Perhaps I'm still too naive and innocent, but I don't think this represents the overall reality of the company. A lot of people participated in the protests mentioned and only two statements of retaliations were given (edit: or at least leaked to the media), with "more than a dozen" shared during the meeting in question. Given the sheer size of the company, if there was "systemic" retaliation I'd expect these to be in the order of a few hundreds, or many dozens at the least.
In addition, we're only seeing this from the perspective of those who feel they were retaliated against because of those protests, with absolutely no additional context or perspective of the managers/execs/peers (which I think we will never obtain for rather obvious reasons).
Personally, I have found Google to have a really open culture of communication. You're generally free to give your opinion. I'd be much more afraid of retaliation from peers due to something I said being considered offensive by some of them, than by an executive or my manager due to speaking out against the way the company does things (which happens all the time and by large amounts of employees). Of course that's just one experience and I may have been lucky with my own team.
disclaimer: I recently joined Google but I'm only aware of these incidents from media publications such as this and everything above is just my personal opinion on the incident.
Edit: Added that "more than a dozen" other stories were shared in the meeting according to the article, as I had originally missed that.
For each reporter - how many people do you think did not report?
Do you honestly think ALL people reported?
If its not dozens unreported per one report (or more) I'd eat my hat.
In my history of corporations, almost all bad behavior goes unreported because those in power are doing the bad thing. It seems like Google is not different in this respect.
> For each reporter - how many people do you think did not report?
For group discussions with no negative impact, there tends to be a 1-9-90 rule. 1% of the group is highly active, 9% are somewhat active, 90% are passive.
I believe it's safe to assume that similar ratios can be found in incidents like this - 1% or fewer will go public, 9% will go to their colleagues, and 90% will suffer in silence.
You could also question the validity/fairness of existing complaints.
Ultimately, I don't think taking the argument down this path of conjecture over allegations (or lack thereof) will help clear our view of what is or is not the reality at the company. That's what company wide satisfaction surveys or platforms like Glassdoor are for. And in both accounts I don't see many signs that Google is doing poorly.
Edit: and the results of investigations prompted by these accusations might shed some light as well.
The problem with that is that only a very small portion of employees actually work on the parts of Google that make money. Everything else is an experiment or hedge.
I think it's not even a hedge or experiment. Everything else they do is smoke and mirrors to keep themselves out of the anti-trust cross hairs.
If all they do is search, they have no competitors and are a defacto Monopoly. But as it stands, they can pretend they have many competitors by being in lots of different tiny businesses.
Alphabet helps the narrative as well. Oh, Google is a monopoly? Well that's just one of the many businesses we own. Never mind that we lose money on everything else and sell fewer smartphones in a year that apple sells in less than a week.
EU has completely different rules for monopolies. And the US is based in the US which accounts for around half it's revenue and probably an even higher percentage of its profit. They are most vulnerable in regards to US law.
They already sunk a large military contract and are setting their sights on AI in general. If Google accedes to all the various pet issues of individuals working there then they won't have a business anymore.
This is the risk of appeasement. Google (and every company for that matter) should try a new stance: If you fundamentally disagree with the areas and methods that our leadership has chosen for our business, then find a new place to work. Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable.
To be fair, Google was the one that came up with "Don't be evil" in the first place. I'm sure that attracted a bunch of talented bright-eyed engineers with a black and white sense of morality. This helped them in the past, but they now have to live with the consequences of their narrative.
I've always felt that it's good to let people know if you have a problem BEFORE ditching them. If they don't change, then I can leave with a clean conscience. Sometimes they decide to change, sometimes they don't. When they don't, sometimes they change after I leave, sometimes they don't. This is the normal back-and-forth between parties that won't always agree.
I don't really see a reason to be upset at communication and get angry about "appeasement".
> Google (and every company for that matter) should try a new stance...
The "stance" you describe is not a new stance at all. It is a very old one-- as old as working-for-the-man itself.
Perhaps it was pipe dream to actually believe the "don't be evil" pledge?
Whatever the case, the outrage of the dissents does seem cloyingly naive and I find it difficult to feel sorry for them. Maybe it's time for people to learn that "mega-corps" aren't exactly the best place for idealists after all.
It might be a good thing for google to shed some talent to the wind and see what comes of it. Who knows, it might lower housing cost and seed many more start-ups and small businesses with new people.
As for "don't be evil" that became useless a long time ago, it was just an invitation for everyone to describe their pet hate as "evil" even when that was clearly over the top. When I worked there I routinely saw trivial things like reskins of Gmail be described as evil (because we're ignoring feedback from users who didn't like it!). The word became debased to the point that it was worthless to even have such a slogan.
All the current issues are morally debatable at best, and simply not evil at worst. Even if you consider the US military hopelessly bloated, for example, is their view that the USA shouldn't have an army to defend itself at all? If not, why not, and how is it consistent with wanting Google to not be involved in such matters?
I come to a similar conclusion as you but from an opposite side.
It really is morally indefensible that Google provide technology for military drone warfare (for example). If someone working at Google finds that ghoulish, it is their responsibility to speak up about it and leave (or be fired) if that's what it comes down to. Lucky for them, they probably have plenty of job prospects and don't "need" Google.
Similarly for the military, they're perfectly capable of funding and staffing their own research centers on novel ways to incinerate human beings. Does a surveillance capitalism platform really need to do that for them?
Sure these activists can go work for a non-profit which supports their moral stances but who will pay for that $1.5 million dollar mortgage and new tesla in the driveway? I’m sorry but I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who spouts righteous indignation on the evils of big tech but has no problem cashing that fat big tech paycheck.
Honestly, though, speaking as someone who had to use things made by military contractors, having people who object to the military working on them seems like a recipe for disaster.
But that's a pretty small slice of Google's business.
> Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable.
So what does unacceptable mean?
Historically, coups like this happen to organizations all the time, to the point where conservatives consider it a fact of life.[1][2] It may be unacceptable now, but they'll just keep at it until their view becomes orthodoxy; it's more or less the point of liberalism. I'm also skeptical that the people in senior positions are that far from them ideologically; they simply have legal obligations to shareholders.
Another notion of acceptability is whether a coup sinks the company in the meantime. But it's a risk either way, unless the complaints are entirely without merit, and that seems unlikely.
Let's say Googlers who dispute this did quietly leave over these issues as you suggest. Google's incentives are structured perversely, the "user as product" business model is just ethically dysfunctional. Losing people who act as a check on bad behavior can thus compound these problems over time. If people then decide they've had enough (buoyed by a string of complaints from ex-Googlers) and go to Congress, that can also effectively sink the company.
I've heard this isn't nearly as true as current conventional wisdom would lead one to believe. (to your point, those in power may feel they MUST do certain things even if they don't have to). If so, push back is one of the ways to correct any deviation and move towards a balance.
Yeah, I abbreviated that point as I felt I was rambling and it's outside my expertise, but it's definitely more complicated than "we must make these profit numbers go up or go to jail."
Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable.
