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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these companies need to start sticking to their guns and simply letting people go for conflicts like this.

If you’re not gonna be a team player there are a billion other tech companies you can go be a part of.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the core issue here – but at some point the message needs to be sent that you don’t deserve a job and aren’t owed anything. You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.

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> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.

Only if you take the most simplistic view of how a company should work.

Almost every company is successful due to the people that work there. Without the people, the organization (whether its a for profit corporation or otherwise) are completely useless.

Human beings deserve to have a voice in the governance of institutions that they spend their time and labor to make successful.

What a defeatist attitude.

In the end, companies are made of people. If you want to affect positive change in the world, leaving does almost nothing to help your cause.

Companies are made of people, you are one of those people, and thus you have ability to affect change. You could either choose to give up, pick up your bags, and flee for greener pastures, or you could try to actually make an effort to improve society by affecting change from within. And, at worst, you could do nothing, and be complacent with whatever the company is doing.

Tech workers affecting change from within is nothing new, either. Your comment seems out-of-touch - employee protests can and have worked in this industry.

A lot of what you are saying is true and resonates with me. However, at some point you transition from trying to affect change to biting the hand that feeds. At that point it becomes totally unreasonable and you should go elsewhere.

If they aren't ok having their hand bit, they'll either stop feeding (fire them) or protect themselves (capitulate).

Companies fire the whiners and radicals all the freakin' time. The fact that these folks are still there says that they weren't, in fact, biting that hand.

I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Software engineers at the big-name companies are exceptionally well off; even low-tier hires are generally above national median of income. In that environment, the most significant thing keeping a lot of people at the job is pretty high up the Maslow Hierarchy, closer to self-actualization.

And if an employee can't shake the feeling that they're helping to repeat IBM's mistakes in the '30s and '40s, they'll walk. Company doesn't even need to fire them.

(This suggests one could possibly use "employee churn at major software companies" as a secondary indicator to societal upheaval).

> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.

The last time this was true for me, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell. In my professional life, I don't just work in exchange for cash, and never have.

Companies are dictatorships. Get in line peasants.

It could just be that if we want a democratic society, we'll need to directly attack the idea that we have no democracy in the place where we spend most of our lives.

Depends on how you look at it. You have the freedom to leave your job and go work somewhere else. You can voice your opinion within the company but at some point the company is its own living breathing entity that is not behooven to you, unless your name is on the building.

That's kinda the point. The person whose name is on the building is a dictator. I am advocating that we live in a more democratic society.

Or, recognize that the company is worthless without its laborers, and that the laborers can use collective bargaining to change the company mission.

Ah yes, nothing says collective bargaining by labor like "Worker leaves company where most value is generated by automation."

It's not nearly automated enough to run on its own without an army of engineers to keep the corner cases from becoming the common cases. ;) We're nowhere near that close to a technological singularity.

Workers leave. That's the "collective" part.

As a current GitHub employee, I can assure you that the value we produce is not through automation. ;)

> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.

well, no, we know this isn't true because people take various forms of non-financial compensation (such as working from home, choosing your own technologies).

compensation is a vector that has a variety of inputs; it's not unreasonable to think that "association with company mission" is one of them that's subject to change over time, and as a result, can be protested, similar to e.g. working from home no longer allowed

Agree that doing political activism on company time to get the company to ban targets of your partisan political agenda seem highly inappropriate.

The other clear option being to attempt to affect what you believe would be a positive change in the organization.

If that doesn't work, then you should leave.

Nothing is stopping companies from doing this. But they need talented engineers more than talented engineers need sales staff with red hats. That's why the firings haven't started. It'll be worse for the company, and it won't be any worse for the employees - as you say there are a billion other tech companies they can join.

Employees don't deserve a job; they work for cash. And employers, similarly, don't deserve labor; they give cash for work.

If company owners aren't team players then the message needs to be sent that they don't deserve a charter or a labor force and aren't owed anything. Businesses that are party to the destruction of human rights have no basis for existence.

the reverse is also true: companies that work in bad faith don't deserve employees. They exist to employ people so that they can sell product. If the company's not going to be a team player, then there are billions of other tech companies its employees might choose to go work for.

See Deadspin for an example of the inverse of what you're calling for: people sticking to their guns and letting a company go for conflicts like this.

TLDR: it's really unwise for a company to fire people for disagreeing with its controversial choices. It's a great way to accidentally damage your brand and lose a lot of staff to competitors.

> See Deadspin for an example of the inverse

The Deadspin situation is in complete alignment with my original comment. One person was let go and a ton of other people left becuase they weren't going to put up with the same BS any more.

Deadspin is better off, they can continue to do whatever it is they are doing and it is either going to work or they'll fizzle out and die. Employees are better off because they can go seek a different environment where they are happy.

the "Deadspin is better off" part is what I disagree with.

Nah, turn tail and leave when you could fight to change the company? Not gonna happen.

It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.

At a major company? The only thing you can do as an individual is take the wind out of their sales or refrain from working for them. Which these companies do notice; Google hiring keeps tabs on candidates who tell them "I won't work for you for ethical reason X."

> It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.

I see this claim thrown around a lot with no evidence for it.

I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses."

That second half is purely subjective, and we won't really have a good idea on how much of a difference it made until historians can look back on this era with a quarter-century of hindsight.

> I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses."

I've yet to see anything actually happen in terms of exerting pressure aside from internal grumbling.

Several employees have left and made public they left over Dragonfly and Maven projects at Google.

Who?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2018/05/14...

Why? Why shouldn't employees have principles at work? Why shouldn't employees of a company work to affect positive outcomes at a place to which they have invested a lot of social and time capital?

Labor is not nearly as transactional in reality as you make it sound. "Just quit" is like "just leave the country" in politics.

because this is how they shield themselves while thinking tha half the folks in the office around them deserve to be deported or detained and actively think of most of their peers as less than human.

The amount I am recruited and asked for various forms of interviews -- "grab coffee?", "grab lunch?", "quick 15 minute conversation?" -- can be seen as a counter-example that while cash is our payment, we are not "blessed" to have jobs. They are blessed that I chose to work for them. I can choose to work anywhere at this point. The money isn't the point. I'm not going to contribute to more human suffering, and you won't get to take advantage of my talents if you do.

It's about being a team player for humans first, corporations second. You seem like a bootlicker to the capital class (or an "entrepreneur" trying to LARP). It's the shitty boomer attitude of "you should be grateful to have a job at all." To that, I say "fuck you."

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