Tech Workers' Values
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.
I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is "we're too special for a union." Which is bogus on it's face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn't exist.
If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I'm wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.
edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it's most high profile members.
You make a good point though and if the intention is that it will result in some kind of engineering code of conduct or Hippocratic oath - then my guess is that it will have too many hurdles. The military code of conduct is immensely difficult to arbitrate and the Hippocratic oath isn't anything without governing boards for certification and licensure.
So there needs to be a power structure somewhere that holds the power of the members if it's going to be worthwhile and that would have to be linked to the other tangibles like pay and time.
It comes down to how and what is measured. Time and Pay are easy to measure, if your MongoDB is being implemented "morally" or not is much muddier.
You don't get the power of a union without the self-interest that makes a union.
There are certifications (e.g. PE) but you can get a job with or without them.
If you don't have the right piece of paper, you can't be one of those.
As programmers, conversely, we build text files that are expected to change every day as the business needs shift, and we know up front that most of the code that we write will not survive as-is. Speed of iteration is far more important than getting things right the first time, and the cost of a delay in the name of building something right can be much higher than the cost of refactoring the simplest solution that can possibly work once you actually need to (YAGNI is not something you'll hear very often in physical engineering fields).
Then there are the security holes in things that will never get updates, the malware-infested webcams and TVs... this too impacts the world.
We can combine it all: connected cars. This isn't "other engineers". It's software developers -- call them programmers or software engineers if you like.
Fortunately most developers write web and mobile apps.
It doesn't really matter that much if 1% of the time the add friend button doesn't work on the Opera web browser.
In terms of dues, unions are democratic, so you can debate, decide, and vote on what you think is appropriate.
As a minority, you can't assume that a union rep is on your side. Especially if the complaint is against someone else at your company who is represented by the same union, if that person is more politically important (within the union) than you are, you're risking a lot - up to and including retaliatory termination of union membership[0] by speaking out. It's your word against theirs, and you're not the one hiring your representative, so you can't be sure that their incentive is to advocate your case to the bitter end, instead of to brush things under the rug.
If you want someone who has no conflict of interest to advocate your case, you need a lawyer, not HR or a union representative. At best, the latter will refer you to a lawyer (at which point they're not doing anything for you you couldn't do yourself). At worst, they will cost you your job, and possibly your career[1].
[0] Which, incidentally, is not protected by the same laws that protect retaliatory termination by employers.
[1] If you're in an industry that's represented by one single union, having your membership terminated means you should probably start looking for other career options.
The problem I'm talking relates to how people in the majority group can politically overpower those in the minority. "Making unions more democratic" doesn't fix that; democracy as a system is literally designed on the principle of the majority (or plurality), not the principle of the minority.
Just as an HR representative works for the company (not for you), a union representative serves the people who elected them as a group, not you individually. If you are a minority member, you can't assume that your representative has your best interests in mind. And, by definition, you don't have the political power to replace them.
Without a a union there's a power imbalance between employer and employee. People say it's all based on mutually agreed contracts. In reality, you are probably much more dependent on your job than the company is on you. That's because they may lose something like 1/1000 of their employees when they fire you, but you lose 100% of your jobs[1].
Unions are a way correct this balance. Employees band together, so that failure to reach an agreement is as painful for the employer as it is for the employee, i. e. (in the worst case) work stops and nobody gets paid.
[1]: If you doubt me, try getting Google to come in for 6 interviews and make your future manager do a whiteboard exam.
I am perfectly OK with "fighting" the power imbalance on my own, using a skill called "negotiating my salary" and "voting with my feet".
They can be - and most unions do prohibit negotiation with employers. SAG-AFTRA is the exception, not the rule, due mostly to the temporary, part-time, and gig-based nature of their work.
There is, and that's the NLRA. It's a very rigid law, and there's a reason that basically all unions formed under the NLRA, regardless of the industry, have converged on the same sorts of membership agreements, employer contracts, and corporate policies.
You can start off with whatever you like, but pretty much any NLRA-regulated union will end up with the same result; it's not a coincidence.
It's great that remote working is possible in software dev, but the flipside is that it's much easier to outsource your job to another country. And working on cutting edge stuff like ML sounds interesting. But it also means you may one day find yourself building the surplus capital that will ultimately replace you. You refuse to do that? Cool, you're fired. Maybe the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you will.
[Dramatization. May not happen.]
This sounds like it's going to have exactly zero to do with what a labor union would normally be concerned with -- pay, working conditions, etc. Instead, I have a strong suspicion this is going to be some sort of enumeration of the progressive ideals that all tech workers "should" be concerned with, as dictated by a group of Bay Area tech workers. Namely, LGBT stuff, female and minority representation, immigrant's rights, etc.
Regarding this issue, I'll stop demanding that corporations act morally above and beyond what the law requires when they seize to influence those laws.
Is that even true? Are you counting Asians and light-complexioned immigrants the same as American white people in this context?
I'm left scratching my head after reading this, and I feel like YC may have lost its way.
https://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14490950/travis-kalanick-ube...
If tech workers express collective displeasure about a company, it meaningfully hurts that company's ability to recruit/retain tech workers.
offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities). Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate, and are definitely going to help increase minority and LGBT representation. Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics?
Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.
> Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics?
Because in my reading of this it doesn't sound like they're going after things like vacation time, pay, IP rights, you know, day-to-day stuff that a union would really be concerned with.
Instead it sounds like they want to define a shared set of principles that tech workers should believe in and then through sheer numbers said workers would convince their employers to be more socially conscious.
So again, I'd be shocked if the results of this were anything other than "A real tech worker believes in the right to an abortion, a real tech worker believes in gay marriage", etc. instead of, say, "a real tech worker believes in a minimum of four weeks paid leave" and similar statements.
tl;dr it's gonna be a bunch of touchy-freely Bay Area stuff.
> Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.
