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

But this is a very dangerous argument, because those same tech companies also control web browsers, operating systems and even DNS hierarchies.

You're assuming that the convention of neutrality in these programs would be upheld, but it's just a convention and iOS already violated it a long time ago in the mobile space. It was after all, once a convention that tech platforms didn't attempt to decide the correctness of what people said, on the grounds that they were just platforms and not publishers.

Additionally the issue here isn't specific to some vague category of tech companies. This is happening because of activist employees like those at Facebook. They can and do crop up anywhere, they can and do impose very nasty demands. It's not merely about de-platforming their opponents, but also forcibly platforming their allies.

For example, Kickstarter's employees unionised in order to force Kickstarter to keep supporting a fundraising project that was openly advocating violence against conservatives. This broke all the rules of the site, which is why it got taken down, but such details didn't matter to Kickstarter's activist workforce - who via unionisation were successful in their goal of converting Kickstarter into a fundraising platform for leftist violence.

There's a clear pattern in which hard left employees seek to both erase their enemies and also make their allies immune to the usual rules. This behaviour is tribalistic and destructive. Judging from history it ends in total cultural cold war, and possibly even hot war. At some point people have to say enough is enough, and that not every company has to get into every fight because a few employees walked out.

I guess tech executives are hamstrung by Californian law and can't simply fire employees who don't turn up to work. This is just one more factor making Silicon Valley unattractive as a place to set up new businesses: set up shop in California and before you know it, you'll have ended up with some hyper-aggressive leftist employees trying to take over your company.

I have the exact same sentiment! SV engineers have an abundance of resources. Ranging from financial to intellectual.

These are are often people who are powerful in the sense that they have alot of whats required to counter the broken issues in tech.

Marx did make a (big) difference here ... unfortunately for the tradesman, no one gave a shit.

I believe those original posts meant that employees often penalize engineers who come from nonstandard backgrounds in favor of those who come from well known universities with top CS programs. This was less common in the past, especially when there were many self-taught engineers in the era when CS was less common as a degree, but credentialism has become more popular in recent years and those from elite schools are often preferred especially over bootcamp grads.

Everything else you're saying is essentially bad faith readings of legitimate industry concerns that I deign to respond to unless evidence of non-trolling becomes manifest. Perhaps you genuinely have bought into the propaganda that unions are intended to protect mediocrity, or are ignorant that unions exist in industries where stark differences in worker performance exist (the SAG and professional athletes' unions), or believe that a union made up of software engineers- the supposed innovators of this age, making the world a better place, etc.- are doomed to repeat the same failures as past unions. And here I thought tech can disrupt and reinvent anything.

But I will mention that those issues you've caricatured aren't even the potentially most killer features of a union specifically for the software industry: anti-discrimination and anti-harassment. HR departments are notorious for protecting companies instead of individual workers, so an independent body that can provide the individual with legal representation and support would be useful in an industry notorious for ageism and issues with gender and race. Would Susan Fowler have endured as many indignities if there was a SWE labor union that had her back? We won't know until there's one to protect those who suffer from similar mistreatment in the future. And yes, such a union would be expected to protect workers from such abuse no matter how many bugs they fix in a month- that is how equality before the law should be, and a union is a way to ensure that labor laws are respected.

> That's not necessarily desirable for somebody that currently has a compensation package that's far above the average.

That doesn't happen in the SAG. Talent are expected to be paid a floor, but no ceiling is mandated. There's certainly stories in the news all of the time about incredible contracts getting signed by big stars.

https://www.wrapbook.com/essential-guide-sag-rates/

> you don't get the negative side-effects of equal pay for unequal work, promotions based on time spent instead of contributions, essentially tenure for underperformers etc.

Given that a hypothetical software engineer union would be a brand new entity with no historical baggage to older, more archaic or corrupted unions, certainly its members can work to design an updated system that addresses some of these issues. Why, if tech is supposed to be about innovation, must a union representing its workers must necessarily be tethered to the same faults as older institutions?