It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing.
Non PW link:
Non PW link:
Effective conflict resolution is always going to be lined up with who's got the power in the negotiation. If management has significant power and workers very little, most conflicts quickly resolve in the direction of what management wants. If management doesn't have quite as much power, you'll see the conflict last longer and not resolve quite as obviously.
A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.
Workers fighting for the rights of themselves and others isn't a new thing. Hell, it even happened in the era of medieval serfdom following the Black Death; there was suddenly a serious shortage of labor, and the serfs realized they could push for reform because the landed gentry now needed them more than they needed the gentry.
To pick just one example though, labor unions were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and fought against racist/discriminatory actions by those companies.
There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2].
There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.... [2] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-studen...
I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.
Except when those rights involve things like freedom of speech. Or even privacy.
Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The clear answer is that one should never just be following orders and if your company is doing something that you personally feel uncomfortable with, you should try to stop it. And failing that, quit.
It certainly would have been better if we could have gotten US policy on Nazi Germany to change much earlier than it did. It would have solved the coordination problem--for US companies, anyway. This would have required direct political action.
> Harry Truman, was quoted in the pages of New York Times in June 1941 as saying, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible …”
So what? You might as well be a hitman because, if you're not, somebody else will. You're just leaving money on the table by not being a killer for hire.
Your own principles don't depend on what your competitors will do.
That specific point was about the importance of using your political power to act as a group in a way that will actually affect the world, rather than solely appeasing your conscience/principles.
But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history.
Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it.
I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.
He is not the cause but the proposed solution to existing injustices. You may not agree he's a good one but that's how his supporters see him.
It is happening outside of America too, so I don't think it is entirely due to domestic politics.
Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.
To be fair, the decision on a policy of conflict escalation in ICE’s domain was, quite overtly, made several steps above the head of ICE in the chain of command.
It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds.
Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.
But people, mostly young people, are clearly more vocal about pushing back when abuses come to light.
I mean: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expo...
It's hard to imagine the average person having access to this kind of reporting 40 years ago. (the 1990 was 30 years ago next year...)
It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.