Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

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> why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem.

This definitely happens for all kinds of problems at big tech companies. But you might be absolutely shocked to learn that many times, random engineers complaining about something doesn't result in management taking immediate action to fix the issue.

> Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel.

Stuff like this does get brought up by employees, especially Google has a lot of internal memes criticizing various aspects of Google's culture or policies. But executives mostly just deflect or ignore it, probably because they don't see the money in fixing it.

> So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech.

I guess the more ignorant ones do? I figured it was common knowledge that when something is broken policy-wise at companies, and they're clearly avoiding fixing it, it's rarely the non-management employees that are the problem. Almost always, it's a strategic decision by management to not address the issue (or sometimes they do address it, but poorly).

> I guess the more ignorant ones do? I figured it was common knowledge that when something is broken policy-wise at companies, and they're clearly avoiding fixing it, it's rarely the non-management employees that are the problem. Almost always, it's a strategic decision by management to not address the issue (or sometimes they do address it, but poorly).

Yikes. I'd call that ignorant myself.

By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it. This is particularly true with well-paid FAANG employees who could absolutely take their expertise elsewhere.

If they were torturing puppies then sure, but the context of this discussion is bad customer service. Having subpar customer service seems to be typical for corporations (and governments) in general, so no, it doesn't trigger my instinct to leave. Especially when the issue is providing customer support at scale to millions, if not billions of users (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything).

I wouldn't leave a company just because execs there seems vaguely anti-union either, even though I think unions are good, because again, that's most companies.

> By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it.

You could say that about a lot of things. Your government does something bad and you don't immediately hightail it to the next city/state/country? I guess that means you implicitly approve.

> (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything)

They are paying, though, with their habits and user data. That's not direct payment, but I don't think the distinction matters. Someone with a Google or Facebook account does pay. Not in currency, certainly, but having those people on the platform is certainly valuable to Google and Facebook, because they monetize their presence in other ways.

Correct, they're still a source of revenue, they're a customer. But legitimately good customer service is expensive, and it may not be viable to provide it even for marginal customers

> Especially when the issue is providing customer support at scale to millions, if not billions of users (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything).

What about those who do pay? Cause I can promise you, you don't get any better support, even if you're paying them tens or hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe if you're paying them millions.

And the context here is NOT customer support, the context is cutting people off from their friends and family because the AI was wrong.

> By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it. This is particularly true with well-paid FAANG employees who could absolutely take their expertise elsewhere.

I mean does somebody grinding down asphalt to repave a road implicitly approve of some random government policy?

Is government a corporation?

Essentially, kinda. They just have different titles for similar roles. If you compare the charter for a city to a company's incorporation papers, they are very similar. Both types of papers are filed with the state. Probably not the answer you were seeking though

Not necessarily, but the same principle applies. You can express discontent by voting with your feet and going somewhere else. And many millions, if not billions of people have done exactly this.

And yet, it's also extremely common to implicitly tolerate bad behavior by government, and part of that is that governments do a lot of things and probably all of them fuck up somewhere. If you tried to avoid local governments in the US with "NIMBY" tendencies, you'd rapidly go insane.

> I guess the more ignorant ones do?

the toxicity that this whole type of signaling represents from a company just means the give 0 shits about users. therefore, that means that its employees are placated by paychecks to also be happy to receive the negative aspects and laugh it off on their way to the bank to cash their large paychecks. this is the loss of respect others have towards the "yous"

If you 'lose respect' for individual employees because the megacorporation they work for has bad customer service or UX design or what have you, not sure what to say.

Most companies seem to suck in some way or another, reflecting that onto the individual workers just seems silly to me.

They're not "laughing it off" because they're paid well; if they were paid badly instead, what would change? Do people with low wages who work for corporations do something differently here?

For me, myself, and I, we have changed jobs when it became obvious that management wasn't going to change. I had made my very public comments at all-hands meetings as well as other attempts with coworkers to attempt internal changes. When it was obvious we were on the wrong side of the internal motes, it was time to leave. I've even taken pay cuts to not continue to be involved in the insanity. So, yes, I've walked the walk after talking the talk. I did not want to be associated with that company.

I think tech companies could probably do better with customer support, but I also recognize that it's an extremely difficult problem to handle realistically at scale, especially when most individual users pay little to nothing directly for many services. A higher-touch CS model would do better, sure, but that's expensive. It's different imo when you're a store or similar business where your customers are constantly actually giving you money.

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