Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by simion314 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #334

simion314 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this in other comments, actors have unions but they still have different salary(superstarts will earn much more then a new unknown actor) and they seem very eager to join the union(or guild or how it is named I am not from US). So it seems that programmers were scared by some bad stories that everyone will have same salary.

> they seem very eager to join the union The actors/aspiring actors I know are only eager to join the union because a) it gets them access to union-exclusive jobs (not a benefit that would exist if the union didn't exist) and b) it gets them access to better negotiated health insurance, which can be difficult with intermittent employment (which is the case for most people in the theater world, well-paid or not). B pr…

A real union would not work as a club, if you are employee you have the option to chose an union, but actors are different.

How I learn about them was from actors that were put in unhealthy conditions and they appealed to the unions to fix the working conditions.

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

#342

Post by techsupporter » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #246

vips7L wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not forced to do any of those things. You are able to find a new employer whenever you want.

I might not able to find a new employer whenever I want. I might not have time to job search because I have children. I might have dependents or I myself need critical medical care that cannot be interrupted by job hopping. I might have a family emergency that has destroyed my savings to look for a new job. I might be in the point of my career in which leaving for a new job so soon would be a red flag to employers. I…

> Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.

Exactly this.

This is why I work the requested 40ish* hours per week that my employer purchases in bulk from me, and rarely more. It's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated. I work very hard while I am working and I do more than the baseline my employer requests of me. My management thinks highly of me and I am well-compensated for my efforts, so clearly my employer values the contributions I make.

I do the work hours I do and how I do them, pushing back on unreasonable on-calls and repeatedly staying late, because I am senior so I have the voice to be able to discourage management not staffing our group appropriately and not setting unreasonable deadlines. I make sure my juniors know, too, that the way to your personal success is a healthy work-life balance that works both for you and for the group of people in which we are ensconced. I also make sure I mentor my juniors and I do what I can to help others be more efficient and effective.

No one should have to burn the candle at both ends just to be able to be seen as doing a good job.

* There are exceptions, of course. I am not inflexible, because that's unreasonable, but my employer pays for approximately 40 hours per week of my valuable single life in this universe and 40 hours, roughly, is what it shall receive.

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

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Post by mbrumlow » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #317

mbrumlow wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By men youean man. And isolated events with individual employees who arguably had alot of power -- given he founded Android -- is a non issue in this argument. Google or any company has no responsibility or should be required to publicly shame employees who misbehave. And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened. The rest of your conserns seem valid though.

As a shareholder at Google, it is absolutely one's business whether the company is paying hush money to make personnel problems go away.

I don't think being a shareholder gives you such rights. Even so, the guy in question probably had more shares than you thus trumps your desire to be a busy body.

Lets see you walk on the google campus and demand to see who has been reprimanded recently to some random manager. As you are dragged off the campus yelling "but but but I am a shareholder....."

But beyond that it is more likely he had a exit plan under which he was guaranteed such money when he joined google, bringing his baby Android. And as I recall it it was not as cut and dry of a situation as everybody likes to make it out to be. It never is.

So you can be outraged all you want, and perpetuate phantom "rights" of being a share holder, but at the end of the day you are not helping the situation.

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

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Post by rchaud » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #301

rchaud wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance. People are talking about the benefits of unionization in a specific industry in response to the near-automatic narrative that unions are bad. You gave an example of an absurd regulation in a completely different industry. How does that tie into what collective bargaining in software dev would look like?

Great question. Of course unions in software aren't really a widespread thing, so speculating at what they would look like is fraught with all the problems of speculation, but this is what I think of: Currently at work, I'm more of a "devops" guy but I get into things all over the stack sometimes too. In previous places I've been a "backend" guy that occasionally got into the frontend, etc. I view this as the optimal…

I can definitely agree with your rephrasing. Unions can be large organizations too, and are certainly not immune to bureaucracy and the pursuit of short-term wins over long-term gains for the people they represent.

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

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Post by hippich » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

hoaw wrote: post #339

hippich wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not talking about some abstract ideas. Me personally, as a foreigner, with an unrelated degree, with low language skills, shaky immigration status, flexibility to pick where to give up something to get a job benefited tremendously. To put it another way - being able to allow being exploited allowed me to secure a better future. Without this ability, I would unlikely to have a life as good as I have it now. Today I am…

It isn't a particularly good idea to build something on survivorship bias. For everyone who got into computers and found a booming industry there were people who were into something else which didn't boom, or never got he chance to be into something in the first place. There are talented people who should but can't get into the tech job market, working lowly IT jobs or in other ways aren't doing so well. Undue regula…

I agree with that, where I got a life chance someone else probably did not get a pay raise or got fired. Now the question is what is fairer, can it be more than zero-sum game, and is there a set of regulations that will make everyone benefit.

