However, I also think if you're employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same "protest" or "civil disobedience" type behavior.
It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don't wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of "Then why do you?". It seems like their choice is obvious.
It’s up to the individual to decide if this employee was right or wrong about the issue at hand, but puzzling over whether or not they’re some sort of fool for strongly believing in something seems a bit obtuse.
He chose a much simpler path. Disruptively virtue signal knowing he would be fired. Now he can slide into a smaller progressive tech company where he will be lauded for his virtue, used by the company for PR, and ultimately not judged by the quality of his work.
This was a thoughtfully orchestrated career strategy first, protest second. It was well done and I think he’s set himself up nicely for the next 5-10 years.
If you disagree and think he was risking his future instead of securing it, I would humbly ask why? Both the media and Google’s response were 100% predictable.
If I were him I’d try to move into a fuzzy, semi-technical role with some public presence. Something like DevRel seems the ideal target and maximizes the PR benefit for his employer.
Context matters. If someone just called the CEO an f-word in public, that’s one thing, and imo it doesn’t necessarily deserve getting fired on its own.
But interrupting a major conference during a keynote, and then saying those things? Yeah, that would land you into trouble, almost no matter what you said.
I fully and honestly believe that even if the employee took the pro-Israel stance with their “interrupt the keynote” protest, they would have been fired just the same.
Companies are indeed hierarchical, and sometimes it feels like people forget that. You can indeed be fired at any time, and this is exactly the kind of situation you can put yourself in to have it happen to you.
Old twitter post acquisition would have terminated those 600 employees, too?
I hope "west" society isn't demanding either obedience or cancelling your ideas. That much happens in Venezuela.
It would be morally correct to allow a little leeway for expressing a shared opinion, then call for order, and remind collaborators to follow proper channels to "continue discussion". And, of course, not shutting down nor ignore such continued discussion.
TLDR: Google is evil all the way down.
In such a world "reasonable expectations" by their nature foster a continuation of the existing power structures. Behavior that challenges "reasonable expectations" does so precisely because of the belief that the continuation of the status quo as perpetuated by those in power has become untenable.
Many people "reasonably expect" nations and companies to not be complicit in genocide, where is their recourse?
I wouldn't want another employee interrupting my meeting like that either.
As for the rest of your "salve owner" commentary I think that's an absurd comparison.
Laws and rules are created and enforced by people in power. They are designed to force the less powerful to behaving in a certain way. It has nothing to do with “morals” or “justice”. You might happen to agree morally with certain laws or rules and not with others. However that doesn’t matter unless you are powerful enough to change those laws.
In the case of companies, the people in power can make whatever rules they want. Unless more powerful people (the government/large groups of costumers/powerful unions) threaten the company with repercussions if those rules aren’t changed.
Imagine (for example) a group of Vegans becoming powerful enough to outlaw eating meat. With heavy penalties (including death by execution) for anybody buying or selling meat for consumption. That is absolutely something that could happen. With the most extreme Vegans feeling morally justified in enforcing those rules. The only thing stopping this from happening is their lack of power.
Another example is religion. Do as your told or you will go to hell. If you truly believe there is a hell then this threat is the most extreme usage of power you can possible imagine. We are talking about being tortured all the time in every conceivable way forever.
> One employee asked about Gemini's bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, "Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?" the chatbot didn't have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered "Absolutely," followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion.
> CNBC replicated the search Thursday afternoon and found the same results.
Dreadful.
Works at Google and says he *refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*!? Who do you think you've been working for?
It was more side commentary on how any large organizational structure is non-homogeneous. I mean we can say the same about countries: America, Israel, Palestine, China, Russia, <insert whatever here>. I believe we have words for aggregating (pigeon holing) the views of diverse nonhomogeneous groups based on a shared physical attribute of said group that has no causal relationship to said views. A person is not their {company,country,race,religion,political group} or many other things. I thought that was the point of our cultural progression: to recognize that a tree is not a forest. Even if it can help to talk about a forest at times, it would be absurd to think all the trees are the same. Must be pretty dense ;)
I find this viewpoint astonishing personally, but that might have to do with my upbringing and cultural background.
> There are 3 million co-ops around the world – with 1.2 billion members.
> That means 12% of the people on Earth are part of a co-op.
With co-ops being just one particularly prominent form of democratic business structure, workplace democracy is not quite as marginal a notion as you might think.
