These comments read like a bunch of low-income retail shoppers defending Walmart because they provide something they otherwise couldn't get.
I think these types of debates are bellwether for programmer/IT professional unionization. These are the exact types of lawsuits brought against organized labor as it was trying to get organized to prevent exploitative behavior.
It's disturbing to see these same anti-organization arguments rehashed simply for a new industry.
The difference is that software engineers, especially those at Google, have high social mobility and are well educated. I think that unions are inefficient, but I'm sympathetic towards or even support most of them because those workers don't have a better option. Googlers just come off as entitled. They should be intelligent enough to acknowledge when they're making clickbaity populist arguments that misrepresent complex issues, but they turn a blind eye to it. Calling out these arguments doesn't mean I support large corporations trampling over the weak.
Funny how people only ever use "entitled" to describe labor demanding better treatment from management, but never to describe management demanding that labor do more for less.
> Funny how people only ever use "entitled" to describe labor demanding better treatment from management, but never to describe management demanding that labor do more for less.
“Entitled” is a term used by elites to describe their lessers seeking to be above their rightful station. It's only ever used to punch down.
Other terms are used for the already powerful seeking to retain power including some that reflect the speaker's perception that it is unjust power involved, but “entitled” just isn't generally used in that direction.
I regularly see "entitled" used as a slur against those seen as assuming privileges they should not have or do not deserve. I've seen it attached to the Covington teenagers more than once.
With that in mind, I think the word may have a general-purpose use to describe people grabbing for things the speaker things they should not have.
Adam Smith discusses this asymmetry in Wealth of Nations. He basically says both business owners and labor try to organize, but business owners tend to win because it's easier for them to make it illegal for labor to organize.
Edit: This is the passage I was thinking of
"We rarely hear ... of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines ... that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.... Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour.... But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters, upon these occasions, are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which ... generally end in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
Have you ever lived or worked in a third world country and seen people struggle to make ends meet? I mean really struggle. I have. It makes me wish I could drop my kids off in Afghanistan or a Syrian refugee camp for two weeks so that they can see just how good they actually have it when they curiously find things to bitch about.
I have worked immediately next to a former South African military officer that now works as a senior software engineer at one of the most profitable companies in the world. This person has also seen and experienced unimaginable poverty first hand and its amazing how quickly these experiences bring people into a common understanding or appreciation.
I think the world entitled is completely appropriate in this context. To reaffirm that when employees walk out of Google for a protest it isn't the contractors or employees in the various support jobs who walk out. It is the entitled software engineers whose jobs are more mobile and face less income insecurity. Ask any Googler that walked out about that stratification.
Ok, but you haven't actually addressed the main point of my comment. If it's entitled for labor to demand better treatment when there are kids starving in Africa, why is it not also entitled for management to demand said labor do more work for less? Your comment is entirely orthogonal to this tension.
Those two things are highly subjective. If the treatment upon the labor could be improved then what are the problems worthy of addressing? It seems software developers at Google have it pretty nice.
As for management demanding more for less that is far more complex than it sounds. Does that imply pay reductions, improvements to efficiency, increased labor education, automation, something else, or a mix of various factors? Demanding more for less is perhaps one of the most solid ways a small shop can compete and take share from a giant titan.
> To reaffirm that when employees walk out of Google for a protest it isn't the contractors or employees in the various support jobs who walk out. It is the entitled software engineers whose jobs are more mobile and face less income insecurity. Ask any Googler that walked out about that stratification.
It does depend why they are walking out. If a software engineer walks out in support of a cleaner then this is the opposite of entitled behaviour. Unfortunately e.g. the UK has made this illegal.
You do realize that several of the walkout demands were specifically designed to improve treatment of temps, vendors, and contractors as well as full-timers, right? Most of the Googlers who walked out explicitly did so in support of the folks who couldn't.
Management can "demand" whatever they want, and employees can refuse whatever they want. It's how supply and demand works, and how free markets work.
The problems happen when the government interferes in this process. For example, recently Washington State removed the exemption mentally disabled workers have from minimum wage laws. This was hailed as a victory for justice and fairness. The result is those workers can't get a job anymore.
The spectacular performance of the US economy, 1800 to the present, relative to countries with varying levels of socialism. The poor performance of socialist industries in the US. The failure of any socialist/communal agricultural system to produce enough food to feed itself. (Even the Soviets gave up on collective farms.)
This isn’t a moral judgment. But a market propped up with strong tariffs is by definition not a free market. The American economy you’re lauding was a mixed economy.
You've just mentioned activities an employer (or government) does.
Market doesn't do any of these. Prices or wages do not set themselves "because market wills it". They are set because people will not accept a different outcome. If the employer is stubborn and there are few other options, nobody can really drive the wages up.
Taking anot market is like talking about evolution. It is not even a force, just a label for emergent behavior.
So the market is as free as people are, and the main damper are actually mobility and debt.
People who cannot move are limited to local market which can have a very different equilibrium. People who are in debt are forced to take immediately available offers.
And finally, a typical person cannot outwit or outwait a corporation, much less government.
Information asymmetry and availability of various instruments of pressure is vastly different.
By the way, corporate law and setting wages is also use of force. You do not get to really negotiate any of it from equal position. Likewise you are very limited in negotiating credit.
The difference is, law is at least slightly transparent and corporate law is not.
This is a strange logic. Your description of a job is more that of a glorified hobby.
Meanwhile, are you expecting that the relatives (if they exist at all) shoulder all the burden and costs of caring themselves?
Only because someone does not live alone doesn't mean they don't have a cost of living. Indeed, a disabled person's cost of living is likely higher than an able-bodied one. Nevertheless, they should be expected to compensate this with a lower income than everyone else?
then "entitled" does seem to be the same concept you refer to as "self-entitled" ...
I don't mind people proposing different uses of language, but the person you are responding to literally quoted "entitled" which in original context meant exactly what you refer to as "self-entitled"
so I really see no value in your "correction" or was that a "self-correction" ?
> There's a difference between "entitled" and "self-entitled"
The former is a superset of the latter and the former term is often used for the latter, as here, where the specific subset being referenced is clear from context.
> so many people abuse the word.
Not particularly; natural language is just subject to more contextual nuance in meaning than most computer code.
Every time an Googler has a minor complaint about something that is miles away from their area of expertise expertise, it blows up to the front page of Hacker News. That's what I find entitled. They can't accept that one of the largest companies in the world is not going to bend to the wills. This happened with the Damore memo or project Maven, so they feed misleading information to the media to get populist pressure on their company. Now, everyone is acting suprised that Google is looking into protective measures.
There is a fair and dirty way to fight. I think most people on HN agree that Damore was out of line to milk all the controversy when his memo leaked out. I would argue that similar things happened with Maven, Dragonfly, and exit payouts to execs, but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
There is no dirty way to fight Google. It's not a person. Google lost its face years ago. Are you seriously arguing being nice to a lifeless construct? It's a mechanism, a machine, and it has buttons to interact with. Not everyone can reach the same buttons but that doesn't mean that some are dirty.
Being employed by Google should not give you special political or social privilege. For someone to have the privilege of deciding what one of the worlds largest companies does, they should stump up the resources to become a shareholder.
You do not want corporations becoming political. Grocers should not choose their customers based on their political leanings. That would be bad. The principles are the same.
Almost all the cooks/childcare providers, office support, etc are contractors not employees. A significant amount of SWE and other technical roles are contractors as well.
The mechanism by which they get paid (W2 vs 1099) isn't important. The parent comment was listing several occupations that people fill at Google that don't fit the idea of "highly compensated software engineer" as examples of people who may be interested in organizing in search of better working conditions.
For what it's worth, I don't agree with the implication of the comment--it isn't fair to say software engineers can't have any reason to organize or protest against things that their company does.
You know who companies spend a lot of time and resources trying to replace (even when it doesn't make sense)...their highest paid employees (that aren't executives, they earn their money! /s).
We get away with what we do because the number of (competent) programmers has lagged the demand for programmers since I was a kid back in the 80's.
I'm specifically referring to the well-compensated Google full time employees. These are the ones who are usually talked about in articles like this one.
If those at Google are truly top-tier talent (which I think many are) and if they work in an industry and for a company that is all about disruption, why is this even a valid mentality?
"This thing sucks, so let's just do business as usual." If they are truly talented disruptors, their mentality would be "this thing sucks, we can make it better and bring it into the 21st century."
"In addition, after Google became successful, the type of candidate who applied and was hired shifted from the entrepreneurial to the smart yet homogeneous type. (Shift was pronounced by 2005.) As I have observed previously, only disruptive people create disruptive companies. (Stated differently, great entrepreneurs do not tolerate rules and constraints very well). Google has screened out personalities of this sort since at least 2004 and maybe since 2002."
Well their moonshot (project X or whatever) companies/ideas say this. However, it is true that their a massive company and thus are less about disruption than start-ups. However, Silicon Valley and the people that work their seem to love to talk about "being disruptors," it seems to be quite the badge-of-honor even if your only knowledge of it is via HN.
Or are those with high social mobility and education more likely to be software engineers? Part of this issue is the need to include those with less social mobility at birth and those with less education in the software process. Correlation doesn’t imply causation: this goes both directions.
Only one data point but this [1] suggests otherwise. It invalidates the idea that the median is in the < 100k range however it does not speak to mobility, i.e. that you may be stuck with an entry level salary for a longtime because you are indentured to the company that facilitated your H1b.
$60-100K sounds really unlikely for engineering positions. A poster a bit down claims $127K, which sounds low but not unbelievably low for base salary.
I can only really talk about my own experience, but I think the paysa total comp numbers are close enough to throw rocks at the truth.
They do: I was. Admittedly, at the top end of that range, and so one might argue that inflation has hopefully made that statement not true now (I would hope Google's hiring salaries have kept up), but the person you're responding to is also discussing H-1B, and I would expect the salaries there are not as attractive as normal hires.
Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. Many computer professionals still remember how nice it was to be able to get an edge by giving up something (undercut competitors to get the first crucial project in the portfolio, not being judged by your credentials, etc)
My prediction - time will pass and the idea of a labor organization will become the norm in IT world as well. Perhaps even a requirement to be certified by some kind of professional organization to be hired at all. But this will hurt newcomers.
>Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc
Classic retcon argument, which sums up why we can't have nice things any more. Don't unionize it might hurt foreigners or minorities!
Almost as good as Hillary Clinton's observation that breaking up the big banks won't end sexism or racism. So like ... why bother I guess? We can all be serfs who strive towards antiracism and antisexism while under the oligarch heel?
Not talking about some abstract ideas. Me personally, as a foreigner, with an unrelated degree, with low language skills, shaky immigration status, flexibility to pick where to give up something to get a job benefited tremendously.
To put it another way - being able to allow being exploited allowed me to secure a better future. Without this ability, I would unlikely to have a life as good as I have it now.
Today I am in the position where labor union, some mandatory certification, would be a benefit to me. But I do remember where I started and would hate the idea of having barriers to get into this job. But my kids, or grandkids, if they will be in IT, probably forget these hurdles and will happily vote for regulation/laborisation/certification/etc.
It isn't a particularly good idea to build something on survivorship bias. For everyone who got into computers and found a booming industry there were people who were into something else which didn't boom, or never got he chance to be into something in the first place. There are talented people who should but can't get into the tech job market, working lowly IT jobs or in other ways aren't doing so well. Undue regulation can be bad, but providing a way for people to do something isn't. By saying that something shouldn't be formalized you essentially being protectionist as well. Just from organized rather than unorganized competition.
I agree with that, where I got a life chance someone else probably did not get a pay raise or got fired. Now the question is what is fairer, can it be more than zero-sum game, and is there a set of regulations that will make everyone benefit.
Everyone benefits from a society with high labor costs. Except maybe short term looting interests of top tier capitalists. Even Henry Ford understood this.
High labor costs are why people want to live in the US in the first place; it sure ain't the food or the beautiful architecture.
> Everyone benefits from a society with high labor costs.
False. China wouldn’t have grown to be such a powerful economy if their labor costs were high. The average Chinese is better off than they were 30 years ago.
As far as why people want to live in America? That one is easy: opportunity. Try to start a business in India. Now, try to start that same business in the US. That diff is why people want to be in America. A narrow example, but very illustrative. France has higher labor costs than the US as a percentage of revenues, but the US consulate in Gaungzhou had lines around the block for immigrant visas while the French consulate does not. Switzerland has higher labor costs than the US, but their consulate in Bogota is practically empty, while the US consulate is swamped. It isn’t the labor costs, it’s the opportunity.
> "Everyone benefits from a society with high labor costs." False.
> [...]
> The average Chinese is better off than they were 30 years ago.
