221–230 of 293 posts
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You ignore the non-union organizations that also protect their own. ABA, AMA, etc. control the supply of doctors/lawyers and accomplish the same end result as unions: higher wages and less competition.
Those are more like guilds than unions.
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You ignore the non-union organizations that also protect their own. ABA, AMA, etc. control the supply of doctors/lawyers and accomplish the same end result as unions: higher wages and less competition.
Most unions and guilds do this. I don’t find it unreasonable, and would still sign on to a technology workers union, dues and all. Credentialing? I’d be okay with that, otherwise if everyone can “be an engineer” just by saying so, no one is (and credentialing would be superior to the white board gauntlet mess tech interviews currently are). Collective action is the only way to improve working conditions and dissuade…
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>> overly expansive ownership claim Yeah, that particular clause gave me a looong pause before signing their contract, in fact I even seriously considered taking one of the other offers I had. This is why you see all those "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects. This means the person wrote this code on their own time, yet it's owned by Google anyway, which IMO is total employee-hostile bu…
I agreed to that contract and open sourced many thousands of lines of code owned by Google, but still available to me and the rest of the world via github. I don't see the problem. If you could demonstrate your project didn't overlap google business then you could do your own project.
I wrote a project at Google that had nothing to do with Google's business, in fact, they explicitly had chosen to not get involved with that whole area at all (Bitcoin). I applied for ability to open source it under the Google name and was denied, I asked for a copyright release back to me and was also denied. The open source programmes office had decided they wanted my project dead and preventing me from doing anything with it was their tool.
Eventually I was able to get these decisions overridden by escalating up (way up) the management chain, but it was a huge pain and the OSPO decided that the exemption applied only to me, not other Googlers, so of course the moment the company hired someone else who happened to be involved with writing the "Bitcoin Core" software already, they tried to force him to exit the project and the same fight had to happen all over again (with more escalations to top management).
The whole nonsense with someone in middle management (who shall remain nameless) deciding to kill spare time projects because they personally didn't like the idea really turned me off to these clauses. Google doesn't need them, they aren't threatened by side projects of employees and the whole thing causes far, far more drama than it can possibly ever avoid.
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>> On what basis On the basis that the contract says "40 hours a week". I don't owe the employer jack beyond that.
> On the basis that the contract says "40 hours a week". It's extremely rare for salaried worker contracts to say that.
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Google will flat out refuse. In their view they own the entirety of your intellectual output for the duration, whether or not it's done on your own time and resources, and whether or not it's in any way related to your day job. I mean I get it (sort of), early on there wasn't really any "moat" to protect the business, so they had to put shit like this in their contracts lest someone goes off and upends their entire b…
I doubt that non related work would actually be enforceable
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Do unions allow competition among union members? It’s always seemed to me that they work in jobs where the people are replaceable. In Google one could work to make 2x to 3x more than the next person - is that will possible with a union? Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%). Collective action / protest works fine, though, for esta…
> Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%). Professional athlete unions would be a counterexample, I believe. It really depends on how the union is structured. I doubt a union for high paid tech workers would be structured the same way as one for blue collar labourers.
Personally I find us far more alike other industries than unlike.
We're a new industry but we're still full of people of all types sizes and emotional colours.
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> the right to surveillance on personal property Wait, what? I don't think I've seen that before, what does this mean exactly?
I work in Google as well, and I simply don't check my personal Gmail from work machines. They can monitor my work laptop as much as they want. This is coming from a firefox-using privacy paranoid Googler. I have no idea what this guy is talking about.
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You ignore the non-union organizations that also protect their own. ABA, AMA, etc. control the supply of doctors/lawyers and accomplish the same end result as unions: higher wages and less competition.
This is the thing. I'm never going to be stopped from working with a guy who wants me to work with him simply because some moron in an ivory tower thinks I don't have the credentials. This is good. I won't accept the alternative.
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I work in Google as well, and I simply don't check my personal Gmail from work machines. They can monitor my work laptop as much as they want. This is coming from a firefox-using privacy paranoid Googler. I have no idea what this guy is talking about.
You're privacy paranoid but work at Google?