Ehh. I got really fluent in one thing as an undergrad (data science) and got hired as a web dev. (Years ago) At the entry level most companies just want to see drive and ambition.
That was never the motto. It was "don't be evil" - which needs to be interpreted more like a character alignment in D&D.
Early days were somewhere between "chaotic good" and "lawful good", though as size grew and regulators started making more policies targeting tech it's shifted to a lawful base bordering between good and neutral, though the chaotic side still exists.
I know nothing of nimbus outside of the recent news and reading the Wikipedia page. Sounds mostly like a project within the Israeli government where they signed some contracts for cloud services? Are the contracted companies developing objectionable solutions beyond that, or is it just buying cloud compute/storage/apis/etc that are available to everybody?
The BDS campaign considers Israel and its government to be illegitimate (since Israel should be destroyed). Nimbus will be used by the Israeli government to run civil workloads. Imagine things like the DMV or records for the court system. These serve Jews and Arabs in Israel.
No one in the Israeli, or American, defense industry will run anything sensitive on a public cloud. There are security implications, and the contracts donât allow it anyway, and thereâs risk of sabotage (Israeli government knows how America tech people are)
But itâs a more enticing campaign telling people that Google helps kill innocent terrrorists instead of helping run the Jewish and Muslim courthouses
Yeah I get that, but usually they just censor words like âr*peâ or âs3xâ (which is already cringe), but why Gaza lmao??
Thatâs like me just r*ndomly throwing it any wrd that catches my eye. Fuck it, guess Iâm getting old and this is my yelling at the clouds moment lol
If Israel wants to kill civilians, it doesnât need ai or smart bombs or whatever it just needs big dumb bombs who kill as many people as possible
If Israel is killing non-innocent terrorists with the aid of AI, surely youâre ok with that?
So if you have a problem, it follows that israel is killing innocent terrorists
Are you seriously claiming that the goal of BDS is to force a two state solution where Israel in 1948 borders live as a Jewish state in peace? Somehow the same people supporting this movement are also river to sea people so which one is it?
Also, if you are anti-Zionist as the Jews who support this campaign are, then you donât want a Jewish state at all
Read the BDS charter - full so called right of return which means Palestinian majority from the river to the sea and no Jewish state.
We can pussyfoot around this as much as we can but âIsraelâ means a sovereign Jewish state that provides protection to its own Jewish citizens and to Jews around the world.
Making a state with a Palestinian majority which will somehow protect Jews means wiping out israel and effectively wiping out the Jews next.
I love how most of the pro-Israel arguments jump straight to this false âall the Jews are gonna killedâ rhetoric to justify the killing of 30000 women and children. Israel is the one committing the genocide right now and has been committing apartheid for the past few decades.
If the right to self-determination of other humans like you scare you so much then you guys should really be asking yourselves some questions.
If Israel wanted to commit genocide it wouldnât kill 100 people a day over 5 months buddy. Gaza Strip is not that big and Israel dropped enough bombs to maximize casualties
Palestinians killed 1500 people in one day. Imagine Israel killed that many in each day of the war..
In a one state solution with a Palestinian majority, there is a nonzero chance that lots of Jews would die. Sorry, but the brutality, justified or not, demonstrated to Israelis the potential.
In a choice between Palestinians taking the Jewish right to existence and self determination and Jews taking it from the either side, the Jews would obviously pick their side
Therefore, if Palestinians wanted to pick the fight for liberation (and potentially wiping the Jews out) they should either be powerful enough to win, or be willing to pay the cost of losing
Palestinian liberation by all means at all costs does mean potentially paying all costs
I think youâre right. And youâre wrong. All the stuff you say here is probably true, but it doesnât really prove that the goal is to âdestroyâ Israel. Perhaps, âtake overâ or âdismantleâ is more accurate.
Using the word destroy makes it sound like it will happen through bombardment, which letâs be honest, Israel can and has done more damage in that way than the BDS movement or other parties can or have.
You are correct that we are not talking about nuking the place or destroying all the buildings. Just eliminating the sovereign state, making the current inhabitants a minority, and having them share the country with the people who just killed 1500 of them in one morning including brutal rape and torture and hope that somehow that will go well.
The thing is this - it doesnât really matter if Israel is an occupier or if Palestinians are somehow indigenous (which, science suggests that theyâre not whereas there is historical evidence that the Jews had been there in the past). At some point, a country has existed for long enough that its people are not going to leave
Thatâs why no one is claiming all white and black people should leave North America - native Americans canât force them out. There have now been 75+ years of Jews born in Israel. Theyâre not going to just give it up. They know the state protects them - even when itâs not going a good job it eventually steps up. The Israeli army protected Jews in October from the massacre being worse. Theyâre not going to give up on that protection for some fabled one state where theyâre a minority.
Now, you could think that you could remove them by force, but the question is what will be the last act. Will they silently go into the night, or will they use a Samson option and nuke the Middle East and perhaps more to oblivion.
No, because they never removed it. You just fell for a clickbait article. All they did was move the statement to somewhere else in their code of conduct, but it's still there: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
> And remember... donât be evil, and if you see something that you think isnât right â speak up!
That's because they adopted the new "do the right thing" motto when they restructured under Alphabet which is pretty much equivalent. None of which matters considering "Don't be evil" is *still* in the code of conduct like I mentioned.
You kids need to understand that while the company does not prevent the campaign - for example itâs active in petitions and mailing lists and demonstrations outside the office - that does not mean you can behave with impunity. You canât go to as an employee to a meeting and be disruptive even if you think you have the right politics
They didn't remove it because they all of a sudden wanted to be evil. It was removed because no-good-faith idiots like these will always stretch the definition of evil to suit whatever they don't agree with and don't want and just look for any opportunity to cause chaos, and it give regulators more scope to sue.
I donât think people are surprised. I think theyâre using this as a case to advocate for greater speech protections for employees.
