The worst aspect- the ad network- is also its most profitable. I am sure if search and ads were separated, they would find a way to create some sweetheart deals that keep operations not too terribly changed.
Android would likely become less coupled to various google services, but I don't think most people actually want that- at least, I imagine most Android users would prefer Google maps to whatever else is out there
Most Googlers aren't exactly passing around union cards, but a bunch are collaborating and organizing on pushing the company to do what they believe the company should do. It's kinda union-like, but software engineers aren't fighting for higher wages and workplace safety as much as trying to push ethical behavior.
Google would vastly prefer the former than organizing for ending forced arbitration (which worked and is what prompted Google's anti-union crackdown/illegal firings), a formal council for engineers to voice complaints/elect representatives, and higher wages/profit sharing.
Google has essentially a monopoly on search and is part of a duopoly on mobile phones, so they have the money to treat their employees LAVISHLY compared to others.
Perhaps Maslow's hierarchy of human needs is right, and the employees are treated well enough their able to care about other groups and the ethical implications of their work? Seems like a good thing to me.
A Kickstarter style union where employees say "we aren't allowing this on the platform, and we will have this even though we normally would not allow it", would allow for an amazing level of evidence to pile up of biases. That would be a nightmare scenario for Google.
Damn straight, or more autonomy over your work environment, less crunch time, freedom to choose wfh outside pandemic conditions? I've literally never worked anywhere that couldn't be improved in one dimension or another, which is kind of what unionization is about for workers.
In addition to pay, a union would also give employees some practical muscle if, say, the company decided to deal with sexual harassment by paying the perpetrator a giant sum of money to go away instead of following up and seeing the situation through to some justice.
Pay might be high, but it has not kept up with the increases in cost of living and inflation over the last 20 years, especially in big cities like SF or NYC.
Also, Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with one another to keep tech worker compensation below its market value[1].
Lots of reasons to avoid unions. For one, unions often diminish individual accomplishments and liberties in favor of what begins as collective interest, and eventually becomes union leadership interest. Unions become an entity themselves, and always trend towards bureaucracy, self-justification, and corruption.
I would never, ever join a union. I like having my role and compensation being things that I am free to negotiate based off of my own leverage. The only situation in which unions would serve me are situations in which the power imbalance is so great between the available market employers vs. the employees, that the employees possess little to no leverage in any negotiation. Literally 0 software engineers in America are in such a situation.
> unions often diminish individual accomplishments and liberties in favor of what begins as collective interest
Is that why NFL players have no individuality and are basically just substitutes of each other? I doubt anyone even knows any individual football player's name, since the union has so diminished their individual accomplishments.
Who even knows the names of movie stars anymore? They just go by their SAG-AFTRA member IDs since the union has made them all practically interchangeable.
They are pretty interchangeable, but I have to say I am a bit partial to actor 958309 from SAG-AFTRA 5757, his performance in Inception was pretty great.
I heard 958309 got a flogging for that performance because it violated union bylaws that forbid one member from making other members look like slackers. That'll show him for being a prima donna and giving it his all!
Screen Actors Guild member Tom Cruise would like to chat with you about negotiating based on leverage, since you seem to have some misconceptions about what a collective bargaining agreement does what to the workplace.
The first obstacle to general software engineering unionization is getting software engineers convinced that their problems stem from shitty management, and not incompetent peers.
Which problems? Being paid well? Having a fun and interesting job? Have you ever worked a union job, did the union make shitty management suddenly disappear? Shitty management is often just swallowed up by the union itself. And I don't think I have incompetent peers, I think my peers are perfectly competent precisely BECAUSE the profession is not unionized. The fastest way to a pool of incompetent peers is by assuring the continued employment of incompetent people under the umbrella of collective protection.
You said that I believe my problems come from incompetent peers, and not shitty management.
I said that not only do I not believe my problems come from incompetent peers, but that I don't actually have any problems. And to the extent that I've worked under shitty management, I've had sufficient leverage to alter my situation accordingly. When I feel as though software engineers are systemically incapable of possessing the degree of leverage so as to alter their situations to a more optimal one, within reason, then I would be willing to consider bringing forth the myriad of problems that come with collectivization in order to attempt to access additional leverage. The landscape at the present could not be described as I have.
