This reminds me of a situation at Twitter where someone was communicating fearlessly to build trust, but learned as the CEO put it there were still consequences.
US companies are going to be weird about this for the next few years. They want to do the profitable thing, but have spent the last decade making workers feel like they have a say. In the end, management and shareholders are in charge, the rest is an illusion.
I've seen this kind of thing pop up in forums over the years. Depending on the audience involved, either you start with strong moderation from the start and make no apologies, or you kinda let "the board decide." Invariably in the latter case, users eventually decide they want moderator elections, etc. because they can't trust the system and the moderators allowed dissent.
HN takes the former model and it seems to have worked out pretty well.
I think those were the last remnants of the cold war. Now every "commie" tool will have to be used to have a say and hope the privacy is still enough not to be infiltrated by agents provocateurs.
This is a longer conversation not fit for HN. The very quick response is 10/7 was a brutal massacre of civilians - the goal being to torture, rape, and kill regular people including and especially women and children (of which many are still held hostage).
This is going to have a military response independent of any country (imagine Mexico doing this across the border to a town in Texas).
Civilians will die in war despite best efforts, but war is sometimes necessary and justified, especially when dealing with ideas of jihad not compatible with western society.
The response celebrating 10/7 in a lot of the western progressive circles on 10/8 was before Israel had even organized a response.
The history here is complicated, and people can have different views - but whatever your views there, this kind of intentional targeting of civilians is not justifiable.
There’s a distinction between civilians killed in war despite best efforts to avoid non-combatant deaths and specifically targeting civilians to torture and kill. The moral confusion comes from not understanding that or drawing a false equivalence.
Hamas also understands Israel has a higher moral standard and does not want to kill civilians - it’s why they use hospitals and schools as bases and to store arms.
If Hamas laid down their arms there would be peace, if Israel did the same we saw on 10/7 what would happen. Some ideas require total military defeat. It was necessary in WWII and we now live in peace with those countries
The focus on the response when the aggressors have not even released all of the hostages is a clear example of this confusion too.
The phrase "best-efforts to avoid non-combatant deaths" is _extremely_ load-bearing in your post.
Israel is locked into a multigenerational existential conflict with people who utterly hate their guts for just existing. Similar feelings have developed on their side. Claiming that Israel cares about not killing Palestinian civilians is utterly laughable, especially given the news.
I happen to believe it’s true that a best effort is made to minimize civilian death (you can read about the lengths Israel goes to in order to avoid civilian casualties, more than any other country, and to such an extent that Hamas takes advantage of these tactics), but it’s also not as load bearing as you suggest.
There are rules of engagement and tradeoffs in war (Eye In The Sky is a decent film that focuses on this).
There’s still a major distinction between intentionally targeting civilians for torture and death and civilians killed as collateral damage while persuing an enemy combatant.
There's no amount of sophistry that can handwave away the fact that Israel is knowingly killing dozens of civilians for every Hamas member that they kill.
I'm not going to be able to convince you that what Israel is doing post 10/7 is wrong (nor can I even convince myself entirely).
But what I do know is (was) wrong was the attempt to found an ethnostate in the center of a political entity that religiously hates your people. That was monumentally stupid. But now I'm just whining.
I find the statements about best efforts hard to believe, considering that we're talking about the most far-right government Israel ever had, with several cabinet members making statements in favor of removing all Palestinians from the Gaza strip and the left bank, and a prime minister that knows he'll lose his job the moment he stops the hostilities. Today we're faced with the logical impossibility of Israel ordering an "evacuation" from Rafah, with nowhere for those people to go to.
Israel has a problem with domestic extremism, but that doesn't invalidate the points that were made.
But they do the same way the US cares more about Palestinians than the Houthis do. Of course such feelings are inhibited because of attacks, so I don't know which expectations you have here.
> shouting down people you disagree with is wrong and illiberal and should not be tolerated in a healthy society (or company), independent of the particulars of the belief itself.
You wouldnt have even shouted at people spitting on black protestors eating in whites only diners?