Ironically, unions are allowed to terminate memberships for reasons that would be illegal to use as grounds for firing someone[0]. In a closed shop, terminating a membership is tantamount to firing someone, so that literally means employees covered by a closed-shop union contract have less recourse if the union decides to fire them than they would if they never had a union contract to begin with.
Also, a democratically-elected body will (in theory) represent the majority of people whom it governs. If a majority of people want to target a minority religion or race or ethnicity, a democratically-elected body representing them will do just that. Unions actually have a long history of lobbying for unbelievably racist laws throughout the 20th century in order to protect their majority-white members[1].
I know this is unpopular to say here, but as someone belonging to a group that was explicitly targeted by these unions as a scapegoat, and who had their US citizenships revoked and property seized due to successful, xenophobic lobbying by those unions, I'm really sick of the pervasive assumption that unions will inherently protect minorities, or even minority members.
[0] This includes retaliatory termination
[1] The AFL is the most well-known of these, but they weren't the only ones.
I agree with you that this doesn't seem to have anything to do with working conditions. I don't see why you think they'd want to go anywhere near abortion.
I don't think those beliefs are exclusive to the Bay Area, nor would I describe those topics as "touchy-freely [sic]".
This is an excellent example of how women make different choices to men driven by the special rights that they are afforded. Giving a women more maternity leave sounds laudable but it creates a perverse incentive where they have to take on those childcare duties.
My wife and I are going through this at the moment and she will be entitled to 5 months of full-paid maternity leave. No employment contract I've ever signed has even come close to that for paternity leave. The only rational decision is for her to take care of the child.
I'm much more in favour of some sort of system where that leave is allocated to a family and how they choose to divide it is up to them.
I also think -- particularly if the HN audience is in any way representative -- that engineering in particular is far too deeply bought into the narrative of the rights of capital owners to unionize. Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I'm well aware unions aren't perfect. But they are a countervailing center of power who work for employees. The relationship between the employeed and the employers is a fundamentally contentious relationship: sometimes your incentives align, but often they don't. See eg things like the option trap vs 10 year exercise periods, or even founders getting millions of cash off the table while employees get $0. Much like how VCs can whine all they want, founders get better deals because of economic forces such as decreased engineering costs from open source software and better tooling, more capital seeking investment, etc; employee unions are a way to better the outcome of the employees themselves.
The reason that old canard doesn't carry a lot of weight around SV and the other tech hubs is that a lot of rank-and file, non-manager techies actually _are_ millionaires.
Why settle for this?
You do realize that you're on a site run by Y Combinator, where a few people with an idea can transform into a multi-million dollar startup or even a multi-billion dollar business[0] for all to see? It should be rather self-evident why tired, old classist rhetoric doesn't get taken very seriously, particularly on a startup-oriented site like HN.
"Why settle for this?" I ask you in turn: why would anyone in SV settle for the stifling mediocrity and onerous rules of a union when millions are out there to be had for any with the courage and drive to try for it?
[0] "Including more than 400 active companies–Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe, Twitch, Homejoy and more–the market capitalization of Y Combinator startups exceeds $30 billion, according to the accelerator's president, Sam Altman." -- https://www.fastcompany.com/3033215/the-value-of-y-combinato...
Of course. Why preach to the converted? And if you think "classists arguments" are outdated in an era of inequality unseen in the US since the 19th century, perhaps look more to history.
>why would anyone in SV settle for the stifling mediocrity and onerous rules of a union when millions are out there to be had for any with the courage and drive to try for it?
Because under the conditions of contemporary Capitalism, believing in venture capital as your ladder to the moon is as mythically fictitious as your description of unions.
Don't get me wrong - technology and its impact on society is as revolutionary as was industrialization. But it's also obvious that a similar class of robber barons is attempting to subvert this revolution into a new Gilded Age. In that era, the laboring classes, through their solidarity and protest, stopped their children and families from being worked to death, their land being poisoned, and generally having their futures stolen from them. What you have the privilege of calling "stifling mediocrity" is only because of their sacrifice.
We have before us, in the form of Y Combinator and other accelerators, many examples of successful businesses started using VC by ordinary people such as you and I. And, as a former resident of Detroit, I quite assure you that my portrayal of unions comes from observing their behavior over quite some time and I am far from alone in having first-hand experience with their, shall we say, drawbacks. So forgive me if I fail to see the "mythically ficticious" bits here.
I will agree that many modern worker protections do stem from the risks taken and sacrifices made by organized labor nearly a century ago and that we ought all to be grateful for that indeed. However, that was then, this is now. History is fine but what unions are in the United States today is something that many software professionals, including myself, don't wish to be a part of.
Well no. We have many examples of successful businesses started using VC by people with family money to subsidize away the risk to their living expenses.
All the rampant stupidity on here and elsewhere about how well tech employees are supposedly paid is simple to vanquish: divide by the median home price within a 30 minute commute of the office.
This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.
I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I've gotten over my college-era "can't pay for anything" attitude, and I'm willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I'm also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don't need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.
I'd be OK with that. Please keep these efforts focused on voluntary interactions.
It does however pressure companies to only hire union workers, or pressure the government to give preference to union workers. That's the whole point of a union, to check and co-opt the monopoly/oligopolic power of corporations and the government and giving it to the collective workers.
You might philosophically disagree with that approach and think that a more anarchic market is better, but a union is not a violent coercive group.
That's the whole point. Individuals have no power. You can fool yourself into thinking that extra 20k a year you managed to get is power.
We'll see who comes out on top with the better job.
The power that I have is the ability to up and leave and go somewhere else that offers me a better deal.
And I will absolutely use my power of leaving if a group every tries to force me to join a union.
The same cannot be said for those trying to force everyone in tech to join a union. Every month I see some hacker new medium post about it, and they never go anywhere.
I have never heard of that. Why would that be?
By maintaining a chokehold on who can supply a vital resource (labor) to businesses, Unions have a history of strangling their patrons - See Detroit. From a distributed systems perspective, Unions represent a single point of failure.