You were trying to highlight how China has become a much more powerful economy - but you forgot some crucial steps there. As recently as 20 years ago "Made in China" was printed on every cheap thing in America and the populace of China was no better for it, the economy was entirely geared toward export and there was very little international purchasing power available. In the past two decades wages and internal consumption have shot up in China and this has allowed the ascent of the economy, all of the Chinese ports in Africa and Asia and infrastructure investment is being driven by internally generated wealth - that economic power isn't derived from American pocket books.
An export focused economy is very vulnerable to international pressures and it's quite hard for nations or regions in this state to actually fund internal education and business development, it's much more likely that every spare inch of profit margin is held hostage by the importer's majority status and extracted from the county.
> The average Chinese is better off than they were 30 years ago.
There is like Zero reliable data to base this observation on. Also you want the modal income because average and median are misleading when it comes to ignoring the most miserable.
China, as an entity, has grown its economy. Big whoop for mankind /s.
I'd move from the US to Switzerland in a heartbeat if they'd let me in.
Your examples are basically saying "the US is giving away residency too cheaply and those other countries are not." If it had something to do with prosperity through cheap labor; everyone would move to China, wouldn't they?
There's ample historical precedent of unions in US being anti-minorities and anti-immigration. It may be a far fetched worry in this climate (although given electoral demographics, I wouldn't be so sure), but it is a legitimate one.
Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc.
I don't understand your point at all. Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. The standard argument against unions (esp. in the tech sector) is that they harm high-skilled overperforming workers by capping the maximum benefits they can receive.
> Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people.
Unions fight to support newcomers? Common union tactics such as closed shops and seniority-based pay agreements are deliberately and severely hostile to newcomers.
> overperforming workers
Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!
Why couldn’t a union created by presumably innovative, disruptive tech workers, invent a better mechanism than seniority-based pay? All of this anti-union rhetoric imagines that unions are inherently stuck in the 19th century and lack imagination.
Most white collar unions don't negotiate pay, other than maybe initial and minimum salary.
Edit: I must say I don't think most people here get it. Unions negotiate with employers. The idea that a tech union would agree with tech companies to set salaries is ridiculous. If that is what tech companies wanted they could have already done it. What white collar unions do is to negotiate for the things most people don't consider. They don't negotiate salaries, they negotiate that you should have salary review every e.g. year and some framework for that. That doesn't make a difference for those who already have that, but it does for everyone else. And that is how it is for every area. I don't know if there is a white collar collective agreement available in English online, but if there is one could just read that to get an idea.
And yet, Silicon Valley seems to be currently focused less on tech itself than using tech to reshape many long-running social conventions. Why would labor relationships be any different?
Well it seems like there's some interest to take that on at least from a product perspective when you look at these HR, Payroll, Employee Relations platforms coming out that could be argued try to take a portion of the market away from HR giants like ADP.
And then you have the various interviewing services (interviewing.io is an example I often point to), developer bootcamps with (presumably, at least by some of the verbiage used by said bootcamps) deep connections and mentor programs that ostensibly exist to get people hired.
Then there are your ZipRecruiters and Indeeds that claim to have revolutionized online recruiting and staffing.
Maybe the question isn't "why would labor relations be any different" but "how can tech make more of an impact in labor relations than just getting people hired and automating payroll?"
I don't have that answer, just thinking through my keyboard here.
> Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!
You must be very sure of yourself that you theoretically belong to these "over-performers", yet somehow very insecure and contingent about being recognised for it. Like you want to get paid well so you can point to that and claim it means you performed well, regardless of whether you did.
Overperformance is when a worker overexerts themselves, by working themselves harder or for longer. Overperformance is a problem because it exerts pressure on the other workers to do the same, leading to a runaway effect of increasing expectation for results while workers are left exhausting their bodies and their time, and often their own personal resources, trying to meet that expectation in order to not be fired or miss out on bonuses or promotions. They are not "making everyone else look bad" they are raising the bar higher than most could even reach.
Are you implying that performance is proportional to hours worked? Research shows that this is not the case for most people and that returns past a certain work/life balance ratio are marginal or negative.
I don't think that is the implication. What is being said is that people start e.g. working 10 hours a day and that becomes expected regardless of performance. This type of thing is very common in Asia.
I have a difficult time understanding this world view. A worker choosing on their own to work extra to get ahead is called sacrifice, and is one of the things that differentiates people who do enough to get a paycheck and people who get noticed and promoted.
Coming up with a way to say someone who outworks you is somehow the bad guy because they make you look bad is exactly the kind of mentality that makes me want nothing to do with union membership.
Say you have two employees. One is smarter than the other. That employee will work relatively hard and deliver constant results. The other will take a big chance and work everything they have for a year. Say the chance of them performing better than the smarter employee is 50%. So measured over one year they essentially perform as well, but over three years the smarter employee wins since the other employee can't keep up their pace.
So what is the problem? Well, now imagine there are multiple less smart employees. Even over three years it might then seem like those employees perform better since they are more and a few might succeed for the whole three years. So now the smart employee might get fired. Performance is therefor no longer about work, but who essentially is lucky enough to not burn out in e.g. three years. Soon enough all the smart employees also have to work similar hours, so now they burn out after a few years as well. All the less smart employees will love it because they feel they have a chance.
For a while MSFT had a labour review that ranked employees, this would elevate high performers and cull out any people on the bottom of the pile - this is a terrible thing.
When you go to work for a company you are producing something and being paid money to do it, generally what you are reimbursed with is well below the value of what you're producing as a developer - your labour is building a product that needs to be marketed, it needs customer support, it needs a lot of things. There is a classical economic ideal that the market will quickly settle into an equilibrium where your labour will be about equivalent to your whole contribution to the revenue of the company - but that's a classicist economic view, more modern takes on the economy agree that a stagnant economy will settle into such a state but that innovation will constantly fight that effect and widen the profit margin, the end result is that most of the companies we techies work in should not be viewed as a zero sum game. Any money that is being reinvested into the company is part of the fruit of your labour and employees shouldn't be motivated internally or by management to see their salaries as a highly constrained resource that they need to compete against fellow employees for to earn.
This is a super unhealthy state for a company to be in for morale and for growth.
That is assuming there aren't also less smart managers who have short term interests of showing swift progress until the project collapses. Management will in best case take a long term interest in the company. They won't take a long term interest in employees. Certainly not employees who doesn't seem to be performing. That is what unions are for. To represent the employees concerns about the future.
> Overperformance is when a worker overexerts themselves, by working themselves harder or for longer.
Nonsense! 'Overperform', not 'overwork'. Someone could out-perform you in fewer hours than you work, by being more efficient, or just by being better at the job than you.
I think overperformance is a flowery term for a race to the bottom. A vernacular red-herring whose adoption implies an argument. The contention is compromising human dignity and living in the name of getting ahead of ones peers in the workplace doesn't help anybody in the end. I propose we call it what it really is, an egotistical pursuit to instill a heirarchy where one should not exist.
> I don't understand your point at all. Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people
They really don't. Unions fight to protect the pay and job security of their existing members. They do not generally try to make it easy to join the profession.
Right, an interesting read that covers this a little is "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" by Sugrue. Black people and Women entering the workforce was against Union interests since it increases the labor force.
In many cities, building trades were essentially white only into the 80s. (I've heard pretty awful stories about the carpenter's union in town into the 90s too. Explicit statements of no Blacks allowed.) This was on purpose. Automotive unions were nearly as bad.
So a baffled, "What? How can Unions be racist?" seems disingenuous.I don't think racism is inherent to unions, or that a tech workers union would even be likely to be racist against Indian people. But a blanket denial seems like trying to gaslight people.
I am not against unions but having spent a career trying to get business to tell me what exactly they want I tend not to put too much faith in large organisations. I feel the administrative overhead of getting all us programmers to agree on specific principles as part of a union is literally going to be impossible. Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar.
I was responding to parent on why programmers are reluctant about the idea of unions. I used a rather silly example on programming languages. To bring it back to the issues discussed in the story. I would certainly agree with holding management to task in the manner they handled the sexual abuse. I am not so sure I agree with all the diversity talk (I speak as a black man, I have to put that in) and as someone who lives in a city where gangs literally own parts of the town, I don't see anything wrong in empowering law enforcement/army with high tech weapons. They are bad motherfuckers out in the world and we need some good badass motherfuckers otherwise we as the world would be in trouble. In a roundabout way, I guess I am trying to say where do you draw the line on which positions the union should take. It would become another system where whoever is elected gets to decide what position we as the workers should take.
Maybe some famous people will pen something like the 'Agile Manifesto' for unionized knowledge work, and it will slowly catch on. It could happen (though it would be risky for anyone who isn't self-employed to be an authors)
As I’ve mentioned before, software engineers will embrace unions once they accidentally reinvent the concept from first principles under a different name.
I am not sure if you deliberately chose Agile as an example of something we all agree on or you are taking my example to the next level. Either way you get an upvote from me :-).
A tech union seems inevitable at this point. It seems like there has been some false starts, but there is a "market need" that is being unmet. Silicon Valley has shown it's very good at meeting unfulfilled market needs.
While true, how do you do that and still maintain the flexibility of moving from lets say Javascript to Golang or Swift development? A Union would stifle or add friction for people wanting to quit your current job work with different technologies they want to work on professionally.
From what I’ve seen the unions forming in tech right now are way more fluid than the corporations they’re working inside. These are very decentralized federations of employees. It’s not some old Italian family who has been controlling the FORTRAN labor market in San Jose for 30 years.
Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why
I think you can just look at the surface and see it as a natural consequence of a relatively easy, high-income, unregulated profession, with high demand for workers. Many of the benefits of collective bargaining aren't applicable to people who are relatively easily able to switch jobs or work as a consultant. That then tends to lead to… complacency, I guess? I would expect that relatively few people in that field have recently been in a situation where collective bargaining would have been a benefit to them, and that allows them to see only the downsides.
I do notice some agitation in the direction of unionisation from some parts of the industry – particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse.
I can think of a mountain of things that programmers could collectively bargain for that would benefit everyone. I'd like for bargaining to happen about parental leave, what "unlimited vacation" actually means, what "on-call" duties really entail, compensation for overtime, and whether or not engineers can be reasonably forced to perform illegal or unethical behavior (data collection, dark pattern designs).
I might not able to find a new employer whenever I want. I might not have time to job search because I have children. I might have dependents or I myself need critical medical care that cannot be interrupted by job hopping. I might have a family emergency that has destroyed my savings to look for a new job. I might be in the point of my career in which leaving for a new job so soon would be a red flag to employers. I might have just made a large purchase (a home, for example) that means I cannot afford to find a new employer at the exact moment my current asks me to be on-call for the next 72 hours nonstop.
And if it's not me, it might be my co worker, who I know is a new parent and cannot afford to stop working to care for their child. It might by my mentor, who is dealing with ageism making it difficult to find work. It might be my mentee, who is being discriminated against because of their H1B status. It might be my new hire, who accepted a lowball offer because they have no knowledge of price transparency. It might be a software developer I just met at a data science meetup, who is being worked to the bone at a startup but doesn't have enough experience to be hired anywhere else.
Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.
> Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.
Exactly this.
This is why I work the requested 40ish* hours per week that my employer purchases in bulk from me, and rarely more. It's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated. I work very hard while I am working and I do more than the baseline my employer requests of me. My management thinks highly of me and I am well-compensated for my efforts, so clearly my employer values the contributions I make.
I do the work hours I do and how I do them, pushing back on unreasonable on-calls and repeatedly staying late, because I am senior so I have the voice to be able to discourage management not staffing our group appropriately and not setting unreasonable deadlines. I make sure my juniors know, too, that the way to your personal success is a healthy work-life balance that works both for you and for the group of people in which we are ensconced. I also make sure I mentor my juniors and I do what I can to help others be more efficient and effective.
No one should have to burn the candle at both ends just to be able to be seen as doing a good job.
* There are exceptions, of course. I am not inflexible, because that's unreasonable, but my employer pays for approximately 40 hours per week of my valuable single life in this universe and 40 hours, roughly, is what it shall receive.
Agreed.. thank you for being aware of these issues. I find the tech industry to be pretty toxic & corrupt overall, usually rewarding the employees that are the least ethical.
Not if you want to actually have a career. This isn't day labor. To be successful in the industry you have to be part of good projects. Those often require at least a couple of years investment. And that is in addition to building a life outside of work.
Although vips7L is getting downvoted into the gutter, their response is exactly the attitude I observe permeating Silicon Valley that can help explain the lack of interest in collective bargaining.
This. And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof).
Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
> And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof).
So even with a history of Silicon Valley playing tricks to suppress what developers get paid[1], the typical HN reader is humdrum about salary because it's "better than average?" I have a hard time believing that.
> Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
I get that.
