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Big Technology
Should Big Tech Whistleblowers Quit Their Jobs?
Leaving is easy. Staying is constructive.
Whenever big tech employees protest their companies’ policies, there’s always a contingent of people who demand they leave their jobs. “Quit, you losers!,” one such critic said last month, speaking of whistleblowers at Facebook. “At this point working there shows you have no values.”
Whether it’s Facebook employees standing up for election integrity, or Amazon employees protesting warehouse conditions, some people will suggest these employees are ‘complicit’ in wrongdoing if they continue to draw a paycheck from the companies they decry.
But leaving in protest may actually do more harm than good. While quitting may feel comforting in today’s all-or-nothing world — and telling someone to quit especially so — the people most likely to bring about change are those who push diligently from the inside. Not those who rage quit.
“It’s important for a dissenter to stay in the organization as long as they can to make a productive difference,” Gregg Pascal Zachary, a technology historian, told me. “Leaving too quickly suggests that you didn’t have enough commitment to the organization’s overall health.”
Showing a commitment to company well-being — even with big issues in dispute — matters if dissenters want to be heard. For decades, managers have studied Kent State professor William I. Gorden’s classification of workplace dissent, and it doesn’t view leaving kindly. Gorden classifies worker dissent under four attributes: active, passive, constructive, destructive. When an employee speaks up inside a company, management sees them as both active and constructive, making them predisposed to listen and act. When an employee quits, management sees them as active but destructive, and their message tends to get lost.
Being active and constructive is particularly impactful inside the tech giants, since these companies build cultures that prioritize listening to employees and taking their ideas seriously (perhaps except for Apple). Without internal…