I'm entirely in favor of groups banding together to request, nee, demand, rights, pay increases, healthcare. Once they start having 'management' tiers of their own, they're no longer representing you - They're a corporation you work for, contracting to your nominal employer. Just being clearer about it doesn't work - Microsoft hires an army of 'contractors' who are abused in precisely the same way. Nor does having multiple competing pseudo-unions - There's dozens of headhunters to go through to work for microsoft, but they all compete on 'price' and drive wages down[2].
[1]http://www.nrtw.org/required-join-pay-teacher/ - "educators cannot be required to do more than pay a union fee (typically called an "agency fee") that equals their share of what the union can prove is its costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment" - Which is to say, you don't have to join the union, they just get to negotiate for you, take a cut of your pay, and be the intermediary that represents you - While you've proved your disloyalty to them by not choosing to 'join' them, so they have no actual incentive to do so. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrichs_v._California_Teach...
[2] The lightly fictionalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs, which still rings very true more than 20 years later.
Yes, a union is pretty much a corporation that supplies labor. The biggest difference is how they're governed. Nobody bats an eye if a supplier negotiates an exclusive contract.
Seniority rules are something unions negotiate for. Contracting firms stick warm bodies on projects all the time. That's between the supplier and the customer, not imposed by the federal government.
I agree it would be better to fix that, but as you said, it's a stretch. Good luck getting Republicans or Democrats to go for it.
They get around that by structuring all of the benefits in the employment contracts to cover only their members, and by negotiating exclusive employment contracts with employers (so that there are no non-members).
Put another way, 94% of people who are represented by an NLRB-governed union never had the opportunity to vote for or against union membership in the first place. Most of those are employed by employers with exclusive contracts ("closed shop"), and because the union itself is not required to stand for reelection (its representatives are, but the union basically guaranteed permanent representation[0]), it means that free-riders are a non-issue.
[0] The process of decertifying or deauthorizing a union is very strictly regulated and unions have very broad leeway in preventing it, so it almost never happens except in cases of criminal misconduct and the like.
I think you're conflating open shops and right-to-work laws, but besides that, the point is that there is no free rider problem even in states with right-to-work laws, because the union can structure their contracts with the employer so that non-members don't receive any benefits. Sure, they'll represent non-members, but there aren't any reasons the non-members would ever need them to, because the benefits literally would not apply in the first place.
Unions don't really talk about this, because the free-rider problem is a convincing argument to use in favor of mandatory dues withholding, but in reality it's an issue that they already have the tools to avoid.
Minority unions can bargain only for their members -- but as far as I can tell, members can't commit to be bound by the outcome, which undermines the union's bargaining power. Even then, the prevailing legal opinion seems to be that they can't negotiate terms that structurally favor members over non-members.
Majority unions have to represent all workers in a bargaining unit, members or not.
Not quite, because you can have an open shop in a state that doesn't have a right-to-work law. Right to work laws only ensure that workers have the ability to dissociate from the union without losing their employment.
> Minority unions can bargain only for their members -- but as far as I can tell, members can't commit to be bound by the outcome, which undermines the union's bargaining power.
Alternative way of phrasing that: Only unions which represent the majority have the ability to compel all members to accept whatever terms they negotiate.
> Majority unions have to represent all workers in a bargaining unit
They have to represent them for things like grievances, yes, but that doesn't mean that they can't pick and choose which subgroups they advocate for in negotiations over others.
That's literally what negotiating is - you have to figure out what you're willing to give up in order to get what you value more. And a union with a heterogeneous membership will inevitably have to decide which group of members to prioritize over others.
The purpose of right-to-work laws is to limit their ability to marginalize minority members, because those minority members always have a second option that doesn't involve unemployment.
"Right to work" laws are also called "open shop" laws because that's what they mandate. Of course unions can choose not to collect agency fees in other states.
Going back to the beginning, you claimed that unions can negotiate closed shops. The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed closed shops, NLRB v. General Motors made union shops equivalent to agency shops, and 28 states forbid agency shops.
> Alternative way of phrasing that: Only unions which represent the majority have the ability to compel all members to accept whatever terms they negotiate.
No, those statements aren't equivalent. Plenty of other negotiations see parties authorize their representatives to agree to terms within certain parameters. Plenty of contracts commit the parties to accept the result of some process.
> They have to represent them for things like grievances, yes, but that doesn't mean that they can't pick and choose which subgroups they advocate for in negotiations over others.
They can't choose members as one of those groups. If other groupings correlate with membership, sure, they can get away with some favoritism. You originally claimed they can exclude non-members entirely.
This is a rather pedantic quibble. In the US, "closed shop" refers to post-entry closed shops, which are legal (except in states with right-to-work laws), as opposed to pre-entry closed shops (which is what Taft-Hartley outlawed nationwide).
Despite that ban, unions can still use tactics like hiring halls (even contractually mandated ones) to simulate the effects of a pre-entry closed shop, while still technically not running afoul of the letter of Taft-Hartley, but undermining the clear intent of it.
> No, those statements aren't equivalent. Plenty of other negotiations see parties authorize their representatives to agree to terms within certain parameters. Plenty of contracts commit the parties to accept the result of some process.
You're missing the point, which is that unions can compel people who never entered a contract with the union or authorized the union as their representative, as long as that person is a member of a bargaining unit for which the union has secured majority representation.
Hiring halls are subject to the same laws. Individual cases of discrimination can be hard to prove, but patterns are hard to defend.
Federal law sets the terms of union representation. Some union members would be happy to have collective bargaining for union members and individual bargaining for non-members, but that isn't an option.
I can negotiate very well on my own, as opposed to being stuck into seniority "levels", thank you very much.
Within the band the company pays whatever they think you are worth.
Other, so-called "right-to-work" states have outlawed the practice.
