Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?
You can employ someone and have them develop and even publicly espouse ethics principles, while also instructing them to keep their criticism of corporate behavior confidential to the corporation.
This is super common in other professions sometimes charged with enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior, including law and accounting. It's not a new idea.
If the former, then they probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place; PR people are cheaper and more tractable. If the latter, then there's only so long you can ask good people to stay quiet. Enabling ethical failure is also an ethical failure.
Your analogies don't really work, I'm afraid. The job of corporate lawyers isn't to force some sort of ethical or legal standard. It's to give confidential advice so a company can do what it wants without anybody going to jail. Accountants do maintain a standard that is quasi-ethical, but they do it by controlling their own work. Auditors are closer to the Ethical AI relationship, but they're specifically external, so as to avoid the conflicts of interest in Google trying to police itself. And both accountants and auditors drop a dime on people all the time, and even have protection under law for doing so: https://www.accountingtoday.com/whistleblower
1. You can make an ethical impact without applying external pressure. Usually through internal channels. That is their expectations when they hire you.
2. Do you really think "apply external pressure via bad publicity on companynwhen necessary leaking internal documents" was in their job responsibilities?
As to point 2, I think that if Google didn't put "make a public stink if necessary" in the job description itself, they should have known it was part of the deal. You can't hire people for their independence and their ethics and then not expect them to be independent and ethical.
Should have known that they were hiring people they would later consider trouble makers is a very different goal post than part of the job description.
Consider a doctor, for example. A hospital can hire them and give them orders. But they see themselves as having a duty to the patient and to society. If something isn't right, they will surely say so internally first. But if harm continues, they absolutely will raise a ruckus, up to and including talking publicly.
That's not them being a "trouble maker". That's them being professionals, not bootlickers. Whether or not the hospital administrator puts that in the job description, everybody understands it's part of the deal.
I would note that real engineers have the same sort of duty: "Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public." https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-engin...
I think it's a little sad that many software developers see themselves as minions, but hold out hope that one day we'll become professionals.
Its line workers, and maybe first-level managers that are the most minion-like, the ones who most believe that their job is to follow orders make their boss look good, without regard to impact, value, or ethics.
And the primary concern isn't to avoid "going to jail," it's avoiding civil liability (for employment) or regulatory action (for compliance). Offering guidance on ethical behavior helps to avoid both of those issues.
Whistleblower statutes are an enforcement mechanism that provide cover (and sometimes motivation) to report or disclose ethical violations. But they are more of an escape valve for truly extraordinary situations, as opposed to the day-to-day guidance that professionals provide.
Compliance departments may include attorneys, but plenty of people aren't. The force comes not because of their attorney-ness, but because they're part of a department tasked with enforcement. Lawyers in general definitely are not at a company to enforce the law.
> And the primary concern isn't to avoid "going to jail,"
Allow me to introduce you to the notion of hyperbole.
There are whistleblower laws now but they apply to illegal actions.
Whistleblowing need not be only about crime. It can just be about harm. [1] Indeed, with new technologies, regulation often has yet to be written, so whistleblowing can only be about harm.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-engin...
Dean said in his letter that the paper didn’t address relevant literature related to the subject that the authors weren’t aware of. To me it doesn’t seem that the reason is that it besmirched Google, but that it wasn’t complete.
Also the article wasn’t an ethics breach type of article and internal so I’m not sure what the legal protection would be. I think if the employees had some evidence of illegal activity then they would be protected.
If this paper would be considered an ethics breach then I don’t think there should ever be relevant protections.
It has not worked out well. Making employees keep unethical behaviour on the down-low has resulted in immense, catastrophic harm.
If we are to maintain a healthy society we need a lot more whistleblowing. We need to put work into being better.
I'd be interested in reading about guidelines for people tasked with "enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior" in other industries, do you have any references?
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
As one of many, many examples, leaders in the employment law field regularly write publicly about fair employment practices (particularly when it comes to discrimination, whether racial, age-related or disability-related), and strive for changes in the law and in employers' practices. At the same time, they also counsel their employers or clients about the rules and about compliance. That's fine.
But a lawyer generally cannot publicly critique their employer/client without permission. Public disclosure of an employer's or client's confidential information without permission violates, for example, ABA model rule 1.6, and is a great way to get yourself disbarred (or at least face disciplinary action).
The same reason to hire a token minority in a position of on-paper significance: something to point to for PR purposes. But, with an ethics team, there's also another advantage; if you get strong people who would be contributing to the field anyway and constrain their output to suit your interests, you reduce the degree to which areas you wish to exploit come under ethical scrutiny.
These resigned/fired researchers might be good in their field, but they're pretty dumb when it comes to their jobs.
But then, if it was, Google would defeat the purpose by admitting it.
There is a huge difference between balatantly violating company policy, name calling your manager and creating drama online to garner attention and doing your job in professional manner. She knew what she was doing and she staged martyrdom for her Twitter mob audience and activist news media.
It saddens me more is that so many people in this thread can't (or unwilling to) differentiate between doing your job in professional manner and creating drama online. Sigh, it will only get worse.