In such a world where shouting people down you disagree with is forbidden you are forever stuck with the status quo.
You know MLK was at the diner sit-in im referring to right?
He doesn't meet your definition of liberal.
Furthermore he directly speaks against your liberal option:
> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Progressives love to quote that one letter, but it's an outlier from the more universalist principles he repeatedly said in everything else he wrote and spoke (though people are complicated and can simultaneously hold conflicting views or change their views over time).
Non-violent civil disobedience can obviously be good (Rosa Parks, protest walks, etc.), but when it becomes shouting down others so they can't speak it's crossed into something illiberal and bad.
The ability for people who deeply disagree to speak and engage in a high level of discourse is how classical liberalism works. Often people hold deeply held beliefs, and often those beliefs are wrong - if persuasion is not on the table you don't improve your society - you just descend into political violence.
Talking to people you deeply disagree with (we're doing that now!) is a virtuous thing and it's something MLK did repeatedly with universalist principles that harkened back to the founding fathers and the rights shared by every individual, it's something both MLK and the founding fathers understood.
The engineer in question said that they refused to work for a company that participated in project Nimbus/contracting with Israeli state. Is that not a resignation?
Not really. Google is a large company, they are fully capable of taking a moral stand along with the worker.
But in reality, there is profits to be made, and in our economy we are encouraged to stand with democracy and human rights but only as long as it doesn’t affect the profits for our shareholders.
To be honest, it doesn’t sound like Google was a good fit for him, given that their whole business is surveillance, with a view to enabling whatever, don’t ask don’t tell, as long as it makes money.
Now, to be clear, Google didn't work on that thing directly. However, the whole point of Project Nimbus is to provide cloud infrastructure to Israeli military and intelligence agencies, and it specifically includes AI/ML. Given all this, it would be very surprising indeed if HaBsora did not run on the infrastructure that is tailor made for just such tasks.
Took two clicks to get there from tfa... Seems like you could do a little more research before insisting it's "spurious" that Google tech is helping Israel do atrocities.
Probably worth mentioning Habsora, in case you think Israel would never use AI to kill Palestinian children. Try searching it yourself though, I'm fresh out of free basic research tokens. I'd suggest you use DuckDuckGo.
He presented himself in the context of his engineering role to make a political statement. That violates Google's own policies. That same policy says they wouldn't have fired him if the context had been one where he was presenting himself as a "civilian" not an employee.
Getting himself fired was something he knew would be part of this protest.
He did the right thing. He knew he was going to get fired and probably didn't care to work there any longer anyway. At least he managed to grab multiple headlines this way. God bless him.
Hi, thank you for bringing the rules to my attention. I had gotten a bit loose and angry there and I'm glad you slowed me down. I've read the rules and can see where I erred. I'll try to do better in the future!
I agree that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39659092 was not a good HN comment (primarily because of the first sentence there) but you and sandspar both broke HN's rules far worse in this thread. That is why I replied to the two of you.
If you see another commenter breaking HN's rules, you're welcome to let us know either by flagging the comment and/or by emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't respond by breaking the rules yourself ("you're an idiot").
You let the [1] comment stand and was the highest ranked when I joined discussion and yet when I used the same language your warnings and my censorship via "you're posting too fast". I rarely comment and seem to get flagged when discussing same topic, thus making me think I am also being censored especially when compared to the comment I saw first. "You're an idiot" is a valid response given what was there. Whether it breaks the rules is arbitrary.
There is no difference. You cannot have someone calling the protester an idiot and then being offended when called out using the same language. Zero difference.
In HN conversations and just about all conversations there is a significant difference and HN's guidelines express this. And the point there is not about who has a right to be offended but not filling up the thread with invective. If you thought the other comment was bad, you can just downvote it and/or flag it.
The comment was the most prominent shouldn't have been given such place. Then me calling them out is subjected to some high HN standard and I get censored, but the original commenter was allowed to stand and also comment again via a deleted comment, calling me out while I had to remain silent per the HN censorship.
