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By contrast, there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google. If the most ethical people with the strongest moral compass leave, then they may be repl

By contrast, there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google. If the most ethical people with the strongest moral compass leave, then they may be replaced with people who have less aversion to working on military drone contracts, or other things. Smart people can be moral, they can also be amoral. Google can continue to execute with either. What you're suggesting could lead to a 'morality drain' equivalent to 'brain drain' Previous internal protests have gotten Google to give up the DOD contract, and may convince them to give up on Dragonfly, without having the loudest voices -- who organize other people in the company -- from all leaving. Leaving is a last resort protest, and often, if you get that far, you've reached a tipping point and there's no going back. You can bring economic pressure and harm to a company by striking, that's how unions work. I see you constantly make this 'love it or leave it' suggestion on HN, but this could lead to a worsening of Google's behavior, not an improvement. I've been in the industry since the early 90s, and have worked for several startups, as well as IBM, Oracle, and Google, and in every case, I've encountered more sexism and sexual harassment behavior elsewhere. Good lord, Oracle would take engineers to strip clubs on business trips. You're asking someone to quit a company which might be persuadable to change its behavior, and join other companies of tech-bros who don't have sexual harassment training, and often don't even have an internal mechanisms to report abuse. To what, walk out and quit again? Sexual harassment and sexism in the tech industry is wide spread, and worse in many other companies. You can't run from it, you should organize collective action where you are and make them fire you. Quitting is the easy way out for a lot of companies.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It is interesting that the defense you've chosen is that which many have used to defend both Maven and Dragonfly; that at least if Google is doing it, it is better than if someone "less moral" was doing it, without recognizing the reduced excellence that would occur if that were true. Perhaps you have less respect for Google engineers than I do! If Google is hiring the best, and many of them leave because of moral issues, then Google is left with hiring the second best. You seem to treat all Google engineers as replaceable cogs which are easily swapped out. But just because there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google doesn't mean there won't be a shortage of people of the caliber Google needs to continue at their current level. Sure, the last few moral people leaving could lead to Google's behavior getting worse, but it would arguably also lead to Google being less successful. Even less people would trust Google as their behavior became "worse". Perhaps you believe other places are worse because you remember them being worse a number of years ago. But things like sexual harassment training are pretty much nationwide standard these days. I've never been to a workplace that didn't mandate it, and every one of them has a process to report abuse. I am curious how you believe you can work for somewhere that's better than elsewhere when nearly every Alphabet executive has some sort of sexual misconduct that can be associated with them, and it's hard to see what way forward there is for remedying this. Is Larry Page and Sergey Brin resigning a possible endgoal here? It's hard for me to see an end to the culture of sexual exploitation at a company where it starts at the very top and those people face no penalty.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  It was only 2006 when I worked at Oracle, I moved to Google in 2009, it’s not like a sea change in sexual harassment reform happened between those years. Oracle was a worse environment than Google in many ways, this is not nostalgia. Political infighting between teams was far worse, to the point that you’d have people yelling in meetings and then deliberately backstabbing and undermining other teams. On a trip I went to Helsinki, they arranged naked Finnish sauna with beer and made no provision for the females with us, some who were from traditionally conservative cultures. After the sauna, they took the men to a strip club with Estonian and Russian strippers. I walked the female team members back to the hotel. Startup companies in the Bay Area of course don’t have these processes, many of them don’t even have a legal or HR department if they have less than 50 people. The toxic bro culture of SV startups has been well documented by female journalists, a lot of it stemming from the VCs themselves. Google has 90000 people now, no one is irreplaceable, except maybe Jeff Dean :).

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

It is interesting that the defense you've chosen is that which many have used to defend both Maven and Dragonfly; that at least if Google is doing it, it is better than if someone "less moral" was doing it, without recognizing the reduced excellence that would occur if that were true. Perhaps you have less respect for Google engineers than I do! If Google is hiring the best, and many of them leave because of moral issues, then Google is left with hiring the second best. You seem to treat all Google engineers as replaceable cogs which are easily swapped out. But just because there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google doesn't mean there won't be a shortage of people of the caliber Google needs to continue at their current level. Sure, the last few moral people leaving could lead to Google's behavior getting worse, but it would arguably also lead to Google being less successful. Even less people would trust Google as their behavior became "worse". Perhaps you believe other places are worse because you remember them being worse a number of years ago. But things like sexual harassment training are pretty much nationwide standard these days. I've never been to a workplace that didn't mandate it, and every one of them has a process to report abuse. I am curious how you believe you can work for somewhere that's better than elsewhere when nearly every Alphabet executive has some sort of sexual misconduct that can be associated with them, and it's hard to see what way forward there is for remedying this. Is Larry Page and Sergey Brin resigning a possible endgoal here? It's hard for me to see an end to the culture of sexual exploitation at a company where it starts at the very top and those people face no penalty.

cromwellian 8y ago
It was only 2006 when I worked at Oracle, I moved to Google in 2009, it’s not like a sea change in sexual harassment reform happened between those years. Oracle was a worse environment than Google in many ways, this is not nostalgia. Political infighting between teams was far worse, to the point that you’d have people yelling in meetings and then deliberately backstabbing and undermining other teams. On a trip I went to Helsinki, they arranged naked Finnish sauna with beer and made no provision for the females with us, some who were from traditionally conservative cultures. After the sauna, they took the men to a strip club with Estonian and Russian strippers. I walked the female team members back to the hotel. Startup companies in the Bay Area of course don’t have these processes, many of them don’t even have a legal or HR department if they have less than 50 people. The toxic bro culture of SV startups has been well documented by female journalists, a lot of it stemming from the VCs themselves. Google has 90000 people now, no one is irreplaceable, except maybe Jeff Dean :).