The clauses make sense for the union and their members because you cannot restrict the benefits of union representation to only members. That creates "free-rider" problems. The opposite argument is about freedoms of contract and association.
I'm unsure if you are typically allowed to make your own agreements with the employer when there's union representation. That's probably defined in negotiation, and whatever has traditionally been agreed upon for steelworkers etc. may not be the best model for tech workers.
No, in closed shop contracts, this is expressly prohibited. Violating this and negotiating with your employer directly could be considered grounds for termination of union membership (ie, termination of employment). The employer would also face consequences as well.
> whatever has traditionally been agreed upon for steelworkers etc. may not be the best model for tech workers.
That's true - unfortunately, the NLRA (the law which regulates union operations) is very rigid, and it does not provide different stipulations for different industries.
There's a reason that virtually all NLRA-regulated unions in each state enact the same corporate policies for membership, the same contract structures, etc. - those are the ones which turn out to provide a stable (in the literal sense) balance of power under the laws.
It's very unlikely that an NLRA-regulated union in the tech industry would operate differently, in the long run, from the NLRA-regulated unions in every other industry.
The union mainly defines a bottom level salary and also gives a defined path upwards. For most people this is a nice system for a long career.
then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them.
Yeah i am a bit jaded but no thanks. Let alone like it will matter because outsourcing will just become the standard means by which many companies will operate in a 24x7 world where talent to do IT can be anywhere. unlike your local plant our jobs can be done about from anywhere in the world. If you can work your job from home so can someone else
> then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them.
But that happens in tech already! And usually that one person is friends with the boss, or a long-term employee who did good work once and is now coasting, or is really good at this one skill that the company doesn't particularly need any more and not at the current stuff, or is a 10x engineer because they spend their time dragging down nine coworkers, or whatever.
If anything, a union gives workers more ability to push back against that: I'm not going to call out the one guy the boss likes for being a jerk dragging down the business, because I know they'll find some way to get back. But if my coworkers contractually have my back, I'll be much more inclined to.
But carry on with your starry-eyed idealism.
Bargaining collectively is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.
I will NOT have my coworkers voting on what is "fair" for me to be payed, based on BS metrics like "seniority".
If unions were so great, then how come I make more money than any other union based engineering position?
I have done just fine negotiating my salary on my own, thank you very much.
And many, many other people haven't. Those people will unionize and won't care a lick to see you go.
You can't unionize every startup in the world, and non unionized employees will be able to demand a premium.
Other people are free to burden themselves with union rules, and I will be free to accept the higher salary that I can command because my competition is hindered.
It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.
I wonder if tech contains too many people who think they are too smart to get screwed to gain critical mass for a union. Maybe everybody thinks they have a competitive advantage... What's weird is that this is also how the employers like it. So is everybody winning, or does one side just think they are? I have never before heard the complaint that unions reduce wages. Maybe I'm missing something because employers should be all for that!
If everyone bargains collectively, overall compensation goes up as companies have much worse alternatives to negotiated agreement. However, these companies are generally very willing to bribe people into breaking solidarity, and so it's often personally lucrative to be the scab crossing picket lines.
Yeah, and it gets really interesting when you look at examples from evolutionary biology, too. There's a pretty common population dynamic that goes on between "punish non-cooperation with some version of tit-for-tat" and "always cooperate because others will punish defectors" and "exploit others because there's enough non-cooperators for this to work as a strategy".
In normal times, companies don't pay more to non-union workers - but the company pays the same, and non-union workers get the benefits that union workers fought for, and the non-union folks don't have to pay union dues and the like. There's a very real reason why unions work to make themselves non-optional, and why businesses favor laws that enshrine a right to not pay union dues.
Give me a better deal.
If the union job pays 50% more then I will take it. I'd have to be stupid not to.
But don't expect my loyalty to the union. As soon as it become a better deal to do something else, I am going to do that thing.
I don't care about solidarity, or "crossing the picket line" or whatever. I will take the best deal that is offered to me.
To elaborate on what that cost would be: If a union represents you, it can compel you to go on strike (even for a cause to which you object on ethical or moral grounds).
If you refuse, they can terminate your membership. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you.
While I am saying that collective bargaining is an important tool to increase workers' negotiating power, I'm not defending every specific implementation. I admire businesses who work with union employees because it implies that the power relationship is at least somewhat in balance, and workers are represented. I don't know if that also means I support "closed shops" where if somebody leaves the union they lose their job... But it sounds like maybe in supporting one I'm implicitly supporting the other.
Thanks for the comment.
It's because when workers at one company have their salaries suppressed - by collusion in hiring, by wage theft, by death-march management - the market rate for their labor goes down overall. When any one company can abuse its workers, we all lose from that injury to the labor market we all share, as well as from the lost productivity from sub-optimal allocation of labor.
They should leave me alone and not get in the way of the contract that is between me and my employer.
If they force me to join with BS closed shop contracts, they can expect me to explicitly and purposefully sabotage their movement in any way that I deem fit.
They do not represent me. I do not want their help. I do not want them to negotiate for me.
And hopefully these people who do not represent me will learn their lesson with regards to forcing people to join their movement, knowing that they can expect purposeful sabotage in retaliation.
Empirically, this is completely untrue. Union workers have higher compensation than nonunion workers overall.
>It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.
Doesn't look like that to me. Unions don't just have advantages in terms of salaries; they have the advantage of helping to grease the wheels between companies, between jobs for the unemployed, and between skillsets. Unions are an important source of job-training for an ever-changing field like tech.
Why pay for a web-programming bootcamp if your union dues entitle you to one?
I am starting to think the giant problem in tech is really attitudes which are dismissive of our differences and our experiences. Tropes about "tech-bros" and "millennials" are rooted in the very same biases that they're railing against.
It's just another face of tribalism.
The idea here is that the person at the top with outsized bargaining power is voluntarily relinquishing it to the person at the bottom in order to increase general welfare.
If you don't believe in that, then that's great, but that's kind of the direction everyone seems to be headed.
