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Mutiny at the big five is part of the future of work
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mav3r1ck 8y ago>Remember the KPMG anthem that leaked circa 2000? Actually, no I don't, never heard of this until now, but it is beyond hilariously bad, assuming this [0] was the real version. It gets better, KPMG tried to claim that another website cannot link to them with their permission [1], now _that_ is hilarious. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver.observerbusiness14 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...
- colordrops 8y agoCybermedia had the worst anthem of all but I haven't been able to find it. There was a page that collated all the cringe-worthy corporate anthems somewhere.
- colordrops 8y agoFound it! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASVcY8woQoM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASVcY8woQoM A former employee of theirs told me that they had to sing it at an all-hands meeting. I would have quit on the spot.
- xevb3k 8y agoOh my, that’s wonderful. Yes when I was younger I would have absolutely refused (it is ridiculous). Now I’m old and cynical and think everything is insane anyway I’d sing it with all my heart... most places are insane, but few are this entertaining!
- hw_penfold 8y agoYou should listen to some Vaporwave. It's specifically geared toward bastardizing a mutant version of that sort of close-of-the-twentieth-century mind set. A good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kdwUOlihDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kdwUOlihDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SolEjKrcg4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SolEjKrcg4E
- dtech 8y agoOh my god, I did not know that Poe's law applied to corporate marketing now. I could not distinguish this from a parody song like Weird Al Yankovic's - "Mission Statement" [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
- moomin 8y agoI can remember the chorus from memory 18 years later, it’s that bad. Incidentally, if you only listen to the start, you might think it doesn’t get worse. You’d be wrong, it has an absolutely gloriously awful outro that goes full gospel, a key change, the verses have Steely Dan on a bad day modulations, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. (It also has way too long instrumental intros and outros, but they’re just bad, not fun.)
- nemo44x 8y agoThe band "Devo" called this years ago. The "Devo Corporate Anthem" song is still great and cynically true to this day - in fact more than ever.
- esrauch 8y agoIBM had corporate anthems going all the way back to before WW2, it isn't like Devo was prescient to the future on that point.
- Animats 8y agoThis is just grumbling. Not even organizing a union.
- ur-whale 8y ago>Salaried status at multinationals is the new citizenship This is pushing the analogy too far and destroys credibility for the article.
- matt4077 8y agoHence “analogy”
- jondubois 8y agoI have a theory that as corporations get bigger, they become more like dysfunctional communist governments.
- cbzbc 8y agoComplete with five year plans and local versions of kremlinology.
- dsr_ 8y agoLook at how they are structured. Most corporations have a Council of Elders who advise the Glorious Chief. The Council can technically depose the Chief, but this is extremely rare. The Chief has a Central Executive Committee which is responsible for establishing and ordering policies. Politics is strictly limited to Committee members fighting among themselves and attempts to influence, bribe and convince the Committee members that certain plans should go forward at the expense of others. If the Council of Elders executes the Chief, it is usually a Committee member who they select to step up. Large Corporations grow by dominating other Corporations through economic warfare and forcing them into starvation, invading and absorbing them, or, most insidiously, subverting their Council Elders and launching a coup.
- h4b4n3r0 8y agoAs a VP from Microsoft described it to me privately many years ago: “warm GULAG”.
- gerbilly 8y agoThink of it this way, large parts of our economy are under central planning because of the power of large corporations. For example Walmart, when they chose which company to buy lawnmowers from for example, they get to decide which lawnmower makers survive and which don't. By picking one winner and putting in a huge order at a huge discount, they can undercut every other manufacturer, effectively putting them out of business. I don't know about you, but I don't remember the election where I got to vote for who is in charge of Walmart, so it's very autocratic.
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
- bitshepherd 8y agoI was almost there with you until the bit about the gig economy. This reads more like an advert for Upwork. People giving up leverage with labor just gives 'them' the upper hand. Why it's so hard for tech workers to band together over something as common as income is the problem, regardless of the disparity. Teachers in my area are striking over much less money than tech workers fritter away on a daily basis. Sometimes it's worth standing outside with signs and waving at people passing.
- goupy 8y agoThere is no incentive. I get paid well and I am constantly getting called by recruiters from other blue chips and hot startups. Tech workers will band together the day that ends. Not anytime soon. Same on Wall Street or with Snowdens colleagues in govt.
- bitshepherd 8y agoThe incentive to come together as a group is not about how much an individual is paid, but to come together over a common ground and influence change that benefits the many over the few. Income is one of the most common things to throw out there because it encompasses pretty much everyone's life. An individual can be paid handsomely, even if the group average is a fraction of the individual's number. Though you believe you are paid well, and you may very well be, it does not mean actions do not happen to suppress the momentum of someone sitting a desk or two away working toward the same goal as you.