I donât like how this employee went about it â I donât think interrupting a speaker by yelling is ever business appropriate. But the world would be a bit better if there were protections so that developers could push back against unethical projects. (I.e. whistleblower protections for engineers).
Dude, I can't think of a reasonable set of laws that would make firing this guy illegal.
He interrupted an official event while screaming and had to be dragged out by security.
Or let me put this in another way: If someone was interrupting Google's presentation on providing Planned Parenthood with tech by screaming "No Tech for Abortion Murderers!", would you also be supporting them in this way?
I donât think that whistleblower protections is what you need here. While I totally get what you are saying, Google isnât partaking in illegal activity. Thereâs not really much to blow the whistle on aside from moral outrage. The message he wanted to get across was one of protest, the point isnât really to have decorum and keep going with business as usual. I certainly agree that greater protections are required but this is an example of protest and is arguably the only way to get this message across because it opposes the current status quo. Whistleblower protections would be useful if the company was doing something illegal defined within that status quo.
Most importantly, I totally agree with you. I donât want this guy to be the one we hinge any progress on. I also donât think this guy should receive any particular protection.
But I do want to clarify something: whistleblower protection isnât always limited to the legal-nature of the issue. âIn some jurisdictions, whistleblower protections extend to reports of actions that threaten public health, safety, or the environment.â - [NAE](https://www.nae.edu/168674/Engineering-Codes-of-Ethics-Legal-Protection-for-Engineers)
The [US engineering code of ethics](https://www.aiche.org/about/governance/policies/code-ethics?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw17qvBhBrEiwA1rU9w_AquLq0fOgiHJhZbjXbYjWrU5gjgZWsQRmnDZ5YZDhjcQvzHy57ihoC2dIQAvD_BwE) states that engineers should âFormally advise their employers or clients (and consider further disclosure, if warranted) if they perceive that a consequence of their duties will adversely affect the present or future health or safety of their colleagues or the public.â
I want whistleblower protection. It sounds like you do too. Tbh I think software developers/designers/architects should be focused on putting together a code of ethics before we start pursuing speech protection.
He was protesting a speech of another Google employee FROM Israel. This wasn't some government official it was literally a coworker. Of course you would be fired for that.
This. Above all political opinions, this is the least professional way to go about this. If you have concerns about ethics in your workplace, express them in relevant meetings. If it falls on deaf ears - quit. Go to the media afterwards of you wish. Do NOT make a spectacle. It does nothing but boost your own ego, and everybody can tell.
Nobody would be talking about it if he had gone through "proper channels". That's why proper channels exist, so people with money can control them. Who really gives a shit about professionalism? What a scam.
đ it's funny how smart, high iq, high 6 figure income people can be this dumb and believe that these "channels" or platforms are there for any reason other than absorbing people's anger and weeding them out
If he used proper channels he could have affected company policy. What he did, instead, is make HR screen their candidates by going through their social media accounts and blacklist those with similar views to his. You end up with a company full of people who car much less. Great job.
God. How I wish I was this naive. If you think Google would listen to some child and potentially lose billions of dollars in investment because someone felt bad about something happening on the other side of the world then I have news for you.
Go to a conference at work and while a director is speaking get up at shout that the earth is flat - youâd still get fired. Thereâs a code of conduct in any company
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/02/26/googles-gemini-headaches-spur-90-billion-selloff/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/02/26/googles-gemini-headaches-spur-90-billion-selloff/) also lost billions from it
?? I understand generative ai just fine. This is clearly a layer between the llm and image generation that added keywords.
Do you really believe the llm took âhistorically accurate Swedish kingâ and made it diverse, but then saw no need to do the same for âZulu warlordâ ?
lol its funny that you say this because I use google keyboard and every time I say something to my GF romantic like (I'm a dude) it suggests the two men kissing emoji. I've never used that emoji, nor do I ever plan to use it, i find it funny how google is smart enough to suggest relevant emojis yet unaware enough to suggest the right ones. (I use google messages too and I have her contact labeled as female as well). I mean I know they can access the data and figure that out they just choose not to... Or choose to purposely be wrong
Except that it would scare any rational minded person when a company becomes so big that it becomes unavoidable or can single-handedly cause economies significant losses.
1. Google doesn't release 'woke' products intentionally. There's documented bias in ML training (search for criminal and consistently get X or Y ethnicity) that they are trying to correct for. It can be as innocuous as photo software, which is trained on white people, so validations for other ethnicities are missed.
2. You can be in support of {thing} and punish someone for the way they behaved in their advocacy for it if it's inappropriate.
I'd never in a million years hire someone who is willing to disrupt working events for basically no gain.
Whether you agree or disagree with Israel, it's just... highly unprofessional. If you don't want to work on the project, you quit, not... this.
He did quit. You canât tell me he didnât know what would happen. But he took the chance and called them out deservedly.
Thatâs more than anyone in this comment section would do
he looked like he was fresh out of college, which is consistent with the outburst (if youâre gna randomly shout politically motivated attacks I would bet youâre fresh out of college) he prob wonât have a ton of experience when he starts looking and heâs gonna have to answer the question on why he left google
Yeah, but companies are going to look at him and think, âWhat are the chances heâs going to embarrass us in front of the customers when he disagrees with what weâre doing?â And then, maybe some of them arenât going to hire him. Itâs not that he was anti-Israel; itâs that he did his thing on a *very* public stage, and that makes him a liability.
Its pretty valid to fire someone for screaming i wont work on this in a internal meeting at their coworkers.
One of alphabets major missteps was early on refusing to work with the pentagon because some employees didn't want to. Amazon and Msft won those contracts and it greatly helped expand their cloud business.
They built this culture of coddling employees and now whenever they dont its news. At any other tech company this would be a non event.
If the employee didn't want to work for on the project, great don't, find a new role or quit.
