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It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the

It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing. Non PW link: https://archive.ph/IkYQ3 https://archive.ph/IkYQ3

geofft 7y ago
I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and business relationships that were hard to replicate. The Traitorous Eight was fairly unexpected, but today, Deadspin writers can walk even in a bad job market. Effective conflict resolution is always going to be lined up with who's got the power in the negotiation. If management has significant power and workers very little, most conflicts quickly resolve in the direction of what management wants. If management doesn't have quite as much power, you'll see the conflict last longer and not resolve quite as obviously.
- ratsmack 7y ago
  Just sitting here thinking about it, I can't remember anything specific like this outside of the tech industry... I may be wrong though.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    The tech industry does have a strong fungibility / "seller's market for labor" advantage. A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    You're not considering the entire history of the labor movement in the United States, then. There were massive protests, literal battles, and many died, all to bring about better working conditions, shorter workweeks, higher pay, etc., not just for those inside those companies but across the entire economy. Workers fighting for the rights of themselves and others isn't a new thing. Hell, it even happened in the era of medieval serfdom following the Black Death; there was suddenly a serious shortage of labor, and the serfs realized they could push for reform because the landed gentry now needed them more than they needed the gentry.
    - ryanbrunner 7y ago
      Genuine question, but are there many examples from the labour movement where there were labour actions directed at the company's general business practices rather than the rights of the workers working in those companies? It feels like the obvious difference here is that GitHub employees aren't arguing for their own rights so much as the rights of people outside of GitHub.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        Genuine answer, you should read books on this stuff. It's a fascinating, complex history, and no one is gonna be able to summarize it well in a low effort Internet comment like I'm making now. But the answer is yes, there are very many. To pick just one example though, labor unions were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and fought against racist/discriminatory actions by those companies.
- mfer 7y ago
  There's also been a noted change in how people handle things thrown at them that make them uncomfortable. A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating. There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2]. There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00507.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.... [2] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-students-don-t-have-as-much-as-they-used-to http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-studen...
  - minikites 7y ago
    People are tired of being treated like garbage. They're tired of seeing their peers murdered for being black/gay/etc. They're tired of stagnant wages. >A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating. 58% of Americans blamed the students for the shootings at Kent State in 1970.
    - will4274 7y ago
      I mean, nothing justifies shooting into a crowd, but some students at Kent State threw rocks at the heads of firefighters because the building they were fighting a fire in was the ROTC building. Some of the Kent State students (likely a small minority) do deserve some of the blame.
jacobsenscott 7y ago
I think it is because human rights abuses by the US government are becoming more common. Or at least more brazen.
- baggy_trough 7y ago
  What an absurd thing to believe.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    There are concentration camps on the southern US border.
    - baggy_trough 7y ago
      That kind of characterization is hysterical nonsense.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        That kind of characterization is definitional. See: the Japanese Internment camps the US ran during World War II.
        baggy_trough 7y ago
        It's really outrageous to characterize them that way. It minimizes the Holocaust.
        mattsfrey 7y ago
        It is outrageous because in both instances we're talking about actual legal citizens being persecuted by their own government for belonging to an ethnic group, not a group of foreign nationals that illegally entered the country and are being held temporarily for criminal prosecution.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times?" I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.
bluehazed 7y ago
I think it's because people are uncomfortable with growing levels of authoritarianism and also don't like supporting genocide.
shadowgovt 7y ago
It's because circumstances in the United States regarding how the government interfaces to the world are getting dangerously fascist, and people in the tech sector are sensitive to the risk of repeating the history of IBM and the Nazi party (i.e. enabling a government's ability to commit atrocities at scale). It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.
- nintendo1889 7y ago
  Chase Bank and Citi are in the Nazi mix. And the Bush family.
CydeWeys 7y ago
That's very weird to conflate employees of tech companies caring more about other people's rights with a loss of "the maturity of past times". It wasn't the maturity of past times, it was the status quo of not really caring about anyone else's rights at all. The civil rights movement was only half a century ago!
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > caring more about other people's rights Except when those rights involve things like freedom of speech. Or even privacy.
  - tenpies 7y ago
    Or the rights of people they don't like.
- fiter 7y ago
  The maturity could be the ability to compartmentalize. Whether that's a good thing is up for debate. Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers.
  - SolarNet 7y ago
    > Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers. Sure we should probably keep politics out of work. Human rights abuses are not politics though. We can disagree on corporate regulation, taxes, transportation policy, zoning laws, bike lanes whatever. Hell we can disagree on gun control, abortion, climate change, whether the earth is flat or round. But if there is a government organization within our control (e.g. we vote for the people who vote on controlling it) that is killing people, is torturing people (raping thousands of kids), is oppressing reporting on it, that's not politics any more.
    - ryanbrunner 7y ago
      > Human rights abuses are not politics though. They absolutely are political. The entire concept of human rights is political. There's a widespread consensus in many, many countries that they are worth protecting, but there's nothing magical or special about human rights that gives them any power beyond any other political decision.
JohnFen 7y ago
My hypothesis is that this is because so much governmental business is done by private corporations. The problem this brings is that there are very few ways you can influence the behavior of corporations.
whytaka 7y ago
Or is it because people are becoming more morally aware?
killface 7y ago
As well as a dramatically shifted power dynamic whereby the 40 hour workweek is a relic of the past, and people work 2-3 jobs just to scrape by. It's easier to say "burn it down" when you're already in the flames. It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds. Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.
noelsusman 7y ago
One man's maturity of past times is another man's unwillingness to confront injustice in society. But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history. Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it. I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  The way a lot of non tech employees vented their anger was by electing Trump. Just as ICE is an injustice to you, Trump's targets (corrupt media, lax immigration enforcement...) are seen as injustices by his supporters. He is not the cause but the proposed solution to existing injustices. You may not agree he's a good one but that's how his supporters see him.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  > I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. It is happening outside of America too, so I don't think it is entirely due to domestic politics.
pjc50 7y ago
> conflict resolution is becoming a dying art Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE. To be fair, the decision on a policy of conflict escalation in ICE’s domain was, quite overtly, made several steps above the head of ICE in the chain of command.

