Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear).

This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost.

James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own.

Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with.

Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds.

Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren't hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it's not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.

I'm not aggressive or even obvious about this disposition, I just gently steer clear of violating it. I feel the same should apply to companies, fine if you want to make a stand on some political issue, but don't make a show of it, because it implies that all your employees should agree with your position.

People in the world have different opinions on things, we need to be able to work with eachother on shared interests without making every place and occasion a battleground. If not in the workplace, then where?

On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'. My relationship to my employer is a professional one, trying to disguise this by intermingling personal feelings can only end in tears, when one day you discover that it was such all along, only you deluded yourself (or let yourself be led) into thinking differently.

Let’s say one of your colleagues or managers occasionally makes decisions that would be frowned upon by some people. Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a female candidate because they thought she might have a child soon. Or maybe they passed on a gay man because they didn’t think he should be working in a role where he’d interact with children.

This is a political act. Deciding to respond to it, or to ignore it, is also a political act. If this culture is widespread, it would seem reasonable to object to it at a company-wise level. It seems infeasible to separate politics from employment in that sense.

When the pet cause is something that affects working conditions at the company, then that "issue" you describe is simply expecting the company to follow labor laws.

Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.

You're misrepresenting the facts. The newspiece states that the activists were fired for tracking and doxxing colleagues that they seemed reactionaries. This sort of abuse is hardly defensible.

    the issue is practicing political activism 
    for your own pet cause in the workplace on 
    company time 

The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and ignore them.

The point is that expecting the law to be upholded is hardly a political act. It's basic rule of law.

EG as per a sibling comment, if an HR Rep is not convinced regarding trans-rights, they should absolutely not let that impact their treatment of a trans person that comes to them.

Or, more famously, (and not that it did him any good) Brendan Eich made a political donation to candidates opposing gay marriage, but (afaik) there were never any reports of him mistreating any LGBTQ+ employees.

Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a white male candidate because they're working on a new diversity initiative. Or maybe, after being trained constantly on gender bias and seeing vigorous workplace political debates on the subject, you investigate the issue and find no evidence to support anything other than the fact that men and women have different preferences, and you present this evidence to the debate and get fired.

Even acknowledging such cases seems to be political.

I don't really believe that people should be expected to respect inane illogical arguments just because they have a political side to it.

In fact, doing knowledge work, being unable to form a coherent argument or inability to distinguish faulty logical arguing, would in fact make you a lot less qualified for it.

I, too, old this belief, but it's kind of hard when the "new culture" is overwhelmed with a sense of entitlement to "be heard". Everyone thinks their individual opinions should be able to be shared whenever they feel the need to be validated, and that everyone must hear their opinion in that moment, regardless of how controversial it may be. And if you try to stifle their attempt or even mildly disagree, then you are the bad person. Couth and tactfulness have given way to entitlement and postmodernism in the modern work culture.

If you want to disagree about, say, LGBT rights, then I will probably deem that you are the bad person. That's how strong, deeply held beliefs work. I'm sure if I tried hard I could come up with an example of a belief that would make you consider me a bad person if I stated it as a coworker.

What you're describing is just that your values differ greatly from "new culture" values, not some new entitlement among young people.

People in the younger generation (myself somewhat included in that) do feel extra entitlement toward saying what they want, when they want, in whatever forum they want. But it's a lot harder nowadays to keep one's personal and professional lives completely separate. I'd lean toward considering this trend a good thing; we don't work in a vacuum. Activism absolutely does have a place in a professional setting when so many social and political issues contribute to discrimination in the workplace.

At the same time, making judgments about the parent's values is a bit out of line. Some people really do just want to go to the office, put in a full day of work, and go home where their "real" life happens. I personally think that's a limiting attitude, but don't begrudge people their need or desire to go that route.

My impression, from working in one of these progressive workplaces, is that nobody is forced to interject or defend their personal opinions, or be a part of those discussions at all. Indeed, just as we have employees bringing the latest from the social justice circus to work, we also have employees who sit it out entirely. We even have a dedicated #activism slack channel, which is obviously opt-in.

So when I see complaints like the parents, my impression is the true feelings are "I want to disagree and say X but my coworkers will think I'm a bad person." Obviously, the coworkers will only think you're a bad person if you're disagreeing with them on a strongly held, deeply personal value, hence my example of LGBT rights.

There are a such thing as bad opinions. If I share bad opinions, people will think I'm a bad person. Every person's conception of bad opinions is a little different - For example, most people here agree that mass surveillance and censorship is bad, but only some people here feel that deporting DACA immigrants is bad.

Thus, I concluded the parent probably just holds vastly different values from his or her more vocal coworkers. There's nothing wrong with having different values, in fact it's quite normal. I don't know why else parent would be concerned with being labelled a bad person.

People holding the majority view are publicly cheered by the company, but people holding minority views are (at best) tolerated.

This frustrates me on several levels:

- There's no room for debate on these topics. The official company position is treated as so obviously correct that a reasoned debate on the matters is treated as unnecessary, or even worse, immoral. I find this insulting.

- The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.

These leave me with the impression that the employer is hypocritical and/or disingenuous.

May I have a specific example?

There appears to be a lot of negative opinions about this kind of workplace based on the comments (and my downvotes on some of my comments haha). I'm just trying to understand it.

