Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 241 posts

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#111

Post by cambalache »

tayo42 wrote: post #28

What's with the cynicism in this posts? They're trying to make a point and bring awareness. Who cares how hard it is. At least they're doing something. To give them credit they're making a political statement at work when we're told not to talk politics at work.

They dont have a god-given right to have all their actions applauded just because they work for a FAANG. For many people this amounts at best to an empty gesture, and at worst a hypocritical take because if you were OK with all the fiascos of that terrible terrible organization you wont get now brownie points by setting today a BLM signature in your OOO reply.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#112

Post by jakelazaroff »

0xy wrote: post #92
jakelazaroff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t cherry pick, I’m simply not defending assaults on people. Any violence by protesters against humans (other than in self defense) is not okay. That said, violence by police against civilians is far worse. It shouldn’t happen in response to property damage, but it especially shouldn’t happen unprovoked — and we’ve been seeing a lot more of that than violence from protesters.

Do you believe in an "eye for an eye"? If not, how could you say that there's been more violence from police than protesters? By my count, more people have died in the resulting riots than the initial incident. That doesn't mean police are "less bad". It means they fucked up badly, and then rioters and looters are responding badly to a bad situation (including with attempted murder, rape, assault, property destructio…

There are a lot of layers here; I’ll do my best to unpack things as I see them.

First, violence by police is always worse than violence by civilians, full stop. They took an oath to protect and serve their communities in a job they knew could be dangerous, so they are obligated to go above and beyond in preventing violence and deescalating conflict. If necessary, they must be willing to suffer physical trauma in order for civilians to be safe. This is an axiomatic belief for me; if you can’t meet me on it, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

I think everyone recognizes that the protests have caused far more violence than the murder of George Floyd alone. But the best way to prevent further violence would have been to immediately arrest the officers (as any civilian would have been) and hold them accountable. As it stands now, the other three officers who helped restrain him and prevent bystander intervention have not even been arrested. It seems to me that police and politicians across the country are willing to accept thousands of arrests, thousands more injuries and millions of dollars worth of property damage all to protect four officers who should absolutely face trial.

That brings me to “acceptable” and “unacceptable” rioting. There are no doubt people using the protests as cover to sow chaos, or to do “riot tourism” — we’ve all seen videos of that. That is not okay. But plenty of rioting is happening because a group of people have been crying out in every which way that they are drowning and nothing seems to help. I’ve seen even staunch conservatives acknowledge that Floyd’s death was beyond the pale. And it’s not just him: it’s Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. And those are just the deaths that make the news — that’s a small subset of all the times when someone was “just” beat up, or profiled, or arrested for no good reason. Plenty of black people feel that society is not honoring its contract with them; given that, can we really blame those protesting for feeling that they don’t need to honor their contract with society?

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#113

Post by Apocryphon »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #19
jakelazaroff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now engineers have incredible leverage. If the engineers’ leverage is so great, why have they been unable to enact policies they support?

Policies that engineers in general truly support are rare. Many engineers - I suspect the majority - just don't feel that strongly about most causes.

Engineer distaste or at least lack of enthusiasm for open offices is near-universal. It might not be the best reason to create a union, but its prevalence is probably rooted in the lack of something like a union to tell management to back off.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#114

Post by ipsum2 »

0zymandias wrote: post #52

Social media is a dead end. The results are depression and misinformation. Unless you believe truth can easily be determined, there is no tweak that Zuck and Jack can do to fix their platforms. At least Zuck is honest about it.

> Social media is a dead end. The results are depression and misinformation.

Honest question. Is Reddit any different? Hacker News? Your average bulletin board?

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#115

Post by luckylion »

bawolff wrote: post #72
baskire wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us have been in unionized industries prior. It also lead to promotion based on years served. Pay scales. And the protection of low performers. Right now engineers have incredible leverage. What do they gain by a union. Don’t like what Facebook is doing. Quit and work elsewhere. There’s plenty of jobs available

Lots of different types of unions exist. Seems silly to throw the idea out because some unions fought for things that aren't popular with this crowd. Instead make a union that fights for the things you want. They are democratic institutions after all.

What examples do you think of where unions do not/did not lead to more formalized, static, equalized systems, which somebody that likes having impact, being paid and promoted based on his work and not his time with the company etc does not want?

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#116

Post by 0xy »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #112
0xy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe in an "eye for an eye"? If not, how could you say that there's been more violence from police than protesters? By my count, more people have died in the resulting riots than the initial incident. That doesn't mean police are "less bad". It means they fucked up badly, and then rioters and looters are responding badly to a bad situation (including with attempted murder, rape, assault, property destructio…

There are a lot of layers here; I’ll do my best to unpack things as I see them. First, violence by police is always worse than violence by civilians, full stop. They took an oath to protect and serve their communities in a job they knew could be dangerous, so they are obligated to go above and beyond in preventing violence and deescalating conflict. If necessary, they must be willing to suffer physical trauma in orde…

Police and politicians are not supposed to be involved in decisions of whether to prosecute crimes, so the fact you lay guilt on them for not prosecuting is puzzling.

Prosecutors are supposed to be making those decisions on behalf of the state or federal government.

The police did everything in their power (immediately firing them). It's up to prosecutors to do the rest.

Do you think police generally support what happened?

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#117

Post by luckylion »

malandrew wrote: post #40
ditonal wrote: post #3

Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmat…

This is absolutely the worst use of a union. Good uses of a Union: maintain a high professional standard and high pay Bad uses of a Union: protect incompetent members and get involved in political issues of interest to only a subset of union members. The threshold for getting involved in a political issue should be a minimum of 4/5s of members if not even higher.

I cannot agree more. If you make everything about politics, you will either force people who don't align with your politics to split off, or silently tolerate that you're using "the union" against them and their interests.

Single issue organizations are much better. You don't need to agree on how to run the justice system to promote safe drinking water, so don't use the Safe Water Now organization to weight in on prison reform or police laws. Start a new, unrelated org if you want to do that.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#118

Post by humanrebar »

adrianN wrote: post #78
matharmin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying a political party leads to what it members want it to lead to, since it's a democratic entity. In practice different members want different things, and it easily ends up as political games with mismatched incentives.

So the argument against forming a new political party is that there are political parties that do things you disagree with?

I think the argument is that a union is more like a party in a winner-take-all system than a party in a multiparty system.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#119

Post by bttrfl »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #109

Private companies must never be the arbiters of truth on the internet. Zuckerberg is doing the right thing, against huge internal resistance. You'd think Americans, out of all countries, would understand this.

FB/Google/Twitter/... are already the arbiters of the truth through their algorithms deciding what to show to people. I don't think they should censor posts though, instead they should make their algorithms transparent and reduce the reach of posts and ads.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#120

Post by luckylion »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #44
0xy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment removes so much context that it's nearly deceptive. He threatened military violence against rioting and looting, driven by terrorism. Some of these rioters set fire to occupied buildings with children inside and prevented emergency services from accessing the location. In other words, property destruction and attempted murder. Do you propose this behavior should be met with praise and not violence?

Property destruction should absolutely not be met with violence, no. Things can be replaced. People cannot.

That's a weird stance. Law enforcement is always based on the credible threat of violence.

You can comply peacefully with everything they ask of you. That's because of the threat of violence. "No, we can't make this person come with us to present them to a judge, if they don't want to, they must be let go. No Violence!" sounds crazy.

"No violence, ever" just means "property should not exist as a concept".

Post reply on HN