So don't have the union do that.
Have the union worry about coming down on places that fire members for refusing to work 60 hours a week, want you to train your replacement, force shitty unpaid oncall schedules, etc...
Unfortunately, it's an all-or-nothing deal. The NLRA is a very rigid law, and once a union has been sanctioned as the exclusive representative of a bargaining unit, they have the authority to do that.
It's next to impossible to either decertify or deauthorize a union once it forms, so you not only have to trust the current leadership, but all future leadership that may get elected, to focus only on the things you list and not focus on negotiating your compensation for you.
but the execs are waiting for most of us to be replaced by the algos we're writing before that happens so who knows
The G in SAG doesn't stand for union.
I'm trying to figure out why a tech worker union would want to sidle up to, say, YC. As someone who spent a few years as part of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, management were adversaries, not partners. Are the bourgeoisie trying to get out in front of this thing?
Well they shouldn't, actually - which was the whole point of my last sentence.
Yes. This sounds like techno-Fordism. Given that Fordism was invented to stabilize and rejuvenate a crisis-ridden form of capitalism, this is a very good sign.
The union would also want to work with VCs, since they're the real managers in the industry. Startup companies come and go, but VCs and giant firms (Google, Apple, Microsoft) last.
There are strong network effects and nearly unlimited economies of scale in most tech markets. In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers). Even in cases where there are a few large firms in competition (e.g. Google and Apple), they will have incentive to collude and make illegal agreements on hiring practices, wage ceilings etc (and there have been documented instances of this).[1][2]
The logical way for software developers to avoid exploitation is to form a labour monopoly (i.e. a union or a guild).
I've noticed some interesting features of the software development labour market: quite a lot of the work is creative in nature, you produce non-rivalrous products (i.e. my consumption of 'software x' does not block someone else's consumption), and the workforce is supposedly peppered with unusually talented individuals who produce 50-100x the value that the average worker does.
There are two other industries that have similar features: traditional screen entertainment (TV & Movie), and professional sports leagues. In both of these industries, the content producing workers (baseball players, actors) are invariably a member of an industry guild or union, and they operate more like independent contractors than employees.
Food for thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Welfare_implications
[1] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Unions that have closed-shop contracts with employers are, by definition, monopsonies on labor. Employees are required to be union members in order to be employed, and the union is the sole purchaser of the employee's labor (before reselling it to the employer).
Some of the earliest and most successful unions formed in industries in which there already was a single, monopsony employer for an unionized market (think: "company towns" in the Rust Belt). But that's a very different situation from taking a competitive market and turning it into a monopsony.
Historically this risk has almost always taken the form of physical danger (e.g. miners, steelworkers, construction workers etc.). Whether intellectual labourers will be motivated to organise by less proximate, but no less real, risks (e.g. the risk of being automated out of a job, being denied ownership of one's own IP/thoughts etc.) remains to be seen.
The other interesting factor is that there seem to be parts of the tech industry where a worker produces orders of magnitude more surplus value for their employer than they are paid for their efforts. I suspect this may have been a factor in the unionisation of screen entertainment workers and professional sports people (particularly when radio and TV turned those markets into 'winner-takes-all' markets).
And I'm not sure I'd personally characterise many of the markets in the tech industry as competitive. The most lucrative markets seem to be either dominated by a de facto monopolist (e.g. search, social networking) or duopolists (e.g. Windows vs OSX, GFX cards and CPUs, the android and iOS platforms etc.).
Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self-evident, which makes me think his (et al) motivation is competitively strategic, and specifically political. Vagueness is construed against the writer, especially when it's intentional.
If he is indeed speaking to the DSA and ersatz-unionization ideas floating around, why not join forces with people who are already working on this? Fragmentation? Disruption? Narratology?
We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country
Evergreen take, but you still can't solve a people problem with technology.
"Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post.
>I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for?
The tech community.
(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there is a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)
I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.
When they write "For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, ..."
they obviously mean the tech community.
And they ARE members of the tech community (regardless of if they are also members of a subset, like SV-liberal tech community or anything similar).
I said this on another thing that got lost on /new recently, but either form a PAC or form a union, but don't try to do both.
I very much expect this to be structurally non-viable. Once the union has to make positive decisions about what to push for even the apparent political unity in Silicon Valley will be revealed to be less strong than it seems when you're merely looking at the fact that "I don't know anyone who voted for Trump", let alone what happens if you try to extend it out of Silicon Valley. (And if this is supposed to be unionesque, you'll have to almost immediately as plenty of SV companies have major non-SV offices.) There are unions that were politically active, but they always combined it with a very strong message to their members that their primary task was watching out for their members. Starting right out of the gate with "Our first priority is political activism" means that you can pretty much guarantee the leadership will end up detached from the membership in a small number of years. Something may emerge from that process, but it won't be a group of people that has anything like a quorum of the "tech community"... it'll just be a PAC.
The SF/SV tech community defined by high-growth startups, maybe. I don't think he is qualified to say a damned thing about the actual practicing developers.
We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.
-companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data
-more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now)
-VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do)
-then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area?
Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?
A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.
I suspect you and HarryHirsch are in violent agreement.
Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner.
And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff.
There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,
One example I recently heard was from a woman who was fired after attending her husband's funeral. That probably happens less than a dozen times per year, and might just not warrant a law. It still shouldn't happen.
(The problem, of course, is that with people our sense of morality is largely guided by other peoples' reaction to our behaviour. Corporations will never have the same sense of shame, and the closest analogy – boycotts – rarely work)
This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.
Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe.
Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.
As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe?
What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter?
Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity.
All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it.
Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.
I'll also point out that the vast majority of U.S. employees don't have ownership stakes and they still show up to work and work hard. Many people (retirees, the rich, other do-gooders) even work hard for organizations and don't get paid.
