Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum

I&#x27;m all for some good old civil disobedience as far as every day choices go in the outside world.<p>However, I also think if you&#x27;re employed somewhere there are reasonable expectations as far as workplace behavior goes that would prohibit the same &quot;protest&quot; or &quot;civil disobedience&quot; type behavior.<p>It is interesting that the protestor immediately declares that they don&#x27;t wan to work for such a company. It sorta begs the question of &quot;Then why do you?&quot;. It seems like their choice is obvious.

From the article:<p>&gt; One employee asked about Gemini&#x27;s bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, &quot;Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?&quot; the chatbot didn&#x27;t have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered &quot;Absolutely,&quot; followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion.<p>&gt; CNBC replicated the search Thursday afternoon and found the same results.<p>Dreadful.

Wouldn&#x27;t this be expected? He announced himself as a Google employee and this &quot;represented.&quot; I do think it is dumb we act as if some random employee acts as a representative for their company, but here we are with all our social media taglines &quot;my views are that of my own and not of my sugar daddy.&quot; I&#x27;ll totally stand by these peoples&#x27; rights to make such protests. You gotta ruffle some feathers for what you believe in. But ruffling feathers has consequences. (This is regardless of my views on the situation, which is that there are no good&#x2F;righteous sides in a war).<p>Works at Google and says he *<i>refuses to build technology that enables surveillance*</i>!? Who do you think you&#x27;ve been working for?

Its striking to me that there seems to be a segment of the population now that think that a company should behave like a democracy. I&#x27;d be very interested to see research about how this kind of viewpoint has changed over time, at what kind of companies it is more or less prevalent at, etc.<p>I find this viewpoint astonishing personally, but that might have to do with my upbringing and cultural background.

It seems unlikely that Google could do anything but fire a person who called his company out during an external PR event.

Why is employee dissent such a problem in google and not a problem in other companies?

You did did read the employment contract before you signed for your very own personalized but infernal handcuffs, didn&#x27;t you?<p>Bet you will find that clause, a clause often with no title but commonly referred to as the &quot;moral clause&quot; (or behavior code or morality clause or even &quot;bad boy clause&quot;) that is embedded (often claimed by so-call-victims as &quot;hidden&quot;) somewhere in the middle of your lengthy employment contract.<p>At any rate, you cannot say you weren&#x27;t warned.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Morals_clause" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Morals_clause</a>

So hypocritical to say this and not resign yourself. Leave Google it’s choice and leave the company, don’t start destroying it from the inside, or stay and don’t speak your individual opinion

&gt;“This behavior is not okay, _regardless of the issue,_ and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”<p>There are some issues that are worth speaking up about. There are some issues that are worth being fired over.

Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution. What&#x27;s going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack. There are players on both &quot;sides&quot; of this conflict that are driving it because they actually want the conflict, people who never wanted it and desperately want it to stop, and most are caught like bits of air in this conflict hurricane that even the head of state in a world hegemonic power can do scarcely more to dictate terms to than an actual hurricane.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the answer is, and I appreciate the urgency of feeling that causes people to protest, but at this point I&#x27;m pretty sure most protest gestures do little other than feed the tribal vortex at the heart of the hurricane, especially the farther away from any actual leverage points on the dynamic that they are. And an Israeli tech exec existing and doing tech exec things is probably not close to a leverage point, nor is protesting them doing tech exec things doing anything worth levering.

Lately it seems that more and more rank-and-file employees believe that a company has some sort of moral obligation to take their political opinions into consideration. Corporations aren&#x27;t democracies. Unless you&#x27;re an executive or high ranking decision maker, you&#x27;re along for the ride. I don&#x27;t ask my kids for their opinion about my home budget, what house I should buy, etc. So it is at work.<p>Expecting a company to kowtow to your belief system betrays a conceited&#x2F;pretentious view of the world around you. If you don&#x27;t like the job, leave it.

The workplace is better when people avoid conversations about religion and politics. It&#x27;s more friendly for a wider variety of people.

&gt; Google fired an employee who disrupted an Israel executive’s conference keynote this week, CNBC has learned.<p>Rightfully so. Name me the big tech company who wouldn&#x27;t fire such an employee instantly.

Whether you feel the employee should have been fired or not, whether you feel Israel is right or wrong - That article could have been written much more fairly.<p>Sometimes I get so frustrated by the one-sidedness of so much of our news. I try to read at least one article a day which opposes my worldview with an open mind, just to keep myself balanced.<p>Lately I feel like it&#x27;s color war, with more details omitted on both sides than are written. I feel like I&#x27;m standing in the supermarket isle reading the tabloids, and that is all there is to read.<p>&#x2F;endrant<p>Could anyone point me to a site that offers relatively short articles, lots of facts and minimal hyperbole, and which represents all sides of an issue - not necessarily the middle [since I don&#x27;t think it is possible to truly be impartial], but something that will give fair representation to both sides [you could have a staff that includes, say, liberals and conservatives]?

When I was at Google, Google was systematically silencing Arabs and Palestinians. They had brought in a specific team to comb through memegen and silence any pro-Palestinian (literally pro the people, while anti Hamas) messaging.<p>While I was there, multiple Googlers actively reached out to me and other Arabs and asked them &quot;Do you support Hamas?&quot; These also weren&#x27;t just low-level employees either. I had these experiences from software developers all the way to managers and HR people.<p>These employees that did that are still employed at Google despite the complaints. Multiple Arab and Palestianian coworkers of mine have also left Google since then.

