> Did the walkouts at Google change anything?

I was a "TVC" at Google several times. One of those times was during the walkout period. Even though I had no way of finding out about it until a lucky "right now in 3 minutes" time period, I participated.

Whilst the walkouts may not have changed much on corporate or the outsourced "side-corporates" [the contract companies], it did change myself.

For decades I've heard of strikes, read about walkouts ... stuff in history books ... documentaries on the History Channel back when the History Channel was the History Channel ...

Seeing it live, participating in it live and in person -- added new color to the understanding. The live speakers, the live news cameramen right there, the whole deal.

What is TVC?

Temporary, Vendor or Contractor

If this isn’t parody, and I am guessing it’s not, then it’s still a perfect depiction of what changed in the American left in the 1960s. Politics became more about changing the orientation of one’s mind than the orientation of one’s society. Walkouts are worthless.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I've participated in a walkout as well, and while I very strongly agree with your overall criticism about the inefficacy of walk outs and the reduction of the American "left" what I feel is essentially a life style brand. When I did the walk I did it for one reason and it was for other people.

I don't want to give away personal info on this account, but the issue was related to treatment of minorities. At this company I was in a management position in a technical role which put me above the vast majority of employees in both pay and autonomy.

I decided to do the walk out because I'm sure there were people who worked at this company who did not feel comfortable expressing their views publicly because they made just enough to get by and couldn't get a new job in two weeks if they wanted.

I want these people to see that there was someone in a management role that at least gives enough of a shit to visibly make their unhappiness with the decisions and actions of senior management known.

Maybe it's a meaningless gesture politically, it certainly didn't change anything at the company, but for me it was like lighting a candle and placing in with others in honor of someone who has passed. It won't change anything but it helps those who are struggling and grieving feel a bit less isolated. Its nothing to be proud of, it doesn't change the world, but for me it was better than sitting at my desk for a few hours completing ignoring a problem that didn't personally impact me.

You’re absolutely right. Political action is impotent if it doesn’t actually move you towards your goal. Walkouts for a day and then you just go back to work, do not affect a company’s policy. Protests don’t magically bring social justice. Storming the Capitol doesn’t stop the election. So much political actions today don’t actually force change, they just “raise awareness” and make participants feel good for visibly being on the right team.

A walkout is worthwhile if it signals that the employees are ready to strike.

Which they aren't. The attempts to unionize Google employees have been a total failure. The union is extremely unpopular. Without collective support, there is no strike.

Not parody. It's what happened as I did it.

American Left went from solidarity, going against the corporates, and better salaries and conditions to supporting whatever the latest hot political stand is.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Politics has been de-economized and the economy has been de-politicized. Not surprising given how dangerous this sort of organization is to the big corporations. Better to have people fight over gender politics than better working conditions and compensation.

People clearly care deeply about about both these things. It’s possible for the left to fight over gender politics AND working conditions.

The issue is that identity politics are a race to the bottom of purity politics. The amount of black you can be or whether you're LGBTQ+ enough is a spectrum that lends itself to eating your own young. Conversely, all of us are workers. We are united in the blood and sweat we offer to the increasingly well-to-do.

Consuming ourselves in intra-labor factionalism while the wealthy elites feed anti-union propaganda does everything to reduce our bargaining power and our feeling of love and respect for our fellow human beings. Because at the end of the day it's not how much melanin you have in your skin or how female you feel or what terms you're using at your workplace, it's your humanity and your labor that unites us.

Buddhism, which I often reference, makes much to do over the uselessness and continued suffering we bind ourselves to by the reification of concepts. We need to stop reifying those ideas which divide us and find the common in which to celebrate our closeness.

There is a stark difference between lifting up and listening to women (which I am strongly for) because they are our fellow human beings in labor not because their state of being will never be understood by their male counterparts, which is often the refrain of the new far left.

Class politics not identity politics.

Sure, and that's exactly what the rich corporations want. They'd rather see people fighting each other over gendered pronouns than threatening to burn the factory down due to rampant exploitation of workers.

A major global publication has written an article about it. Spotlight is shone on Activision Blizzard's culture.

We have seen that the only way to get any sort of customer support out of big tech companies is making noise on social media. And it works when enough noise is made. This is the next level of that: making noise in publications with global reach. The management will be wise not to ignore it.

The Guardian will be tuned out as noise by anyone who doesn't already agree.

There is almost nothing which would change the minds of the people who don’t already understand these as problems.

No one seeking change is targeting them as the audience. Though, in their own heads, they probably delude themselves into believing they are.

That sounds like an easy way to discount any criticism of your own actions or views, which doesn't seem a particularly healthy way to go through life. You could almost mistake it for being the same thing you're saying causes others to be not worth engaging with...

Who is saying not to analyze the event? And who is saying never to engage with others? I’m certainly not saying either of those things.

Did you respond to the wrong comment?

If you assume there is nothing you can do to change someone's mind, there is little to no reason to interact with them with regards to that thing. Without that interaction, you won't get their concerns and criticisms. Not interacting with people about something you and they disagree on is a good way to make sure there's nothing they can do to change your mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if they view you in a similar way to how you described them originally.

The only solution to that is to engage, and engage with the assumption that change is possible, for both of you. Otherwise you're just lecturing someone, and that's not engagement.

Again, Im just not following. This has little to do with the point my comment was making.

I said, anyone who would tune out The Guardian article as noise because they disagree with the topic is not the target audience of the walkout.