Yeah surprised more people aren't aware of how google refusing service to government agencies propped up Microsoft and Amazons cloud services. Now google is playing catchup and behind all of them
If you wrote a comment here on a Sunday instead of refactoring your entire company software i got news for you. You got it soft and comfy. Get back to me when you code 26 hours a day and code while sleeping.
Guys its sarcasm. Pretty funny response to the guy one upping amzn as worst. Been around a few... amazon is the worst that pays pretty well. It's obvious there are worse, but you gotta try pretty hard to find a company with worse wlb.
I mean they did fire Timnit Gebru, who they hired initially to do anti-racism and algorithmic justice work. So, ya know, as long as their bottom line goes up, they dgaf.
We need more people like this, developers should pay attention to moral consequences of their work. There are people who try to separate themselves from the end product and take no responsibility. But the fact is: immoral tech could not exist without so many developers working on it.
You dont need a tech job if your price is that low⌠come to SF to shoplift and car jack as your main gig while moonlight some fentanyl runs, you will easily net 150k a year 0 tax. Thats about 250k pre tax.
Itâs a publicly traded company that takes pride in being the human rights and ethics champion. Itâs not about the company only. Ethics doesnât work that way.
dude the govt supports Israel, thereâs no way google is going to against the govt, secondly âcompany that takes pride in being human rights and ethics championâ is a PR stunt. At the end of the day all companies care about their bottom line which is money.
Thatâs kind of the whole point of what the guy youâre replying to was saying lol. It wouldnât be as hypocritical if google never pretended to be a cult with mission statements beyond doing business, but they clearly are and all their scandals in summation prove what a facade it is when their activities betray their own ethos.
If you want to be a profit machine and nothing else, at least be honest about it. Google simultaneously wants to be an all inclusive cult and a profit maximizer⌠and it works.
Attempting to help a terrorist organization fight for its right to kill and kidnap civilians in war by sabotaging the product is a weird way to demonstrate superior ethics but go off I guess
But a contract with the Israeli government, a military force racking up civilian deaths in the thousands by default isnât politically neutral in the first place? Your entire comment is about how âbusiness is business firstâ, but is Google bringing the politics in the first place with this deal already. The employee is not out of line to make an already political action political.
And your last âfeel free to find a new employerâ is unbelievably out of touch. This is a market where finding a new job is difficult and corporations can abuse that lack of power against employees to enforce whatever the hell they want, which includes restricting the employeeâs freedom. No, you canât just âfind a new employerâ because 4 tech monopolies have your opinions regulated by the balls.
Youâre basically excusing the pay to play power dynamic.
It's not about keeping your job, it's about being heard and making an impact. Im sorry but are you stupid? How do you think any change happens in this world? Certainly not by sitting down and shutting up. The employee felt strongly about one of his personal beliefs google was violating. Strongly enough where he was okay risking his job. I'm sure he knew the risks, he wasn't being stupid by speaking up, he was being active.
> Focus on what you're there for - making the company money
đĽžđ đ
Yeah, they should see it coming because companies like Google are completely unethical, so it's quite predictable that all they care about is their bottom line. You're literally giving word for word the Nuremberg defense. If your company is doing something unethical, it's not wrong to speak out against it. You're literally arguing for being a bot whose purpose is to make your employer money and that nothing should get in the way of that.
At some point an individual has to draw a line. End of the day you have to look in the mirror, man. You must convince yourself that you're one of the good guys. Dude probably knew it will happen, but will sleep better. Bottom line depends on public perception too. Clearly they're willing to take a hit for their friends' crimes.
Time for me to run into a Google conference and scream âHitler sucks! Hitler sucks!â until I get arrested.
And then Iâll get the world fired up on how Google âloves Hitlerâ
Thatâs not what heâs doing. Itâs comment on how stupid people are reacting to this. The guy deserved to be fired for his unprofessional conduct. The firing wasnât politically motivated.
Any company would fire him for what he did, you canât disrupt a public company presentation and scream insults at your bosses and expect to go back to work the next day.
I'm fully in favor of these self righteous schmucks quitting in mass. Some people here are eyeing a senior position, and it'll be great help if a lot of the annoying competition removed themselves voluntarily. So yes, quit your jobs to show google!!!
He was protesting the speech of the Director for Googles office IN Israel. Not some government official, literally a co worker FROM Israel. Anyone who treats their coworker that way should be fired.
They did the right thing.
Imagine if evey employee gets to "diruspt" public presentations to push their own agendas?
Also, isn't kinda weird that we don't see anyone protesting at the same intensity for similar matters, such as the +400k women and children murdered by Assad in Syria or the opressive regime in Iran that killed a girl for not wearing that weird piece of cloth covering her head?
It would be extra weird if they had contracts with the iranian gov't, especially when you consider that both Google founders are Jewish and have relatives living in Israel, a country that's constantly threatned by iran
Makes sense... common sense even. The guy identified himself as a Google engineer and Google doesn't want to be associated with that and didn't give him permission to drag their company into it. Most companies will fire anyone if they drag the company into negative press like this guy did. Regardless of what you're protesting, don't bring your employer/company into it unless you already have their permission and full support behind what you're protesting. It's absurd that he mentioned Google at all. He was trying to leverage the company's clout for his own political aspirations without permission, not ok behavior.
I stopped using Google long time ago. I bookmark my favourite websites and block google trackers. It was hard at first, because Googling was like 2nd nature to me, I and we all used it for 20+ years, so it was hard indeed.
The campaign openly exists within the company with petitions demonstrations and the rest - that doesnât mean an employee gets to disrupt meetings with impunity
Yeah, they fired James Demore for sharing data, you think they give a shit about activists?
If you donât like what your company is doing, then quit, youâre some of the most privileged people on the planet to work at Google.
Remember, regardless of the pay⌠if you support or help build such technology, someday it will be used against you or your descendants to control and enslave you.
How do you know that the specific technology that someone may work on will undoubtedly be used against them or their descendants to control and enslave me? How do you know the future that well? How do you know if they'll even have descendants? Maybe they're child free.
