This is likely the only segment of the labor market outside of executives that are highly valued by Corporations. Naturally, they have to be coddled and not abused like most of the rest of the American workforce.
I wouldn't be easily fooled. Companies try as hard as they can to turn engineering talent into a commodity, and they're relatively successful. The High-Tech Employee Antitrust suit is an example of this.
If you need to work for a living, employers will commodify your role to the best of their abilities.
Sure, but those are the competing forces at work, right?
Employees: get the most money for their labor.
Employers: get the labor for the least possible money.
It may not be ethical in your viewpoint, but those are the natural forces at play. It follows that employers will commodify my role as part of their strategy to pay me less. So I take other actions to make myself more valuable. As long as those actions are strictly technical (learning new technology, rather than management), I am quite happy to play this natural game driven entirely by reason.
Companies are vehicles for accumulated wealth and power for the ownership class.
Labor, on the other hand, has very few vehicles to accumulate their wealth and power. In fact one such vehicle, the union, is often legally neutered such that private contracts made between unions and employers can be nullified in favor of the ownership class (see: right-to-work laws and union security agreements).
There's an inherent asymmetry of power between labor and the ownership class enshrined in both law and contemporary markets. We live in a nation started by the wealthy merchant class, for the wealthy merchant class, and it shows in our labor history.
So, yes, there are competing forces that are very unequal. You as an individual engineer will have little clout against, say, an industry-wide anti-poaching agreement like we saw in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust case.
They could just quit then organize together and form a competing company with stronger ethics. Would be good to see this happen to a lot of near monopolies.
Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council appeared like the closest thing to fascism in the USA that I have ever witnessed. I hope some people see the need for diversity of viewpoint and start to be more accepting of their fellow countrymen, while agreeing on what to condemn.
I may not agree with her politically, but its important to have different viewpoints in discourse as long as they're rooted in principles. I think its shameful that the AI Ethics Council was disbanded, if employees took issue with her it would have been nice to see them suggest an alternative.
Having bigoted values and using them for social control is a familiar scene in America for its entire history. The natural progression of pro-business is to use regulatory capture to create an artificial monopoly—competition brings down profits. All we really need to add to this is a one party system to form a true fascist state: something republicans could conceivably achieve given their control of the senate.
The democratic party, on the other hand, is showing a clear schism between pro-corporate and an pro-labor wings. It is trivial to imagine a split into two parties. The republicans have no future without the social control our president demonstrated in his run and term.
If anything, putting a bigoted republican on the AI ethics committee is leaning into a future where Alphabet would benefit from a fascist state.
> its important to have different viewpoints in discourse as long as they're rooted in principles.
OK, so besides James', which other viewpoints rooted in principles were represented on the council? Did Google assemble a panel of balanced viewpoints?
>How can Google now expect conservatives to defend it against anti-business policies from the left that might threaten its very existence?
Looks like she's petty about it and threatens to punish Google for political reasons, confirming the appointment was for political goodwill rather than about doing the job.
Meredith Whittaker and company could not find peace in their hearts with the appointment of (the president of the long standing, prominent conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation) Kay Cole James. So they made a big problem about it, and here we are. Tolerance, for my views but not yours.
Tolerance and freedom are empowering. Those societal attributes tend to create more creative and productive societies all across history, going as far back as ancient times.
The "paradox of tolerance" in 2019 is used as a word game for one group to justify their intolerance of another group they do not like.
> Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council appeared like the closest thing to fascism in the USA that I have ever witnessed.
Other than that either your witness to even recent, well-publicized events is quite spotty or your understanding of fascism is quite broken, I'm not sure what one is supposed to take from this statement.
* dictatorial power
* totalitarian one party state
* embrace of political violence as a means to silence opposition
* strong opposition to Marxism, liberalism, conservatism
* radical nationalism
* nationalist economic policy through protectionist schemes
What about a group of employees collectively organizing and protesting non-violently against an internal board at a privatized company is exactly fascist?
It is possibly some groundwork being laid for the argument that the term 'fascism' has been overused so much by 'the left' that it no longer means anything. Should other lines of argument fail, this one can be mobilized as a distraction, giving time to regroup.
Well it never had a strict definition once it stopped just applying to the Italian fascist party. In the 30s or 40s it's usage by non-fascists morphed into a subjective umbrella term based on a loose collection of similarities with other groups.
eg for the Nazis, "Fascist" still meant the Italian party despite their own party having quite a large overlap in philosophy. Every political movement seems to care more about internal differences far more than outsiders do (see People's Front of Judea).
It was always hard to pin down and never really ever had a strict definition - just an incomplete collection of possible tendencies (see the Wikipedia article above).