But doesn't this seem weird:
1. Devs apparently don't care for the bureaucracy of the taxi medallion service. So two companies build a nationwide service that does an end run around it.
2. Devs apparently don't care for the lack of salary transparency. So they create a cryptographic system that... oh wait, nope, there's no app for that.
> So even with a history of Silicon Valley playing tricks to suppress what developers get paid[1], the typical HN reader is humdrum about salary because it's "better than average?" I have a hard time believing that.
Yes, because the "pay suppression's" effect was to knock people making six-figure salaries down to six-figure salaries, on average. It actually had very little observable negative effect.
(Note that if you go back to the original lawsuits, they were regarding gentlemen's agreements around headhunting. Given that SV's default attitude is "individuals are responsible for themselves," an agreement against headhunting isn't interesting---if an employee is dissatisfied, they know where the competition is and who to talk to about changing companies. If anything, there's a weak positive to an anti-headhunting agreement for employees at the companies in question: it was one fewer recruiter squads pumping spam into an employee's inbox).
Note that if you go back to the original lawsuits, they were regarding gentlemen's agreements around headhunting. Given that SV's default attitude is "individuals are responsible for themselves," an agreement against headhunting isn't interesting---if an employee is dissatisfied, they know where the competition is and who to talk to about changing companies
You may be interested to learn that one of the corrupt agreements was that in the event that an employee does talk to the competition about changing companies and one of the other colluding companies makes an offer to the employee, that company will not counter-offer beyond the first offer.
So, "little observable negative effect" is not quite as dispositive (or even as visible) as you portray it would be.
It's still, on average, a choice between two very cushy six-figure-plus-stock-options deals. No doubt collusion like that puts downward pressure on salaries, but with so much inequality in income in the US, you could put a LOT of such downward pressure on salaries before anyone's going to bat an eye.
(Hm... There's either an economics or sociology paper in the making there about the consequences in employment practices when the wealth inequality in a nation skews large).
Ask yourself: after these allegations came to light, did people flee from these companies? We are still talking employees with massive bargaining power and opportunities. "Apple," "Google," and "Lucasfilm" carry a lot of clout; the wronged employees could probably have found work anywhere in the market of their industry of choice if they chose to leave in protest over this mistreatment. We're not exactly talking unskilled labor or easily-replaceable skillsets here.
Did the companies shrink or grow their workforce?
If they grew, wouldn't that suggest to you that the workers themselves aren't seeing the hostility you are?
A "Gish Gallop" with hours of gap-time between posts? Please.
If you don't want to offer counterpoints you are not obligated to, but it's rude to simply attach insulting adjectives to the message without trying to argue it.
It's more "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" imho. Many HN denizens are angling to either work at google or launch a startup that is acquired by google or grow to the scale of google. Why offend the future employer / acquirer now over proletarian issues?
In case you aren't familiar with the Steinbeck quote:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I'm not sure the pro-union crowd are doing themselves any favor by constantly telling people they don't know what they want, insisting things could only be better, inventing straw-man arguments, and so on.
This is misquoted quite a bit. Here's the actual quote.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
What is different then the acting though? Actors have unions that protect their rights but don't affect their salaries AFAIK (maybe they were abused so much that the history if fresh for them still?)
The difference is that actors were treated like shit first. Even the stars. Just look at what they did to Judy Garland, not to mention everyone else on Wizard of Oz.
I know a fair number of developers who aren't doing that great, or at least not as well as they should. Life quality issues are very common. It is for instance very common to get screwed on salary, pension or vacation at some point of your career, be let go because a project was mismanaged, having a dysfunctional work environment or any number of issues were developers draw the last straw.
Edit: To add to this. I think people don't understand the "failure mode" of being unorganized. It isn't that it is going to be bad all the time. It is that since you don't have a voice other people don't have to consider you. Which means that the likelihood that you will be negatively affected by both small and large decisions of other people increases over time. And that isn't necessarily something you can correct after the fact. Getting unduly interrupted in your career, working in a bad environment or not getting credit is something seemingly small can really affect your life long term. And at least many people I know have these types of stories.
You may want to think back just 25 years to the early to mid-nineties when developers where considered “code monkeys” who couldn’t think past their current module and needed “business analysts” to write requirements for them.
It wasn’t slavery by any stretch, but working in programming was akin to working in “IT” and thought of as a department full of weird nerds who cost the company money.
Separate business or system analysts managing requirements documentation weren't (and aren't in the many places where they are still a thing) about developers being “code monkeys” with limited and not particularly valued skills, in fact, it was and is usual for such analysts to be considered inferiors to the programming staff who do work that is beneath programmers worth.
The reason they exist is because the organization values (or is subject to mandates for) documented requirements, and doesn't want programmers to have to bother with the tedious work of developing and maintaining them, focussing on actually developing the software.
Was this always the case though? Perhaps my position is colored by my experience working for a former IBM manager who thought of programmers as those who “just write the code” based on the requirements written by the “more senior” business analysts.
That particular experience reeked of superiority of managers, project managers, and the business analysts who worked directly for them. I admit that my experience could have been anecdotal, however I’ve asked several senior programmers who were active in the nineties who have confirmed the relationships were by and large toxic at the time.
Correct, but perhaps unions didn't arise from that because the model failed---that era of Silicon Valley died in the dot-com bust.
The second generation of dot-coms that succeeded centered developers as domain experts and essential to company survival (broadly-speaking; there is certainly variance).
"But, the new documents added, employees had to waive the right to take their age cases to court. Instead, they had to pursue them through private arbitration. What’s more, they had to keep them confidential and pursue them alone. They couldn’t join with other workers to make a case."
Videogames, in particular, should be a fascinating case study in lack of unionization.
I assume it's because there's always another batch of fresh-out-of-college young people willing to throw their bodies onto that grindstone that we haven't yet seen successful unionization in that space?
I think video game developers are a subset of developers and that subset is almost entirely passionate about video games. Very few people end up working in game development if they are not passionate about it. I think any time you have a workforce who are passionate about their field you can get people to work for less than if they held the same job in a different field that wasn't full of passionate fans.
Do you think the passion keeps them working more then 80 hours a week or there is some pressure?
I worked 16 hours a day for a week, it was horrible, I don't think I can do 2 times more in 16 hours then in 8 and I gave up the money and just worked the 8 hours(now I am doing 4 hours a day , screw the money)
I think the passion is definitely a force that on average pushes developers to take more punishment to get ahead of their peers. That adds up a lot pretty quickly when it's everyone in the industry. (4 hours a day sounds quite nice)
Actors' unions do impact salary. Union contracts set and enforce minimum amounts that all working actors have to be paid, for example. An actor earning these amounts is said to be "working for scale."
So isn't ok of setting some minimal salary? I do not see why the developers would be against this, only the companies would like to abuse the developers and work them extra hours and not pay.(so probably companies are spreading the FUD against unions? )
The major benefit of the acting unions is the ability to limit the labor supply. In a growing industry like tech, this isn't necessary as the demand has always been greater than the supply of talent.
> Many of the benefits of collective bargaining aren't applicable to people who are relatively easily able to switch jobs or work as a consultant.
The other side of the coin is that collective bargaining itself makes switching to a different employer or working as a consultant a lot more difficult than if the sector wasn't unionized. Sure, some people will have trouble doing these things anyway, especially at the low-end of the income distribution. But that's why we should support policies like Basic Income, or at the very least expanding things such as the EITC and getting rid of e.g. payroll taxes for low earned incomes. And I think that many people here on HN would agree, whether or not they self-identify as libertarians.
> ...particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse.
Game development is the sort of industry that everyone thinks they'll want to work in, only to change their minds very quickly once they see how the sausage is made. Even just raising awareness about the work conditions in the industry - and making it clear that they're not representative of "tech" more generally - would help a lot.
Thank you. As someone who worked in a union before switching jobs, it is not all rainbows and unicorns like so many people try to present it. In one shop I worked in, I was a truck driver delivering fuel to airplanes. If my truck broke down in any way, even something as stupid as the key got jammed, if I pulled out my leatherman and pulled it free, I could be fired for violating union agreements. Even most of the mechanics agreed how dumb it was. I was the sucker sitting out in 100 degree summer sun in the airport with zero shade, waiting 30 to 60 minutes for somebody to come do a job that would take me 10 seconds.
That's before we even talk about collective bargaining. Getting a pay raise was completely out of the question, as raises were almost entirely based on seniority and how long your ass had been in the chair. It was highly punitive to younger people like myself. We also got crap shifts because shift preference was also awarded by seniority in the union. The non-unionized shop paid a shift differential, so people willing to work 2nd and 3rd shift got more money for their time. That was a great solution, as it increased the supply for shift work to approximately the levels of demand (basic economics).
So tl;dr: unions have and had a place, but the cure can sometimes be worse than the disease. Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
> Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
People are talking about the benefits of unionization in a specific industry in response to the near-automatic narrative that unions are bad.
You gave an example of an absurd regulation in a completely different industry. How does that tie into what collective bargaining in software dev would look like?
Great question. Of course unions in software aren't really a widespread thing, so speculating at what they would look like is fraught with all the problems of speculation, but this is what I think of:
Currently at work, I'm more of a "devops" guy but I get into things all over the stack sometimes too. In previous places I've been a "backend" guy that occasionally got into the frontend, etc. I view this as the optimal arrangement: blurry lines of responsibility (so people aren't pigeon-holed), but you can still develop depth and expertise in an area of specialty.
In a world of unions, if it were analogous to my past experience, there could be a "front end" union, a "back end" union, a "dev ops/operations" union, etc. These unions would then draw up lines, much like the "driver" and "mechanic" unions did in my past. Need to change a line of javascript? Talk to a "front end" guy. Tweak a deploy script? Not if the union agreement forbids it.
Those seem like ludicrous thoughts based on where we are now. But I'm sure at one time the idea that a driver can't effect any repairs to the truck, no matter how small, probably seemed ludicrous as well. Yet here we are.
I know I probably sound very anti-union, but to clarify my position, I'm only anti-forced unions. So long as I can opt out of the union if and when I please, I have no qualms. Sadly that is not the case in many places in the United States.
P.S. If I could edit and re-word this line, I would. I think the language is unclear and unnecessarily harsh:
> Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
I would change that to: "Thinking of unions as all upside with no downside (or vice versa) is an argument from ideology, not one from experience."
I can definitely agree with your rephrasing. Unions can be large organizations too, and are certainly not immune to bureaucracy and the pursuit of short-term wins over long-term gains for the people they represent.
I started out anti-labor due to my own experience in a minimum wage job. I was forced to join the union and pay union dues, yet I still received only the minimum wage, so being a union member resulted in a sub-minimum wage!
Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together.
The destruction of the middle class shows that the balance of power is too extreme on the side of the employer, and something has to be done.
> Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together.
You're aware that several major US tech companies were colluding to keep employee wages lower than they otherwise would be[1], right? Once a company's size exceeds Dunbar's number[2] (and often long before then), it's de-facto us vs. them from the executives' point of view.
> Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together.
Look up prior posts here about salary negotiation for developers. You'll find that most of the advice and the resulting comments are in the "fuck you, pay me" vein.
When doing day to day work, you and your employer are on the same team. When it comes to negotiating the conditions and compensation for that work, you are 100% on different teams.
Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.
That's because a decent programmer (especially one working at Google) has many companies fighting for him trying to offer more than others. It's usually easy to leave and that often comes with a hefty raise and it will be your former boss' problem that his direct reports are leaving. Unions are seen from this perspective as bureaucratic organizations run by not very smart people who want to get their piece of the pie by regulating what they don't understand. Unions are good for the opposite market situation when there are too many workers and they have to fight for the limit number of jobs.
Not all are. Unfortunately, the need to unionize period is a sign that employers are neglecting the employee side of the partnership, largely in a never-ending quest for growth of shareholder value.
No one WANTS unions. We would like to be dealt with individually in a fair manner. But when tithe business you want to employ you has an entire department intended to get you to sign on for the smallest cost possible... Well... Some union starts to look like a pretty good idea. Even if it does end up causing a lot of grinding since common sense goes out the window once lawyers and contracts come into the picture.
You are technically right yet still downvoted. These days these words have so many different definitions for different people that they've become nearly meaningless.
To be fair, I was expecting the downvotes. For two reasons:
1) For a long time, there was no "institutional" left in the United States; so in the US - liberalism was seen as the "left". This is slowly changing now...
2) The tech crowd wants really to believe to be progressive (because they work on "progressive" technologies); but in fact, I never saw so many real life liberals like among tech workers.
It all depends on what you want to be liberal about. You could be liberal about gun rights and advocate laissez-faire capitalism, but not be liberal on social issues such as gay rights and religion. Liberalism is not technically left or right-wing. When someone on the right is saying they don't like "liberals" they mean they don't like social liberals.