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

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Post by rhizome » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #304

jancsika wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof). So even with a history of Silicon Valley playing tricks to suppress what developers get paid[1], the typical HN reader is humdrum about salary because it's "better than average?" I have a hard time believing…

> So even with a history of Silicon Valley playing tricks to suppress what developers get paid[1], the typical HN reader is humdrum about salary because it's "better than average?" I have a hard time believing that. Yes, because the "pay suppression's" effect was to knock people making six-figure salaries down to six-figure salaries, on average. It actually had very little observable negative effect. (Note that if yo…

Note that if you go back to the original lawsuits, they were regarding gentlemen's agreements around headhunting. Given that SV's default attitude is "individuals are responsible for themselves," an agreement against headhunting isn't interesting---if an employee is dissatisfied, they know where the competition is and who to talk to about changing companies

You may be interested to learn that one of the corrupt agreements was that in the event that an employee does talk to the competition about changing companies and one of the other colluding companies makes an offer to the employee, that company will not counter-offer beyond the first offer.

So, "little observable negative effect" is not quite as dispositive (or even as visible) as you portray it would be.

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

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Post by aquadrop » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

what_ever wrote: post #283

dominotw wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee 100% that if there is a ever a union for IT workers. First ask would be, Ban H1B

Why? Would the union only consist of American workers?

Because that's what unions do. They protect current members at the expense of everyone else, including unionized colleagues.

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

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Post by dvtrn » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #293

yters wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would labor relationships be any different?

Well it seems like there's some interest to take that on at least from a product perspective when you look at these HR, Payroll, Employee Relations platforms coming out that could be argued try to take a portion of the market away from HR giants like ADP.

And then you have the various interviewing services (interviewing.io is an example I often point to), developer bootcamps with (presumably, at least by some of the verbiage used by said bootcamps) deep connections and mentor programs that ostensibly exist to get people hired.

Then there are your ZipRecruiters and Indeeds that claim to have revolutionized online recruiting and staffing.

Maybe the question isn't "why would labor relations be any different" but "how can tech make more of an impact in labor relations than just getting people hired and automating payroll?"

I don't have that answer, just thinking through my keyboard here.

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

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Post by Aunche » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

Itaxpica wrote: post #324

Aunche wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that software engineers, especially those at Google, have high social mobility and are well educated. I think that unions are inefficient, but I'm sympathetic towards or even support most of them because those workers don't have a better option. Googlers just come off as entitled. They should be intelligent enough to acknowledge when they're making clickbaity populist arguments that misrepresent com…

Funny how people only ever use "entitled" to describe labor demanding better treatment from management, but never to describe management demanding that labor do more for less.

Every time an Googler has a minor complaint about something that is miles away from their area of expertise expertise, it blows up to the front page of Hacker News. That's what I find entitled. They can't accept that one of the largest companies in the world is not going to bend to the wills. This happened with the Damore memo or project Maven, so they feed misleading information to the media to get populist pressure on their company. Now, everyone is acting suprised that Google is looking into protective measures.

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

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Post by asdff » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

bunnycorn wrote: post #306

wasdfff wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make a living building missiles payed for with public money that blow up schoolbusses across the world just to put their own children in a better school district. When people get a decent paycheck no one thinks about how much that dollar cost.

If you think your country commits such acts of war crimes, then you should flee your country today. If you are not building the missiles, you are paying taxes that go to buy those missiles to blow up school buses. As an Electrical Engineer, I would be glad to help my country or the allies of my country to build missiles to help in the war effort. If we don't help, we will end up with barbarians blowing up our neighbo…

You are correct, it is pretty heinous that we are all beholden to paying the war industry vast sums of money. Is it really worth it to spend millions on missiles that notoriously miss their targets? Wouldn't a very small trained team of operators be much better and far cheaper at safely eliminating a threat than blowing up an entire apartment complex from a desk hundreds of miles away with a missile that costs more than everything in that town? In August, Saudi Arabia fired a missile that killed 40 school children (1), probably one of the many weapons they bought from the US. I'm sure that missile that ended their lives cost 1000x more than whatever school building they were bussing to when they became the latest victims of geopolitical theater.

At which point do you realize you are engineering more and more expensive and advanced ways of killing for the sake of skimming personal profit for executives and investors out of public budgets? If I worked for one of these companies, I don't think I could live with myself with that huge guilt, knowing my great efforts lead directly to further destabilizing the world and ending peoples lives. I'm not comfortable using my skills to perfect ending peoples lives. That isn't innovation, that isn't advancement, that is regression. Raytheon is the barbarian blowing up the neighborhood, not a Yemeni schoolkid.

1. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/13/middleeast/yemen-children...