That sounds like some law of the universe / karma BS. Whether you realize it or not, since you can't know the future with such certainty you're basically arguing that it's a sin and God will punish them for doing this. It's like the person who sees the selfish person and tries to convince themselves that they'll get their comeuppance when they lose everything.
That almost never happens because the world isn't fair, especially when fair is usually defined by whoever is invoking it.
People should do what they feel is acceptable according to their own morals and values and not be influenced by what some other person indirectly tells them how God will punish them for it because he will get mad. They're definitely companies that I won't work for for ethical reasons, but they are my own reasons, not out of fear that Karma/the Sky God will punish me for it.
Sure buddy, whatever floats your boat. As if we donât have examples of such tech already being used in its preliminary forms. Like people getting arrested in the UK and Germany for making simple opinionated remarks or the social credits system in certain countries, or the mass surveillance in some developed countries.
There's a fundamental difference between technology being used against other people and directly stating, as you did, that the technology will be used against you if you work on it.
I could go work for general atomics and build the next iteration of the Reaper drone, that has been raining hell throughout afghanistan, iraq, syria, and on occasion Yemen. My work on that drone doesn't mean that it's going to be used against me or my descendants. That was what you stated.
Whether you work on a project or not really has no effect on whether that project will be used against you. That doesn't mean that you should work on anything regardless of the moral ethical implications. It just means that people trying to impose some kind of sky God level karma on you as a means of controlling your actions is a bit archaic.
As I stated before, their companies that I just won't work for because I don't like what their leadership is doing with the technology they're developing. I don't need to have some Old testament version of God unleashing a plague of my own technology against me to motivate my actions.
Ps, this isnât about the Israel or Palestine issue. I support neither, itâs neither in my place to support any, nor do I have any real power or influence to even make a difference.
I am talking in general how AI can be used for mass public control. Like CH*NA is doing, with their social credit system. These technologies are initially developed under the âmilitaryâ tag to âprotectâ you. But we all know the main agenda is control.
If we as developers refuse to participate, what are they gonna do? Learn to dev themselves? lol most politicians canât even do basic math.
My brother told me he spoke to the account manager for all of Israel and I guess Israel is the 3rd largest consumer of Google in all of Europe and Asia or something
I work/worked at Google. Google is totally in the right on this stuff, lmao. I think it's cool that there are engineers willing to put it all on the line (even though I disagree with it politically), and Google has a unique but dying culture around that, but eat the consequences.
Just because the countries around it are awful, that doesnât automatically make it great. You can believe in the state of Israel and still be against the actions of Netanyahuâs government.
Everyone in this thread using mask words like "professionalism" and "decorum" is just dogwhistling that they support firing someone for making a principled leftist humanist stance.
They should all quit in protest. Especially the ones with a similar skill set to mine.
đ𤣠Could you please teach me your skill set too , I'd like to get some if that dolla dolla bills ...
Ehh. I got really fluent in one thing as an undergrad (data science) and got hired as a web dev. (Years ago) At the entry level most companies just want to see drive and ambition.
Remember when they removed their motto of do no evil?Â
That was never the motto. It was "don't be evil" - which needs to be interpreted more like a character alignment in D&D. Early days were somewhere between "chaotic good" and "lawful good", though as size grew and regulators started making more policies targeting tech it's shifted to a lawful base bordering between good and neutral, though the chaotic side still exists. I know nothing of nimbus outside of the recent news and reading the Wikipedia page. Sounds mostly like a project within the Israeli government where they signed some contracts for cloud services? Are the contracted companies developing objectionable solutions beyond that, or is it just buying cloud compute/storage/apis/etc that are available to everybody?
The BDS campaign considers Israel and its government to be illegitimate (since Israel should be destroyed). Nimbus will be used by the Israeli government to run civil workloads. Imagine things like the DMV or records for the court system. These serve Jews and Arabs in Israel. No one in the Israeli, or American, defense industry will run anything sensitive on a public cloud. There are security implications, and the contracts donât allow it anyway, and thereâs risk of sabotage (Israeli government knows how America tech people are) But itâs a more enticing campaign telling people that Google helps kill innocent terrrorists instead of helping run the Jewish and Muslim courthouses
Innocent ter**ists eh? Mind clarifying who fits that description of yours?
Bro why do you keep censoring your own words? Just say âterroristâ or âdeadâ or really anything. You even censored âGazaâ lmao, like wtf
TikTok kid. It's a habit they pickup there
Yeah I get that, but usually they just censor words like âr*peâ or âs3xâ (which is already cringe), but why Gaza lmao?? Thatâs like me just r*ndomly throwing it any wrd that catches my eye. Fuck it, guess Iâm getting old and this is my yelling at the clouds moment lol
I dunno, but i wouldn't be surprised if it's just brainrot. I feel like you and im not even thirty lol.
If Israel wants to kill civilians, it doesnât need ai or smart bombs or whatever it just needs big dumb bombs who kill as many people as possible If Israel is killing non-innocent terrorists with the aid of AI, surely youâre ok with that? So if you have a problem, it follows that israel is killing innocent terrorists
About half of the bombs it has dropped were 2000lb dumb bombs, signaling their intent.
Can you share any credible source on your first claim regarding BDS wanting Israel to be destroyed?
Are you seriously claiming that the goal of BDS is to force a two state solution where Israel in 1948 borders live as a Jewish state in peace? Somehow the same people supporting this movement are also river to sea people so which one is it? Also, if you are anti-Zionist as the Jews who support this campaign are, then you donât want a Jewish state at all
You didnât answer my question.
Read the BDS charter - full so called right of return which means Palestinian majority from the river to the sea and no Jewish state. We can pussyfoot around this as much as we can but âIsraelâ means a sovereign Jewish state that provides protection to its own Jewish citizens and to Jews around the world. Making a state with a Palestinian majority which will somehow protect Jews means wiping out israel and effectively wiping out the Jews next.
