zlacker

Liz Fong-Jones (who left Google earlier this year after some 11 years there) tweeted about this last night: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1150960547803860993

Of the walkout organizers alone, four out of seven have now left.

>>geofft+(OP)
That looks very bad.

On the other hand, if you're organizing a walkout, you're probably pretty fed up already. How far are you from quitting at that point? Probably not very. If you organize the walkout and nothing changes, even if there is zero retaliation, do you quit?

At a minimum, this probably indicates that there was not enough improvement, fast enough, at Google.

Note well: I am not saying that there was not retaliation. I am saying that this, by itself, does not prove retaliation.

>>Animal+U9
I actually think organizing a walkout is something you do if you don't want to leave. I mean, if they were really just fed up, they could have just left like you said. I think these people (as a couple have said publicly) really did want to help change Google for the better because they love at least some parts of it.

>>ketzo+lf
I agree that they don't want to leave, that they want to fix it. And yet, they have to be dissatisfied with current conditions, or they would not have organized the walkout in the first place.

How dissatisfied? I'd guess pretty bad. Dissatisfied to the point that you're willing to do something that has some possibility of costing you your job. So they want to stay, and yet they're not that far from being fed up enough to leave. (Or so it seems to me, someone who is not at all in that situation...)

>>geofft+(OP)
I actually got on Liz's block list for suggesting that Google the company "wasn't worth saving", when Liz was still at Google organizing employee action to try and "fix" it.

I get the impression we'd agree on that point much more today than we did then.

>>Animal+Th
I mean, the honest truth is: They walked out, made clear demands. Google refused to enact all but one of them. If they stuck around, it wouldn't suggest they were very committed to their goals.

I guess my biggest surprise was that there wasn't a second, more severe "walkout" or "strike" after Google declined to respond adequately. The Walkout made news but it wasn't nearly a strong enough action to really say it was all they could do. Most of the people who walked out went right back to their desks after work and kept working.