- gaius 8y agoA traditional union with collectively-bargained pay grades and seniority probably wouldn’t work in hi-tech but an even more traditional mediaeval style guild could work very well indeed.
- rpvnwnkl 8y agoRight: the guild certifies members are of a certain skill level, helping the members better negotiate for pay, time-off and other work terms. Pay has not been an issue, but overwork has been, and so has the interview process. A union/guild backing could help with this.
- chx 8y ago> G9 who walked out of air gap If you are as confused as I am as to what this means, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/google-engineers-refused-to-build-security-tool-to-win-military-contracts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/google-en...
- itronitron 8y agothe cynic in me believes this is just an engineered PR stunt by Google
- gaius 8y agoThe perception that Google is an American company serving American national interests as opposed to a fluffy post-nation collective can only harm them over the long term.
- zabana 8y agoThis article is very well written. It's a very interesting perspective that I find spot on. The cyberpunk dystopia is becoming more and more real. Also (on a side note), if anybody can link me (and other readers) to similar articles, I'd very much appreciate it.
- abcd_f 8y agoThe article is hard to understand for anyone not immersed in the politics/events of the SV. For example: > At google: air gap, maven, dragonfly. At microsoft, ICE detention. At amazon, rekognition. I have no idea what this is in reference to. A better introduction even if very brief would've gone a long way.
- zabana 8y ago> I have no idea what this is in reference to. A better introduction even if very brief would've gone a long way. True, this portion also went a bit over my head but nothing a quick google search cannot fix :) (I was really speaking in broad terms)
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoYou must like "The Prince" then.
- h4b4n3r0 8y agoWhat’s really disappointing is I’m pretty sure there’d be no mutiny at all if HRC got elected. Case in point: ICE family separations happened under Obama as well, with nary a peep from anyone at those companies.
- icebraining 8y agoSurely some were, but there was no policy by the Obama administration to separate families.
- sctb 8y agoWe've banned this account since we just asked, “Please stop doing political and ideological flamewar on Hacker News.”
- imgabe 8y ago> As gig work expands, salaried employment status may take on a coveted and special status like citizenship in Rome or the Greek city-states Ugh, seems more like serfdom under a feudal lord. Gain protection in exchange for pledging fealty and giving up most of what you produce.
- erikb 8y agoIn some US companies it is already like that, that citizenship is a priced good. Especially since most teams are a collection of differently sourced consultants. You rarely see any real employment besides the project manager. And yes, a lot of the stuff feels like feudalism. But from my perspective the feudalism part comes from topic ownership and titles, budget ownership and headcount more than from employment status. Of course you can't get your own budget if you are not a full-time employee, but just because you're a full-time employee doesn't mean you will ever get your own budget to manage.
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoCorporate serfdom is definitely the name for it, we're building a two tiered society of the privileged corporate few who work at Amazon, Google, etc, along with the army of lawyering professionals who protect their wealth vs everyone else. Inequality isn't new of course, but it's getting really hard to ignore.
- esrauch 8y agoThe point of the article is that the salaried people get to contribute a voice to the ethical decisions being made, including how does the company act in the rest of the world. That is kind of the opposite of living under a feudal Lord: the nonsalaried employees are in that bucket (noncitizen residents in the ancient Greek analogy).
- erikpukinskis 8y agoHow is it opposite? Serfs had a voice too, and just like in a corporation, the lord had no legal obligation to listen. Similar to a corporation, that serf could just be ejected because the lord felt like it.
- harimau777 8y agoThe idea of corporate employment as citizenship is interesting and straight out of cyberpunk. There's an exchange in Gibson's "Count Zero" where Angie (daughter of a corp engineer) asks Turner (freelance mercenary) something along the lines of "Isn't it scary to live without a corporation taking care of you?" I think you could make a case that corporations already take on some of the economic roles traditionally associated with governments, but they don't seem to have taken on the legal protection roles yet. However, I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy (e.g. to contest credit rating inaccuracies on an employee's behalf). Another possibility would be the corporations and the cities associated with them sort of work together to act like city states. It definitely seems like the laws of San Francisco/California are informed by their association with tech and provide extra protections for the people living there (or at least the people living there who are employed by tech companies).
- colordrops 8y agoSome companies already do provide subsidized legal services for employees.
- nradov 8y agoYes I work for a Fortune 500 company and we get subsidized Arag membership. It's a good deal and I've used it a couple times. https://www.araglegal.com/ https://www.araglegal.com/
- pluto9 8y agoI'm curious--what happens if you have a legal dispute with your employer? Can you use your Arag benefits for that?
- usrusr 8y ago> I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy Corporations that routinely do international projects have always been working like that: employee x needs to work on assignment in county y for z years? There's a department for that.