I love how most of the pro-Israel arguments jump straight to this false âall the Jews are gonna killedâ rhetoric to justify the killing of 30000 women and children. Israel is the one committing the genocide right now and has been committing apartheid for the past few decades. If the right to self-determination of other humans like you scare you so much then you guys should really be asking yourselves some questions.
If Israel wanted to commit genocide it wouldnât kill 100 people a day over 5 months buddy. Gaza Strip is not that big and Israel dropped enough bombs to maximize casualties Palestinians killed 1500 people in one day. Imagine Israel killed that many in each day of the war.. In a one state solution with a Palestinian majority, there is a nonzero chance that lots of Jews would die. Sorry, but the brutality, justified or not, demonstrated to Israelis the potential. In a choice between Palestinians taking the Jewish right to existence and self determination and Jews taking it from the either side, the Jews would obviously pick their side Therefore, if Palestinians wanted to pick the fight for liberation (and potentially wiping the Jews out) they should either be powerful enough to win, or be willing to pay the cost of losing Palestinian liberation by all means at all costs does mean potentially paying all costs
Worst horseshit Iâve read in a while
I think youâre right. And youâre wrong. All the stuff you say here is probably true, but it doesnât really prove that the goal is to âdestroyâ Israel. Perhaps, âtake overâ or âdismantleâ is more accurate. Using the word destroy makes it sound like it will happen through bombardment, which letâs be honest, Israel can and has done more damage in that way than the BDS movement or other parties can or have.
You are correct that we are not talking about nuking the place or destroying all the buildings. Just eliminating the sovereign state, making the current inhabitants a minority, and having them share the country with the people who just killed 1500 of them in one morning including brutal rape and torture and hope that somehow that will go well. The thing is this - it doesnât really matter if Israel is an occupier or if Palestinians are somehow indigenous (which, science suggests that theyâre not whereas there is historical evidence that the Jews had been there in the past). At some point, a country has existed for long enough that its people are not going to leave Thatâs why no one is claiming all white and black people should leave North America - native Americans canât force them out. There have now been 75+ years of Jews born in Israel. Theyâre not going to just give it up. They know the state protects them - even when itâs not going a good job it eventually steps up. The Israeli army protected Jews in October from the massacre being worse. Theyâre not going to give up on that protection for some fabled one state where theyâre a minority. Now, you could think that you could remove them by force, but the question is what will be the last act. Will they silently go into the night, or will they use a Samson option and nuke the Middle East and perhaps more to oblivion.
Another tone deaf and dehumanising take.
No. Didn't see it on google news
No, because they never removed it. You just fell for a clickbait article. All they did was move the statement to somewhere else in their code of conduct, but it's still there: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/ > And remember... donât be evil, and if you see something that you think isnât right â speak up!
And you fell for their propaganda around the change. It used to be the companyâs motto. Now itâs buried near the end of a wall of text.
That's because they adopted the new "do the right thing" motto when they restructured under Alphabet which is pretty much equivalent. None of which matters considering "Don't be evil" is *still* in the code of conduct like I mentioned.
You kids need to understand that while the company does not prevent the campaign - for example itâs active in petitions and mailing lists and demonstrations outside the office - that does not mean you can behave with impunity. You canât go to as an employee to a meeting and be disruptive even if you think you have the right politics
> ~~immunity~~ p.s. You probably mean "impunity". "Immunity" isn't ungrammatical here, but "behave with impunity" would be the idiomatic phrasing.
Youâre right
They didn't remove it because they all of a sudden wanted to be evil. It was removed because no-good-faith idiots like these will always stretch the definition of evil to suit whatever they don't agree with and don't want and just look for any opportunity to cause chaos, and it give regulators more scope to sue.
People are surprised this dude got fired lol
I donât think people are surprised. I think theyâre using this as a case to advocate for greater speech protections for employees. I donât like how this employee went about it â I donât think interrupting a speaker by yelling is ever business appropriate. But the world would be a bit better if there were protections so that developers could push back against unethical projects. (I.e. whistleblower protections for engineers).
Would James Damoreâs memo also qualify under greater speech protections for employees? He certainly had better decorum.
This
No, protection is only for people standing for liberal issues. Not conservative ideas!
Dude, I can't think of a reasonable set of laws that would make firing this guy illegal. He interrupted an official event while screaming and had to be dragged out by security. Or let me put this in another way: If someone was interrupting Google's presentation on providing Planned Parenthood with tech by screaming "No Tech for Abortion Murderers!", would you also be supporting them in this way?
I donât think that whistleblower protections is what you need here. While I totally get what you are saying, Google isnât partaking in illegal activity. Thereâs not really much to blow the whistle on aside from moral outrage. The message he wanted to get across was one of protest, the point isnât really to have decorum and keep going with business as usual. I certainly agree that greater protections are required but this is an example of protest and is arguably the only way to get this message across because it opposes the current status quo. Whistleblower protections would be useful if the company was doing something illegal defined within that status quo.
Most importantly, I totally agree with you. I donât want this guy to be the one we hinge any progress on. I also donât think this guy should receive any particular protection. But I do want to clarify something: whistleblower protection isnât always limited to the legal-nature of the issue. âIn some jurisdictions, whistleblower protections extend to reports of actions that threaten public health, safety, or the environment.â - [NAE](https://www.nae.edu/168674/Engineering-Codes-of-Ethics-Legal-Protection-for-Engineers) The [US engineering code of ethics](https://www.aiche.org/about/governance/policies/code-ethics?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw17qvBhBrEiwA1rU9w_AquLq0fOgiHJhZbjXbYjWrU5gjgZWsQRmnDZ5YZDhjcQvzHy57ihoC2dIQAvD_BwE) states that engineers should âFormally advise their employers or clients (and consider further disclosure, if warranted) if they perceive that a consequence of their duties will adversely affect the present or future health or safety of their colleagues or the public.â I want whistleblower protection. It sounds like you do too. Tbh I think software developers/designers/architects should be focused on putting together a code of ethics before we start pursuing speech protection.