"Fascism" is used today to refer to "bad thing I don't like".
It's a mistake to interpret diction literally. Yes, it would be lovely if people used the word "fascism" to refer to right-wing, ultra-nationalist, authoritarian political movements. But that's not how people use words and the ship has long since sailed on that particular word. According to George Orwell "fascism" has a been a synonym for "bully" since 1944 - http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Ok, I guess I am out of the loop on the meaning of fascism. However, even if I substitute the word "bullying" the statement doesn't make sense to me:
"Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council appeared like the closest thing to bullying in the USA that I have ever witnessed"
I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I genuinely don't understand what the OP is trying to stay in that statement. Is he saying Google employee's protesting of the AI board is the worst example of bullying they have seen?
Sorry I left for a few minutes. I don’t agree with Kay Cole James on any issue socially. My read on the situation though is that, by not recommending a viable alternative. I read that as Googlers saying they are not open to have conservative viewpoints on the council, hence them disbanding. That forcible suppression of an opposition viewpoint instead of coming to the table together to debate differences when crafting policy, I see as having elements of Fascism.
That forcible suppression of an opposition viewpoint instead of coming to the table together to debate differences when crafting policy, I see as having elements of Fascism.
> That forcible suppression of an opposition viewpoint instead of coming to the table together to debate differences when crafting policy, I see as having elements of Fascism.
Do you see Orwell literally taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War against his ideological opponents instead of debating them—especially when he wasn't even Spanish himself—as having elements of fascism, too?
Orwell fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and found his side being called fascist by the Stalinists. I suspect he was more hoping to return the word to meaning something (he quite passionately cared about fighting fascism) than encouraging its misuse.
Much of that time shaped George Orwell's later writings. All of the weird, anti-truth tendencies of The State were references to things done by Franco's Spain, the UK, and the Stalinists. The erasure and rewriting of the past. The use of blatant propaganda. Getting their own ranks to deny the simple truth before them. To George Orwell, the Fascists, the Stalinists, and the corrupt and Machiavellian parts of the British government were all part and parcel of the same evil and corruption.
* dictatorial power
* totalitarian one party state
* embrace of political violence as a means to silence opposition
* strong opposition to Marxism, liberalism, conservatism
* radical nationalism
* nationalist economic policy through protectionist schemes
Funny, but if you just erase the word "Marxism" then you also have something which resembles the Soviet Union under Stalin. It also fits a lot of historical communist regimes, though the nationalism is disguised or submerged as "worker solidarity." However in times of war or crisis, they generally bang the nationalist drum as hard as anyone else. A "nationalist economic policy through protectionist schemes" is just meddling against markets and central planning by another name.
National Socialism and Fascism are identified as "right," but this is primarily through the application of nationalism, conquest, and opposition to communism. Look under those fig leafs, and you find something very different.
National Socialism and Fascists consistently implemented socialist policies. Under National Socialism, control by the state was so complete, the private ownership meant nothing. Property owners were called Betriebsfurhrer -- basically shop managers enacting state policy. What was made, who it was sold to, how much was charged, and how much the workers were paid were largely determined by the government. National Socialism was strongly against liberal democracy. (Liberalism in the 19th century Classical Liberal sense, which in 2019 is labeled "conservatism" in the US.) They were also openly against free markets, multi-party democratic government, freedom of speech, and other individual human rights. Mussolini started out as a Socialist, and at one point, he literally styled himself, "The Lenin of Italy." Also, many of the essentially socialist policies of National Socialist Germany in the 1930's garnered praise from American progressives.
What about a group of employees collectively organizing and protesting non-violently against an internal board at a privatized company is exactly fascist?
The collectivism is a shared attribute of Fascism. Also, as observed in a different comment, if they are suppressing dissent and speech in their own ranks and using pressure tactics to keep their own ranks in line, then this is another shared attribute.
> Under National Socialism, control by the state was so complete, the private ownership meant nothing.
Sure, state control is a hallmark of fascism/totalitarianism. However, the USSR did not have a socialist mode of production essentially because of the lack of worker control of the state (and therefor the means of production).
I would argue that if the state owns the means of production, then the state must necessariy have some kind form of democratic control by the citizens in order to be considered socialist. The USSR may have had this very early on, but as Stalin rose to power it slipped away and became what is known as state capialism.
There needs to be a distinction between a "socialist country" (as in, a country with a socialist mode of production where the workers control the means of production) and "country rules by socialists" (USSR, China, Cuba, etc) where the means of production is centrally controlled by a government not representative of the population.
As far as I'm concerned, no socialist countries have ever existed for more than a handful of years.
In other words, Marxism, at its core, is at odds with fascism in a fundamental way, and Marxist-Leninists (and by extension Stalinists and Maoists) are fundamentally at odds with Marxism.
