Earlier quoted context omitted.
But your work is innately political.
what is political about this? for(const i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ... }
Nothing, but we're not talking about contextless for-loops here, and you know that.
Google Protest Leader Leaves
161–170 of 442 posts
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this look bad for Google? Honest question.
It's bad to retaliate against workers who organize against sexual harassment and gender compensation disparity in the workplace. It looks bad because it is bad.
Sounds like getting rid of troublemakers who bite the hand that feeds them. If anything this will make googles stock price go up.
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Google gives them money in exchange for said work.
And Google employees do the work that keeps the company going. There's no law that says that people can't refuse to do certain kinds of work. You take a job that you expect to give you work that you find acceptable and if that expectation is violated, you resist.
s/resist/quit
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#164I don't really understand why it's surprising to anyone that they would face "internal retaliation" after exposing their employer as evil and boycott worthy to the entire world. By publicizing it to the degree that they did and attaching their name to it, they were putting their interests over the company. If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the di…
It's literally illegal. There are laws against retaliation against whistleblowers. That is why it is surprising. > I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them. Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a…
>Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.
The question is not why would you publicly protest actions of your employer. The question is why would you expect, or even want, to work there while you do.
Also, do whistleblower laws protect you from retaliation if what you're blowing the whistle on isn't illegal?
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's bad to retaliate against workers who organize against sexual harassment and gender compensation disparity in the workplace. It looks bad because it is bad.
So as long as you have good intentions you should be free to bring whatever politics to work? Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?
> So as long as you have good intentions you should be free to bring whatever politics to work?
(IANAL.) Gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace are against the law in California. I believe the law also protects against retaliation for claims of violations of these things. This is hardly "bringing politics to work".
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many great people are hired not necessarily to move Google forward, but so that they don’t move a Google-competitor forward.
This makes me think about something. I don't work at a FAANG company, nor have I ever been to SV, nor do I know anyone who works at one of the many enormous tech companies around SV. In the TV show Silicon Valley they have characters who sit around unassigned doing nothing at the Google-like company in the show. Does this actually happen? Are there people hired at these companies who just don't have a project? Its en…
I have, in the last year, twice been hired then found myself way under-utilized because the company wasn't really ready to do anything with me, or the thing they hired me for fell through, or whatever. A few years ago I was brought on to a mid-sized business software company as part of an acquisition, and in the short time before I ran away was used at maybe 1/8 capacity in the most anti-productivity low-wall-cubicle open-floorplan office I've ever experienced.
Organizational/planning/managerial waste of expensive developer time is real and huge. I'd be surprised if companies the size of Google didn't do similar things some of the time, and if their management's a little more clueful than average they might even make such light-weight or non-assignments official and highly visible to make them easier to account for.
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
From this article: > In an email to colleagues, Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally. From the aforelinked Guardian article: > In the letters, Stapleton said that two months after the walkout, she was demoted and “told to go on medical leave” despite not being sick. The demotion was reversed after she hired a lawyer, she said.
The manager feedback was posted in an internal mailing list. It said no such thing. manager asked her to focus on her day to day job. Her ai ethics work was not aligned to the job she was hired for.
Do you have proof of this?
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Correlation != causation. Could be that, because cities become tech hubs, and because cities tend to lean left, that anyone who wants to work in tech will move to a city and be influenced by the left-leaning culture. I've known people who were farther right, went into tech, moved to cities, and are now farther left.
Sure, but the effect is the same. A "right-wing Google" won't succeed because left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities, which are beneficial to the success of organizations like Google.
It is actually sort of surprising to me that cities are tech hubs - you should be able to deliver fantastic products while working remotely and never meeting anyone in person. (And the free software/open source movement is an existence proof of that.) So there must be something else about cities that makes them better at not just the success of tech companies but the success of groups of tech companies.
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people say they want politics out of something, what they really mean is they want everyone else's politics out. My beliefs are common sense; your beliefs are partisan politics.
If your politics are encouraging or even accepting of sexual harassment and pay discrimination based on gender, then your 'politics' aren't worth acknowledging, honestly.
The one you've responded to was clearly making fun of the one who dismissed the issues as "politics".
Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
They organized the woman's walkout, so it seems relevant to mention that they were women facing retaliation for protesting the treatment of women.
Imho it isn't relevant. The implication of OP is that the fact that they are female paints Google in a bad light, not that they were protest leaders. Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it. The Canadian Documentary "The Corporation" is a good example of how corporations behave: https://www.youtube.co…
Why is talking about how women are treated differently in the workplace somehow dividing narratives?
And saying corporations do not care about gender is just wrong. Because corporations protect people who harass women. I'm rather baffled by all of the outrage going on because the article mentioned the person was a woman.