If you're curious, you can see a specific example from my workplace in the edit region here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21524930

I've never personally had a bad experience from being in a "progressive" workplace. I don't agree with them on everything, but in general I've never had a bad experience. The "social justice" aspect is pretty opt-in, so I don't know what could lead to a negative experience such as being less than tolerated.

> The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.

I don't really see the contradiction. My work celebrates employees by giving us catered lunches that often include pork but nobody perceives that as being anti-muslim, as long as there are non-pork choices. The vegetarians and vegans don't mind meat on the table as long as there are vegetarian and vegan choices.

A subset of teachings from a subset of Christian faiths will say something like "[homosexuality] is an abomination". It would be disrespectful to employee's religion (and common sense) for the employer to tell their employees they must be homosexual. It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?

> May I have a specific example?

I can't without giving out too much detail. I shouldn't have stated that without being able to provide substance, sorry.

> It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?

I think we're getting close to the fundamental issue here. Let me unpack my logic a bit:

1) Celebrating behavior X implies that X is in some way virtuous.

2) To claim that X is virtuous, is to claim that any belief system S which states X is not virtuous is in error.

So I see the current discussion as having the structure shown above, with:

X = partaking in a homosexual relationship, and

S = the theologies of various Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects.

So in short, it seems to me that employers are logically implying that certain employees have false religious beliefs, but the employers are hiding behind the fact that the their implication isn't clearly stated.

I think that's inconsistent with the employers' claims to respect employees' religious views.

3) an employer can respect employees religious views only if they will not imply the religious view is in error

It's clearly (from your logic) the case that employers description of "respects" violates axiom (3). If you belong to one of the sects in question I can understand being upset, but I would argue that (given the breadth of beliefs in the world) it is impossible to not imply some employees "respected" belief is wrong.

So perhaps this is the point, that employers should not claim to respect beliefs because they necessarily must act inconsistently while doing so. Thus, one might conclude, a workplace should stand for nothing in particular and thus allow employees to believe anything without celebrating or respecting it.

However, I wouldn't agree with this conclusion. I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.

In fact, I'd claim this the common sense approach. This is how I resolve having friends with non-identical belief sets, for example.

(An example: one coworker made a joke to the expense of astrology. A different coworker chimed in that she and others adhered to astrology and found this joke offensive. The original coworker offered an apology and all was well.)

> I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.

I think we agree that employers ought to take positions somewhere on the Pereto curve [0] of that tradeoff-space.

At one level, it seems to be a question of how happy various employee groups would feel for the different policy options. I don't have a principled reason for my own preference in that trade-space, so I try to not put my own views on a pedestal for this topic.

If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

> If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.

I would suspect that it is, so I guess we've gone a bit meta because the "accepted" way for large organizations of humans to make these trade-offs is politics

So then is it right to say the solution to "too much politics at work" is office politics to decide the right amount of politics at work?

I have the feeling I'm a few philosophy-degrees short of being confident in any particular answer to that question :(

I hate it when discussions about potentially important topics end with a muddle of uncertainty about metaphysical matters. It seems to end this way just about every time.

They can probably avoid the more metaphysical questions but as soon as they have a canteen there's going to be issues if any group assumes their religious rules must be applied to everyone's food (and indeed what they're eating outside of work).

What is "right to be heard" mean? For me it usually means employees speak their concerns with management, and management is receptive enough (ie they care about employee retention) that if something is really bad they hold a Q&A session. Maybe act on it.

I'm an empowered, high-demand employee in a high demand industry. If management doesn't want to hear about my concerns, that's fine and they can say so. I'll find another employer in less than a week.

Edit: to give a more concrete example, my employer was in talks to write software for client X, a corporation well known for being Bad People™️. A bunch of employees came forward that they didn't want to do business with client X. Management discussed it thoroughly with these employees, hosted public roundtables, etc. I wasn't part of this discussion so I can't say the outcome, but yes the employees who cared demanded a right to be heard, because often that's why we work for progressive employers in the first place.

For example, a CEO might not want someone who is anti-LGBT representing their company in any way. On the flip side of that, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the leadership was anti-LGBT. Even if these people are otherwise good at their jobs, a person's morality does matter when deciding who to work with/for.

You might make the argument that no one at work should even know if anyone else is anti-LGBT or not, or argue that people should put those cares aside in the interests of a harmonious workplace, but I just don't think that's how (all) humans work.

There are practical considerations to this, too: say a trans employee has to deal with an anti-LGBT HR person regarding trans healthcare and the company's health plans. The HR person is going to be uncomfortable about that conversation, and the trans person isn't going to feel like their concerns are being taken seriously, or even feel safe having that conversation in the first place. That's... not okay.

> On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'.

Just like any other random group of people in the world, some of my colleagues are my friends who I socialize with outside work, and some (most) aren't.

(Agreed, though, the whole "company is family" nonsense needs to stop.)

What would be the expected reaction in this case? We'd want (or require) those people to keep their desires to themselves and choose their employees/employers professionally without discrimination, right?

Thing is, you can't both have your cake and eat it; if we argue that companies should be allowed to act on political/social opinions, then that applies also if you don't like them; and if we argue that it should keep their nose out of what position their employees take on various political/social issues and just focus on their work, then again this will apply to both positions that we like and those we hate.

