Replacing people might be easy, but it's never cheap - even in industries with an abundance of candidates.
The real issue with having your work-force leave is three-fold. First, you lose all the accumulated knowledge of your team. Second, you lose the cohesiveness of your team. Thirdly, you have to _pay to get a new team_.
All of these things conspire to make all but the lowliest of jobs (think Target Associate) much more painful to replace than it seems.
In short, there are lots of hidden costs in recruiting.
There are hidden costs to taking a stand too. The costs to either side are not the point of the story.
Nor are the outcomes produced by a few brave people locally.
The point of the story is to draw a line in the sand. And that line matters when people are afraid to stand together on one side of it.
If you look at the example of Gandhi and the Salt Tax the mere act of picking salt of the ground and being threatened with arrest unified a country and sent a signal to the British were the line was. Sending that signal matters. Countries were that signal was not sent took many more decades to get independence.
I don't know man, I see so many companies voluntarily do this aftering being bought by PE -- only to flip the same company for 5 to 6x 3 to 5 years later.
I think it is a engineer's dream to think they can't be replaced. But they can, and the probs created by it simply don't matter.
Fifth, many of your remaining employees may be inspired to jump ship to a FAAN if the worst comes to pass. Much easier to be a silent follower than a vocal leader.
Point 4: the new people come in with knowledge of the walk out, which can cause all kinds of secondary reactions. If this goes through every new google employee will have something to think about during the HR feel good antics.
I think you maybe are now ignoring the number of H1B / Visa / or otherwise applicants happy to take a lucrative job that don't give 1/2 a damn about any of that.
My post about SCALE was apparently too hard to understand. There is a big sea of programmers that would be happy to work for Google censorship or not.
If you want to argue the cost of replacing people - I'd argue the cost of paying people who won't do the job you want them to do.
Allegedly the secret to Google's success is hiring (and more importantly, retaining) the best of the best. Presumably Dragonfly work can be done by any H1B, but all the people who no longer want to work at Google would impact plenty of other projects.
There's a difference between your coder who can build you a chat app and a coder who can keep you on the bleeding edge of innovation. In theory.
The real issue with having your work-force leave is three-fold. First, you lose all the accumulated knowledge of your team. Second, you lose the cohesiveness of your team. Thirdly, you have to _pay to get a new team_.
All of these things conspire to make all but the lowliest of jobs (think Target Associate) much more painful to replace than it seems.
In short, there are lots of hidden costs in recruiting.