Dang gets celebrated by various folks who hide behind HN standards which are selectively applied. You and anyone else trying to explain this mess is BS as I had expressed repeatedly.
>> ... but not filling up the thread with invective
Don't use the words you cannot hear yourself, otherwise the comment should have been removed and we wouldn't be discussing this.
I think the more important difference to recognize is that HN operates by its particular rules rather than, say, the rules of The International Court of Toddler Justice.
It’s crazy to me that we have so many people that think they have a god given right to a paycheck. You get paid money to do what the person paying you wants you to do. Not because you are a good person who worked hard in high school and college and now deserve money from the sky for the rest of your life.
People have a right to a paycheck just like people have a right to water. Companies wouldn't exist without economy which is propped up by various governments and the collective goods we all create, think roads, freeways, laws, schools and everything else Companies don't pay for but enjoy fruits off of.
This is an empty platitude, which is why it works so well for corporate PR.
In reality, “diversity” is not binary, but is a continuum. And any time you have a continuum, you will have a threshold beyond which a given person cannot tolerate the level of that thing.
Hire enough people and you are bound to come upon someone with incompatible values to your own.
Firstly, for the record, as far as political beliefs go, mine are quite aligned with the protesting employee here.
Having said that, Google is entirely right here. The speaker was not some right wing political wingnut from Israel. He was just another employee of Google who happened to be from Israel. And from all the reports I've read, the talk had nothing to do with Middle East politics.
Heckling a fellow employee giving a speech just because they're from a country whose government you have policy differences with is like picketing a Chinese restaurant in New York to protest China's aggressive posturing in the South China Sea.
He did what he did with the consequences he knew were coming. But, we cannot shame people into not doing anything about things they oppose because they are getting paid by the "bad guys". Do what you want but face the consequences, 'tis life.
It’s pretty crazy that you’d have people protest fellow employees because they are from a country you disagree with. Presumably this protestor while employed by Google would protest its founder and major shareholder as well just because his patents were Russian.
It used to be you’d keep politics and religion at home and would not bring them into the workplace. On the other hand these companies encouraged activism over the years and they shouldn’t be surprised when it goes off the rails.
I agree with your first point, but as for the second, you can't "keep politics at home" when your employer goes there first. Which Google did with Project Nimbus.
Just another employee of Google who is heading up a surveillance technology project for a government that many view as regressive and oppressive, to put it mildly.
If by quite aligned you mean you agree Israel is engaging in genocide then broaden the sources of information you're consuming. You're being manipulated.
This employee is an idiot and they deserved to be fired.
Shouting down others is not speech - it’s censorship, even a company with broad internal speech protections/policy is likely to enforce discourse standards.
Google would be better off taking a hard stance here - their culture from the outside seems pretty messed up, they’re going to need to fire a lot more to fix it (starting with their CEO imo).
This is independent of the specific views the employee held, though I think those views in this case are also wrong and the company can (and arguably should) fire people who hold views in conflict with the mission, especially when they act to cause problems internally.
> I think . . . the company can (and arguably should) fire people who hold views in conflict with the mission
Obviously, in the US, a company is allowed to fire employees for any non-prohibited reason or for no reason at all. But I strongly disagree that a company should fire people who hold views in conflict with the mission of the company. They should only fire them if they act on those views or otherwise do not work to support the company's mission.
It's not a fine distinction. It's totally OK to hold your nose and work to support a mission that you don't necessarily personally agree with. I don't think that should be cause for termination.
All you’re doing is antagonizing and soliciting a retaliatory response from anyone with a differing opinion. That doesn’t lead to intriguing, constructive debate and really doesn’t belong on HN.
You assume there is no objective fact and that having an opinion is enough. That is a faulty assumption. Our society suffers from a deficit of truth seeking and a surplus of confirmation bias & wishful thinking.
I agree, Google should fire everyone involved in the development of mass surveillance tools that are sold to the highest bidding government. It's immoral and highly unethical.
People tend to dismiss Palestinians deaths 'cause Hamas.