I think you can draw a parallel between "people who think they support Marxism" and fascism, but drawing a parallel between Marxism and fascism is a stretch.
You could just go to AskHistorians and get an actual, not- made- up answer to the question of whether Nazis were "socialists", in the conventional sense. It's asked often enough that it's in the FAQ:
Given that Fascists universally destroy Socialist Orgs, and openly, wantonly, slaughter every concieveable kind of socialist, from anarchists, to hard stalinists, to simple trade unionst social democrats, it kind of beggars belief that someone can hold this sort of opinion. Theres a tee shirt company "Right Wing Death Squads", you should look them up and then maybe do some digging on why their shirts bear pictures of helicopters with people being thrown out of them. Or maybe why the first people to fill concentration camps in Germany were communists and socialists. Or, really, just read any history of fascism not written by a fascist or a fash-sympathizer. But then you might not be moved to drop hot garbage like this.
I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee pressure. I can’t imagine Bell Lab employees had all that much leverage against Ma Bell.
I’ve often wondered this myself. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on search alone. I can’t even fathom what they’re all doing. And then what is everyone filling their time with?
As much as we joke about this, a google doodle is such a great sticky "come back and see what's new tomorrow, and while you are here, maybe search which will make us money" tactic.
Google builds a lot more of its own infrastructure than other companies can afford to do, all the way down to the hardware. They also change things more often internally than you will see with public-facing API's.
What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to slow down. Where does it end?
Worked there, It might be that I was in a wrong place (and folks I know), but high quality standards, sometimes vague deadlines that can be moved desire to do the best thing result in a very slow dev process.
I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing
> I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing
I disagree. I feel AWS definitely has more options, functionality, and better enterprise support, but in many areas GCP is much easier to manage for smaller teams. For example, if I were starting a startup, I would definitely favor GCP over AWS right now.
It probably has a healthy engineering staff, but as Wall St. sees it, Google could just cut out dev work, scale back to minimal ops and print money the whole way down the death spiral.
search is complex, but google spend well over a decade building infrastructure to enable search to scale without massive people count. it's a modest number of very productive people.
It's almost as if... bear with me here...
Some sort of collective action by employees of a monopolistic company can't be ignored... because - uh - they'll stop working en masse? Voluntarily in lieu of pay? Madness, it'll never catch on.
15,000 un-unionized employees in New England walked off their family-owned supermarket jobs after a board-flip and resulting capitulation of existing (family owned) leadership. Customers joined forces with the employees en-masse. The company is an icon and in many ways a prime mover in the area due to their intense real-estate investment strategy.
This multi-billion dollar business was brought to its knees in mere months. Shelves were empty, customers were taping competitor receipts onto the doors, it was doomsday. MA and NH attorneys general got involved after the new corporate CEO's threatened to fire 15,000 people. It was chaos.
And it worked. The board sold the company to the CEO they fired for $1.5b and everything was back to normal within a day or two.
I think a part of it too is how well the company is regarded by the employees. Market Basket is a really good company to work for. They pay well and offer decent benefits, and they have profit sharing and immense bonuses. I worked there, once in high school and again afterwards for a while. My ex was management and brought home $8,000 worth of bonuses one year at Christmas. And that was on-top of profit sharing, which they permit hardship withdrawals from.
Google pays well and is highly regarded in the industry. Those jobs are worth fighting for.
Your link says the "protests" were triggered by the NYT. It is not surprising they would cover the continuation of their own story:
> "The backlash was prompted by an article in The New York Times last week"
And I don't see a single sign in that story (actually I glimpsed one blurry one in the video), which is for the best because those signs make it difficult to take them seriously.
Someone posted preliminary sit-in attendance numbers. Attendance ranges from 50-150 per office in the larger offices. Anecdotally, I've seen very little discussion and energy this time compared to the walkout. Back then, one couldn't walk 20 feet without hitting some kind of exhortation to join the walkout. This time, more people might find out about this sit-in through this HN story than through internal channels.
The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue. The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public. It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.
The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue.
I hope this is a bellwether for the rest of SV, the Bay Area, and the rest of the country.
The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public.
Ditto.
It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.
When "movements" start going around using authoritarian intimidation tactics to keep their own ranks in line, this is a sign that the movement is no longer guided by principles. It's devolved into yet another group which is in a power struggle against a different group.
There were plenty of "movements" within the Google-Intranet using tactics that are at least cognate to authoritarianism - namely bullying, harassment and intimidation - to pursue their politically-skewed goals and drive political opponents out. It's not something that's in serious dispute by now - the reporting, even in court-submitted documents like the James Damore complaint, is way too clear for that. And yes, of course this is severely dysfunctional for any sort of enterprise. We actually have laws on the books that are meant to prevent these things; though the enforcement is quite inconsistent.
