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If you just saw someone get terminated at your employer, and you considered it unfair, wouldn't you fear that speaking up might get you disfavor, perhaps due to whatever element resulted in the earlier unfairness? Personally, I've been a scaredy-cat about this. I actually didn't go to a different FAANG a couple years ago, partly because I anticipated a dilemma: the company had been in the news for some alleged unfairness, and I decided that I could easily imagine being there, and trapped between wanting to speak up on behalf of a fellow employee facing a similar unfairness in the future, and suspecting that I would be terminated if I did. Had I already been there (rather than merely anticipating the situation with a hypothetical) I don't know whether I'd speak up. (Personally, given past battle scars, I'd probably make quiet and delicate internal inquiries, trying to find a sympathetic person in a position to look into and correct or mitigate what seemed to be unfair, while being clear that I'm still a team player.) So, I do think speaking up in a big-corporate environment, in the public manner these people have done, would tend to come with some personal risk in most companies. When people do it (perhaps) despite a perception of personal risk to themselves in doing so, we should pause and consider what they are saying. Also, I don't blame people for not anticipating this situation to which they're objecting (based on the information available I've seen at this point). If the concern had instead been "I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find the amassing of intimate personal information of Internet users going on here!", then I'd wonder how they couldn't have realized that before going to that company, but I don't think that's the concern. I'm not taking a position on the concern itself, since the information I have so far is incomplete and complicated -- only suggesting that, when people are saying something at some personal risk, those people and what they're saying shouldn't be dismissed offhand. |