Shopping for execs: ID management biz Okta poaches Google's veep of engineering to run product dev activities Identity-as-a-service slinger Okta has poached Google veep of engineering Sagnik Nandy to become its president and chief tech officer. Nandy will run his new employer's engineering and business technology functions, including the planning of product development activities. He will report directly to Okta CEO and co-founder …
The call for compulsory Covid-19 vaccinations for Google employees when they return to working from Google's HQ is making many look elsewhere.
No employer is going to dictate their policies to employees very much in demand, with sort after skills they can take elsewhere, when other employers are willing to accept that vaccination is a personal choice/private decision, and by doing so, get Google talent which might otherwise have remained at Google.
I can't see Google keeping the compulsory vaccination policy in place, as key employees jump ship. For me, there is a line, and this policy crosses it, my personal health decisions are private, and they will remain so.
First, your anonymous comment has nothing to do with the article and I strongly believe that Sagnik Nandy, being an intelligent person, is fully vaccinated.
If you must troll your anti-vax comments, at least wait for an article that mentions vaccination rules.
BTW, the article itself was interesting, if you'd bothered to read beyond the headline.
You don't have to be an anti-vaxxer to acknowledge that people prefer choice. Not being forced to accept a vaccine is not the same as being prohibited from receiving one; if Mr Nandy wants to be vaccinated against the dread coronavirus, he can do so regardless of whether he works for a corporation forcing that on its employees. Just as people prefer not to be forced to work from an office, or from a specific office. When people write about employees looking for greener pastures when told they have to work from a specific place, that's considered perfectly acceptable commentary. And it's true: choice means that people who want to work at an office can, and those who don't, aren't required to, so as an employee you're better off with choice regardless of your specific preference. There is really no doubt that working from an office is more productive, and throwing away 5-10% (I suspect it's more) of our collective productivity (read: wealth, security, and standard of living) is not a trivial matter; by that logic, it ought to be equally controversial to assert that employees are leaving because they prefer flexible work locations, yet somehow it isn't. In any event, not having a choice is always worse than having one. This is no different. People like choice, and people will seek out situations that preserve it. And if someone wants to speculate as to why a particular employee left a particular employer, there's nothing wrong with suggesting it's because that employer is depriving its employees of choice. Whether that's accurate or not is another matter...
And in fact this probably isn't relevant to the article: people at the VP level tend to have somewhat different objectives. Making it to that rung of the corporate ladder at a megacorporation pretty well guarantees that Mr Nandy is first and foremost an empire-building politician with ambition to rule ever-larger fiefdoms and collect ever more of the corporate world's riches and perks. He undoubtedly went to Okta primarily because he felt that would give his career the biggest boost in that direction. If forced vaccinations or work-from-home policies played a role, it was probably minor. It's a different story for the rank and file.
Reminds me of being a graduate student at a certain university in the north of England. In the staff common room where the grad students and lecturers and profs emeritus 'hung out' chatting maths, politics, football etc., there was a water boiler and a tub of instant coffee, and chart. The chart listed everyone's name and when you got a coffee (or tea) you marked the event on the chart and every month paid for what you had drunk. This raised the question each time you got a coffee "who shall I be today?"
(Eventually the system folded and people just had to buy their own jars or tea bags.)
The fridge kept the milk cool, and people marked their own cartons. I once caught a very senior prof stealing MY milk and gave him a stern telling off. (Fortunately he wasn't my prof., but all the same, one has to draw the line somewhere.)
I've posted this comment before, and I'll continue doing so until you stop abusing the language to the detriment of humanity:
Don't use language to benefit the megacorporations. They want you to associate hiring free human beings with the right to work for whomever they like with the criminal act of hunting a game animal without license. When you use the word poaching to mean hiring, you help them associate that connotation, which in turn makes other employers less likely to hire and thus enables them to retain unhappy staff at artificially low wages. Don't do it!
Mr Nandy has the right to work for whomever he likes, on any mutually agreeable terms. Okta have the right to hire anyone willing to work for them, on any mutually agreeable terms. Changing employers isn't a crime, and there is nothing morally wrong about providing incentives to hire people you really want working for you. If he were as valuable to Google as to Okta, Google would have been paying him more.
As an employer, if you want employees to be bound to you for a specific period of time, then hire on term contracts with mutual penalties for early termination. If you don't do that, you have no right to complain when they leave for greener pastures. And you certainly don't have the right to abuse the language to gain public disapproval of the very act of making those pastures greener. When we let them do that, we end up with less happy employees (people like us!) and less productive employers; the winners are the abusers, who get to keep people who don't want to be working for them, and avoid paying them what they're worth.
For shame, El Reg!
See also: copyright infringement is not piracy, unless it involves stealing a container full of DVDs from a ship at sea.
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