It may certainly be the case that people are experiencing "outrage fatigue" and that many have evaluated the claims of retaliation and found them unconvincing, but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to support these conclusions. The original walkout simply got way more publicity from the start, fuelled by a massive news story about Andy Rubin. But the biggest thing was it was officially sanctioned and promoted by the company, as far as I was concerned. Nearly everyone got an email from their manager and manager's manager in support of the walkout. Screensavers were changed en-masse to promote the walkout. Lots of people got up and tagged along. However, I didn't get the sense there was much awareness at that time of the specific demands, let alone the internal website that promoted it. Most people were just "along for the ride".
On the other hand, this sit-in wasn't planned as far in advance and details were not firmed up until the absolute last minute. Flyer designs were only sent out the day before for the retaliation event, so there wasn't much time to build awareness and momentum. And there wasn't a major news story about one of the company's execs to fuel conversation, just a few personal stories that trickled out in niche mailing lists. It had a very different feel, and I think it's hard to attribute that to one factor when there are so many in play.
Interesting I did not realize that about the first one!
I can imagine a company thinking they could take the wind out of it by supporting it. An escalation of conflict was probably better for the protestors than the company at that point.
Not officially, but the experience of someone there says they perceived them as unofficially supporting it, that managers and others did a variety of things to encourage it in a seemingly coordinated or at least consistent way, which is interesting.
And like I said, I can see why they would do this as a strategic move, I don't think it implies anything about the justness of the cause either way or the actual morality of the company either way, just a strategic move.
In fairness, they wrote something that could end up in the media. Who wants that kind of attention?
Googler in Bay Area here, non-throwaway account. Don't know enough about the situation to comment on any of the details or form an opinion, but I can attest to the fact that I didn't really notice the sit-in, for better or worse.
Not to detract from or endorse anyone's opinion, I'm just bothered by the weird conspiracy vibe in this thread. I signed the Dragonfly letter so it feels like posting a small anecdote to Hacker News is relatively benign, but maybe I'm naive :)
(My opinions here, not my employers. You know the drill.)
But no media article will be able to identify the poster through their IP address. So unless you re-use your username, Tor or not shouldn't make any difference.
I don't work for Google. My company has strict policies to discourage employees talking to the public about internal affairs. That was the case with my previous two employers too. Frankly, it makes sense from their POV to not have their dirty laundry made public. And I take similar precautions as a matter of self-preservation anyway. I don't want anything I write here to be used against me either by my current employer or any of my future employers.
Google could be keeping track of which of their internal IPs visited which HN pages, etc.
How would they do this? HN is served over https, which would make this a massive and deliberate undertaking. The only possibilities I know of would be an intercepting proxy (don't know whether Google uses this, I doubt it) or tracking the size of payloads (which would require infrastructure explicitly and only for this purpose).
Payload size would be very helpful, but they don't need that to shortlist candidates. Correlating the timestamps of when the comment appeared on HN and when the domain name was accessed from an internal IP may be enough, subject to luck. Considering that Google is already tracking (crawling) the entire web for its core business, adding a few tweaks should not make much of a difference to their system load.
The whole point of the sit-in is that people are retaliated against for participating. If you believe this is the case, that's a strong disincentive against participating in the sit-in.
Even 5 years ago if you had said there would be a protest kind of thing with even 50-150 people per Google office protesting... that would have seemed like an unlikely thing.
I've enough friends working at Google to know that they have a pretty strong mandated daily dose of kool-aid, where you are elite and only valuable if you work at google and adopt the one true Googler world view.
Certain factions at Google demanded and ensured that anyone not in conformance at Google no longer work there. Then they are shocked and surprised when the same executives use the same mechanisms to hurt them, for the exact same reason - business reasons.
Google abandoned "Don't be evil" a long time ago. It's time for people to realize that making corporations all-powerful is a really bad thing, even when they seem to be doing your bidding.... for now.
I managed to interact with lots of people who work for Google daily. The culture "The Circle" illustrated is spot on but I guess making 4x or 5x federal median wage would do it.
The ruling basically ratifies fake ideological "blank slate" pseudo-science as actual science. It's findings with regards to James Damore's employment status may still be valid, but that particular part is wrong and pernicious.