You seem to have an internal inconsistency in your argument -- assuming that it has the potential to destroy the company, if one fundamentally disagrees with the areas and methods that the leadership has chosen, by far the most effective means of preventing those actions would seem to be using it as a staging ground for a coup.
Perhaps they already tried to find a different company with better policies, but wasn't able to? There's a few of them around, but not that many of them.
Are you the sort of person that tells people not to complain about the politics in your home country or to "move to China/North Korea if you don't like it here"? That would seem consistent with what you're saying.
Right, Google, China and North Korea, none of them are democracies.
If you fundamentally disagree with their values, find a new place to live? Hey, at least it's possible to move to a democratic country, but a democratic corporation? Not that many of them around.
Would you agree with your own argument when it comes to say, illegal activities? Or how about if we were talking about Facebook instead of Google?
Should people have zero insight into issues which could cost a company money or PR? Or should everyone expect to toe the line and simply follow the suits lockstep into hell?
That is bit like saying people are inherently good..
Just a thought, but perhaps this is just another power play where employee wellness is used as vehicle. The best way forward in enabling unionization and get better benefits is to create more division between employer and employee. If you look more closely that is already happening. In the coming months there will be a lot of rehashing the stories (and even a dedicated movie) where Google employees are deprived of a bigger and better paycheck.
> That is bit like saying people are inherently good..
Not my intention - I was offering an alternative to the "If you don't like it you should just leave, because appeasement is death for a company"(paraphrase) I was replying to. (Though I do think people as a whole tend towards communal improvement, albeit with lots of short term self-focused protections)
> The best way forward [for union/benefits] ... is to create more division between employer and employee
OTOH, I wouldn't agree with this statement either. More division is something that CAN happen (and appears to HAVE happened here), but it's a bad idea for both employee and employer to SEEK that out.
On the gripping hand, people regularly find a way to perform below my lowest expectations, so I may be pollyannaing all of this.
> More division is something that CAN happen (and appears to HAVE happened here), but it's a bad idea for both employee and employer to SEEK that out.
That is just basic politics, strength in numbers. If you want align people with different ideological ideals/background or engage non participants, you use a common ground. What better way than to tell people they are being treated/payed unfairly. Not saying it is the best way or that they are intentionally doing this, but it works.
I don't know the specifics here but I wonder if this is a correlation/causation issue. If a bunch of people walked out, and afterwards some of them feel mistreated for whatever reason, it seems easy to assume it's retaliation. It could very well be some completely separate issue (reorg, change in priorities, etc..). Google management is really in a bind here.
How often does a reorganization or "change in priorities" cause management to force healthy and capable employees to take sick leave? Particularly at a company with an unlimited sick leave policy.
It seems to me they're trying to "encourage" these people to leave rather than fire them because that would look like retaliation. Google management isn't in bind, they're using the same playbook that has gotten them into trouble time and again.
About half the ex Google employees I've spoken to recently talk about projects starting and getting cancelled frequently and often with little warning. It would be suspicious if these events were limited to the people that protested, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Not to mention, while raising complaints about sexual assault would be protected, criticizing Google's decisions to do military contracts and open in China are not. If the company doesn't like what you're saying, and it's not specifically in one of those protected categories, then the company can fire you.
You're absolutely correct that a company can fire you for expressing an opinion but I think there's an important distinction that's often missed in the discussion because these are white collar employees.
If an employee had simply made a public statement critical of government contracts they could be fired for cause and it would be a non-issue (from a legal perspective, at least). But where Google runs into retaliation trouble isn't with what the employees have said but with how they're saying it: in a group.
Employees have an affirmative _right_ under the NLRA to join together and engage in "concerted activity" to advocate for their interests and to do so without interference or coercion from their employer.
It doesn't matter whether the employees are critical of sexual harassment or the food in the cafeteria, if two or more of them are making the statement jointly then the matter is far more complicated because the employees have additional rights.
> Employees have an affirmative _right_ under the NLRA to join together and engage in "concerted activity" to advocate for their interests and to do so without interference or coercion from their employer.
For discussing working conditions like better pay, better benefits, etc. Not for getting on a soapbox and proclaiming that your employer is being morally bad. Yes, it absolutely does matter whether the employees are talking about sexual harassment vs. making moral criticisms of Google.
> Not for getting on a soapbox and proclaiming that your employer is being morally bad.
Criticizing management (for example, for soliciting and accepting government contracts) and advocating for change to company policy (for example, to no longer sell controversial technology to government entities) is well-established protected concerted activity.
Additionally, political speech (for example, "we don't support selling controversial technology to government entities") is also protected when there is a direct nexus between the political speech and the employees' interests "as employees." (The NLRB was feeling lazy the day they came up with that definition...)
Recently the NLRB ruled that a company wrongfully fired employees in retaliation for missing work to attend a pro-immigration protest. IIRC the company hadn't even taken any actions against the employees (or in general) that could be considered "anti immigration" but their group attendance of the protest was protected concerted activity.[1] And the employees in that case missed their shifts at work (generally a fireable offense) and they weren't even criticizing management - they were criticizing the federal government.
You should read your link in greater detail. The NRLB recommended taking the employer to court in that case, but we'd have to see how that case plays out to know whether firing employees for skipping work to attend a protest is not legal. The NRLB is quasi-judicial, their word is not law.
A bunch of your employees walk out in protest because they don't want to do the work you want them to do. Isn't it totally normal and expected that you would then sanction or fire them?
Yes, you can totally fire them. These aren't labor issues (i.e. working conditions or unionization which might provide some protection), and this isn't political protest /outside/ work. This is no different than, "I refuse to work in Java because I hate it," and you get fired.
I'm sure Google has never been perfect, but it used to sound like a great place to work free from much of the bullshit that goes on in other companies. I envied those that got to work there for that reason. I'm sure it's still a long way from turning into an Amazon or Microsoft, but I hope it takes some active measures to avoid sliding down that slope.
Is Microsoft still a bad place to work? My impression was that they've gotten their act together over the past decade, and they're near the top of my list for the next time I look for a job. Their strategy and execution seem a lot better from the outside, but I don't personally know any employees to verify what it's like to work there.
(I can personally attest to Google being a demoralizing catastrophe of mismanagement, and many of the colleagues I most respected while I was there have left in frustration or in protest.)
It definitely improved over the past few years. But a lot of the people who made it to the top under the old system of bullying and undercutting your peers are still in positions managing people, so you can still see a lot of capriciousness, bullying, politicians hiring politicians, retaliation, so on. Stack ranking is meant to be long gone but you still see managers handing out zero ratings to teammates that clearly don’t deserve it.
A few millennial classmates of mine (graduated ‘15 or so) say similar things about the company culture. The previous systems in place and the existing old guard have affected their experience working there too.
Having worked at the others, it's still miles miles ahead. Pay and perks are at the top and there is def more transparency than other companies. Also, the quality of devs doesn't vary a lot across orgs, you're guaranteed to work with really smart people.
That’s what happens When Google hired Wall Street executives to manage their actual business: all sort of politics and purging. Reducing cost by most primitive capitalism means(just look at the quality downturn of google cafeteria)
Google's Cafe food has actually increased over last 4 years I've been at Google.
