Google confirmed it 'terminated' an employee who staged a protest against Israel

This reminds me of a situation at Twitter where someone was communicating fearlessly to build trust, but learned as the CEO put it there were still consequences.<p>US companies are going to be weird about this for the next few years. They want to do the profitable thing, but have spent the last decade making workers feel like they have a say. In the end, management and shareholders are in charge, the rest is an illusion.

Their protest was very effective given the existence of this discussion here and across the web.<p>Despite what those who claim politics can or should be kept out of work want to claim.<p>For those who claim the protester was an idiot, consider their goal wasnt keeping their job and instead living their values.<p>That doesn&#x27;t make them an idiot.

The engineer in question said that they refused to work for a company that participated in project Nimbus&#x2F;contracting with Israeli state. Is that not a resignation?

To be honest, it doesn’t sound like Google was a good fit for him, given that their whole business is surveillance, with a view to enabling <i>whatever</i>, don’t ask don’t tell, as long as it makes money.

He presented himself in the context of his engineering role to make a political statement. That violates Google&#x27;s own policies. That same policy says they wouldn&#x27;t have fired him if the context had been one where he was presenting himself as a &quot;civilian&quot; not an employee.<p>Getting himself fired was something he knew would be part of this protest.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;rZvpO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;rZvpO</a>

He did the right thing. He knew he was going to get fired and probably didn&#x27;t care to work there any longer anyway. At least he managed to grab multiple headlines this way. God bless him.

It’s crazy to me that we have so many people that think they have a god given right to a paycheck. You get paid money to do what the person paying you wants you to do. Not because you are a good person who worked hard in high school and college and now deserve money from the sky for the rest of your life.

Note, YC is actively auto-muting much of this conversation.

Anyone opposed to this should start a company and see how they like paying someone six figures to waste their time.

Firstly, for the record, as far as political beliefs go, mine are quite aligned with the protesting employee here.<p>Having said that, Google is entirely right here. The speaker was not some right wing political wingnut from Israel. He was just another employee of Google who happened to be from Israel. And from all the reports I&#x27;ve read, the talk had nothing to do with Middle East politics.<p>Heckling a fellow employee giving a speech just because they&#x27;re from a country whose government you have policy differences with is like picketing a Chinese restaurant in New York to protest China&#x27;s aggressive posturing in the South China Sea.

This employee is an idiot and they deserved to be fired.<p>Shouting down others is not speech - it’s censorship, even a company with broad internal speech protections&#x2F;policy is likely to enforce discourse standards.<p>Google would be better off taking a hard stance here - their culture from the outside seems pretty messed up, they’re going to need to fire a lot more to fix it (starting with their CEO imo).<p>This is independent of the specific views the employee held, though I think those views in this case are also wrong and the company can (and arguably should) fire people who hold views in conflict with the mission, especially when they act to cause problems internally.

the american at will system at work. I dont judge the content of the protest itself, but that you can be fired for political beliefes is crazy to me as a european

Sure. Dominance reached, no need to pretend to be fair and thoughtful company. Same as with Elon.