The rulings stated it was legal for Google to do what they did. And I totally agree that it was legal - my gripe is with the difference in how society at large reacted to it. I've quoted a few relevant sections from the rulings
In the summary:
"we conclude that the memorandum included both protected and unprotected statements and that the Employer discharged [Damore] solely for [Damore's] unprotected statements. Therefore, the employer did not violate Section 8(a)(1) of the Act"
In the Action:
"The Board has acknowledged that it has a duty to balance an employee’s statutorily-protected rights against an employer’s legitimate right to enforce its workplace rules and managerial prerogatives"
"In furtherance of these legitimate interests, employers must be permitted to “nip in the bud” the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a “hostile workplace,” rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been created before taking action."
An earlier decision they quoted in the ruling:
"In view of the controversial nature of the language used and its admitted susceptibility to derisive and profane construction, [the employer] could legitimately ban the use of the provocative [language] as a reasonable precaution against discord and bitterness between employees and management, as well as to assure decorum and discipline in the plant"
To me this sounds like they are saying that Google indeed retaliated, and it was legal for them to do so
In exactly the sections I quoted. For example: "nip in the bud"
We could have a big discussion about the definition of the word retaliation, and under a lot of very reasonable definitions it's fine to me if we don't call it "retaliation"
The point is, Google is an organization that acts and reacts within a hugely complex system. I wish it was more acceptable for their employees to critique them, even if these critiques are largely received as taboo
"Nip in the bud" is not retaliation. You can ban politics at work in order to "nip in the bud" political bias, or ban some sorts of intimate relationships among employees and the pursuit thereof to "nip in the bud" allegations of sexual harrassment. It's ridiculous to consider these as retaliatory moves.
In your view, what action could they have taken other than "letting him do whatever he wanted" that would not have been retaliation?
Retaliation has the legal definition of a negative job action in response to a protected activity.
They explicitly found they did not do that.
Trying to redefine retaliation to include a negative job action in response to an unprotected activity makes the definition of retaliation include any negative job action in response to anything.
Oh! I did not know that retaliation had a legal definition. Super relevant here and apologies for not knowing that -- glad to have learned something today
To reiterate, my gripe is not about anything "legal". Rather, my comments are focused on how our milieu responds to corporate actions
A huge Q.E.D. for my point: my original comment got flagged!
They found that Google firing him in response to a complaint about their discriminatory practices wasn’t retaliation because him complaining upset his coworkers.
It’s an insane ruling, that undermines the basis of protections.
Your being downvoted indicates why that is the case. Unfortunately, it's not about objective approach, it's all about being part of the group think, feelings, etc. These companies resemble kindergarden as far as their social dynamics go.
That's not what happened, though. Google management was quite happy to completely ignore Damore. He was punished only once his screed became public and embarrassed the company. That's exactly the opposite of retaliation!
This guy literally said the hiring bar was lowered for women. It says that in his doc. And it's false. After everyone was upset about this, he never apologized or walked back that part of the doc at all.
Without objective data to back it up, claims on either side would be hearsay, no? For someone convinced they are at a disadvantage, how can you convince them that the system is fair?
I think the burden of proof would be on someone making a claim that runs counter to everything that everyone in the company who actually works in hiring is saying
Is it possible that Damore witnessed specific instance(s) of an explicit bar-lowering (or a trend for one team/manager) but no general policy at Google?
I am asking out of curiosity, I don't want to skewer or stick up for Damore.
He didn’t back up that claim with any evidence. I’ve talked with many people who are on hiring committees and those are blinded to gender and other factors.
It wasn't retaliation, a good number of Googlers didn't want to be working with someone who believes women and minorities were just dumb diversity hires.
That was the authoritarian narrative pushed by Google and reinforced by the media.
It's not at all what Damore's memo said.
The real game is suppressing engineer salary in a decade long bull market to limit competition. James got too close to this truth and was punished for it, and the people who actually know the game toxified him by surrounding him with bad social stigma so that no one else thought to question.
how did the managers doing the alleged retaliating get hired at google in the first place? I thought the crazy I interview process existed to get the right people?
Does anyone at google actually work? This is what happens when you pay people a ton of money to do intellectual work. Basic needs are met and they start getting uppety... /s
Honestly though, seems there are so many demonstrations at Google. More than say Facebook which is getting way more of a media thrashing for actual lapses. Whatever actual grievances there are, they’re buried amongst the chaff.
Aren't people worried that they'll all be fired for protesting?
People are within their rights to protest in public places, of course, but not on private property and certainly not on the clock.
I'm not sure how it works from the business's perspective, but couldn't Google just get rid of all those people at once? Is that legal to do?
From Google's perspective, if they just fired all these people, there would be some blowback but there would be no future walkouts/protests/disruptions at work. There are plenty of smart people who would take those jobs at Google in a heartbeat.
Can someone explain this to me? Like if I did this at any place I've ever worked, I'd be gone in an instant.