MK Snacks are better. Coffee Better.
Its less cost cutting and more about logistics. You can't buy Mom & Pop created chocolate for 60k Bay area employees spread across 100 offices. We'd be consuming > 100% their supply. Most of the changes are around streamlining our logistics in the bay area to single suppliers.
As for w-street's changes, its not all negative. E.g. When I First joined google I heard of a team spending 10mil on an experiment by buying custom hardware to test form factor...the same experiment could have been done with a 1000$ foam/clay/3d printed mockup. People like Ruth have tought many teams in google to be more frugal.
Dear cobookman. You are batshit insane. I haven't seen a snack in an MK that I actually wanted to eat in over a year. I am pretty sure many of the same packages have been there for that entire year. I may start marking them with a sharpie to confirm my suspicions.
It will be interesting to see if the recent tax law changes will affect Google perks like the cafeteria. Providing food for employees on-site will no longer be expensable for corporations. So there will be no tax advantage.
Or maybe that's just reality of growth - the larger the organization the harder it is to keep a specific culture as founders can't align culture with all managers anymore, but have to let people go their way.
Larry and Sergey were having affairs with subordinates since the early days, and even as recently as 2014. So maybe the culture was never really that squeaky clean in the first place. I never heard about them retaliating against anyone, or any complaints being filed against them. But . . . would you hear about that? I don't know.
I wish I could say that I don't know anyone who this has happened to. But that wouldn't be true. I know of at least one person who has experienced retaliation at Google. She left the company for a while, but ultimately came back.
You're probably joking, but the disappearance of fringe benefits like free food or drinks is a very early warning sign that you should polish your resume. Somebody is running a cost cutting exercise for some reason good or bad. In a modern tech company the only way to cut significant costs is to cut employees, so you might be next...
If this article is to be believed, Microsoft does double that every year. I imagine many huge companies do. I realize it probably sounds weird, but Google just ain't that special.
It could be a result of recent tax law changes. Many fringe benefits like on site food service for employees are no longer a deductible expense. So the cost of providing food to employees essentially went up by 40% overnight.
Been at Google for over two years and haven't seen the food quality go down in that period at least. Coffee actually keeps getting better everytime I move to new buildings.
> I actually personally know someone who was retaliated at Google for raising a basic OSHA violation..
People are still complaining about not enough bathroom stalls? That issue has gone on for so long that I feel like the original person that decided that was an OSHA violation might be wrong. OSHA has had plenty of time to step in and assess penalties, their lack of action is suspicious.
Rank-and-file employees have strong legal protections against retaliation for unionization efforts. Employees in management roles do not.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for Google to attempt to transition union organizers out of a management role.
Of course, "management" is a term that is extremely vague inside Google; at least historically "Tech Leads" would not have been considered managers, so there could be an extremely low proportion of the company in a managerial role.
In established US unions often anyone in a management role is not allowed in the union.
Having said that unionizing activities are widely protected so ... talking about a union and such is allowed broadly so it would come down to what the actual established union rules would be.
It's shocking to me that Googlers are using internal/workplace email to organize. These discussions should be moved to a place that is outside Google's reach—have them on Signal, Slack, ProtonMail, whatever. This in is the 0.1% of cases where it's really ill-advised to be using Google tools for organizing.
The problem is even if you use another service, you're probably still on their Wifi. Large buildings don't always have good cell coverage.
So even if they don't know what you're saying on Signal, they know who used it at what times.
Plus Signal groups are unwieldy with many participants, plus it's just a PITA to type on your phone vs a keyboard.
Also, does GOOG MITM employee connections? Many large banks and hospitals make you install a root cert to use the wifi.
In short, there are many nudges pushing employees to use "insecure" organizing methods.
Also from a legal perspective, if you have a history of allowing internal debate, you open yourself up to liability if you silence that debate when it touches on the workplace.
(It's protected speech in the states to discuss working conditions, and it can be considered retaliation to not allow discussing conditions if other non work talk is allowed)
One obvious reason is, it's easiest. I hardly know anyone's private contact info, but of course you can always look up colleagues' work emails in the corporate directory.
And a large part of organizing is bringing people into the fold, so you'd still need to be organizing at work somehow, even if all you're doing is asking for external communications methods to continue the conversation. There's a much higher drop rate that way though.
It's honest. It's transparent. It's trusting. And it's protected by the law and could easily accounted for during discovery for a lawsuit (not a lawyer, do not play one on tv either).
Being transparent and trusting towards your employer is fine as long as your efforts are ineffective. Once they start to have an impact, it helps not to be totally reliant on your opponent for your ability to hurt them.
Legal protections are not very helpful in a context where the other party has unlimited legal resources and time is not on your side.
My understanding is it's not just email, but internal message boards. Absolutely fine for gaining an audience, but the discussion should immediately move elsewhere.
I know this isn't a popular opinion here, but the reality is that Google has created a hotbed for activism, espoused very political opinions internally, hired Twitter activists, played with identity politics, fired people for right of center political discussion...
Now they are having their dirty laundry aired in the media (the same media that is aligned with the social activists they've been courting). This was the inevitable outcome of playing these games and they have absolutely reaped what they've sown. Hopefully this will be a lesson other companies can learn from and we'll start to see a return to "business" instead of "activism+business+social media outrage".
> the company’s lawyers urged the U.S. government to give companies more leeway to reign in rebellious employees from organizing over workplace email.
I'm all for tech workers organizing (or dare I say "unionizing"), but it seems like a no-brainer to use non-work email. There are plenty of other free options, including Gmail. If Google retaliated against an employee for something they sent from a personal Gmail account, they would be in a whole lot more trouble.
It's likely you're missing why they're using work email: It's a way to broadcast and promote the concerns to people who aren't already part of their organized action. From what I've read, there's an incredibly large number of not-work-related email lists internally at Google, they have somewhat of their own private little Internet world there.
So "organizing" with their work email wasn't about "the organizers talking to each other", it was about getting people to join the Walkout.
You're right, I was forgetting about how Google is its own internet world. The meat-space protections for labor organizers could reasonably apply to email lists, and sending a message to some internal list is easier than putting up flyers in the cafeterias.
Still, internal not-work-related mailing lists seem like a bad idea for all involved. For an example that cut the other way, see jwz's "Bad Attitude" list at Netscape, which got subpoenaed by Microsoft:
This is old news. Wasn't there a prominent case of a Google developer alleging that they were fired in retaliation for protected activity relating to political beliefs as well as work conditions? I'm happy that this kind of stuff is being taken more seriously this time around, but let's acknowledge priority and credit, where credit is due.
Having been involved in similar events in the US with unions, I would argue unions don't do NOT do good job at preventing retaliation outside of jobs with very specific and prescribed career paths and etc. Effectively they trade flexibility for super rigid job paths in order to "protect" the worker and that cuts off other opportunities.
If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that. US unions are often only concerned with the aspects of the job they can / have negotiated, or things that are already illegal (and you'd be surprised what comes out of the sausage factory when negotiations end). If the job allows for any judgment calls by the employer, they get to make them just the same as a non union job.