If employers are allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing anti-LGBT agenda, they'd be allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing a pro-LGBT agenda. Either employees have the right to freely express their political positions or they do not - but that right doesn't depend on which of opposing positions they hold.

Your example of the HR person who has to make decisions about medical issues obviously falls in a different category, but even in this case discretion could be assumed to be the default.

I have friends who work in LA and in SF and they constantly bombard me with stories of how employees of all levels (even recent hires) just spew the most extremist political diatribes at all times and some just do it to troll other employees of the different faction. It has gotten so bad that there are several "secret" slack channels for these cliques dedicated to continue gossiping and sharing memes that are pretty distasteful.

Whenever I ask about them reporting it to HR they just tell me that HR doesn't really exist and they pretty much exist just to make sure payroll is distributed.

Just my 2 cents but I prefer just clocking in and talking about the weather than have to put up with that kind of toxicity.

It's in vogue to use the ideas from the Nonviolent Communication book to make this work better. But those ideas are of course politocal.. as is the debate on whether to allow political discussions.

Also it's pretty hard to separate political discussions from work if you're doing something that impacts people's lives. (I'm leaving out jobs where the societal impact is clearly negative, there discouraging discussion might be rational for the employer)

From the company's PoV you're correct. From the employee's PoV I'm not convinced.

To be less glib, the level of acceptable discourse tends to be built into a companies culture. I've never seen a workplace with zero discourse on the outside world, and I doubt it exists. Companies like google clearly push the concept to its breaking point, though.

Do you allow colleagues to become friends?

I've never worked for Google so I have no basis for comparison but it's very common across white collar jobs for employees social circles to very closely if not entirely overlap with work.

Unless you participated in extracurricular activities that weren't school sponsored, you probably never learned to make friends outside of school. Work, like school, is how you develop your social circle.

The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably in part due to the rise of teleworking. No longer do people grab a drink after work.

    The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably 
    in part due to the rise of teleworking. No 
    longer do people grab a drink after work.

Now that I'm a teleworker, I've got about 10 extra hours of time each week that I don't have to spend commuting. So that actually has benefits for my social life, since I never really hung out with my coworkers anyway!

Of course, I'm a best-case scenario. I have a wife. I have pets. I've lived in this area my whole life and have friends here. I don't need workplace friends. If you don't have those things then you might depend on your workplace for your social connections a little bit more.

To be honest I think workplace friends can really suck anyway. I have made great friends at various jobs, but these days I sort of like to keep "work" and "friends" separate. Having workplace friends can be healthy, but depending on your workplace for friends seems extremely unhealthy. I mean, what happens when you're no longer with the company? It's like you've left a cult and now all your connections have been severed.

When I was in my early 20's, my social life was all about where I worked but now that I'm an adult, I've started to build a solid social network within my town and its various groups. I would hate to socialise with people purely from my office now.

That's something I experienced. I was laid off after 15 years and really I was laid off from my friends too. The company even monitored social media accounts which at the time seemed bizarre but now it's common. I was told by someone still working there HR declared unfriending a fellow employee was considered bullying.

I'm trying my best not to put all my eggs in one basket. I'm trying to make friends outside of work. Everyone knows you shouldn't date a coworker but really we should also not base our entire social life around coworkers either.

But as mentioned above you are in that bubble. Apple even went so far as to encircle everyone with their new building.

This culture of being friends with your coworkers is odd to me. My coworkers suck as friends, the vast majority of the time. And heaven forbid you don't want to be friends anymore, because now you're stuck with them. I have much better luck making friends by joining and participating in clubs dedicated to my hobbies.

It's even more the case I assume to people at Google or other big multinational s. People there are much more likely not to be locals, and a lot of their colleagues are going to be in the same situation. That's the perfect context for friendships.

From personal experience, clubs can be difficult if it is a tightly knit community and you're an outsider; especially so if you don't speak the language. It's not that they are not nice, it's just that you need 2 people to form a friendship.

That said, I'm friendly at work, I've made many friends at work. Some jobs have been a lot friendlier than others. But the idea that you need a job to make friends or you'll lose your friends when you lose a job is alien to me. If they don't want to spend time with you outside of work, they're not your friend.

Would not go into detail but in my past I've encountered some peculiar things that HR was trying to impose on employees. I just told them to sod off and keep me away from their kindergarten. The HR person I talked to was sort of shocked but they did leave me alone. No actions were taken. They just asked me not to promote my view among other employees which I was not interested with anyways.

Teleworking is a major benefactor to breaking that imbalance. Typical IT workers out of every 24 hours you spend about 9 working, 8 sleeping, 2 on commuting and 3 on grooming, meals and chores. That leaves just 2 hours of uncommitted time in which to fit me-time, sports, hobbies and friends. So some things will have to give.

Teleworking doubles the amount of time you have uncommitted. That is not just a 100% quantitative increase. 4 hours can fit things that 2 hours just can not, as any outhouse activity (gym/evening class/pub/cinema/theater/...) has setup/travel/wind-down time as well.

Teleworking, or more general, the absence of the typical commute is what enables you to have a social life.

