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Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

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Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#391

Post by mseebach »

minhaz23 wrote: post #389
mseebach wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I started out with BASIC and a library book and a supportive dad, then HTML and Javascript, most likely based on random online guides (this was late 90's), online communities (likely newsgroups and IRC, and I spent a lot of time on Slashdot), then PHP, based on the same. Along the way I taught myself Linux, too. Why? It was what was there and what was accessible. There wasn't a particular plan or direction, j…

I felt that same excitement when I was a kid. Like 10 years ago maybe? The excitement of making a computer do what you want it to do. I used to mod Halo Combat Evolved games for fun and just put random code together and make shit work, picked up HTML and CSS even trying to make myself and some friends clan websites! My father didnt foster it as much, and somewhere along the line I stopped messing around and tinkering…

Web dev, possibly mobile app dev. Not the shining cutting edge, you'll struggle to compete, but the "boring" bread and butter stuff (think "utility company app for meter reading" and "replacing that brittle/broken Sharepoint/Excel based workflow with a simple Ruby on Rails CRUD app" more than "instagram" and "cloud AI internet-of-things"). Focus on adding (and articulating) real business value, not on getting to play with the latest shiny thing.

Alternatively, find a niche that needs fixing with a CRUD web app, then build and sell it.

A couple of years of doing that, always making sure you're educating yourself (educating doesn't have to equal scrambling to keep up to date with every fad or sitting in a classroom, it means making sure that you're adding skills and increasing your proficiency in ways that adds value to your work. Read a few CS textbooks, it's good to know the jargon, and understanding the theory behind what I knew to work was very helpful for me), a lot of good firms will take a good hard look at you. Just always keep in mind that you're "invisible" to recruiters, so you'll probably have to hustle a bit/network a lot.

Anyway, that was roughly my path, combined with moving to London somewhere between paragraphs one and three (employers here care much less about my missing degree than they do in Denmark). YMMV.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#392

Post by jules »

krapp wrote: post #316
jules wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely need government force to enforce the rule that you can't use a gun to make somebody give you their wallet. That is not what I disagree with. Calling this a market regulation is what I disagree with. > You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market. In what sense is that a market at all? Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. Unregul…

> Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. That doesn't have to be true for all parties. Referring to your earlier comment, that "an unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people," I would claim that, yes it does - all that's needed is for someone to pay you to shoot people. Murder for hire, extortion, blackmail, piracy and slavery are all examples of valid markets with non-voluntary participat…

There is nothing involuntary about the _transaction_ when you hire a hitman. The involuntary bit is when the victim receives the bullet.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#393

Post by jules »

jahaja wrote: post #388
jules wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking there is indeed no such thing as a completely voluntary transaction, as every transaction affects a third party, even if in a minuscule way. Similar criticisms can be made of any system, or any word (such as "voluntary") for that matter. The original point of discussion was whether "unregulated market" includes shooting people. As I said above: > Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined sy…

> In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bea…

There is nothing theological about the widely accepted meaning of voluntary. If your definition of voluntary includes putting a gun to somebody's head or does not include exchange of one good for another, then you are the one redefining language in service of your ideology.

The problem in the age of kings was that kings enjoyed special rights and the populace did not have property rights. The king could, and often did, take whatever he wanted without consent. We see the conflict between aristocracy and private property even in modern times. Consider how the aristocracy in the UK reacted to Thatcher's selling off government entities to the people who worked in those entities. The aristocracy reacted in horror when they saw ordinary "peasants" getting control of what were previously government entities controlled by the aristocracy. They desperately attempted to throw her out of the conservative party, and eventually succeeded.

I would also point out that the places on earth where the poor have relatively good lives are precisely the places with property rights, and that the places where the poor aren't even able to get a loaf of bread (e.g. north korea, venezuela, several countries in sub-saharan africa) are precisely the places without property rights.

I'm surprised by the extent to which the recent rise of socialism has even penetrated HN. I fear we need another 100 million cold bodies to relearn that lesson.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#394

Post by pyrale »

jules wrote: post #385
pyrale wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did not follow my advice: rather than fixating on the violence, look at what happened before: these workers effectively lived in cities where the only jobs available were those provided by the mine owners. In the case of Ludlow, despite it being illegal, they were paid in script money. This means they could only buy from the company, and only what the company would sell to them. The pay incentive system, which on…

Why is that relevant when the violence was initiated by the company?

It is relevant because there is more to violence than merely physically harming people. Forcing people to use script money when it's not legal is a form of violence, even if they can leave town. Forcing curfew is a form of violence. Refusing to pay workers for work that isn't related directly to profit, but to workers' safety is a form of violence and endangerment, even though it's the miner that still decides he needs that job so much it's worth taking the risk.

Once you've piled up all these kinds of domination schemes, it becomes hard for the owner to actually discern the difference between all of this and physical violence ; it is also a process of dehumanization that makes it much harder to consider the workers deserve safety. Therefore, violence that goes as far as deportation, mutilation or death becomes acceptable.

My point being, there is no instance of unfettered relations of power that don't end up like that.