What is the answer then? You get the typical US union job where the job is hyper track driven as far as career path goes because the union feels that is the only way to control / have a say in those aspects. The employer doesn't have the flexibility to retaliate and hide it as a business decision.... but they also don't have the ability to promote someone over another for the same reasons (what is seen as retaliation by one person might be seen as a well earned promotion by someone else who got the job). Even then if your boss is a "jerk", often a union can't do anything.
The results are jobs where easy to identify things like seniority, some sort of certification system, and etc determine pay, progress and etc. That is a terrible trade off IMO.
That's bullshit. I was in a union for most of my career and didn't have those rigidity or other stupid things that are common complaints.
There was a track very similar to the salary bands that you see in a F1000 company (<title>, senior <title>, staff <title>, <pricipal> title, etc), the only difference was that salary advancement within a band was time based, with only a small discretionary component. IIRC, you could get a 1% boost for exceptional performance identified by management, in addition to the schedule. Job titles were broadly defined.
Basically, unions that are oriented towards professionals vs. blue collar are less task and bullshit focused.
The union I was a member of provided generous training/tuition benefits, a platform for getting advice without potential retaliation, and dispute resolution. As a manager, it can be frustrating to deal with the dispute part, as the union is obliged to defend everyone.
The core issue here is that using employer resources to organize actions that could be perceived as against your employer is dumb for a variety of reasons.
Salary advancement primarily based on time is my idea of a nightmare. In an industry primarily constrained by attracting talented people, I can't imagine that not pushing talent out. I know I would leave if that was how it was.
If my coworker can spin up a new, valuable product, they should be able to multiply their comp as quickly as they can compound value. If my other coworker fell through the cracks and is a liability for the quality of the codebase and for regression of our talent pool, they should be able to be cut.
And the people here aren't actually going against their employer. They are the ones taking the long view in an increasingly myopic ecosystem that is more and more skewed towards the short game.
Google has a disproportionately skilled talent pool on the back of advertising a deal to employees where they are treated with respect, are allowed support for pursuing things that are good for the world, and aren't leaned on to accept evil. Smart, capable people tend to be thoughtful and have a vision for how they want the world to be, and tend to care about how what they're doing fits into the big picture.
If they reneg on that deal they will bleed top talent, which is problematic when your whole company is primarily constrained by the size and depth of its talent pool.
It's either idiocy or an inevitable game-theoretical degradation of institutions that will lead to its death, at least as a tech company by the thielian, pro-innovation, definition, if not of the company itself if it eventually lacks the talent to keep on top of new paradigms.
Either way, the company will end up as a shell of its former self or dead if Whittaker and company don't turn the boat, however unlikely that is to succeed.
> If my coworker can spin up a new, valuable product, they should be able to multiply their comp as quickly as they can compound value.
That’s employee hostile. Effectively you’re creating a system where compensation is based on your ability to “engineer” placement on a hot team/product.
Ultimately it’s bad for a company as you’re signaling that political savvy is valued above skill, and less directly profitable teams become ghettos.
Yeah, you should work to get onto whatever team you want to be on. People aren't interchangeable pieces, and the system is generally not capable of figuring out where you should actually go. That's in practicality your job.
Maybe we could theorize of a magical system which deeply understands you and itself well enough to find an optimum mapping, but the reality is it doesn't exist, so you need to do that yourself.
In doing so you're making the system function better too, by voting with your feet and putting yourself where you'll give a shit and consequently get stuff done.
If you want to accrue resources, align your competencies and values with the surrounding system so that you create value. If you're an employer and want people to be happy and create value, give people freedom to rearrange themselves to fix the problems you create by not knowing the actual people well enough to figure out where they align and will be happy and create value.
Ignore that reality at your peril, whether as an employer, an employee or a policy-maker.
>There was a track very similar to the salary bands that you see in a F1000 company (<title>, senior <title>, staff <title>, <pricipal> title, etc), the only difference was that salary advancement within a band was time based, with only a small discretionary component. IIRC, you could get a 1% boost for exceptional performance identified by management, in addition to the schedule. Job titles were broadly defined.
Very accurate for unions at large employers; employees trade flexibility and meritocratic values for a bureaucracy where they theoretically get one seat at a large table.
Unions for trades/gigs, where the union is more guild-like, operate a bit differently.
> ...I would argue unions don't do NOT do good job at preventing retaliation outside of jobs with very specific and prescribed career paths and etc....
> If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that...
US-style unions are really only just once instance of "unions." I can imagine another instance, where the union itself is both independent of the employer but also has a significant power in promotion decisions, that could deal with these situations better. That's getting toward a decision-making structure that formally represents multiple stakeholder grounds instead of just capital and its representatives.
>where the union itself is both independent of the employer but also has a significant power in promotion decisions
I would really hate to deal with a second level of bureaucracy when it comes to promotions and such.... let alone employer's having to accept "this guy is a senior X now" and realize he is not as opposed someone else who wasn't given that chance. That still seems like a very track type of career path situation where the technology world is still fast changing and has huge amounts of variety.
> I would really hate to deal with a second level of bureaucracy when it comes to promotions and such....
I was imagining it more as peer-accreditation and peer-participation, as the other union members would be your peers. Basically more democracy rather than bureaucracy.
Sure, but in many ways Google's promo process is already this way. Its not perfect, but at least IME, my promotion/performance evaluation has been based significantly on feedback from my peers.
> my promotion/performance evaluation has been based significantly on feedback from my peers
"Based significantly on" is not the same as "made by" or "made in collaboration with." The problem here is an employer using their discretion as a hidden means of retaliation, and they can still do that with all the feedback in the world as long as the discretion is still all theirs.
Why all sensible unions keep them selves at arms length from this even more so M&P unions as they aren't in the business of stopping the employers right to manage as they represent managers.
This. I've been a software engineer for twenty years and a union member the whole way through. It's paid off, time and time again, not just for me but for colleagues as well. Solidarity forever.
Neoliberal "progressivism" isn't leftist or especially progressive. It has one goal- maximal utilization of labor resources. It just turns out integrating as much of the possible workforce as it can is useful (and helps ultimately drive down labor costs- see e.g. the rise of two-earner middle class households). It's not hypocritical, since these companies usually just talk about those ends rather than redistribution of ownership or other material reforms that would benefit their lower level workers.
I'm a moderate liberal and I percieve SV as being quite a lot farther left than me. Notably Google terminating James Damore and Apple terminating Denise Young Smith for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy in the most inoccuous ways possible. Mozilla also pushed out Eich, although his transgression was more controversial, and I don't know that his particular mob was particularly concentrated in/around SV.
The top brass are probably as you say. The rank and file, at least as I read, are quite sympathetic to causes and issues we'd generally say are politically supportive of union formation. Why haven't we seen any serious effort from within? Maybe it's not so bad over there. Maybe these "retaliation" stories are few and far between, and we're only hear the employee's side of the story.
SV in itself is this: I support things as long as it benefits me or doesn't change my life.
e.g. Let the immigrants in! (But don't build any housing because then they could afford it here) Global warming is real and we should do something! (Ok - let's mandate solar panels on all /newly/ built homes) etc.
