I've noticed a trend where toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause, usually something related to social justice. It's effective and usually short circuits the public's willingness to see the nuance of the issue.

This is just how you behave: when faced with opposing pressure you roll over. That's fine, I do the same in some situations: I don't fight people who can cause me great damage like police or air stewards or immigration agents.

But rolling over all the time is not an optimal strategy. The more power you have, the rarer you should roll over.

And of course many without power will see those with power and say "In their place, I'd roll over". Yes, naturally. That's because you don't have any power. So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.

Google tried to prevent her from publishing a paper, which is outside of their normal practice, then dissembled about what happened (pretending internal reviewers are anonymous, for example)

I don't think anyone would claim corporations are democracies, but the view that the corporation is its CEO and/or its shareholders isn't so obvious, either. There are clearly cultural differences here (e.g. see the situation in Germany [1]), but I don't think that the American view of what a corporation is and who it serves is necessarily the only reasonable one.

I don't know any more details on this matter than those in the article, but I don't see why you assume that if employees -- well paid or otherwise -- make demands of management then it must be them who are toxic, or, indeed, that anyone is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Secondarily, the level of management craft displayed by Google here has been awful. Both in hiring and creating such a situation, and in their inability to effectively defuse it.

Probably not a primary cause, but contributory.

I blame academia. Seems like most of these people spend years on degrees in critical theory, the whole time being coddled and told they are victims and never confronted or forced to argue with logic. Then when they leave the bubble of academia and get into the real world they expect the same treatment and the only thing they know how to do is play the victim card.

Even reading just your own, clearly biased, summary, it sounds like you are describing "worker solidarity".

People just shrug when "leadership" at a company fires people randomly, places bad managers on good teams, demands unwarranted apologies from workers and makes everyone obey arbitrary demands.

But when a group of employees try to take any of these powers into their own hands they are immediately written off as toxic.

Tech workers have been fooled into thinking that they are a respected and privileged type of labor. Anyone who has been in the industry long enough has already seen this degrade over the years. A decade ago engineers made much more decisions at companies, had some say in the quality of code and technical direction companies were in. Software devs are still paid well but are increasingly told to keep their heads down and focus on code, and zero consideration will be given to any technical concerns if they remotely impact some PMs quarterly goals.

As boot camps ship out more and more "good enough" engineers, and a "just ship it" mentality dominants, quality technical skills become less and less of an advantage.

Technical workers squandered their advantage by thinking that some how they really were better than everyone else, and that they would forever enjoy easy employment, high salaries, respect at work and comfortable working condition. In a few years I think most technical workers will see that in the long run Amazon's engineers and Amazon's warehouse employees become more and more a like.

Sadly, comments like this show most engineers will still rabidly support management rather than risk rocking the boat, deluded into believing it will extend their privilege in the marketplace just a bit longer.

That's quite the statement considering that there's lots of PoC, women, queer people, sexual abuse victims, etc who have been suffering through toxic work environments for ages. What makes this group "the most toxic group" you've ever heard of?

> She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands

Is this letter public? Is there anyway we can see what those demands were?

Alternatively, anything that shows that you have indeed read the letter?