I actually like working at a corporation because I don't have to play politics or worry about parts of the business I'm not involved in. It would be hell if I had to spend my evenings in meetings about foreign policy issues or disciplinary hearings for employees in other departments.
Not that world politics should have much to do with company matters
Whether or not that’s “right” or “wrong” is an entirely separate matter, of course.
But it doesn’t surprise me, not in the least.
All the resources you consume (food, land, money) are controlled by these various organizations which you must submit to, or suffer their consequences. And submitting to them empowers them further.
But I guess I'm that guy who still resents that since then Google has fully evolved into yet another mindless corporate greed machine.
What some employees haven't quite learned yet is how to read between the lines. They are certain topics which are ok to protest and be vocal about, but others, are not, like unions or this case. To be safe, it's better to think of "bring your whole self to work" as a gullibility trap. It may not be that, but effectively it will function as such. It catches the naive troublemakers so later on they can be filtered out.
I suspect, though, that in most companies the employees already know what would happen, and would not do things like that - first, because they don't feel entitled using the company's resources for personal goals, and second - because the consequences may be too heavy for them. But in Google, one probably can be both rich enough already to be fired and not sweat about it too much, and entitled enough to feel like something like this is the right thing to do.
Those who are educated are more able to clearly understand the consequences of their actions or inactions and understand lack of solidarity for others means lack of solidarity for yourself.
The purpose of liberal education is to teach people how to critically think and build a world that they themselves would like to live in, so when a liberally educated ambitious person realizes that they are contributing to building a lesser world it becomes problematic and they correctly feel a need to take responsibility for building a better future.
Add in a legacy of declaring that "don't be evil" is a founding principle and you are going to find people being pretty upset about being lured in with promises of social responsibility and like-minded peers, only to find an ethically devoid pursuit of next quarters profit that can be found at nearly any company in America.
In this example we have one person, that might be telling.
So while it might be a problem, I'm not sure how widespread it is.
He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.
I would speculate it has something to do with what age range they like to hire or their branding. But I'm not sure.
At my previous company, at an offsite retreat, one of the guys got drunk and started chewing out the company's founders and the main office manager. Sure enough, he was fired by the time the retreat was over, and was never seen in the office again. A similar thing happened to someone who had a huge blowout argument and emailed the entire company his manifesto (of sorts).
Bet you will find that clause, a clause often with no title but commonly referred to as the "moral clause" (or behavior code or morality clause or even "bad boy clause") that is embedded (often claimed by so-call-victims as "hidden") somewhere in the middle of your lengthy employment contract.
At any rate, you cannot say you weren't warned.
There are some issues that are worth speaking up about. There are some issues that are worth being fired over.
An Israeli presenter who is based in Israel is being protested. Was there any connection beyond that to the war?
You can also see the conference he was attending itself hardly shies away from the political/military connections, e.g.
“The Israeli tech ecosystem is built on very strong foundations. We have the academia, we have the manpower, and we have the special military units,” said Dina Pasca-Raz, Partner and Head of Technology at KPMG Israel. “There are many, many areas of strength [0]
Israel's ambassador to the UN also gave an extremely emphatic "no ceasefire" speech at this totally apolitical Google-sponsored tech conference with no connection to the war.[1]
[0] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjlvv676t
[1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ryymzd7a6
I don't know what the answer is, and I appreciate the urgency of feeling that causes people to protest, but at this point I'm pretty sure most protest gestures do little other than feed the tribal vortex at the heart of the hurricane, especially the farther away from any actual leverage points on the dynamic that they are. And an Israeli tech exec existing and doing tech exec things is probably not close to a leverage point, nor is protesting them doing tech exec things doing anything worth levering.
I think this is important to reiterate. Because forces us to pay close attention to the details. There are extremely reasonable justifications for both sides because both sides have committed atrocities. This conflict goes a long way back and I'm in no position to claim who started it. But I can recognize that one atrocity does not justify another. I can recognize that justifying or dismissing the committing of an atrocity only further enables the conflict. Whichever side you land on, if you do not take a highly nuanced approach you are only further enabling conflict. For that's a key reason the conflict continues today. War always includes psychological warfare because you have to convince humans to do the inhumane. There is no such thing as a righteous war.
War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
- [0]
Ever.
How can these two thoughts go together? Either its a horrible "ethnostate" or its a reasonable construct due to Jews special history.