I always assumed it’s because the workers are pretty well off and have a lot to lose. Tech workers are mostly treated and paid well, so even if one believes unions are great, there isn’t much to push them to create one for themselves.
People like to make this claim because of their diversity efforts. But the fact is, it's the same stuff every other industry went through, including ones that skew conservative (like food service, oil/gas, and Real estate). They went through this stuff in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It's just hitting the tech industry now.
Anyway, leadership at these places tend to support the status quo, and maybe pay lip-service to a few issues to protect the corporate image. They're arguably the real "centrists" which in the US means a socially-permissive capitalist.
Meh. If we had German style unions or even guild sure.
But unions otherwise would destroy the current advantage of paying highly productive workers their due share in favor of seniority and other bs.
Plus like this example:
>In the email, Stapleton said that she arranged a meeting with Google’s human resources division after flagging changes to her job. She was told to go on sick leave. When she replied that she wasn’t sick, Stapleton wrote, the HR director said: “We put people on it all the time.”
Just drop a line to your state DoL and they would be all over that instantly with nail filled baseball bats.
It sounds like the issue is people in some sort of management or leadership role who are also leading protests in the same area (AI ethics)? This isn't exactly a conflict of interest, but it sounds like a conflict of something?
I’m not sure this is a problem. Of course a company is going to retaliate against employees that are protesting instead of working. What did the protestors honestly expect? That they would get promoted?
If I ran a company, and my employees were protesting decisions that I thought were in the best interest of shareholders, I would first listen to them. If after listening I still believed the course of action was correct I would have no other choice but to punish/fire them. It’s not the protestors’ job or responsibility to go around the company again and again instead of proper channels.
At some point, your morality and the morality of corporations and capitalism will always conflict. Is Google going into China a decision I like. No, it’s not. Would I maybe be upset if I was a developer on a censored search engine? Of course.
But is it the right thing to do for the shareholders? Yes! Of course. China is a huge market and represents massive potential for Google. They have a moral responsibility to maximize profits for their investors and that should always be the primary mandate for companies (unless they are a B corp, like Etsy).
This will naturally conflict with personal morality, as it should, but cognitive dissonance is always a given. The only question is whether you recognize and accept or deny it’s constant presence in everything.
The company also has a legal responsibility not to retaliate against workers for engaging in concerted action. The obligation to maximize profit is subordinate to the obligation to follow labor laws.
You say that corporations have a "moral responsibility to maximize profits for their investors."
Why? Why does profit have to be only motivator?
I understand it's a norm. I understand it's expected. Can you give me a reason beyond that?
It's not like Google is doing poorly and has to go to China to survive. Why contribute to the Chinese government's oppression of dissidents and minorities if you don't have to?
It doesn't have to be, it's what the investors want. The investors decide what gets to be optimized for, because they won't invest otherwise. It's not always profit, it might also be growth. And yes, there are cases where it's something else all together, but for the most part it's measurable and something that involves making your investors richer.
> Why contribute to the Chinese government's oppression of dissidents and minorities if you don't have to?
If you build the tech and the platform, you are in control, and you can stop at any point, you can nudge and you can pull. If you're not doing it, somebody else will and you won't have any influence to make it better/less bad.
That has a long tradition, even in non-profit companies like banking coops. People want to play the lottery, so you offer them a lottery. But by buying tickets to your lottery, they are putting 50% of the ticket price into their savings accounts. 50% aren't 100%, but they sure are better than 0%.
If perfect, good and neutral aren't available options, less bad looks good to me - even if it means that you will have to get your hands dirty and get your karma into trouble.
> that women were not as well suited toward engineering roles
While this is, notably, what a Microsoft employee in a non-engineering role reportedly said (in an unclear and unexplained reference to purported "thought patterns") referencing their own diversity efforts, Damore's memo did not allege that women at Google or any other company might be less suited; only that the pool of those who would be interested enough to pursue the field in the first place might be smaller.
> Damore's memo did not allege that women at Google or any other company might be less suited
It did though. Damore hedges a bunch, but
>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Can be reduced to
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of [...] abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
That's not saying women are unsuitable, so your first point is just incorrect.
It is really saying there are fewer suitable women. Which is true, and there is a huge movement to remedy that by making it more inclusive. Not that I'm on-board with lowering the bar hiring unqualified applicants or anything, but I think changing project structures to use better use underutilized talent is great for employers and employees.
Though, IMHO, the most honest way to do any of this is by evaluating candidates sight unseen, with no name presented, to remove bias. I like that other approaches are attempted, but this one is my favorite. It doesn't make my resume less favorable. :)
The problem is that science agrees with it. Surely setting policies that accommodate nature will be more effective than pretending nature fits whatever the popular ideology says.
About abilities, it's well known that men have a higher standard deviation of IQ, which, as Damore explained, means there are more men of high IQ than there are women. Google preferentially hires high IQ people so it will be skewed towards men, all else being equal.
Not really. Science certainly agrees that there are differences between males and females. But if you can find me a peer reviewed article showing a causal relationship between sex and performance in a software engineering career, controlling for environmental and social factors, you'd be the first.
> Google preferentially hires high IQ people so it will be skewed towards men, all else being equal.
Note here you aren't arguing about performance, but about culture. But to throw a wrench in your argument, Google hires mostly college graduates, which as we all know, skew female. Sprinklinga wrong "ceteris paribus" into your line of thinking isn't conducive to interesting discussion.
If I can find a paper showing the sex-IQ relationship and another showing a IQ-software engineering performance relationship, will that satisfy you? Though, so save myself time, do you really doubt the 2nd one?
Yes, I think they probably do get more females by preferring graduates than they would if they didn't have that bias towards graduates.
What do you mean by a wrong ceteris paribus? Of course it's wrong in the sense that all else isn't equal in reality, but you can still consider what would happen if it was. Or do you mean it's not even possible for all the other factors to be constant because they're correlated with the one we're changing so we still have to make a choice about which ones to really hold constant?
Thanks for sharing the quote. Given the redacted variant, I understand that you take issue with the "abilities" part. Do you also take issue with the "preferences" part?
Unfortunately, I think there's enough subtlety and nuance to that discussion, and it's charged enough, that I don't particularly feel comfortable giving an answer that is both honest and what I would consider "satisfying" to your question. Sorry.
Aren't you engaging in identity politics yourself by pulling out this argument?
And that said, obviously retaliation is going to vary on the scenario. You're essentially saying that they deserve retaliation for reporting sexual harassment etc because of an entirely separate incident.
How is it a "non-sequitur from the topic"? Damore is by far the most famous case of a Googler trying to flag issues internally via the provided channels and being fired in retaliation for doing so. It is literally the first case that came to mind when I read the headline.
It's bizarre how such an obvious point is being described as grasping at straws, a non-sequitur etc.
Damore's Complaint also brought to light quite a bit of politically-motivated cyber-harrassment occurring (and sometimes being outright planned) on Google's intranet "forums", in some cases with some degree of acquiescence from middle management being at least implied. But apparently, even the notions of "harrassment" and "causing a toxic work environment", which are rightly enshrined in labor law, can fall prey to double standards.