Many Google employees are basically the most sought after people in their respective fields. Google spends obscene amounts to recruit and then retain the best possible workforce. Many of these engineers could barly raise their hand and would get hundreds of offers from competitors. As such they have much more leverage and get paid a lot more than employees at even other tech companies outside FAANG.
It is in Google‘s interest to generally retain a maximum possible number of employees. Because there‘s a limited supply and also because you don‘t want them working at your competitor. In the weirdest scenarios you might end up in some really kafkaesque situatuon where you earn like 300 to 500k a year for basically not doing that much. The main thing is that you stay put and don’t go work for someone else. Maybe you’ve seen HBO’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like Big Head on the roof.
I had a post about how generic the signs were in that link and it got modded to oblivion and "flagged" so I guess no one had to be made uncomfortable by constructive criticism. What a great little microcosm of the larger issues with google.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttps://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/apr/02/washington-nur...
Pretty much the only high-paying job that isn't unionized are doctors, but they use the American Medical Association to limit supply.
If you need to work for a living, employers will commodify your role to the best of their abilities.
Employees: get the most money for their labor. Employers: get the labor for the least possible money.
It may not be ethical in your viewpoint, but those are the natural forces at play. It follows that employers will commodify my role as part of their strategy to pay me less. So I take other actions to make myself more valuable. As long as those actions are strictly technical (learning new technology, rather than management), I am quite happy to play this natural game driven entirely by reason.
Labor, on the other hand, has very few vehicles to accumulate their wealth and power. In fact one such vehicle, the union, is often legally neutered such that private contracts made between unions and employers can be nullified in favor of the ownership class (see: right-to-work laws and union security agreements).
There's an inherent asymmetry of power between labor and the ownership class enshrined in both law and contemporary markets. We live in a nation started by the wealthy merchant class, for the wealthy merchant class, and it shows in our labor history.
So, yes, there are competing forces that are very unequal. You as an individual engineer will have little clout against, say, an industry-wide anti-poaching agreement like we saw in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-help-goo...
I may not agree with her politically, but its important to have different viewpoints in discourse as long as they're rooted in principles. I think its shameful that the AI Ethics Council was disbanded, if employees took issue with her it would have been nice to see them suggest an alternative.
The democratic party, on the other hand, is showing a clear schism between pro-corporate and an pro-labor wings. It is trivial to imagine a split into two parties. The republicans have no future without the social control our president demonstrated in his run and term.
If anything, putting a bigoted republican on the AI ethics committee is leaning into a future where Alphabet would benefit from a fascist state.
OK, so besides James', which other viewpoints rooted in principles were represented on the council? Did Google assemble a panel of balanced viewpoints?
Looks like she's petty about it and threatens to punish Google for political reasons, confirming the appointment was for political goodwill rather than about doing the job.
Glad she's out.
The "paradox of tolerance" in 2019 is used as a word game for one group to justify their intolerance of another group they do not like.
That rather suggests that it is Meredith Whittaker's intolerance that we should not be tolerating, no?
Other than that either your witness to even recent, well-publicized events is quite spotty or your understanding of fascism is quite broken, I'm not sure what one is supposed to take from this statement.
What about a group of employees collectively organizing and protesting non-violently against an internal board at a privatized company is exactly fascist?
eg for the Nazis, "Fascist" still meant the Italian party despite their own party having quite a large overlap in philosophy. Every political movement seems to care more about internal differences far more than outsiders do (see People's Front of Judea).
It was always hard to pin down and never really ever had a strict definition - just an incomplete collection of possible tendencies (see the Wikipedia article above).
But yeah, usage has always been loose/overused.
It's a mistake to interpret diction literally. Yes, it would be lovely if people used the word "fascism" to refer to right-wing, ultra-nationalist, authoritarian political movements. But that's not how people use words and the ship has long since sailed on that particular word. According to George Orwell "fascism" has a been a synonym for "bully" since 1944 - http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
"Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council appeared like the closest thing to bullying in the USA that I have ever witnessed"
I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I genuinely don't understand what the OP is trying to stay in that statement. Is he saying Google employee's protesting of the AI board is the worst example of bullying they have seen?
It's certainly authoritarian.
Do you see Orwell literally taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War against his ideological opponents instead of debating them—especially when he wasn't even Spanish himself—as having elements of fascism, too?
"Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council is disgraceful"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
National Socialism and Fascism are identified as "right," but this is primarily through the application of nationalism, conquest, and opposition to communism. Look under those fig leafs, and you find something very different.
