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Tech Workers' Values

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Tech Workers' Values

#131

Post by ryanisnan »

idlewords wrote: post #48
ryanisnan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who knows little about Tech Solidarity, other than what's shown on their site, it seems like they're a bit different. Sam's group is a little more pointed in the direction of promoting the broader tech community's values into a company, and Tech Solidarity seems to be more about connecting developers to their community and supporting that interaction. Perhaps you can expound?

I've been talking about organizing labor in tech companies around an ethical agenda since December. For example: https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2017/01/05/meeting_notes.ht... That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.

I didn't mean to understate or downplay what Tech Solidarity was (I am just learning about it now), so I hope you don't take offence to my my questioning.

I am sympathetic to your cause.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#132

Post by BadassFractal »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #94
erikpukinskis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own"). Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all…

>> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consid…

Thank you for sharing that.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#133

Post by igk »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #94
erikpukinskis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own"). Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all…

>> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consid…

I model you a bit like my father, who grew up in a Soviet satelite state, if he had ended up in the US instead of a country with strong socialist history: he will argue for free education, basic income, national healthcare, nationalization of infrastructure and resources (all of which are pretty socialist ideas), but will immediately revert to referring to kolkhoz and aparatschiks if any politician or activist openly endorses socialist views.

The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#134

Post by EduardoBautista »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #102
EduardoBautista wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I don't understand the people who say "I'd rather work in a company with a good working environment" as if you have to work for peanuts to have a good job. If you are convinced to work for a low salary in the name of "culture" your employer is laughing all the way to the bank.

And you're laughing all the way to having an excellent life. Like, this is the market behaving appropriately. If companies can get better talent at better prices by providing better working environments, well, we're effectively buying nicer work environments. Whether it's worth the cost or not is a separate issue, and really depends on the price. Personally, I've priced working in SF instead of Mountain View at rough…

You don't seem to understand what I am saying. You are making the argument that you either have an excellent life or make 20k more. I am saying that you can find both.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#135

Post by jdhopeunique »

One value I'd like to see enforced is better separation of employees' work and private life. Examples would include:

Not having to support politics I disagree with during or outside of work hours.

Not having my photo and about me on the company webpage. No one wants to know the truth that my hobbies are not rock climbing and playing the guitar.

Not being forced to go to conferences, hackathons, and other company sponsored events.

It would be nice if these values included lobbying for tech workers to not be exempt from overtime pay and reforms of the h1b visa program.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#136

Post by matt4077 »

throwaway29292 wrote: post #22
alphonsegaston wrote: post #11

There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights. We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to wo…

If the root cause of this problem is that -companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data -more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now) -VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do) -then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area? Define standards that would limit the amoun…

Of course the government should do something about it. But I'd bet most people would agree that killing or stealing are immoral, even in the absence of laws against it. In fact, every one here has, on innumerable occasions, not stolen something even though they could have been sure they wouldn't be caught.

Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner.

And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff.

There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#137

Post by chimeracoder »

xienze wrote: post #116
lazyasciiart wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Namely, LGBT stuff, female and minority representation, immigrant's rights, etc. offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities). Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would…

> Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for. > Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics? Because in my reading of this it doesn't sound like they're going after things like vacation time, pay, IP rights, you know, day-to-day stuff that a union would really…

> > Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate

> Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.

Ironically, unions are allowed to terminate memberships for reasons that would be illegal to use as grounds for firing someone[0]. In a closed shop, terminating a membership is tantamount to firing someone, so that literally means employees covered by a closed-shop union contract have less recourse if the union decides to fire them than they would if they never had a union contract to begin with.

Also, a democratically-elected body will (in theory) represent the majority of people whom it governs. If a majority of people want to target a minority religion or race or ethnicity, a democratically-elected body representing them will do just that. Unions actually have a long history of lobbying for unbelievably racist laws throughout the 20th century in order to protect their majority-white members[1].

I know this is unpopular to say here, but as someone belonging to a group that was explicitly targeted by these unions as a scapegoat, and who had their US citizenships revoked and property seized due to successful, xenophobic lobbying by those unions, I'm really sick of the pervasive assumption that unions will inherently protect minorities, or even minority members.

[0] This includes retaliatory termination

[1] The AFL is the most well-known of these, but they weren't the only ones.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#138

Post by cholantesh »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #10

We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn't the perfect metaphor for this, but it's not far off. If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is. I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other place…

And Carmack is unlikely to ever join such a group, being as he is a staunch libertarian.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#139

Post by stale2002 »

carlosdp wrote: post #91
bosie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I have never heard of that. Why would that be?

Because they would need to join the union and the union negotiates compensation for everyone, that's one of the main purposes of a union.

And that's exactly why I will never join a union. As soon as that happens at any job I have, I will hand in my resignation the next day.

I can negotiate very well on my own, as opposed to being stuck into seniority "levels", thank you very much.

Re: Tech Workers' Values

#140

Post by idlewords »

ryanisnan wrote: post #131
idlewords wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been talking about organizing labor in tech companies around an ethical agenda since December. For example: https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2017/01/05/meeting_notes.ht... That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.

I didn't mean to understate or downplay what Tech Solidarity was (I am just learning about it now), so I hope you don't take offence to my my questioning. I am sympathetic to your cause.

No offense taken at all! Tech Solidarity is about in-person meetings, so I get that it's not easy to get a sense of the agenda from the outside.
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