Retaliation is when someone experiences adverse consequences for doing the right thing. You wouldn't say, "Joe is a victim of retaliation. He didn't show up to work for two weeks and they retaliated by firing him!" The people who didn't like the Damore memo believed it demonstrated a fireable offense -- creating a hostile work environment by stating or implying that women are less suited to the job. They wouldn't view his firing as retaliation, because they view it as justified.
Of course, there are individuals like yourself who have a different perspective on that -- and for the purposes of keeping this discussion on topic I'll avoid sharing my views on that. Regardless, it is different from being fired or punished for reporting sexual harassment or racial discrimination. There is substantially no political group who, at least publicly, would espouse the view that such reports are wrong, or should be punishable in any way. Except I suppose if they are found to be baseless. So if someone suffers adverse consequences due to making such reports, assuming they are made in good faith, almost everyone would agree that that is retaliation.
> Retaliation is when someone experiences adverse consequences for doing the right thing
Not quite: retaliation is when someone experiences adverse consequences for using the proper channels and methods to try to do the right thing.
They are allowed to be wrong about whether their complaint or concern is actionable; as long as the employee was proceeding properly they are protected against retaliation.
Most bosses that retaliate do not view it as retaliation. I know that when I have acted immorally in my own past, I felt justified about it.
It is not true that he stated women are less suited to the job. It is possible that he was implying it. Firing him for something he did not say, but may have implied, is weak. Destroying a person's livelihood for an imagined offense WHILE the company releases a statement that they encourage widespread opinions is even weaker.
> Most bosses that retaliate do not view it as retaliation.
I don't understand how that's relevant. I mean I grant you that wrongdoers often believe they are doing right. That is true in almost any context. The issue is about whether wrong is being done -- by which I mean, the consensus viewpoint on that question -- not how the wrongdoers feel about their wrongdoing.
(I see your other paragraph, but I'm not responding to it because, as I said earlier, I don't wish to discuss my views on it. I'm not afraid to talk about it, but I don't think it would move this particular discussion forward.)
By doing what? Pulling the curtain open on psychological findings? Your idea of human decency is to keep science secret if it has politically inconvenient conclusions? He was trying to support Google's goal or hiring more women. What riled people up was that he proposed doing it by making the company more attractive to them instead of forcing women into a system designed by and for men.
Also, politics is human decency. It's a way of imposing our morals onto everyone else. Some people (protesting Googlers) think killing people in wars is against human decency. It is, and it's also political.
> No, my idea of human decency is to respect the wrongs of the past and to not try and sweep them under the rug under the guise of equality now.
Don't try to make a workplace more attractive to women because it's better to criticize people from the past instead?
> Awful convenient for the straight white males to be demanding equality now
Do you want equality or do you want oppression of the popularly marginalized group (straight white males) as punishment for what different people from the same group did in the past?
You fundamentally misunderstand the situation if you think straight white males are being oppressed.
Consider two people who are equally qualified; one is a straight white male, the other is a minority gay woman. The fact that they're equally qualified demonstrates the minority gay woman is a better hire, because she did the same as the straight white male, but with fewer resources. It stands to reason then that providing her with additional resources will result in a higher output than what the straight white male would be capable of.
The reality is, straight white males are given plenty of extra resources and opportunities, and despite that they're very frequently on the same level as people who have been given less. Those are the situations that are relevant; no one is hiring unqualified people to do jobs.
If Harvard accepted every qualified applicant, they'd have to triple their enrollment. The reality is there are very often too many well qualified people and not enough slots, be it a job or any admissions/application process. Pretending like less qualified people are being let in, and the straight white males are being denied despite being just as good is a complete lie.
By providing opportunity to minorities in hiring, Google is simply leveling the playing field. It's beginning the process of giving those minorities opportunities that have been granted to straight white males for literally millennia.
We're nowhere close to MLK's dream yet, because of people who think like you.
And no, I don't want revenge on anyone, stop focusing on yourself. This is about giving people who don't have resources more of them, and in so doing finding the true bright spots on this planet.
If you think this has anything to do with individual punishment, you're a lost cause...
People who think like me by not wanting discrimination based on race? You'll need to find a reference for your claim because it seems obviously wrong.
I can think of two ways you might justify your view:
A) By assuming that every member of a class has the same characteristics as the class average. This overlooks the existence of privileged wealthy gay black female from Portland who grew up being glorified as a precious minority and of disadvantaged poor straight white males from Appalachia who were abused as children and taught by their whole society that they weren't meant to be successful. You want to give extra advantage to the already-advantaged person because different individuals in her class are disadvantaged.
B) Class-based revenge. You accept that individuals are different from their class averages, but it's OK to push some disadvantaged people down and lift advantaged people up as long as it's consistent with your view of which class should be punished for their collective situation. This option seems more realistic because it's not factually wrong like A), and it's consistent with your reference to the millennia of opportunities. There's nothing anybody can do to change the thousands of years of now-dead people so their advantages should have no bearing on what happens today. But you still mentioned them. Maybe you want to correct the balance between classes by putting the advantage in the other direction for another few millennia, under the assumption that two wrongs make a right.
You chose race, sex, and sexuality as your classes because that's what your culture told you it's OK to discriminate on. You didn't chose history of psychological abuse, mental illness, wealth, intelligence, having powerful friends, quality of parenting, chronic pain, height, physical attractiveness, or any of the other ways that people have different advantages to each other. You don't care about real people with real differences, and only care about the classes that your culture has told you are important. Have you asked yourself why race is more important to you than intelligence or age, which have much more consistent and severe histories of discrimination?
> Pretending like less qualified people are being let in, and the straight white males are being denied despite being just as good is a complete lie.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19779093. It's no surprise that generic ideo-political flamebait (meant that way or not) gives us generic ideo-political flamewar.
I don’t know that it’s so much being against the idea of a fair and just society as much as being against SJWism. Where SJWism seems to now be about dividing up people into groups. Refusing to engage honestly. Labeling anyone who disagrees or has different ideas the enemy and forcing them out. Problematizing things that aren’t problems. So on.
>Where SJWism seems to now be about dividing up people into groups. Refusing to engage honestly. Labeling anyone who disagrees
I want to have a spirited genuine conversation about this, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around arguments like this - isn't your comment doing exactly as you have described, dividing and labelling people?
Yes, based on their stances and actions. I find that a far more tolerable way of dividing people up than doing so based on immutable characteristics that they have no control over. Yes, the grand parent didn't mention this distinction, but I think they intended it (and if not, then I am interested in how they justify the difference).
As for why I'm okay with the difference, consider putting someone in prison because they broke a law (something they can control) vs. because their parents broke a law (something they couldn't control). The latter is, in my mind, worse in every possible fashion. Even when applied to a law I disagree with, I find the latter option far worse than the former.