So no, I haven't proved any of your points. Nothing that you said applies to what I said.
My guess is they are not worried now but they know a strong union may cause problems for them in the future. If there's any kind of trouble in the future, a union will be harder to control.
I'm not sure it's even a hypothetical future situation. I don't know if a majority of Googlers were against it, but the way Google handled Andy Rubin wasn't exactly a popular move internally.
I'm a member of a union in Norway. They have zero to do with my day-to-day. Which is nice. I bargain pay on my own etc., same does everyone else. Don't even think my employer knows I'm a member.
However, the union has pushed for better regulations. When I started my career 5 years ago for instance, I had to sign a non-compete. Almost every offer had one, as an individual I couldn't do much. The union however helped pass legislation so those general non-competes are illegal, and can only be used for very specific purposes. When I got offers, they would also look over the contracts, tell me what I should be expected to be paid etc, giving me more knowledge and backing as a rookie (vs big cos). The yearly salary statistics is detailed and useful for me every year.
The union also collectively bargains for other stuff. For instance my mortgage rate is far lower through their offer than anything else I've found. The member fee (~400 yearly?) pays it self many times over just from this.
So I think this works great. Everyone on here always paints unions as these monoliths, but they don't have to be. I am still valued as a singular, but for the big stuff we're numerous.
This sounds more like a "professional organization". I wonder if this would be a good thing for software engineers, where it's not a union for a specific company but just a lobbying organization to push for legislation that is beneficial for software engineers and maybe a legal arm available to members to sue for violations of those laws.
Yeah, it may be that the union word is too tainted.
A union doesn't have to be a monopoly keeping everyone else out ("you have to hire our licensed workers") or something that is in the way of doing your job ("you're not allowed to crawl under your desk and plug in ethernet"). Which are the examples I often see here.
Probably a tiny but vocal minority who use internal tools to amplify their message, becoming a nuisance to their colleagues. From the outside, it reads similarly to the recent struggles inside Coinbase. But this being google, the company’s response is more “corporate”.
"Why would serfs want to have say over their activities anyway?"
It really struct me one day at work, as myself and all of my coworkers watched in horror as "leadership" made decisions after decision that we all felt not only made our lives worse, but were fundamentally bad decisions for the health of the company, how powerful the ideological tools are that keep us from questioning who has a say in the future of a company.
One of the key reasons there weren't more peasant revolutions was a combination of violence to suppress this, and, more importantly, ideological tools to keep peasants in line. That we still read our kids stories about how great princesses and kings are is evidence of how strong this feudal propaganda is.
Especially at software companies, the hardworking engineers are why the company can exist at all. How many times have engineers deeply cared about things such as quality of the code base, giving back to open source communities, or even things like ethical treatment of coworkers and users?
But we have been trained to treat CEOs and "leadership" like divinely ordained kings. Sure the VCs and Founders have laid out the capital to run the company, but capital alone does not make the company.
Have you never worked at a company where software engineers are forced by management to make very bad technical choices? Have you never been in a room where everyone working on the project sees clearly it will be a disaster but has absolutely zero say in the decisions around it? Have you never seen your company do questionably illegal or unethical things, where everyone working on the project wishes that they could stop things, but no individual wants to handle the risk of being a whistle-blower and having their career destroyed?
Imagine a startup or large tech company where collectively the engineers had a voice on par with the c-suite. Where they could say "I know that we have quarterly goals to meet, but we refused to ship new product until we have our infra in a least a semi-stable state. This will allow us to ship faster in the future and it's important for the company"
or
"We strongly believe that while this current feature does generate slightly more revenue, it is intentionally deceptive to users and ultimately harmful to them and our product, so we would like to see it changed or removed"
or
"X,Y and Z Open source products have saved us tremendous amount of capital, to continue to keep these ecosystems we depend on healthy, we demand that N hours a month be actively devoted to giving back to these projects"
or
"I know you are unhappy with employee 123, primarily because they have openly questioned the decisions of management. However they have no records of outright insubordination and are considered a valuable member of the technical team, so we will fight your request to fire them."
