Mapbox Workers Union | Hacker News Reader

Mapbox Workers Union

mapboxworkersunion.org

47 pointsedward31 comments

"Equal pay for equal work"

This is interesting as the company have teams in developing worlds. I imagine they would be supportive of raising their pay and conversely reducing pay for Americans.

I've always thought being paid for where you were in the world and not for what you do as unfair.

Why would any pay be reduced? Profits can be reduced instead. The workers are opposed to the owners, not to each other.

Profits can't be reduced forever.

They still dwarf salaries, overall. There’s a long way to go until zero.

Full disclosure - I worked for MapBox for about 18 months and left as it was a miserable and fucked up place to be because of the internal politics and lack of competence in the geo domain.

The Washington DC team are a bunch of social warriors who spend more time preaching politics and activism versus doing their jobs. During the 2020 election campaigns several of the more conservative staff were actively retaliated on - code review comments like "This is the sort of code a Trumper would write..."

The SF team is a bit better as further from ground-zero, but not much.

The Belarus people get shit done without drama or complaints. They are the top performers in the company. They also avoid all the politics.

The union is nothing more than an attempt to stall the offshoring of all dev to Belarus and other locations due to the performance of the DC/SF teams. We have the social warriors protecting their nice do-nothing but get paid well jobs.

The company is on a path to a SPAC with Softbank so this was well planned timing to prevent that, or force some nice severance plans to allow the company to move forward.

From their FAQ:

> Additionally, we will reserve the individual right to refuse to work on any projects that conflict with a worker’s ethics and to do so without fear of reprisal; as well as the ability to deny service to any customer completely if put to a majority vote by the workers.

This union's landing page already reads like a desire to bring progressive politics into the workplace, a disturbing trend throughout the tech industry that is completely inappropriate and needs to stop. But this portion from their FAQ goes even beyond that, basically saying they want to control business decision making based on their personal ethics and politics, but without any consequence. Put another way, they basically want to take control of the company and create a new management structure that supplants the existing one. Maybe they should just go do the hard work of leaving and forming their own company, instead of engaging in a long march through the institution (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_insti...).

The whole point of unions is workplace democracy, struggling against the dictatorship of the owners. Of course workers want to decide what they work on and ultimately own the workplace collectively.

>Put another way, they basically want to take control of the company and create a new management structure that supplants the existing one.

Why do you think unions exist?

Atleast it would be a structure that works could elect instead of being forced into.

Hmmm, no comment from Mapbox management on the company "blog" just yet:

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/

So I guess Mapbox will be on a downward trend from now on?

FAQ:

"we will reserve the individual right to refuse to work on any projects that conflict with a worker’s ethics"

Are these the same workers that are very happy with and encourage closed source proprietary software to sell for profit (as some developers from the company have written and posted previously to HN)?

Or maybe that's another group? Anyone know? Maybe there's some crossover?

At the very least one can say that "ethical source" licenses as implied in the FAQ are anti Free Software. But should be ok for proprietary software right?

There is no mention about open source or users freedoms in the website.

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