Perhaps I'm missing something, but Google seems to experience far more labor action than most other large tech employers. Why is that?
Because they cave into the demands for better or for worse.
All employers cave to labor action.
Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
291–300 of 473 posts
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overperformance is when a worker overexerts themselves, by working themselves harder or for longer. Overperformance is a problem because it exerts pressure on the other workers to do the same, leading to a runaway effect of increasing expectation for results while workers are left exhausting their bodies and their time, and often their own personal resources, trying to meet that expectation in order to not be fired o…
Are you implying that performance is proportional to hours worked? Research shows that this is not the case for most people and that returns past a certain work/life balance ratio are marginal or negative.
I don't think that is the implication. What is being said is that people start e.g. working 10 hours a day and that becomes expected regardless of performance. This type of thing is very common in Asia.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why couldn’t a union created by presumably innovative, disruptive tech workers, invent a better mechanism than seniority-based pay? All of this anti-union rhetoric imagines that unions are inherently stuck in the 19th century and lack imagination.
There's always human nature to wreck a good idea.
And yet, Silicon Valley seems to be currently focused less on tech itself than using tech to reshape many long-running social conventions. Why would labor relationships be any different?
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not against unions but having spent a career trying to get business to tell me what exactly they want I tend not to put too much faith in large organisations. I feel the administrative overhead of getting all us programmers to agree on specific principles as part of a union is literally going to be impossible. Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get p…
Maybe some famous people will pen something like the 'Agile Manifesto' for unionized knowledge work, and it will slowly catch on. It could happen (though it would be risky for anyone who isn't self-employed to be an authors)
As I’ve mentioned before, software engineers will embrace unions once they accidentally reinvent the concept from first principles under a different name.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
A tech union seems inevitable at this point. It seems like there has been some false starts, but there is a "market need" that is being unmet. Silicon Valley has shown it's very good at meeting unfulfilled market needs.
While true, how do you do that and still maintain the flexibility of moving from lets say Javascript to Golang or Swift development? A Union would stifle or add friction for people wanting to quit your current job work with different technologies they want to work on professionally.
Why? A tech union need not operate in the same way previous unions have.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
This opinion reflects a particular kind of career and living situation. If you rent and work in a field that has many options per city, and/or remote work, things are fine. I've heard it said that programming is an industry that favors lateral movement. On the other hand, if you own a house and the economy has tanked to where it's worth less than you owe on it, and you work for a large company that is a unique indust…
I'm familiar with that argument. My take is that I don't make much of a distinction between a worker and an entrepreneur. I think the healthiest approach is for everyone to see their personal financial journey the same as if it were a business. The situation of owning (or rather heavy leveraging the purchase of) a house and working for a company that is unique in the town, etc. is the result of a series of risk/rewar…
A counter perspective to this: what is a company? Is it not a group of people organized with a central purpose? So to discourage or ban other forms of organizing that may overlap this organization is actually the compromise of principles in this case. A union is just another group of people making an agreement together. The difference is, the company is organized by, and empowers, the person at the top. The union is organized by, and empowers, the workers. I don't see how they're different or how it can be legal or ethical to silence one type of group. As to what particular actions either group can legally or ethically demand of its members, that's where the real discussion begins.
Edit to elaborate:
I'd go so far as to say that companies getting larger or merging is a form of collusion. Say you have 10 small companies that each need one programmer. They are in competition. They each have to pay a fair wage in hopes of snagging you. Say they all merge. Sure, there's a global marketplace for the hotshot programmers still, but they have drastically reduced the local competition. If they're still hiring 10 programmers, they have much more power now because there are 9 fewer alternatives to consider, both for bargaining power and for information about the market.
The solution to this, as companies get to, say, Amazon or Google size, is one of two things. You can have government regulation, like the antitrust suits or minimum wage laws, or you can have the workers do their own form of collusion by forming unions for collective bargaining. Of the two, the latter is much more libertarian in spirit.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#297These 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…
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
Classic retcon argument, which sums up why we can't have nice things any more. Don't unionize it might hurt foreigners or minorities!
Almost as good as Hillary Clinton's observation that breaking up the big banks won't end sexism or racism. So like ... why bother I guess? We can all be serfs who strive towards antiracism and antisexism while under the oligarch heel?
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations! You figured out that this isn’t about “theft of services” or anything like that. It’s about 1) Legalizing retaliation in case you mention the union meeting to a coworker over a Slack private message. 2) Drastically reducing the visibility of union organization in the workplace. That makes it much harder to reach critical mass.
To me the primary issue has nothing to do with unions. It has to do with private property. The company pays for and owns the property. No one should have any "rights" to using it.
Right??! What kind of upside down world of entitlement are we sliding into? With google on your resume just go work somewhere else that fits your ideology better if you aren’t happy with the present’s behavior.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may want to think back just 25 years to the early to mid-nineties when developers where considered “code monkeys” who couldn’t think past their current module and needed “business analysts” to write requirements for them. It wasn’t slavery by any stretch, but working in programming was akin to working in “IT” and thought of as a department full of weird nerds who cost the company money.
Separate business or system analysts managing requirements documentation weren't (and aren't in the many places where they are still a thing) about developers being “code monkeys” with limited and not particularly valued skills, in fact, it was and is usual for such analysts to be considered inferiors to the programming staff who do work that is beneath programmers worth. The reason they exist is because the organiza…
Thank you for your perspective.
Was this always the case though? Perhaps my position is colored by my experience working for a former IBM manager who thought of programmers as those who “just write the code” based on the requirements written by the “more senior” business analysts.
That particular experience reeked of superiority of managers, project managers, and the business analysts who worked directly for them. I admit that my experience could have been anecdotal, however I’ve asked several senior programmers who were active in the nineties who have confirmed the relationships were by and large toxic at the time.
Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers
#300Perhaps I'm missing something, but Google seems to experience far more labor action than most other large tech employers. Why is that?
Google encouraged political discussions as part of their "bring your whole self to work" policy. Most other companies don't.