I spent 7 years teleworking and had no problem grabbing a drink after work. Now that I have to physically co-locate with cow orkers I can't do that because (a) I'm driving and (2) they want to join me.

Drinking alone is the best kind of drinking.

Drinking alone? I dunno about that.

This is absolutely, 100% false. This is exactly what you SHOULD do, and this is what unions are for.

Always organise with coworkers. Otherwise you are giving employers more power over you than you should.

I don't want to be in a union. I don't want to join some club. I don't want to pay dues. I don't want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby, underhanded manuevering for power that would come with a union. And I'm tired of people condescendingly telling me that I'm wrong for feeling this way. I'm not wrong. Power corrupts and labor is no more pure than mangement. If labor gets the upper hand it will abuse its position.

The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.

If you want to do good, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Of course that would be hard and would involve looking at things you'd rather not see.

Respectfully - were you a programmer during the last recession? I only ask because this power dynamic you imply is inherent in being a programmer can change (and has changed) in a matter of weeks and you'll find the entire industry is not hiring, not seeking consultants, and not looking to buy your *aaS product.

There were a lot of desperate programmers during the great recession (and before that, the dotcom bust)

edit: removed age from what should have been a more general question.

The employer has a workforce and resources at their disposal, you bring to the table only your time. You can eschew unions all you want, but it's simply untrue to state that "a union is no more pure than management."

I'm sorry you feel condescended to to be told this, presumably yet again. Perhaps we can find a way to preserve your feelings, because condescension isn't my intent; I'm just trying to address a century's worth of anti-union propaganda.

By the way, labor organizing is significantly harder than volunteering at a soup kitchen. In the past, employers have hired private armies (the Pinkertons, etc) to attack and kill labor organizers; these days, despite it being illegal, employers often fire workers for legally-protected labor organizing activity. No one's being fired from a soup kitchen.

"Balance of power between labor and management" doesn't mean 50:50. It means the employee has some leverage.

The employer should have more power than the employee. Just like the president should have more power than the citizen, the general should have more power than the private, and the parent should have more power than the child. Power differentials are necessary.

> The employer has a workforce and resources at their disposal, you bring to the table only your time. You can eschew unions all you want, but it's simply untrue to state that "a union is no more pure than management."

Unions are pure when they are correcting an imbalance of power. They're corrupt when they're are accumulating power for its own sake.

> I'm sorry you feel condescended to to be told this, presumably yet again. Perhaps we can find a way to preserve your feelings, because condescension isn't my intent; I'm just trying to address a century's worth of anti-union propaganda.

After reading this paragraph, I have a really hard time believing that condescension isn't your intent. I don't think "unions are bad," I think they are a valid tool to correct power imbalances but they're just a tool, sometimes there is no power imbalance, and a union for programmers is a terrible idea.

> By the way, labor organizing is significantly harder than volunteering at a soup kitchen. In the past, employers have hired private armies (the Pinkertons, etc) to attack and kill labor organizers; these days, despite it being illegal, employers often fire workers for legally-protected labor organizing activity. No one's being fired from a soup kitchen.

Yeah, we've all heard the stories about Google putting out hits on dissident employees.

A unionized workplace doesn't mean you 1) need to join the union (closed shops are illegal in the US) or 2) be involved in the "grubby underhanded maneuvering for power" -- in a pragmatic sense because you can't be compelled to join a union, but more importantly because that is not what union activity is.

What I would find far more convincing is an explanation of how a workplace like Google would be worse if it were a union shop. Lower pay? Nope, union shops consistently draw larger salaries for their workers. Less workplace safety? Nope, union shops consistently have fewer injuries than non-union shops. Fixed salary schedule? Nope, a technical union could easily be structured like SAG -- e.g. Tom Cruise doesn't have a salary cap. Can't fire a bad apple? That seems like a bad idea until someone decides you're the bad apple.

I bet that Damore guy would've appreciated having a union rep sitting at the table with him in those HR meetings where they were going over his blog posts or whatever.

Really? My argument is very straightforward:

> The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.

> I don't think "unions are bad," I think they are a valid tool to correct power imbalances but they're just a tool, sometimes there is no power imbalance, and a union for programmers is a terrible idea.

I'm not a cog in a machine. I have a significant amount of control over what I'm working on and who I'm working for and how that work gets done.

> What I would find far more convincing is an explanation of how a workplace like Google would be worse if it were a union shop. Lower pay? Nope, union shops consistently draw larger salaries for their workers. Less workplace safety? Nope, union shops consistently have fewer injuries than non-union shops. Fixed salary schedule? Nope, a technical union could easily be structured like SAG -- e.g. Tom Cruise doesn't have a salary cap. Can't fire a bad apple? That seems like a bad idea until someone decides you're the bad apple.

This is exactly my point. Unionization for programmers is about MORE money, LESS work, and LESS accountability. It's an employee cartel. The idea that agitating for a union is a moral endeavor is laughable. It's a moral endeavor when you're a serf or a coal miner.

Correct, and it is certainly your right to wish for less money and more work, even if that is an unorthodox position to take. Perhaps unfair to advocate on behalf of your coworkers for, in your own words, less money and more work, however.

I'm under the impression that once a union takes hold of a company, you're required to join the union to work there. That was certainly the case when my spouse was a teacher.