National Socialism and Fascists consistently implemented socialist policies. Under National Socialism, control by the state was so complete, the private ownership meant nothing. Property owners were called Betriebsfurhrer -- basically shop managers enacting state policy. What was made, who it was sold to, how much was charged, and how much the workers were paid were largely determined by the government. National Socialism was strongly against liberal democracy. (Liberalism in the 19th century Classical Liberal sense, which in 2019 is labeled "conservatism" in the US.) They were also openly against free markets, multi-party democratic government, freedom of speech, and other individual human rights. Mussolini started out as a Socialist, and at one point, he literally styled himself, "The Lenin of Italy." Also, many of the essentially socialist policies of National Socialist Germany in the 1930's garnered praise from American progressives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNJzqqh-jRw
What about a group of employees collectively organizing and protesting non-violently against an internal board at a privatized company is exactly fascist?
The collectivism is a shared attribute of Fascism. Also, as observed in a different comment, if they are suppressing dissent and speech in their own ranks and using pressure tactics to keep their own ranks in line, then this is another shared attribute.
Sure, state control is a hallmark of fascism/totalitarianism. However, the USSR did not have a socialist mode of production essentially because of the lack of worker control of the state (and therefor the means of production).
I would argue that if the state owns the means of production, then the state must necessariy have some kind form of democratic control by the citizens in order to be considered socialist. The USSR may have had this very early on, but as Stalin rose to power it slipped away and became what is known as state capialism.
There needs to be a distinction between a "socialist country" (as in, a country with a socialist mode of production where the workers control the means of production) and "country rules by socialists" (USSR, China, Cuba, etc) where the means of production is centrally controlled by a government not representative of the population.
As far as I'm concerned, no socialist countries have ever existed for more than a handful of years.
In other words, Marxism, at its core, is at odds with fascism in a fundamental way, and Marxist-Leninists (and by extension Stalinists and Maoists) are fundamentally at odds with Marxism.
I think you can draw a parallel between "people who think they support Marxism" and fascism, but drawing a parallel between Marxism and fascism is a stretch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe#wiki_...
(Answer: no).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378
> Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years.
What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to slow down. Where does it end?
https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-...
I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing
I disagree. I feel AWS definitely has more options, functionality, and better enterprise support, but in many areas GCP is much easier to manage for smaller teams. For example, if I were starting a startup, I would definitely favor GCP over AWS right now.
15,000 un-unionized employees in New England walked off their family-owned supermarket jobs after a board-flip and resulting capitulation of existing (family owned) leadership. Customers joined forces with the employees en-masse. The company is an icon and in many ways a prime mover in the area due to their intense real-estate investment strategy.
This multi-billion dollar business was brought to its knees in mere months. Shelves were empty, customers were taping competitor receipts onto the doors, it was doomsday. MA and NH attorneys general got involved after the new corporate CEO's threatened to fire 15,000 people. It was chaos.
And it worked. The board sold the company to the CEO they fired for $1.5b and everything was back to normal within a day or two.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Basket_(New_England)
Upper class professionals are less likely to strike even though proportionally they are giving away far more of their surplus labor.
Google pays well and is highly regarded in the industry. Those jobs are worth fighting for.
Not a single visible sign explains what they are protesting...
Seems like they did a reasonably effective job of conveying their protest message across to the NYT, vague signs or not.
> "The backlash was prompted by an article in The New York Times last week"
And I don't see a single sign in that story (actually I glimpsed one blurry one in the video), which is for the best because those signs make it difficult to take them seriously.
The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue. The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public. It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.
Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.
I hope this is a bellwether for the rest of SV, the Bay Area, and the rest of the country.
The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public.
Ditto.
It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.
When "movements" start going around using authoritarian intimidation tactics to keep their own ranks in line, this is a sign that the movement is no longer guided by principles. It's devolved into yet another group which is in a power struggle against a different group.
It may certainly be the case that people are experiencing "outrage fatigue" and that many have evaluated the claims of retaliation and found them unconvincing, but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to support these conclusions. The original walkout simply got way more publicity from the start, fuelled by a massive news story about Andy Rubin. But the biggest thing was it was officially sanctioned and promoted by the company, as far as I was concerned. Nearly everyone got an email from their manager and manager's manager in support of the walkout. Screensavers were changed en-masse to promote the walkout. Lots of people got up and tagged along. However, I didn't get the sense there was much awareness at that time of the specific demands, let alone the internal website that promoted it. Most people were just "along for the ride".
On the other hand, this sit-in wasn't planned as far in advance and details were not firmed up until the absolute last minute. Flyer designs were only sent out the day before for the retaliation event, so there wasn't much time to build awareness and momentum. And there wasn't a major news story about one of the company's execs to fuel conversation, just a few personal stories that trickled out in niche mailing lists. It had a very different feel, and I think it's hard to attribute that to one factor when there are so many in play.