geofft 7y ago

I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and business relationships that were hard to replicate. The Traitorous Eight was fairly unexpected, but today, Deadspin writers can walk even in a bad job market. Effective conflict resolution is always going to be lined up with who's got the power in the negotiation. If management has significant power and workers very little, most conflicts quickly resolve in the direction of what management wants. If management doesn't have quite as much power, you'll see the conflict last longer and not resolve quite as obviously.

ratsmack 7y ago
Just sitting here thinking about it, I can't remember anything specific like this outside of the tech industry... I may be wrong though.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  The tech industry does have a strong fungibility / "seller's market for labor" advantage. A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  You're not considering the entire history of the labor movement in the United States, then. There were massive protests, literal battles, and many died, all to bring about better working conditions, shorter workweeks, higher pay, etc., not just for those inside those companies but across the entire economy. Workers fighting for the rights of themselves and others isn't a new thing. Hell, it even happened in the era of medieval serfdom following the Black Death; there was suddenly a serious shortage of labor, and the serfs realized they could push for reform because the landed gentry now needed them more than they needed the gentry.
  - ryanbrunner 7y ago
    Genuine question, but are there many examples from the labour movement where there were labour actions directed at the company's general business practices rather than the rights of the workers working in those companies? It feels like the obvious difference here is that GitHub employees aren't arguing for their own rights so much as the rights of people outside of GitHub.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Genuine answer, you should read books on this stuff. It's a fascinating, complex history, and no one is gonna be able to summarize it well in a low effort Internet comment like I'm making now. But the answer is yes, there are very many. To pick just one example though, labor unions were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and fought against racist/discriminatory actions by those companies.
mfer 7y ago
There's also been a noted change in how people handle things thrown at them that make them uncomfortable. A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating. There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2]. There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00507.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.... [2] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-students-don-t-have-as-much-as-they-used-to http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-studen...
- minikites 7y ago
  People are tired of being treated like garbage. They're tired of seeing their peers murdered for being black/gay/etc. They're tired of stagnant wages. >A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating. 58% of Americans blamed the students for the shootings at Kent State in 1970.
  - will4274 7y ago
    I mean, nothing justifies shooting into a crowd, but some students at Kent State threw rocks at the heads of firefighters because the building they were fighting a fire in was the ROTC building. Some of the Kent State students (likely a small minority) do deserve some of the blame.

