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Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

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Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#231

I'm a googler, going anonymous for soon-to-be obvious reasons. While I think this headline is overblown, I think the change would be for the better. For the past couple of years working at Google has been like what I'd imagine it's to work for the Trump administration: constant scandals, people around you being outraged, constant diversion of internal attention to issues unrelated to the core business etc. Nominally…

This is just what it's like to work at a large tech company in the Trump era. Emotions run too hot, and the vocal minority runs the show. I'm just waiting them out, their lack of focus on their actual work will be their downfall.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer. Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. From that perspective, organized labor seems like an unnecessary dependency. Programming is a form of extreme independence many will be hard fought to give away. Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.

> Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. If your code isn't using your own libraries compiled by your own compiler hosted on your own OS running on your self-built machine using a CPU you designed, no, it isn't. Sure, your own hard work and passion goes a long way but you rely heavily on the works of others and the privilege of being able to use them.

But people who developed those libraries allow anyone to use them, so you have the same chance as yor neighbor to develop the next Google, and there are a lot of smart people trying to do it, and not all of them will succeed.

So, your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#234

There’s something very rotten at the top levels at Google. The “Don’t be evil” motto has long disappeared and has been replaced by apathy and/or hostility on different fronts. Maybe this move by Google is actually good...to help more employees and others realize how the company has morphed into something that’s no longer doing as much good for humanity as it used to boast about. I’m still hopeful that the rot in comp…

Relations with Google are definitely starting to sour, here are a few recent examples: - IE switches to Chromium engine, Chrome has full clearance to dominate the web. - Questionable actions toward ad-blocking (seen only just yesterday). - Colluding with China to create a blatantly dishonest search engine. - Questionable products (Google Fi, Pixel phone, Google Home, etc, are share their own controversies) - Search r…

A somewhat recent news about Google’s silence on sexual harassment by men at senior levels while paying them big exit packages a few years ago.

Logging people in to Chrome automatically and then backing out after heavy backlash.

Google tracking Android users’ location and using it even when they have turned it off.

Then there’s also an older one — Google’s bypassing of Safari’s privacy protection through default blocking of third party cookies.

I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. Many computer professionals still remember how nice it was to be able to get an edge by giving up something (undercut competitors to get the first crucial project in the portfolio, not being judged by your credentials, etc) My prediction - time will pass and…

Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. I don't understand your point at all. Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. The standard argument against unions (esp. in the tech sector) is that they harm high-skilled overperforming workers by capping the maximum benefits they can receiv…

> Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people.

Unions fight to support newcomers? Common union tactics such as closed shops and seniority-based pay agreements are deliberately and severely hostile to newcomers.

> overperforming workers

Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#236
post #90
post #79

These comments read like a bunch of low-income retail shoppers defending Walmart because they provide something they otherwise couldn't get. I think these types of debates are bellwether for programmer/IT professional unionization. These are the exact types of lawsuits brought against organized labor as it was trying to get organized to prevent exploitative behavior. It's disturbing to see these same anti-organizatio…

Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why

"The Californian Ideology"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#237
post #144
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.

Liberalism is a right-wing ideology...

You can think of the political spectrum as a two dimensional plane, so you have the libertarian axis, but on the part of the economy you have a quite different dimension! Interesting that everyone is picking his favorite features when they define their political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Greenberg_a...

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#238
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "being very liberal" is not the same as "being very pro USA Democrats". Liberals are often right wing parties in other countries. Basically you have a scale from socialism where everything in your life is dictated by social contracts to liberalism where almost nothing in your life is dictated by social contracts. The left in the US calling themselves liberals is kinda like the north korea calling themselves "demo…

Yet we are on a U.S. based website talking about a U.S. company and its American workforce and a story published in a U.S. newspaper, so we will stick with the common convention and not go on semantics tangents.

we are on the internet

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#239
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how programmers are super conservative. In my experience, especially on HN, they tend to be fairly progressive on average. However, they also tend to be somewhat libertarian. And so far, software development hasn't been an industry that really needed unionisation. But that could always change in the future, of course. Personally, I generally support unions, though I don't see the need for them in software…

I've found that programmers tend to be socially liberal (pro-gay rights, abortion rights, etc.) but financially conservative (don't like their money being spent on public goods). Which somewhat overlaps with libertarianism, yes.

I dunno if that's true either. Things like UBI were wacky ideas popular in SV culture long before their recent mainstreaming. I think the libertarian streak is better described as a mistrust/realism (depending in your views) of the _competency_ of any given government program.

The government's advantage is that it lets us directly align objectives in a way that markets often don't, but it's disadvantage is that it'll generally optimize much less efficiently for the objective it's targeting. This means that government action and markets are appropriate in different situations; I'm not crazy about the fact that we're the least competent at transit construction in the developed world, but I'm still a supporter of transit investment despite the eye-popping levels of waste.

Live in San Francisco long enough, and you get a really strong sense of how detached a government can get from reality, and how much its actions can reflect the selfishness and idiocy of part of its constituency instead of any pretense of benefiting society or achieving its goals. It's unsurprising that you'd see a portion of the population, especially one used to more well- functioning institutions, start to drift towards support of government policy that doesn't rely on individuals within govt making complex decisions. UBI and other such hands-off policies fit directly into this. They're not anti-govt spending, they're anti-centralized decision-making

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#240
post #144
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.

Liberalism is a right-wing ideology...

It all depends on what you want to be liberal about. You could be liberal about gun rights and advocate laissez-faire capitalism, but not be liberal on social issues such as gay rights and religion. Liberalism is not technically left or right-wing. When someone on the right is saying they don't like "liberals" they mean they don't like social liberals.
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