I appreciate your recounting of history though, and share your concern. The biggest fear I have is that decentralization of operations will make it easier for exploitation of workers on a small scale in secret. I also do share your fear that my understanding of how much resources will be needed is off because I grew up in a country where those resources were presumed.
But these fears are not enough to stop my work. Capitalism has led to my neighbors in the Bay Area being regularly shot, and that's a real problem I am dealing with today. So my concern over those shootings is greater than my concern about the theoretical future ones you are cautioning against.
You're wrong to assume that us naive Americans have no idea what it's like to see your friends and neighbors be shot for political reasons.
"Exploitation of workers" is actually the greatest thing about the West. Those workers wouldn't even be able to care for themselves if they weren't "exploited", and by creating the societal pressure to do so, through moderate poverty (very few people in the US know what real, actual poverty is), and general disapproval of leisurely lifestyle, you motivate people to be productive, which ultimately benfits society. Then, once they acquire a modicum of wealth and property, they get to "exploit" others by paying them a mutually agreed upon fee in order to have some work done.
I'm technically a "worker" who is quite happy to be "exploited" by my capitalist overlords, as long as I get paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure, they make millions, and I make much less but so what?
The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two
If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.
It's hard to measure the effects, but it's generally thought to have at least lead to less-bitter labor conflicts, because there's constant communication between the parties.
Many industries (and I don't mean natural food stores) have had cooperatives for decades. Agriculture is a big one, but industrial cooperativism is very real too. There are even already a few tech firms run as cooperatives.
The way to push the shift is to build a cooperative corporate structure which allows neatly for outside investment without compromising the interests of the worker-owners.
There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check.
Some tech workers run multimillion dollar businesses and some push bits around for them in the wee hours of the morning for much less.
Some have PhDs in category theory and write Haskell on a multiple 6 figure salary in finance and some maintain dated ruby on rails systems they didn't write for much less.
Some roll around on scooters in data centers putting out real fires in environments that need high availability. Others spend their days upgrading old versions of windows in small town school districts.
The same divides that existed before the internet will follow us. Nothing new here. Work hard, strive to get to the top, and hang on. Unions are not the answer. Darwin always wins the day.
We'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country.
Why _shouldn't_ there be divides in our country? Which divide is being referred to? Religious? Political? Net worth? Productivity? Persuasion?
Why assume differences need "healed?" Why this constant, desperate push for homogeneity?
Why can't people simply be different, and have conflicting opinions and worldviews? Why can't these disagreements, alongside of passionate debate, be lauded and encouraged instead of shamed?
Why can't people simply not like one another sometimes, without needing "healed"?
I don't think this is true, to state it mildly, but a lot of modern politics (and nearly every smart-aleck tweet ever written) makes a lot more sense when viewed through this lens.
If people could simply not like each other without killing each other or making each other's lives unbearable that would be one thing. Problem is people cant' seem to be able to manage that.
Yes, he should visit the rust belt (where I grew up) some time - there are gasp actual programmers making decent money there!
And a whole lot of people who are just never, ever going to be able to learn how to code.
Mob rule knows no fairness. When your ideas are vague, people fill them up with their version of fairness. Employees who are just starting out do not know anything about making sacrifices to build something bigger than themselves. If they collectively form a gang and override the will of the founders and investors who made more sacrifices, it drains the spirit of the individual to risk their time and savings to start something new.
People are free to organize their efforts but it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen. This collective power should embrace ideas of fairness and voluntarism instead of laws and force to get their way.
Quick reminder that unions are the reason that many of the benefits you have in the workplace today are standardised across the workforce -- a union that has teeth can actually make a difference to your employer's actions.
Tech companies are trying to do something better than what previous generations could do.
I believe that in many cases, the very first employees are equally responsible for the success of a company. I think this is especially true for tech companies founded by non-engineers.
Perhaps you can expound?
That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.
I am sympathetic to your cause.
(I think this makes sense in a lot of ways, because there are already good people doing the former work, and usually when tech-focused groups try to help out we just get in the way.)
But hey, Friday flamebait I guess.
>“Tech workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your goddamned open-plan offices.”
This is the greatest thing I've read all week.
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is just going to make the polarization worse.
This necessarily means erasing the voices of people who hold minority positions in that group.
It has every potential to be another place where those with the most time to burn, the most anger, and the most refined ideological weaponry grab power over those with minority viewpoints or healthy self-doubt.
Unions are supposed to fight for the thing the workers definitely have in common - their direct economic interests. Lashing that union structure to entirely different political fights invites the above kinds of problems.
I guarantee this is code for "we think Trump wouldn't have been elected if he couldn't use Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Let's figure out how to make that possible."
"We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. [...] We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create."
Easy as could be: switch to the other side
"We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans"
Probably step #1 is to hire Americans.
"by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures. [...] We are planning to hold a meeting on the evening of April 9th in the Bay Area."
Oops. To fix, move the meeting to one of the following: Wyoming, Oklahoma, northern Texas excluding Dallas, Alabama excluding Huntsville, Georgia excluding Atlanta, West Virginia, Tennessee, Montana...
When you claim all of our thoughts on and off the clock, you encourage us to avoid creatively-fulfilling ventures, burn out, and leave for greener pastures.
you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else?
i mean sure, you can live in that world, it's just nobody would pay for anything to happen.
in other words, yes it works, but not that great.
If I'm a web programmer, don't give me a contract that claims my paintings, music, consumer electronics designs, video games, etc, and then claim that it is unalterable "boilerplate." I don't care that you're a big company which has its fingers in many areas of business. That shit won't fly.
For instance, in a sufficiently broad view, 99% of AWS is other people's IP - the PC platform, hardware virtualization, Xen, Linux and userspace tools, Perl, etc. etc. And they seem to be doing a fine job commercializing it. They could build their own computing architecture, write their own hypervisor, design their own OS, etc., but that would probably be a less profitable approach. There's an existence proof in Microsoft's Azure and IBM's z/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days, which are significantly less popular.