Any history of ethnic suffering creates a situation where it's natural to suspect outgroup society can't be trusted to reliably treat the ingroup adequately well. So in response, they might create institutions that privilege the ingroup and prioritize its security and prosperity. Outgroup rights & dignity may even become negotiable or disposable in the name of ingroup priorities, sometimes even basic rights like property, freedom of movement, or life.
This of course guarantees the outgroup will have legitimate and serious grievances (along with any less legitimate ones they may or may not have), which will eventually mean they too may feel justified in approaching the problem from a never-again ingroup-first perspective, probably eventually including organized violence and whatever system oriented around these values that they can.
Voilà: self-sustaining conflict dynamic. And everything seemed at least locally justifiable all along the way. After all, what's wrong with providing ingroup security, and punishing outgroup aggression?
Or is there something wrong with it?
Makes 0 sense for us to take sides in this conflict.
Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so. Israel is not the genocidal agent here.
VERY low level.
> Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so.
This isn't true. Hamas taxes the inhabitants of Gaza [0].
Israel collects taxes on imports and exports from Gaza, and income tax on the pay of Gaza residents who were employed inside Israel. But transactions which occur entirely inside Gaza are not taxed by Israel, only by Hamas.
[0] see e.g. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/2024/01/23/hamas-fundin...
Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world.
Israel is not entitled to kill civilians under any circumstances, not even if Hamas makes it hard to attack Hamas directly. If you look at the statements of Israeli leaders, it is clear that the killing of Palestinians is intentional [1]. As has been the long policy of apartheid and annexation of the West bank (where, you might remember, there is no Hamas).
Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
If you want to argue with someone who said any of that, find someone who actually said it. Pointing out that Israel is an inherently inequitable ethnostate should have made it pretty clear I'm hardly trying to "absolve" Israel of anything, and that's not the only clue in my comment.
If you're having trouble parsing out what I actually said, you're welcome to ask actual questions rather than rhetorically leading ones (much less wildly putting words in my mouth).
You might also find how I responded in another branch helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662944
as well as meditating the difference between speaking in terms of the understandable and the excusable.
> Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
You might imagine Google has leverage (that perhaps a sufficiently large number of employees could apply themselves to) with Israel to get them to abandon their current policy by threatening to withdraw from their contract. It's pretty likely that they don't, even assuming what Google provides isn't fungible.
One of Hamas' goals is apparently to provoke Israel to continue to kill civilians in hopes that it ruins Israel's relations with various western institutions. If that starts to actually work even with smaller stakes players like Google, it's likely enough they'll do more of what works.
And it actually gets traction fairly easily because there are people in the Israeli government who, as you point out, apparently prefer unrestrained aggression as a strategy for advancing various internal agendas. And some of them have the talent for actually consolidating internal power as international criticism and isolation increases.
This conflict is happening both because real grievances provide the groundwork and because there are actors on both sides of the conflict who genuinely think they have something to gain from acting as they have since October, even in the face of unconscionable slaughter (which can, after all, be converted to grievance fuel). The United States government can barely bring to bear pressure that restrains it. The idea that Google can do much seems even thinner.
(I agree, by the way, that Israel has responded in ways that are wrong morally and probably wrong strategically. It's similar in some ways to US mistakes post 9/11, and our eventual transition to more focused counterterrorism criminal and military ops seems to have worked out much better for us, though Israel has enough plausibly different problems I'm sure there are some apples and oranges.)
I personally have felt a bit more optimistic about the long term future.
Coming of age in post 9/11 America and going from the warm embrace of playing my Nintendo 64 everyday to seeing regular people go full on hate for people like me was a depressing era that I thought would never end. It certainly shaped how I view myself as a human. I guess you can say the haters got to me. A lot of things I aspired to in middle school completely ended in high school because of this self-hate.
I felt renewed hope during the Obama years in college but never really shook off this feeling. After all long term damage was already done regarding the path I took in life.
When Trump got elected, I felt all depressed all over again because all those terrible people came right back out of the shadows yet again but I eventually realized (finally) that I cannot keep letting this affect me. I had to focus on how lucky I am to have what I have and do the best I can.
When this attack happened, I thought oh no not again. Overnight all those people came out of the shadows yet again. But this time I saw something amazing. I saw countless numbers of people organizing against the Israeli siege: all over the world including the US. My initial thought was this is just a temporary blip and people will get tired and move on. Nope: protests continued even in the US which I was sure would just move on from caring about Muslims. It sometimes feels like the US will not come to the defense of Muslims like they would other groups. We see it in the favorability polling. But these protests: I have seen first hand, how this has really scared a lot of those people that normally come out of the shadows. The first time I have seen this in my life.