You can think of the political spectrum as a two dimensional plane, so you have the libertarian axis, but on the part of the economy you have a quite different dimension!
Interesting that everyone is picking his favorite features when they define their political spectrum.
That's an equivocation. The word has been around for hundreds of years and represents many different things. For example, "Liberalism" in the US is both associated with American Libertarianism and with FDR's New Deal, and those two things have about as much in common as oil and water.
In every context besides economic journals it refers to social liberalism: the progressive left. No one is calling reagan or bush liberals even if they are by the economics definition of the word.
But "being very liberal" is not the same as "being very pro USA Democrats".
Liberals are often right wing parties in other countries. Basically you have a scale from socialism where everything in your life is dictated by social contracts to liberalism where almost nothing in your life is dictated by social contracts. The left in the US calling themselves liberals is kinda like the north korea calling themselves "democratic people's republicc". Their only liberal agenda is freedom from the Christian social contract.
Yet we are on a U.S. based website talking about a U.S. company and its American workforce and a story published in a U.S. newspaper, so we will stick with the common convention and not go on semantics tangents.
Being pro-labour is one of the cornerstones of being leftist. I think you are using the word liberal differently than the antonym of conservative - which I am implying to be "right-wing". Maybe "social liberalism" is a good term for what you seem to be saying.
Technically no, but practically it does, so long as massive corporations exist. I think you can argue that with smaller scale business you can work to better employee conditions without collective action, but given the power and resources that a corporation can bring to bear it's hard to imagine effective bettering of employee conditions without collective action.
Most of us have no way of evaluating that. I don't WANT to be in a union, from what I know of them, but I've never worked in one, so I can't say. There's no control group.
My wife has worked the same job in and out of unions. She didn't want a union, it was a drawback for her. Her union job seems okay. Some things are better, some are worse. They've got some absolutely asinine policies that everyone hates that don't change and haven't changed for a decade or more despite the union "power".
Also, her job requires a masters, soon to be a Ph.D, and still pays less than most of tech (though it pays very well).
And of course because PART of the industry is unionized, it is impossible to say to what extent non-union jobs are free-riding on the "benefits" of a union.
> Technically no, but practically it does, so long as massive corporations exist
That's an interesting assertion that you seem to be accepting as universally axiomatic.
(... or perhaps, a self-referential definition. Maybe a company isn't "massive" until one observes behaviors that suggest the company is purposefully acting counter to employee quality-of-life wishes?)
I think it's simply because many people here dream of some day becoming the next Gates, Bezos, or Elon and they don't really empathize with the thousands and thousands of people whose hard work actually creates that ridiculous amount of wealth.
I'm not sure that's true; the 1%/10% dichotomy gets abused a lot, but there are some salient differences; most of my professional circles in their 20s are making up to half a million dollars in their 20s at a large tech co. Whether you consider it myopic or not, it's easy to see why they (and those aspiring to be them) would consider a labor movement to be against their interests. And it certainly represents a much larger (and more reasonable) group than those asusming that they're going to make billions from founding a startup.
I don't know how much correlation between the 'secret' history and the rest of SV's history but if you're interested Steve Blank covers the secret history nicely:
Programming historically involved access to expensive equipment and intellectual property, and involved pretty heavy math education. Once the industry professionalized (meaning here that the professional was expected to provide his own qualifications rather than being trained), the previous workforce of largely women was replaced by people drawn from privileged classes. Those people ultimately became management, established a culture, and replicated that culture by hiring people who came from the same backgrounds; so the effect lasted long after programming became far more accessible (although still requiring large amounts of leisure time.)
Those groups of people from a non-indigenous, non-minority, never-enslaved, non-female background have always been conservative, consisting largely of 1) white men, and 2) immigrant professionals (generally drawn from more privileged groups in their country of origin and statistically more conservative than the average for their country of origin.)
These same demographics, no matter what profession they're in, are conservative. Their world has generally treated them well, and changes in their world are dangerous for them. If the world were to change for the better (for them), they imagine themselves, or somebody who looks like them, making those changes.
Calling SV programmers, or even just HN, "super conservative" betrays a hugely simple-minded view of the political spectrum with no relation to reality. Politics is a lot more complex than a single 1D liberal/conservative metric, and even if you were to force it into this model, calling SV "super conservative" is an utter joke.
"Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative"
I think spots on a left-right political spectrum is a sloppy way to represent people. There have got to be over 100 valid 'axes' to position a person on, 'projecting' everybody onto a single line forces people to 'sit next to' positions they do not appreciate.
>'projecting' everybody onto a single line forces people to 'sit next to' positions they do not appreciate.
That's the point.
If someone has an opinion you don't like but is hard to dismiss or prove "wrong" then you can dismiss it by association with a group of "wrong" opinions. An easy way to make this association is by attributing it to a group whose opinions are known to be "wrong" by whatever the local in-group is. Once you have associated the inconvenient opinion with a bunch of "wrong" opinions it is easy to dismiss.
For example I were to say "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" (probably not a welcome opinion around here because most here like gun control) then people would use that to assume that I am anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and all the other things that the HN user-base generally agrees is bad about the modern American republican party and dismiss my opinion.
I could say the same exact sentence in a context where the dominant group is ardently racist and classiest but not pro gun control they would use the bits about race and class to assume that I am some crazy leftist who wants the proletariat to seize the means of production and use the association to dismiss my opinion.
It's quite hard to dismiss a statement like "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" when you have to fight it head on. By associating a statement like that with people who also have a bunch of views that are "known to be wrong" by the local majority or in-group the playing field is tilted and it's easier to dismiss.
I don't see how programmers are super conservative. In my experience, especially on HN, they tend to be fairly progressive on average. However, they also tend to be somewhat libertarian.
And so far, software development hasn't been an industry that really needed unionisation. But that could always change in the future, of course.
Personally, I generally support unions, though I don't see the need for them in software development. Though as a self-employed freelancer, I do see the use for an organisation that argues on behalf of freelancers on the national level, and I'm member of an organisation that does that. It's not really the same thing as an actual union, but it fills one of the roles of a union.
I've found that programmers tend to be socially liberal (pro-gay rights, abortion rights, etc.) but financially conservative (don't like their money being spent on public goods). Which somewhat overlaps with libertarianism, yes.
I would call it libertarianism if most of the people I've written to seem to actually believe in minarchist government and having rights limited only as much as absolutely necessary. I don't think that's what most people on here believe. I think most people here hold a few political-social ideas they strongly believe in (such as LGBT issues or clean energy), a smattering of other fashionable social opinions, and then finally an entirely selfish collection of fiscal ideas which objectively seem to benefit themselves the most.
I dunno if that's true either. Things like UBI were wacky ideas popular in SV culture long before their recent mainstreaming. I think the libertarian streak is better described as a mistrust/realism (depending in your views) of the _competency_ of any given government program.
The government's advantage is that it lets us directly align objectives in a way that markets often don't, but it's disadvantage is that it'll generally optimize much less efficiently for the objective it's targeting. This means that government action and markets are appropriate in different situations; I'm not crazy about the fact that we're the least competent at transit construction in the developed world, but I'm still a supporter of transit investment despite the eye-popping levels of waste.
Live in San Francisco long enough, and you get a really strong sense of how detached a government can get from reality, and how much its actions can reflect the selfishness and idiocy of part of its constituency instead of any pretense of benefiting society or achieving its goals. It's unsurprising that you'd see a portion of the population, especially one used to more well- functioning institutions, start to drift towards support of government policy that doesn't rely on individuals within govt making complex decisions. UBI and other such hands-off policies fit directly into this. They're not anti-govt spending, they're anti-centralized decision-making
Many programmers I know have no problem with money getting spent on public goods, as long as they're public good and not public stupidity, pork barrel spending, vanity projects, and that sort of thing.
That said, I do think American-style right-wing/capitalist libertarians are overrepresented among programmers compared to the average public, as are left-wing libertarian socialists/anarchist.
Because a lot of programmers on HN are at the upper edge of their field’s income distribution for a variety of reasons, location definitely being one of them. When a field unionized, the people near the top typically stand to lose the most, even if everyone as a whole are more enriched.
I would bet money that the most elite members of car manufacturing were also not particularly enthused about unionization, although I have no clue what specific job would qualify as elite.
From what I've read, older, experienced pilots get the safest, convenient, day-time routes and the best pay, while inexperienced pilots get the harder routes with little sleep and less pay. (Some of?) their unions represent mostly the interests of the older, experienced pilots and not so much the younger ones.
You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer. Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. From that perspective, organized labor seems like an unnecessary dependency. Programming is a form of extreme independence many will be hard fought to give away.
I don't know if this is true. My career is also a result of the excellent mentors I have and continue to have, the wonderful peers I cooperate with, the selfless professors who taught me fundamentals, the excellent technology already built by those who came before me, etc.
I really can't say that my career is a result of my own hard work and passion as if my own hard work and passion is the primary thing that allowed my career to succeed. It doesn't matter how passionate and hard working I am if my environment wasn't condusive to computer science as a profession.
Tech makes an alternative path available to others though. You can be a self taught programmer and become very successful. It's one of the only fields where you can achieve an upper middle class lifestyle without accreditation. You'll definitely be working hard to make that happen though.
I couldn't be self taught without learning materials that others have produced, the programming languages that others wrote, or the technology that others built.
I'm also not speaking mentors and peers just in school. I mean literally I do not believe I could be self-taught with 0 outside mentorship or learning materials or community and be considered a highly successful developer. I needed learning materials and mentors to teach me best practices in software development. I needed programming languages that I didn't write myself. I needed a computer, whether paid for by myself, family, or the public taxes via libraries.
Not stopping to recognize that I program on the shoulders of giants would make me arrogant and foolish, I think.
That said, such independence can be taken away just as quickly by the megacorps through all manner of illegal dealings and anti-competitive practices. We worked hard to earn the money we do, it's our right to defend ourselves against another "no poaching" agreement or, god forbid, another attempt to use our hard-learned skills to support the oppression of others.
> You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer
... which requires access to time and computers to train on. Not everyone is quite in that state. And not everyone is an autodidact either, it's not the only valid route to programming.
> Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion
Not completely - it's a result of getting accepted by hiring managers, and then retained by internal performance processes, both of which are incredibly subjective and vulnerable to prejudice.
Moreover, some people care about things beyond themselves. A key component of unions is solidarity: caring about how your colleagues are treated. This may also extend to how your employer is treating the wider society.
> Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.
If your code isn't using your own libraries compiled by your own compiler hosted on your own OS running on your self-built machine using a CPU you designed, no, it isn't. Sure, your own hard work and passion goes a long way but you rely heavily on the works of others and the privilege of being able to use them.
This is an unproductive reductionist gatekeeping response to a genuine description of the effort and toiling many have gone through to reach their position.
I'm developing in 2019. If I was developing in 1976 I would have been working on something much farther down the stack. Either way requires an immense amount of time in front of a computer to be a top performer and in either time period putting that time in would lead to success.
But people who developed those libraries allow anyone to use them, so you have the same chance as yor neighbor to develop the next Google, and there are a lot of smart people trying to do it, and not all of them will succeed.
So, your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.
That assumes you're starting from the same place and head in the same direction. You have to know a library exists before you can use it. It has to be compatible with what you're using. There are many things out of your immediate control that can influence these things (imagine my next door neighbour only has an i3 and the fancy functions of the library which make it 100x faster require extensions of an i7. I immediately have an advantage. There are many subtler advantages that can come into play.)
> Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why
That's not quite right, HN is full of anti-labor libertarians. And I think it has something to do with startup culture, which is a lot about working to get a golden ticket to join the capitalist class. That causes a lot of people to identify with that class and its interests, despite actually being laborers themselves.
I mentioned this in other comments, actors have unions but they still have different salary(superstarts will earn much more then a new unknown actor) and they seem very eager to join the union(or guild or how it is named I am not from US).
So it seems that programmers were scared by some bad stories that everyone will have same salary.
Unions also often times throw up massive barriers to entry in order to keep out new comers.
I absolutely do not want everyone to be forced to get a degree, and a certification just to be allow to make a freaking web app.
Right now there is nothing preventing companies from hiring someone who just went to an 8 week bootcampers, and this is a good thing. I know many people who have done this route.
Nobody is talking about unionizing at a sub-10 person shop, aka the type of place where bootcamp grads learn the ropes.
The companies unionization would affect are behemoths (FAANG but also HP, IBM, Oracle etc) that hire enormous numbers of people, few to none of whom would be a fresh bootcamp grad.
> The companies unionization would affect are behemoths (FAANG but also HP, IBM, Oracle etc) that hire enormous numbers of people, few to none of whom would be a fresh bootcamp grad.
