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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.

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It's refreshing to see people deciding that things can be important enough to warrant taking some sort of action other than washing one's hands of the matter.

Recognizing that there are paths available other than "doing what the company says" or "walking away" is a good thing, and people should speak up if they feel their work is being used in unethical ways.

There's a view that employees are subservient to employer's wills, to the extent they agree to stay under their employ. While obviously true to some extent, it seems silly to extend this to carte blanche for what employees must agree to be complicit in.

I think it is generally better to state your complaints to management first rather than leaving quietly. Give management a chance to fix whatever issue you have or to come up with an alternative. You can always leave as a last resort.

Try to do that at Oracle or IBM. This is the culture fostered by Google executives, so they shouldn't be surprised if employees are publicly outspoken about their business decision. Is it a good or bad thing? If the higher ups are OK with employees publicly voicing their opinion then I don't see a problem. Management doesn't seem to be fighting this and Google does seem to work that way. The only issue I'd see is if a public petition was created and employee were coerced into signing it by their fellow workers under threat of being put "on the list".

Agitating would be step 1. If enough employees speak up, perhaps the plans get changed or the practice stops.

Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.

For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.

leaving and doing something else is a far stronger personal statement than staying and agitating

It's a big company, perhaps the best at one or many things that are NOT the one project that someone opposes

Google is a publicly traded company, so they unfortunately answer to shareholders and customers not to employees unless they are one or both of those things.

In this case investors are who can make any worthwhile difference and they should be appealing to investors. However, I imagine a significant chunk of investors don't even know/realize they are due to whole/broad market funds.

Google sees 17% of the world's population as potential customers via China so who is going to have their attention more 'thousands' of employees or 1.4 billion potential customers? The only way they're going to get Google's attention is to get shareholders concerned. There will always be employees willing to be on board with this, fact of the matter is most people just don't care as long as they are getting paid. They need to get investors against it if they want to have any hope of getting Google to not do this.

A Medium article, or a petition, or a 'hey thousands of us think you shouldn't do this', is unlikely to do a damn thing. If they want to make a stand they should have Amnesty International create a video campaign that describes, FROM PUBLIC SOURCES (to avoid any potential blowback from sharing company secrets/violating NDAs), what Dragonfly is and have non-Google employees that are industry experts comment on why they think it is a bad idea. Then the Google employees should share this on all of their social media, share it directly to their friends. You want to get outsiders championing the cause and generating attention and you want to minimize any single employees risk as much as possible by using non-employees to be the public face.

If I were doing it I'd do a video as Amnesty International, try and get the Internet Freedom Foundation on board, reach out to college human rights groups and try and grass roots the shit out of it to get as much media attention as possible which would increase chances of reaching the eyes of investors.

Doing it as a group of employees though, ehhhh, that's almost certainly going to do nothing and if anything it'll have a negative impact on employees and potentially result in future policies designed to thwart future attempts like this.

It sucks because it's too big of a market to effectively deter Google from wanting to bend to the will of the Chinese government.

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