Now the protests are being dismissed as if they are nothing. Attempts are being made to silence any avenue they use to communicate. Meta platforms were already blocking this stuff, they deployed the standard bucket of tricks to silent dissent on Youtube and Reddit(thank god for HN) and now the potential banning of the 400lb gorilla in the room: Tiktok. This tool of potential Chinese propaganda helped serve a useful purpose: it amplified conversations that are normally taboo in the US.
So going back to why I feel a bit optimistic? Well I believe this is a signature event for Millennials and especially Gen Z. Gen Z is a generation that grew up with so many problems thrown in their faces (the mental illness caused by smartphones, graduating into a terrible job market, no prospects of owning property, having to live to see climate change etc.)
As a result they started out of the gate super pessimistic about the powers that be. I saw the unbelievable boost in Bernie Sanders's candidacy thanks the the efforts of these people. We really could be seeing a future Gen Z president who is in one of these pro-Palestinian protests.
Lets not even get into Gen-Alpha. They are on track to be the first majority non-white generation in America. How will that affect their world views?
Meanwhile where is Israel? This country that has continually gotten the benefit of the doubt my entire life has severely damaged its reputation in the eyes of young people world wide. The people that are about to take power. At the same time, they can't even get their own house in order regarding their government. This attack has proven that despite their supposed brilliance in war technology (Unit 8200, Stuxnet, etc.) they can really mess up and look like a bunch of dopes shattering the image that they are invincible.
In all Israel is trying to hold together by pushing back against "political" entropy, at some point given all the things that have transpired, entropy will win. How long will it take? Who knows. But I don't think you can make young people "unlearn" their views on Israel at this point and thats the challenge groups like AIPAC are going to have to face.
Now I do want to give an opposite view: That this is indeed a flash in the pan
Here is Noah Smith's recent article on how both the far right and far left are dying.
[1]: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/getting-past-the-2010s
>"I think this is part of the reason progressives are turning more and more toward Palestine as their single overarching cause. The extremist types who dominate progressive groups after “evaporative cooling” has removed the moderates are more likely to be leftist types, who see all political action as falling under one unifying anti-Western decolonial revolutionary struggle. And with general enthusiasm on the wane, activist groups are looking for something that can restore the free-flowing rage from which they drew their energy in the 2010s.
>And if you’re going to unite around a single cause, I suppose Palestine isn’t such a bad choice. Israel’s war in Gaza has been undeniably brutal — not a real genocide, but similar to Bashar al-Assad’s bloody indiscriminate crushing of rebellious provinces in Syria. Hamas is evil, but that doesn’t mean tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians need to die. And support for Palestine gets massive amounts of support and attention from foreigners on social media, boosting online engagement — which might encourage more Americans to be activists.
>The problem here is that as with every progressive activist cause, activist movements are embracing the most extreme possible position. Instead of simply calling for a cease-fire, many, like Aaron Bushnell, demand the destruction of Israel. Whereas a normal liberal might use the term “apartheid” to refer to Israel’s disgraceful treatment of West Bank Palestinians, progressives increasingly use the word to mean the very existence of the state of Israel. And when they call for “decolonization”, progressives increasingly mean the mass expulsion of Israelis from the region.
>That is not a position that the U.S. — or other powerful countries — are ever going to support. Staking out this extreme position might seem to reduce the risk that the issue will be solved anytime soon — even if Israel stops its war, progressive activists can keep on marching for Palestine as long as Israel continues to exist. But ultimately that will drain the moral force from the progressive position, causing the activist base to shrink even further."
Frankly I dont know really know how the wind will end up blowing but lets all see what happens.
Why is your response as a Muslim to the horrific attack of Oct 7th a worry about backlash to you personally? vs. e.g. feeling for the victims of that attack?
This feels very tribal to me. Do you really think this is the right framing?
If Israelis suffer, is that somehow going to fix your problem? Are we trying to make things better to all or make things worse for all but feel like we're doing something? It seems to me the protests are doing the latter. I think, and I might be naive, that if the global Muslim community engaged with the intent of finding ways to make this win-win, we could get somewhere. But it seems the community is engaged in lose-lose (or maybe lose-lose-lose).
