Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they can get the best of unions without getting the worst of unions with this behavior.
The worst of unions being?
Can you not think of any negative aspects of unions?
Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
271–280 of 293 posts
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty common in general. I recently saw a lawyer provide a template independent contractor agreement which had such a provision in the boilerplate, entirely unrelated to Google or any other huge company. I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to. (They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any com…
> I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to... They can't seriously expect their standard form agreement to stay NDA-confidential Yep. Basically the same logic as companies with competitive salaries trying to keep wage info quiet, even in the age of Glassdoor. It's not that there's something to hide about the standard…
> But it adds a hurdle to people comparing notes on exactly what they signed, and when somebody does get a special exemption, it stops them putting up a point-by-point guide for everyone else.
So to make it harder for labor to organize, basically.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine that sentence coming from a wannabe doctor or civil engineer.
I don't build things that will kill people if they're wrong. If I get this slightly wrong, the wrong people will be advertised the wrong car. The world won't end.
There's a new story about passwords getting hacked and leaked every month, if not every week. This industry needs stronger standards, and if the industry doesn't come up with it ourselves, the law will.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I think about self driving cars I can't help but think about the Therac-25. Software bugs kill people. Not all software bugs, and not all software, but the lines are getting blurrier. It's not just medical equipment. Phones explode. A connected coffeepot could burn a house down. The Toyota acceleration bug (where cars would accelerate uncontrollably) was preventable if industry standards were followed. These are…
If you want to say that people working in self driving cars should have to pass qualification tests or whatever, I don't care about that. That is a small amount of people though. The vast majority of people are not working on anything at all to do with self driving cars or medical equipment or space X. Instead, what I care about preventing, and will fight extremely hard to stop, is barriers to entry for the most comm…
Anyone handling PII is dealing with high stakes. That's not my opinion, that's the post GDPR world we live in. And that's pretty much everyone in the B2C space.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to say that people working in self driving cars should have to pass qualification tests or whatever, I don't care about that. That is a small amount of people though. The vast majority of people are not working on anything at all to do with self driving cars or medical equipment or space X. Instead, what I care about preventing, and will fight extremely hard to stop, is barriers to entry for the most comm…
Anyone handling PII is dealing with high stakes. That's not my opinion, that's the post GDPR world we live in. And that's pretty much everyone in the B2C space.
> that's the post GDPR world we live in.
In America nobody cares about that. This isn't going to effect any of the major companies that matter, and is already causing companies to merely stop doing business in countries that have bad laws like this.
But also, I don't care. I will defect and fight every step of the way any of your efforts to keep out people from non-traditional backgrounds. (regardless of whatever misguided reasons you have to keeping people from non-traditional backgrounds out of the industry)
Your only options are to try to make some sort of law, which is extremely unlikely to happen in the US, or form some sort of union. And I will defect that union hard. Along with a whole lot of other people who do not want to see this industry destroyed. We will defect and sabotage any attempts to do this any way.
Fortunately for me, though, the anti barriers to entry side of the debate and anti union side of the debate is currently massively winning, and the people who are trying to throw up barriers to entry are losing.
All I have to do stop by the nearest tech bootcamp to see just how much the pro barriers to entry side of the debate has lost this war. And those barriers to entry are only continuing to be lowered.
It has never been easier to become a professional programmer. And it is only getting easier.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#276Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone handling PII is dealing with high stakes. That's not my opinion, that's the post GDPR world we live in. And that's pretty much everyone in the B2C space.
> that's the post GDPR world we live in. In America nobody cares about that. This isn't going to effect any of the major companies that matter, and is already causing companies to merely stop doing business in countries that have bad laws like this. But also, I don't care. I will defect and fight every step of the way any of your efforts to keep out people from non-traditional backgrounds. (regardless of whatever mis…
There have always been barriers to entry to be a programmer. For every self-taught coder, from both the pre-CS as a degree days to the modern day bootcamp devs, there several times as many employers who only want graduates from top-league schools or FAANG experience. Credentialism is not being advocated for by employees, but by employers. If anything, a union could be useful to combat restrictive hiring practices.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that's the post GDPR world we live in. In America nobody cares about that. This isn't going to effect any of the major companies that matter, and is already causing companies to merely stop doing business in countries that have bad laws like this. But also, I don't care. I will defect and fight every step of the way any of your efforts to keep out people from non-traditional backgrounds. (regardless of whatever mis…
There have always been barriers to entry to be a programmer. For every self-taught coder, from both the pre-CS as a degree days to the modern day bootcamp devs, there several times as many employers who only want graduates from top-league schools or FAANG experience. Credentialism is not being advocated for by employees, but by employers. If anything, a union could be useful to combat restrictive hiring practices.
The tech world has changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. I know many people who got into the industry by merely going to a tech bootcamp, which got them into a junior engineering position.
Yes, there are still barriers to entry. But the barriers to entry have been massively reduced over the last 10 years. Going to a bootcamp, and getting a job within a couple months used to be unheard of.
Your opinions on what a union "could" be are vastly different than the opinions of what other people want. This whole thread is me responding to a person who literally wants to raise the barrier to entry to tech.
Credentialism is very much being advocated for, by many pro-union/pro-guild people. And history has shown that whenever a union, in every single industry in the world, gets enacted, the result is higher barriers to entry.
Go look at the American Medical Association. Go look at the American Bar Association. Go look at the actor's guild. Screen writers guild. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Pick any high skilled labor union/guild and you will see an organization that is creating barriers left and right, and making it harder for people to get into the industry.
Yes, the current tech industry could be better. But the pro-union people are the ones who are most advocating in favor of keeping out competition/newbies/immigrants, you name it.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think forced arbitration should only be legal in actively negotiated contracts (i.e. both parties were active in writing and modifying all the terms), where the proposing party disclosed the implications in plain language, and where agreeing to it was entirely optional for either party (sort of like GDPR consent). I think those conditions would effectively exclude it from consumer contracts while permitting it when…
> and where agreeing to it was entirely optional for either party That’s really the crux of it, isn’t it? In general it is entirely common in a contract situation for one party to care so much about a particular provision that it would rather not contract at all than contract without that provision. Generally the better the best alternative to a negotiatied agreement (BANTA) for a party the more likely it is to be wi…
Hm,
What if entities were limited in how many active contracts they could have outstanding in which they had an obligatory arbitration clause in play, based on how many employees they had?
So, like, if you couldn’t have over 2 + 4*log_2(your number of employees) cases where people you either currently employ, or used to employ and are still bound by that clause of their employment contract, are subject to forced arbitration.
(Or some other function. Sqrt might be better than log)
This would still provide some of (hopefully most of) the benefit of having the arbitration, while preventing it from being common or typical amongst the employees, as the proportion of employees would have to be asymptotically zero as number of employees increases.
Re: Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arbitration comes from agreements on how to settle future disputes being legal [1]. If two company agree to settle through a chess match between their CEOs instead of suing, by all means let them. This is obviously problematic in cases where there is a significant power discrepancy (employee-employer, producer-consumer etc), or where arbitrators are paid by a single party. Despite this, US suspreme court has held tha…
I'd argue any contract is problematic if there is both a significant power discrepancy between the parties, and the terms are non-negotiable (take it or leave it). When I think of the word "contract" I don't picture two companies with a meeting of the minds, on equal footing, settling something. Instead I associate the word with a hammer that a powerful company uses to smash a relatively powerless individual--because…
Technically verbal contracts, like when one pays someone to cut one’s hair, are contracts, I think?