Even large companies are willing to hire people who have taken non-traditional paths, if you can get past the initial HR screening (typically by finding the right engineer or manager to talk to directly). Let's not break that.
I have a friend who's a Hack Reactor alum. There is simply no comparison between the rigor of their program and what the majority of bootcamps require. HR is incredibly selective in who they pick; they behave like an elite school in that regard. Their cohorts would likely be successful as self taught devs anyway, so HR knows they can push them hard.
Most bootcamps focus on commerce first; if you can pay, you can attend.
I don't disagree that most bootcamps are lower quality.
What I am instead saying is that I strongly oppose barriers to entry, that a union would implement, to keep out the highly qualified people from the top places like hack reactor.
It would not be possible for people like that to succeed if unions started throwing up barriers to entry, regardless of how good the bootcampers are.
And this applies to top tier self taught programmers too.
Why an union formed by you and your pears would put those barriers? I am under the impression that the programmers that are not having the CS education are not few so they can surely make sure they are represented.
It is like you telling me that you heard that some police officers did some horrible things somewhere so it is better to not have police at all.
> Why an union formed by you and your pears would put those barriers?
Unions are run by majority rule, not by me. It is perfectly possible for the majority to implement rules that I disagree with.
The history of almost every union in existence, proves implementing barriers to entry is extremely common.
The fundamental reason, as for why unions try to screw over new comers is obvious. The reason is become people who aren't already in the industry don't get a vote.
It makes perfect sense as for why people who already have a job might want to screw over people who don't have a job, to prevent them from competing.
And it turns out that a lot of people are horrible individuals who want to discriminate against newcomers because "F you, they got theirs!".
> It is like you telling me that you heard that some
It is not some unions that do this. It is instead most of them.
Screwing over new comers to protect the established members is almost the entire purpose of unions.
> I am under the impression that the programmers that are not having the CS education are not few
Those people would be grandfathered in, if they already have a job, likely. The people who would get screwed are the ones in college right now, who aren't allowed yet to vote on union rules.
The actors/aspiring actors I know are only eager to join the union because a) it gets them access to union-exclusive jobs (not a benefit that would exist if the union didn't exist) and b) it gets them access to better negotiated health insurance, which can be difficult with intermittent employment (which is the case for most people in the theater world, well-paid or not). B probably shouldn't be an issue for a thriving developed country, but we all know how that argument goes.
You are right, there are lots of low-income shoppers who buy things at Walmart they couldn't otherwise afford.
To these shoppers, Walmart provides a better way of life. I don't think they'd rather be low-income shoppers buying from more expensive stores that offer fewer choices.
Walmart is beneficial for the shopper. If it wasn't so, Walmart wouldn't be successful.
> the employer side should also be numerous enough to establish an employer organisation.
They are and they have; see US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al. From the wiki article:
"DOJ alleged in their Complaint that the companies had reached "facially anticompetitive" agreements that "eliminated a significant form of competition...to the detriment of the affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities."
Unions organize in public, employers collude in secret. The fact that the companies proposed a settlement the day the suit was filed indicates they simply priced that into their cost-benefit analysis when they were colluding.
What would be the remit of such a union? These companies likely compete with each other; Adobe and Apple for example have competing video editing products, and Jobs's letter sent Flash, another popular Adobe product to an early grave.
Employer organisations also consist of multiple employers. In a fully unionised bargaining, both employer and employee unions attend bargaining process.
There are sufficient number of software and database companies to establish an employer organisation for software.
Fairness depends on the ratio of employee employer monopoly power. There may be enough tech companies to form a union, but that just means employees need to be more consolidated to match. Your "fully unionized bargaining" case is just one point in the blanced subspace. A many-to-many relationship where the employers per employee matched the employees per employer (along with other hierarchical symmetries) would be an (outlandish) other such point.
Historically anti trust laws in the united states considered unions as potential trusts that the government would be able to break up. However, they later repealed that piece because it's completely absurd. Even the most powerful union is unable to form a trust in the way that companies can do in order to systemically underpay workers.
No one could really say what the absolute position of a union would be in that question. Unions are membership organizations that work in the interest of current, and to some extent future, members. The rest is politics.
A union would have incentive for foreigners to e.g. come to the US, so the US get a larger slice of the market. On the other hand they don't have an interest in those workers e.g. having lesser rights or lower compensation. Because then foreigner workers become more attractive than their existing members, thereby preventing those members from having long term success. So it depends on how you view e.g. H1B.
It really isn't that complicated if you think about it.
You are unlikely to find a western labor union that is specifically pro immigration these days. Since labor has been in decline in the west for the last few decades. Before that I am sure you could find those who were pro labor immigration. The Nordic countries have for example had relatively large labor immigration under social democratic governments (which are usually associated with the labor unions).
Also it depends what you mean by pro immigration. No union is going to be pro liberal immigration rules, since they don't want to undermine their own members. For it make sense for a union it has to be employees who are lacking, either in numbers or skill, in the country and can therefor expand the country's share of the market.
If one holds strongly a principle that opposes monopolies and supports strong anti-trust protections in the market, it would explain why the same argument is made regardless of industry.
Also, the issue focusing on using the company email system sounds to me like a bit of a strawman. Why in the world would you want to use a communication medium owned and controlled by your opponent for such a thing? And even if you wanted to, being not allowed to doesn't in anyway limit your ability to organize in any practical way. I mean seriously, these are presumably some of the smartest tech people on the planet. They can't figure out a way to commmunicate independently?
To me the primary issue has nothing to do with unions. It has to do with private property. The company pays for and owns the property. No one should have any "rights" to using it.
Right??! What kind of upside down world of entitlement are we sliding into? With google on your resume just go work somewhere else that fits your ideology better if you aren’t happy with the present’s behavior.
There’s something very rotten at the top levels at Google. The “Don’t be evil” motto has long disappeared and has been replaced by apathy and/or hostility on different fronts.
Maybe this move by Google is actually good...to help more employees and others realize how the company has morphed into something that’s no longer doing as much good for humanity as it used to boast about.
I’m still hopeful that the rot in companies like Google and Facebook will be the biggest trigger for decentralized and privacy respecting platforms (and also in this context, preserving the freedom of people to dissent) to grow faster.
By men youean man. And isolated events with individual employees who arguably had alot of power -- given he founded Android -- is a non issue in this argument.
Google or any company has no responsibility or should be required to publicly shame employees who misbehave. And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened.
Please read this recent news about a lawsuit brought by a shareholder against the board. [1] There's more than one man named in that.
> And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened.
I strongly disagree. If we have to criticize or call for action only when we're personally impacted, we wouldn't have civilized society. Google paid "hush money" to not reveal what happened. Also, more than 20000 Google employees who staged a walkout in November [2] disagree with your statement that it's none of anybody's business.
Number of people doing something does not strengthen any argument.
I can point to 100s of things that the masses do that are completely wrong. So the fact that 20k Google employees did anything does not mean they were right.
A civilized society does not have people getting outraged and storming out of work every time they feel offended, or don't agree with the actions of others. Even more so when those people simply do not have the facts of the situation -- mostly because it was none of their business in the first place.
Everything you say above (except the last sentence) is true in the general sense. But you seem to have missed what's happened in the sexual harassment scene around the world in the last few years, and hence treating this as a one off expression of anger by some people doesn't make sense. I've said enough on this topic for now.
I don't think being a shareholder gives you such rights. Even so, the guy in question probably had more shares than you thus trumps your desire to be a busy body.
Lets see you walk on the google campus and demand to see who has been reprimanded recently to some random manager. As you are dragged off the campus yelling "but but but I am a shareholder....."
But beyond that it is more likely he had a exit plan under which he was guaranteed such money when he joined google, bringing his baby Android. And as I recall it it was not as cut and dry of a situation as everybody likes to make it out to be. It never is.
So you can be outraged all you want, and perpetuate phantom "rights" of being a share holder, but at the end of the day you are not helping the situation.
I don't think being a shareholder gives you such rights.
Doesn't the state of California actually allow vested shareholders to inspect certain financial records and other inspection rights? Wouldn't this include the records of finances marked for distribution from a legal settlement or otherwise?
Shareholders should be justifiably concerned and can be expected to put pressure on a company that's cagey about such matters. Because it increases the risk that they'll have a messy scandal on their hands that could impact share value.
I should clarify, google is rife with visual noise, especially for simple queries. As an example, try googling "how to clean rain gutters" in both search engines. You'll need to scroll half down the page, past "Suggested Clip", past "People also ask", past "Videos", to finally arrive at the 1st search result. DDG also shows videos, but doesn't require scrolling.
EDIT: I forgot about ads because I use an ad blocker! If you don't use an ad-blocker, you'll also have to scroll past a large section of ads.
It is definitely not as good, especially for certain queries. Those tend to be queries that have additional semantic meaning outside of just the keywords typed.
For me DDG is still nowhere close to Google, but I wouldn't classify it as terrible in general. Also, DDG doesn't have searching by date range and doesn't have searching for recent results beyond one month.
What I do is use DDG as my default, and then progressively use the bang commands [1] to move to Startpage with !s and then to Google with !g. Sometimes it takes a little longer to find something, but I try to avoid using Google search directly as much as possible.
I didn't realize they had any protection in the first place. That certainly explains a lot.
Google has a small but extremely vocal (some would say "unhinged") minority of folks who mostly just do activism on the internal G+ and little else. You can even find their names online from the various leaks if you'd like to follow their own proposed practice of blacklisting people they disagree with.
It was always a mystery to me how they manage to stick around for so long.
It just goes to show that a large company is made up of many different people in different departments, sometimes with different agendas. It appears that there is a conflict of vision within Google.
> It just goes to show that a large company is made up of many different people in different departments, sometimes with different agendas
The e-mails referenced in the article were unsolicited policy preferences communicated by a multi-billion dollar company to a regulator in writing. These communications were sent following a PR and HR crisis. The chances that this didn't have high-level sign-off is virtually zero.
> you have the timing wrong. " In filings in May 2017
Conceded. Pardon me--cannot edit the original comment.
> it was solicited, as they were written as a legal response to a legal claim
Do we know these filings were in response to a legal claim? It could have been in response to something more frivolous. (I am having trouble finding the filing.)
> Do you believe that criminal defense attorneys express a policy preference that say, murder is okay?
One, this isn't a criminal matter. It isn't even being judicially decided. These are confidential regulatory proceedings.
Two, when criminal defense attorneys defend a murder suspect, they don't advocate overturning murder statute. There is a wide berth between arguing against the facts and circumstances of a case and arguing for overturning a law.
Three, I've been in senior roles at companies in regulatory deliberations and litigation. Each time, company counsel briefed senior management on the arguments they were preparing. More than once, someone asked if an argument was essential. Once, it was. (It was maintained.) Another time, it wasn't. Concerned about a client relationship getting caught in the cross-fire, the argument was dropped and the case amended.
When you give a shit about a constituency, you don't argue for overturning their rights.
"Do we know these filings were in response to a legal claim? It could have been in response to something more frivolous. (I am having trouble finding the filing.)"
Yes, it is in front of proceeding at the NLRB that they have to exhaust before they can file in court.
"Two, when criminal defense attorneys defend a murder suspect, they don't advocate overturning murder statute. There is a wide berth between arguing against the facts and circumstances of a case and arguing for overturning a law."
Oh come now. Every single lawyer worth his salt is going to argue the law should be overturned when it doesn't favor their client. I'm very surprised you are trying to claim otherwise.
Even in criminal proceedings there is almost always a "this statute is unconstitutional on its face" argument thrown in, even when that statute is something like "protect children from being run over by cars".
This is similarly true in the civil proceedings of the kind we are talking about - just about every regulatory action has arguments about the propriety of existing case law or statutes.
"Three, I've been in senior roles at companies in regulatory deliberations and litigation. Each time, company counsel briefed senior management on the arguments they were preparing. More than once, someone asked if an argument was essential. Once, it was. (It was maintained.) Another time, it wasn't. Concerned about a client relationship getting caught in the cross-fire, the argument was dropped and the case amended."
FWIW: I have been in multiple large companies in that role (for 8+ years), and nobody would ever brief senior management on a claim like this one. It's way too low level.
"When you give a shit about a constituency, you don't argue for overturning their rights."
I'm glad this is all very black and white to you and that you can easily reduce complex situations to quips and feel like it does it justice. I wish i could feel that way. It would actually make life a lot easier.
There are no right answers in these situations, only shitty tradeoffs.
(It's not even as simple as:
Don't make argument, allow/pay out frivolous claim which hurts current constituents.
> There are no right answers in these situations, only shitty tradeoffs
Companies have lee-way in where they make those trade-offs. Just because a company could argue to roll back back rights for gays or women doesn't mean they have to. And if they choose to advocate for rolling back protective rules, they'll deservedly get flack.