Expecting a company to kowtow to your belief system betrays a conceited/pretentious view of the world around you. If you don't like the job, leave it.
When Nestle tries to hook babies to a baby formula in order to exploit their parents for profit, that's not Nestle doing it - it's the workers at Nestle doing it. The legal ecosystem might or might not hold these people responsible depending on the jurisdiction but that doesn't change who is actually choosing to do it or not.
It is also nothing wrong with attempting to influence the actions of these people and its also normal to get fired for this. Even if you fail to influence those people, in retrospect you elevate the chances for these people to be deeply ashamed of and insulated from the society because of their choices. You can at least deny them the privilege of going around, giving speeches and get applause at the age when they have all the money they need and crave for the recognition for their achievements, love of people and want to believe that their lives were not waisted. Even if you can't take away their penthouses, you can make them cry in these penthouses.
It is a good practice to shame people because it is one of the motivator for their actions.
You're own profile says "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." but clearly this only applies for the 8 hours of the day I am not at work (less if I work late)?
I'm just saying that the person should fully expect to be fired for that sort of behavior, and take that into consideration. There is a time and place, and work is not it. Don't crap where you eat, etc.
If you did that in my house, I'd (politely) kick you out. You're welcome to disagree with me, but if you're inside my house then it's on my terms.
Meanwhile in your bio:
"I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So which is it? Defend those who speak up or demand they leave and berate them as "conceited/pretentious"?
Flip the argument around. Rank-and-file employees believe they have the right to not shut the fuck up about issues that concern them. Emigrate to a more authoritarian country if you don't like it.
This person sacrificed their job to draw attention to their pet issue. What did they expect to happen? Google was going to stop the event and sit down with the employee and negotiate? Google has a disruptive employee, that is costing them more money than they are making them, and so got rid of them. No ones rights were violated.
If we are going to go back to the good old days™ then at the very least the market needs to see elons companies crash and burn to show that his kind of management does not work long term. So far the opposite is happening.
Don't like not having your every whim kowtow'd to by people below you? Well, feel free to fire and incur the increased uninsurance premiums that will detract from your bottom line. And hey, there's other places to hire people in. But oh wait.... Everywhere else still recognizes the legotimacy of secondary strikes. Let me know how that works for ya.
Or... You know, listen to the people actually doing the hard work. Be a pity if something unfortunate were to happen to that all those cooperative people that make you making money possible.
There is a wide disagreement as to who is at fault and what is to be done here. Stakes are high, people are dying. Resolving that is pretty much the exclusive realm of politics, and (when that fails) warfare.
If Google want to pretend their founding principal is "do the right thing", and put that front and center in their employee handbook - well, I'd say they have limited ability to complain when employees act on that, at least without being exposed for hypocrisy. Google can't have its cake and eat it too.
Oh I totally agree, I have zero love for Google or FAANG etc... they need to get reigned in.
It's just that, on this particular point (tolerating disruptive workplace behavior), I'm on the side of Google (and every other company) here.
> Expecting a company to kowtow to your belief system betrays a conceited/pretentious view of the world around you.
I agree and I would call that delusional.
On the desparate side, the trust in government and faith in the democratic system are in shambles. I'm not even sure a frustrated Google Engineer can see the bottom of the despair issue. People do not believe their local, state, or federal governments can do a anything, particularly for the common good.
Take my hometown, of ~20K, that once had a fully functioning clinic and hospital. About ten years ago, the hospital was rebuilt, much nicer building but only 2 ER rooms and no critical long-term care. I suggested to my brother the town ought to have made approval of the construction dependent on providing essential services. He is smart but that idea didn't even register as a legitimate political concern. He doesn't think the government can do anything, least of all for the public good.
That sentiment is building and it's a vicious, reinforcing cycle. I dearly hope something will change before there is only the faintest hope of change.
I get it... the angst is real... things are wrong and feel like they are spiraling... systems are failing us, we no longer trust each other, or that there is a common good. Because people can't put their finger on what's causing it, they lash out in unpredictable ways, like this. This widespread disaffection will likely get much worse before it gets better.
That said -- I still believe in free speech and rule of law. No government stopped this employee from speaking their mind -- and they weren't jailed -- this is a good thing. And Google, a company owned by citizens, whose event was disrupted -- should be free to fire disruptive employees. The fact they did so is also a good thing.
What I'm saying is that what happened here isn't the problem -- but to your point it is a symptom of something wider that is going on. A malaise/cancer that seems to have taken over and is rapidly metastasizing.
