I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.
In the case of boeing/uber the problem is the regulators are getting more and more relaxed and/or corrupt.
In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.
Yes. Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent leave to force their hand. Anything else is mostly just noise.
Google is experimenting with self driving cars and they are always interested in working for the military or the police. I want the employees to talk if they feel something is not right rather then do the Uber thing and disable the safety because the code was garbage and had too many false positives.
Is there historical proof that this is more effective than a union effort?
Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.
The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.
Maybe do what actors do?
I'm sure you've heard the myriad stories about where the decision makers at a company have done some damn boneheaded thing, something so rock stupid that could only come from never having worked on whatever ground floor the business has. And what can the employees do? Nothing. They have to comply because they don't have a voice, because if they argue, they're fired. If they don't do it, they're fired.
THAT is what a union can fix, among tons of other problems. A smart boss is one that listens to his employees when they speak up about problems; a boss working with a union doesn't have a choice.
And that's not to say that unions are perfect, like anything else made by humans and run by humans they have flaws. But IMO, problematic representation is better than no representation.
Here's The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE, which represents Hollywood animators at the major studios.[1] Disney, Pixar, Warner, etc. This union is all creative people. They have salary floors, but not ceilings. Most usefully, they have overtime rules. Beyond 8 hours, time and a half. Weekends, time and a half. Crunches, double time. In Hollywood, management tries hard to avoid crunches, because they have to pay for them. The Animation Guild has a pension plan, which has, they point out, outlived all but two animation studios.
The Animation Guild tried to organize game development companies. They got Pixar, but not EA. They used to send a labor organizer to Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings.
That's what Silicon Valley needs.
In principle I do support the right of workers to unionize. But the current implementation of unions in the US has a lot of problems.
Plenty of them have problems. Plenty more don't. Generalizing them all in this way is exactly how big business has demonized them to the average worker.
If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates. Can you say the same for your employer?
Really? I'd likely have very close to the same amount of say I have in my company, namely, zero. I might even have more in my company, depending on my position and the relative size.
Honestly, you sound like a propagandist here.
Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.
Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves pro se (without a union).
I do not understand the rest of your comment, what I was trying to argue against is the idea of "leave if you don't like it" so it appears to me that some people are trying to suppress employees that complain, organize and demand improvements.
Are you suggesting that the only way for say game developers to get better condition is to lobby some politicians to pass a national law for the sector ?
As a result, having a job at that company means you automatically adopt paying their fees, their organizational structure, the pay scale they’ve negotiated (often can turn into tenure-based, which is basically age-based), etc. This means you sort of have two management structures in a sense. Since unions participate politically and fund campaigns and such, you are automatically paying your salary to support political candidates you may disagree with, because union leadership makes the choice on how to spend the money it collects.
It can also lead to workplace inefficiency and frustrations that customers end up paying for. As an example, if you work at Boeing you may have some task you can finish immediately yourself (like screwing something in) but the union protects the job security of some people by saying that only those people may do certain tasks. As a result you might need to wait to coordinate with the screw guy to do something you could finish in 5 seconds.
Corruption is also common, although I cannot say how much exactly. One of the largest unions in the US is currently going through an embarrassing corruption scandal right now (https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-prosecutors-ask-uaw-mem...). There’s also a history of unions and the mafia working together (https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/), although it might be unfair to blame unions for this pattern as much as blaming the mob.
Without this protections the company could promote the people that stay and work extra hours and from home for free or find different ways to abuse you.
And one could easily say this is a ploy by management-level people to show the other serfs that "You can make it too!" because paying one dev who's a little better than his peers costs a fraction of paying them all what they should be paid.
This is a valid concern for highly-paid/specialized individuals, IMO. Price's Law (https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/): 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
I could see a union that won't put upper limit but would fight for fairness, extra hours paid double, no more then X hours a month etc.
I know this is sacrilege to say this in our system and even moreso in our profession, but this is not good for you. I don't care how much you like it, I don't care how much money you're gaining from it, I don't care if you're the most willing of willing to have ever willed. You're abusing yourself in exchange for money, and that's the end of it and it shouldn't be allowed.
You should have a salary commensurate with your skill set, and you should not have to eschew anything resembling a proper work/life balance to do it.
I understand that you are thinking at some stupid politic arguments but I am talking about larger topics like killing drones, self driving cars, law enforcement AI , I want the developers to be able to speak when they see something questionable then leave.
Absolutely not. And if you leave, at least do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail. But serious as Googlers' misgivings may be, it's hard to compare their concern to what Boeing did.
Are you saying that an employee might be convicted of a crime in the US for not speaking out as he or she quit? If so, I disagree.