Labor having a voice is about far more than just salaries and benefits like it is for factory workers. And if you think the solution is just that engineering management needs to better represent their teams, then you likely haven't worked in management.
Thing is Google will eventually get to the stage that the PR of not having a union exceed any downsides of having one.
As for software engineers (apart from SQL ones who would of read your UNION JOIN as a whole different sentence), most grown up in a work environment that has seen the need for Unions moot as tech companies shifted in perks/remunerations that exceeded what many a Union could of dreamed of achieving. That alone seen the driver for Unions moot in many eye's, combined with a lack of tech focused Unions and the shift from lifer work mentality to few years being classed a long time at a company. Times changed and moved faster than many Unions.
However, many tech companies grown to the stage that they ain't all software engineers and the size/scale of them has seen them grow to the stage that some level of check like a Union wouldn't go amiss and opinions about unions as a whole been slowly improving in the past few years after decades of disdain. Thing is, what type of Union and is the need for a larger more tech orientated Union or lots of smaller ones? That's the crux.
Though when I started in tech, the worry about competition bugging the water cooler was the edge-case worry, today it's the company itself that has become that worry and less of an edge-case as well. So clearly the use of Unions does have some safety in voice for employee's.
If Google workers organized/became a union shop, compensation would probably be unbelievably high.* They are the source of most of the profits and Google is very profitable.
*assuming the union only represented SWEs and not PMs/etc.
Slight aside but I'm somehow reminded of a quote from the film - The Dark Knight "You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain".
Given this legal complaint is USA-based, it would be interesting to understand how ‘friendly’ Google is to unionised employees or employees organising unions in other countries (eg UK, France, Germany, Australia, etc) where it has a significant number of employees.
Laws and perceptions on unionisation of staff obviously differ heavily on a per-country basis.
In other countries, employees enjoy different protections in general, and in general Google complies with the regulations of other countries regarding employment.
This doesn't preclude them from making decisions that favor the company over individual employees' best interests if the law allows it, but I can't think of an example of Google breaking employment law in, for example, Germany.
A Workers' Council is a legally recognized body representing employees of a single employer. It has very limited rights and duties, like being informed in the case of mass layoffs.
A union is a body that represents workers in an entire industry. It can have whatever duties the employees feel like giving it.
They are as friendly as the law makes them, like any other company.
Note also that although France is often cited it actually has a very low unionisation rate, lower than the US, and e.g. the UK is massively more unionised. Unions are mostly active in the public sector. A specificity is that the right to strike is a constitutional right with quite lax requirements and it is a recurring debate that it is abused by unions. Union activity is also extremely protected so if you get elected as union rep it is virtually impossible to fire you for any reason.
There is a huge difference between unions in the US and Europe. When you organise a union in the US, you often do it in order to have some rights that employees in Europe already have. So normally there is little incentive to form such a union in Europe among white-collar workers.
If you give your employer an ultimatum with the fallback choice being "... Or else I resign" and they decline, it seems obviously logical and reasonable that your resignation has been submitted. This was the case for her. She admits to doing as much in her tweets, but then chooses to characterize the outcome as a surprise firing.
> it seems obviously logical and reasonable that your resignation has been submitted
In the United States, there is a huge difference legally between being fired and resigning. You don't get to declare someone else's "resignation" for them.
Maybe that's the logical thing, but lots of people also bluff and fail.
> You don't get to declare someone else's "resignation" for them
I think you are arguing that this is more straightforward than it really is. If we suppose (in absence of her actual email) that she declared "...make x, y, and z happen or I resign", that certainly reads as a (conditional) offer of resignation that can be accepted by the other party.
All of this is likely to end up in court and we'll get a decision on whether it was a resignation or firing.
"However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."
That isn't accepting previously offered conditions. I agree what it means legally will probably end up in court.
Well, if you want to get technical with implications and waive normal process, she did not actually say "Or else I resign". I don't see that that argument holds.
From a legal perspective, she was quite clearly terminated. There was no point at which she "worked on a last date" (her exact words) with her management, they just sent her home.
Now, that said, except for her unemployment eligibility, there's not a lot of legal meaning to "terminated". A later law suit isn't going to be bound by definitions like this.