So, then, isn't fighting for a union shop also unfairly advocating on behalf of your coworkers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States

As for advocating for organizing at your workplace being unfair to your coworkers: they are not required to join, but as union shops consistently pay better, are safer, and provide better protections against arbitrary firing, I would still be comfortable advocating for those conditions for my coworkers.

Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way. You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.

If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. I'm comfortable saying "I don't want to work for a company that is complicit in X bad thing". But we have to understand that "complicit" and "bad" are not easy to define. Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake.

> Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way.

I don't want to "influence the direction of the company" in the way that you mean. I want to influence its culture by speaking and writing precisely and being nice. But I don't want to make the kinds of decisions you're talking about. I don't know what a "positive direction" is (I don't think you do either). We are constantly acting into an uncertain future and the idea that "the laborers are the good guys who know what's positive" is infantile. I already said what I think about that: if labor gets too much power to "influence the direction of the company," labor will abuse that power (less work, more pay). If management has all the power, management will abuse its power (more work, less pay). The answer is a balance of power and I don't think we, in software, are doing too bad.

> You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.

If I want to take the plunge and choose what I do with 8 hours a day, I'm sure as hell not going to choose "working for someone else". By "working for someone else" I am making a very clear decision to avoid risk. I'm fine with this decision. You're trying to have it both ways. You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.

And the deeply unethical behavior would continue to happen.

>Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake.

You have to make a compromise here. As an individual you don't have much power to stop those unethical behaviors, and as a group you do.

>You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.

No, you can have this. By collectivizing.

Hardness of an activity or it involving things you don't want to see have no bearing to its goodness.

It's like suggesting that everyone should give gifts of 100 dollars to each other for Christmas. No one wants that. People aren't rational agents with utility functions or, if they are, the utility functions are unknown, vary from person to person, and are not solely based on material well-being (my guess is that they're mostly based on the esteem we estimate that we have in the eyes of our peers).

Pick a problem in your community, directly contribute to its solution, and you will be happier plus the people around you will respect you more. If you give money, that won't be the case. You can insist on a strict utilitarian perspective but you're fighting reality and you can't rewire your brain.

As an example of what is in there, for their tech workforce, whites have declined from 57.8% to 43.5% in four years. (see page 33) You can decide for yourself whether this suggests racial bias in hiring.

Download the PDF here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/...

edit: I was mistaken about the intersectional part. The corresponding stat for white males is a decline from 47.5% to 33.3% in four years. Stunning.

All roles: Asian, 43.9% Black, 4.8% Latin, 6.8% Native American, 1.1% White 48.5%

Women: 33.2% Men: 66.8%

Tech Roles: Asian, 51.8% Black, 2.8% Latin, 5.3% Native American, 0.8% White, 43.5%

Women: 25.7% Men: 74.3%

Well, this is exactly the question at stake. And it's not Google that makes some of us believe that it is indeed possible to not be estranged from our labor, but the history of human cooperation related to sharing our labor and other resources.

We dream of sharing labor and governance of said labor. To say Google did not hire their employees to do that is resorting to one level of rules (legal or operational). But these employees are implicitly contesting a deeper level of rules (constitutional). The question of _who we are_ is deeper than any contracts or protocols that Google explicitly defines.

I don't really like Google very much, but I'm with them on this one, these people sound nuts.

This is not my experience at all. Work-life balance there was way ahead of other tech companies I’ve worked for. Most people show up, work reasonable hours, and go home. Evenings and weekends are yours.

In my experience, Bay Area startups are way more guilty of trying to exploit young people with a sense of that the startup is your family. Eat, work, play, and socialize with your team, 24/7. Some people enjoy that, and sometimes these same startups go belly up, and your social network is lost.

I have no idea where your rhetoric comes from, though.

They go out in the pub around the corner after work with their company badge on display, they leverage having worked at Google in later jobs as if it has blessed them with infinite wisdom and knowledge.

It's quite cringe worthy to see people fall into that trap. And yes, it's not every single one of them but not exactly a fringe group either.

Surely this is an exaggeration? I mean, being friends with co-workers is great, but surely people at google also have friends outside Google, right? Right?

[1]: https://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

>Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait)

Imagine thinking that you can literally publish and circulate several revisions of an internal company memo telling 50% of your coworkers that they should be paid less because they're genetically inferior to you in regards to the job and then when people tell you that you're kind of a dick and they want nothing to do with you, getting outraged and making a grandstand about being unfairly and terribly oppressed, while bemoaning of course that people nowadays are "too sensitive".

Sadly, you can find many examples of this amazing exercise in woke coherence right here on HN.

#Edit, since I've been accused of "being ignorant" and not having read the memo by people who clearly haven't read the thing themselves. In a section titled "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech", wholly dedicated to justifying, among other phenomena, gender pay gap for reasons other than sexist bias, in James Damore's own words:

> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.

>Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

>Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” 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.

I've not cherry-picked these quotes. There are no omissions, they're whole, untouched paragraphs.

This is an outright fabrication. Nowhere did Damore write that women should be paid less, or that they were genetically inferior at tech. He said that gender differences can explain, in part, difference in preferences between men and women.

