CharlesColeman

> Since Wikipedias concentration of labor itself is a source of declining participation[1] it's doubtful that continuing this behavior will result in something else than a death spiral

I'm not as interested in the viability of Wikipedia's culture than the reliability of Wikipedia as a resource given its prominence. I'd take a dead Wikipedia over one that's lively and fun but full of crap and poorly-checked influence attempts.

It's never going to recapture its halcyon days, so it's going to have to evolve with the times in more ways than one.

> Just spitballing, but it'd be nice if Wikipedia worked a little more like Linux distro repositories. Keep the tightly curated articles in a "core", but leave room for "community" or "nonfree" collections if you want to turn them on.

I think that's a fantastic idea, especially if it would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of articles served from the main Wikipedia domain (to a number that can meet some reasonable quality and maintenance standard, maybe 10 times the size of the most comprehensive print encyclopedia, or a 1/6 of Wikipedia's current size) [1].

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/101795/encyclopedia-britanni...: "The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words..."

> Maybe there's no cost to a page sitting on Wikipedia describing, like, some guy's special attack from Naruto.

There is a cost, but it's measured in hours of maintenance labor not bytes of storage.

If Wikipedia wants to maintain a semblance of accuracy [1] in the face of declining participation, it needs to concentrate its labor resources rather than spread them out.

[1] which IMHO is vital given its unwise prestige as arbiter or truth

Wikipedia can actually be pretty schizophrenic on the issue. Depending on timing and the interest groups involved, it can go either way.

I've personally given up on editing Wikipedia (too many fanatics with infinite time), but IMHO it needs to be much more deletionist than it is now. There is value to its current wide scope, but its maintenance model has trouble with long tail articles. It shouldn't have an article unless it can consistently gather medium-sized quorum of active editors to watch over it.

> You don't get to co-opt internal tools to post your interpretation of federal labor law, or to send a message to the management team, or whatever else her motivations were. That's why she got fired.

> This kind of thing would have gotten her fired from pretty much every company in the country and for good reason - she's untrustworthy and cannot seperate her job as a Security Engineer from her activism, and I'm sorry you can't see that.

What Google-specific support do you have for this, than post-hoc rationalizations based on her firing? Every indication I've seen has told me that Google has developed a very unique corporate culture, which makes inferences from "every company in the country" suspect.

I can definitely see your position (which approximately seems to be: a worker's primary moral obligation is to serve his employers to their satisfaction during his employment. Assertion of his own rights on work time with work resources is a severe moral violation as it puts the workers' interest above the employers'.), I just disagree.

> She's not a black person during Jim Crow era. She's not oppressed, and it's offputing that you would even make that comparison. She's a bay-area engineer who was making a very good salary and betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.

I'd say she is oppressed, just in a different, less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era.

> And it is interesting that you can claim that she did nothing wrong, and at the same time understand why she should be reprimended.

Really? I thought it was pretty widely understood that morality and law are not the same. You can have immoral things that are legal, and moral things that are illegal. Corporate policy is a weak kind of law that has even less claim to respect than federal and state law.

So you can't answer the question, then.

> Do you really need someone to tell you that if you work on security it’s not your told to disseminate information about hiring?

Maybe if you're fully indoctrinated into a particular corporate culture that very hierarchical, siloed, and highly biased towards management and shareholders.

However, Google, at least for now, has a very unusual corporate culture.

> This was an activist power-play. Every article that is written about this lists the action as activism. Again, why pretend otherwise?

When you use the words like activist and activism you evoke images of people pushing for new things that are politically decisive in some way.

The message she got fired over was expressed pretty settled interpretation of federal labor law that Google recently agreed to disseminate. It's like calling it an "activist power play" to remind the government of the First Amendment when if it tried to censor something or other. It's a stretch.

If anyone's being activist, it's the people who are trying to treat the expression of those rights as some kind of inappropriate activism.

> I also have yet to have anybody demonstrate that Google was breaking any federal law, and I highly doubt they would. They have entire departments that deal with legal complience.

