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If I was Tim Cook I would immediately shutdown slack and mandate everyone go back to using email. It’s always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack w
by vimy 5y ago
If I was Tim Cook I would immediately shutdown slack and mandate everyone go back to using email. It’s always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoThis would not help Apple’s case with the current Department of Labor probes, as well as the investigations complaints lodged with California’s Dept of Industrial Relations Labor Commissioner's Office. Organizing efforts are protected by federal law, as is discussing and sharing your compensation information with others (regarding pay equity). https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investigation-083212877.html https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investig...
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIs it similar to Twitter where the <0.1% drive dialogue?
- epistasis 5y agoYou could say that about most communities though. For every person that submits an article to HN, how many readers are there?
- anonporridge 5y agoSame with Reddit. Hell, same with IRL, in person communities. Honestly, that realization is part of why I started commenting on message boards rather than lurking. The vast majority of people read but don't even bother to up/down vote. You have a lot of outsized influence if you choose to comment, even if it doesn't seem like your comments get much attention.
- mhh__ 5y agoSomewhere between 5 and 10 million uniques a day IIRC
- fragmede 5y agoAn unofficial, definitely don't tell management slack would have 1000s of users before the email prohibiting it managed to finish sending to all employees. Draconian policies seem viable and like they'd work, but they require a certain amount of compliance to be effective.
- dogman144 5y agoThese shadow IT attempts surface all the time through a vaguely competent SecOps’ team daily work, especially insider threat. Gets bragged about or picked up via MDM or DNS queries. So ya in this case the rule comes with easy enforcement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gkop 5y agoYour comment raised some questions for me: * Just curious, how do you enforce against, for example, a Facebook group? Would you have to totally block Facebook? * With word of mouth an activist Slack workspace can take off on personal devices over cellular data, if the conditions are right. Is the idea of internal enforcement just to make it less convenient to participate? * Why don’t activists use Blind to organize? Is Blind hostile to activists? How active is Blind at moderating content on behalf of companies (eg. taking down or burying activist content)?
- dogman144 5y agoTo preface, “insider threat” is a bit of a harsh way to name the program this behavior falls under- it also covers “good” employees behaving in non-malicious but mistaken ways that will harm a company. Also, all work-related actions taking place off work devices gets covered under an AUP. So heading into this, Apple has both the program and policy to enforce a few different legal/HR actions against employees who’d go this route. With insider threat, the idea isn’t to force the behavior into concealed channels, but instead into “cleartext” channels where the data exfil, or I guess in this case subversive employee behavior, can be watched/snapshotted. Once that’s done, it goes over to HR/legal. So it’s not so much make it inconvenient to participate, but to make it easy to catch that participation is occurring, with some safeguards around what that participation is - chatter is ok, but have safeguard for Apple intellectual property landing in that activist slack. So with FB and Blind, a company has two ways to ID that’s occurring, take evidence,nand then over to HR /Legal it goes. If it occurs on work computers, one is device management tools like Forcepoint that allow an insider threat team to see your real time action. They see the employee going to this Slack/Blind, insider threat team starts taking artifacts, and that’s evidence. Other device mgmt tools aren’t as invasive, but achieve similar ends. All in all, regardless of the forum, the behavior can get caught, and it’s shipped to HR. If all of the activism occurs off work computers, I’d bet the behavior gets caught by two ways. One, 3rd party vendors who scan social media/GitHub for company branding existing outside of company channels (so on FB “Apple Activist Group” would fire). Two, and more likely, is the activists suck at OPSEC because Bob or Susan from marketing who join the group but computers are Google-machines to them talk about it on work devices or the water cooler/Slack. Gotta remember a place like Apple has insider threat programs dealing with industrial/corporate espionage. A bunch of pissed off activist employees trying to sneak around aren’t the same challenge. If Apple did have an employee activist group with ironclad OPSEC, Apple prob has big problems and those employees need to balance how important the cause is and why can’t they just talk about it to mgmt vs how that would look from the outside to a company/law enforcement.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoThat would push internal communications into a far more externally facing/visible forum, I would guess.
- hamburglar 5y agoI think when "suppressing employee communication" is part of your playbook, it's time to consider that the unrest might be warranted.
- wolverine876 5y ago> It's always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies. This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 million people in the streets. Just think of the logistics of food, water, and waste ... cellular data bandwidth ... Twitter, Facebook and Instagram load ...) That's how change happens; we try to persuade each other. People who are more involved, motivated, skilled, available, etc. do more of the work. If there was an environmental problem in SF Bay, the people who have the knowledge and expertise about the issue, and the communication skills, would inform and try to persuade everyone else. I'm not going to investigate it myself.
- Spooky23 5y agoA business isn’t a social club. More often than not, agitators have an agenda to agitate no matter what, or to provide air cover for other issues. When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.
- exBarrelSpoiler 5y agoApple isn't like any business you've worked at before. While this movement might have signs of social activism, Apple's culture of secrecy is sui generis. It's been a long time coming for any sort of pushback against it, and it makes sense that it took a pandemic and enforced WFH for the systems of control to begin to break down. As to whether or not their grievances are warranted, try asking any of your colleagues who used to work at Apple, and decide for yourself.
- wolverine876 5y agoPeople never have legitimate concerns about pay, working conditions, etc.?
- 5y ago
- lostinquebec 5y agoThat's the right direction, but the wrong policy. Basecamp's "no talking politics on work channels" is more likely to be effective, in part because spending work hours on other things - e.g. a political non-company slack - then becomes an issue of wasting time.
- fortran77 5y agoTim Cook reaps what he sows. He started all this when he fired Antonio García Martínez in response to an employee petition. (Hint to Tim Cook: You should have fired each and every one of the employees who signed that petition.) He made the wrong, worst people at the company feel "empowered" and now there's no stopping them.
- kf6nux 5y agoFor those who don't remember, this fired leader wrote "Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self- regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel" and many other things similar to it. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-hiring-antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos-monkeys-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...
- samhwr 5y agoYeah, the complaining about this is ludicrous. It feels like there are increasingly two camps, one of which believes anyone fired for social justice reasons is being wronged due to some kind of cancel culture, and the other of which believes that the former never happens in any case. The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 5y agoThe fact is, that was a minor point in a well-received, critically-reviewd book he wrote a number of years before he was offered the job at Apple, and Apple hired him knowing about the book. And now you, who never read the book but copy-pasta a few quoted sentences, want to destroy this man. To go back after the fact and fire someone because of this was wrong. (That's why Apple settled for a lot of money, and Mr. Garcia can no longer talk about it.)
- Bahamut 5y agoJust a note, before Slack a lot of the company was just using iMessage - nobody wants that, 30+ people group chats with messages at all hours of the day was the worst digital communication experience I've ever seen at a company.