- erikb 8y agoHonestly, I work in a huge company (number three in comparison worldwide, >90k employees world-wide), and it feels like Socialism. We eat lunch together in a canteen. Everything we do and buy is shared ownership. There's false propaganda from the top down, and you can live a happy life as long you accept the size of your share of the cake and don't criticize people above you. This is not meant as criticism, I actually like the lifestyle. Especially since in such a big corps there are actually resources available compared to end-times socialist countries. But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.
- groestl 8y agoCapitalists do not necessarily like the competitive market aspect of capitalism ;)
- devonkim 8y agoCorporatists tend to parade around as if regulations are what limit competition when they're the ones writing most of them to keep competitors (both large and small) at a disadvantage. Any sufficiently large and concentrated capitalist system becomes a corporatist system.
- grimbly 8y agoOf course, that's not REAL capitalism, because I, devonkim, say so. Reality be damned!
- conception 8y agoActually that's one of the big things people misunderstand about capitalism - it doesn't have to be competitive. Capitalism can, and does and wants to thrive in a monopoly. Capitalism and free markets are two different things and the latter is far more important though they are often conflated.
- groestl 8y ago
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago"But (1) they were never internally transparent about anything sensitive, and (2) it’s naive to think 10 thousand people can keep a secret." Maybe this is an opportunity for the C-levels of the very companies responsible for the modern surveillance economy to have a tiny taste of the crap sandwich that is having every detail of your life out in other people's hands, to exploit for their exclusive benefit, at odds with your own interests?
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago"This means giving some people on the engineering team exact information about what the system will be used for." Yeah, well, remember there were at least a couple people who went around installing fiber replicators for AT&T to tap the entire internet for the NSA, and they managed to keep that a secret for a LONG time.
- gaius 8y agoGive that job to the military and it can remain secret for a long time. A signals regiment could have done that job with no leaks, even more so if they were SF.
- icebraining 8y agoNot really, it only lasted three years (started in '03, and was exposed by Mark Klein in '06). And more generally, that communications were being spied upon by the NSA was public information for a long time. I first learned about it in a Spanish tech magazine back in 2000 or so (the great HackxCrack), but by then it was old news.
- gaius 8y agoconsumers when given the option to pick any two of ‘cheap’, ‘high quality’, ‘ethically produced’, have made the obvious choice. My observation is the consumers pick only one of those.
- shove 8y agoChange-from-within is a lovely fairy tale. There are maybe a few dozen engineers with enough outsized talent to get away with challenging the status quo. Anyone else will be fired and replaced by a ready and willing throng of recent grads eager to put a dent in their student loans.
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoThere a few big time security engineers/privacy advocate types who fought tooth and nail to change these organizations from within. They no longer work there. Sheryl Sandberg however, does. Guess who won?
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI think that’s an important narrative. Thanks for contributing it. It’s worth noting though that those people probably would never have been hired if Sandberg didn’t turn Facebook into the financial giant it is today. So, I’d put this story in the “I created you, and I can destroy you” category. Sandberg is higher on the cash food chain than any engineer.
- vehementi 8y agoI feel like you're just cynically making this up. Are you talking from experience here? Most big tech companies have massive amounts of open head count -- you should probably sell them the location of all of these eager recent grads that they can hire who are just as competent as whoever you imagine they'd be replacing. These companies will want to hire them all, this morning, without firing anyone. You could be rich!
- erikpukinskis 8y agoYour logic doesn’t follow. GP didn’t say these grads were sitting around waiting to get hired. They just said those are the people who will do your job after you’re fired for not being a team player/trying to upset the status quo. The recent grads will be hired either way. The point is they vastly outnumber the people who will even make a legitimate attempt to change a corporate culture. It’s replacemwnt as in, when you get out of the ocean, you will be “replaced” by salt water.
- mg794613 8y agoOh what a time we live in where 'standing up for your basic rights' equals to 'mutiny'
- thyrsus 8y agoWas it not ever thus? Until the 20th century, it was common for navies to have little regard for the "basic rights" of their crew. See: etymology of "shanghaied". And I don't know why I say "until the 20th century": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailand-fishing-sea-slaves-pets.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thaila...
- aquamo 8y agoCorporate Social Responsibility (CSR) I had to look that up.
- neokantian 8y agoIn terms of recurring income (retainers) or access to "upsides", corporate employment does not do any better than the gig economy. You can charge $250/hour for a gig, but I doubt that corporations would agree to pay that out as a monthly salary. You can get 25% of the shares and therefore the profits in a startup but good luck trying to get any share in the profits of a corporation. Furthermore, in the gig economy you don't get a payslip. You invoice. That allows you to extensively use jurisdiction shopping to minimize tax bills. In Europe, that can spare you from handing over 70% of your revenue to the tax collector. Good luck trying to do that in corporate employment.
- throwawayperson 8y agoThank you for you tip.
- buboard 8y agoSomeone needs to remind this person that the arab spring ended up as a tragedy that only bolstered the idea that there will never be any change. The best mutiny against the big five would be to leave them.