jacobsenscott 7y ago

I think it is because human rights abuses by the US government are becoming more common. Or at least more brazen.

baggy_trough 7y ago
What an absurd thing to believe.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  There are concentration camps on the southern US border.
  - baggy_trough 7y ago
    That kind of characterization is hysterical nonsense.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      That kind of characterization is definitional. See: the Japanese Internment camps the US ran during World War II.
      - baggy_trough 7y ago
        It's really outrageous to characterize them that way. It minimizes the Holocaust.
        mattsfrey 7y ago
        It is outrageous because in both instances we're talking about actual legal citizens being persecuted by their own government for belonging to an ethnic group, not a group of foreign nationals that illegally entered the country and are being held temporarily for criminal prosecution.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

"It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times?" I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.

bluehazed 7y ago

I think it's because people are uncomfortable with growing levels of authoritarianism and also don't like supporting genocide.

shadowgovt 7y ago

It's because circumstances in the United States regarding how the government interfaces to the world are getting dangerously fascist, and people in the tech sector are sensitive to the risk of repeating the history of IBM and the Nazi party (i.e. enabling a government's ability to commit atrocities at scale). It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.

nintendo1889 7y ago
Chase Bank and Citi are in the Nazi mix. And the Bush family.

CydeWeys 7y ago

That's very weird to conflate employees of tech companies caring more about other people's rights with a loss of "the maturity of past times". It wasn't the maturity of past times, it was the status quo of not really caring about anyone else's rights at all. The civil rights movement was only half a century ago!

zozbot234 7y ago
> caring more about other people's rights Except when those rights involve things like freedom of speech. Or even privacy.
- tenpies 7y ago
  Or the rights of people they don't like.
fiter 7y ago
The maturity could be the ability to compartmentalize. Whether that's a good thing is up for debate. Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers.
- SolarNet 7y ago
  > Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers. Sure we should probably keep politics out of work. Human rights abuses are not politics though. We can disagree on corporate regulation, taxes, transportation policy, zoning laws, bike lanes whatever. Hell we can disagree on gun control, abortion, climate change, whether the earth is flat or round. But if there is a government organization within our control (e.g. we vote for the people who vote on controlling it) that is killing people, is torturing people (raping thousands of kids), is oppressing reporting on it, that's not politics any more.
  - ryanbrunner 7y ago
    > Human rights abuses are not politics though. They absolutely are political. The entire concept of human rights is political. There's a widespread consensus in many, many countries that they are worth protecting, but there's nothing magical or special about human rights that gives them any power beyond any other political decision.

JohnFen 7y ago

My hypothesis is that this is because so much governmental business is done by private corporations. The problem this brings is that there are very few ways you can influence the behavior of corporations.

whytaka 7y ago

Or is it because people are becoming more morally aware?

killface 7y ago

As well as a dramatically shifted power dynamic whereby the 40 hour workweek is a relic of the past, and people work 2-3 jobs just to scrape by. It's easier to say "burn it down" when you're already in the flames. It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds. Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.

noelsusman 7y ago

One man's maturity of past times is another man's unwillingness to confront injustice in society. But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history. Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it. I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.

malvosenior 7y ago
The way a lot of non tech employees vented their anger was by electing Trump. Just as ICE is an injustice to you, Trump's targets (corrupt media, lax immigration enforcement...) are seen as injustices by his supporters. He is not the cause but the proposed solution to existing injustices. You may not agree he's a good one but that's how his supporters see him.
mattlondon 7y ago
> I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. It is happening outside of America too, so I don't think it is entirely due to domestic politics.

pjc50 7y ago

> conflict resolution is becoming a dying art Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE. To be fair, the decision on a policy of conflict escalation in ICE’s domain was, quite overtly, made several steps above the head of ICE in the chain of command.