Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
bloomberg.com
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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.
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?
It’s about
1) Legalizing retaliation in case you mention the union meeting to a coworker over a Slack private message.
2) Drastically reducing the visibility of union organization in the workplace. That makes it much harder to reach critical mass.
Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
... 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.
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.
> When a field unionized, the people near the top typically stand to lose the most,
> even if everyone as a whole are more enriched.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11843237/Apple-G...
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).
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.
(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).
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?
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.
And for 2 - there's app for that, but I don't think the statement is generally true.
For illustration, SAG-AFTRA's current rate sheet for TV productions can be found here: https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010...
That hasn't happened yet to developers.
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.
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.
The second generation of dot-coms that succeeded centered developers as domain experts and essential to company survival (broadly-speaking; there is certainly variance).
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 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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16648000
Here's a choice quote:
"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."
I am aware only of actors getting protection from dangerous activities, exploitation, bad work condition.
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.
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.
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's an interesting combination that doesn't fit super-well into America's dominant left-right political axis.
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.
Eg. Support gay rights and environmental causes, but don't really give a shit about poor people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Greenberg_a...
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsui...
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are sufficient number of software and database companies to establish an employer organisation for software.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
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.
So what would this employers' union do exactly?
search H1b applications for google and other companies. you will see google hires with 60-100k salaries.
being stuck for 10yrs on the lowest end of our category pay is very far from "high social mobility"
[1]: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+EN...
Well over $100K, but that won’t go as far in San Jose as it would in Sacramento :-)
Most actual H1B abuse happens in companies like Tata and Infosys, that are structured around it.
Yes that is the law. And companies break that law all of the time.
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.
>Googlers just come off as entitled
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" ?
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.
Or only every time you hear about it?
Yes, employees are fighting for their wills. What's wrong with that? If you don't fight you don't get anything
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.
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.
But they want to feel valued and do worthwhile things. By pricing them out of a job, they are denied that opportunity.
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?
http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-were-tariffs-pol...
Your claim that it must be perfect to be considered a free market is argumentative, not substantive.
What’s your definition of free market, then?
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/ha-joon-...
Protectionism isn't free market, either.
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.
So, where it's this "free" in the market?
Not Force: do this or I won't give you something of mine
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."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- salespeople,
- tech support,
- cooks,
- childcare providers,
- all kind of office support folk,
- data entry, hmmm, technicians?
- probably many more I can't think of.
Not all of them can have it as nice as we do.
As nice as we do right now for a subset.
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.
It won't last.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/alphabet-google-employed-mor...
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.
"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."
According to Keith Rabois: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-so-few-successful-startups-co...
"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."
Trivialities like favorite technologies can be put aside when it comes to questions of values and fairness.
Try asking them how much they think programmers should be paid and I think you'll find they come to agreement pretty quickly.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
Only I truly have my own interests in mind - not the company and not the union.
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.
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.
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.
Edit2: I found one: "Collective Agreement between The Employers’ Association of the Swedish Banking Institutions and ~Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations" https://www.jusek.se/globalassets/pdf/avtal-privata/collecti...
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.
There are example after example of unions trying to screw over new comers by putting over barriers to entry, to keep out competition.
Putting up barriers to entry, to keep wages up, is basically the entire purpose of many unions.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> [...]
> 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.
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 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.
It's why a lot of leftists decry identity politics while still recognizing intersectionality and fighting for the rights of various groups.
Here's history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Exclusion_League
Here's a recent example of unionized workers exhibiting racism:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/us/gm-toledo-racism-lawsuit/i...
Ban H1B
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.
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.
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.
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.
- IE switches to Chromium engine, Chrome has full clearance to dominate the web.
- Questionable actions toward ad-blocking (seen only just yesterday).
- Colluding with China to create a blatantly dishonest search engine.
- Questionable products (Google Fi, Pixel phone, Google Home, etc, are share their own controversies)
- Search results quality is decreasing (which is just my personal speculation, DDG is usually retrieves less polluted results).
Let me know if I missed anything.
Logging people in to Chrome automatically and then backing out after heavy backlash.
Google tracking Android users’ location and using it even when they have turned it off.
Then there’s also an older one — Google’s bypassing of Safari’s privacy protection through default blocking of third party cookies.
I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed.
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.
The rest of your conserns seem valid though.
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.
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.
> 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.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/technology/google-rubin-s...
[2]: http://fortune.com/2018/11/03/google-employees-walkout-deman...
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.
My experience is that DDG results are terrible. I try it periodically and never lasts more than a day. Has that changed?
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.
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.
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.
This is the norm.—the wonderful things some Google employees produce are the exception.
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.
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.
It sucks.
You can't accuse someone of something for which you would never accept anything as evidence in their defense.
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.
But that's not how he runs that company -- which is the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing is an example.
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.
First, you have the timing wrong. " In filings in May 2017 "
IE before a PR and HR crisis or whatever you want to call it.
Second, it was solicited, as they were written as a legal response to a legal claim.
Third, claiming that expresses a policy preference is silly.
Do you believe that criminal defense attorneys express a policy preference that say, murder is okay?
If you go and read the actual filing, and other filings, here's an actual fact for you:
Google is literally making the same defense that others before the NLRB are.
So if you want the outrage, i suggest you direct it at everyone.
Like, i can find filings from various "loved" open source companies that make the same argument, etc.
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.
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.
vs
Make argument, destroy constituent rights )
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.
I don't know how easy that would be for you to do, but if it's quick, I think that would be a very useful data point.
Mind sharing?
- 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.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
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?
So which is it? Speech is protected or speech should be punished?
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?
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.
That being said, it's foolish to use workplace email to do things like organize unions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are laws that cover this stuff. A company is not a "democracy", but it does have to follow the law.
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?
Discussing working conditions is a legal right, and it is illegal to prevent this.
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.
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.
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.
I would have started with that. At this point you are shifting ground to qualify an indefensible position on a topic that isn't that important.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, I suspect they really do lose a lot of people over this stuff, they just keep hiring at a very fast pace.
(Of course this is a generalization - I know people with good experiences and others with bad ones at many companies, including these two.)
If you are not building the missiles, you are paying taxes that go to buy those missiles to blow up school buses.
As an Electrical Engineer, I would be glad to help my country or the allies of my country to build missiles to help in the war effort.
If we don't help, we will end up with barbarians blowing up our neighbourhood.
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.
1. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/13/middleeast/yemen-children...
Give us the stats.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
What they should do is follow the law, and not try to get rid of worker protections.
I don't care that it has negative effects on them. I am going to judge them morally, for trying to get rid of a good law.
The whole point of laws is to prevent companies from doing bad things, that might be in their interests.
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.
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.
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.
Google has fiduciary duty to not lose money unnecessarily. The corporate policy is completely different from legal defense when sued.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The easier it is to fire, the more willing a company will be to hire risky people.
Can't have it both ways.
""" 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. """
thanks!
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.
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.
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.
Is that naive impression off base or is the kernel of truth there?
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.
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
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.
Alphabet's Code: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-conduct/
Google's Code: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
Your other claims are merely speculative and unprovable.
But make sure to not use company email for this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the same argument net neutrality is coercing speech.
A company has the right to decide what appears on the company blog. Deciding what is written in internal communication is on a very different level