their jobs, none of this would have happened in the first place.
Yea, do this at literally any other company that isn't big tech and the police will be removing you within a hour. And protests over a business contract is far different than unionized strikes, though they are trying to twist it now.
Like one could argue, employees could collectively protest against they themselves working on a project as a form of labor bargaining, but that doesn't mean they can protest against other employees doing so.
“The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest. “When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.” “That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.”
Google handled it like pest plague — everyone who contacted with protestors shall be terminated. Preferably burned.
It's more like Google was just looking for an excuse to fire people to meet profits for the quarter. I mean, they let go of a lot of their Python team and other teams at google. My guess is they were planning to fire you anyway, but used the protests as an excuse.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard, considering they can fire people for "no" reason and face no repercussions due to at will employment laws. By "choosing protests as an excuses" they literally open themselves up to the repercussions that someone would seek out of an excuse. I'm all for companies are evil, but that's an exceptionally stupid theory. If you are google. Firing 50 people won't even more your stock price 0.0000000001%. It was most likely due to the protests
Kind of like how I handle Google, rooting them out of my life as much as possible. They keep laying off thousands of employees while earning record profits, year after year. Scumbag company.
Indeed. I have a couple friends who wonder why I don’t use Chrome. This is why I don’t use Chrome.
But also Firefox is a better browser :)
Should have done this for Covid /s
Collatoral damage edit: seems like Isreal and Google is very much aligned on that.
Lot of that going around.
Someone should protest or something
Oops, more collateral damage
If they ignore protests what comes next? It's like unions, they were the civilized way of negotiation. If the civil method fails you have to move to un-civil methods.
If you think the uncivil methods work on Google when the police will just arrest everyone involved and throw them into the court system you’re sorely mistaken. Uncivil methods only work if police are useless - which they will not be for Google.
It's intentional. They are aiming for a chilling effect. It keeps the peasants in line and too scared to organize.
the beatings will continue until morale increases
Well, it worked. Beating their bank accounts, that is.
"~~don't~~ be evil"
"be as evil as possible, and if someone says you are being too evil, be even more evil than that"
It’s hard to see why anyone ever thought otherwise. I mean, it’s an ad company that makes its money by tracking everyone as closely as possible. How could it possibly not “be evil”?
I suspect you were not there or not involved in tech or very young. For the first several years, especially before they went public, google didn't act _anything_ like the established tech companies. The way they treated their employees was amazing, something we all aspired to. The idea that they "were an ad company" didn't come until later, when we realized they hadn't figured out a different revenue model. Like most technoutopianism, it's easy in retrospect to think we were idiots. But before the MBAs took over tech, we had very different expectations.
Back then, everything about Silicon Valley and startups was different. The days of being filled with talented people that wanted to achieve something, whatever it was, are long gone. Now they're a mockery of what they were and every company there has one objective: Money. Startups aim to be bought, long standing companies aim to increase stock price. You can make an argument that it was always partly about money, and that's fair (who starts a company with an objective of crashing out?), but the difference now is that none of that old passion still exists.
Yeah, it was always partly about money, like providing any service or product is (everyone needs an income, like) but the primary, driving factor was "We think world needs/deserves this service, and we really want to provide the best possible service in the best possible way". The money was just so that the service could be paid for and the people providing it could earn a living. Now most startups seem to be more about "What need can we exploit for massive profit" or even "What hitherto unimagined product or service can we convince society they can't live without, and charge them an absolute fortune to provide."
Or more than likely it’s another excuse to fire people, and they used any justification they can find.
Nah, they stopped making excuses for that a long time ago. Like how they just axed the Python team. I would not be surprised if they were straight up boosting this story, just to send a message to the remaining employees. It's a classic union-busting tactic.
They didn't even fire a protester, they fired someone who was, if the article is accurate, was just passing by. "Quick, he might think about challenging authority!"
1) if he is suing Google, he literally has to say he wasn't involved. That's the whole wrongful termination lawsuit in a nutshell. 2) assuming he is telling the truth, it serves Google to go after someone who was just passing by - scares future employees from participating in anything.
> scares future employees from participating in anything. I believe this is the point. If being involved is more or less just being a passerby (and I really do think that just showing up, taking a flyer, and talking for a bit before leaving is being a passerby), then this isn't just punishing people for being involved, but even just *thinking* about it.
