Then they should quit if their personal beliefs no longer align with the company. The expectation that they can do anything outside of working for the company on company objectives while on company time and not face consequences is insane to anyone that's worked at a non-SV tech company.
> why on earth should they quit instead of doing what they did?
Would’ve made them more hireable in the future. Especially given the arrest record for some of them.
Usually, having an arrest on your record isn’t going to result in an automatic rejection of your offer during the background check. You usually get to explain yourself, and it could be salvageable.
However, I see it being rather difficult in their case to explain away “yeah, so i was fired for disrupting my previous workplace with a protest and then got arrested for refusing to leave the company property and, subsequently, trespassing.”
But that’s the thing, most of them would much rather be employed at a FAANG with high pay and high tolerance for “expressing yourself” in the workplace.
I totally agree with you that they would be unlikely to not be able to get a job at some old school enterprise with a very unsexy product. Those types of employers typically won’t tolerate even a hint of a similar behavior they could get away with at a FAANG though.
Also, I dont automatically stigmatize people for having prior issues with the law. Imo, it all depends on a case by case basis. However, if I was an employer, I would feel just as uneasy hiring someone who was previously fired and arrested for staging a protest that got out of hand at their previous workplace, as I would about hiring someone with prior convictions for wire fraud and embezzling as my CFO.
P.S. Besides FAANG, also good luck to them to be able to get employed by the government or military contractors (which I assume they wouldn’t even apply for in the first place, given their stances).
There are plenty of just-below-FAANG tier high-paying companies that aren't spending time Googling your history outside of LinkedIn. Most of these folks will be fine and getting paid lots of money. If they make this cause their entire online personality then maybe they'll have an issue, but I have a feeling most of them will probably get back to work and move on with their lives.
Makes sense to protest and raise hell before you get fired (or quit), in such a context, yes.
What doesn't make much sense is to act surprised and complain that you got fired afterwards.
Getting fired is exactly what one would expect when an employee is not only misusing their working time, but also disrupting everyone else's work, and actively trying to publically undermine the company's image (e.g., by suggesting that Google is supporting literal genocide, without any actual evidence of such).
I don't think that should be the first step. Trying to voice your frustrations is an important first step, maybe leave if you eventually find the organisation impervious to change, but simply leaving as a first step isn't the right way to do things.