No. I believe I’ve described the behaviors that I suspected dawhizkid was referring to when using the SJW label. There are many behaviors that have many labels. If you want to substitute SJWism for something else you may, but it happens to be that people are increasingly associating this collection of behaviors with that term now. I’m not one to battle too hard with the English language when it doesn’t seem necessary (the SJW term has always been pejorative in one way or another so it’s hardly one to protect).
But you're still dividing people under the label of being a SJW. You could replace all instances of the acronym 'SJW' with 'Conservative' and your post would still make just as much sense as before. The only difference being that it would likely be instantly flagged and downvoted unlike using the SJW strawman.
> You could replace all instances of the acronym 'SJW' with 'Conservative' and your post would still make just as much sense as before. The only difference being that it would likely be instantly flagged and downvoted unlike using the SJW strawman.
It's very ironic you say this when dawhizkid's comment using the term SJW was flagged and it spawned a thread of people taking offense and this whole thread has been removed now. :-)
There is a difference between making observations about different political ideologies (what the parent was doing) and advocating for the establishment of racial, gender, etc hierarchies (what "SJWs"--for lack of a better term--do).
Disclaimer: As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I don't particularly like the term "SJW" for its pejorative connotations, but I'll use it since it's the established term in this thread.
It's not an opinion, it's true by definition†. SJWs are characterized by their propensity to group people according to their immutable characteristics (specifically race, gender, sexual-orientation, etc) and their specific†† treatments for each group (what each group is allowed to do, how negatively their group is to be portrayed, whether a group is allowed to be defined by its best members, whether a group is to be defined by its worst members, etc).
I suspect SJWs would object to the term "hierarchy"--instead they would say they are fighting white supremacy or other hierarchies; however, when you press them, it becomes clear that they are merely advocating for a different racial hierarchy (e.g., "you can't be racist against $RACE people").
†Obviously there is no formal definition; that doesn't mean that there is no definition
†† To be clear, I don't mean to say that SJW-ism is the only identity ideology, but rather it is a particular one which varies from the others by its specific ranking of identities and the affordances it makes for each ranking.
I see what you're saying - "you can't be racist against some people." It seems unfair because I guess you're thinking of situations where then subjugated races can then be racist towards non subjugated ones?
Obviously the answer is that nobody can be racist towards anybody and be pure to a positive read of the sjw cause, but humans gonna human.
I will say that from a utile standpoint white vs black racism is far more harmful than black vs white, in the reality of 2019, so outside the rhetorical realm of debate of pure morals. Therefore I'm not sure even the existence of "reverse racism" (terrible term but the most universally understood to describe my meaning) SJWs does not indicate an sjw desire to create hierarchy.
The best description of an ideal sjw future I believe was captured and described in Walkaway, by Cory doctorow. I believe he offers the full text for free on his website.
> It seems unfair because I guess you're thinking of situations where then subjugated races can then be racist towards non subjugated ones?
It's not a question of "fairness"; it's a question of whether or not the ideology is a racial ideology, and the quoted slogan (in context) is considerable evidence that it is. Because (lawyering aside), the slogan is a pronouncement it morally permissible to treat members of one race worse than members of other races.
> The best description of an ideal sjw future I believe was captured and described in Walkaway, by Cory doctorow
Thank you for the recommendation; will check it out.
If you have a profound negative reaction to someone purporting to advocate social justice, frankly I think it's very very likely the problem is on your end.
It's true that someone can advocate a thing ineffectively, or miss some finer point, or claim to be about justice but advocating something else. But one must consider their intentions. Likely they are good, and your alleged conflict with them is a misunderstanding. So don't take it as a personal attack and you'll likely be fine. If you feel they are excluding you, very likely they are not intending to do so. You can try to ask them politely if you have any doubt.
[Full disclosure: I am a left-wing person and likely you would call me an SJW.]
You’re accusing me of things that I am not and inferring things that aren’t in anyway implied in my comments. We likely exist in very close proximity on the political spectrum and you’ve maybe made an assumption I am not because in your mind only those on the right can be against the bad behaviors described.
A lot of people who engage in SJW behavior are indeed good at heart. A lot I would argue are also being used by bad actors. That doesn’t make the bad behaviors okay or free from criticism. It’s a scary world where that becomes mainstream.
All I see is you're getting very defensive. Even if you are left or centrist, even as I read your reply, it's probably that you take the behavior personally. My reply was not to assume a right-winger, my reply is more along the lines of "why do you have this negative reaction?"
If you object, let it be known, ask for clarification. Perhaps the person you object to will open their mind to your concern too. Assuming "SJW" and ending it there is to keep the misunderstanding going.
Isn't it part of the problem that left-leaning people consider themselves to have good intentions but consider right-leaning people to have bad intentions? Everyone is the hero of their own narrative.
While I would likely be more aligned politically with you than not, I also understand that there are many on the left that bring an aggression and intolerance to the policing of ideas and discussion that seems of little benefit to the world.
It seems to me we need more advocacy for self-reflection and less for people's individual belief systems.
> Isn't it part of the problem that left-leaning people consider themselves to have good intentions but consider right-leaning people to have bad intentions?
Perhaps. But I didn't say that, and I'm not arguing that point. I read your point as a direct consequence of what I've written, actually.
But if I may argue that point for a bit, for the sake of argument, a lot of the "SJW" stuff that riles people up is to say that a protected class or minority should be allowed to exist, and people do react to that with what amounts to "your existence is offensive to me". Which is one reason I immediately jump into: why is the SJW offensive to people? Is it that the anti-SJW has some kind of hangup? Often, yes.
Just let them be. And they will let you be too. I know this is an unpopular opinion on HN and so I'm losing karma over it. OK.
I think this is the point of contention. I don't think the type of person I'm describing will 'let you be' if you make an argument that falls outside their worldview. And the tone of the resulting debate is more often than not fairly toxic. The result is just more division.
Ok. So if I may ask, what happened to you? If you don't want to say, that's fine.
I have had many kinds of ludicrous mistreatment or misunderstandings in life, but I try to not extrapolate them to all humanity, or even everyone expressing a political view, or even expect that they recur from the same set of characters.
> a lot of the "SJW" stuff that riles people up is to say that a protected class or minority should be allowed to exist
I have tested this several time on HN, face to face and other places. I do this by suggesting that it should be made in to a generic law.
For example, when Muslim clothing is debated in the news someone from the "SJW" political side will eventually state that people should be free to decide what they wear. By forbidding burqa at work or public places, they say we deny that minority to exist. I bring up that I know a nudist who would very much like the freedom to decide what they wear, and who very much is denied to exist as a nudist at work and public places.
By turning what is advocated into a generic law that give everyone the same freedom, suddenly the interest from SJW drops.
>> a protected class or minority should be allowed to exist
This is the default view of 99.9% of people. If you want to battle the 0.1% of people who feel otherwise then fine but trying to say that is the majority position of everyone who doesn't think like you is the problem.
Similarly, using the term "exist" is uselessly hyperbolic. Communicating like this is usually not in good-faith, it's just antagonistic and unproductive.
I'd much prefer the "equitable companionship" interpretation.
Kind sir or madam, I and my definition of "social justice" are not your enemy. You are a stranger to me but I trust you are able to interpret the phrase just as well as I, and hope that you can trust me to do the same. So do relax.
