The company is slowly dying internally from ideologically possessed people.
Not that that is a bad thing, the great people there will leave for better things.
A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit everyone by name or credit no one by name. It is inherently unfair to only credit key talent.
Isn't the moral right of every (software) author that his name is mentioned next to the authored intellectual property (software)? This is even written in copyright laws of some countries...
That's an excellent question. I believe non-visual moral rights are not recognized in the US, and I'm not sure they've ever been tested for software in any other Berne Convention signatories.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#263The recurring theme in the comments against unions can be captured by a simple truth: Unions don't protect your interests; they protect their interests. Which is fundamentally true, and cannot be changed. So if your employment situation is so bad that you need a second, massively powerful, self-interested entity to negotiate with the massively powerful, self-interested entity in the hopes that your interests may happ…
Unions also fuck non-union members, which in turn creates a lot of economic deadweight and inefficiency.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
You list teachers, who in my opinion are the poster children of how problematic unions are. And there are some phenomenal teachers out there. There are teachers that change lives profoundly. But they don't need the unions, and the terrible teachers who should be fired /are/ protected. It's really messed up, most people have first-hand experience with it, and they are a corrosive factor in the end.
This is the elephant in the room. Unions make it much harder to fire low performers. I think they have great benefits, but this terrible side effect. For another example look at police unions.
Public unions are a bad idea in general. The citizens collectively employ the government, and that government shouldn’t have a right to organize against the people whom it serves.
So in my opinion, these two examples of toxic public unions shouldn’t be applied to private unions.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. There are regular complaints about benefits and pay multipliers being cut back. Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible? People don't seem to complain when businesses do that.
> Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. Isn’t this roughly the same order of magnitude as many Google developer salaries? If so, how much more expensive can any employee be before he is too expensive to employ?
That is profit, ie after the employee has been paid.
So the answer is they can afford to pay 300,000 more before the employee is too expensive (based on this comment anyway)
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#266When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve. People often seem to think of unions as being purely blue-collar operations, and this just isn't true. For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.…
Apple used to have easter eggs in its software, crediting individual engineers. Steve Jobs banned them, saying it would be unfair to give credit to individuals instead of the whole company, would make it easier for competitors to poach key engineers, etc. At the time, Jobs was also running Pixar, which never seemed to have problems in its movies to credit everybody down to the hairstylist of the second unit's caterer…
We've done a /humans.txt for this in a now dead project.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too. You're saying this like it's a bad thing. Why shouldn't employees expect, and get, better working conditions? > engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better" How is individuals leaving "coll…
Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead. There are very few perils of leaving Google - a top tier company in an industry t…
* but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google*
Oh how quickly we forget. It wasn't all that long ago that Google was involved in a massive wage fixing scandal (along with darn near every other major player in the "big tech").
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. There are regular complaints about benefits and pay multipliers being cut back. Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible? People don't seem to complain when businesses do that.
> Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. Isn’t this roughly the same order of magnitude as many Google developer salaries? If so, how much more expensive can any employee be before he is too expensive to employ?
Since that's profit, I would assume (based purely on the phrasing) that it's net of obligations like salaries.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
So these are really good examples, but I still don't understand what unions can do for 1% of someone's pay. They kind of look like subscription services, or worse places you have to join or else there are unintended consequences from other examples where they mention looking at union membership as an indicator of some experience (so kind of like a tax). The screen actors guild and all the movie-related guilds seem in…
While not union myself watching how IBEW (international brotherhood of electrical workers) works, it ends up working well for all involved parties. For workers pay is kept higher, benefits stay active between jobs, and benefits stay unchanged between jobs at different companies. Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements (without ruining life's of workers), and know workers have a…
My experience with unions is setting up a booth for a trade show and being unable to plug into the outlets myself because I had to wait for a union electrician.
Total scam.
Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
#270Good for them. I work for a large company and am a member of the union. While they're not perfect they're very constructive and provide a lot of benefits to all employees, and also to the company itself. Compensation has become very complex over the years. While most people understand their pay the rest is usually where employers cheap out, things like insurance, sick pay, long-term provider care, pension contributio…
> I understand that in the US unions are often seen as a burden Some are, some the opposite. Often people discuss unions like something very homogenous. They're like companies - there will be both loan sharks and non-profit activists (and lots in between). I hope it all turns out well for googlers.
Unions have also been centers of corruption and organized crime. This is what gave them such a bad name in the 1980s and is why it's so easy to "tie" anyone in construction to the mob, such as one famous person in charge these days.