Not releasing core tools can itself be a major impediment. Several years ago, a Google architect, Yonatan Zunger, noted half-in-irony that he'd settled on a hiring decision heuristic: "No".
That is: the answer to whether or not to hire anyone, was to not hire them. Again, somewhat in jest.
But also partially serious: Google has highly complex systems, operates very much on an NIH mindset, and has significant risks for any level of failure (though they've also engineered some impressive systems against many of those causes of failure).
I thought, and wrote, at the time that this was actually a major concern for me over the future viability of the company. If Google literally cannot find qualified talent, or figure out how to make the talent it does find qualified, then it cannot continue. Even accepting the hah-hah-only-serious nature of the comment, it's troubling.
Much of this problem can be avoided by opening up more of your core infrastructure, as it allows potential talent to both gain experience with your tools, and to demonstrate that experience, most particularly to you, which would then be of interest in an employment context.
Some additional context comes by way of a YouTube engineer I'd spoken with some years before that, who was commenting (this in the mid-2000s) how Google's technology was really old. That is, Google had settled on a software stack in the mid-to-late 1990s, and has (or had) to a large extent sealed itself off from the world since. As a consequence, Google's tools were diverging (in Google's interests) from those of the rest of the world.
(I don't know how that situation's played out since, though the comment sticks with me.)
Back to the question of IP: claiming rights to both what it is you teach your workforce, and what they come up with on their own (as I've seen written into employment contracts) ... betrays a staggering level of short-termism to my mind. It works out for the current King of the Hill, for so long as they're KotH, but tends to end rather poorly. Not only for those companies, but their customers, who are ultimately saddled with old, stale, one-off software for which the potential employment pools are small and generally less than stellar.
(Look up the recent HN discussion of the MUMPS programming language and the firm which continues to utilise it, largely in medical software, based out of Minneapolis. Cautionary tale. And yes, I'd heard of MUMPS decades before, and run then.)
Because software is, by default, a non-rivalrous good, and so a cooperative, share-and-share-alike mode of production makes more sense for it. Companies already deliberately support open-source contributions for exactly this reason.
However: Altman is a business owner and an executive. I don't think he can coordinate the solution. The kernel of the issue here is the disengagement rank-and-file employees have from the public policy implications of their work. Employees don't need permission from owners and managers to be accountable for those implications. The widespread, implicit belief among the rank-and-file that they do need permission is the first obstacle that we need to address.
Rather than staging meetings and attempting to help shape the outcome, Altman and other executives should encourage their employees to work amongst themselves. Getting directly involved, however, is problematic, and I think owners and executives should probably avoid doing that.
sama is a leader in the class of the exploiters, and crowdwashing like this won't change anything.
EDIT: The "general you", not "you, tptacek". :)
> Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter.
..
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Are tech employees the correct population to attempt to bridge a political divide? I'm not convinced that's the case.
What you want is for no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom of speech.
Do you think that liberals or tech employees are somehow above bigotry and treating people poorly? Remember Talia Jane and her letter, and the extreme criticism she faced from HN members? Do you think the attitude you commented with will help bridge a political divide? Because your words are exactly why I think it's laughable to expect tech employees to do anything about polarization other than make it much worse.
Perhaps people wouldn't call what you're exhibiting "bigotry", but I would: based on a single statement, you jump to conclusions and attack someone based on those conclusions. I think such behavior is one of the biggest problems in (a part of) American culture, and I would wager I'm not alone in thinking this.
Because that one statement is from Stormfront.
1. Is there proof you have of this? Or is your statement just one of "This is something I think /they/ would say."?
2. More importantly: If a statement comes from the mouth of someone you feel is unsavory, does that make the statement invalid? Is everyone who then utters that statement unsavory, and so on? Do you think you can come to that conclusion? Particularly with EduardoBautista's thought: do you think you could come to that conclusion?
Attempting to associate EduardoBautista with Stormfront (with a comment like yours) would be considered a damning accusation to many, though such tactics have become painfully commonplace. That is not what you intend, is it?
Except your typical Trump supporter avatar is being distilled into a handful of beliefs, even though many may have other reasons for supporting.
Maybe he should replace "employee" with "investor" and start working on that? In the end it's the investors that force companies to make money at any cost.
If you are not doing that, you should.
This sort of "anything but financial compensation" compensation is ubiquitous in this industry.
Like, this is the market behaving appropriately. If companies can get better talent at better prices by providing better working environments, well, we're effectively buying nicer work environments. Whether it's worth the cost or not is a separate issue, and really depends on the price. Personally, I've priced working in SF instead of Mountain View at roughly $20k/year when evaluating job offers.
From what I can tell, this doesn't really line up with the location and remote-friendliness of YC companies. Most seem to be in the Bay Area and few that I can tell allow remote engineers, managers, or execs.
Sorry, but being an Instacart delivery person in Dallas isn't a high-paying technology job.
Prove me wrong with real numbers please.
- Unions are a force to protect the 99% from the corruption of the 1%. They are not a force to drive a liberal agenda, though by protecting the little guy they may indirectly align.
- Increasing competition by getting more people into coding (be them from outside the country or from outside of cities) is the exact opposite of what a union would do. It would drive down wages for the skilled workers that investors are getting rich off of.
- Technology making peoples lives worse is the fault of a combination of capitalism and the fact that CEOs and investors are more motivated by adding 0s to their bank account than anything as nebulous as "good." Why should tech workers risk their jobs to force the hand of the companies they work at?
- Is he talking about automation taking jobs? Because the profit from the concentration of wealth again is at the hands of the 1% and .1%. Unless he's saying tech workers need to pass the buffet rule, or tech workers need to refuse to work at companies that don't give enough equity then I don't see how the average tech worker is the solution to the wealth being drawn away from the average citizen (who can't afford $500 in an emergency) into an investor's portfolio....
If we want to protect our workers, our labor laws, and our standard of living, we have to stop globalization.
