>It is, though, a termination of business.

A promise to not renew a contract is not even the same as not renewing the contract. For all we know, Google might renew it anyways. Either way, Google is doing what they were paid to do for the period they were paid to do it. The DoD has no reason to have sour grapes with that. Other government agencies absolutely have no reason to.

>I also never said or implied that. I have worked all over the country and a few times out of the country. Only in the bay area and Seattle are people so social engrossed with intermingling their personal politics with their work. Most other locations, both inside and outside the US, would consider this ethically collusive. Whether or not that hurts peoples' "feewings" (as you put it) is up to the individuals involved.

I don't know what you're getting at, I've worked across the country as well (though not out of it.) The consensus among workers is different because the power dynamics are different. When I was working in the midwest, tech jobs were rare and most people did not want to put their jobs in jeopardy.

Employees at Google just feel that they have job security, because they do. Not just those in the Bay Area, but certainly those in Pittsburgh, or New York City, as well. The proof is in the pudding: to the best of my knowledge, Google employees were not fired for protesting Project Maven.

But of course people in the Bay Area feel especially safe in their endeavors. Again, they are. If a Google employee gets fired for protesting, plenty of other bay area companies will be eager to sweep them up. Some will even throw in a sweet signing bonus to welcome them in.

I don't have strong opinions about whether or not these protests are good or bad, but plenty of people across the world would love to be able to speak their mind at their job without it putting their career in jeopardy.

The Bay Area is really just the perfect place for this because it is a highly liberal area (in some aspects, anyways) and people feel extremely safe. So you get these sorts of liberal protests. I'm sure it would play out the same anywhere if this set of conditions were true regardless of political leanings.

I work in the midwest. Tech jobs aren't rare in the larger urban areas, no differently than California. Drive south towards Fort Hunter-Liggett or toward Napa Valley and even in California tech jobs become rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano,_Texas#Headquarters_of_m...

I do agree though that the ability to protest and boycott is an entitlement. How many security, facilities, janitorial, or vendor staff have that freedom at the Google campus? In that consideration it does not sound like such a campus achieves equal opportunity employment in theory, but perhaps might by contracting other those positions to service providers. If that is true and those service providers were to boycott a Google business priority it should be no surprise when Google would refuse to continue services from such vendors. Again, this is a horrible way to do business.

> I don't have strong opinions about whether or not these protests are good or bad, but plenty of people across the world would love to be able to speak their mind at their job without it putting their career in jeopardy.

I vote with my time. If I become disgruntled with an employer I find another. Tech jobs, even in the midwest, are always in crazy demand for talent. I certainly don't put my employer's business in jeopardy to enjoy externalizing a personal opinion.

> I'm sure it would play out the same anywhere if this set of conditions were true regardless of political leanings.

History does not reflect this. I am old enough to remember the bay area was just like this during the 80s since I lived in Santa Clara. More lucrative markets were not like that without regard for job security, such as the financial district of New York. Other geographies are not like that. Most people are not willing to risk their employment relationship for the sake of freedom of exercising politics and actually look upon as a negative and potentially damaging behavior. To make the assumption that other areas are likely reflective of one's own is a form of ethnocentricity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism

Unsure if you meant the implication, but north Texas is most definitely not the midwest.

Why not? Similar location. Similar geography. Similar ecology. Similar climate. Similar economy (cost of living and infrastructure). Similar weather, though north Texas is the southern extreme of it.

>I do agree though that the ability to protest and boycott is an entitlement. How many security, facilities, janitorial, or vendor staff have that freedom at the Google campus? In that consideration it does not sound like such a campus achieves equal opportunity employment in theory, but perhaps might by contracting other those positions to service providers.

I believe you are correct about all of that.

>If that is true and those service providers were to boycott a Google business priority it should be no surprise when Google would refuse to continue services from such vendors. Again, this is a horrible way to do business.

What's good business is very much opinion, many people would work for less money to keep their dignity. It's not exactly a Silicon Valley secret that Google is not the highest paying employer, after all.

>To make the assumption that other areas are likely reflective of one's own is a form of ethnocentricity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism

When I said "anywhere" I meant "in the United States." Personally, I believe culture in the U.S. is more similar than it is different. This point could be debated but there's not much of a point since I doubt there's an agreement to come to with that.

I also was not intentionally referring to all types of jobs, just software developers. It obviously doesn't make as much sense with the power dynamics of jobs that are seen as unimportant. Programmers also take months to get ramped up in a company, and carry a lot of trade secrets and knowledge that they will take with them when they leave, making it very different from a line cook for example. Therefore, you probably don't want to fire a programmer if you don't have to, and you especially don't want a bunch of programmers with important domain knowledge to all leave at the same time.

So quite a bit less broad than "anywhere."

Still, I do not have as much life experience as you, and I do not know why Silicon Valley was different in the 80s. If I had to guess, I'd guess it's because there was no Internet, and the job market was insanely different. Today most software companies have standardized on things, but in the 80s there were plenty of different microarchitectures and programming languages you might need to know on top of other mandatory skills that are not so common anymore. Nowadays for most software developers you don't need to care about microarchitectures and everyone uses languages that look like C or JavaScript. The big tech companies were definitely a lot smaller. Employees sometimes even had more direct say than they do now. Reading old stories about Apple on Folklore.org or Quora paint a picture of an employer that employees respected, but disobeyed frequently. But if they wanted to protest, would anyone hear them? Apple wasn't the massive company it is today in the 80s. Without the Internet, their message might've gone unheard entirely. And, without the Internet, a lot of employees might not have even known about a DoD deal or the implications, positive or negative, that it might have.

Basically, comparing the tech industry of the 80s to the tech industry of today feels a bit strange. Today the tech industry is one of the world's largest. In the 80s, it was very impressive if you shipped 1000 computers.

> What's good business is very much opinion, many people would work for less money to keep their dignity.

I write JavaScript for living and I have mostly worked large monolithic Java shops, so I know this is a lie, at least in software. Most software developers are simply happy to press buttons against a framework while continuously achieving a paycheck. The thought continuous refactoring or doing it free, as in open source contributions on your personal time, is still a complete mystery to many corporate developers.

Dignity is certainly not immediately present in much of the code I have seen in my career. If dignity were the principle aspiration people would not be selective in its application. I suspect the motivation is something more immediately socially conforming. Contrarily, dignity is often expressed by rejection to conforming social pressures.

> But if they wanted to protest, would anyone hear them?

The bay area has never had a problem with this and in the past didn't need social media to prove it. More traditional media channels were sufficient. The area is substantially more sensitive and less diverse now though.

>> What's good business is very much opinion, many people would work for less money to keep their dignity

> [...] I know this is a lie, at least in software. Most software developers [...]

Many != most, and even if it did, different interpretations != a lie.