Over 1000 people, some of them very prominent, have pledged to quit their jobs if they are asked to do unethical things. How is that "merely a gesture"?
As much fun as it may be to pretend this is a Trump problem, it's a Silicon Valley problem. It's Silicon Valley waking up and realizing that it's all fun and games until someone you don't like gets the data that they have already painstakingly collected, polished, and devoted billions of dollars to processing and extracting features of interest. The existence of people you don't like and the fact that some of them will be someday be in positions of power isn't news, it's a constant fact of life.
I find it a bit disgusting that this is what finally crossed the line when the line should have been considered crossed a long time ago, but I'll take what I can.
Now, what has anyone done about the excessive collection of data, beyond virtue signaling that they don't like Trump? We don't need virtue signaling. We need actions. One of the signs that action has actually been taken would be that some of these companies are going to make less money. If that doesn't happen, this is hot air, so much "it's OK when we do it, but not those guys over there, no way! Now don't you feel better that we said that? BTW, here's a popup that offers you the choice of either giving us everything you have on your phone or being unable to use cell phones. (It's choice.)"
At the last company I worked at I promoted the use of HTTPS everywhere, when we had more pressing feature work to do. I shamed someone who shared around that a famous customer had signed up, and made it clear internally that we shouldn't be looking at or commenting on that data. I gave company-wide talks on security, phishing, the implications of storing our data in Slack, and realistic and unrealistic security threats.
Not the next coming of Claus von Stauffenberg but I don't think everyone needs to be; just conscious of the choices they make and the consequences.
I realize you want to see grander, significant results, but what do you think that looks like at the outset? People starting to do something in an industry that has been historically very wary of being "political".
The industry is wary of being "political" for good reasons - engaging in shallow political campaigns and especially being seen to both biased and powerful is a good way to trash the reputation of the field. Software engineering isn't as respected as medicine, but it's at least better respected than journalism and politics.
The worst case scenario is that this kind of crap becomes widespread and software ends up being like the social sciences: riddled with political extremism (there are basically no conservative social scientists) ... yet unable to see it because all people with opposing viewpoints were systematically shit on and excluded for decades until the point was reached where there were none left.
People haven't quit already because there is diversity of opinion about what kind of data collection is inherently bad. There are people from Palantir who signed the pledge. I don't pretend to understand it myself.
However, it represents a public commitment, and comes at a personal risk. People are making a very visible public promise at a time when visible people get harassed, and their own management is trying to make nice with the incoming Administration.
Respect.
This pledge is so full of get-out clauses it makes Swiss Cheese look robust. Many of the signers already work for companies that build large databases that could be used in bad ways by governments.
This is the Silicon Valley equivalent of saying "I'll move to Canada".
In talking to people about this pledge --- particularly people resistant to the pledge (I have conservative friends), the most notable thing I've learned is that people do this all the time. Almost everyone I've talked to knows someone who quit a job over principle, or did so themselves.
It's time for us to stop acting like this is such a weird thing to say or do, and recognize the market power we can so easily put behind basic principles we all share. Please don't tell me that thousands of people who have --- I am not being hyperbolic --- changed jobs over the quality of the free catered lunch wouldn't do so to avoid being affiliated with mass deportation or a Muslim registry.
You will need a better argument than this to dismiss the effort.
Have you ever been asked on an interview how you handled being assigned to write code that you had serious ethical concerns about, or whether there was any kind of projects you'd object to being assigned to? I haven't. Maybe those questions come AFTER the whiteboard hazing if there's time...
I've in the past objected to an ethically questionable assignment, and the company dealt with by moving me to a different part of the code base and hiring a contractor who had no problem with doing the deed. Had I quit over it they would likely have shrugged and hired someone else.
Hey. I'm getting some mileage out of this on Twitter and you're getting a little jumped on, but: if you're not joking, this is good news. It's kind of great news.
It means all you have to do is learn a bit about the labor movement to see a whole new dimension of possibilities for intervening against a system we're widely concerned about.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...
This is exactly what labor law is designed to help do, and I can assure you people are interested.
I can only talk about Germany, and in general I'd say unions here have limited to moderate power, depending on the field they operate in. (e.g. you always hear news about strikes from the metal-related union (IG Metall) or the train drivers, or pilots/air personnel.)
Now, the thing is that there's also one very broadly defined one for "services" (ver.di) which used to have mostly shop assistants, hairdressers, people with desk jobs, etc.pp. But recently (let's say since the 90s) also more and more IT people and especially software developers. And I can't give you specific details, but I've heard and read so many stories about what they want is quite contrary to what people in these jobs want. Maybe (probably?) because we're better off anyway? Maybe because hardly any people in software here are paid via the regulated union tariffs (is that the correct word I'm using? The rate of pay that the union agreed to with the bigger companies. Often involves politicians, but sometimes only for mediation when there's no progress on talks) but via direct negotiations with your company.