Making Palestinians "worth" only 1/14 of the superior nation citizens, Israeli, hopefully highlights what we are doing -- some lives seem to be less worthy than others.
Wow, so you think everyone must have the right to disrupt other people's lives with force? To block roads, to heckle meetings, is a god given right?
If someone wants to be heard, they have like 5 hours after work, an infinite amount of internet forums to spend political battles on, and they can't put their head down at work to just... work?
> they can't put their head down at work to just... work?
Thinking about this in the lens of civil rights:
> Can't I just enjoy my dinner without these black people coming into the diner to cause a scene for their protest that won't make a difference anyway?
Ethics should be considered at all times. So if by putting your head down at work to just work you mean turning a blind eye to ethics I dont care to preserve that right.
Exactly that, generating discomfort to the ruling class that is the one that makes these decisions (you know, arms companies, resources companies, etc.), because there is no other way in which they will try to listen to you than affecting the profits of their businesses.
the american at will system at work. I dont judge the content of the protest itself, but that you can be fired for political beliefes is crazy to me as a european
He wasn't fired for his political beliefs. He was fired for persistently heckling a senior leader during a public presentation, which meets anyone's definition of gross insubordination. He could have gone on a tirade about how Google supports putting ketchup on hot dogs and the result would have been the same, in Europe or the US.
Please stop generalizing. As a an european you definitely CAN be fired here for political beliefs if they impact work. Actually you can be fired for anything. Come to Austria and see.
You're not allowed to bring your political beliefs at work, which IMHO is best for everyone. Keep them at home/your private time. Same for religion, sexuality, etc. Your workplace is not your market square for your personal beliefs and activism.
Yes you can. Nobody's stopping you from engaging in politics outsider of work(go vote, write to your congressman, go protest, etc), and nobody'd forcing you to work at a company that does things you disagree with. But at work, you go to do work in exchange for money.
The publicly listed company must do what its shareholders want, it has no obligation to do what its employees want, and as long as the company doesn't break any local government laws and employment laws, then it's in the green. You disagreeing with the company's direction is your own matter to deal with, as in, you are free to walk since the company isn't forcing you to work there against your will.
You have no idea what authoritarianism actually means.
They mean that politics and ideology are what your boss is going by to determine whether to give you or your coworker a raise. Or at the least it plays a large part.
Even if you dont talk about politics you are subject to the forces of it.
But politics is changed at the voting booths or via engagement with your lawmakers, not wit your employer. Your employer will only follow the laws set by the state, not by the employees (unless we're talking about a cooperative which Google isn't)
Also, consider the visibility of their protest after getting fired and discussions like this happening across the web.
And no, not all of those discussions end with "keep politics out of f work" and instead focus on how googlers are or arent complicit in powering genocide in t he e project presentation interrupted.
> instead focus on how googlers are or arent complicit in powering genocide in t he e project presentation interrupted
Yes, and Googlers who are against that can put a stop that by quitting their jobs in protest. You can't go around and publicly slander your company calling them genocidal, while still being employed there, just because they don't do what you'd want them to do, without expecting repercussions when you don't follow your contractual agreement.
You are free to do that after you resign and no longer have the responsibility to follow your contract, which probably stated your job is to be a coding cog, not a PR public speaker for the company policies.
Even in Europe(the German speaking countries), if you publicly accuse your employer of causing genocide, you'd better bring some hard proof to back that up(other than your emotional feelings), otherwise you can not only get fired on the spot but also sued for libel/slander and have to pay defamation damages.
If you were to read a some critiques of neoliberalism you would understand how free market utopianism can lead to authoritarianism/is used as a cover for it. The idea of the absolute duty to shareholders is newer that you would think. It’s an ideological standpoint.
So already you are quoting a political line
Regulatory capture and monopoly are both things shareholders might want but are bad for society.
‘Just doing your job’ doesn’t cut it, we’re are part of a community and should feel a civic duty. That’s what i mean
You're not allowed to bring your political beliefs at work, which IMHO is best for everyone.
