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Google Protest Leader Leaves

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Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#281

Post by username90 »

KirinDave wrote: post #188
joey_bob wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The two women who claimed retaliation were organizers of the women's march. The common thread between them is that they were organizers of that event. The claims of retaliation fell shortly after that.

> The two women who claimed retaliation were organizers of the women's march.

I don't really understand this, the people accused of retaliation against Claire Stapleton are women as well. Why would they retaliate?

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#282

Post by pessimizer »

mkoryak wrote: post #118
spamizbad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But your work is innately political.

what is political about this? for(const i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ... }

An IBM subsidiary worked on software to tabulate census results in order to classify individuals by degree of Jewishness. Is it alright to godwin in order to directly answer an obvious question?

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#283

Post by tomxor »

KirinDave wrote: post #276
repolfx wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But nothing Google has done in these cases is illegal. The protestors just didn't like it, so that shouldn't be protected actions.

This is untrue. You're not actually reading the salient facts. Radical reduction in job responsibility and opportunity IS retaliation.

> Radical reduction in job responsibility and opportunity IS retaliation.

Is that generally illegal in the US? if not then what specifically does the retaliation have to in response to to become illegal?

e.g I would expect negative retaliation in response to poor quality work or slacking off etc, and would expect it to be legal. This person's actions would be considered intentional bad PR, so what specifically about retaliating to it is illegal?

(Genuine question)

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#284

Post by CodeMage »

snvzz wrote: post #117
charliesharding wrote: post #47

I don't really understand why it's surprising to anyone that they would face "internal retaliation" after exposing their employer as evil and boycott worthy to the entire world. By publicizing it to the degree that they did and attaching their name to it, they were putting their interests over the company. If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the di…

This should be obvious to anyone, but people are for some reason having trouble understanding it. It's completely expected for a company to get rid of individuals on the payroll who are badmouthing the company they work for. Why would anyone willfully employ people to work against the company's interest?

I don't think people are having trouble understanding it. I would rather say some of us have a broader view of it.

It's the same old discussion about whether something is right just because it's legal or allowed. Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.

In my opinion, what Whittaker is doing is, in a way, analogous to civil disobedience. And, just like with civil disobedience, reprisals are expected. It's worth keeping in mind that those reprisals aren't automatically right by virtue of being expected, just as her actions aren't automatically right by virtue of being similar to civil disobedience.

In other words, some of us feel we can't afford to, as another commenter put it, "leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace". I believe this attitude -- that science and engineering should somehow remain orthogonal to and decoupled from ethics and morality -- to be downright pernicious to the society.

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#285

Post by jancsika »

wastedhours wrote: post #11
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Google works like crazy to hire all of the smartest and the best people, but do they really need them? Billions and billions in shareholder value could be extracted by hiring a bunch of mid-tier Java programmers and having them farm Ad Words for the next decade, until the first competition shows up.

> until the first competition shows up Their worry is that competition will be started by the people they've not hired and kept on the bench. I'd imagine a large amount of their top-level hiring is driven by taking minds off of the market, more than optimising their output.

Suppose Google hired person X to take their mind off the market.

How would person X discover this?

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#286

Post by PavlovsCat »

charliesharding wrote: post #47

I don't really understand why it's surprising to anyone that they would face "internal retaliation" after exposing their employer as evil and boycott worthy to the entire world. By publicizing it to the degree that they did and attaching their name to it, they were putting their interests over the company. If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the di…

The question how surprising something is is useless. Ask what makes a good person, not what makes a person a good predictor of the human potential to be rotten.

> If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize

Or maybe you'd stay, and maybe you'd retaliate against whistleblowers. There is no way to know, it's moot speculation. What we do know is that if the people who retaliated against the whistleblower had acted like you say you would have acted, they wouldn't have been around to retaliate.

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#287

Post by gizmo686 »

floren wrote: post #271
KirinDave wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fairly ridiculous to suggest that Fuchsia is not a real project. It wouldn't be the first OS Google has built.

What are the others? Android and ChromeOS are both built on the Linux kernel.

Not just Linux, but ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux (originally Ubuntu); which is to say, much of the userspace stack was pre-exsting as well. The core of the operating system is the Chrome web browser, which was also a pre-exsting project, which a relatively clear business interest to Google (influence over the web platform).

Android has a bit of a better claim, as more of the userspace stack was written for it. It also wasn't started by Google (although they bought Android Inc. years before it was released publicly).

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#288

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

damnyou wrote: post #88
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which is the bigoted right at the moment Ah yes, let's generalize ~50% of the country as bigots. That surely will lead to quality discussion.

The leaders certainly all are. Not saying anything about ordinary people. Why would you think I'm optimizing for quality of discussion? I'm optimizing for the material conditions of oppressed people, not some silly debate conducted on an online forum. It's more important to state the obvious truth than to soften it.

> Why would you think I'm optimizing for quality of discussion?

You should because the guidelines for HN politely request it, its users expect it, and its moderators firmly enforce it (and thank heavens for that).

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#289

Post by anonuser123456 »

r3bl wrote: post #273
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand the response. Is your claim that, if something bad happens to a woman without simultaneously happening to a man, that automatically makes it a gender bias issue?

You do understand it, you just refuse to understand it. But to answer your question, yes. If enough women were affected that they felt compelled to step out, and men didn't, that's clearly a gender bias issue.

>You do understand it, you just refuse to understand it.

I like how you believe to have superior knowledge of the internal workings of another person's thought process than said individual.

What a totally reasonable position to have.

Re: Google Protest Leader Leaves

#290

Post by KirinDave »

floren wrote: post #271
KirinDave wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fairly ridiculous to suggest that Fuchsia is not a real project. It wouldn't be the first OS Google has built.

What are the others? Android and ChromeOS are both built on the Linux kernel.

They're entirely alternative binary arches with a bunch of patches.

The idea it's just a Linux flavor is sort of like saying iOS is "just a build of OSX". I.e., gross simplification.

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