> FWIW: I have been in multiple large companies in that role (for 8+ years), and nobody would ever brief senior management on a claim like this one. It's way too low level.
This might say more about the corporate cultures you've been exposed to than what is normal or right.
Accepting your argument, we have a multi-billion dollar tech company, rightfully in the political cross-hairs, viewing its workers' rights as "way too low level" to merit management's attention. Furthermore, following a first-hand experience with why such organization rules are important, the official response is shying away from a defense. Nothing in the way of meaningful action.
the person you are arguing with has real credentials in this matter (lawyer) and works for the company we are discussing. Even if you don't agree with him, he's knowledgeable and honest about the situation.
I'm not assuming he's honest; he's a person I worked with for many years and developed a respect for his honesty and technical precision when it comes to legal matters.
If you don't want to believe me, that's fine. I understand that you believe he could be motivated to be inaccurate to defend his employer. I am giving a third-party account supporting his statement.
I would never judge a company based on their words. Most corporations spend immense amounts of money on public relations firms, and these firms are pretty decent at their job. And words can be faked - lies, deception. If you want to see what a company truly is judge them by their actions, particularly ones that are not obvious PR efforts. Google in recent times:
- looking to move into China and create a censored search engine blocking offensive search terms like "human rights" [1]
- the above search engine would also tie users' searches to their phone numbers for ease of tracking
- tracking users' location on phones when tracking was set to disabled (we're back to everywhere - not just China on this one)
- looking to implement change that would disable most ad-blockers
- lobbying the government restrict employees' rights to organize against it
And this is just a list of things from the past several months. It is seriously not comprehensive. No, I think Google has quite a clear agenda, a great PR department, and a whole bunch of people in cognitive dissonance who want to believe the PR rather than acknowledge what they're taking part in.
---
edit : Added a source for first point. It's borderline unbelievable, but it was not rhetorical. Human rights (in Mandarin of course) was literally on Google's black list of terms.
Funny detail, it turns out the complaints were filed against conservative ex-googlers alleging that they were discriminated against by the progressive activist majority inside Google.
The people filing NRLB complaints probably disagree with you about the morality of all your bullet points above, and they're claiming they were discriminated against for disagreeing with the consensus.
I wonder if that changes progressives' opinions on the topic?
Not my opinion. These rules are in place for the good of all workers. We need to hold on to what power we have, the right not to be retaliated against for attempting to organize being one of the most basic.
That's great for you but I'm saying that the great mass of 'progressives' who are outraged by this filing were 100% on board with firing these people in the first place.
So which is it? Speech is protected or speech should be punished?
While this statement is definitely true, in this instance, it comes across as some sort of apology for Google—as if the vast majority of their other activities are benign and this is a glaring exception.
This is the norm.—the wonderful things some Google employees produce are the exception.
> It appears that there is a conflict of vision within Google.
So what you saying is that two departments in a big company can have their own attorneys and/or publicists and approach government agencies on their own without a higher approval?
No, it doesn't. I think it shows precisely what's going on in every MegaCorp in the US: Woke Capitalism. Everything is calculated to maximize profit, including campaigning, branding, and marketing to say that you're NOT all about profit.
In this case, both the saying of soothing things to the people who are complaining, AND lobbying the government to make those complaints less effective in the future are in line with the real goal: maximizing the success of the company, as measured by profits. When viewed through this lens, these actions do not conflict. In fact, BOTH are REQUIRED.
These only APPEAR to conflict when you think that top leadership actually REALLY cares about anything other than money, and the influence it brings.
What could a company like Google do to convince you that this isn't the case, if it truly isn't the way you imagine for that company? Because it sounds like there isn't anything.
The comment you're replying to is hot-blooded, but your question has a simple answer nonetheless. Sergei Brin stands in front of the "activist employees" at an all-hands and tells them that he strongly disagrees with some of their political beliefs, and that while they're welcome to advocate for them, those beliefs will find little purchase so long as he remains president of Alphabet.
But that's not how he runs that company -- which is the point.
Capitulate constantly to their Workers' demands, converting their authoritarian management hierarchy into a worker-led cooperative, buying back their stock and issuing it to their users.
Not retaliating at workers. Not being in the business of more efficient murder. Not paying smart people a lot of money to ensure as little profit possible goes towards public use.
There really is no other credible argument that they could give. Business must grow, if they don't they die.
It's predatory no doubt, and Google certainly can't be considered an honest broker. But this dichotomy is necessary in today's hysterical environment that social media has created.
Perhaps re-labeling major (and unprecedented) communication/organization platforms from "businesses" to something akin to "utilities"—or, more radically, "platform coops"—would quash such apologia.
> It appears that there is a conflict of vision within Google.
Perhaps, but when then chips are down and Google is obliged to file their position on pain of perjury it is clear which 'vision' is real and which is window dressing.
So they're undermining worker's rights to protect themselves from lawsuits? And I'm supposed to be okay with it because them pushing to get the rules changes for their own gain is not lobbying, it's a "legal defense".
That being said, it's foolish to use workplace email to do things like organize unions.
Given Google's level of internal transparency, many employees (as said in the article) use internal forums to organize action like "walkouts". As you'd imagine having 60,000+ global employees trying to coordinate stuff over their personal email would not be possible.
> If the Labor Board did what Google wanted, “it would have a huge chilling effect,” said Google employee activist Colin McMillen
Weird, I guess then they would have to use the employee email system for employment related matters. There isn't any restriction to prevent any employee from using a non-employer email system for organizing the very same activities.
The unintended consequence of allowing this kind of activity in the office place is the creation of political gravities. If you don't agree with the mass consensus the majority will find a way to punish the minority opinions. During one of the private internal all hands Google's chief of HR said their research indicated this very behavior. If you cannot be honest in the work place then its a hostile work environment.
> There isn't any restriction to prevent any employee from using a non-employer email system for organizing the very same activities.
Actually, in some cases there is. By using third-party email systems employees might violate non-disclosure agreements or company rules, which would in turn give the company cause for direct termination.
The fact that their employer made special deals with people accused of sexual harrassment or wanted to work on military projects are employment related matters.
As a corporate leader what is more important: allowing employees to use employer resources for personal politics or solving for toxic/hostile behavior?
The answer is that being a human with moral and ethical obligations to the rest of humanity should take precedence over being a corporate leader. If you don't sell censorship and weapons tech or cut backroom deals to silence victims of sexual harassment, there's no need to try to stop your employees from talking about it.
And there’s nothing preventing employees from finding a new place to work if they don’t agree with how their company handles things. It’s a multinational corporation not college or even a democracy.
But the company shouldn't prevent employees from trying to improve their workplace for their fellow employees either way, especially given the power imbalance between employers and employees. Children, debt, high COL, and health emergencyes can easily prevent employees from seeking new places to work.
These are systemic problems in the industry, though. Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse, and where the ability to set industry standards is less.
As for the "it's not a democracy:" I ask why we tolerate that. In a country founded in individual freedoms, we're apparently ok with creating no-freedom zones that pretty much every adult has to spend half of their waking hours in.
> Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse
That is a baseless assumption. For me a toxic work culture is the worse situation.
The US was founded on the concept of liberty more so than on the concept of democracy, which is how we ended up with a federal republic and an electoral college. According to JS Mill the greatest enemy to liberty is a hostile majority.
>"These are systemic problems in the industry, though. Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse, and where the ability to set industry standards is less."
These issues seem to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley. "The industry" is much more than companies located in the Bay Area and Peninsula in Northern California. There is no shortage of companies out there that have zero tolerance for sexual harassment, who do not pursue projects related to censorship or the Pentagon. I know because I have worked at them. They are only worse than Google salary-wise. Let's not pretend that Google employee's primary concerns are trying to set "industry standards" or that they're somehow looking out for all of us.
The whole point of these actions is to avoid paper trails.
The political speech aspect of the matter is a red herring. The priority is suppressing contrarian contemplation in writing to avoid issues with litigation, etc.
Lawyers who are defendants want to preserve nothing. Lawyers who are plaintiffs want to retain every utterence ever made since the dawn of time.
That's just, like, your opinion man. Other people have different political opinions.
The progressive majority were all for firing people for political beliefs as long as it was people they disagreed with... now they're aghast at the abstract concept of it?
It isn't nearly as easy to connect to people outside the workplace. You have to reach out to people to get their personal contact details, and doing this en-masse could be construed as organizing activity by itself. They could even argue you are ex-filtrating confidential information (list of employees).
> It isn’t nearly as easy to connect to people outside the workplace.
I think this is absolute core of the discussion. Like nearly all bad decisions ultimately it comes down to convenience. If this form of political discourse were as important as people claim they would find a way.
You know, unless the difficulty of doing without it makes it infeasible.
Mobility impaired people lobbied for curb cutouts waybackwhen because it would make it easier to use sidewalks. I think that situation obviously shouldn't be belittled by saying it's about convenience. Ugh, if going to the grocery store were as important as they claim they would find a way /s.
I'm not convinced this particular situation isn't also about feasibility.
Accessibility is justified by equal access or anti-discrimination, which isn't the same as convenience. As an accessibility advocate I find that equivalence either insulting or grossly misinformed. This conversation isn't about equal access. Trying to warp it into such is insulting.
You're right. It's about workers rights. I'm telling you that I think construing the ability of workers to effectively organize as a convenience is also an insulting stance. In fact, I'm glad I chose an example that you find important. Maybe you can consider the possibility that there is a higher principle at work, maybe one that is as important to society as equal access is.
The only purpose of my example was to show that in general the implication that ease of use reduces to convenience is false. I used an obvious counterexample. In summary, to imply that I think your assertion that it's about convenience is unjustified and off-base. If you think I was drawing an equivalence between the two situations, then I apologize for not being clear.
I don't understand the tendency to fix markets by "organizing". I wish there was more of an attraction to work with the market. Just quit and work somewhere else. Spread your ideas and persuade others to do the same. It's a lot healthier in my opinion for all involved, not to mention the consumers of the product.
This opinion reflects a particular kind of career and living situation. If you rent and work in a field that has many options per city, and/or remote work, things are fine. I've heard it said that programming is an industry that favors lateral movement.
On the other hand, if you own a house and the economy has tanked to where it's worth less than you owe on it, and you work for a large company that is a unique industry in that town, your options are limited. If they gouge you (see history on "the company store") you're screwed. Hence unions are far more important in certain industries than others.
I'm familiar with that argument. My take is that I don't make much of a distinction between a worker and an entrepreneur. I think the healthiest approach is for everyone to see their personal financial journey the same as if it were a business. The situation of owning (or rather heavy leveraging the purchase of) a house and working for a company that is unique in the town, etc. is the result of a series of risk/reward decisions that were made. Sometimes they're made well and pay off and sometimes they're not and end up biting you.
For those that have a particular lack of innate ability for making good decisions (for whatever reason), I would rather see the community have a sense of responsibility to work with them to provide assistance either proactively (to keep them out of trouble) or retroactively (to keep them afloat after disasters). Without the community approach, it seems like the alternative is to allow compromises to principles - in this case the temptation to manage the market. Theoretically that's not the end of the world, but in practice what I feel happens is that bad actors are hanging around these doors egging others to crack them open. And as soon as that happens, they rush in and take advantage of it.
A counter perspective to this: what is a company? Is it not a group of people organized with a central purpose? So to discourage or ban other forms of organizing that may overlap this organization is actually the compromise of principles in this case. A union is just another group of people making an agreement together. The difference is, the company is organized by, and empowers, the person at the top. The union is organized by, and empowers, the workers. I don't see how they're different or how it can be legal or ethical to silence one type of group. As to what particular actions either group can legally or ethically demand of its members, that's where the real discussion begins.
Edit to elaborate:
I'd go so far as to say that companies getting larger or merging is a form of collusion. Say you have 10 small companies that each need one programmer. They are in competition. They each have to pay a fair wage in hopes of snagging you. Say they all merge. Sure, there's a global marketplace for the hotshot programmers still, but they have drastically reduced the local competition. If they're still hiring 10 programmers, they have much more power now because there are 9 fewer alternatives to consider, both for bargaining power and for information about the market.
The solution to this, as companies get to, say, Amazon or Google size, is one of two things. You can have government regulation, like the antitrust suits or minimum wage laws, or you can have the workers do their own form of collusion by forming unions for collective bargaining. Of the two, the latter is much more libertarian in spirit.
Yes, a company is a group of people organized with a central purpose. However, companies are not allowed to coordinate with each other to fix pricing or availability or other terms. Nor are they allowed to take actions that shut non-coordinating companies out of the market. I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that unions do not have these constraints and, in fact, the reason they are even legal is due to statutory exemptions from anti-trust law that makes that combination of "purpose" an option. So to me, it's not an apple to apple comparison. And that's the problem of principle that I have. I don't think a market operates well when the ability to fix it is granted to some parts but not others.
