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Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF th
by ditonal 6y ago
Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmatized even though doctors/lawyers/police/actors/teachers unions all wield massive political power, engineers accept their market based compensation and micro kitchens and decide that’s enough then are shocked that on political issues they get pushed around by the execs and VCs. If you want to have any voice in what your work does in the world, step 1 is collective organization of Silicon Valley engineers, anything besides that is smoke and mirrors and a waste of time.
- Apocryphon 6y agoJust invent a union and rebrand it as a guild. That could have greater appeal. Alternatively, shore up the ACM with lobbying power and give it teeth, similar to the AMA/ABA/APA.
- max_ 6y agoI have the exact same sentiment! SV engineers have an abundance of resources. Ranging from financial to intellectual. These are are often people who are powerful in the sense that they have alot of whats required to counter the broken issues in tech.
- jonnypotty 6y agoYou can't have a union of silicon valley engineers who weild power by deciding what is and isn't acceptable to say online. The problem is that the judgement is to do with perceived 'impact'. No normal person is going to be prevented from saying 'when the looting starts the shooting starts', you prevent trump from saying this because its 'dangerous'. The situation is awful. Its a cluster fuck of people with too much power welding it in unprincipled ways. Fb employees walking out in some display of outrage at the companies behaviour when what they should ACTUALLY do is NOT WORK FOR FACEBOOK I don't understand. These are not impoverished coal miners with no choice where to work. Get a different job you idiots. Stop working for an obviously not ethical company. You're part of the problem, don't pretend to be virtuous by 'protesting', you're achieving nothing apart from making yourself look stupid.
- finnthehuman 6y ago>massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing You're calling engineers irrational for not subscribing to an implementation detail before identifying the key deliverables. Unless goals are set and understood upfront before unionizing, then all they'll end up organizing is a pay raise.
- baskire 6y agoSome of us have been in unionized industries prior. It also lead to promotion based on years served. Pay scales. And the protection of low performers. Right now engineers have incredible leverage. What do they gain by a union. Don’t like what Facebook is doing. Quit and work elsewhere. There’s plenty of jobs available
- Apocryphon 6y agoHere's a few lists of reasons for why SWEs might want a union: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15248774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15248774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8498324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8498324 commandlinefan 3 months ago [–] Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359605 And a rather prophetic comment: LarryDarrell 10 months ago [–] My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now. If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298
- thu2111 6y agoSo what you're saying is a union would try and prevent companies interviewing candidates to weed out the ones that can't code, would block its members from working in open offices regardless of their preferences (some people like them), protect workers who fix one bug per month just as much as those who fix ten and then ... the last parts I don't even understand really. Are you claiming that companies deliberately penalise education? That's not true at any company I've ever worked at.
- ReticentVole 6y agoSo we should hand over control and censorship of the President's communications to a small group of Silicon Valley engineers?
- jakelazaroff 6y agoDo you really think — if Facebook and Twitter hypothetically decided to ban him — that the President of the United States would have trouble getting a message out?
- ReticentVole 6y agoDe-platforming is a key part of the Alt-Left's strategy of controlling opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming
- jakelazaroff 6y agoDid you read your own link? Deplatforming has been used for decades, by the right wing as well as the left: > The University of California, for example, had a policy known as the Speaker Ban codified in university regulations under President Robert Gordon Sproul, mostly, but not exclusively, targeting Communists. One rule stated that "the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda." This rule was used in 1951 to block Max Schachtman, a socialist, from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley.
- ALittleLight 6y agoYes? What's he going to do if he's kicked off social media? His reach would decline my millions or tens of millions at least.
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- RHSeeger 6y ago1. It's my understanding that doctors and lawyers have professional organizations, which aren't really the same thing as a union. 2. Unions and professional organizations, and really all organizations intended to consolidate power for one group over another, have both good points and bad. Obviously, unions have played an important role in improving worker safety and security, and that's great. But they've also contributed negatively in some ways. Not wishing to organize under as part of a union is not necessarily irrational; it may just be a different weight applied to the varies effects said organizations have.
- bildung 6y agoUnions are also the reason why most other industrial countries have mandatory holidays, sick leave, parental leave and so on.
- logicchains 6y agoThat's not a very good argument in this case because the average Silicon Valley tech worker has a better take home salary than a programmer in those countries even after accounting for education/childcare and insurance costs.
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- bildung 6y agoTake home pay certainly isn't the metric that is improved here, but rather pay per hour. How many hours per year does a Silicon Valley tech worker work? Absolute pay e.g. in Germany is significantly less, but then the absolute hours worked in a full time job are probably 800 hours less per year than in Silicon Valley: 6 weeks of paid holiday are standard in tech here, plus e.g. 2 weeks paid sick leave because of the flu, plus 4 weeks of paid sick leave with the kids, and a work week is actually 40 hours (or less).
