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> What if your punch in, put on the blinders, work 8 hours, punch out, go home; emotionally-deatched approach has you building tools to enable censorship in Chi

> What if your punch in, put on the blinders, work 8 hours, punch out, go home; emotionally-deatched approach has you building tools to enable censorship in China? If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. I'm comfortable saying "I don't want to work for a company that is complicit in X bad thing". But we have to understand that "complicit" and "bad" are not easy to define. Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake. > Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way. I don't want to "influence the direction of the company" in the way that you mean. I want to influence its culture by speaking and writing precisely and being nice. But I don't want to make the kinds of decisions you're talking about. I don't know what a "positive direction" is (I don't think you do either). We are constantly acting into an uncertain future and the idea that "the laborers are the good guys who know what's positive" is infantile. I already said what I think about that: if labor gets too much power to "influence the direction of the company," labor will abuse that power (less work, more pay). If management has all the power, management will abuse its power (more work, less pay). The answer is a balance of power and I don't think we, in software, are doing too bad. > You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out. If I want to take the plunge and choose what I do with 8 hours a day, I'm sure as hell not going to choose "working for someone else". By "working for someone else" I am making a very clear decision to avoid risk. I'm fine with this decision. You're trying to have it both ways. You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.

ddevault 7y ago
>If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. And the deeply unethical behavior would continue to happen. >Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake. You have to make a compromise here. As an individual you don't have much power to stop those unethical behaviors, and as a group you do. >You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that. No, you can have this. By collectivizing.

ddevault 7y ago

>If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. And the deeply unethical behavior would continue to happen. >Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake. You have to make a compromise here. As an individual you don't have much power to stop those unethical behaviors, and as a group you do. >You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that. No, you can have this. By collectivizing.