Is it sexist to say "hey, maybe 95% of kindergarten teachers are women not because men are discriminated against, but because men don't prefer to work with young kids at the same rate as women due to innate biological reasons."

Closer to reality, but you're still injecting your own narrative here. He did not say that women are worse at negotiating. He said that Google rewards assertiveness rather than agreeableness in it's negotiations, and because women are on average more agreeable this disadvantages women. And later, he suggested that Google should make it's environment more rewarding of agreeableness to make things fairer for women.

How people made the jump from this to, "women are genetically inferior at tech" is astounding to me.

And regardless of the correctness of firing him, him getting fired is a little stronger than "people tell[ing him] that [he's] kind of a dick".

On a section dedicated to offering alternative explanations to sexism for the gender gap in tech, James writes:

>Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.

>Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

The implication is that it's partly natural that women do worse and get lower salaries at tech. In case there's any adoubt, the section it's written in is titled "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech", in the subsection "Personality differences".

People make these leaps of fiction on their own from usually well meaning but confused stances.

Yes, your are making an unsubstantiated leap from what was actually written to claiming that Damore write that his female coworkers should be paid less than men for the same work.

Statistics are all we have to go on in this regard, and they are in Damore's favor.

The truth is not bigoted.

"White men can't jump" is generally true.

Personality traits are like most things on a spectrum, and women tend to have less of the traits which have until now been perceived to be necessary for "negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading"

There are leaders that are women, see AMD.

Dunning/Kruger etc

> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.

Yes, that does say that women are genetically worse leaders and implies that their lower salaries are at least in part because they are naturally worse negotiators.

The whole section it's written on is focused on explaining how sexism is mostly a exaggeration and that sex differences can instead be explained by genetic factors. Any more questions?

No it does not. It says that women are more agreeable and less assertive, on average. And because Google rewards assertiveness, this means women have a harder time negotiating salaries at Google. In a workplace the prioritizes agreeableness over assertiveness, women would be at an advantage. And later in the memo he says Google should better reward agreeableness.

It does not claim "women are genetically worse leaders". This is a fabrication.

In order to be discriminatory, they would have to be broad, ignorant statements based on personal anecdote and prejudice that he pulled out of his ass right before adding 'on average' at the end of the phrase; since they are not that in any way, but carefully researched, unbiased observations, they do not fit the definition of discriminatory.

Now that you've explained to me what facts are, I finally understand James' logic, so please consider this argument won.

What happened to James, who simply circulated a fact-based memo telling half of his coworkers that they need special rules to make things fair since they're at least partly genetically inferior when it comes to the job, was yet another gratuitous act of SJW, PC, fact-censoring repression against one of society's most silenced and powerless collectives: top-salaried, Ivy League educated young white males working at the top companies of male-dominated high growth industries in the largest economy on the planet, like so many others we sadly see so often here on HN.

It's time we finally took a stand on these issues.

If you think that there is no difference between saying people who belong to a certain group are more or less X on average, and saying that individual members of that group are X then I really cannot help you. This is just patently wrong. There's nothing sexist about saying "men on average commit rape 50 times more than women". That's fact. If you told a man, "you're a rapist" because of mere fact that he is a man, then yes that is prejudice.

He didn't just add the word "on average" at the end. He explicitly pointed out that conflating population wide averages and individual characteristics is wrong:

> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

If you think his presentation of this data is ineffective, then the productive thing to do is offer a reasoned refutation. Not exaggerate (to be generous, I'm more inclined to call these fabrications) and write that he claimed "women are genetically worse leaders" and "naturally worse negotiators."

1. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-13299-011

So for example "I want to hire people who don't have trait X. I give an objective test for this. More men than women pass it. Studies have shown that more men than women pass this globally, so it is as expected. Therefore, due to this test, the people I hire tend to be more men than women." is not discrimination.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sexism

>Definition of sexism

>1. prejudice or discrimination based on sex

Enough. Just believe what you want, I give up. There's no sexism on the tech industry or schools. James Damore is right and is an oppressed victim of his own bravery. Whatever.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discrimination

>1. prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action, or treatment

Hm. Let's check out the definition of sexism again.

>1. prejudice or discrimination based on sex

Prejudice or discrimination. And discrimination also means prejudiced or prejudicial...since I'm not a tech person like yourself I wouldn't know what 'or' means, it's too complicated for me, but I think I do know what 'and' means: for example, you are wrong about your definition of sexism, and about your definition of discrimination, and about your use of 'or'.

This is great, I love learning new tech concepts on tech forums from tech experts.

From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)

If the Google calendar is for a personal gmail account, then accessing the calendar details server side is a huge privacy breach.

The fact that Google employees, in this case, may not be considering forming a union at this time is irrelevant. The meetings they are having may prompt them to form one at a later time. Either way, their freedom of association is protected.

Google also has a clause in their employment agreement that says you agree to them putting surveillance software on your devices, company supplied and personal, as a condition of your employment. I asked about that one, got the HR response "Well I suppose you could interpret it that way, but that isn't what we mean." and I said, "Okay, lets change it to say what you mean." and got the "Well we really aren't in a position to change these documents, it would be a mess trying to track a zillion individual agreements." etc etc. That rabbit hole of pushing back and forth leads to "perhaps Google isn't the right place for you." :-)

That doesn't mean it's enforceable or that it wouldn't run into statutory limits. Many workplace relations laws are written on a strict liability basis, intent isn't necessary for infringement. So if it has a chilling effect on organising, it's potentially infringing.