- david38 6y ago
- renewiltord 6y agoWe're in this situation because of police unions. Fuck any SWE union. It'll be full of xenophobic crackpots.
- EVdotIO 6y agoWhat? Damn, what's happening here?
- renewiltord 6y agoSorry, I'll make the connection which was obviously unclear because I skipped a lot of steps. Unions concentrate power. Concentrated power is easy to take hold of (cf. Coup d'Etat, E Luttwak). Lots of SWEs are incredibly xenophobic - can tell in any thread on HN and Reddit on H-1Bs. Xenophobes (of whom there are many) tend to be protectionist. Xenophobic protectionists are very good at holding power. Therefore, given sufficient time, probability of any power structure being taken over by xenophobic protectionists is almost 1. I don't want that. This industry flourishes because it is unbounded. No union. Will dedicate myself to scuttling the union if it gets any reasonable power. Collective bargaining is a powerful tool. I recognize that and think it would be good for good people to have. But the danger is too high here.
- Apocryphon 6y agoThrowing out the baby with the bathwater, really putting the liberal in neoliberal. Never mind that existing efforts to organize engineers, such as the Tech Workers Coalition, mostly comprise those who often have leftist sympathies, and the caricature nativist union member is mostly an artifact of the 19th century, the above comment both ignores that most modern unions don't end up being xenophobic- are the Teamsters or the SEIU xenophobic?, and international trade unions exist.
- renewiltord 6y agoThe problem with building a powerful weapon is that one day the weapon may be trained on you. Of course it isn't dangerous when it's just parts. But one day, when you've finished building it, someone will take possession of the weapon, and you won't control where they point it. Jeremy Corbyn has taught me that closing borders and leftist sympathies are not in opposition. And what will you do when that weapon is trained on my friends? Apologize in shock at how your ideals have been usurped? Apologize and say that it was a trade-off that must be made? Say that your priorities have shifted? No, that's not nearly enough. The weapon must simply not be built.
- 0xy 6y agoI don't support unions because unions drag everyone's wages to an average (I'd rather be a top performer and be paid accordingly). Also, I've seen first hand the amount of incompetent teachers, police and government employees who are unfireable because of unions. So the concept of a union for me personally means I'll be paid less, be surrounded by unfireable underperformers and have zero incentive to improve my craft. I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work.
- bawolff 6y agoThis viewpoint always seemed silly to me. Actors have a union, yet the variation between highest paid actors and low paid actors is in the hundreds of millions.
- 0xy 6y agoThe highest performing teachers in a state with teacher unionization is paid the same as the lowest performing teacher who is totally incompetent. This rewards ineptitude, punishes high performance and punishes children. The worst thing about unions is protecting low performers, though.
- bawolff 6y agoSo? Don't have that type of union. Unions fight for what their members want them to fight for. Some unions fight for things i wouldn't want. Some unions fight for things that i would want in some jobs but not in the tech industry. It doesn't follow that just because one union did X all unions would do X.
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- waon 6y ago> I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work. The president of the United States is threatening military violence against its own citizens and you criticize people for being "political"? Seriously?
- baddox 6y agoSerious question: do you genuinely think he would care if 50% of the SREs went on strike, or even if they quit immediately? I find it hard to believe that he would be significantly distraught.
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- malandrew 6y agoThis is absolutely the worst use of a union. Good uses of a Union: maintain a high professional standard and high pay Bad uses of a Union: protect incompetent members and get involved in political issues of interest to only a subset of union members. The threshold for getting involved in a political issue should be a minimum of 4/5s of members if not even higher.
- luckylion 6y agoI cannot agree more. If you make everything about politics, you will either force people who don't align with your politics to split off, or silently tolerate that you're using "the union" against them and their interests. Single issue organizations are much better. You don't need to agree on how to run the justice system to promote safe drinking water, so don't use the Safe Water Now organization to weight in on prison reform or police laws. Start a new, unrelated org if you want to do that.
- smegma2 6y agoDo teachers wield massive political power?
- 2arrs2ells 6y agoTeachers unions are very influential - especially in state and local elections (ex. described here as "political juggernauts" https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/02/14/are-teachers-unions-on-the-brink-of.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/02/14/are-teachers-u...)
- blaser-waffle 6y agoDepends on the state. In some they have actual power; in others they're a boogyman pushed by conservatives who want to push for private schools a la Betsy DeVos. They're fairly strong in Canadian provinces.
- jshaqaw 6y agoParticularly in blue states the public unions have massive power because they can turnout voting blocs in generally low turnout primaries. Since a Democrat is 99 percent likely to win, the primaries is where the power is.