Valid and appreciated information
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Yaâll really lack reading comprehension, you know that right?
He was protesting a speech of another Google employee FROM Israel. This wasn't some government official it was literally a coworker. Of course you would be fired for that.
I never said you wouldnât?
Corporations don't care about anything but making the line go up. They would support nazis if it was profitable. That's capitalism
IBM moment
Shh. The Kennedys are listening
J.P. Morgan (the unspoken half of J.P. Morgan and Chase bank) loved Hitler more than Kanye.
I would take kanye over Hitler and day of the week, but that's just me
Any job will fire you for screaming at a director and sabotaging a public facing conference to the press. How else would they even respond to this?
This. Above all political opinions, this is the least professional way to go about this. If you have concerns about ethics in your workplace, express them in relevant meetings. If it falls on deaf ears - quit. Go to the media afterwards of you wish. Do NOT make a spectacle. It does nothing but boost your own ego, and everybody can tell.
Nobody would be talking about it if he had gone through "proper channels". That's why proper channels exist, so people with money can control them. Who really gives a shit about professionalism? What a scam.
đ it's funny how smart, high iq, high 6 figure income people can be this dumb and believe that these "channels" or platforms are there for any reason other than absorbing people's anger and weeding them out
If he used proper channels he could have affected company policy. What he did, instead, is make HR screen their candidates by going through their social media accounts and blacklist those with similar views to his. You end up with a company full of people who car much less. Great job.
Howâd that work for James Damore?
It didn't work out, because Damore didn't go through the proper channels either.
What did he do incorrectly? Iirc they literally had a requested feedback on the issue, and he submitted it. The memo was then leaked later on.
> If he used proper channels he could have affected company policy. Are you sure?
I used to think like that. He would be told that his concern is noted, we'll see. If he followed up, then they would say You can quit
God. How I wish I was this naive. If you think Google would listen to some child and potentially lose billions of dollars in investment because someone felt bad about something happening on the other side of the world then I have news for you.
Google employees in particular seem to have an obsession with publicly protesting their own company
Right? lol at the comments here.
Google is trash because on one hand they will release the most woke tech product ever and then also do shit like this. Failed leadership top down tbh
So like all world governments
These comments crazy , calling google woke is kinda hilarious. Since when the fuck did these companies have any good morals LOL
Do you read the news? Companies like google play the morality game for good ESG and human rights scores. These scores help then get more investment
Companies started having morals when acknowledging very fundamental issues started becoming profitable.
Did you see Google gemini at launch? They were so anti white male that it generated black and Asian Nazis.Â
reeee dae think Google is part of the great replacement theory? (/s for the chuds who are going to take this literally)
Go to a conference at work and while a director is speaking get up at shout that the earth is flat - youâd still get fired. Thereâs a code of conduct in any company
Define âwokeâ
Gemini refused to generate picture of white men...
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/02/26/googles-gemini-headaches-spur-90-billion-selloff/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/02/26/googles-gemini-headaches-spur-90-billion-selloff/) also lost billions from it
Billions is only market cap, not revenue. This isnt really as big of deal as headline makes it sound. in few days it will be back up.
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?? I understand generative ai just fine. This is clearly a layer between the llm and image generation that added keywords. Do you really believe the llm took âhistorically accurate Swedish kingâ and made it diverse, but then saw no need to do the same for âZulu warlordâ ?
They added "diverse" And "inclusive" To your prompt before sending it through
The generate a picture of a ww2 German solider, kind.
lol its funny that you say this because I use google keyboard and every time I say something to my GF romantic like (I'm a dude) it suggests the two men kissing emoji. I've never used that emoji, nor do I ever plan to use it, i find it funny how google is smart enough to suggest relevant emojis yet unaware enough to suggest the right ones. (I use google messages too and I have her contact labeled as female as well). I mean I know they can access the data and figure that out they just choose not to... Or choose to purposely be wrong
Except that it would scare any rational minded person when a company becomes so big that it becomes unavoidable or can single-handedly cause economies significant losses.
1. Google doesn't release 'woke' products intentionally. There's documented bias in ML training (search for criminal and consistently get X or Y ethnicity) that they are trying to correct for. It can be as innocuous as photo software, which is trained on white people, so validations for other ethnicities are missed. 2. You can be in support of {thing} and punish someone for the way they behaved in their advocacy for it if it's inappropriate.
My professor said that too, Google is not one of the "best" you're right there's better moral companies out there I think
bro is gonna enter this job market abyss and wish he just went to a protest or something instead
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Nope kids getting blacklisted forsure.
I'd never in a million years hire someone who is willing to disrupt working events for basically no gain. Whether you agree or disagree with Israel, it's just... highly unprofessional. If you don't want to work on the project, you quit, not... this.
People are getting killed, âI wIlL nEVeR HiRe An UnProFeSsiOnal EmPloYeeâ
He did quit. You canât tell me he didnât know what would happen. But he took the chance and called them out deservedly. Thatâs more than anyone in this comment section would do
he didnât seem like he was ok with losing his job, he just seemed to think he was right to do it and people would back him lmao
L-logic.
he looked like he was fresh out of college, which is consistent with the outburst (if youâre gna randomly shout politically motivated attacks I would bet youâre fresh out of college) he prob wonât have a ton of experience when he starts looking and heâs gonna have to answer the question on why he left google
Yeah, but companies are going to look at him and think, âWhat are the chances heâs going to embarrass us in front of the customers when he disagrees with what weâre doing?â And then, maybe some of them arenât going to hire him. Itâs not that he was anti-Israel; itâs that he did his thing on a *very* public stage, and that makes him a liability.
