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New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

theintercept.com

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Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#81

Post by BiteCode_dev »

ShamelessC wrote: post #79
teddyh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a good article to show people: http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

Rocket League's approach to this is very good. The D-pad is bound to several predefined words and phrases that are useful such as "Nice shot!" or "Great pass!". Because of the fast paced nature of the game it's pretty tough to try to abuse this system (maybe by spelling words with the first letters of allowed phrases?) but no one does that. To appease the folks who wanted to express that they were using a curse word,…

> That reminds me of Rocket League's approach. The D-pad is bound to several predefined words and phrases that are useful such as "Nice shot!" or "Great pass!". Because of the fast paced nature of the game it's pretty tough to try to abuse this system (maybe by spelling words with the first letters of allowed phrases?) but no one does that.

Dota has that, and it didn't work.

People just used the nice phrases sarcastically, and repeatadly.

When you miss an actions for the 3rd time and your team mate congrats you everytime with a "nice one", it's equally infuruating. Even more, because it cost so little to be an ass.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#82

Post by triceratops »

pjc50 wrote: post #58
wpietri wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly bad unions. But I think that often arises as a reaction to poisonous management behavior, a zero-sum mentality that treats workers as a cost center, not a value generator. It's a "fuck me, no fuck you" scenario. Your point about the Hollywood unions is a great one. Like tech, in Hollywood everybody has clear incentives to create a great final product. Positive-sum thinking usually part of the cult…

Hollywood unions are a slightly special case: while the studios hold a huge amount of power, the staff are pretty much all contractors per-project, and the entity they're contracting with will be a special purpose corporate vehicle for that film. Most software doesn't look like that - except game development, which is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people.

> game development...is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people.

Hollywood also has an endless supply of enthusiastic young people. To me this sounds like an argument in favor of unionizing the game dev industry.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#83

Post by BiteCode_dev »

nfoz wrote: post #78
mattbillenstein wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've fought this feature in products for years - the product ppl always wanna ban bad words and I'm like - you can't, it literally never works, it just becomes a stupid arms race and it's not worth our time. I always lose this argument for some reason.

In apps targeted to kids I've found it to be often a useful deterrent. And can even shift the culture a bit; it makes it very clear what is "ok" and what is not.

Yes because kids don't have a strong opinion on anything, so as long as you don't prevent them to have fun, they won't try to find work around.

Try the same a few years later, with teens, and it's a whole different story.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#84

Post by hatchnyc »

koheripbal wrote: post #61
objclxt wrote: post #25

I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…

> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point. At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work. In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to…

Every time someone brings this up I can only imagine some horrible version of of something like SCRUM being given the force of law.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#85

Post by kdtsh »

koheripbal wrote: post #61
objclxt wrote: post #25

I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…

> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point. At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work. In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to…

This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it and everyone has a problem with it). The benefits of unionisation almost always outweigh the negatives, and most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy so you can attempt to change internal processes.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#86

Post by teekert »

dijit wrote: post #70
koheripbal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point. At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work. In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to…

Well, sorry to be blunt but that's fucking stupid. Contrast that with my experience with Unions in Sweden; and that is that they basically don't exist except to ensure that workers rights are not infringed. So they'll be involved in a termination, or help negotiate overtime pay. There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".

Yeah, this, same in the Netherlands. Where a large company tends to put share holders first because that is where the CEO's bonus depends on, the unions put the employees first. I see it almost a necessary thing to keep the balance. But the way I see it, with the very little workers rights there are in the US the anti-union movement has basically won there. Reminds me of that quote [0] or this meme [1]. Yeah, you don't need a union, it's a privilege that your boss can fire you on the spot without proper reasoning. It's also a privileged for a woman to get 2 weeks of paid pregnancy leave (can you even walk normally when you're expected back at work?). Working on chemo sounds great as well. Keep telling yourselves that you don't need unions. I feel American work culture completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of people is nice, social and wants to make nice things they feel good about, even if they didn't go to an "ivy". This attitude is reflected by employees. You would do good just being a bit nicer overall.

