
The Tech Revolt - minimaxir
https://story.californiasunday.com/tech-revolt
======
m0zg
Protesting Chinese censorship, I get that. But they lost me at "protesting
projects with ICE". I happen to think that immigration and customs enforcement
is a net positive. Those people deal with human trafficking, seize a ton of
dangerous drugs (2370lbs of Fentanyl alone in 2017), and send a lot of people
who shouldn't be here back to where they should be (or to jail if they've
committed other crimes).

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
_I happen to think that immigration and customs enforcement is a net
positive._

I guarantee those people would be as well if they were effected by it
personally. If you're not personally doing the kind of jobs an illegal
immigrant can do for less, then you can only benefit - it lowers the cost to
you for many things in your life. As a bonus, you get to pretend that makes
you a good person.

An episode of South Park addresses this brilliantly, though people
conveniently only remember the first part. Time travellers from the future
come into South Park and take all the menial jobs. The blue collar americans
yell "they took our jerbs!" Randy - a geologist - admonishes them as racists,
until he finds out his own white collar positionhas been given to an alien,
and then he too is complaining about how they took his job.

The day the wealthy Californian tech companies start hiring illegal immigrant
developers at a lower cost is the day the echo chamber changes its tune.

~~~
IOT_Apprentice
Have you heard of outsourcing? Or the term Offshoring? Or Tech Companies using
H1B Visas?

I mean it is already happening, perhaps you just missed it.

~~~
drankula3
Sure, and there is resistance to that too.

------
lordnacho
You have to wonder if the key ingredient in this is the fact that tech jobs
are booming. There's so much written about the job market, you tend to feel
confident that you're in high demand.

I know a lady who was working for a startup that folded. She got told, then
walked down the hallway in the same building, got hired by another startup.
Boot camp grad.

There's even a person mentioned in the article who refused to work at Amazon,
which I guess pays over $200k. Some people would do it out of principle
regardless, but many more would find it easier to protest if they had high
confidence they could find another job in that bracket.

I've seen sexual harassment suits happen in finance, and it hasn't led to any
form of mass movement. People just get paid off and let out the back door.

In addition you have to ask about the effect of that hiring cartel being
broken.

~~~
AznHisoka
You're right. It's also because we live in 1st world conditions, and once your
basic needs are met, we strive to address the higher ones, like fulfillment
and meaning.

I've worked with programmers who live in 3rd world countries like the
Philippines, and notice a huge difference in the way they treat their job.
When I give them a boring task, they don't ask what is this for, or why am I
doing this? They just do it - on the flip side, they don't care about the
product, or the company mission. I'm not saying this because it's good or bad,
but this is just what I've noticed.

~~~
charlietango92
interesting. Sometimes I wish I was more like them, and things didn't bother
me if they seemed boring or pointless. Seems like an innately selfish view,
but one i'm having trouble rectifying.

~~~
jriot
After serving in the military (Air Force air traffic controller, so military
lite) I align more with the 3rd country workers mentioned. Take the task,
complete it to the best of my ability, move on to the next task. I don't care
about the mission or domain. Im paid well, work from home and have relatively
little stress compared to 11 years in the military. Searching for more meaning
out of my work would create undue and unnecessary stress trying to find that
unicorn role, which in reality doesn't exist.

~~~
bronco21016
I think the ‘find the unicorn role’ thing is a generational thing. So many of
my peers (early 30s) are striving for the side hustle that will bring them
millions while they chill on the beach. What happened to just going to a
decent middle class job, doing your work, then going home and living your own
life? It seems to me social media has created so much of this. It’s social
media where people find the need for one-up-manship that leads them down these
ridiculous paths.