Mind you, there's something very rich in Google employees complaining about Chrome being used as a monitoring tool. Look around you, folks. What do you think pays for the fancy cafeteria? It's not hugs and smiles.

I'm generally of the view that knowingly adding unenforceable provisions to a contract should be a crime and/or professional malpractice worthy of being disbarred. It's obtaining advantage through unconscionable deception. Or, less fancily: fraud.

Entirely too much of this kind of thing is allowed to slide by legislatures.

How would Google even know about your personal devices? That seems to only make sense if you intend to use your personal device for work.

Lots of people at tech companies use personal devices for work. This includes things like having your work calendar, email, or corporate applications on your personal phone. In my company's case there is some kind of enterprise iOS policy that gets installed as part of onboarding a device to access company systems. This has the ability to enforce a password policy, monitor installed software and software versions, to lock out devices that are running known vulnerable apps or iOS versions, as well as the technical ability to remotely wipe the entire device (never heard of that being exercised). Company data resides on the device (via email, documents, and other means) so it's reasonable for them to want to have some oversight. An attacker could attempt to get into company systems via the device, after all, since it has (some limited) access to my corporate account.

I use my personal phone for work because it's extremely handy to have work email and calendar on my phone, and I don't want to carry two phones.

I invite my personal calendar to any work events that I need to be aware of when I'm not at work.

Otherwise, when I leave the office, I leave work there too. I'm extremely fortunate to be able to do that.

It's tragic that my good fortune isn't an option for many.

I think it is a good incentive to disconnect from the workplace.

It's definitely a slippery slope though.

"If we already have a privileged app running on people's devices... {insert management-centric ask}"

Didn't a whistleblower at a car company suggest this...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263757/tesla-elon-musk-...

And if such a a company had that technology then we can only speculate its use is more widespread than imagined.

Maybe this is the only reason remote jobs are not available at these companies... Nothing to do with being onsite just more of a precaution to vet employees before even allowing them to be remote.

So if a company could capture your personal text messages and personal cell phone calls while within an office campus (and no BYOD app installed)... would they use that knowledge to prevent poaching as well?

Be careful.

As for how? It was left unspecified but we speculated they could drop a keylogger or other bit of surveillance kit if you logged into your corporate gmail account from a device where it wasn't already installed. Clearly crooks can do this, it has to be easier when you can sign your downloads and are a 'trusted' vendor.

> So if you read your corp email on your home computer, or access employee only services from your phone or laptop etc

I know literally no Google employees that use Google corp resources from personal computers. Phones are common, but as you're hopefully aware, the security considerations are different.

> As for how? It was left unspecified but we speculated they could drop a keylogger or other bit of surveillance kit if you logged into your corporate gmail account from a device where it wasn't already installed.

Who theorized this? Because it's certainly not a thing that's ever happened. It would be trivial to detect, either as a client, or by looking at the source of Gmail.

No. It is a necessary thing to do and what a legal system ostensibly exists to do.

A slippery slope in what direction? In the direction of too many rules being illegal or too many things that could impede organizing being allowed?

Legal and generally accepted in US jurisdiction. In Germany that would require approval by employee representatives, unlikely to happen in any bigger company. In Finland a somewhat related and highly controversive law was introduced many years ago that it would be legal if registered with data protection authorities. Something like 3 companies registered in a decade. Maybe some did it without registering, but generally this is not deemed clearly acceptable practice.

Google has a big data center in Finland. IIRC they stopped their plans for a Berlin lab after visible anti-Google protests in the neighborhood, but I'm sure they have employees somewhere in Germany. International companies just follow local legislation and practices and there is no problem (most of the time at least, there are examples of failure like Walmart trying to expand to Germany with too much of an American management style and eventually giving up).

Surely, Googlers have separate work and personal Google accounts, and only the former would be used with the Google corporate calendar? Article says that one of the things which triggers a report is booking more than 10 meeting rooms for a single meeting – surely, a Googler's personal account would lack permission to book meeting rooms in their corporate offices, and only their work account would have permission to do that?

Before employee leaves the company, its manager is responsible to get all the company data stored (by leaving employee) on another computer, then IT takes the computer and wipes all the drives, with at least two persons present.

A big portion of one of my information security jobs involved looking at employees' browsing history and emails daily. Sometimes to investigate potential misconduct (something dumb like a manager wanting to see if someone's slacking off, or something serious like suspicion of stealing information), but usually to investigate potential security issues (like if we believed a computer visited a malware-associated web page, we wanted to see how the computer ended up there).

In the US, pretty much no one bats an eye that this is considered necessary and normal. Employees who don't want to be snooped on are free to use their personal devices at work, like their phones, which of course we have no access to. But it's considered very normal that if an employer gives you a computer to use for work, that they can inspect that computer and data to and from it. No one has a feeling of their privacy being violated, because there's no expectation of privacy when using someone else's (the company's) property.

For infosec operations people in European countries, how are these things handled? How do you investigate potential breaches which originate from endpoints? Do you have to ask the employee if you can look at their browsing history? What if it's a potential misconduct investigation, where tipping someone off may result in destruction of evidence?

