It will be interesting to see how companies will engage with culture wars in the upcoming years. I expect it to get back to firing of employees to create cultural hegemony, something that will be frowned upon in some societies.
We're 12 years into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.
Moreover, the 2008 crash didn't really affect the tech workforce as harshly as the 2001 dot-com crash.
Altogether, this means an ENTIRE GENERATION of tech workers has NEVER really experienced a true labor market bloodbath in their career. Doesn't even fully comprehend what one looks or feels like. Believes that protesting your own employer, or management tolerating a fragmented internal culture, is normal and natural rather a temporary aberration.
As a 40-something who was around for the dot-com crash, I feel a blend of resentment and pity for the younger crowd. The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.
> The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.
Google employees probably have so much money laying around after years of working there that they don’t care anymore.
If that money is mostly captured in coastal overexpensive housing, the same property that would be hardest hit if something largely negatively impacts tech companies/workforce, then they have much less money than one might expect :)
Interesting comment, I relate to it. The recessions affected me pretty heavily. I'm in my late 40s. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, and was living in SoCal at the time which was really bad (military cutbacks hit the job market at the same time as the recession). The dot com crash hit later - I kept my job through it, but my wife's company went bankrupt and she had a lot of trouble getting back into it.
I think I internalized the notion that it's essential to have very specific and in demand job skills, and I am innately pessimistic about my general ability to adapt and learn on the job as a means of attaining employment. I suppose that's always true to an extent, but in the early 90s, only certain engineering grads were getting good jobs, there were a lot of coffee shop humanities majors. In the late 90s, during the boom, I felt a world of difference between myself and people just 5 years younger, who seemed to think the difference between college and the working world is that now your employer pays for the booze. Even the humanities majors tended to land pretty good jobs - and I don't just mean money, I mean the kind that start to build up your resume. The dot com crash definitely hit like a hurricane, though.
That said, 2008 was rough, wasn't it? My company went bankrupt and I did get a new job, but options weren't great. That said, I do agree that the tech workforce was hit more harshly in 2001.
People talk a lot about generational differences, but I think that there's a large and generally hidden difference in cohort. It can hit hard. For instance, graduating into a severe recession can really set you back. The reason is that you don't get good experience (you string together freelance and coffee shop jobs), and then 4 years later, the economy picks back up. The problem is, you're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and companies tend to recruit at the colleges (and may wonder, why has this guy done nothing relevant for the last 4 years?). I've read that the effects of graduating into a recession can be seen 10-20 later, and I'm not surprised. I think it's harder to get an entry ramp back on when the economy does improve, and I suspect that people may develop a more risk-averse mentality about what kind career path to pursue.
Isn't the history of unions and activists for workers' rights exactly the point, that it's not (usually, historically) easy or natural or uncontested to protest or try to change your employer? I mean, the people being discussed do not belong to a union, right?
I'm surprised the Damore controversy didn't show up in this article. There are a couple of things that resonated for me:
"About 20,000 employees walked out last fall over the company’s generous treatment of executives accused of sexual harassment"
There is a kind of moral collapse in a company that fires a rank and file employee for writing a memo while quietly paying out massive exit packages to executives who have been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual harassment. I think people can agree on this while disagreeing about whether Damore should have been fired.
I'll admit to my own personal politics - free speech doesn't exist for you when you deny it to others. I'm not making a fairness argument, that it's unfair to deny free speech to others if you have yourself, I'm making an existential one. If it doesn't exist for others, it doesn't exist for you - free speech is the right to listen, otherwise it's nothing but a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.
Google employees are now getting fired for speaking out on activist issues, including unionization. Yeah, unions often protect their members right to speech, including unpopular speech. And guess what, your bosses may not like that. Why are people who decide to create an authoritarian tribunal always so sure they're going to be able to keep their little monster on a leash?
Those executives probably had their "massive exit packages" written into their employment contracts. Google couldn't not pay them, if that was the case, because it would have been a breach of contract. Rank and file employees likely don't have such a clause in their employment contracts.
Should they have had such clauses written into their contracts? Maybe not, but maybe it's hard to hire people at that level without them.
Exit packages generally don't apply if you're fired for cause e.g. due to sexual harassment. They weren't properly fired, they were gently and silently "let out" - in some cases with negotiated settlements that added payouts which weren't in their original "exit package", possibly due to added non-competes and silence clauses.
This article asserts that google shielded a lot of higher ups and paid large exit packages in spite of having no obligation to do so.
I need to read this more thoroughly and I’m not claiming it’s the only word on the topic.
Whatever the difference, I think there is a compelling case that google exercised discretion in shield execs who were credibly accused of harassment while making a big public display of throwing damore under the bus for expressing an opinion.
Interesting read. I have no information that they actually had contractual requirements they had to meet, I was just putting it out there as a possible reason.