How can you make moral judgements about "social justice" and its advocates/opponents, when you can't even define the term in your own words? I appreciate your instinct toward open and polite dialogue, I just don't see how that can work on a topic you can't propose a definition for.
This is kind of facetious, my friend. You haven't asked me to define any other terms in the language we are using and yet you know what we are talking about.
Likely you have formed your own opinion about the term a priori that is incompatible with popular understanding, and you wish to make a point which is not relevant to my commentary.
I have given you everything you need to understand the comment. Cheers.
Edit: if you do really want me to expand, I do take it as the conjunction of two words, one implying fairness, and another implying people or society. I also recognize that many will interpret the phrase with emphasis on protected classes, or things that ought to be protected classes that may not legally be so. Fairness is a subjective term so people will disagree. My personal definition does not matter so much since this discussion is, far as I can tell, centered around people who are not me.
Most people have a fairness instinct. The fairness instinct has been observed even in monkeys [0]. Given that most people also live within a social fabric, it is not too hard to imagine that most people have an instinct for a fair society. Alas, this is simply too vague of a definition, as it encompasses most religious/philosophical/political perspectives out there, on the left as well as on the right [gasp!]. The modern "social justice" movement has a number of very specific insistences, which align with a much smaller subset of perspectives than the umbrella "fair society" ideal would imply. I simply want to have someone sympathetic to the modern "social justice" movement to state some specifics on what they mean by "social justice". Looks like you're not the right person, no worries. I'll keep asking. One day someone will answer.
We really need a better term than 'SJW' these days for those crypto-Maoists. It's been taken over by the alt-right, who use it for anyone who might object to their "based", "redpilled" (or so they say) toxic crap.
I agree that we need a better term, but I don't perceive it as being co-opted by the alt-right so much as a pejorative that gives the user an air of bad faith. I want a neutral label for people who advocate for race/gender caste systems in the name of "equality" and who override standard terms (like "racism", "equality", "white supremacy", etc) with opposite meanings. It would be really useful for advancing the conversation.
To the extent that social justice is about collective justice rather than individual justice, it is unjust. Sometimes those things coincide and social justice is just when they do. But as a casual observer, social justice seems to emphasize collective justice and collective guilt, which are often hard to distinguish from bigotry.
So please tie this back to the case on hand. Because I see little nexus between employees advocating against AI arms sales to some „individual“ or „collective“ right, unless it’s the individual war lord‘s right to aerially decimate the collective.
Alternatively, maybe „SJW“ is just a pleasantly blank canvas, pliant to change meaning to whatever is currently needed when one is unwilling to argue the actual case? With the added benefit of inverting the usual moral framework, because arguing for what’s considered „good“ now becomes the meat of the charge against the speaker.
No, I'm not. But there is a real difference between actual social justice and "social justice warriors" that can't engage in objective debate/truth seeking about issues they claim to be so knowledgable about.
What, specifically, about the protests are Google have made you believe the participants can't engage in objective debate or truth about issues? What, specifically, have led you to believe the Google engineers assigned to weaponized AI projects are not knowledgeable in the subject?
The PATRIOT act was named by the people who concocted it. The term "social justice warrior" was not created by activists or people involved in organizations working for justice in our society.
So, no. One is self-branding. The other is other-branding.
So, I'm curious where this narrative comes from, because I first met "social justice warrior"s in the 90's and they where very much claiming that brand. I mean, they where made fun of but that seemed to validate the "warrior" part in their mind. Now it seems the brand is being dropped but, not because it was never the brand in the first place.
Edit: for context I don't think of the people who got the military work stopped as Social justice warriors. This may be because I tend to avoid the term. I'm still curious about this dropping of the brand thing though.
Can't speak for OP, but Social Justice (tm) is mutually incompatible with social justice. The former is roughly a movement to establish identity-based hierarchies while the latter opposes these hierarchies. So when people say they're "opposed to SJWs", chances are they mean they "support social justice".
"Social justice" doesn't mean anything. It's, at best, a metaphor. Those words don't mean anything apart from the movement because otherwise, there would be a social government and a canonical social code.
It's like "ethnic cleansing". It doesn't mean anything unless you interpret it as a metaphor.
"Social justice is a concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges. In Western as well as in older Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive what was their due from society.[1][2][3] In the current global grassroots movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets and economic justice."
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, often with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous.[1][page needed] The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), intimidation, as well as genocide and genocidal rape."
Typically far-right uses SJW as a slur, with a straw man filling the role as a blue haired non-binary Berkeley student.
I'm curious to see it used here - what about the Google engineers not wanting to do military contracts strikes you as "sjw?" Do you perhaps not use the term as it is typically employed?
Could we do without the derogatory „SJW“ insult? It’s blatantly obvious that it never leads to any discussions of value.
And as far as insults go, it’s an incredibly lazy one. Because there is absolutely no defense against it: the mere advocacy of, for example, anti-discrimination or against AI arms trade will expose you to being called an „SJW“. It’s an insult of last resort, because actually engaging for discrimination or selling drones to child soldiers in Western Africa or whatever would make you look like a deranged crank. Therefore, you use precisely the fact that something is generally recognized as good as an argument against the speaker.
Theoretically, I guess there’s a „no-risk“ accusation included as well (see also: virtue signalling). But apparently, organizing a walk-out and risking your career (see: this article) doesn’t actually qualify as „risk“.
Earnest question--what is the non-perjorative word? "Progressive" is the closest I've found. I genuinely want to debate ideas, but I'm not sure what the most precise term is.
I like progressive. SJW is only used (in what I have seen) by those trying to diminish the value of the work and sacrifice that others have made. Attempting to lump someone in with a movement for easier criticism of their opinions is never done in good faith.
Yes, I think that would be fine. But maybe you just don’t need to talk about people with some term encompassing a multitude of different issues.
It’s long been said that the left/right dichotomy isn’t entirely meaningful, leading to an expansion into a 2D economic/social space. Still, left/right or progressive/conservative, or SJW/fascist tend to lead to just stereotypes that everyone projects their opinion on.
It's not possible to communicate the full nuance of any ideological group, especially not in every HN post or tweet. We need meaningful definitions even if these definitions don't 100% apply to every individual in the group. And we need to be able to talk about ideological groups (however fuzzily) to advance our (inter)national conversation.
In addition, we're only seeing this from the perspective of those who feel they were retaliated against because of those protests, with absolutely no additional context or perspective of the managers/execs/peers (which I think we will never obtain for rather obvious reasons).
Personally, I have found Google to have a really open culture of communication. You're generally free to give your opinion. I'd be much more afraid of retaliation from peers due to something I said being considered offensive by some of them, than by an executive or my manager due to speaking out against the way the company does things (which happens all the time and by large amounts of employees). Of course that's just one experience and I may have been lucky with my own team.
disclaimer: I recently joined Google but I'm only aware of these incidents from media publications such as this and everything above is just my personal opinion on the incident.
Edit: Added that "more than a dozen" other stories were shared in the meeting according to the article, as I had originally missed that.