She did not post the actual email to twitter or elsewhere (nor did she attempt to effectively summarize, oddly). Were you a recipient? If so, please do share (if you're able to legally).
Side note: she is being strangely cryptic about the contents of the email in her tweets.
She shared what she says is Google's response. She also said she would share her email except her account was cut off. Not trying to paraphrase it when lawyers are about to be involved isn't weird.
It is weird when you are making public accusations against specific individuals and alluding to still hidden conversations. In other words, it sure looks like she is cherry picking which facts get sunlight and which remain hidden in order to bolster her PR efforts. And then really strains credulity by characterizing her termination as a firing.
I am referring, specifically, to the as yet private email exchange between Timnit, Megan(?), and possibly others wherein Timnit offers an ultimatum which Google then declines.
If I write my employer an email that says "do x, y, and z or I resign", that is pretty obviously a resignation if x,y, and/or z are refused.
In fact, there is no law that states resignation must be submitted in writing (though a contract can stipulate that requirement). I can walk into my boss' office and resign verbally with immediate effect. California is an "at will" state.
That said, I would be happy to read the source you're citing with respect to the employment law relating to resignation if it contradicts my claims.
She gave them the out because they had no plans to do as she said, that's just the way it works. They both probably have at-will clauses in the contracts. It's not really fair but it's just a fact of life in the USA unless your contract says otherwise. There is no "fair" in law, just what the law says.
> I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.
Most tech companies have that toxic group of employees who think management is doing it wrong, and that they should be the ones in charge. Eventually they will try to form a union. I've seen it 5 or 6 times. Fire early, or this is what happens.
Do you think Google was right to have forced arbitration for sexual harassment or should employees be allowed to sue Google for sexual harassment in a court of law?
Was management "doing it right" by prohibiting such suits or did the employees have a point?
I don't think any company should have forced arbitration for regular employees for anything, but the right place to lobby for a fix to the arbitration problem is Capitol Hill, not memegen.
> the right place to lobby for a fix to the arbitration problem is Capitol Hill, not memegen.
So, remembering that employees successfully organized to get Google management to end mandatory arbitration, whereas such requirements are still permitted by law, - that was the wrong approach, and employees should have continued waiting (and still waiting today) for congress to act?
The "right place and time" to fight corporate power usually turns out to be the most ineffective place and time anyone can think of. It's such an odd and consistent coincidence!
It absolutely is toxic. If you're not in leadership, you don't need to have a voice in leadership. If you want to make the move to leadership, gain the respect of your superiors. You won't make it there by being a toxic employee.
Don't believe the headline. Google has a problem with activist employees pushing radical political agendas, often in ways explicitly prohibited by company policy -- for example, leaking internal documents to sympathetic press and harassing individuals on public forums like memegen because of their privately held political views.
These activists present their activities as "union organizing","transparency and ethics", "whistleblowing, and other sweet-sounding and broadly-liked labels, but in reality, what they're doing is not any of these things. What these activists are actually doing is trying to turn the company into a vehicle for advancing their fringe vision for a Utopian society. And if you know your history, you should run away screaming from anyone trying to engineer a Utopia.
Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs. Companies should be mission focused. Coinbase got it right where Google got it wrong, and now Google's activist chickens are coming come to roost.
You mean internal-public, I assume. Memegen isn't public AFAIK.
> ... because of their privately-held political views
It's hard to get called out for privately-held political views. Things you do in public, though, have consequences.
> Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs
Is that a constraint we should extend to owners of companies also? Or is flexing muscle to advance personal ideological beliefs something only reserved for Fortune 500 owners? Google was outspokenly gay-friendly before that became a mainstream opinion in the US, to give a concrete example.
Activists inside Google have no business riling up hate mob against follow employees, even when the targets of the mob have expressed non-activist-approved opinions in public. A company should not tolerate one group of employees imposing "consequences" on fellow employees for legal things that occur outside work.
Google's treatment of Kay Coles James for example disgraced the company.
Agree to disagree. KCJ was a bad pull for the AI Advisory Board and shouldn't have been offered a position in the first place. Google strives to be an LGBTQ-friendly workplace and consulting with the Heritage Foundation on more or less any topic is somewhat antithetical to that goal.