I believe there's a large corpus of work on the various areas involved here, if you want a specific precision, I can try to find relevant infos.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#395

Post by eli_gottlieb »

morgante wrote: post #324
ryandrake wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. "Shortage of software engineers": The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants. > I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there in…

> If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing In my corner of the world, they definitely are. I think a lot of these discussions are complicated by the fact that there are essentially two developer job markets: prime and sub-prime. The prime developer market is for top-tier developers who work at top tech companies and startups, primarily in SV & NYC. The sub-prime developer market is all the developers working…

>A hiring manager in the prime market might legitimately perceive there as being a shortage, even when receiving dozens or hundreds of resumes because the vast majority of those resumes are simply not qualified.

I was unemployed last winter into spring. I had job experience on my resume, as an embedded firmware developer. No company doing embedded wanted to hire me, because I'd worked on a small variety of fairly specific boards. No company doing non-embedded wanted to hire me, because I lacked substantial web-dev experience. I thus went from a six-figure year to depressingly continual unemployment.

I have a job now, but at a reduced salary because, well, I have to be the junior to do webdev (a friend helped me out).

Really seems to me like there's no shortage, and salaries are not skyrocketing. Nothing's gotten expensive enough that anyone's considered hiring people without exact skill combinations, but who otherwise have solid records.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#396

Post by eli_gottlieb »

deathanatos wrote: post #327
ryandrake wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. "Shortage of software engineers": The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants. > I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there in…

> The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants. I don't know whether to think it is real, or that it is a myth. It's true that tech companies are picky, it's true that salaries are not skyrocketing. Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, t…

>I don't know whether to think it is real, or that it is a myth. It's true that tech companies are picky, it's true that salaries are not skyrocketing. Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, that was my impression.

Then you should probably hurry up and skyrocket your salaries.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#397

Post by eli_gottlieb »

halflings wrote: post #278

> When the crowd reconvened, Andrew Barney, a former Intel cafeteria worker, drew cheers and applause when he said, “I think Google should pay the residents of this community for being allowed to squat in our backyard.” “Google’s vulnerable right now with all this building and everything they’re doing, and they need a lot of approvals,” says the Teamsters’ Aloise. “We may just pick one, one time, to get involved, and…

Speaking from another metro area, that sounds like what companies do to our municipalities when offering to set up shop. Oh, sure, they'll build an office here... so long as we shovel some free public money down their throat to "incentivize" them to make a profit off our labor.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#398

Post by viridian »

tptacek wrote: post #107
tedunangst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that the word union has a particular stigma not shared by associations not called unions.

You hear a lot of things about city bus drivers burning down houses, or telecom engineers slashing tires? There are a lot more unions in the US than people realize. For some reason (I can think of many), high-status workers in the US are captivated by the drama of a few particular unions, and have extrapolated wildly from it.

Coal unions have executed non-union shippers and started shootouts during union strikes where I'm from, back in the 30's - 70's when the town was a coal town. It's anecdotal I know, but it always colors the discussion of unions in places like Appalachia. Also the violence has gone both ways, the government at one time wasn't above plying the strong arm of the national guard against unions.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#399

Post by jahaja »

jules wrote: post #393
jahaja wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bea…

There is nothing theological about the widely accepted meaning of voluntary. If your definition of voluntary includes putting a gun to somebody's head or does not include exchange of one good for another, then you are the one redefining language in service of your ideology. The problem in the age of kings was that kings enjoyed special rights and the populace did not have property rights. The king could, and often di…

It's certainly not widely accepted. Almost only libertarians have such a dogmatic understanding of the meaning of voluntary - simply because it defies common sense. Furthermore I have no idea where I defined it as including "putting a gun to somebody's head". However I do recognize, unlike libertarians, that there's both direct and indirect ways of putting a gun towards someones head. Only acknowledging the former is to, as you nicely put it; "redefining language in service of your ideology".

You do realize that even if the common people would have property rights during the age of kings it wouldn't matter? Neither will it in a modern version of it. The concentration of capital/property, and thus kings, would be inevitable. I'm sure this is a feature and not a bug given the demographics of libertarians.

Also you could've spared me the inevitable "Let's compare the idea I oppose by a measurement than I'm not willing to judge my own idea". I'm sure we could compile an equal body count of regimes calling themselves free market/market economy/capitalist or similar. But people using this body count rhetoric seldom accept such comparisons.

Re: Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at Apple, Facebook, Yahoo

#400

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jules wrote: post #222
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does your ownership of the land originate if not from someone at some point in history using the threat of violence to keep other people off of it? The concept of an unregulated market that includes land ownership is already nonsense because the system of land ownership is inherently non-voluntary. I never opted into the system where people can exclude me from certain parts of the earth; it was imposed on me wi…

> Where does your ownership of the land originate if not from someone at some point in history using the threat of violence to keep other people off of it? It comes from exactly that, and the system in which that occurred was not a free market. > it was imposed on me with the threat of violence. Absolutely, _the system_ is imposed with the threat of violence. I said that transactions within the system must be volunta…

That's an awfully convenient choice of what can regulated and what can't be regulated. Regulations can be imposed to regulate what 7.4 billion people can do with a piece of land, but applying them to one additional person is beyond the pale?
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