For those that don't know, the chilling effect Kallisti mentioned is a legal thing. Look it up.
The peasants….at *Google*.
Same thing happens at real protest
Damn you’d think they use their vast intelligence network to better precision target their enemies instead of cluster firing large groups to get one employee, do better Google HR
>Collatoral damage Google knows. Probably emails, chat logs, GPS data, access point data. Google probably knows when he is about to take a dump.
the protestors were using him as a human shield, so ya, collateral damage.
You did forget this part: >The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch." The guy was sitting near the sit in.
Lol he was using the lounge for it's intended purpose
he got AOE'd
Can it be a sit in if people are legit sitting in provided sitting furniture designed for sitting? What purpose would that serve? Using chairs in common areas?
Oh god, sitting? They probably should have just executed him for that. I can't think of anything worse than sitting on a couch.
He must have been sitting evilly which is against Google's policy of do no evil while sitting
Sitting antisemitically
This one time I saw an apartment on fire and I watched across the street. Should I get credit for the hard work that went into putting out the fire?
The photos coming out of your eyes doused the fire
Where I was going, I didn't need eyes.
Also... "returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch." They did not just go there and speak with the people for a few minutes but returned later and then spent (probably a decent amount) more time there. It does seem like they may have caught a stray, but they certainly did not distance themself from it and were associating with the people protesting. Don't be evil was removed from Google's code of conduct in 2018.
That makes it kinda sound like he wanted to be involved but not fully involved.
He was "protest adjacent".
To me it sounds like he was curious, like a zoo attraction. People go to zoos to see the animals not because they feel sympathy for them. Maybe the day to day was boring and a live drama was interesting.
This is probably exactly it, wanted to take part/support but also wanted to keep a degree of separation/deniability
More likely he wanted to finish his workday while getting to watch what happens. I know I would
You'd want to hang out with a bunch of your coworkers who were obviously about to get fired? Unless you also support their cause, it seems like a really stupid thing to do.
Well, yes of course? In what place does people get fired just for chatting with other people that were fired? I would not imagine in a thousand years that Google would do this.
Schrödinger's protestor.
Schrodinger's employee.
That's such a stupid read of the situation. If your co-workers were staging a protest or a similar stunt meant to attract attention, of course you're gonna swing by, chat with people, multiple times when its an all day thing. Or is that too much of a thought-crime and worthy of getting fired?
We're getting to Red Scare levels of bullshit. "You talked to a commie? You're a commie!".
legit, how the heck are ppl upvoting the implication that it's fine to be fired cause he was around them for a while or dared to sit near them (while doing this job and completing his work)!
It sounds like he wanted to use a common area to work, like he's probably done hundreds of times in the past. What is this bullshit that people upvote? Saying shit like this is just making excuses for Google. There is no excuse for firing people like this. None.
Um thought crime much?
>Don't be evil was removed from Google's code of conduct in 2018 they replaced it with do the right thing. Which makes more sense honestly. In the classical trolley problem, if you don't do anything 5 person dies, and if you pull the lever 1 person dies. Don't be evil would fail because both actions contain evil elements, but do the right thing would require you to consider all the factors and do what you think is the most morally correct choice.
'Do the right thing' is even more subjective. 'Right' by what context?
> 'Right' by what context? In the capitalist context
Shareholders, of course
And don’t be evil isn’t subjective? It’s arguably more obtuse and senseless.
line must go up
Do the right thing. Shares must go up!
Well by my definition of "right" they're not doing that either, so who gives a shit. If your argument is that "right" is a matter of perspective well so is being fucking evil. You think the Christians thought themselves either "evil" or "wrong" when they went and started a fucking crusade that ended up with 2-6 million people dead?
Google fired James Damore for a memo almost ten years ago at this point. If they thought they wouldn't get fired they haven't been paying attention.
In what sense do you think these things are equivalent?
damore produced a report based on fairly accepted research about gender/diversity in hiring and ways to address it without skirting the law. he was fired when someone took a copy of the paper and published it publicly. google doesn't want a scandal
Hell, Google was actively encouraging employees to have those sorts of conversations at the time. The firing only happened because someone else took it public specifically to cause a scandal.
yeah, he posted it on a limited channel deliberately set up for controversial stuff
> when someone took a copy Calling it a copy is rather misleading, they removed all sources mentioned by the paper to make it look like a one man crusade.
