Is it really that surprising? Since when profit isnt the highest value?
Oh good, so Google has stopped all political donations and canceled all government contracts so they can stay out politics?
No? Ok fuck you.
The workplace, or at least career progression, is like 50% politics lol. Google is no different.
In fact, I’ve heard Google is especially bad here. You only get ahead by shipping a product, and getting a project approved is largely politicking. It’s one of the more political business environments around.
My company seems a lot better. We don’t have aggressive ladder climbing like the big tech firms, we instead value consistency.
You only get ahead by shipping a product, and getting a project approved is largely politicking
Yep - I had a friend who worked for three years at Google, none of the products he worked on ever shipped and eventually he gave up on ever receiving a good salary (bonuses/stock options/etc are supposed to be most of the pay, but you only get that by working on a successful product)
They have ten major campuses worldwide that focus on product development, but only one of those actually ships products regularly.
And working on stuff that never gets shipped/used is demoralising too. No product to be proud of making/maintaining etc.
It’s the digital equivalent of working in a coalmine.
google the company needs to be garroted with their old “don’t be evil” line.
Don’t
be eviltell me your opinionsDon’t ask don’t tell in corporate form!
If it wasn’t for politics then they shouldn’t take government contracts
I’m just hearing Google advocating for a strict ban on lobbyism.
I mean, otherwise it’s discrimination, no?
Or fire people because of politics.
Or lobby.
Indeed ! This Would be much easier to take seriously if Sundar hadn’t meet with Sunak, Modi, Biden et al. In the first year or so since getting the job.
Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don’t talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don’t badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don’t talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don’t combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.
You also don’t do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.
While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.
Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.
All of which is a problem, not something we should passively accept as the status quo. These employees were advocating for change to fix exactly those sorts of problems.
Unless the goal is to make a political statement with your departure.
exactly, which is what those workers did, they could’ve just resigned but they wanted to make a political statement and they did so
They weren’t just making a random protest. It was intended to show leadership their dissatisfaction. When your company is the size of tens of thousands of employees, your only real way to get within earshot is something like a protest.
Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss.
Tired of this. The 1st amendment protects you from the government, but the idea of “freedom of speech” is much broader than that. We are allowed to be dissatisfied with how speech is suppressed even if a government is not involved.
And like it or not they are allowed to fire you for voicing that dissatisfaction. Don’t like it? Protesting the company is the wrong seat of power to point your dissatisfaction at. “Freedom of speech” says you can say what you want, but does not mean you are free from the consequences of that speech either when it comes to your dealings with non-government bodies.
I see the alt-right is out of school early today!
Still waiting for first period to start
“THE WORKPLACE IS NOT FOR POLITICS”
— With love, your employer who is investing amounts of money beyond your comprehension in a government of a county now being tried for genocide with undenial and ongoing human rights violations.
But you see, Google isn’t doing it for political reasons.
They’re doing it for money.
They don’t care who wins or loses, what’s right or left, good or bad as long as they get that cheddar.
“The workplace isn’t for politics” is about social etiquette, not criticizing what your own company is taking part in you stupid fuck.
Riiight… the fact that corporations are petty dictatorships isn’t political at all.
Right.
I would argue that firing them seems like a pretty strong political statement.
Insightful 👍
“The workplace isn’t for politics” says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.
@theluddite@lemmy.ml @jeffw@lemmy.world Since most people spend most of their best hours at the workplace, what this person is really saying is that there shouldn’t be any politics at all. I.e., this is a confession: “I am an authoritarian”.
Every boss is an authoratarian. Places of employment under capitalism are top down totalitarian structures. What the guy above you says is what goes.
“Google isnt the place for your politics. It is only a place for my politics. So get in line with my thinking or get the fuck out!” - Googles Chief Cunt.
yay
The little-known genocide assistance exception to “don’t be evil.” You have to read the fine print these days.
They dropped that line some time ago
If I’m not mistaken there’s a more long winded watered down version at the end of a bunch of bs now. I may be misremembering or out of the loop on subsequent updates and changes though
Yes it’s still there, it was just moved, albeit from a very noticeable position to quite an obscure one.
Gotcha. Yeah thats more or less how I remembered it… 🙃
Its a bummer, I used to consider myself a fan of Google’s direction. But lesson learned I suppose, money is power and power corrupts.
I feel like the turnaround was somewhere around 2008-2010. Before that they seemed a lot more amicable.
Twenty hard years of spinning on this planet has shown us the truth.