Everybody does bring their political beliefs to work, and it manifests in things like how they interact with their colleagues and customers.
Choosing whether or not to provide equal benefits to same-sex couples is a political decision. Providing goods or services to an authoritarian regime is a political act. Your maternity policy is a political act. Even your dress code can be a political act.
What you really mean is that people shouldn’t be bringing to work views outside of a small range you deem uncontroversial.
>Everybody does bring their political beliefs to work, and it manifests in things like how they interact with their colleagues and customers.
Not it doesn't. How people interact with others at work is a function of their personality and professionalism at their job, not a function of their political color.
If someone at work is being a dick, it only shows that he's a dick, but political junkies will try to justify that it must be because he's of the opposite political beliefs they have, because in their head "all those people behave like that".
Ugh. Why is it that political junkies try to involve everyone else in their game? Most people just want to have a normal life and not get wrapped up in your meta-game about politics. Even the portentousness of calling them "political acts". That impressive sounding two-word phrase that everyone in the political game copies each other by using. Ugh. "You can't play your favorite game because you're all playing in my favorite game."
Willfully disrupting meetings? Lol. That's not "one small thing", that's "this guy has no place inside a mcdonalds as a CUSTOMER, let alone inside a company"
This kind of behavior doesn't scale. Eventually you have people that just give in to the hysterics because they just want to do their job and not fight ideological battles and the ideologues take over the company. See: how dei took over google and we got gemini.
If speaking up against supplying surveillance and AI systems (to a state under investigation for genocide) is political, then so is supplying the systems in the first place.
If you have an issue with being protested, maybe don't directly assist the world's most live-streamed set of daily atrocities.
lol what? Standing up and yelling during a meeting is probably the tip of the iceberg. They’re also trying to stage protests, etc.
Nah this person wasn’t working productively any more, as far as I can tell. Worse, they were reducing productivity of others. Possibly making an unsafe work environment.
It’s not about being sensitive or even agreeing. It’s about making product. If we were chopping wood and someone stopped chopping to complain about inner city transit systems. You’d fire them.
Depends on the thing and the place. In Germany you cannot do a Sieg Heil salute in public, for obvious reasons - and even that is loosely enforced. But you're absolutely allowed to protest.
Right to protest is under threat in the UK, but it's a difficult situation.
You have XE protestors shutting down infrastructure. You have Pro-Palestinian/Pro-Hamas marchers chanting extremist stuff like "From London to Gaza, Victory to the intifada", "We will honour all our martyrs", "Praise the martyrs" and "From the river to the sea".
The whole hate speech/free speech thing, and at what point is calling for and glorifying terrorism, and do we as a society allow that?
It's not helped by our incompetent and corrupt government whose primary base is the worst stereotype little Englander. Our police whose handling of protestors ranges from ineffective to Orwellian.
I'm generally pro-Civ-Lib and hands-off, but at this point, it's difficult.
We need to have an adult conversation as a country about where we draw lines, lest we allow extremism to fester or allow authoritarianism to raise its ugly head.
But we're utterly incapable of having an adult conversation about anything. This may change after the general election later in the year, but... It's a hope rather than a certainty.
I agree with the substance of the protest and frankly I respect the bravery of the person who conducted it. But let’s be realistic here: they were not fired for their views, they were fired for the manner in which they displayed them, which was clearly not appropriate for the workplace, and really left Google no choice but to fire them.
It is an expression of political belief, which is what is normally meant in such contexts. I don't see much point in detangling the two, as belief that is not expressed is by definition something that you cannot act against since you don't know about it.
See, you've got that backwards. If your government makes specific political beliefs illegal, and sends you to jail for expressing them, then you are not free.
What exactly is fair and thoughtful about keeping on an employee that shouts down a company representative giving a public presentation.
I don’t understand how anyone could even think a company—or any enterprise—is morally required to pay people that publicly work against its chosen strategy.
US companies are going to be weird about this for the next few years. They want to do the profitable thing, but have spent the last decade making workers feel like they have a say. In the end, management and shareholders are in charge, the rest is an illusion.