Except it won't mean anything. Because someone will just fill their shoes after they leave. There's enough money to make that possible. And in fact it's the companies doing the most icky things that have the most money to just go hire more. That's where the revenue firehose is.

When I was at Google, it was internal culture for Googlers to raise a fuss about a lot of things all the time -- despite the company being an advertising company there was a general uneasiness about crossing various "lines in the sand". There was a very active internal dissent culture, on "memegen" and the weekly TGIF all-hands, and so on. It was broadly acceptible to stand up at TGIF and politely take Larry to task on some thing that was seen as crossing this line in the sand. It happened all the time.

Over time the company just got better and better at evading responsibility to this pitchfork crowd. After all, they had investors to satisfy. And the "line in the sand" just got further and further out, and what was seen as "creepy" and "not Googley" and against company principles just got more and more watered down.

And if you walked away from that (like I did, not that I was of any importance)? Google has plenty of money to go hire new SWEs.

The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market. How we get there from here, I don't know. Some jurisdictions have been better about this than others.

The fact that dictators are usually replaced by dictators doesn't mean dictators aren't actually the problem. This is akin to the common argument that other, bad people are also doing the same thing that I'm doing, therefore what I'm doing is good, or at least morally neutral.

Just because there are people just as bad as you that can replace you doesn't make you not bad.

> The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market.

We say this as if the institutions that would define and enforce this behavior aren't subject to the same self-interest as Google management. Soon, plenty of them will be ex-Google (and other tech) management, to which they'll return after delivering.

What "we" need to do is dismantle and descope large institutions. But since there's really no "we" what we each need to do is protect ourselves from these institutions by creating smaller federated defensive institutions of narrower scope, and treating the Googles and the USAs of the world like the weather, or more accurately like natural disasters or invasive species.

Sadly we know that groupthink is a thing and that many people seek conformity over conflict and correctness. You can safely assume that anyone working for Oracle is a mindless Borg drone out for more money without any care what they destroy to reach that goal. They are still guilty as hell but from a general apathy and not some active choice to be evil.