101–110 of 148 posts
I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee pressure. I can’t imagine Bell Lab employees had all that much leverage against Ma Bell.
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I’ve often wondered this myself. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on search alone. I can’t even fathom what they’re all doing. And then what is everyone filling their time with?
Google builds a lot more of its own infrastructure than other companies can afford to do, all the way down to the hardware. They also change things more often internally than you will see with public-facing API's. What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to…
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This is likely the only segment of the labor market outside of executives that are highly valued by Corporations. Naturally, they have to be coddled and not abused like most of the rest of the American workforce.
I wouldn't be easily fooled. Companies try as hard as they can to turn engineering talent into a commodity, and they're relatively successful. The High-Tech Employee Antitrust suit is an example of this. If you need to work for a living, employers will commodify your role to the best of their abilities.
Employees: get the most money for their labor. Employers: get the labor for the least possible money.
It may not be ethical in your viewpoint, but those are the natural forces at play. It follows that employers will commodify my role as part of their strategy to pay me less. So I take other actions to make myself more valuable. As long as those actions are strictly technical (learning new technology, rather than management), I am quite happy to play this natural game driven entirely by reason.
I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee pressure. I can’t imagine Bell Lab employees had all that much leverage against Ma Bell.
That's not true. The majority of google employees are in areas that directly impact the bottom line such search, ads, sales, technical infrastructure.
Someone posted preliminary sit-in attendance numbers. Attendance ranges from 50-150 per office in the larger offices. Anecdotally, I've seen very little discussion and energy this time compared to the walkout. Back then, one couldn't walk 20 feet without hitting some kind of exhortation to join the walkout. This time, more people might find out about this sit-in through this HN story than through internal channels. T…
Because the protest is such a matter of indifference at Google that... you need to take extreme measures not to be identified talking about it?
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Here's a WaPo article from the controversial woman Google appointed to the board, Kay Cole James. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-help-goo... I may not agree with her politically, but its important to have different viewpoints in discourse as long as they're rooted in principles. I think its shameful that the AI Ethics Council was disbanded, if employees took issue with her it would have been nice…
> its important to have different viewpoints in discourse as long as they're rooted in principles. OK, so besides James', which other viewpoints rooted in principles were represented on the council? Did Google assemble a panel of balanced viewpoints?
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This guy literally said the hiring bar was lowered for women. It says that in his doc. And it's false. After everyone was upset about this, he never apologized or walked back that part of the doc at all.
> And it's false Is it possible that Damore witnessed specific instance(s) of an explicit bar-lowering (or a trend for one team/manager) but no general policy at Google? I am asking out of curiosity, I don't want to skewer or stick up for Damore.
Someone posted preliminary sit-in attendance numbers. Attendance ranges from 50-150 per office in the larger offices. Anecdotally, I've seen very little discussion and energy this time compared to the walkout. Back then, one couldn't walk 20 feet without hitting some kind of exhortation to join the walkout. This time, more people might find out about this sit-in through this HN story than through internal channels. T…
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Toleration of intolerance is self-defeating, but you probably knew that.
> Toleration of intolerance is self-defeating, but you probably knew that. That rather suggests that it is Meredith Whittaker's intolerance that we should not be tolerating, no?
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That's not true. The majority of google employees are in areas that directly impact the bottom line such search, ads, sales, technical infrastructure.
I believe ads, but search core search stuff can't be that many people.