Given that Silicon Valley engineers have attitudes that are not broadly representative of the general public, I think it's rather presumptuous for them to operate as moral crusaders within a company.
You forgot cost. The 737-MAX is fairly well documented to have been pushed by management for the purpose of increasing profits while compromising safety.
Obviously the second hypothetical statement was wrong, but it's hardly "evil" to make that argument.
> Crash investigators were presented with photographs supposedly showing that a mandatory test was done after the vane had been replaced. But upon further inspection, investigators concluded the photos were from a different aircraft.
> “This is a test that Lion Air was required to do, and they didn’t,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant.
> If the test had been done, engineers likely would have realized the vane was calibrated incorrectly by 21 degrees. The misalignment would prove fatal because it mistakenly catalyzed Boeing’s anti-stall system, forcing the plane into its final plummet.
Your reference to unrelated issues such as the software patch can apply to numerous complex systems in many industries (not just aircraft), and I bet it applies to planes from other manufacturers as well. Your comment seems more like FUD, since it casts doubt in one instance (one aircraft) without a comprehensive understanding and comparison across other comparable aircraft or manufacturers. You can't just take one complex system, scrutinize it, come up with a wish list of things you would want (without knowing the tradeoffs/implications), and then say there is something systematically broken here.
We know that both airlines are bad so this implies the airplane has no fault.
First of all even if the pilot crashed the plane ntentionally this does not invalidate the reality:
- MCAS was hidden and pilots were not trained because of economic reasons.
- MCAS had too much autority then the regulation allowed , so basically this is a black and white situation no shifting the blame on a third-world country company
- after the first crash and even after the second crash Boeing failed to consider the safety of people and ground the planes until the MCAS is fixed or pilots were trained.
- the MAX can enter in a state where you don't have enough power to control, the warning messages were a paid DLC and there was no training on how to handle this cases.
Even if you did not intended your comment is sounding racist, those poor country companies used the plane wrong.
Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%. If you care that much about this topic please put a reminder in your calendar and get back to me when the investigations are over and MAX is back in the air and tell me "I told you so"
This is an uncalled for exaggeration, and not based on anything I said. Lion Air lied about testing their angle of attack sensor, per that NYT article. It isn't racist to point out that fact.
And Ethiopian also had issues - for example, the copilot had just 200 hours of experience (https://www.businessinsider.com/ethiopian-airlines-flight-30...). Pilots have commented on how the gap in experience between the pilot and copilot can be confusing in an anomalous situation.
> Still, 200 hours of flying experience is far below the requirement to copilot a plane in countries including the US. In 2013, the FAA upped its copilot (also called first officer) qualification requirement to 1,500 hours from 250 hours, while European airlines often require at least 500 hours.
> And having just 200 hours of experience is especially cumbersome when flying a massive jet like the Boeing 737 Max 8, which was the plane involved in the March 10 crash, said Ross Aimer, the CEO of the airline consulting and legal firm Aero Consulting Experts.
> "Two-hundred hours is extremely low," Aimer told Business Insider. "In an emergency, it becomes a problem. If you have a complicated airplane and you basically put a student pilot in there, that's not a good thing. Even if the guy in the left seat has so much experience, if you have so much imbalance of experience, that can be a problem."
-------
> Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%.
Yes I think there is blame on both sides. I don't think Boeing is "a lot more than 50%", personally. And I don't know that their safety culture is "completely broken" as is often claimed. I think there may be room for improvements, but these are highly-complex machines, and highly-complex organizations, that work hard to strike a balance between being economically-efficient and perfectly-safe (since no system is truly perfect). If we pull back the covers, I bet we will find similar tradeoffs and decisions being made regularly in most industries, for most manufacturers, and for most aircraft.
Say my Ford brakes stop working while I am speeding, then we find that there was a software bug but we blame the driver because if he would have driven with 10 km less speed maybe he would have survived and if he would have been above average the diver would have known how the transmission works under the hood and in an instant would have executed an engine brake by shifting the transmission into lower gear (thing that was not learned in driving school and tested for)
Basically the airplane should never had placed the pilots in the situation they were in.
Because some super hero american pilot could have saved the plane does not excuse the fact that every pilots that is given a license should be able to safely operate it.
Anyway the fact that the pilot could have done more or not is a completely unrelated topic with all Boeing issues, MCAS or non-MCAS. I will patiently wait for the full reports, I hope there will be record on how did Boeing decided to make the warning that the sensors are malfunctioning a paid DLC, who was the person that decided or what were the procedures that decided that a malfunction warning should not be the default.