Excellent. Now you only have to remove the expectation of privacy in any situation from the social norms, and another big problem will be solved. You will be able to live under total surveillance without anyone feeling that their privacy is being violated, because there was no expectation of privacy to begin with.

An alternative hypothesis (crazy, I know...), is that the power imbalance in favor of the rich went very far in the US, which means that the poor have no safety net or ability to organize, so they are completely at the mercy of the whims of corporations for survival. And so, they will accept many indignities without bating an eye.

Do people in EU countries expect to use any other of their employer’s equipment for personal reasons?

Every single second that you are working, you know that your employer might be looking over your shoulder. It's like living under a microscope. For me, this is an indignity. Having to work in such circumstances would probably drive me to deep depression.

> Do people in EU countries expect to use any other of their employer’s equipment for personal reasons?

Within reason, sure. I would say that the main value that underlies all EU countries (not that we realize it perfectly, or even get close to it, of course!) is that human beings are the most important thing.

I find mainstream American values increasingly inhumane.

    Within reason, sure. I would say that the main value that
    underlies all EU countries (not that we realize it
    perfectly, or even get close to it, of course!) is that
    human beings are the most important thing.

Still, I just... would never feel "entitled" to use my employer's property for personal uses. And I wouldn't have an expectation of privacy. When I care about privacy, I simply use my own device.

Now, let me be clear. The reality of working in America is that people use their work computers for personal uses all day long. Generally nobody cares, as long as you're getting your work done.

And if somebody really needs to do something personal, they can always just whip our their phones. If I was printing out some concert tickets at work, I'd use my employer's printer. Everybody does this. But if I was going to send some sexy messages I wouldn't do it with work equipment.

So, I don't know. I just don't see the problem. There are many many problems with America, and many ways in which Europe does things better IMO. I just don't see this as one of them.

I'm not saying this is always the case in the EU, though. Obviously there is equipment where for many reasons it's absolutely vital that you don't use it for anything personal. I'm not supposed to run a torrent client on the company server, for example. You can't just "borrow" a company car for a personal trip. But when I happen to use the laptop that the company has assigned to me to work on, to do a bank payment, my boss has absolutely no business knowing the details of that transaction.

I would be okay with them knowing I visited the banking site on company time (if I used their equipment, their DNS, etc) but not with decrypting the SSL encrypted data I'm exchanging with the bank or obtaining it in some other way such as a keylogger.

Though again, I'd probably avoid the issue entirely by using my own device and data connection if I didn't trust my employer. (I'm a bit spoiled, working in IT: I'd probably know if my employer was doing shady things with the data)

How did this work? I presume they had a whitelist of Internet banking sites. But, do you really think their whitelist would include every Internet banking site in the world? I doubt it.

In addition, everyone has a personal computer in their pocket they can use if they want privacy.

I do agree that there should be more requirements to look at data, though. Managers requesting bullshit fishing expeditions to see if an employee is slacking off should be required to submit some sort of evidence before making the request. That never sat right with me, or anyone on my team. But for security issues, there was no question that there was an absolute necessity and justified reason to look at that information.

I'm asking because my concern is maybe European corporate infosec people really aren't managing, here, and are blind to some ongoing major security issues.

It's a weird idea that you have to be a complete robot at work and only ever do work things.

But the official position of the company can’t be “everyone use the company’s resources as they see it for personal use”. So it’s best to just say company resources are for company. What if someone gets hurt using company machinery for personal use? In the US, that would be cause for the company’s workman’s compensation insurance premiums to increase. Why would an employer want that kind of headache?

In practice, from doing many of these investigations, no one bats an eye or gives a single shit about what kind of non-work activities you're doing. The visit to the ticket website would just be a few entries in a long list of other web visit entries, which we'd quickly scroll past while trying to find the thing we're actually looking for (usually malware-related traffic).

Ah, but it's not someone else's device now is it? It's a corporation's device and corporation's have lobbied for laws that specifically prevent individuals for being liable for the colorations actions. If they aren't liable for the actions of said corporation, why should this be treated as two people's opposing rights of property vs privacy rather than a non human entity's property rights vs a humans privacy rights?

This is not an EU-wide regulation. The UK is currently a member of the EU, and this practice is legal in the UK. Employees do not have the expectation of privacy on employer owned equipment.

(Please, lets not devolve into a conversation about Brexit, it's an unrelated tangent)

After all, the rooms belong to Google.

Making a single use extension takes an hour or three by a contractor who won't object. Its trivial enough that the whole thing could be built using a bottom of the barrel freelancer site with a high success rate.

Tracking activity in activity planning software isn't quite as nefarious as looking at peoples emails. Pulling up the meeting bookers boss and sending an email to them & legal is pretty bog standard integration work.

As stated, I can't see any requirement for a client-side footprint...

If it's not, what in the flipping hell are you doing using company property and resources to organize it? I understand that people mix their personal and corporate identities together shamelessly, but that just seems like shockingly poor opsec.

Note that Google didn’t need an extension to know which employees were tracking other employee’s calendars.

Obviously for the “chilling effect”. Really rubbing it in the employee’s faces that they’re being surveilled.