A Selfie with Netanyahu Turns Into an Employee and Customer Exodus

> We’ve written at Hard Reset before about tech workers leaving long-time employment at companies like Oracle and Cisco, driven away by their employers’ blind corporate advocacy of Israel and retaliation against any form of pro-Palestine activism. One former Oracle employee told us that she is leaving tech and the idea of “girl-bossing” altogether, instead traveling around in a camper van and buying a vineyard in Porto, Portugal

If you can afford to buy a vineyard in Portugal, then you didn’t leave tech out of protest over Middle East politics, you retired because you’re rich. Which is fine, but don’t try to make it about Israel.

A single employee tweeting "last day" is the proof of an employee exodus? Are there more?

> A few days ago, the CEO of Vercel—an AI coding startup that, as of Tuesday, raised a $300 million Series F at a $9 billion—posted a selfie with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Vercel is a product for AI developers that companies like Meta are investing heavily in in order to develop their AI faster than competitors.

As an aside, when was Vercel ever an AI company? I’ve been (past tense, but I left a bit ago) a customer for years and it was a “hosting service with convenient feature bundling”.

Labeling everyone an AI company is watering down so much detail and nuance to put it lightly.

Single people without significant real-world constraints are capable of quite amazing acts of pique, or idealism, or altruism. And in today's connected world, criticism and support can be gained almost instantly. To some (significant?) fraction of the population, one's (on-line) reputation is more important than your bank account - so actions have to be viewed in this light.

We're seeing an interesting change here in the response of Americans to the moral behavior of employers. It's always existed to some extent but it seems more pronounced.