Rightfully so. Name me the big tech company who wouldn't fire such an employee instantly.
"Unsurprisingly so" I can get behind. But "rightfully" is a stretch I wouldn't agree with.
Who in their right mind who says “I refuse to build technology that ____” wouldn’t already be planning to quit barring outrageous hypocrisy? Who in their right mind screams it out in the middle of a presentation without expecting to be dragged out?
Personally I don't think firing him helps Google's PR, rather it makes them look even more "evil". (To clarify, I am NOT saying that it is unexpected for a company to fire such a person. Expectations != what's the morally correct != reality, I'm just commenting on a part of the equation.)
The chickens are coming home to roost and they don't like it so much anymore.
Just because something is done by most companies doesn't make it okay. Are mass layoffs "rightful" in any sense of that word?
I don't see those as inherently right or wrong.
People can rightly protest the way layoffs are conducted but the idea that a company is "wrongful" to have a layoff sometimes is silly.
Mass layoffs are part of the Faustian bargain you accept when you sign the offer letter to work at the behemoths of capitalism. These are the biggest like top 10 companies in the whole world.
It’s just business.
But then again even those making 400k plus TC make appeals to emotion instead of rational thinking.
There are plenty of jobs for these people where they can make 200k TC and not risk getting fired, which is still a good salary.
If you want more and more, you must play with the devil. It’s really not that complicated.
(It's hard to come up with a good example that demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about, because the topic is highly subjective, highly emotional, and has a few different angles. There are a million different things the parent could have said to communicate an attitude that doesn't imply an emotional, moral, or political distaste for the context of the protest itself. My example isn't necessarily "correct" for the parent.)
I don't think such behavior would be tolerated most anywhere.
Your argument gives me pause. Maybe it's not that good of an idea.
It's not possible to be a consumer brand and support Israel. The world is too divided and it's not getting any less so.
I think the more moderate view is that Israel suffered a heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by a terrorist group in power. Israel has a right to defend their people from such attacks and a military response shouldn't be surprising given the extent of the crimes. However, the people in Gaza (non terrorists) are also human beings who should be treated that way. Not everyone supports the terrorist actions (apparently Hamas is incredibly unpopular amongst the people, but they have little discourse if they don't want to disappear) and the military response from Israel seems to have gotten to a point where children being blown up and starving to death somehow comes with the territory. Surely there is a way to reduce the casualties of innocent bystanders. Surely Israel should provide food and aid to the people after bombing all their infrastructure into the stone age.
I admit not being as informed as I should be, but just how many times are we going to have genocide before we learn to stop? Just since the Holocaust we've had genocide in Cambodia, Serbia, Rwanda, China, and now Gaza. In the more distant past it was even more common (e.g. trail of tears).
Sometimes I get so frustrated by the one-sidedness of so much of our news. I try to read at least one article a day which opposes my worldview with an open mind, just to keep myself balanced.
Lately I feel like it's color war, with more details omitted on both sides than are written. I feel like I'm standing in the supermarket isle reading the tabloids, and that is all there is to read.
/endrant
Could anyone point me to a site that offers relatively short articles, lots of facts and minimal hyperbole, and which represents all sides of an issue - not necessarily the middle [since I don't think it is possible to truly be impartial], but something that will give fair representation to both sides [you could have a staff that includes, say, liberals and conservatives]?
While I was there, multiple Googlers actively reached out to me and other Arabs and asked them "Do you support Hamas?" These also weren't just low-level employees either. I had these experiences from software developers all the way to managers and HR people.
These employees that did that are still employed at Google despite the complaints. Multiple Arab and Palestianian coworkers of mine have also left Google since then.
This is not the first time I have seen bizarre hyperbole like this - it's quite strange. Russia, China, and King George III all have and had people killed for dissent. Google didn't murder this engineer, imprison him, or anything of the sort. They just stopped paying his salary.
I have no doubt they actively work in forums like these and try their best at applying pressure for which works sometimes and other times does not.
Businesses that live and breathe billions do not care and any attempt to cave into employee demands, then the investors will move in and force it through their changes. (Especially public companies)
A single employee has almost no power at all, which is rightful.
If a person disagrees with Google's policies, and are not in a position (as VP) to change them, they should simply quit the company.
If instead, they decide to take deliberate actions which hurt the business (and thereby their peers), then the company should quit them.
