291–300 of 442 posts
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.
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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?
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IANAL, but nothing I've read in sibling comments and other threads fits the legal definition of retaliation. Realigning priorities in a way that the employee doesn't like, sure, but not technically retaliation from a legal perspective. EDIT: To clarify, Google's reaction isn't the disqualifier, it's that the employee's action of staging a political walkout isn't legally protected since it conflicts with contractual d…
It depends on which protections you're talking about (note: IANAL either). From what I can gather, it's true that the organizers may not be covered under laws protecting employees who report concerns internally or file EEOC or OSHA complaints. However, any activities related to collective bargaining (which may absolutely include organizing and participating in protests) are legally protected under the National Labor…
I agree with your aside as well. Public Relations are always in play.
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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".
These people, regardless of what they thought they were doing, weren't blowing the whistle on anything because they failed to highlight any illegal behaviour.
Remember that Google is the company that initiated a massive review of pay to try and uncover this supposedly widespread sexist underpaying of women. It discovered it was underpaying men and had to adjust men's pay upwards.
Likewise their big walkout was triggered by the fact that Andy Rubin was fired, but also paid money, after a woman he was in a consensual relationship with discovered he was cheating and made an (unverifiable) accusation against him. But this isn't Google tolerating sexual harassment in any legal sense of the term.
So what makes you think the law has anything to do with their protests?
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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.
You cannot be "retaliated against" if you aren't engaging in revelations of illegal behaviour. These people were not doing the latter, when you look at the details. They were merely protesting against things they didn't like, but which aren't illegal, and in one case, didn't exist at all (Google underpaid men, not women).
If there's no illegal behaviour, there's no whistleblowing, and if there's no whistleblowing, then reducing "job opportunity" (which is of course not a right) is just ordinary corporate performance management in response to an employee behaving badly.
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> 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?
This is false and I'm not sure how you got here.
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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.
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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.
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> 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?