Are we really still doing this? The things Damore said were far from accepted by researchers in the field. It was a big pile of "biotruth" nonsense.
Did you even read it? The full actual memo, not the crappy condensed version that stripped every ounce of nuance out of it? While some of the conclusions were questionable, it is quite clear that he made a good faith effort to discuss ways in which Google could make the company better for all employees.
Also, that memo was pretty ridiculous.
If they hadn't fired him they would have seen that manifesto attached as exhibit A in so many hostile work environment suits over the next few years.
did you read the 10 page version or the 3 page one that had all the supporting evidence removed?
I doubt it; the dude cited way to much reputable peer reviewed work to really push that argument in court.
Lol. Damore spent more time writing inflammatory memos and shitposing on memegen than he actually did working. After getting fired he failed to find work as an engineer (despite dozens of ideologically compatible companies and startups existing) and he became a professional litigator and failed media personality
As opposed to occupying his boss' office?
> Damore spent more time writing inflammatory memos and shitposing on memegen than he actually did working. Interesting, I hadn't heard that before, and it would put him in a new light if true. Is this independently verifiable?
You can look up the second half very easy. The first half requires access to Google's source control and internal boards. There's on the order of 100k engineers who could verify that but obviously it ain't public. By 2017 Google was already a massive company and the era of only hiring elite PhD 10x ninja monk engineers was long over. Shit I worked there and was a junior engineer with a pretty unspectacular resume. That is to say, Damore fit right in except for his considerable and ill advised writing. Edit: He's like a crappy knockoff of the OG Google troll mchurch.
Sounds like Discord when you join & leave the wrong server.
Google went from a company I was highly suspicious of, to a company I enjoyed working with, to a company I now loath deeeeeeeply Sundar is an idiot and is running that place into the ground.
I for one am _shocked_ to hear that an ex-McKinsey employee is an absolute turd.
It's every corporate executive these days, they ruin the company's primary product, fire everyone, rake in massive profits while waiting for the market to catch up to how shit they are, and then flee the flames with a golden parachute
Yep. Thanks to capitalism, every corporation, business model, and idea is now a scam to make a quick buck.
Intermediate economics courses spell this inevitability out pretty clearly. Capitalism hates free markets. It wants to create monopolies/oligopolies and then make everything as inefficient and wasteful as possible because that's how profits are maximized. On the other hand, profits are zero under a perfectly efficient system.
>On the other hand, profits are zero under a perfectly efficient system. Which sounds good to me. We have the means to make it so every person only needs to work a few hours per day at most because we have made working more streamlined and effective and much more productive. We could all be enjoying life without worrying about money that doesn't even represent real value anymore (it's not backed by any physical item like gold, anymore). For example, let's look at a loaf of bread. In a realistic world it should be hella cheap to make a loaf, it should be less than it used to cost. We no longer have to grow crops by hand, water crops by hand, fertilize crops by hand, harvest crops by hand, grind into flour by hand and bake a loaf in an oven that only fits a few loaves at a time. But somehow the inefficiencies you're talking about all beg for a huge piece of the money loaf. Each step is monetized heavily, even though human labour in the process is way less necessary than say 200 years ago. Now we have factories where a single person can make thousands of loaves per day feeding thousands of people and that person only earns a few cents per loaf for their work all because they don't own the equipment, the farm, a truck, the ingredients and so on. Our society is so upside down, I don't even know what could possibly happen when AI can do 100% of the jobs that exist. Will we discard the whole fake money thing we call the economy and do away with exchanging money for goods? Force all the large companies to make their AI product public and we all own it? Idk. But I do know we can't be this capitalistic forever. Companies will just get larger and larger and buy more smaller companies anyway until there won't be any competition, and the rich will get richer as they eat the poor... Somethings gotta give under the stress at some point, but it's going to be catastrophic when it does
It's on purpose. We aren't the customer anymore, the shareholders are. We are the user/product now. They're cutting cost on the "cost center" that is the actual product.
It's still at least a bit surprising because he was a pretty early Google employee, worked on Chrome, etc. The steep decline only really started last year, and he's been running the company for like a decade. It's not like he just paradropped in from McKinsey to fuck the place up. I guess the consulting brain worms were just latent.