TLDR: can only speak for Germany, but the union seems to be not representative of the people for this field of work
* Work-for-hire and IP assignment rules and how they relate to side projects
* Non-solicitation clauses and pacts between big companies not to hire
* Transparency about equity valuations in job offers
* Exercise periods for options (in fact: an area of current open conflict between VCs and employees!)
* Overtime, on-call requirements, and death-march schedules
There are probably a dozen more things like this, and that's before we get to the true purpose of organizing, which is to make sure that software talent as a bloc can use market pressure to prevent itself from being subverted by unethical government requests.
This is not a crazy weird idea. There are white collar unions, and there are professional organizations (like the AMA) that do many of the things a union does on behalf of their members, without calling themselves that.
Addendum: I think the job safety thing is bigger, who can predict if this will be a safe job when most of us readers here (assuming age 20-40) are closer to retirement. Then again I'm not sure unions really help against companies not wanting to hire 50+ people for normal (I.e. non-manager) jobs.
We can easily get new jobs. But we cannot easily find jobs that satisfy all the points I laid out above. Short exercise periods, for instance, are almost universal among tech startups. Companies can get away with doing that because right now, the interest in fixing that is diffuse, and the interest in maintaining the status quo is concentrated.
Straightforward fix: form a professional association, and collectively shun companies that screw over early startup employees with post-vesting clawbacks. We'll see how much longer khaki-clad sweater-bevested VC partners mouth off to the press about disloyal employees when the cost of employing developers for their portfolio companies (and theirs alone) goes up by 40%.
The more I think about unionization, the more I think 2016-2017 is an immense opportunity. A Chicagoan I'm not entirely fond of once memorably said: never let a crisis go to waste.
And then compare that to other countries. Maybe that's my point. I don't see myself disagreeing with anything you wrote, yet you seem to take it that way :)
Sorry if I sound snippy. That happens a lot. The problem is with message boards: they're weighted heavily towards comments that highlight distinctions in point of view. That doesn't mean, in my case at least, that I'm trying to be dismissive.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
People changing jobs because they want better lunch isn't comparable. That's a choice they make on their time, at their leisure and having weighed up many other competing factors.
A pledge like this one in theory demands absolutism. Bad behaviour happens, you quit, regardless of how inconvenient or impractical it is for you at that time.
In practice, because the pledge has had absolutely minimal thought put into it, the authors filled it with weasel words to get a big list of signers. If someone was wanting to quit their job for lots of other reasons perhaps they can use this to justify leaving and make themselves out to be super virtuous. But if they didn't actually want to quit their job then they'll just say that they objected internally and were ignored, but that satisfies the pledge. Or that they made some token change that "minimised" the data collected.
Ethics is a deep, complex field of study. This is the opposite: a highly partisan and political document that exists only so people who don't like Trump can show that to the world, which I expect they were loudly doing anyway. It will only increase mistrust amongst conservatives, who will ask awkward questions like "Where were these tech guys when people were talking about databases on issues that matter to us, like gun control?". Why weren't they signing pledges in 2013 when Snowden revealed what the Obama administration was doing; why is this only a big deal now someone we like got into power?
Pledges like this speak for everyone in tech. They shouldn't do that.
First: it does not demand absolutism. The point of the pledge is to exert market pressure on companies that are creating negative externalities. The idea is simply to internalize some of the risk they're creating. That market pressure works just fine whether someone quits the moment they discover malfeasance or whether they take the next job offer they get, 2 months later. From the perspective of engineering management, both outcomes are catastrophic.
Second: the pledge doesn't speak for everyone in tech. It speaks for the people who signed the pledge.
I do agree with the guy above that said that it'll start a conversation but I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't change anything anyway.
Most of the people who signed the pledge at (for instance) Google[1] are never going to be anywhere near the actual creation of misuse of databases for deportation or religious discrimination. The pledge isn't about denying labor for the actual project.
What it's about is radically altering the cost to companies of having anyone comply. It doesn't matter than you can find 5 random people who need some extra cash to do the scut work of actually abusing the database. When it gets out --- and it will get out --- the company loses team members.
If enough people sign this, the market pressure they're exerting becomes significant, and must influence decision making.
[1]: by the way, more people from Google signed the pledge than from any other company, and hey Facebook there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to lap them.
Makes sense. I suppose whether it has an effect, then, depends on how many people sign it AND are actually willing to go through with it.
^(the salary commonly quoted on HN about how much the usual Googler makes)
That being said, who is to say that it would be those people who were asked to do it? Most unlikely. It'd be the grey people, those you don't even know about. Those already doing it.
And finally, it's already done, isn't it? Facebook, Google, et al. I've worked for small companies before that are able to identify demographics of users right down to their likes, dislikes, and ages, even without submitting that information.
You think there isn't already swathes of Island-centric data out there?
People have agency. The whole point of the pledge is to make people aware that their colleagues aren't going along, and maybe send a signal to management about what employees will and won't accept. Hopefully others who haven't signed the pledge will have a clearer idea about what their colleagues think is unethical.
Employees acting in concert at those companies are a powerful point of leverage.