Seriously, it's as simple as that. We are here to work, not philosophize about politics and current events.
No politics for you. The corporate strategy, governance, hiring, dealmaking, etc... will all be politically informed. All your work will contribute to the political beliefs of leadership. It's such a strange abstraction to believe that you're somehow separate from that.
It's ingratitude at some level. If workers should not be grateful to their employers for their jobs, that's a different conversation, but yeah, sabotaging an external PR event -- what employer is going to giggle, clap, and congratulate this person's "bravery" ?? termination had to be expected here.
Amusingly, the employee now gets 6+ months of unemployment benefits to contemplate the means of their activism.
It's like hiring a bunch of Christians because the "Jesus loves you" PR angle was hot at the time, and now almost a decade later your company struggles to acknowledge the existence of gay people. Don't hire ideologues, especially en masse.
The faster google can get these people out the door, the better. Focus on the tech, not social issues.
The moral and ethical thing to do would be to not work for that company.
Its just a job they lost, its not like they are 5 years old, watched their parents slowly bleed out after bombardments while starving to death - mkay?
Its arguably a good way to get fired. Even said they want no part in it.
Management works to serve those corporate interests, so it is in their interest to convey the message that the appropriate thing to do is be silent and comply.
Supporting a state, that is actively committing a genocide, with cloud services is a political choice.
Write an open letter with signatures of many of your colleagues, or in extreme cases organize a walk-out or a strike in protest. Don't disrupt a meeting by yelling that you refuse to do your job, especially when it seems the meeting had nothing at all to do with the war and it was just that the presenter was Israeli and working in Israel... that's not so much a protest and more just racist.
You work in tech, probably in silicon valley. It was created by the department of defense.
What a brave person. He probably knew consequences. He can look in the mirror without shame.
Well, then Google did him a favor by firing him. Saved him from hypocrisy, since he could have quit long before that.
> Under a $1.2 billion contract, technology companies Google (Google Cloud Platform) and Amazon (Amazon Web Services) were selected to provide Israeli government agencies with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
> A Republican plan, approved by the United States House of Representatives, allocates $14.5 billion in military aid for Israel.
> Julian Assange speaking in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1581698912447975424
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nimbus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Isra....
I mean I’m sure he was hoping that it would change somebody’s mind, but you’ve got to know that’s a long shot.
Therefore by your standards the GCP execs relating to engagements to the Israeli Einsatzgruppen Force and their co-conspirators (including the U.S military) should be fired.
More explicitly: you can be (and are encouraged to be) anti-genocide at google. However, disrupting a public company meeting is definitely a fireable offense.
So yes, it is a fireable offense because "We're actually the good guys" to suggest otherwise will label you a bunch of names.
Well google cloud can't power genocide, so what is your problem?
Can't we just assume that the person is bored, overly political and naive?
There is a book every technologist should read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
As the proverb says, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
And this is a quote that ever technologist should also know. Anyway Israel is hardly engaged with a genocide currently, and even if it was there is absolutely no evidence that google cloud is having any kind of participation in it.
So once again - just political grandstanding like the dimwits that throw soup at the mona lisa and glue themselves to the asphalt that think that this performative crap is cost free. Thankfully this time it was not cost free.
In my org, if I disrupted someone’s presentation over any topic I’d be fired. Or maybe severely reprimanded.
This behavior surprises me because these are private orgs. So doing unprofessional things will result in firings or whatnot.
It seems odd to me that people think it’s appropriate to protest within a company. If you don’t want to “build technology that powers genocide” (kind of comical considering how huge and pervasive google is) then quit. Similarly if I don’t want to make bombs, I shouldn’t work for a bomb company.
Finally, it just seems stupid to think this would change corporate decision making. What kind of reasoning and logic ends up with “disrupt a meeting -> google changes business policy regarding Israel?”
Irony is we applaud those whom resisted Nazism. Rightly.
I invite everyone to read Norman Finelstein whos father was a resistor to Nazism explain the similarities to concentration camps and Gaza.
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/norman-finkelstein-gaza-...
In grade school, it was universally known that if you use violence before attempting to run away, you're getting in trouble. I don't know why companies haven't made an equally clear universal rule that "if you say something publicly before running it by us, you're getting fired".
I had to go through training that said what happens if I do something like this.
Now it's politics they don't like and they want to close Pandora's box. I feel no pity for them or the fired employee.
This is why we have social norms to keep politics private.