71–80 of 276 posts
Isn't the elephant in the room extreme capitalism? Tech is just accelerating it.
Perhaps the alternative is workers managing their own workplaces:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights. We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to wo…
I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life. This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life…
If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.
Do people forget that this industry is built upon the ideal of innovation? Why can't we build a new type of union that fixes the bugs that prior unions suffered? Why can't we experiment and find new solutions? Why can't we disrupt the relationship between capital and labor?
The notion that unions are somehow inherently unworkable flies in the face of everything that the tech industry stands for.
From what I can tell, this doesn't really line up with the location and remote-friendliness of YC companies. Most seem to be in the Bay Area and few that I can tell allow remote engineers, managers, or execs.
Sorry, but being an Instacart delivery person in Dallas isn't a high-paying technology job.
Prove me wrong with real numbers please.
I can't articulate why exactly... but I have a very bad feeling about this. > We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is just going to make the polarization worse.
I guarantee this is code for "we think Trump wouldn't have been elected if he couldn't use Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Let's figure out how to make that possible."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not special. We're just like the other engineering disciplines.
No, this industry is far from being like the other engineering disciplines. It should be like them, but it is still far too immature to be put at that level.
We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn't the perfect metaphor for this, but it's not far off. If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is. I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other place…
My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately. This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of…
Bargaining collectively is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.
Reminder: TechSolidarity, a very similar initiative is open to everyone and is meeting next Wednesday in SF https://techsolidarity.org/events/sf_april_5.html