Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over Israel cloud contract
The employees were protesting against “Project Nimbus.”
The fact that they call their employees "Googlers" is very strange and kinda makes me feel a little uncomfy.
I'm pretty sure it started off self-driven but it's definitely more cult than culture now.
Reminds me of those super creepy Walmart chants they did (still do?) at the beginning of the shift.
Still not as weird as "Amazonians".
You mean that the employees of Amazon AREN'T exclusively mythical warrior women from the South American rainforest?! 😱
Not as bad as metamates. It's amazing how much money is accumulated by people who are so far removed from basic human sensibilities. I don't know if the money makes them detached or if their detachment is somehow a key to them making so much money.
If someone called me that I slam them into the ground, consequences be damned.
Every tech company names their employees tbf and I think that's a cool way to promote culture. "Employee" feels impersonal and un-team like, it has this conotation of Employer-employee relationship which we all try to delude ourselves is not real lol
Frankly, you won’t get fair treatment unless you treat it like an employer-employee relationship; It reminds me of workplaces that say ‘we’re family’. I have personally found those kinds of workplaces to be some of the most exploitative, because they want you to feel like you owe them something when you honestly don’t.
In my opinion, companies intentionally use tactics like this to abstract away from that fact.
Having worked in some of these tech companies with company names, I've got to disagree. It's very cringy.
Every tech company names their employees
That doesn't make it any less cringy and manipulative.
a cool way to promote culture
It's actually a manipulative way to try to make employees think "we're all in this together" when in reality they're treated as completely disposable the moment a dollar of extra profit is available.
"Employee" feels impersonal and un-team like
Which it SHOULD. Google isn't a team. It's a vehicle for turning labor and ads into corporate profits. Any company loyalty is as one-sided as that towards Donald Trump.
it has this conotation of Employer-employee relationship
Well, duh!
we all try to delude ourselves is not real lol
Speak for yourself. Some of us try to avoid delusions and manipulative business practices rather than celebrate them.
Tech employee here. No, they don't.
The bigger subject here is that Google is taking on a government contract as a power flex not as a real growth opportunity. It's 1.2B usd contract shared with Amazon so it's 600M right? - that's like 3 days of adsense revenue (or 1 EU fine lol)
Google is not doing this as a direct business opportunity but as a market flex or some ideological goal. I think it's fair that it's being responded in ideological sense as well.
It seems more likely that they are trying to compete with Amazon in the government contract sphere, which is very lucrative in general.
They are trying to grab any business. I work with many companies and I’ve yet to see any actively using gcp. I know a few planning to move data there but Google is throwing a ton of resources at them.
Azure and Aws are where most are located.
Stupid move by Google.
It's definitely not going to get them any PR points, but unfortunately I feel like Google is far too intrigued in our modern Internet and cellular infrastructure for it to do any real damage.
What are people going to do? Switch to iPhone and forfeit their entire digital application libraries?
No, they'll just grumble and keep handing Google money and metadata because it's simply easier than the alternatives.
Another good reason not to use Google products
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until they were forcibly removed by law enforcement.
Last month, Google fired another employee for protesting the contract during a company presentation in Israel.
In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, said that “behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.” You can read the full memo at the bottom of this story.
He also warned that the company would take more action if needed: “The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing.
In a response statement, the “No Tech for Apartheid” group behind the protests called Google’s firings a “flagrant act of retaliation.”
“In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns,” the group wrote in a post on Medium.
The original article contains 303 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
With the Fortune 500-wide hiring blacklist, it’s going to be hard for them to find their next jobs.
I think people at most companies would be fired if they did a sit-in protest instead of what they were being paid to do.