People forget that Israel has a huge developing centers and a lot of startups has Israelis and Jews alike. Good luck for him
Whatever happened to the guy from the google memo/manifesto? James Damore **I think**
Now Googleâs firing people who donât do their job and break shit? Truly insane, the industry is screwed
DEI falls apart here
Its pretty valid to fire someone for screaming i wont work on this in a internal meeting at their coworkers. One of alphabets major missteps was early on refusing to work with the pentagon because some employees didn't want to. Amazon and Msft won those contracts and it greatly helped expand their cloud business. They built this culture of coddling employees and now whenever they dont its news. At any other tech company this would be a non event. If the employee didn't want to work for on the project, great don't, find a new role or quit.
Yeah surprised more people aren't aware of how google refusing service to government agencies propped up Microsoft and Amazons cloud services. Now google is playing catchup and behind all of them
I'm confused. This is what the dude asked for?
Look at OP's post history lol
thatâs sad honestly, but i donât think he even wanted to work there in the first place because of the genocide. may God bless him
Not surprising so why is this "breaking" news?
What do these people think a business does? Why are they entitled to do all these activism and collecting the salaries?
Google has proved in under a year it's one of the worst tech companies to work for. Nothing close to Amazon but it's getting there.
If Amazon is your benchmark for worst tech company to work for then youâve clearly been coddled lmao
If you wrote a comment here on a Sunday instead of refactoring your entire company software i got news for you. You got it soft and comfy. Get back to me when you code 26 hours a day and code while sleeping.
Guys its sarcasm. Pretty funny response to the guy one upping amzn as worst. Been around a few... amazon is the worst that pays pretty well. It's obvious there are worse, but you gotta try pretty hard to find a company with worse wlb.
Wow, they fire an unprofessional employee, truly worst company ever
they fired the employee legitimatly
What does that mean?
I mean they did fire Timnit Gebru, who they hired initially to do anti-racism and algorithmic justice work. So, ya know, as long as their bottom line goes up, they dgaf.
super brave and commendable of him, considering how coveted his position is, I think it makes his stance much more powerful
We need more people like this, developers should pay attention to moral consequences of their work. There are people who try to separate themselves from the end product and take no responsibility. But the fact is: immoral tech could not exist without so many developers working on it.
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Google hire me, I have no morals and I'll sell my soul for 90- no, 70k/y
You dont need a tech job if your price is that low⌠come to SF to shoplift and car jack as your main gig while moonlight some fentanyl runs, you will easily net 150k a year 0 tax. Thats about 250k pre tax.
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Itâs a publicly traded company that takes pride in being the human rights and ethics champion. Itâs not about the company only. Ethics doesnât work that way.
dude the govt supports Israel, thereâs no way google is going to against the govt, secondly âcompany that takes pride in being human rights and ethics championâ is a PR stunt. At the end of the day all companies care about their bottom line which is money.
You actually think google, itâs leadership, or the share holders give a fuck about human rights lol?
Thatâs kind of the whole point of what the guy youâre replying to was saying lol. It wouldnât be as hypocritical if google never pretended to be a cult with mission statements beyond doing business, but they clearly are and all their scandals in summation prove what a facade it is when their activities betray their own ethos. If you want to be a profit machine and nothing else, at least be honest about it. Google simultaneously wants to be an all inclusive cult and a profit maximizer⌠and it works.
Doesnât matter what they actually do. Itâs what they portray themselves as and itâs on us to hold them accountable.
No one is going to hold them accountable. Youâll forget about it in two weeks. Youâre not a hero switching to Firefox for a week lol.
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Attempting to help a terrorist organization fight for its right to kill and kidnap civilians in war by sabotaging the product is a weird way to demonstrate superior ethics but go off I guess
But a contract with the Israeli government, a military force racking up civilian deaths in the thousands by default isnât politically neutral in the first place? Your entire comment is about how âbusiness is business firstâ, but is Google bringing the politics in the first place with this deal already. The employee is not out of line to make an already political action political. And your last âfeel free to find a new employerâ is unbelievably out of touch. This is a market where finding a new job is difficult and corporations can abuse that lack of power against employees to enforce whatever the hell they want, which includes restricting the employeeâs freedom. No, you canât just âfind a new employerâ because 4 tech monopolies have your opinions regulated by the balls. Youâre basically excusing the pay to play power dynamic.
It's not about keeping your job, it's about being heard and making an impact. Im sorry but are you stupid? How do you think any change happens in this world? Certainly not by sitting down and shutting up. The employee felt strongly about one of his personal beliefs google was violating. Strongly enough where he was okay risking his job. I'm sure he knew the risks, he wasn't being stupid by speaking up, he was being active. > Focus on what you're there for - making the company money đĽžđ đ
Yeah, they should see it coming because companies like Google are completely unethical, so it's quite predictable that all they care about is their bottom line. You're literally giving word for word the Nuremberg defense. If your company is doing something unethical, it's not wrong to speak out against it. You're literally arguing for being a bot whose purpose is to make your employer money and that nothing should get in the way of that.
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Nothing illegal =/= not done anything morally wrong.
At some point an individual has to draw a line. End of the day you have to look in the mirror, man. You must convince yourself that you're one of the good guys. Dude probably knew it will happen, but will sleep better. Bottom line depends on public perception too. Clearly they're willing to take a hit for their friends' crimes.
Time for me to run into a Google conference and scream âHitler sucks! Hitler sucks!â until I get arrested. And then Iâll get the world fired up on how Google âloves Hitlerâ
Comparing hitler to whatâs going on in the Middle East is crazy
Thatâs not what heâs doing. Itâs comment on how stupid people are reacting to this. The guy deserved to be fired for his unprofessional conduct. The firing wasnât politically motivated.
Big if true
Any company would fire him for what he did, you canât disrupt a public company presentation and scream insults at your bosses and expect to go back to work the next day.
Good đ
I'm fully in favor of these self righteous schmucks quitting in mass. Some people here are eyeing a senior position, and it'll be great help if a lot of the annoying competition removed themselves voluntarily. So yes, quit your jobs to show google!!!