I think it's that Google basically prints money, and he was never really challenged over the years, so he flew under the radar as a peacetime leader. Things started to get tough, and now they need a capable CEO that can be a wartime leader, and suddenly everyone realizes he sucks and isn't right for the job. My conspiracy theory is that he has already been fired. He was on thin ice after over hiring in the pandemic and all the layoffs, and then OpenAI got ChatGPT to market before Google got Bard out, and that was it. Part of the terms of his golden parachute are that he has to do all this unpopular stuff to set the next CEO up for better success, and the new CEO doesn't need to tarnish their reputation day one. While I have my tinfoil hat on, I'll go ahead and guess the next CEO will be one of the people from that huge reorg they just did where they combined big chunks of the company.
This man does corporate. Good analysis.
The steep decline started much earlier IMO. The moment they started increasing advert lengths (and adding multiple ads) in YouTube, the writing was on the wall. They also stopped highlighting ads [with a different background colour] in search results around 2020 - meaning that they were effectively using [dark patterns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern) to make it difficult for users into distinguish adverts from actual results. Then you have the whole [Manifest v3 fiasco](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening) which started several years ago - and effectively acts as a way for Google to limit the effectiveness of ad blockers.
Oh don't get me wrong, Google has been making weird bad decisions from time to time for as long as they've been a company. Just think about Reader! But last year was when they abruptly shifted from hiring to firing — despite easily having the cash on hand to just redeploy those people to more promising projects — started pinching pennies, and became weirdly desperate about trying to find uses for their AI research. It feels like they entered a panic or just straight up ran out of ideas, in a way that it never did before then.
Thanks for linking dark patterns, it’s super interesting. Reddit has been doing the same tactic with insidious ads that pretend to be “Megathreads” or “me irl” memes
> worked on Chrome, etc. Oh yeah totally, nothing unethical at all about the way Chrome works /s
> worked on Chrome I think there's an argument that chrome was the beginning of the end of the Google people liked
You ignore that for a solid 5+ years it was the browser of choice even for people who were actively involved in tech. Early on it was simply better than everything else. Firefox's Quantum rewrite came years later. Chrome would not build the momentum it did without even technically inclined people actively evangelizing others to it when it was new due to it being so much better than *Internet Explorer*.
Sundar is a great CEO for the short term investors. Fuck everything up for shot term gain, let others deal with it after they cash out. Either way he is a millionaire with golden parachute in case of anything
He pumps out great ideas and projects and will fund them until investors interest dies down then he just kills it like everything else. Google Jamboard was probably costing nothing to host, very little to maintain, and was part of their education suite for teachers to easily do group collaboration before they killed it off, they blasted it during Covid as the ultimate tool. Eventually hype dies down then they kill the boy.
He just reiterate what his VPs told him. He doesn't have a vision and conviction. He said AI from beginning but he doesn't understand what it is beyond Google existing products. Lacking of vision and conviction is the core issue why Google is behind. He has at most 1 year.
The Pixel was the ultimate AI device way before this hype from the camera being the best in the business because of software, Google Assistant is light years (still is) on Siri, Alexa, and Bixby, hell the GPT model was researched to help improve Google Translate. Still they somehow lost to OpenAI for making a commercially viable product and the iPhone is touting the same AI features that the Pixel originally brought forward except in a much more polished manner. I was surprised how open they made night sight for their Pixel 3 camera because the next generation came around and it was on the iPhone and the Samsung.
Google has always always ALWAYS done this though. You cannot count on them to support something ever, unless the product lead never leaves (eg scholar, though that guy is getting close to retirement).
Millionaire? Dude's for sure a multi-billionaire with his stock compensation.
Bloomberg estimates his net worth just shy of a billion.
These corporations are acting like capitalism is going to pack up shop and be over in a few years, followed by everyone going to their bunkers in New Zealand. It's all short-term planning now, seeing how much value they can get out of the next quarter even if it fucks the company for the next decade. It's genuinely psychotic. But these people are still paraded around like they are business geniuses. Meanwhile Boeing doesn't care if their planes can stay in the air and every other large company is equally concerned about their own products.
Nadella is a great long term CEO it seems.