Perhaps I’m delusional because I’ve been comfortable in my low stress, check
out and go home, type of job for some period of time. I just don’t feel any
desire to chase some kind of meaning in my work. Most of my coworkers seem to
have the same outlook.

~~~
jriot
We are in the same peer group, of early 30s. Luckily, most of my peers don't
have this line of thinking, although they do put great deal effort after hours
into our line of work - data science / machine learning. They all want
influence someone, somewhere - who are they attempting influence, I don't
know.

I will admit I also an outlier for my age group. Have been married over a
decade had kids in my early 20s without any debt (GI Bill helped here).
Probably could have a bigger nest egg saved but traveled quite a bit before
and after kids. This has resulted in different goals, and career trajectory
than my peers. Both of our children will be out of the house when we are 46.

I 100% agree with you that social media has warped people's views of life. My
social media presence is LinkedIn (and I guess here), just a page with one
post. None of my hobbies I post about or share online, only through in-person
interactions. Nor do I have smart phone, so I don't take pictures to share,
thus we discuss what visiting a Nepalese village was like, instead of scanning
a bunch of photos. In my opinion this creates a better relationship dynamic. I
am sure there are things Im missing out on due to the extra step people need
to take to invite me (a phone call) but I gladly trade it for the reduced
information overload from a smart phone.

------
ForHackernews
Neveragain.tech is silly to me because they pledge:

> We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying
> information for the United States government to target individuals based on
> race, religion, or national origin.

But then you have people signing it who work for companies like Google and
Facebook that obviously already _have_ built huge databases to target
individuals based on race, religion and national origin to show them ads.

If the US government really wanted to go full fascist, these companies have
conveniently collated all the data for them.

It's like saying "I'm happy to work on building nuclear bombs, as long as you
pinky-swear you'll only ever use them for digging harbours."[0]

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot)

------
taraploughman
This seems a good time to point out that a few of us been organizing a revolt
against HN. I wish it wasn't so, and the drama is mostly uninteresting.
Suffice to say, expressing concerns about HN on HN is a quick way to end up
beheaded.

If you're looking for an alternative:
[https://www.laarc.io/](https://www.laarc.io/)

You may find the site a welcome change of pace. We just had our first Show
post today.

There is a good chance that this account will be quickly banned, this post
killed, and this account marked as "uncommentable", meaning this is the last
comment I am likely able to post under this handle. But you may also know me
as sillysaurus.

I've missed you guys.

~~~
ProAm
Why the revolt over HN?

~~~
untog
I can't speak for the OP, but I've been frustrated to find that any time a
controversial topic comes up on HN (say, sexism) it is immediately flagged off
the homepage. A small cohort of HN users get to dictate what the site at large
discusses, and I'm not sure that's for the betterment of the industry.

~~~
bilbo0s
???

So is this basically a revolt by the more political oriented people? I mean,
the people who want to discuss the political type controversial stuff and not
so much tech and science?

Just wondering why I never heard of it until I read that comment?

~~~
untog
> Just wondering why I never heard of it?

Because it gets flagged off the site immediately.

~~~
bilbo0s
In fairness though, if you want a politics version of HN, you can just make
your own. I think there are a large number of flags required to get a post
removed from the front page. So, to me, it sounds like there are a lot of
tech, math, science types who are just not interested in posts that they feel
"pollute" the stream so to speak.

I mean, again, if we're being fair, those guys should get as much of a say as
you do.

~~~
untog
I think the core contention is that tech, maths and science do not live
outside of politics - they're all political topics. Books have been written
about the politics involved in science.

> those guys should get as much of a say as you do.

Absolutely agree. But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of
users make the choice for the rest, who never see the story in question.

I'm not suggesting I have an easy fix, community moderation is one of the
biggest problems out there. But I'm not sure the current approach is the best
one, that's all.

EDIT: and you might notice it happening now. This story has slipped down to
23rd on the front page, despite having far more upvotes in a shorter space of
time than the stories that surround it. Soon it won't be on the front page any
more.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of users make the
> choice for the rest..._

That's the thing though, _" a small number of users"_ made the choice to put
the post on the front page in the first place. It only really takes a tiny
fraction of the daily user count to promote a submission to the front page,
and, to my mind, YCombinator is just kind of saying, "well, since there's no
way to downvote a submission, we'll have this flagging mechanism." I think
that's a reasonable compromise.

------
hydrogenglow
I'm interested in seeing whether we begin to see more unionizing among tech
workers and therefore more collective action. It'd be like the incidents
detailed here but to the Nth degree.

~~~
jbob2000
Big companies have this thing called “segregation of duties” which protects
the company from organized labour. You can organize all you want, but the job
has been cut up in to so many pieces, it’s easy to replace whoever forms a
union.

~~~
ForHackernews
That's why solidarity mattered, historically.

~~~
jbob2000
Can't have solidarity if you coworkers all speak different languages than you.

------
malvosenior
Never to be mentioned: All of the engineers who won’t work at Google because
of what they did to Damore.

Techies aren’t as politically mono cultural as this (and most other pieces)
would have you believe. Many would happily build something for ICE as another
example.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
I'd be surprised if there's a statistically significant number of engineers
making a stand because "company fired engineer hired to do machine learning
because he demonstrated an impressive ignorance of statistics and applied that
knowledge to make a public ass of himself".

Sure the number is nonzero, but I'd look beyond you're own bubble if you think
that's a population worth mentioning in a discussion about larger trends.

~~~
zozbot123
It would sure be nice if researchers who work on machine learning were less
ignorant of statistics! But singling out one employee for this seems rather
disingenuous, doesn't it?

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
Are there many (any?) jobs where you can go and publicly announce that you're
not only unqualified but extremely proud to be so and not suffer consequences?