2. Can it be stopped? If US companies refuse to work with Indian or Chinese employees, what is preventing India or China from out-competing the US company in the international market? If the US places tariffs on technology products and services from other countries, what is preventing those other countries from outpacing our standard of living?
2. It can be stopped. The US was an economic powerhouse before globalization, and had an incredibly powerful middle class with a high quality of life. What China has done is use the money from outsourcing into creating its own internal industries, which is why their economy is rising all across the board, while in the US we've been outsourcing our industries to the point where only the capital owners who exploit globalization are seeing an increase in quality of life. If we stop that, the globalists will suffer but our middle class will rise. As far as competition goes, what does it matter if we have the "strongest market" or whatever if the majority of people don't benefit from it?
As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights
We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Let's start with the easy one, polarization: that gets reduced if the tech industry accepts Red America values. Well? It works. It is a solution to polarization. Problem solved.
Red America is fond of privacy. FYI, the recent ISP thing isn't going over well with non-politicians. When gun registrations were published in a newspaper, that didn't go over too well. Opposition to stuff like home/family/schooling inspections (kid-related government agencies) is intense in Red America.
Red America loves the rule of law. You can tell that Trump has disappointed them on this when they chant "LOCK HER UP" and he evades the issue. Red America prefers that the constitution be interpreted very literally, using the actual text, with the meanings of words as they were in the English language at the time they were written.
Red America accepts freedom of expression even when they don't like it very much. It wasn't Red America that violently shut down Milo's speech. That was all blue.
Red America is obviously fond of other fundamental American rights. When the ACLU counts to ten, they do this: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (skipping the amendment they don't like)
In the end, it was conservatives who shot Milo down by exposing his advocacy of Catholic priest molestation. His remaining supporters are fascist and reactionary pedophiles.
Not having to support politics I disagree with during or outside of work hours.
Not having my photo and about me on the company webpage. No one wants to know the truth that my hobbies are not rock climbing and playing the guitar.
Not being forced to go to conferences, hackathons, and other company sponsored events.
It would be nice if these values included lobbying for tech workers to not be exempt from overtime pay and reforms of the h1b visa program.
[1] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVUGkuUj28o
[2] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZHxUwqPVw
[3] Alan Kay's Reading List http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
This is mostly bullshit. Instead of putting the honus on the executives and VC's who define the growth-first business models, it's somehow the responsibility of their employees to wield the power of a tech company responsibly? To shape the direction of a company?
Maybe in a round-about way, Sam is saying that unions are the only way to responsibly limit the power of tech companies' leadership. But make no mistake, the responsibility for the power of technology falls directly in the laps of a company's leaders.
Liquidate Twitter?
Isn't the elephant in the room extreme capitalism? Tech is just accelerating it.
Perhaps the alternative is workers managing their own workplaces:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
Do people forget that this industry is built upon the ideal of innovation? Why can't we build a new type of union that fixes the bugs that prior unions suffered? Why can't we experiment and find new solutions? Why can't we disrupt the relationship between capital and labor?
The notion that unions are somehow inherently unworkable flies in the face of everything that the tech industry stands for.
I believe this is key. Technology does not have to be binded to one or a few locations. If tech could once again try to be spread across other cities and states that will be good for everyone. It will be good for remote work, cost of living, people will support tech growth more nationwide, there will be new ideas that might not emerge in a tech hotspot and not everyone will have to move to one place which is really a single point of failure.
While an obvious positive, this completely ignores the fact that these higher salaries are precisely because we write software that increases efficiency over what a handful of humans can do. So while there is an increase in high paying jobs, there is inevitably a decrease in many more low paying jobs (short-term at least, likely long-term unless we learn how to re-train people better)
https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics....
I was surprised we didn't discuss this more and I wanted to help someone early in their career think through it.
(I also got some good feedback from YC's Paul Buchheit who helped coin "Don't be evil" in the early days of Google)
I do like the idea of spreading the wealth to other parts of the country, especially those that are hit hardest by the changing characteristics of the economy --people we often forget, hollowed out industrial cities, forgotten rural areas, etc.
Would there be an opportunity for individuals not located in the Bay Area to attend, provide commentary on meeting notes, or somehow participate without being present locally?
Paul Graham's "How To a Silicon Valley" [0] has the best recommendations I've seen.
There's the role of the defense industry and Silicon Valley. See Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley":
https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...
That said, there's a bunch of strength to @pg's points and conclusions. Portland and Boulder as potential tech hubs sounds about right. It might be possible to build out elsewhere -- Rochester and Buffalo in New York were technology centers, once, and though it's small, Burlington, VT, has much of the right vibe (though possibly too harsh winters) for tech.
I don't see the sweat-and-mildew belt -- the midwest -- really doing much. There's too much about getting outside and actually clearing your head, which the vast expanses of overhumidified prarie (or frozen tundra) don't offer. Though the land is cheap, and a few college towns (University of Illinois, University of Iowa, Notre Dame) might manage to create some centres around.
I'm also not entirely sure Chicago ought be written off, though I suspect it would take a tremendous amount to turn it around. On the one hand, it's lower-cost land, nearer East Coast centres, with good natural transport (air, rail, ship, truck) for various industry. On the other hand, the weather's little different from Ithaca or Pittsburgh, and the politics are interminable.
The flexability of pretty much doing what you wanted in California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is hard to beat, and that's continued to pay off. Though I'd argue those benefits are now largely gone.
The role of a cheap housing stock and/or the ability to pick up and create a long-term plan with a large set of land, say, in Chicago or Detroit, seems interesting though.
E.g., a large and cash-rich firm could bid on more visas than it needs, starving other firms.
It also fails to address the leverage that the visa sponsor has over the visa holder -- lose your job, and you lose your right to remain in-country.
To have "rights", they must be encoded in the legal code.
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, 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. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. 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. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. 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 combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Book I, Chapter VIII, "On the Wages of Labour".
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...