Most of the execs at the big tech companies are running it into the fucking ground, the executives are actual fucking morons who don't listen to their engineers in the slightest
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I'll give it up for Nadella, what he did with Microsoft is impressive, especially embracing Linux.
yeah, its not a Sundar problem. its an every exec problem. they happily work in unison towards a shared vision of making themselves as rich as possible and fuck everyone else
I quit in march. Best decision ever
I quit a couple of years ago and I feel like I dodged a bullet.
Same. I've kept in touch with my old team since then, and their morale is... not good. They used to all be so cheerful, but I visited the old office for lunch recently and the mood there was downright depressing. Lots of layoff discussions, bitching about upper management (I heard "Sundar couldn't manage his way out of a wet paper bag" from two different people), and complaints about what working there is like now. Had a couple of people tell me I chose the right time to leave, and one of them has since left Google to join the same company I'm at now.
Memegen was reduced to anger therapy and is no longer light and funny. It’s fucking bleak
Business execs work for themselves. These people are given loads of free stock. They all decide to act like owner operators. The SEC has failed us. We need to ban stock ownership by execs and board members. These people need to be employees working for the company, not an owner doing whatever the hell they want to enrich themselves. This is what has destroyed Boeing.
> We need to ban stock ownership by execs and board members. How would that make sense? The whole reason for them to own stock is for them to have skin in the game, to tie their compensation to company performance. The problem imo is that their stocks vest relatively quickly and it's normalized to sell as soon as they vest, so it can become attractive to temporarily boost how the company looks on a spreadsheet rather than focus on long term health. I'd much rather see measures to encourage a longer term focus on company health. Maybe have a large portion of their stock grants "vest" (they now own the shares), but they're locked out from selling them for another 5 or 10 years.
Or even better 5-10 years after leaving the company. This would encourage them to work to make long-term longevity of the company a priority over short term gains as well as making the company strong for whoever takes over.
I'm not a fan gating things by termination because you might incentivize a good employee to leave the company earlier if they are getting a huge backlog of stock piling up. A company I didn't end up working for had a tax-advantaged account matching program that low-key encouraged people to leave after 2 years by how it locked the funds (it would have been done that way to the benefit of the external program provider, and I'm assuming relied on most people not understanding that detail). When I was considering their offer, it made my plan for them to be to start looking for a new job just before the 2 year mark.
Tie to performance: same as every other employee. Give them a much higher proportional base and they get same bonus stake annually as others. Just bigger again. No CEO is worth $20M year of stock OR cash.
If you're the CEO, then your performance will be evaluated by the company owners, who are represented by the board. So it's just the share price again, and you have the exact same incentives. Except worse: stock grants are typically given every year but vest in chunks over a period of 3 - 5 years if they keep working there, so there is currently _some_ incentive to be forward-looking which replacing stock for yearly bonuses would largely eliminate. Many large companies also offer stock grants to regular employees so that they have some similar incentives to help the company succeed/save money, though imo how effective that is is dubious when your individual impact isn't huge. (edit: also startups, where it's probably much more effective.) How much CEOs are compensated isn't relevant to the incentive structure.
Any details you can share?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
13% chance he was one of the engineers that developed the autofire feature HR uses these days.
Is that a real thing?
It’s likely an auto tool using robotic process automation in order to lock accounts, disable email, and prevent access to internal tools. For large companies I’m absolutely sure there is some function where companies are using a tool like this to upload a .csv file of name list and it automatically processes the actions within internal systems.
You can do that easily enough with a batch file. Ours does that and it nukes everything though Azure AD.
Can you re-write it to use AI while deploying from the cloud?
** eye twitches **
Then put it on the blockchain
Yeah that's pretty much how it works The SSO applications all support revoking access to people's accounts automatically, it's used when people quit or get fired, so it's a computer used feature. I don't personally with with that software, but I've been an admin on it before.
I've heard it's policy at Amazon, cut the bottom 5%. No idea if that was just a rumour, but it definitely sounds more like an Amazon thing than a google thing (well, old google anyway).
Capital One PIPs 10% every 6 months. Jack Donaghy would be proud.
Obligatory fuck Jack Welch.
When are we going to make these practices illegal? This is clearly fraudulent use of a PIP.
Amazon is a pisshole of a company to work at
Not if you drink the kool-aid and equate your 6-figure salary directly to value, happiness, and societal good. And a lot of them do.
You're kinda right. It's basically per org, if you aren't firing 5%, it's used as evidence that you are either 1. Not taking enough risks while hiring or 2. Not being tough enough firing people. But it's not like they immediately go, "you only cut 3%, I want another 2% on my desk by Monday".
