Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones (born ) is a site reliability engineer and developer advocate known for labor activism with her contributions to the Never Again pledge and her role in leading Google worker organization efforts. She is the president of the board of directors of the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, which she seeded with her own money. She is Honeycomb's field chief technology officer.

Education Fong-Jones started attending college at the California Institute of Technology in 2005, then dropped out in 2007 when she realized she was not going to have enough money to finish school without going into debt. She later returned to school, graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2014.

Career and activism Fong-Jones started her career in technical support at a massively multi-player online game studio. She says that her career followed in the footsteps of her family members, who are mainly engineers. Fong-Jones joined Google, which she said is one of the best places for a transgender person to work,

In 2016, Fong-Jones contributed to the codebase of the 2016 Never Again pledge, which made it easier to verify signatories' identities who pledged not to work on harmful projects. The data and arguments of the essay were criticized by some Google employees and journalists for allegedly perpetuating sexist stereotypes. Damore was later terminated.

On 10 August 2017, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google's now-parent company, was set to answer employee questions about the controversy at the company's weekly all-hands, known as TGIF, but canceled it 45 minutes prior, citing the leak of the questions and fear of employee safety for "asking a question". The terms used by some of the reprimanded employees included "white privilege" and "white boy", which Google said in a statement was grounds for termination under their policy that "Promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender is prohibited".

Fong-Jones helped start a petition, along with a statement about her and her colleagues decision to go to the press, demanding a safer working environment, including better moderation of mailing lists, and rules against doxing colleagues. The petition gathered 2,600 signatures.

In October 2018, Google was accused of mishandling sexual harassment complaints, including a $90 million severance package for Andy Rubin, who was accused of coercing a junior employee into sexual contact, which he denied. Fong-Jones said that the company "covers up harassment", contributing to a work environment that discourages women from reporting misconduct, saying that victims believe, "the men will be paid and the women will be pushed aside." In 2017, Fong-Jones had alleged on Google+ that she was sexually assaulted by a director at the company, which was later reported on. In a series of tweets, Fong-Jones criticized the company's culture as allowing leadership to operate "abuse of power relationships where there was no consent, or consent was impossible." She went on to name the director from her 2017 Google+ post as Richard DeVaul, the head of X Development, who was also named in The New York Times article about Rubin. DeVaul apologized for his behavior.

On 1 November 2018, across 50 cities, nearly 20,000 Google employees participated in the Google Walkout for Real Change demanding changes over their working conditions, ethical technology concerns, and how the company handles sexual harassment complaints. One of the catalysts was a report that Project Dragonfly (Dragonfly), a search engine built by Google for China involving censorship that was implicated in the persecution of the country's Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, had ignored the company's privacy review process and lied to the public about how close it was to launch. Pichai was later called to appear before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary at a hearing about Dragonfly. He testified that they had no current plans to launch a search product in China.

On 29 November 2018, Fong-Jones started a solidarity strike fund, consulting with Coworker.org (which is backed by Pierre Omidyar of the Omidyar Network ), promising that if her fellow employees donated $100,000, she would match it, which she publicized on Twitter. The fund was matched within a few hours, and reached $250,000 within days. Fong-Jones told Fast Company she was seeking to start the fund for workers so that they "feel empowered to speak up about issues in the future",

One of the motivations to threaten to strike again was Dragonfly, and the allegation that the few people with knowledge of the project would be terminated if it was revealed to anyone else, which Google denied. and another on 27 November by more than 700. a statement that was later alleged to be false or misleading based on leaked internal communications. and a half million in unvested restricted stock.

She told Business Insider, "If I didn’t care about Google I probably would have silently quit many, many months or years ago." Fong-Jones said that if she had stayed at Google and continued her activism she would've burned out, but applauded her colleagues who pressed on without her.

Following her departure, she shared responses to her resignation from the application Blind which were mainly derogatory comments, including transphobic and racist comments about her identity. Comments made on Blind are anonymous, but the comments Fong-Jones shared were in the Google section, which requires a Google email address to be authenticated. She said that it was "scary" to know that they were written by some of her coworkers.

In an essay she published on Medium in February 2019, she said, "I have grave concerns about how strategic decisions are made at Google today, and who is missing a seat at the bargaining table." She is Honeycomb's Field Chief Technology Officer.

Fong-Jones has continued to publicly advocate for inclusion, equity, and diversity in the workplace. She has said that the most important thing companies can do is to involve employees in structural decision-making processes, pointing to European Works Councils as an example for American companies to follow.

In 2019, Fong-Jones invested $200,000 into Tall Poppy, a startup online harassment protection and reputation management company named for the Roman metaphor.

The Solidarity Fund In 2020, Coworker.org incorporated The Solidarity Fund, after a year of researching the legal intricacies involved in turning Fong-Jones' Google strike fund into a broader fund for the tech industry. Roughly half of the initial fund went to Amazon workers. Fong-Jones joined the board as its president, along with Whittaker. Laurence Berland and other Google workers joined as committee members.

In fall 2021, Fong-Jones and The Solidarity Fund created an emergency fund after Apple workers, including committee member Cher Scarlett,

The Solidarity Fund was a winner of Fast Company 's 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards.

Kiwi Farms lawsuit In May 2023, Fong-Jones brought a defamation case against the Brisbane-based company Flow Chemical and its sole director, Vincent Zhen, who were associated with the IP range used by KiwiFarms. The lawsuit alleged that the company was helping to keep the forum Kiwi Farms, which has doxxed and targeted her and other LGBTQ people, online. An interlocutory judgment was made against Flow Chemical and Zhen in July 2023, and, in an October 2023 default judgement they were ordered to pay Fong-Jones $445,000 plus costs.

Personal life In 2012, while residing in Massachusetts, Fong-Jones rented her car out through RelayRides (now Turo), a ridesharing company that allows users to rent their cars out peer-to-peer. The driver was involved in a traffic collision that resulted in the loss of his life, a total loss of the vehicle, damage to another vehicle, and injuries to four other people, which the police determined were the fault of the deceased. Fong-Jones was contacted by her own insurance company, Commerce Insurance Group, and learned she could be liable to a lawsuit that exceeded Turo's coverage limits. She posted about the incident on Google+, which was later reported on. Turo's service was suspended in New York state (NY) after the Department of Financial Services contended that they were not licensed to sell third-party insurance, leaving owners liable for damage caused by renters. Turo re-launched in NY for commercial hosts in 2021.

Fong-Jones is transgender. She said that she experienced dysphoria that she could not cope with when she was 15, leaving her no choice but to start transitioning. She said that her parents were not supportive, and that her biological father disowned her. She said that she has given 40–50% of her income over several years to support other trans people.

Selected works Resolving Outages Faster with Better Debugging Strategies USENIX SRECON18. Refining Systems Data without Losing Fidelity USENIX SRECON19. Identifying Hidden Dependencies USENIX SRECON20. Optimizing Cost and Performance with arm64 USENIX SRECON21. Using Serverless Functions for Real-time Observability USENIX SRECON22. Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, George Miranda. Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence. O'Reilly Media, 2022.