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

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

#211

Post by rramach »

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.

Yes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).

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

#212

Post by klipt »

edoceo wrote: post #4

I support this walkout. As a small business owner all I've been able to do was purge my FB page profiles. I'm proud of them for taking a bigger step than I'm able to make. Working people of all countries unite. Seize the means of production!

> Seize the means of production!

Many employers give away the means of production via RSUs, and the standard advice is to sell them and buy index funds so that you're diversified across multiple means of production.

Don't know if Marx would approve, but it seems clearly better to me that Microsoft workers can own some Amazon and vice versa, so if one company goes down the workers don't end up losing everything (as they would if they only owned the company they work for).

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

#213

Post by klipt »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #198
foolfoolz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this explains everything. you can stage a walk out in a meeting but you’re still on zuckerbergs payroll. and if 50% of the us based engineers quit based on some social principles there’s thousands of engineers ready to fill those spots around the world for a fraction of the price. covid has shown remote work works. unionizing and making the US more costly to work with will only accelerate how “remote” these jobs can…

The FAANGM types aren't hiring mediocre programmers out of Uzbekistan, they're looking for MIT/Carnegie Mellon/Stanford types. Plenty of primo talent coming out of Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, etc. as well. Plenty of bodies to replace those who leave, for sure, but they're not about to start hiring random offshore types.

But there are brilliant IIT graduates from India who would much rather work from their home city in India than pay Bay Area landlords just so they can sit on an 80 year waitlist for a green card.

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

#214

Post by david38 »

bildung wrote: post #178
logicchains wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good argument in this case because the average Silicon Valley tech worker has a better take home salary than a programmer in those countries even after accounting for education/childcare and insurance costs.

Take home pay certainly isn't the metric that is improved here, but rather pay per hour. How many hours per year does a Silicon Valley tech worker work? Absolute pay e.g. in Germany is significantly less, but then the absolute hours worked in a full time job are probably 800 hours less per year than in Silicon Valley: 6 weeks of paid holiday are standard in tech here, plus e.g. 2 weeks paid sick leave because of the…

I work in the valley.

I take about six weeks. I stay home whenever I’m sick.

Even if you assume I work 60 hours a week, I still make quite a bit more than I would in Germany. Even including health care.

So yes, my per hour rate is better in Silicon Valley.

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

#215

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

rramach wrote: post #211
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.

Yes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).

> These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time

Classical liberalism has never been a majority position. The reason it exists is due to smart people thinking hard about the problem of governance, and imposing its rules top-down. But maybe thats just me being european.

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

#216

Post by Apocryphon »

klipt wrote: post #213
blaser-waffle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FAANGM types aren't hiring mediocre programmers out of Uzbekistan, they're looking for MIT/Carnegie Mellon/Stanford types. Plenty of primo talent coming out of Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, etc. as well. Plenty of bodies to replace those who leave, for sure, but they're not about to start hiring random offshore types.

But there are brilliant IIT graduates from India who would much rather work from their home city in India than pay Bay Area landlords just so they can sit on an 80 year waitlist for a green card.

Extreme time zone differences are still a challenging problem that might actually be an insurmountable limit to remote work. (Depends on the level of asynchronicity of the job, of course.) Unless there starts to be a culture of remote shift work, which would just be dystopian.

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

#217

Post by hef19898 »

rramach wrote: post #210
hef19898 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US. As one example, look at training and employment. It takes three years to become a police officer in Germany or France. Once you are one, you are employed for life (after a probation period). A lot of the training is focused on legal work…

> I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US. Hard to say if it is the most important but it is a pretty important factor. See https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ for all research that indicates the unions are a key stumbling block.

That is true. On a meta level, that is kind of what a police union should protect interests of the police force. Shows how this, be it unions or any other association, can backfire.

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

#218

Post by sjtindell »

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.

And they don’t feel strongly because they don’t have to care. I know I don’t. I could never open a newspaper or go to a protest and live quite blissfully. I’m white, I’m a man, I’m an engineer. So I’m safe. Everything seems to work just fine for me. I have friends struggling to pay rent, my girlfriend has trouble finding peers at school who will treat her like an equal, but I get an inbox full of emails all the time from companies begging to pay me amounts of money that boggle even my mind. I’m 27 and I make more than both my parents combined, of course you don’t see me fighting for a union. I can barely keep up with all the perks I already get! It’s rare to find someone willing to step outside their bubble and do work for someone else when they won’t benefit.

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

#219

Post by devado »

vore wrote: post #67
erik_seaberg wrote: post #18

Journalists are quoting Trump's statement as newsworthy. Everyone knows what he said. What's the point of censoring it ineffectually?

It's not about censoring or not censoring. It's about Facebook actually giving a shit about the state of the world it's in, and not just Mark Zuckerberg's incessant handwringing about "feeling disgust" but... doing nothing about it. Too long have abhorrent actions by Donald Trump gone completely unchecked by major platforms and, if Facebook won't even do the token step of doing something about a clearly racist and di…

> Too long have abhorrent actions by Donald Trump gone completely unchecked by major platforms

Why blame the platforms? What have the society, people, leaders done about it? He is the elected president after all. Hint: maybe there is a very large chunk of population that agrees with him. This might disgust you but I don't know what the fix is if a huge number of people are "backward"

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

#220

Post by devado »

vore wrote: post #150
humanrebar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the common standard then? Does it ban leaders of countries that oppress homosexuals and other minorities as policy? Leaders who actually imprison political dissenters? Donald Trump is a bad president IMO, but there are far worse people (and their spokespeople) active on social media. The inconsistent standard makes this seem more like virtue signalling, which isn't quite "giving a shit about the state of the w…

So? Flag their messages too. You and I are both agreeing what Trump is saying is horrendous. And, for what it's worth, I'm gay and a part of a minority and I am privileged to live somewhere where there's little repression for who I am. I absolutely want to see people pushing back on countries that have terrible leaders who would repress my life: if you're going to shrug then say "well that's just policy", that honest…

> I am privileged to live somewhere where there's little repression for who I am.

We reached here because we had complete freedom of speech. And you are against that very thing, the irony

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