751–760 of 779 posts
I'm constantly baffled by how anti-union many Americans are, how willing to give up their rights.
My impression of these tech unionization efforts are that they're mostly about pushing a social/political agenda, with workers rights being an afterthought. Every single time I see these posts the involved employees are activist LGBT folks. Am I wrong here? Why do all these issues seem to stem from the same group of people?
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A CompTia Security+ cert is actually pretty trivial. It's complete regurgitation, and not even of industry standard best practices, but of CompTia defined "best" practices. It's the lowest and most basic tech cert you can get. It certainly isn't evidence of any engineering discipline. The board and shareholders will have to decide whether this action was, or was not, in their best interests. But history has shown tha…
> It's the lowest and most basic tech cert you can get. As opposed to... what? Do college degrees promise engineering discipline? Surely not. Many successful engineers have nothing more than a high school diploma and industry experience. This has clearly gone into sexist territory now. She's a she, and therefore her experience and education is going to be audited by arbitrary and increasingly vague standards to make…
How insane to claim that simple negativity toward a member of a protected group is an -ism. I'm not saying she isn't an engineer because of ANYTHING related to her sex.
She's getting raked over the coals because what she did was stupid and shows incredibly bad judgement. To imply that this is less bad, or maybe we shouldn't discuss it, or maybe we'd have a different opinion if she was not female is itself far more sexist.
I fully support non-degreed engineers. Yes, I agree there is no litmus test for "Engineer".
I'm clearly stating that a CompTIA+ is not sufficient to call someone an engineer. Regurgitating questionable facts does not make you an engineer. I didn't move the goalpost. But I can recognize something that isn't one.
She screwed up bad, because if there is ever any collective action, her case won't be in on it. She gave google an ironclad excuse to be fired. I'm not even arguing right vs. wrong but the way employment lawsuits work, she has zero chance.
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It doesn't matter if it's "political" or not. It's completely 100% google management's choice whether the punishment for a serious (or tiny) rule infraction is anything from no action at all to firing. There is no rule that says it has to be consistent either. You can't fire a worker for organizing, or on the basis of sex, race, etc. But you CAN fire whoever you want for breaking even the most minor rules or even jus…
No, courts are run by humans and patched the "pretense" hack a long time ago.
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Being in charge of the infrastructure does not mean you are in charge of the content. Those are well defined roles. Specially in a company of that size. She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.
True, but the optics are terrible on this one. They should have seen this one coming and promoted her instead. They also should stop trying to prevent googlers from unionizing. The google of today is not the google of 15 years ago that's for sure. While they're at it, they should stop bending (and probably breaking) export controls regarding China, and stop doing immoral DoD and ICE projects. And heck, why not implem…
Now understandably the janitor has provided a lot less capital than deeply invested shareholder, so their votes are uniformly weighted according to their share of ownership.
I'm guessing the engineer might own about 1/10,000,000th or so of the company if she has a healthy 401K. So as long as she can convince 10,000 or so other employees and 49.91% of the rest of shareholders to go along...
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When workers organize and attempt to make demands greater than than the bosses are willing accede to, the bosses call in the police, private security, and depending on the political climate, right wing street fighters to start cracking heads. For a famous example of a dual power situation consider the 1934 Minneapolis teamsters' strike. https://teamster.org/about/teamster-history/1934
Even setting aside the obvious " Two wrongs do not make a right " response, if you have to cite history from 3/4 of a century ago, well...good luck persuading people with that. On the other hand, the public can easily find news stories of major corruption and criminal involvement by unions for each of the past few decades. (Oh, and by the way, the Teamsters, whose site you linked to, figure prominently in quite a num…
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Of course they do. They wouldn't hire you otherwise.
They hire you to make money off your labour, and pay you less than you make them, none of that involves "partnership".
Understand: I make no claim that malevolently exploitative companies don't exist; of course they do.
But your position seems to be that any company that makes any profit is malevolently exploitative.
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Which is pretty dumb. The most important threat to a typical office dev computer is not console access, it's wayward processes and network traffic. What's more secure, a locked console (that protects you from ~1 local people that you know) or something like Little Snitch, which protects you from ~10e6 people you don't know?
It depends on the industry and the company. In some types of government work, it's a very serious security violation.
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You added your personal code to a browser extension.. I can't see how google is in the wrong. Unless google allows anyone to change this extension for personal reasons and they only flagged her. Could someone change it to let everyone know they are selling cookies or accepting donations to their church.
That's not how Google works. She mentions in the Gizmodo article that she had ownership over these files, which isn't given out casually. Creating these policy notifications would have been a core part of her work.
It's incredibly obvious this was a violation of her fiduciary duty.
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It's significant that she did this on her own. You need multiple people for protected concerted activity.
It sounds like she went through a code review process for the change, would that count?
I don't believe the code review meets this test, but I'd love to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about.