Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization!
Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."
According to the movie the shells were all non-functional, so I'm not really sure why you brought that up.
"the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations..."
As a laborer, the greatest value you bring to the company is your labor. That's the only real thing that gives you leverage to negotiate the terms of your employment. At least, that's what I do when I'm looking for a new job, I'm not sure if you're just morally opposed to negotiating or something. It sounds like what happened here is this person spent a lot of time having these DEI discussions in which they did not feel heard, and that combined with an (allegedly) unprecedented change in the publication review process led to them concluding that these discussions weren't actually doing anything, so they tried to use their full leverage: the withdrawal of their labor.
It's neat that your discussions were always fruitful and you felt heard, but that isn't always the case.
That accepted conditional resignation (as someone mellifluously put it in an earlier HN discussion) is being interpreted by some as a firing. Having read the original letter, it sure sounded like a conditional resignation to me and, as a manager, I would've done my best to get the writer of the letter out the door ASAP.
Keep in mind that as an IC, I once worked for a company that imposed a 10% across the board pay cut without consulting me. I resigned the day it was announced, because my compensation is a term of employment mutually agreed to by my employer and myself, not something imposed upon me. So I've been on both sides of this.
As a general life rule, I go nuclear on people who play hardball with me, whether I am the manager or the managed.
... and then other employees raising a stink, perhaps in the hope, misguided or not, that the company will reverse its decision or change its behaviour to help its PR. The employer can use whatever power they think they have, but so can the employees. It's one thing to say that what the employees did wasn't a wise way to achieve their goal, but it's a whole other thing to say that what they did is wrong.
That's a non-sequitur. There are many things that make America, and every other country, unique. Maybe America produced Google because it's the only country with that population size that's made up virtually entirely of immigrants?
It's also an is-ought fallacy. America is also the only rich country that's built that much of its wealth on slave labour, so does that mean slave labour is a good thing?
> let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account
As a reminder, just in case the principles of capitalism, quite ironically, elude you, the company hires employees it expects will pad its own bank account more than it pads theirs.
> Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
It is certainly true that the conditions of most Google employees are much better than those of the rest of the world, but they are so because the company's employees created that wealth.
I'm curious about this one. Most of what I've read indicates that modern American wealth was largely circumstantial due to european economies being obliterated during WW2. Do you have a source for how much slavery affected American wealth?
Different systems produce different results. It tends to be the case that when you drastically alter the fundamental properties of a system, you won’t get the same results - because it isn’t the same system.
If you want a system where a company is not the property of its shareholders, and you fail to observe that all current implementations of that idea have never demonstrated a single instance of producing Google-like companies since the industrial revolution, your ideas are not going to be very robust.
If you don’t want that, sure, this is a perfectly valid position. But you are not to be taken seriously if you make these claims while earning 7 figures at Google. You haven’t even demonstrated that your ideas are viable to you, let alone all of society.
And since the principles of capitalism apparently quite unironically elude you, yes, they expect their own bank account to be padded more than yours (as it must, game theory prevents the transaction otherwise), which is why they fired her.
And the conditions that make Google better for them were not created exclusively by employees and especially not by employees who didn’t share the mission. Nor were they created and sustained without leadership. Nor were they created without venture capital. If you cherry pick certain properties of Google and expect to be reproduce those results, you aren’t making payroll. It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.
Yes, but you claim to know changing which set of variables, by which amount, produced what result, while you don't actually know that. Your epistemology is emotional rather than rational.
> and you fail to observe that all current implementations of that idea have never demonstrated a single instance of producing Google-like companies since the industrial revolution, your ideas are not going to be very robust.
Not that I think Google is a great company (it's a pretty lousy one, all things considered) but it is unique, and still you don't know precisely what combination of variables unique to the US produced this particular result.
> which is why they fired her.
That's fine, but you blamed them for being sort of victims in the first place.
> And the conditions that make Google better for them were not created exclusively by employees and especially not by employees who didn’t share the mission.
I never said that.
> It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.
Sure, but there can be more than one right balance, and you don't know all of them. You make the mistake of thinking that if the current situation is X and you think X is good, then any other balance Y is likely worse than X.
Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome.
If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...