I can imagine a company thinking they could take the wind out of it by supporting it. An escalation of conflict was probably better for the protestors than the company at that point.
And like I said, I can see why they would do this as a strategic move, I don't think it implies anything about the justness of the cause either way or the actual morality of the company either way, just a strategic move.
Because the protest is such a matter of indifference at Google that... you need to take extreme measures not to be identified talking about it?
Googler in Bay Area here, non-throwaway account. Don't know enough about the situation to comment on any of the details or form an opinion, but I can attest to the fact that I didn't really notice the sit-in, for better or worse.
Not to detract from or endorse anyone's opinion, I'm just bothered by the weird conspiracy vibe in this thread. I signed the Dragonfly letter so it feels like posting a small anecdote to Hacker News is relatively benign, but maybe I'm naive :)
(My opinions here, not my employers. You know the drill.)
Google could be keeping track of which of their internal IPs visited which HN pages, etc.
Certain factions at Google demanded and ensured that anyone not in conformance at Google no longer work there. Then they are shocked and surprised when the same executives use the same mechanisms to hurt them, for the exact same reason - business reasons.
Google abandoned "Don't be evil" a long time ago. It's time for people to realize that making corporations all-powerful is a really bad thing, even when they seem to be doing your bidding.... for now.
The privilege to speak up against the status quo is important. Especially when you have less power, and even if your opinion is unsavory to some
In the summary: "we conclude that the memorandum included both protected and unprotected statements and that the Employer discharged [Damore] solely for [Damore's] unprotected statements. Therefore, the employer did not violate Section 8(a)(1) of the Act"
In the Action:
"The Board has acknowledged that it has a duty to balance an employee’s statutorily-protected rights against an employer’s legitimate right to enforce its workplace rules and managerial prerogatives"
"In furtherance of these legitimate interests, employers must be permitted to “nip in the bud” the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a “hostile workplace,” rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been created before taking action."
An earlier decision they quoted in the ruling: "In view of the controversial nature of the language used and its admitted susceptibility to derisive and profane construction, [the employer] could legitimately ban the use of the provocative [language] as a reasonable precaution against discord and bitterness between employees and management, as well as to assure decorum and discipline in the plant"
To me this sounds like they are saying that Google indeed retaliated, and it was legal for them to do so
We could have a big discussion about the definition of the word retaliation, and under a lot of very reasonable definitions it's fine to me if we don't call it "retaliation"
The point is, Google is an organization that acts and reacts within a hugely complex system. I wish it was more acceptable for their employees to critique them, even if these critiques are largely received as taboo
In your view, what action could they have taken other than "letting him do whatever he wanted" that would not have been retaliation?
Retaliation has the legal definition of a negative job action in response to a protected activity.
They explicitly found they did not do that.
Trying to redefine retaliation to include a negative job action in response to an unprotected activity makes the definition of retaliation include any negative job action in response to anything.
To reiterate, my gripe is not about anything "legal". Rather, my comments are focused on how our milieu responds to corporate actions
A huge Q.E.D. for my point: my original comment got flagged!
They found that Google firing him in response to a complaint about their discriminatory practices wasn’t retaliation because him complaining upset his coworkers.
It’s an insane ruling, that undermines the basis of protections.
Well said.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/screed
Is it possible that Damore witnessed specific instance(s) of an explicit bar-lowering (or a trend for one team/manager) but no general policy at Google?
I am asking out of curiosity, I don't want to skewer or stick up for Damore.
It's not at all what Damore's memo said.
The real game is suppressing engineer salary in a decade long bull market to limit competition. James got too close to this truth and was punished for it, and the people who actually know the game toxified him by surrounding him with bad social stigma so that no one else thought to question.
Honestly though, seems there are so many demonstrations at Google. More than say Facebook which is getting way more of a media thrashing for actual lapses. Whatever actual grievances there are, they’re buried amongst the chaff.
People are within their rights to protest in public places, of course, but not on private property and certainly not on the clock.
I'm not sure how it works from the business's perspective, but couldn't Google just get rid of all those people at once? Is that legal to do?
From Google's perspective, if they just fired all these people, there would be some blowback but there would be no future walkouts/protests/disruptions at work. There are plenty of smart people who would take those jobs at Google in a heartbeat.
Can someone explain this to me? Like if I did this at any place I've ever worked, I'd be gone in an instant.
It is in Google‘s interest to generally retain a maximum possible number of employees. Because there‘s a limited supply and also because you don‘t want them working at your competitor. In the weirdest scenarios you might end up in some really kafkaesque situatuon where you earn like 300 to 500k a year for basically not doing that much. The main thing is that you stay put and don’t go work for someone else. Maybe you’ve seen HBO’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like Big Head on the roof.