This is exactly the mentality that I find exhausting: it's this with us or against us attitude, this idea that the company shouldn't engage at all with people who have views contrary to those of the activists, this ridiculous demand for purity --- it creates a claustrophobic and hostile ideology-suffused atmosphere. It's not healthy.
Google is one of the most LGBT-friendly companies on Earth. It's not going to lose this spirit because it has someone from a milquetoast place like Heritage on some non-binding AI advisory board. The Kay Cole's James outrage mob was an ideological flex, not a genuine concern for the wellbeing of LGBT employees in the company.
The Kay Cole's James affair is a perfect example of the activist dynamic at Google: the activists claim to be protesting vulnerable people, but what they're actually doing is trying to sideline, delegitimize, and silence their political opponents.
What perspective regarding the future of AI does the Heritage Foundation bring that another organization could not bring? they're not exactly experts in artificial intelligence. Or cybernetics. Or ethics.
> ideological flex
I'm not sure why you say that. the Googlers I corresponded with at the time had some serious questions about how this seemed to operate in contradiction to the company's goals. and if I recall correctly, the company was undergoing management shake up at the time, so I don't think it was an unfounded concern.
The entire advisory board was an activist flex on the part of Google, not a genuine interest in AI ethics (if it were, Kay Cole James would have no place on it, she has no expertise). So I'm not sure what your point is.
> It's hard to get called out for privately-held political views. Things you do in public, though, have consequences.
No, this is just wrong! If I'm making political statements in the public square (e.g. Twitter) then people should respect that as long as it's not something outlandish.
The problem is US politics is just too visceral.
In the eyes of these mobs, being a Trump supporter is akin to supporting the Nazis, and they rile everyone up to harass somebody who probably just wants lower taxes or border control.
I feel for them. It's unfortunate that in the US, the party of lower taxes is now also the party that's trying to overturn the popular vote in a national election. It'd be nice if they had a home for their political philosophy that hadn't become grossly anti-American along the way.
I strongly disagree with this view.
Companies should do what is right and ethical (beyond just what is legal). And who else than the managers and employees working for the company can determine this? It requires exactly those employees pushing for what is right to move the overall company into the right direction. It was even their job as ethics in AI researchers.
Who decides what is "right" and "ethical"? Should the company ban, say, oil and gas companies from GCP because a few people get angry on industryinfo? Who put those angry people in charge?
Of course employees should be able to voice concerns about projects and policies and suggest an alternate strategy. But if leadership rejects that alternative strategy, that needs to be the end of it. If leadership disagrees with you, you can't just start leaking stuff to the press, doxxing people, and organizing protest events. A company is not Twitter and any healthy company should fire employees who are confused about the difference.
Currently, companies decide what is "right" and "ethical" using a standard - shareholder return - that has been proven time and time again to have unethical consequences.
Not infrequently the consequences are literally disastrous and/or fatal. (See also Boeing, Lehman, Enron. HP at its worst, and many many more.)
What exactly gives corporations the moral authority to act like this?
Is it simply that large accumulations of money somehow render other moral concerns irrelevant, as if by magic?
> Should the company ban, say, oil and gas companies from GCP because a few people get angry on industryinfo
I mean, maybe. They'd ban them if the few people were the owners and the SVPs.
If they company did, they'd be within their rights to. The only problem would be all the money they'd leave on the table. Usually (1), that's been the backstop against corporations operating with their private ethics on their sleeve; corps that make a habit of leaving money on the table tend to get left behind by the market.
If Google started banning GCP use for ethical reasons, some other company would step up to fill the gap; no doubt.
(1) Usually. Chik-fil-A supports conversion therapy for LGBTQ people and Hobby Lobby's owners have used their assets for "art acquisition" that was illegal.
Does anyone have a link to the primary sources? All I can find is news reports. The NLRB search is almost useless, and the only case I managed to find involving Google has only redacted documents.
Google, Facebook, Amazon all need to be broken up cleanly along org lines. Competition is a good thing. We need a need type of trust busting place and the law should be modernized.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadGoogle's pieces could be just as anti-union as Google itself.
