A Tech Union is a great idea, starting with Bay Area employees banding together for higher equity at startups. If VC-funded startups suddenly couldn't hire their first employees for 1% equity (against the founders' 50-70%) then we'd see fairer payouts for successful startups.
Tech Workers' Values
81–90 of 276 posts
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#82Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP. When you claim all of our thoughts on and off the clock, you encourage us to avoid creatively-fulfilling ventures, burn out, and leave for greener pastures.
> Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP. you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else? i mean sure, you can live in that world, it's just nobody would pay for anything to happen.
Obviously an employer should own the work that their employees do for them as part of their job description. But we really need to stop accepting employment contracts that claim ownership of any unrelated works that you produce.
If I'm a web programmer, don't give me a contract that claims my paintings, music, consumer electronics designs, video games, etc, and then claim that it is unalterable "boilerplate." I don't care that you're a big company which has its fingers in many areas of business. That shit won't fly.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The root of the problem is the authoritarian structure of modern enterprise. I know many good people who work at bad companies, who, were they given the chance to have their say, would change things wildly for the better.
You'd rather say that at-will employment and especially the tight labour market outside tech enables the authoritarian structure of the modern workplace.
No, I meant expressly what I said.
A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#84The great thing about "values" is that everyone can have their own (play on same phrase with "standards")
To have "rights", they must be encoded in the legal code.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#85We 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…
What benefits would a strong Tech Workers' union to provide? And what percentage of one's income would be membership dues be?
Susan Fowler should've had a union to complain to, instead of Uber's hostile HR department.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#86Who is the "we" he's speaking to here? I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for? Gavin de Becker and "forced teaming" comes to mind. Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self-evident, which makes me t…
> Who is the "we" he's speaking to here? "Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post. > I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for? The tech community.
The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?
(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there is a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)
I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#87We 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…
I have to wonder if this isn't an attempt to co-opt the movement started by @TechSolidarity / Maciej. I also think -- particularly if the HN audience is in any way representative -- that engineering in particular is far too deeply bought into the narrative of the rights of capital owners to unionize. Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. I'm well aware unions aren't perfect. But…
> Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The reason that old canard doesn't carry a lot of weight around SV and the other tech hubs is that a lot of rank-and file, non-manager techies actually _are_ millionaires.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#88We 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…
We're not special. We're just like the other engineering disciplines.
Our starting salaries are much larger than other engineering disciplines, and I'd argue we don't make nearly as stable constructions as other engineers. In Australia the starting-out civil engineering salary is almost half the starting-out software engineering salary (and this is a country which hates technical innovation and prefers building more mines).
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I have never heard of that. Why would that be?
At my last job(not tech), our wages were negotiated with the union at a much lower rate than our competitors and owed dues. We had no control because the union was "representing" us and we could take it or quit.
Re: Tech Workers' Values
#90We 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…
it's odd the tech community in sv wouldn't want a union. i mean the tech alone is already attracting top talent imagine what a decent union would do. people from all over would be like omg they work normal hours and have decent benefits and they get to work at these huge companies and they're protected by a union damn
but the execs are waiting for most of us to be replaced by the algos we're writing before that happens so who knows