The comparison to me would be operating only within a single company. I don't think there's anything stopping a group of employees from using whatever bargaining value they have to move the company in one direction or another - whether it's pay, working conditions, product development, etc.
What you say about unions having fewer constraints is interesting. I think it's important that both sides be made to play fair in such things, and the laws could use a review. I just think in principle unions are important in certain industries due to the structure of the industries themselves. Especially ones with a centralized nature, such as trains, electricity, cable TV, and fossil fuels. That unions are important in these areas is shown by them having a longer, stronger history of such.
I think you were composing your edit as I was composing my reply. I'm with you completely on companies that merge being a form of collusion in many cases. I believe that the US government needs to act on anti-trust way more than it does. Not a fan of wage controls because to me that's an indirect approach. But yea, collusion is really damaging - at whatever level.
Making matters worse, if you talk a big game about allowing free and open discussion and then make a big show of firing people for expressing views that are too right-of-center, you’ve thrown your institutional weight in the direction of radicalizing the left wing.
>If you cannot be honest in the work place then its a hostile work environment...
Not sure I would go that far. I mean how many people are honest about how they feel about their boss? But is that "dishonesty" or just "professionalism".
I'd say that you have to be professional. There should be some sort of a sanctioned mechanism or forum for giving professional criticism.
But yeah, if all a guy or gal wants to do is spout off some expletive laden rant, then that's not really helpful for anyone. Least of all the other employees.
They'll be upset and "outraged", before returning to work. I keep thinking, each time Google is in the news, that this is finally the day engineers will just walk off the job and not come back. But I know it probably isn't. Even those who have every ability to find a new job quickly will find some excuse to justify staying.
Probably at the point when they can no longer offer sky-high starting salaries. You should see the job boards for my school co-op program. Job postings by Google, Apple, et al get ridiculous numbers of applications for just 1 position. Nobody here cares about Google's stance on activist employees. They want to get their money and pad their resume.
People make a living building missiles payed for with public money that blow up schoolbusses across the world just to put their own children in a better school district. When people get a decent paycheck no one thinks about how much that dollar cost.
You are correct, it is pretty heinous that we are all beholden to paying the war industry vast sums of money. Is it really worth it to spend millions on missiles that notoriously miss their targets? Wouldn't a very small trained team of operators be much better and far cheaper at safely eliminating a threat than blowing up an entire apartment complex from a desk hundreds of miles away with a missile that costs more than everything in that town? In August, Saudi Arabia fired a missile that killed 40 school children (1), probably one of the many weapons they bought from the US. I'm sure that missile that ended their lives cost 1000x more than whatever school building they were bussing to when they became the latest victims of geopolitical theater.
At which point do you realize you are engineering more and more expensive and advanced ways of killing for the sake of skimming personal profit for executives and investors out of public budgets? If I worked for one of these companies, I don't think I could live with myself with that huge guilt, knowing my great efforts lead directly to further destabilizing the world and ending peoples lives. I'm not comfortable using my skills to perfect ending peoples lives. That isn't innovation, that isn't advancement, that is regression. Raytheon is the barbarian blowing up the neighborhood, not a Yemeni schoolkid.
You'll be waiting quite a while: Amazon has long been (and remains) an overall much worse place to work, yet they find plenty of warm bodies to fill their seats.
(Of course this is a generalization - I know people with good experiences and others with bad ones at many companies, including these two.)
Goldman Sachs has been on the back-burner of ethical issues for decades, yet they're still one of the most desirable employers among college graduates.
This is absolutely not true. You might be confusing median tenure with turnover rate, but those are drastically different things; especially so in a company that’s growing.
Several approximations are floating around and none of them look good. Over 10% annual tunover is bad and Google is as far as anyone can tell well above that.
Are we going to ignore that Google responded that they published this as part of a legal defense rather than a lobbying effort.
From the article: "We're not lobbying for changes to any rules." Rather, she said, Google's claim that the Obama-era protections should be overturned was "a legal defense that we included as one of many possible defenses"
I'm not saying that makes it right, but I see a difference between pushing for it as an independent agenda and using it to defend yourself from a legal filing.
IANAL, but Legal arguments tend to be set up as: They are wrong because of argument 1, and even if you don't agree with argument 1 they are wrong because of argument 2, and so on through argument n. You include everything that's relevant in that list to preserve it for future appeals even if you have some pretty weak or controversial arguments.
> Are we going to ignore that Google responded that they published this as part of a legal defense rather than a lobbying effort.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. I'd go as far as to say that this actually makes it _worse_, not better. Saying that that those protections are important is easy when there's nothing at stake. The fact that they then called for their overturn when the chips are down is how you know what they really think about it.
It's silly to equate a legal defense with a belief though.
I may not have the belief, personally, that spontaneous crimes of passion deserve a light sentence, but it would be malpractice for my lawyer to therefore not advance that argument if, god forbid, I was convicted of a murder. Whether I committed the murder or not, and whether or not I believe those sentencing guidelines should be extrapolated to wider society, as a lawyer you have an obligation to use every tool in your arsenal that can help your client. It has nothing to do with your own personal or political views on whether those tools should exist.
> It's silly to equate a legal defense with a belief though.
It's actually silly not to. As was said; when there is something at stake their story is something other than what they offer while placating outrage. I can't fathom rationally choosing to believe meaningless pillow talk over the black and white filings of Google's representation in a court.
Had they argued that the Obama-era rules didn't apply to this case for some reason, I would've agreed with you. But the argument is that those rules should be overruled. That is precisely arguing that your preferred outcome for this case should be "extrapolated to wider society", as you put it.
If those two arguments would have been equally effective, then perhaps you would be right. I would bet that that wasn't the case, and that's why Google's attorneys advanced the argument they did. Perhaps you are right but they advanced both arguments to be safe, as a higher parent comment suggested.
But it's hard to tell, because the article is vague on these points. It refers to their actual argument only as "urged the National Labor Relations Board to undo that precedent". What exactly does that mean? It's written as if they submitted a policy brief, but it sounds more like they were arguing a prior decision by the NLRB was incorrectly decided, based on previous precedent. Which is something attorneys do all the time and much less dramatic, sans the lobbying-esque framing here.
Sure, I wrote a contrived example. But the onus, I think, is on the critics in this thread to provide the theory of legal ethics under which attorneys should refrain from advancing the most effective defense of their clients if doing so might cause public relations concerns. It's my understanding that zealously defending their clients within the bounds of the law is among an attorney's highest obligations.
In my view, the lawyer is absolutely obligated to present all viable (in their view) legal options to their client. But the buck stops with the client -- they decide which legal arguments to make.
To use an equally contrived example of my own — there's plenty of jurisdictions where arguing something along the lines of "look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it" will get you off the hook on rape charges. Would you still argue that an attorney who makes that argument is merely "advancing the most effective defense of their clients"? Or would you find that conduct reprehensible both for the attorney, and the client who allowed the attorney to use that line of reasoning?
Ultimately, it's your own choice what lines of arguing you present, and you don't get an ethical freebie just because it's "effective".
> To use an equally contrived example of my own — there's plenty of jurisdictions where arguing something along the lines of "look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it" will get you off the hook on rape charges.
Rape is an unusually problematic situation because consensual sex and unconsensual sex produce a lot of the same physical evidence, and it's possible for someone to consent but after the fact have regrets or experience social pressure.
That leaves you having to evaluate evidence of whether or not there was consent. If you're a falsely accused defendant trying to rebut a claim that she didn't consent, what evidence of that do you propose to use?
Also notice that look at how she was dressed is a particularly ineffective "get out of jail free card" when the accuser was a nun dressed in her habit.
The implications of that, i.e. that you're more credible if you dress conservatively and don't attend frat parties, are very politically inconvenient.
But a black man has a constitutional right to carry a handgun, which also makes it more likely that he'll be shot by the police who will use it as a defense. It would be better if these trade offs didn't exist, but how do you propose to make them not?
It is not about "making a proposal to make sure these tradoffs don't exist".
Instead it is about morally judging someone for making a morally reprehensible argument.
If there is some country in the world where black people don't have equal rights, and a company uses this as a legal defense for it's behavior, then I am going to judge the company as being full of horrible horrible human beings.
One does not get a free pass for your behavior, just because it is legal. Onr instead should get judged for the horrible person that one is.
Someone is a horrible person if they are falsely accused of something and use the argument that most effectively allows them to avoid being falsely convicted of it?
It seems to me if you have a country where some people don't have equal rights, the problem is the law, not any individual defendant. That's the easy one to fix, in the sense of knowing what should be done. Much easier than trading false positives against false negatives when there is no way to actually know what happened.
I am saying that if you make an argument in court that says "This law should be overturned!" as google literally did, then I am going to assume that this means that you think the law should be overturned.
And I will judge you morally if I believe overturning this law is a bad thing.
A company is responsible for it's actions. And if it's actions in court cause a good law to be overturned, as is their stated argument, then I will judge them very poorly for this.
The problem is that everything is always complicated.
If employees use the company's email system to discuss politics, then the company's email system contains their policy views, which may not be the company's. Then the company gets sued by someone else who gets a copy of those emails and uses the employees' personal views as evidence of the company's official position.
A solution to that would be to have the law be that political discourse can't be used as evidence of policy or intent in a court case. That might be a good solution, but there may not be support for it in the existing law.
The alternative would be to prevent employees from using the company's official channels for their political discussions, to create a brighter line between official and personal speech. Arguing for the second thing is worse -- it has a lot of other problems -- but arguing for the first thing may not be possible under existing law, leaving it as the company's only apparent alternative to avoid liability. What are they supposed to do then?
there's plenty of people who think defending a criminal at all is ethically dubious. Depriving criminal defendants of the most effective defense by applying social pressure to their attorneys is not a good road to walk down.
I'm guessing stock holders would argue that there's a fiduciary duty to get the best legal defense and the lawyers have a similar mandate. Still you would think that Google would not mount such a defense on the basis of a moral principal.
IANAL but "We're in an extremely competitive industry and we might lose all of our best people if we do this" is a perfectly good reason to give shareholders. It only breaks fiduciary duty if the executives have concrete data that their actions will have zero impact on hiring, which is a stretch.
> we might lose all of our best people if we do this
This is the argument media seems to be making for long time. So far instead of all not even 0.01% seems to have shown conviction and left Google. Or it just might be the case the best people seems more concerned only with technical issues at work.
Court room is an adversarial game, everything the defense or prosecutors say should be considered in this light. They should use every argument to defend themselves.
Google has fiduciary duty to not lose money unnecessarily. The corporate policy is completely different from legal defense when sued.
This is fine, but then you can't claim the moral high ground if your legal defense is that employees don't actually have the rights that your policy says they do.
It's worth noting that people don't like doing business with hypocrites either, so Google has a fiduciary duty to avoid pissing its customers and employees off by systematically eroding their rights through legal arguments as well.
If I think that castling should be removed from the chess rules. Am I a hypocrite when I use it when I play with others?
In the same way proposing laws that would limit legal tax evasion loopholes and using those loopholes is not a hypocricy. They work at different levels.
Wanting to change rules (laws) so that everyone must play with the same rules and using rules until they are changed is not hypocrisy.
Court battle is like debate competition, you can use arguments you don't believe in.
> Court battle is like debate competition, you can use arguments you don't believe in.
Except that court battles have consequences. If you use an argument you don't believe in for a debate competition, you aren't going to overturn laws designed to protect people from those with more power. If you do it in court, there's a possibility that you're going to make many lives worse.
> they published this as part of a legal defense rather than a lobbying effort
We live in a common law system [1]. Case law, regulatory proceedings, statutes and constitutions are all law. What ultimately matters is outcome.
We don't know the details of the case they are defending against. We don't even know if there is one. Either way, there is lots of ground between "this right shouldn't apply here" and "you should take it away." Google chose the latter.
The grandparent comment is noteworthy among HN comments for being so eagerly apologetic for the kind of corporate/branding hypocrisy that Google used to position itself against.
It makes me wonder if someone posted it in an attempt to make Google look bad even though the comment purports to defend Google.
Lobbying is talking to legislatures and regulators in an attempt to change laws/policy. Arguing in court is trying to do an end run around the legislatures and regulators. Big difference.
Lobbying is not limited to specific venues if that's what you mean. It's "attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of officials in their daily life, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies". Isn't the NLRB exactly such an agency, given its power to undo a precedent?
Whether you do it by "urging" them in a justice court or "influencing" them on a tennis court it's still the same even when arguing semantics.