The worst aspect- the ad network- is also its most profitable. I am sure if search and ads were separated, they would find a way to create some sweetheart deals that keep operations not too terribly changed.
Android would likely become less coupled to various google services, but I don't think most people actually want that- at least, I imagine most Android users would prefer Google maps to whatever else is out there
Perhaps Maslow's hierarchy of human needs is right, and the employees are treated well enough their able to care about other groups and the ethical implications of their work? Seems like a good thing to me.
Just because I'm being paid outrageously high, doesn't mean I shouldn't also be getting paid more.
Also, Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with one another to keep tech worker compensation below its market value[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I would never, ever join a union. I like having my role and compensation being things that I am free to negotiate based off of my own leverage. The only situation in which unions would serve me are situations in which the power imbalance is so great between the available market employers vs. the employees, that the employees possess little to no leverage in any negotiation. Literally 0 software engineers in America are in such a situation.
Is that why NFL players have no individuality and are basically just substitutes of each other? I doubt anyone even knows any individual football player's name, since the union has so diminished their individual accomplishments.
I said that not only do I not believe my problems come from incompetent peers, but that I don't actually have any problems. And to the extent that I've worked under shitty management, I've had sufficient leverage to alter my situation accordingly. When I feel as though software engineers are systemically incapable of possessing the degree of leverage so as to alter their situations to a more optimal one, within reason, then I would be willing to consider bringing forth the myriad of problems that come with collectivization in order to attempt to access additional leverage. The landscape at the present could not be described as I have.
So no, I haven't proved any of your points. Nothing that you said applies to what I said.
However, the union has pushed for better regulations. When I started my career 5 years ago for instance, I had to sign a non-compete. Almost every offer had one, as an individual I couldn't do much. The union however helped pass legislation so those general non-competes are illegal, and can only be used for very specific purposes. When I got offers, they would also look over the contracts, tell me what I should be expected to be paid etc, giving me more knowledge and backing as a rookie (vs big cos). The yearly salary statistics is detailed and useful for me every year.
The union also collectively bargains for other stuff. For instance my mortgage rate is far lower through their offer than anything else I've found. The member fee (~400 yearly?) pays it self many times over just from this.
So I think this works great. Everyone on here always paints unions as these monoliths, but they don't have to be. I am still valued as a singular, but for the big stuff we're numerous.
A union doesn't have to be a monopoly keeping everyone else out ("you have to hire our licensed workers") or something that is in the way of doing your job ("you're not allowed to crawl under your desk and plug in ethernet"). Which are the examples I often see here.
It really struct me one day at work, as myself and all of my coworkers watched in horror as "leadership" made decisions after decision that we all felt not only made our lives worse, but were fundamentally bad decisions for the health of the company, how powerful the ideological tools are that keep us from questioning who has a say in the future of a company.
One of the key reasons there weren't more peasant revolutions was a combination of violence to suppress this, and, more importantly, ideological tools to keep peasants in line. That we still read our kids stories about how great princesses and kings are is evidence of how strong this feudal propaganda is.
Especially at software companies, the hardworking engineers are why the company can exist at all. How many times have engineers deeply cared about things such as quality of the code base, giving back to open source communities, or even things like ethical treatment of coworkers and users?
But we have been trained to treat CEOs and "leadership" like divinely ordained kings. Sure the VCs and Founders have laid out the capital to run the company, but capital alone does not make the company.
Have you never worked at a company where software engineers are forced by management to make very bad technical choices? Have you never been in a room where everyone working on the project sees clearly it will be a disaster but has absolutely zero say in the decisions around it? Have you never seen your company do questionably illegal or unethical things, where everyone working on the project wishes that they could stop things, but no individual wants to handle the risk of being a whistle-blower and having their career destroyed?
