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I think I remember this. IIRC google's story were that they were fired because they were sharing internal documents and keeping track of other employees one-on-ones, medical aptmts, family meetings, etc. The NYT article does a decent job of going over a timeline of everything. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/goog...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder how much of HN culture is affected by very smart people (in one domain) being subconsciously led to believe things by the machinations of tech. As smart people, they take very passionate positions on issues they believe strongly. Perhaps they wouldn't have believed them so strongly in a vacuum though?
I don’t think this kind of analysis is ever productive. Have you considered the possibility that they’ve been convinced not by subconscious machinations but by arguments they believe are valid? If someone went around saying that your beliefs come from subconscious influence operations, is there any way you could prove them wrong?
I get the point you're making that this seems like an individually unfalsifiable proposition. Fair point. It would require massive amounts of data to show the arc of people's beliefs and I'm not certain it's a tractable problem.
That said, I already believe that many things I care about I only care about because they are issues that society (or rather members/organizations there within) dedicated time to considering. I think that discourse is inherently limited because attention span and time are limited and, as an extension, I believe that there are issues that most people/all people never think about but by metrics that we deem relative importance we'd find worth major consideration. I would give an example but you can understand the difficulty of describing something no one finds important that is important.
By extension of the above, I believe that organizations, through concerted effort, are able to crowd out the marketplace of ideas (either at societal level or at organization level) with issues that they deem less threatening to their interests, so long as they have hooks that draw attention. I don't think this idea is particularly unbelievable because we can see similar concepts outlined by even the government in the forms of documents suggesting how to disrupt organizations [1]. I think that this idea also dove tails quite clearly with the concept of propaganda and mass media influence like that discussed by Chomsky.
I would argue that there are many arguments that are valid (and sometimes valid from both sides) but at a societal level not productive. I think the American issue of abortion is a great example of this: would you agree that in 70 years of debating the issue, we as a society have made the implicit choice to not debate other issues? Not that we discuss nothing els, but certainly we'd have filled that time with some other issues if there had been a conclusive resolution on the issue. There is no resolution to the debate which is what makes it such an effective tool for politicians to rouse support, so why would they seek a longstanding resolution instead of this continue back and forth of the judiciary as members die and are added? I am happy to continue this conversation but I've rambled enough now and must work.
A lot of people seem confused why a lot of tech people aren't pushing for unions. For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that? Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
A union offers other protections. Right now, your employer can (I'm assuming) just fire you for whatever they want. If you have a union and a proper contract, then they need justification and the union will back you up.
A lot of people seem confused why a lot of tech people aren't pushing for unions. For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that? Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
It’s a real shame that the middle and upper classes in the US have abandoned having their teens work in favor of various, expensive, college application boosting fluff. I went to work at McDonalds at age 15 and was part of a union. I have direct experience with what that is like. I don’t need to get my knowledge on the subject from flamewars between people pushing ideological agendas (most of whom themselves have app…
All it did was prevent me from working as much as I wanted, with ridiculous red tape rules. The union actively depressed my earning potential.
That's after growing up in terrible schools with incompetent and abusive teachers who were never admonished or fired because of union protection (side note: teacher's unions regularly protect sexual predators).
A lot of people seem confused why a lot of tech people aren't pushing for unions. For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that? Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
But speaking cynically, computer programmers have a lot of the clout that unions enjoy, due to market demand and also creating barriers to entry (programming languages and code bases that are difficult to learn). I refer to it as a guild. Doctors and professors are guilds in a similar fashion. My dad spent his career at a unionized company. There were both union and salaried workers. He was salaried. He experienced a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one in their right mind would rather work for a german software company in a union than work for an american one without a union. EDIT: Hyperbole here, and it was lost on some. Despite unions in germany, German companies are exploiting their workers compared to lucrative salaries that non union US software engineers are enjoying. The gap beteween the lifestyle of a german software engineer and a US one is quite la…
I would and I am sane of mind.
All helps keep me sane, anyway.
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I don't know how the union law works in the US. Over here (Europe), you can have multiple unions in one company. It takes minimal 3 people to form one. So you could probably form a union for pro-DoD people?
In USA if other people form a union at your company then you have to pay their union dues even if you don't like the union. In EU that is illegal, but in USA that is how it works. If you ever wonder why Americans are so anti unions that is why.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering. This is disingenuous, because the sort of unions that were involved with racketeering were manufacturing unions, specifically the Teamsters, and overlapping a period during the late 19th century where corporations often employed actual violence (with paid armed security squads) against workers who attempted to…
The American Mafia ran it's biggest and most profitable racket, concrete for construction in NYC, aka the Concrete Club, from 1977 to 1985...long after the period you're talking about. You can even read about the corruption and (non-mafia) racketeering involved in NYC's lifeguard union, which continues literally to this very day. In most major cities, the mafia controlled a majority of the unions and used them to eff…
How about the Aerospace Engineer's union, then: https://www.speea.org/ Pretty sure it's predominately male.
> If you do your research though, you'll see that the Russian mafia is heavily skimming from medical services through control of the nurses' union in Germany. There is no reason they couldn't replicate that here.
Organized crime could get entrenched in any industry given enough incentives and lack of rule of law, and just as much: lack of protection by the law for regular people. I could just as easily say the mafia could start heavily skimming the bagel business.
If you have any evidence that teachers and nurses unions are any more likely to fall into that, or that current manufacturing or professional unions are beholden to organized crime, present it. Otherwise it's just an attempt to smear all industries' organized labor with the past of a very specific sector.
Imputing altruistic morals to profit-seeking entities and then continually being surprised and offended when companies act shady puts employees in a pointlessly weak position. Instead, treat the relationship as adversarial and come ready for battle every day against the legal structure designed to exploit you for the benefit of distant shareholders. There is no shame in fighting for yourself. You are worth it.
> treat the relationship as adversarial and come ready for battle every day against the legal structure designed to exploit you for the benefit of distant shareholders Exploit you with industry leading pay and perks? Unions are designed to balance out monopolistic / low pay / highly geographical companies like large auto manufacturers or airlines. There is so much competitive hiring in tech, it’s one of the easiest c…
It seems like you're implying that this is absurd or impossible, but...it's not, right? Surely whether my employer is exploiting my labor has very little to do with my compensation relative to similar jobs.