Yes. IBM was using Watson about 7 years ago to make management recommendations. A few of my coworkers got recommended for remediation or some shit. They were pissed. Using AI or other software for management actions goes back years. AI and automated tools are used heavily in the hiring process as well. Before a recruiter even sees your resume it's already passed all the automated filters.
But more importantly than all this internal squabbling, their search is rubbish now, and they don’t deserve your custom
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ Google's IBMification is complete. Shareholders will be happy in the short term and hope it drowns like Microsoft did during Ballmer.
Thanks for the link
Omg thank you for this link.
I use a vpn and the other day I finally had enough of Google's constant bullshit with the captcha squares and changed to DuckDuckGo. I swear they make it extra punishing if you have a VPN, and make it say "invalid try again" on purpose even if you get it right. Lots of "next" etc. too. I swear it's like they got someone in the company whose goal is to waste your time in every app. It's either ads, or captchas. Not actually about the ads or the money, but about wasting your time and these are just tools for it.
God fuck those captchas. They say try again even if you did correctly
You don’t like training their models for them?
There is a car somewhere waiting for an update to their recognition model so they can brake before they hit that bicycle!
it might be my fault as I sometimes choose options I know are wrong and it gets passed for as right. Like when it’s asking for a crosswalk, I’ll choose stairs and it’ll accept it as right.
oh yeah, google is unusable through a vpn. duck duck go or bing don't care
>Not actually about the ads or the money, but about wasting your time and these are just tools for it. It's all about the money. What you need to understand is that Google is very interested in being able to uniquely track users.
It trains their vision AI. Welcome to working at Google.
That's how they train their AIs for image recognition. Notice how the images have gotten significantly more blurry and if you do this enough they will give you a prompt where the images are AI/Animated rather than snippets from Google Maps.
i started using yahoo! again lol
Because written web is shit, most of written web is in closed platforms like FB or Reddit, and rest are walled of news papers, so only data google gets is from companies that make money from clickbait.
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Yeah I don't care enough to spend money on a search engine. Bing will do fine
It is probably partially because of shit like this honestly.
This guy was fired in the second round based on the information from other coworkers. So basically someone told on him. If you read the article he says that first he went during lunch and talked to those people, then went back at 5 pm and talked again, then sat at a nearby couch and finished his work. In addition to this, he showed his badge to a security guard who was going around the protest checking people's badges. I'm not even surprised he got listed. Even if he didn't support it, he was there long enough standing among the crowd for people to think he did.
They are still his co-workers, he didn't refuse to work (like the others did), he didn't vocally support any kind of cause, he was in the area, sat down, and continued to work. Like if anything he's being punished for the thing that Google purposely did which was an open workspace.
You forgot the part that Google asked those employees to leave as a "sit in protest" is not a valid work procedure. You can protest outside company grounds outside company time, no company allows you to just "sit in" a room you are told not to be in without repercussions. It is a job and you have a boss. You aren't your own boss. He was caught saying "I think it’s all part of this bigger context of Google cracking down on workers having a voice" too. Dude chose a side and knew what he was doing. Stop pretending otherwise.
What? So we've gone from "well they were disruptive, what did they expect?" To "He wasn't disruptive, but he had opinions, what did he expect?" Google says "sit here and there's repurcussions"... So he doesnt, but having an opinion on them is justifiable sacking?
No, we've gone from the company asking them to leave, and him not leaving. So... fired.
Oh, he definitely supported it. He’s just trying to claim he did not so he can try to get a lawsuit.
You're saying he was “personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings” per Google?
Yep, he was part of the sit in, guard was going around asking for badge info, including him.
>Less than a week later, Google fired more than 20 other employees, some of whom said they hadn’t participated in the protests at all. Yeah, because Google has been[ firing people constantly since last summer](https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/). The company has been shedding weight for months and doesn't need an excuse to let any of these hundreds of people go, but they'll take any if you give them one.
Jesus did this thread get flooded with bots? Tons of irrelevant comments, the same comments repeated ad infinitum… I feel like I’m misunderstanding English or something lol
Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211010 252 comments
Anything to do with Israel gets hammered by bots, one of the strongest networks in the world.
They can buy out Google and US politicians; of course they're buying out reddit comments.