How much someone chooses to spend their personal energy or personal time “debating” contrarians just isn’t relevant to my comment…

You seem determined to change the subject away from who the walkout was for into this boring and repeatedly beat-to-death discussion, so, here’s where I stand: You can say they somehow have an obligation to spend their valuable time and valuable energies engaging with people who would tune it out as “just more SJW noise” or whatever, but I would personally argue, if they’re already tuning out an article because they disagree, rather than wasting time on them, there are thousands of ways to better use one’s time.

The second part of my argument would be, I understand that some of these people who would ignore it as noise have convinced themselves that everything has to do with them. But they should be asking themselves, “Why do I think this walkout was to convince me?” and “Why do I think they would spend their time and energy to do this walkout for me?” and “Why do I think my opinion is even relevant to this company where I don’t work and people I don’t even know?” and then, they if they’re honest with themselves, at least one of the conclusions they’ll come to is, “omg, im so vain that i believe these people i don’t know at a company i don’t work for should be seeking my approval…” which should lead themselves to ask the most important question of all…

But yeah, this topic of “you ought to spend your limited personal time and personal resources convincing contrarians” is boring af. we’ve read it in comment threads tens of thousands of times by now and with people who still can’t figure out how to break out of the elementary level loop they’ve gotten themselves stuck in.

So to sum it up, people who have tuned out the article as noise because they disagree are absolutely not the target audience. And if they find this basic fact troubling, they should reorient themselves to figure out why they would even imagine they are.

> I said, anyone who would tune out The Guardian article as noise because they disagree with the topic is not the target audience of the walkout.

No, you said "There is almost nothing which would change the minds of the people who don’t already understand these as problems." That's far more expansive than a statement about the people that read the Guardian that don't agree ignoring it. It's one thing to say people may not trust one source or how it's presented, it's an entirely different thing to say they are unwilling to consider any source or argument. One is stating the people have a bias around a source and/or topic, the other is painting a large group of people themselves as entirely unreasonable, and to me it seemed your statement was conveying the latter.

If that's not your intent, then we can just chalk this up to some combination of poor expression and poor interpretation and call it a day.

we can be as pedantic as we like, but either way, people like that were not the target audience. <—- that’s the important piece of what i was saying.

I don't think an article on the side of the front page of a foreign newspaper remotely compares to what the NYT center front page or NBC Nightly News spotlights would mean.

It's on the front page of the Washington Post and NPR.

“Sunlight is not a disinfectant; try gasoline” —Amber Frost

Google removed its mandatory arbitration clause for sexual harassment cases in response to the walkout: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/tech...

> True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.

What do you imagine this path to "true employee organization" might look like, if it doesn't involve actions like these along the way?

It's unfortunate, but walkouts and other employee activism around social justice can achieve the opposite effect. The marginalized leave because they don't feel heard, and potential new hires who might represent change stop applying or responding to recruiting attempts because of the company's tarnished reputation.

Over time this leads to increased marginalization and concentration of the vary behavior that provoked the activist response in the first place.

The only thing that actually works is board level action and commitment to following through on the change. Boards can hold execs accountable.

Also the employees who agree with the sentiment but find the tactics to be naive (or worse) become less likely to speak out.

We’ll you’re still talking about it all this time later, so at the very least it absolutely contributed to topics being in the conversational arena.

We have to remember how many people still say “Did Occupy really change anything?” —- on its own? Of course not. However “The 99%” is absolutely a concept which every disconnected midwesterner now knows and understands what it means, in two small words. This is a concept which was not previously a dinner table conversation and Occupy flipped that on its head. And when we’re dealing with something that’s as complex and messy as superpowers and their economic systems, that is absolutely not something to hand-wave away and proclaim “it did nothing.”

None of these incredibly ingrained societal problems will be solved from one single instance of a walkout, and frankly, it would be more than a bit myopic to expect they would.

These are complex and messy issues and there isnt one single thing which will address any of them, it’s going to be a lot of single instances that add up to something over time–and I think most people understand this.

Walkouts are an easy way to get more attention to an issue and it costs an employer real money. A single action doesn't need to solve everything.

The sceptic in me is unsure how much money this costs. They aren't an assembly line, so did any deadlines get pushed back? Similarly, they are not a services company, so no services were lost.

Certainly bad press. And I hope it has impact. But I'm not seeing direct lines to it.

World of Warcraft, the cash cow product, is getting content delayed according to one of the devs:

https://twitter.com/JeffAHamilton/status/1419115702569472003

Delays are common, and expected as par for the course in the game industry. No one blinks an eye at delays and most games seem to not launch when announced anyway (like most software). The question that matters is, will this actually cost them lost revenue in the long run, or just delay inevitable sales by however long the employees can hold out in a walkout/strike? A delay is just as good as money in the bank in the long run. Will people not buy the product because it was delayed? Will they care why it was delayed, or even know unless it was an in-game message? Some will, sure, but will they still make the purchase? Likely.

World of Warcraft is a subscription-based product, so delays do directly lead to lost revenue as players get bored and cancel.

They are absolutely a service company since game nowadays are live service content (I.e fortnight). In Activision’s Case, numerous of their games rely on new content being worked on for seasonal releases , bug fixes , reports etc. Time not being spent working on such causes delays which of course cost money.

Agreed, human nature being what it is, I guarantee you most of the work missed during the walk out was made up that evening by the same employees working late without being asked to do so.

On the contrary, there's evidence that less time at work (especially a single day) can keep productivity the same or better. Look at 4 day work week experiments.

Productivity per hour, or productivity per week?