Imagine a startup or large tech company where collectively the engineers had a voice on par with the c-suite. Where they could say "I know that we have quarterly goals to meet, but we refused to ship new product until we have our infra in a least a semi-stable state. This will allow us to ship faster in the future and it's important for the company"
or
"We strongly believe that while this current feature does generate slightly more revenue, it is intentionally deceptive to users and ultimately harmful to them and our product, so we would like to see it changed or removed"
or
"X,Y and Z Open source products have saved us tremendous amount of capital, to continue to keep these ecosystems we depend on healthy, we demand that N hours a month be actively devoted to giving back to these projects"
or
"I know you are unhappy with employee 123, primarily because they have openly questioned the decisions of management. However they have no records of outright insubordination and are considered a valuable member of the technical team, so we will fight your request to fire them."
Labor having a voice is about far more than just salaries and benefits like it is for factory workers. And if you think the solution is just that engineering management needs to better represent their teams, then you likely haven't worked in management.
As for software engineers (apart from SQL ones who would of read your UNION JOIN as a whole different sentence), most grown up in a work environment that has seen the need for Unions moot as tech companies shifted in perks/remunerations that exceeded what many a Union could of dreamed of achieving. That alone seen the driver for Unions moot in many eye's, combined with a lack of tech focused Unions and the shift from lifer work mentality to few years being classed a long time at a company. Times changed and moved faster than many Unions.
However, many tech companies grown to the stage that they ain't all software engineers and the size/scale of them has seen them grow to the stage that some level of check like a Union wouldn't go amiss and opinions about unions as a whole been slowly improving in the past few years after decades of disdain. Thing is, what type of Union and is the need for a larger more tech orientated Union or lots of smaller ones? That's the crux.
Though when I started in tech, the worry about competition bugging the water cooler was the edge-case worry, today it's the company itself that has become that worry and less of an edge-case as well. So clearly the use of Unions does have some safety in voice for employee's.
*assuming the union only represented SWEs and not PMs/etc.
Laws and perceptions on unionisation of staff obviously differ heavily on a per-country basis.
edit: added last sentence
This doesn't preclude them from making decisions that favor the company over individual employees' best interests if the law allows it, but I can't think of an example of Google breaking employment law in, for example, Germany.
Can't seem to find anything else.
A Workers' Council is a legally recognized body representing employees of a single employer. It has very limited rights and duties, like being informed in the case of mass layoffs.
A union is a body that represents workers in an entire industry. It can have whatever duties the employees feel like giving it.
Note also that although France is often cited it actually has a very low unionisation rate, lower than the US, and e.g. the UK is massively more unionised. Unions are mostly active in the public sector. A specificity is that the right to strike is a constitutional right with quite lax requirements and it is a recurring debate that it is abused by unions. Union activity is also extremely protected so if you get elected as union rep it is virtually impossible to fire you for any reason.
e: surprising that this comment appears to be controversial
So it’s a bit disingenuous to say she was fired without mentioning her threat of resignation.
Unless you actually submit your resignation, I don't think they can just "accept" your resignation and that still counts as a firing.
In the United States, there is a huge difference legally between being fired and resigning. You don't get to declare someone else's "resignation" for them.
Maybe that's the logical thing, but lots of people also bluff and fail.
I think you are arguing that this is more straightforward than it really is. If we suppose (in absence of her actual email) that she declared "...make x, y, and z happen or I resign", that certainly reads as a (conditional) offer of resignation that can be accepted by the other party.
All of this is likely to end up in court and we'll get a decision on whether it was a resignation or firing.
"However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."
That isn't accepting previously offered conditions. I agree what it means legally will probably end up in court.
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392
From a legal perspective, she was quite clearly terminated. There was no point at which she "worked on a last date" (her exact words) with her management, they just sent her home.
Now, that said, except for her unemployment eligibility, there's not a lot of legal meaning to "terminated". A later law suit isn't going to be bound by definitions like this.
She did not post the actual email to twitter or elsewhere (nor did she attempt to effectively summarize, oddly). Were you a recipient? If so, please do share (if you're able to legally).
Side note: she is being strangely cryptic about the contents of the email in her tweets.
I am referring, specifically, to the as yet private email exchange between Timnit, Megan(?), and possibly others wherein Timnit offers an ultimatum which Google then declines.
Google terminated her employment sooner and for a different reason than she offered to resign. Firing someone who's offered to resign is still firing.
