371–380 of 473 posts
Google has a small but extremely vocal (some would say "unhinged") minority of folks who mostly just do activism on the internal G+ and little else. You can even find their names online from the various leaks if you'd like to follow their own proposed practice of blacklisting people they disagree with.
It was always a mystery to me how they manage to stick around for so long.
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Everyone benefits from a society with high labor costs. Except maybe short term looting interests of top tier capitalists. Even Henry Ford understood this. High labor costs are why people want to live in the US in the first place; it sure ain't the food or the beautiful architecture.
> Everyone benefits from a society with high labor costs. False. China wouldn’t have grown to be such a powerful economy if their labor costs were high. The average Chinese is better off than they were 30 years ago. As far as why people want to live in America? That one is easy: opportunity. Try to start a business in India. Now, try to start that same business in the US. That diff is why people want to be in America…
This is the best defense of sweatshop labor, to be sure, but it’s hardly got legs in the end.
First, “better off” bares defining, and “average” plays a big role in your claim. China is less homogenous than ever before, of course. It’s social make-up is a tremendous mystery for the most part.
Second, are we assuming average Chinese would not be “better off” now than they would be without rabid labor abuse by the billions and free global trade? That’s a heavy assumption to make.
Third, China is a world leader now in a way that it was not 30 years ago. China itself is a world power, and to only measure the “better offness” of the Chinese would be to completely discount the global nature of the stage in which China operates...
The average American is not better off now, and America’s industrial business with China is obviously an important consideration in why.
And, of course, does China impact the quality of lives in other countries? (hint: yes)
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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 bloc…
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.
> And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened.
I strongly disagree. If we have to criticize or call for action only when we're personally impacted, we wouldn't have civilized society. Google paid "hush money" to not reveal what happened. Also, more than 20000 Google employees who staged a walkout in November [2] disagree with your statement that it's none of anybody's business.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/technology/google-rubin-s...
[2]: http://fortune.com/2018/11/03/google-employees-walkout-deman...
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>Every time [...] it blows up [... on] Hacker News. Or only every time you hear about it? Yes, employees are fighting for their wills. What's wrong with that? If you don't fight you don't get anything
> What's wrong with that? Being employed by Google should not give you special political or social privilege. For someone to have the privilege of deciding what one of the worlds largest companies does, they should stump up the resources to become a shareholder. You do not want corporations becoming political. Grocers should not choose their customers based on their political leanings. That would be bad. The principl…
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let me try to help you fill the data you assumed with concrete examples. search H1b applications for google and other companies. you will see google hires with 60-100k salaries. being stuck for 10yrs on the lowest end of our category pay is very far from "high social mobility"
Software engineers don't get hired to Google with 60-100k salaries, not even close.
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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…
> Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar. Try asking them how much they think programmers should be paid and I think you'll find they come to agreement pretty quickly.
Once everyone realizes they need nothing else in common as long as they have this, it all becomes quite obvious.
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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.
The problems happen when the government interferes in this process. For example, recently Washington State removed the exemption mentally disabled workers have from minimum wage laws. This was hailed as a victory for justice and fairness. The result is those workers can't get a job anymore.
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Google, while known for software engineering, employs also people in other professions: - salespeople, - tech support, - cooks, - childcare providers, - all kind of office support folk, - data entry, hmmm, technicians? - probably many more I can't think of. Not all of them can have it as nice as we do.
Almost all the cooks/childcare providers, office support, etc are contractors not employees. A significant amount of SWE and other technical roles are contractors as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/alphabet-google-employed-mor...
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…
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…
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You should be able to see all this as a manager and talk to your people about it. Why does a union need to get involved?
That is assuming there aren't also less smart managers who have short term interests of showing swift progress until the project collapses. Management will in best case take a long term interest in the company. They won't take a long term interest in employees. Certainly not employees who doesn't seem to be performing. That is what unions are for. To represent the employees concerns about the future.
Only I truly have my own interests in mind - not the company and not the union.