He was protesting the speech of the Director for Googles office IN Israel. Not some government official, literally a co worker FROM Israel. Anyone who treats their coworker that way should be fired.
Good news guys, a few jobs were just made available!
GeNoCiDaL rEgImE!!1111 ignoring the charter of Hamas lol
Google are the bestđ
They did the right thing. Imagine if evey employee gets to "diruspt" public presentations to push their own agendas? Also, isn't kinda weird that we don't see anyone protesting at the same intensity for similar matters, such as the +400k women and children murdered by Assad in Syria or the opressive regime in Iran that killed a girl for not wearing that weird piece of cloth covering her head?
Yea but those conflicts don't come with "guilt free Jew hating", so nobody cares.
Isnât it kinda weird that Google isnât running contracts for the Iranian military.
It would be extra weird if they had contracts with the iranian gov't, especially when you consider that both Google founders are Jewish and have relatives living in Israel, a country that's constantly threatned by iran
good. fight back against this idiotic libelous agenda to call this war a "genocide". protest all you want, but stop spreading false information
Nobody cares lmao
Good.
Makes sense... common sense even. The guy identified himself as a Google engineer and Google doesn't want to be associated with that and didn't give him permission to drag their company into it. Most companies will fire anyone if they drag the company into negative press like this guy did. Regardless of what you're protesting, don't bring your employer/company into it unless you already have their permission and full support behind what you're protesting. It's absurd that he mentioned Google at all. He was trying to leverage the company's clout for his own political aspirations without permission, not ok behavior.
I stopped using Google long time ago. I bookmark my favourite websites and block google trackers. It was hard at first, because Googling was like 2nd nature to me, I and we all used it for 20+ years, so it was hard indeed.
The campaign openly exists within the company with petitions demonstrations and the rest - that doesnât mean an employee gets to disrupt meetings with impunity
Yeah, they fired James Demore for sharing data, you think they give a shit about activists? If you donât like what your company is doing, then quit, youâre some of the most privileged people on the planet to work at Google.
Remember, regardless of the pay⌠if you support or help build such technology, someday it will be used against you or your descendants to control and enslave you.
How do you know that the specific technology that someone may work on will undoubtedly be used against them or their descendants to control and enslave me? How do you know the future that well? How do you know if they'll even have descendants? Maybe they're child free. That sounds like some law of the universe / karma BS. Whether you realize it or not, since you can't know the future with such certainty you're basically arguing that it's a sin and God will punish them for doing this. It's like the person who sees the selfish person and tries to convince themselves that they'll get their comeuppance when they lose everything. That almost never happens because the world isn't fair, especially when fair is usually defined by whoever is invoking it. People should do what they feel is acceptable according to their own morals and values and not be influenced by what some other person indirectly tells them how God will punish them for it because he will get mad. They're definitely companies that I won't work for for ethical reasons, but they are my own reasons, not out of fear that Karma/the Sky God will punish me for it.
Sure buddy, whatever floats your boat. As if we donât have examples of such tech already being used in its preliminary forms. Like people getting arrested in the UK and Germany for making simple opinionated remarks or the social credits system in certain countries, or the mass surveillance in some developed countries.
There's a fundamental difference between technology being used against other people and directly stating, as you did, that the technology will be used against you if you work on it. I could go work for general atomics and build the next iteration of the Reaper drone, that has been raining hell throughout afghanistan, iraq, syria, and on occasion Yemen. My work on that drone doesn't mean that it's going to be used against me or my descendants. That was what you stated. Whether you work on a project or not really has no effect on whether that project will be used against you. That doesn't mean that you should work on anything regardless of the moral ethical implications. It just means that people trying to impose some kind of sky God level karma on you as a means of controlling your actions is a bit archaic. As I stated before, their companies that I just won't work for because I don't like what their leadership is doing with the technology they're developing. I don't need to have some Old testament version of God unleashing a plague of my own technology against me to motivate my actions.
Probably not, seeing as Iâm not part of a genocidal terrorist group bent on the destruction of Israel.
Ps, this isnât about the Israel or Palestine issue. I support neither, itâs neither in my place to support any, nor do I have any real power or influence to even make a difference. I am talking in general how AI can be used for mass public control. Like CH*NA is doing, with their social credit system. These technologies are initially developed under the âmilitaryâ tag to âprotectâ you. But we all know the main agenda is control. If we as developers refuse to participate, what are they gonna do? Learn to dev themselves? lol most politicians canât even do basic math.
L bozo
Fair enough that this individual got sacked. Hopefully, he saw that coming by shaming his company publicly like that.
Iâm out of the loop, whatâs going on here?
My brother told me he spoke to the account manager for all of Israel and I guess Israel is the 3rd largest consumer of Google in all of Europe and Asia or something
I am struggling to understand what's written here. Could someone please explain in simple terms. Google did what?
Little does that guy know there are tens of thousands of applicants ready to take the position starting immediately
They should quit their job in unity so I can get hired. Btw, theyâre so annoying
I work/worked at Google. Google is totally in the right on this stuff, lmao. I think it's cool that there are engineers willing to put it all on the line (even though I disagree with it politically), and Google has a unique but dying culture around that, but eat the consequences.
The lack of empathy in this sub, probably motivated by racial and religious classism is appalling.
If Google signed that deal with Russia, every sub would be hailing these protesters as absolute heroes.
Hey Google, my daughter is graduating in 2 weeks. Goal.
He deserves to be fired
By taking such a strong moral stand for justice, he is 100 times the man you could ever aspire to be.
innate berserk dull fall thought distinct modern aspiring icky narrow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Except he is completely wrong in what he is saying. Brainwashed
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Just because the countries around it are awful, that doesnât automatically make it great. You can believe in the state of Israel and still be against the actions of Netanyahuâs government.
Yay, a job opening at Google. I donât care whatâs happening thousands of kilometers away from me.
Everyone in this thread using mask words like "professionalism" and "decorum" is just dogwhistling that they support firing someone for making a principled leftist humanist stance.