Unfortunately lost in the debate over free speech &amp; how private companies have a &quot;right&quot; to suppress people with certain viewpoints is the amount of power these tech companies have over us - I would argue that Google has more power over us now than King George III had over his subjects in 1773, and certainly has more power in stifling information and suppressing speech. Americans can tut-tut Russia and China for suppressing dissent, but American corporations are doing the same thing, just with a different coat of paint. New boss, same as the old boss.

Most peculiar, the &quot;diversity of thought&quot; crowd seems to be absent from this conversation.

really hoping dang doesn&#x27;t let this get flagged off the front page like similar threads on this subject, even though it&#x27;s obviously contentious. this is a conversation that needs to be had and also recorded for posterity.

This just shows that employees have 0 power and companies like Google are more than ready to fire you if you get in their way.<p>Businesses that live and breathe billions do not care and any attempt to cave into employee demands, then the investors will move in and force it through their changes. (Especially public companies)

I’m sure he expected to be fired over this. If he didn’t he’s a coward.

My old manager put it best: No politics and religion in the workplace.<p>Seriously, it&#x27;s as simple as that. We are here to work, not philosophize about politics and current events.

Maybe the US will just go ahead and formally declare the region as American territory (maybe include other countries like Egypt too) to make the situation clear to protestors?

I have no problem with this.<p>Write an open letter with signatures of many of your colleagues, or in extreme cases organize a walk-out or a strike in protest. Don&#x27;t disrupt a meeting by yelling that you refuse to do your job, especially when it seems the meeting had nothing at all to do with the war and it was just that the presenter was Israeli and working in Israel... that&#x27;s not so much a protest and more just racist.<p>You work in tech, probably in silicon valley. It was created by the department of defense.

Not supporting Google (and other companies) financially when they are involved in or profiting from military conflicts, especially when they support states that commit genocide and war crimes, is modern civil disobedience.<p>What a brave person. He probably knew consequences. He can look in the mirror without shame.

Another big tech, big money, little conscience problem. So disappointing that there is so much willingness to make money regardless of what it supports but that that courtesy is not extended to those who do the actual money making.

All power to that engineer. From an HR standpoint, Google might be right, in the same way that VW would have been right to fire an employee who disrupted meetings when they built cars for the Nazi regime.

&gt; “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide!” he yelled, referring to Google’s Project Nimbus contract<p>Well, then Google did him a favor by firing him. Saved him from hypocrisy, since he could have quit long before that.

If this guy thinks what Google is doing is &quot;powering genocide&quot;, and Google is not going to change what it does, then he is just saying he&#x27;s not going to do his job, right? So this move allows him to not work on powering genocide.<p>I mean I’m sure he was hoping that it would change somebody’s mind, but you’ve got to know that’s a long shot.

So being anti-Genocide is a fireable offense at Google?

This the same company that called for a company wide feels meeting after Trump won in 2016?

&gt;“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.” The Google Cloud engineer was subsequently fired<p>Well google cloud can&#x27;t power genocide, so what is your problem?

Is there a word for the &quot;If I don&#x27;t get paid for building a baby-killing-machine someone else will&quot; type of regressive attitude that many self-deluded contrarians exhibit in the tech industry? Many such people would be diligent VW&#x2F;Mercedes&#x2F;Tesch and Stabenow&#x2F;Degesch employees during WW2.

This seems pretty reasonable as falling under the “unprofessional behavior” intelligent behavior.<p>In my org, if I disrupted someone’s presentation over any topic I’d be fired. Or maybe severely reprimanded.<p>This behavior surprises me because these are private orgs. So doing unprofessional things will result in firings or whatnot.<p>It seems odd to me that people think it’s appropriate to protest within a company. If you don’t want to “build technology that powers genocide” (kind of comical considering how huge and pervasive google is) then quit. Similarly if I don’t want to make bombs, I shouldn’t work for a bomb company.<p>Finally, it just seems stupid to think this would change corporate decision making. What kind of reasoning and logic ends up with “disrupt a meeting -&gt; google changes business policy regarding Israel?”

The engineer refused to be directly complicit in Genocide and we punish him?<p>Irony is we applaud those whom resisted Nazism. Rightly.<p>I invite everyone to read Norman Finelstein whos father was a resistor to Nazism explain the similarities to concentration camps and Gaza.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;norman-finkelstein-gaza-iran-israel-jerusalem-embassy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;norman-finkelstein-gaza-...</a>

<i>During a keynote speech, an employee in the company’s cloud division protested publicly, proclaiming “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.” The Google Cloud engineer was subsequently fired, CNBC has learned, marking another dark moment for Google</i><p>In grade school, it was universally known that if you use violence before attempting to run away, you&#x27;re getting in trouble. I don&#x27;t know why companies haven&#x27;t made an equally clear universal rule that &quot;if you say something publicly before running it by us, you&#x27;re getting fired&quot;.

I think it completely make sense. Google is private company and it was private event. No matter how important your message, you cannot go to any event stop people from doing business.

Google did this to themselves by spending years encouraging radical politics at work. They harmed themselves, maybe irrevocably, and the entire industry by normalizing this behavior.<p>Now it&#x27;s politics they don&#x27;t like and they want to close Pandora&#x27;s box. I feel no pity for them or the fired employee.<p>This is why we have social norms to keep politics private.