
Google employees are staging a sit-in to protest reported retaliation - thereare5lights
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/google-employees-are-staging-a-sit-in-to-protest-reported-retaliation/
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googthrow2019
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.

Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

~~~
justin66
> Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

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?

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jchw
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.)

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dx034
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.

~~~
jchw
Sure, but Tor is overkill for any real or imagined threat in this case. So
frankly, I don’t see the reason to single that aspect out.

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InTheArena
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.

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notyourday
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.

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cjhopman
4-5x federal median wage is new grad level at Google.

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bradleyjg
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.

~~~
spyspy
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?

~~~
skybrian
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?

[https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-
for-...](https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-
microsoft-yahoo-google-and-facebook-9ede22a37824)

~~~
puzzle
The new headcount is coming from cloud. Lots of sales people in particular.

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tyingq
The original walk out had an estimated count of 20,000. Any estimated counts
for the sit-in yet? Or just anecdotal...is it a lot of employees?

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analognoise
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.

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v7p1Qbt1im
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.

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natalyarostova
The implicit unionization benefits of being too smart to readily fire.
Interesting.

~~~
pm90
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.

~~~
simple_phrases
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.

~~~
pm90
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.

~~~
simple_phrases
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.

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novok
How does a sit in work?

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nonbel
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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mesozoic
Sounds like a normal day at work.

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sureaboutthis
A big company is difficult to manage. Why aren't these employees being more
effective by targeting the abusers instead?

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jarym
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?

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jarym
Getting downvoted here but really not sure why - don't live in Silicon Valley
(or the States for that matter) and it was a genuine question.