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467
In fact, there is no law that states resignation must be submitted in writing (though a contract can stipulate that requirement). I can walk into my boss' office and resign verbally with immediate effect. California is an "at will" state.
That said, I would be happy to read the source you're citing with respect to the employment law relating to resignation if it contradicts my claims.
Totally irrelevant to whether this was a resignation. Your boss can't "resign" you for any reason whatsoever, that is not what "at will" means.
> I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.
Was management "doing it right" by prohibiting such suits or did the employees have a point?
So, remembering that employees successfully organized to get Google management to end mandatory arbitration, whereas such requirements are still permitted by law, - that was the wrong approach, and employees should have continued waiting (and still waiting today) for congress to act?
Who determines the "right" place?
These activists present their activities as "union organizing","transparency and ethics", "whistleblowing, and other sweet-sounding and broadly-liked labels, but in reality, what they're doing is not any of these things. What these activists are actually doing is trying to turn the company into a vehicle for advancing their fringe vision for a Utopian society. And if you know your history, you should run away screaming from anyone trying to engineer a Utopia.
Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs. Companies should be mission focused. Coinbase got it right where Google got it wrong, and now Google's activist chickens are coming come to roost.
You mean internal-public, I assume. Memegen isn't public AFAIK.
> ... because of their privately-held political views
It's hard to get called out for privately-held political views. Things you do in public, though, have consequences.
> Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs
Is that a constraint we should extend to owners of companies also? Or is flexing muscle to advance personal ideological beliefs something only reserved for Fortune 500 owners? Google was outspokenly gay-friendly before that became a mainstream opinion in the US, to give a concrete example.
Google's treatment of Kay Coles James for example disgraced the company.
https://www.glaad.org/blog/heritage-foundation-intensely-ant...
Google is one of the most LGBT-friendly companies on Earth. It's not going to lose this spirit because it has someone from a milquetoast place like Heritage on some non-binding AI advisory board. The Kay Cole's James outrage mob was an ideological flex, not a genuine concern for the wellbeing of LGBT employees in the company.
The Kay Cole's James affair is a perfect example of the activist dynamic at Google: the activists claim to be protesting vulnerable people, but what they're actually doing is trying to sideline, delegitimize, and silence their political opponents.
> ideological flex
I'm not sure why you say that. the Googlers I corresponded with at the time had some serious questions about how this seemed to operate in contradiction to the company's goals. and if I recall correctly, the company was undergoing management shake up at the time, so I don't think it was an unfounded concern.
No, this is just wrong! If I'm making political statements in the public square (e.g. Twitter) then people should respect that as long as it's not something outlandish.
The problem is US politics is just too visceral.
In the eyes of these mobs, being a Trump supporter is akin to supporting the Nazis, and they rile everyone up to harass somebody who probably just wants lower taxes or border control.
Of course employees should be able to voice concerns about projects and policies and suggest an alternate strategy. But if leadership rejects that alternative strategy, that needs to be the end of it. If leadership disagrees with you, you can't just start leaking stuff to the press, doxxing people, and organizing protest events. A company is not Twitter and any healthy company should fire employees who are confused about the difference.
Not infrequently the consequences are literally disastrous and/or fatal. (See also Boeing, Lehman, Enron. HP at its worst, and many many more.)
What exactly gives corporations the moral authority to act like this?
Is it simply that large accumulations of money somehow render other moral concerns irrelevant, as if by magic?
I mean, maybe. They'd ban them if the few people were the owners and the SVPs.
If they company did, they'd be within their rights to. The only problem would be all the money they'd leave on the table. Usually (1), that's been the backstop against corporations operating with their private ethics on their sleeve; corps that make a habit of leaving money on the table tend to get left behind by the market.
If Google started banning GCP use for ethical reasons, some other company would step up to fill the gap; no doubt.
(1) Usually. Chik-fil-A supports conversion therapy for LGBTQ people and Hobby Lobby's owners have used their assets for "art acquisition" that was illegal.
Are you saying that this extreme "personal ideological belief" you just stated is applicable to every single company on the planet?
I suspect this employee immediately started receiving targeted ads.
Why should google employees expect privacy protections that google customers don't get?
These threads from a year ago are related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21520129
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21634095
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21813619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21960921