Google Internal Controversies: Google Fires A Cloud Engineer
Google has recently fired a cloud engineer, who criticized the company during a conference in New York. He yelled – I’m a Google software engineer and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide or surveillance!”
This incident happened at the annual Mind the Tech conference in New York. Mr Barak Regev, the managing director of its business in Israel, was delivering his speech at the conference. The employee interrupted him during his presentation and was yelling regarding the project “Nimbus” but later he was thrown away by security.
The employee interrupted the presentation and started yelling at the conference. The Google Cloud engineer’s video went viral on the internet.
If you are wondering about Project Nimbus, it is a $1.2 billion contract between the Israeli government and tech giants Amazon and Google. As per this project, Google and Amazon supply AI and other advanced technologies to the Israeli military. For the last year, many employees of both Google and Amazon have been asking to cancel the project Nimbus.
Also, read – Google Adding New Developer Fee under DMA Compliance
After this dispute at the Tech conference in New York, Google fires the engineer immediately. Confirming the news, a Google spokesperson said-” “Earlier this week, an employee disrupted a coworker who was giving a presentation — interfering with an official company-sponsored event. This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”
This is not the first time Google employees have raised a dispute regarding the project Nimbus. Last year also a group of Google employees has published an open letter, demanding the company to cancel the project Nimbus.
As per the sources, there are many internal controversies at Google especially regarding the project. Google employees have also staged up “die-in” at the company’s San Francisco offices. Not only this the employees of Amazon also protested against the project Nimbus asking the company to stop working on the project.
The fired engineer was expressing concern about the project Nimbus saying “hate, abuse and retaliation” Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian workers are getting within the company. “Project Nimbus puts Palestinian community members in danger! I refuse to build technology that is going to be used for cloud apartheid,” the engineer said.” later on he was thrown out from the conference.
However, Ragev then continued with his presentation and said- “Part of the privilege of working in a company, which represents democratic values is giving the stage for different opinions.”