Arguing in court that this specific case doesn't fall under the regulation is just arguing in court. Arguing to undo the regulation is literally lobbying. They are asking people with the power to regulate to undo regulation. Read this as you wish.
Unless the Bloomberg article is misleading in the way it words the story then I believe my comment is pretty accurate.
> but I see a difference between pushing for it as an independent agenda and using it to defend yourself from a legal filing
> In filings in May 2017 and November 2018, obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, Alphabet Inc.’s Google urged the National Labor Relations Board to undo that precedent
Are we going to pretend that "lobbying" and "urging" are different concepts? It simply represents their views, and they're trying to push them into reality.
> Lobbying, persuasion, or interest representation is the act of attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of officials in their daily life, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies.
Also, are we going to pretend that they are not actually doing this because a spokesperson used the right words in a PR statement? You can't claim to use it "just" as a defense but you don't actually want it or even believe in it. You do it because you want a specific outcome. And given the vile nature of Google in recent times I wouldn't expect better from them.
P.S. Oh, double digit downvotes in just a few minutes on all comments I made in this thread. Nothing to see here. o_O
P.P.S. And still rolling in as I edit. 10 downvotes in just 5-6 minutes for pointing out that OP is (deliberately) misrepresenting what the article states very clearly.
Why is it the most profitable companies fight the most against spending money on workers? They of all should be able to afford it. Take that money you're blowing on fighting us and spend it on us so we're living happier and healthier lives.
I find this an interesting question as well. I am a senior Googler and my old friend is similarly senior at Amazon. He told me that Amazon culture is much more transactional: you're hired to do a job, you do the job for pay and the company discards you when they're done. The company is not your friend. (As I've worded it I make it sound cruel, but in his framing of it, it's an honest but direct relationship.)
In contrast, historically Google culture has tried to be more of a "family", with a lot of talk about perks and culture and a focus on the mission or whatever. To be clear, I don't believe Google has necessarily succeeded in these goals. But rather, that is the employee relationship Google has attempted to represent, so when Google fails at it the employees are more disappointed than when Amazon (you can substitute other employers here, e.g. Oracle) fails in the same way.
I realize that Bloomberg probably slants this for clicks but it is another example of why I left Google when I did.
All organizations that I have been a part of have something which might be called a 'dissonance' level. That would be defined as the difference between the policies that were being pursued by the leadership versus the messaging and communication on policies that were being communicated to employees. When dissonance is low, there are only small, and insignificant, differences between the two. When dissonance is high there are large differences between them. Two examples during my tenure which highlighted this were a change to the employee store and the other a change on juices.
To set the background, when I joined every employee got a credit for the employee store, and the prices in the store were half off for employees. This was a nice way to give new folks some logo wear which would show off the brand but in a way the knew they could use. Later this was changed to no credit when you were hired and a flat 20% discount. The actual reason this was done (and came out eventually) was because it was money management didn't want to spend any more. They wanted the store to be 'revenue neutral' with respect to employees. It was presented first as a way of correcting "abuse" where people would do their Christmas shopping at the Google store, or managers using it to give everyone on their team some schwag as a spot bonus. At the time, free cash flow (aka net money going into the bank account every quarter) was nearly $2B, with a cash flow per employee of $100,000 a quarter (or $400,000 a year) and management was upset that they "gave away" $150 to every new employee and "lost" about $15 per employee per year on margin in the Google store. The new CFO at the time (Pichette) was extraordinarily cheap. But the problem wasn't that they took that away, the problem was that they didn't own it like a grown up company would. Instead they created this fiction of a "big problem" that was being corrected that deflected anger from management for taking away a "perk" to fellow employees who were "abusing the system."
Similarly a year later they swapped vendors for juice from Naked Juice to Odwalla, and then pretty much stopped restocking juices. It was presented as a problem with Naked Juice being able to provide for Google's needs, and yet once again it wasn't actually the story. The story was money. Odwalla was cheaper and not as many people liked it so overall consumption would go down, by not restocking popular flavors the juice refrigerator could have "juice" in it and give air cover to manager for not taking away juices while insuring that as little as possible would be consumed.
The pattern was very clear, the messaging was "We're this hip company that is employee focused and care about what you need to do great work" but the actual policy was "We're just another greedy corporation who will lie to our employees in order to extract and keep as much value as possible out of the people who work for us."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And now we find they say "express yourself, we're open here" to the employees while they lobby to get the laws changed so they can fire trouble makers? Not a big surprise to me.
That said, it can be a fun place to work and there are amazing people there to work with. If you don't care about "fair" compensation and treat all of the company messaging as fiction, it was a place where you could take on tasks that no where else was ready to take on yet. I got to play with a huuuuge storage cluster to do some really useful research on that. No storage company in the world would have been able to field, much less give a couple of engineers pretty much exclusive access to for a couple of months. Eventually though, I just couldn't continue to look away from the dissonance and had to leave.
Maybe workers shouldn't be punished for it, but as an organizer why in the world would you use the company email? All company email is subject to potential review by management. Why would you give up s strategic advantage like that? Seems silly.
I am not supprised that they are doing this, if you dont like what they are doing then dont work there. Why should people who work there be protesting their own company! They should expected be fired.
can someone translate this in a way any layperson can understand?
"""
In an emailed statement, a Google spokeswoman said, "We're not lobbying for changes to any rules." Rather, she said, Google's claim that the Obama-era protections should be overturned was "a legal defense that we included as one of many possible defenses" against meritless claims at the NLRB.
"""
No wonder they obliterated "Don't be evil" from the workers' code of conduct.
This, yet again, reinforces the idea that people with good values are no longer welcome to work for Google anymore.
But some, the same people who LOVE to point out that "Don't be evil" is still forgotten somewhere in the last line of the workers' conduct, will likely remain skeptical that Google is becoming more evil by the month.
>No wonder they obliterated "Don't be evil" from the workers' code of conduct.
Of course they didn't do this. As your own comment goes on to prove. You should not encourage the spread of misinformation just because it suits your world view.
I'm a googler, going anonymous for soon-to-be obvious reasons.
While I think this headline is overblown, I think the change would be for the better. For the past couple of years working at Google has been like what I'd imagine it's to work for the Trump administration: constant scandals, people around you being outraged, constant diversion of internal attention to issues unrelated to the core business etc.
Nominally the internal culture is all for open communication and being yourself. However, it's far easier to express an opinion that signals your 'good' and 'acceptable' values by eg. demanding Google shuts down anything that's even remotely suspicious. This leads to the loudest voices being the most extreme ones and makes you feel like you're alone with your opinion if you happen to favor nuanced debate over knee jerk reactions. For example, I think Dragonfly is a good idea and something we should pursue - but honestly, I'm only comfortable expressing that opinion to a select few coworkers in a private setting.
This brings me to my point of why I think more company control over worker organization might be good. I take pride in my work ethic. My dad raised me to respect the work I do. And every time a new scandal comes along and the internal company focus gets diverted to an issue on which only a small part of the company feels comfortable expressing their opinions of, my attention gets diverted and my work suffers. As does the company as a whole. As a stock owner, having an internal company culture less focused on outrage would be a great improvement.
I dont think anyone is arguing it wouldnt be better for stock owners. Workers rights are generally the opposite of an improvement for stock owners. Thats not what they are there for. Its targeted at improving and safeguarding workers and in a broader sense society. In this case its so employees arent just silently doing what they are told matter the consequences those actions will have for the rest of the world.
He's also speaking as an employee who is uncomfortable with the current state of Google. Do workers rights include the right to not be constantly bombarded with political messaging you don't agree with and to be intimidated into keeping your own opinions silent?
This poster's message and the internal dialog that came out during the Damore hearing make Google sound like a horrible place to work that is aggressively overly politicized. So yeah, the stock holders would benefit from this but so would the employees.
>Do workers rights include the right to not be constantly bombarded with political messaging you don't agree with and to be intimidated into keeping your own opinions silent?
As a said, workers but also in a broader sense society.
edit: Maybe a more concrete example would help, lets take Whistleblower protection for example
> the internal dialog that came out during the Damore hearing make Google sound like a horrible place to work that is aggressively overly politicized
Sundar Pichai made almost the same argument as Damore - that interest in CS may be gender based - in an interview a few months later. Nobody tried to destroy him.
You're missing the point. I'm saying I'm completely willing to exchange some ease of worker organization for a more peaceful (some might even say thoughtful) workplace due to the current mess the culture is.
It seems, from the outside, that Google has quickly pivoted over the past 5? years from an innovative tech company to an entrenched, political operation trying to preserve status quos and revenue streams.
Is that naive impression off base or is the kernel of truth there?
This is just what it's like to work at a large tech company in the Trump era. Emotions run too hot, and the vocal minority runs the show. I'm just waiting them out, their lack of focus on their actual work will be their downfall.
What is evil about expecting a work email system to be used for you know work?
There are many other forums employees can use to organize. Coercing a company to allow employees to use a company funded and provided system to actively organize against the company is closer to being evil.
I tend to agree with the people saying there's a problem in Google. But that said, I also think Google should have the right to say what can and can't be broadcast. Otherwise, you make the company transmit, broadcast, and disseminate viewpoints: coercing speech.
I don’t see how allowing workers to use workplace email to organize can be equated to coercing speech. Worker protections in the U.S. are quite poor in relation to the EU. I see no evidence that further limiting worker rights would be good for the people.
It does get a bit absurd when extended. Can you not speak to someone in company buildings? On company property?
The logical rule seems like if if the communication doesn't have a direct impact on company operations (e.g. flooding email servers so other mail cannot be processed), then it's protected.
And the quote to the effect of 'This was a legal defense, not a position Google endorses' is... odd.
Most companies, even in the EU, say that workplace systems are for performance of job duties only. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily legally enforceable, but either way it’s a much more nuanced argument than it’s being portrayed as.
If I have a right to use company systems to organize a strike, how do they then account for those messages in their normal record keeping and compliance procedures? Do they also have to retain them for x years along with everything else? If they have some kind of mandatory audit procedure how do they separate those emails out so that they aren’t reviewed on a regular basis? If someone sexually harasses someone in what is not specifically a workplace communication but do it over company email how does that impact their liability? How does it impact what materials may have to be handed over for any kind of other lawsuit?
If I were going to protest the company who is actually paying me presently I would never do it using their email system so for me it’s a moot point, but it’s not quite as cut and dry as an evil corporation trying to restrict the rights of workers.
Google has never, as far as I know, required that work email systems be used for performance of job duties only. They certainly want work usage to be primary, and in some countries and circumstances they claim more rights to intellectual property created using work systems that they otherwise wouldn't claim, but they do allow incidental personal use.
In my experience working there in the past (before these cultural issues became a main focus), it was a major perk to, for example, be discussing a news item about a quantum computing device on a suitably targeted mailing list and have someone with quantum physics expertise chime in. :) Also informal peer-to-peer financial planning advice and many other topics.
Note I haven't worked for Google or Alphabet since early 2015 and certainly am not speaking for them here.
And I’ve never worked for Google or Alphabet. The company has nothing to do with it, this is about a supposed moral issue that should (I hope) apply to every company, not just them.
Your initial argument in the post I was replying to seemed to be based on the assumption that Google forbade non-work use of work email; I was simply saying they don't, so the nuances around those bans don't apply. That's all I was addressing.
Here's what I don't understand -- why would I use work email for organizing purposes? Even if there were very clear laws in place prohibiting employers from stopping me, wouldn't organizers be paranoid that their employer would find out and position themselves accordingly, making the unionization drive likelier to fail? I just don't see why anyone would choose to use an employer-owned communications channel to organize something that will inevitably be fought aggressively by their employer.
Google owns the email system. Why can't they limit its usage by its own employees? Companies do that all the time. Employees have no rights to do whatever they want with someone else's infrastructure.
I don’t know the history of union organizing in the U.S. but I believe unions have a right to try to organize at a business and can do so on the business’ property. Can people trying to organize use a bulletin board? Can they post flyers on company property even though it’s owned by the company? I think the answer is yes. It seems to me the principle involved is that workers can use to some extent property owned by the company for the purpose of organizing.
Do you mean "Otherwise you allow free speech" ? Because it seems you are arguing companies should censor everything a person says it does on the Internet. I for one want a decentralised and open internet where you can be anonymous and say anything you like. I know people will argue about trolls and cyber bullying in an anonymous internet but I would sooner choose that for my kids then a corporate internet designed to spy and report back on us.
Only a select few individual employees speak for Google. To claim that the writings of those who don’t, on an internal system, speak for the company is disingenuous.
I think these types of debates are bellwether for programmer/IT professional unionization. These are the exact types of lawsuits brought against organized labor as it was trying to get organized to prevent exploitative behavior.
It's disturbing to see these same anti-organization arguments rehashed simply for a new industry.