Why do you "highly doubt" Google would break the law? In the past they've broken federal law in pretty obvious ways over labor practices.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

They've also been forced to display the list of rights in question as part of a settlement with the NLRB:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...

Apparently that list is what the notification in question linked to.

> And you linked to a labour consulting company website, which I take is where this actvist decided to helpfully issue threats to senior management through the security tool she was tasked with maintaining so they think twice about contracting them.

I linked to a screenshot of the message we're actually discussing. You can see the so-called "threat" yourself:

> go/nlrbnotice Policy

> Do not violate go/nlrbnotice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.

> View Policy

> This is a such a clear violation on her part that I am flabbergasted that you would actually defend the move.

Black people sitting at lunch counters was once "such a clear violation" of corporate policy, too, but it was pretty defensible, no? Sometimes you have to take a broader view of something than whether it violated policy or not.

I'm not saying this action is fully equivalent to a lunch-counter sit-in, however I do think Google's reaction here was unsupportably harsh. The worst they should have done was issue a reprimand. I'm also "flabbergasted" by the over-the-top condemnation of this engineer's actions.

> So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

> And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.

> This 'standard industry practice' should die.

Addressing things like these would be a good thing for a tech workers union to take up.

> internal security mechanism

Correction: an internal message display tool.

> for your own pet activism

> push your slogans

Correction: a warning not to break federal labor law, which Google is actually required to provide.

https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*1BTVYLTvuHiJVvp_.jpg

> Do you activism in your personal time.

This is about Google. Apparently their company culture has been the opposite, and they have commonly had lots of political discussions on company time using company resources.

> Certainly though if someone started putting in notes at the top of some of the pages to push a political agenda that would be an abuse of the process, wouldn't you say?

Just to be clear: the message she communicated wasn't about some divisive social issue, it was warning employees to not break federal labor law.

https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*1BTVYLTvuHiJVvp_.jpg

> Some things are just common sense. It wasn’t her role to disseminate information about any type of compliance outside of security. As a professional, you should know what’s appropriate in a workplace based on your position.

"Common sense" often isn't as common or as sensible as some people think.

You often make seemingly-authoritative statements like "it wasn't her role." Avoiding post-hoc rationalizations based on the fact that she was fired, can you explain to me how that was communicated to her?

I understand and agree with many of those points. I think that if software engineers unionize, there should be a lot of innovation and experimentation in union structure and practices to address them.

The other thing is that I see a lot of criticism of some practice or other of some particular union inflated into a critique of unionization in general. I object to that because 1) it often echos management's anti-union propaganda talking points, and 2) it denies the possibly to innovate in the area of worker organization. I think there's a lot of value for workers in worker organization, even for high performers, and I think that needs to be the focus.

> having one lawyer trying to get the best deal for 5 of his clients, even if one is innocent and the other 4 guilty

That's stretching the analogy too far, and adding biasing details to force the impression that unions are bad.

Here's another analogy:

Going to work without a union is like going to war without any military organization. If your enemy is well-organized, how smart is it for you and your fellow soldiers to attack individually in an uncoordinated way without any overall strategy?

> Is she part of the company’s legal team?

If that's was an actual requirement, can you make or point to a statement in an official Google capacity that states the notices displayed by the tool she maintained had to be written or pre-cleared by Google's legal team? If you can, was the requirement for legal team involvement established practice and not some post-hoc rationalization for her firing?

> Why would anyone want a cloud based, proprietary, non-free, non-oss password manager is what I really want to know.

Former reputation and inertia. I use it, and when I started it seemed to have the best reputation for ease of use. I also recall that its security model was publicly endorsed by quite a few people who looked at it closely. I only use it for "less important" sites, which basically means everything that isn't a primary email account or an investment website. For those, I use 2FA whenever possible and memorize random passwords [1].

I've been interested in switching since LastPass was bought by LogMeIn, but it's never been a high enough priority for me to actually spend the time to search for another tool.

[1] when memorization gets to be too much, I split the passwords in half: a common half I memorize, and a unique half I write down on paper.

> On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't.

If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement?

> On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story

Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other.

Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.

> If it hasn’t been solved yet, it’s probably not that trivial. How many is “too many”? What happens if I change one attribute every week or so until I’ve completely changed the product?

The problem seems trivial, especially for a company of Amazon's size. All they'd need to do is have some prominent part of the product description (say the product name) be unmodifiable without review and approval by Amazon, and have reviewers that are trained to spot patterns of fraudulent behavior. Any legitimate issues caused by the review can probably be mitigated by giving sellers the ability to get pending changes pre-approved before they go live [1].

If a seller doesn't want to go through the approval, they can delete the product listing and create a new one with a new description, but they'd lose all the reviews. Seems like a fair tradeoff.

However, all that would cost a little bit of money, and would require staff. Amazon probably made the business decision that they like money, and don't mind the costs of allowing the fraud since it's mostly borne by customers.

[1] so the Amazon review for a legitimate product name change can happen while the packaging is being redesigned, and it can all go live in a coordinated fashion

> So that means she should be able to inject her opinion on any site that she doesn’t like?

Just to be clear: her "opinion" is "don't take actions that would cause the company to break federal labor law."

> I like this. Where is it from?

It appears to be from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadestown_(musical)

It looks like it's sung in the voice of the Fates from Greek mythology.

> She was using a security tool to spread her message. Does that seem appropriate to you?

Yes, of course.

Apparently this "security tool" exists to notify Googlers of policy, and the notification just linked to a Google policy notice with a warning not to violate it. This is apparently the actual notification that was displayed:

https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*1BTVYLTvuHiJVvp_.jpg

> Do not violate go/nlrbnotice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.

Sorry, my mistake :)

> It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from.

No one's saying it "passed PR", it passed the review process that was in place for similar changes.

> IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a cafeteria or break room. Trying to fulfill the requirement by putting the posters up in a broom closet of the CEO's office would be forbidden.

> It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work.

A lot of this thread feels like unusual sudden concern for the aesthetics of the cafeteria wall.

Edit: I agree.

>> Why would any sane person be against unions?

> Because they, like any other organization, tend to become corrupt and exercise their power to the benefit of the "party insiders", at the expense of the everyday member. And I, for one, don't feel any need to have my pay rate negotiated based on some group average or least common denominator. And union dues.

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.

I'd join a union if one were available to me, then I'd work in it to make sure it was well-run and effective.

> It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?

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 in court pro se (without a union). The sad thing is the campaign has worked surprisingly well.

Dropping the analogy, I think many tech workers are treated relatively well for now by employers. Sort of like a well-treated personal assistant to the boss, who is comfortable and has their small privileges compared to those in the factory floor, and therefore feels like they're more like a boss than a worker, even though that's not at all the case.

The startup ecosystem has also encouraged tech workers to think of themselves as future bosses rather than present-day workers, so they favor the policies they imagine their hypothetical future selves benefiting from, even though it hurts themselves and their friends today.

It sounds like she went through a code review process for the change, would that count?

> I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me.

It's about as political as informing someone they have a right to be paid the minimum wage.

IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a cafeteria or break room. Trying to fulfill the requirement by putting the posters up in a broom closet of the CEO's office would be forbidden.

I think the employee has a point with the pop-up. Wall posters aren't a good way to reach technology workers. Some kind of digital notification like a pop-up or regular reminder email would be more sensible. Remote employees can't see a poster at the office, for instance.

> Indeed. Though personally I feel perhaps Boeing should be left to fail, I'm considering going long if the stock slides further in the short term because I anticipate some form of bailout/buyout.

I don't want to see it wind down as a going concern, but I wouldn't mind a bankruptcy and seeing the executives and board of directors fired with their compensation clawed back.

> The 737 Max is doomed without the MCAS, the entire reason it exists is to keep the same type rating the same to keep pilots from needing to re-certify.

That's what Boeing wanted, but that doesn't mean they should get it.

Anyway, I think "doomed" is overstating it. I would assume whatever training an existing 737 pilot would need to fly and MCAS-less MAX would be far less that what they would need to fly an Airbus.