[0] Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

[1] https://m.9gag.com/gag/aoP1WMg

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#87

Post by 0xy »

jodrellblank wrote: post #68
0xy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the person to fight in my corner is me? Unions drag everyone's wages to an average. Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself. Look at teachers and police unions for a prime example. Great police get paid the same as the police who racially profile. Great teachers get paid the same as the teachers who phone it in. Additionally unions protect incompetent…

> " Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself. " The two retorts to this are: 1) it's selfish arguing. "Fuck you got mine" style, dismisses what happens to everyone else as long as you're OK. Which may be fine for you, but why should the rest of us agree that you being wealthier is the thing we all want? 2) You negotiating against the resources of a multi-milli…

>dismisses what happens to everyone else as long as you're OK

Not really, because it's not like tech low performers are in poverty. Tech salaries bottom out at $60-70k in most places in the US. $60k is far from poverty and far from nothing.

>Which may be fine for you, but why should the rest of us agree that you being wealthier is the thing we all want?

Well, the collective in this case has already agreed that I should be paid the market rate that I successfully negotiate. Unionisation is extremely unpopular in tech.

>You negotiating against the resources of a multi-million dollar company who can hire any legal or negotiating team of experts against you

Negotiating isn't 1:1. If you are an effective negotiator and perform well then you're usually negotiating multiple offers and using them as leverage against each other. In reality, it's less "David vs Goliath" and more like "Goliath vs Goliath vs Goliath". If a company refuses to meet my expectations, I move on. No harm done.

>Unions protect exploited, abused, unfairly treated employees too, which you might become one day

I willingly give up those rights. No, really. My current employer can terminate my contract for any reason with minimal notice required. I don't really care, because I know they won't do that as long as I continue to deliver value. In return for those contract stipulations, I am paid more.

But you seem to gloss over the inconvenient facts about police and teachers unions.

In fact, teachers unions regularly protect sexual predators. [1]

Similarly, police unions regularly protect officers who commit heinous abuses of power.

>Democracy only serves to harm my interests

Maybe I just think a bloated organisation that protects incompetent employees shouldn't be the moderator of so-called "democracy".

If I have a problem within an organisation, I make my thoughts clearly heard with management. If management refuses to listen and the issue is serious enough, I leave.

For example, I once worked for an undisclosed company who refused to allocate resources to fix security issues impacting our customer's privacy. I pushed the issue as high as it would go in the chain of command and left when it was clear they refused to do anything.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443437504577547...

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#88

Post by cool_dude85 »

dijit wrote: post #70
koheripbal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point. At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work. In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to…

Well, sorry to be blunt but that's fucking stupid. Contrast that with my experience with Unions in Sweden; and that is that they basically don't exist except to ensure that workers rights are not infringed. So they'll be involved in a termination, or help negotiate overtime pay. There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".

Often, things that seem to not make sense are the result of historical practices at that workplace or others. In a situation like the comment describes, usually it's at a partially unionized workplace.

If you don't have these kinds of things in the contract, what can sometimes happen is a situation where all the "monitor movers" are unionized, but then management hires a new "screen transporter" for $10 an hour who isn't in the union.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#89

Post by shp0ngle »

Workplace is very very very annoying to actually use, btw.

Workplace is basically "facebook, but in a corp"; but all the nags and annoying notifications that kind-of work in Facebook, because you can chose what pages and groups to follow, just flat out don't work there, because you have to follow certain group. And you keep getting these annoying notifications that you cannot easily filter.

So you still have one stream of notification, as on Facebook, which is both "funny pictures haha" and "important company-wide announcement". So bad!

Workplace Chat is just Messenger. And again, it sucks in corporate settings.

Workplace is really, really bad UX.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#90

Post by hef19898 »

0xy wrote: post #44
objclxt wrote: post #25

I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…

What if the person to fight in my corner is me? Unions drag everyone's wages to an average. Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself. Look at teachers and police unions for a prime example. Great police get paid the same as the police who racially profile. Great teachers get paid the same as the teachers who phone it in. Additionally unions protect incompetent…

Obviously, I have no idea how unions work in the US. But there was the example of Dwayne Johnson, earning 90 Million and being a union member. The collective bargaining I am used to, has the effect in some cases of maybe overpaying certain individuals. IMHO that always happens. It doesn't drag salaries anywhere but up so. And there is a cap on salary levels and job levels being covered by unions collective bargaining. Above these levels, it is what you negotiate with your employer.
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