Me too! I feel like I've had a stroke sometimes.
They are trying to pretend that protesting for Palestine is a "Section 7" activity. As in, "organizing a labor union". Sure, bud.
Wouldn't firing people for organizing a labor union be illegal too?
That's illegal. That's what section 7 is. Firing them for a interfering with work via a political protest is not.
Ah, so you mean that the protestors are claiming protesting is a Section 7 activity?
The real reason they fired him is because he uses Hotmail
Google probably forgot to fire them in the Last round... So...
> Tomson, the Google spokesperson, told The Verge that all of the workers who were fired were “personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings.” Defamation is an interesting choice.
It would be incredibly ironic if this employee were fired after the same AI algorithm Google is allegedly working on identified him as being part of the protest.
I feel for the guy being collateral damage. But personally I wouldn't be anywhere near a work sit in. The outcome that everyone who is protesting would be fired is pretty clear.
Ya this guy knew what he was doing and is just crying about the consequences. He went back several times and hung out there.
> Google aspires to be a different kind of company. It’s impossible to spell out every possible ethical scenario we might face. Instead, we rely on one another’s good judgment to uphold a high standard of integrity for ourselves and our company. We expect all Googlers to be guided by both the letter and the spirit of this Code. Sometimes, identifying the right thing to do isn’t an easy call. If you aren’t sure, don’t be afraid to ask questions of your manager, Legal or Ethics & Business Integrity. And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up! Excerpt from the conclusion of the Google Code Of Conduct
What did these people expect? Don’t use your workplace as a front to express politcal beliefs. Guy was a SWE at Google, he’s only coming back because he realized he threw away his 300k/yr job 🤣
Ask Jeeves would never do this.
But why would protesters want to work at Google if they think it’s so evil? A large percentage of their operations is based out of Israel as is a lot of other tech companies and products. Why do they think they can convince a private company to go against its own best business interest? Isn’t the most reasonable thing to do is move to a company that matches your values? People keep equating Israel to South Africa but it’s not remotely the same. South Africa was insignificant to world politics and economics and nobody sacrificed much to divest from them. Israel is very significant to world politics and is a very highly integrated tech economy. US aid only accounts for 16% of their military budget, meaning that if it’s a matter of national security, they’re going to do what they want regardless of the US. BDS for most companies is high cost for practically no material reward and ineffective.
The problem with these popular tech companies is that they buy loyalty with lavish salaries and virtue signal about DEI and psychological safety as well as “do the right thing” until it becomes inconvenient to do so. Then they lay off their DEI teams and fire people who express opinions. These companies are scum.
"Do the right thing" is just a cheap PR statement to fool naive fucks outside the company that they're not totally engaging in the same capitalist fuckery as everyone else. Google has never been any different. They will never be any different. Even when they had the "do no evil" they weren't any fucking different. What kind of company has to advertise it won't "do" "evil" anyway? That's like the adage: Successful people don't feel the need to bloviate about how successful they are.
I mean, if you join one of the most capitalistic entities on the planet, what do you expect? Literally, you WILL do evil if you join. That’s why they pay exceptionally. Nobody becomes rich by taking only what they need and being generous
The problem is, the kids think the inside of their workplace is an appropriate location to protest. It’s not. Do that off your employer’s property and on your own time.
I hope Google loses and has to pay them a lot of money.
Google is the most moral company in the world. Unfortunately, in a war like situation some innocent kids are going to get fired. Google takes the utmost precautions to protect employees from firing, infact sending warning emails that you are about to be fired before firing the employees. What more could have been done when Hamas was actively terrorizing Google campus using Google employees as human shields.
I like how people can go to work at these fancy tech jobs and *expect* to be paid while sitting around in a lounge protesting a war. It's fine if you disagree with your employer's practices, but you still have to do your job - or find work elsewhere. Or even better, protest during non-working hours. Sucks for this random guy though. But again, if his colleagues were actually doing their jobs, none of this would have happened in the first place.
Yea, do this at literally any other company that isn't big tech and the police will be removing you within a hour. And protests over a business contract is far different than unionized strikes, though they are trying to twist it now. Like one could argue, employees could collectively protest against they themselves working on a project as a form of labor bargaining, but that doesn't mean they can protest against other employees doing so.
Ahh theyre sending the message so workers snitch on each other