I think utilizing one's power as a worker and aligning other workers to increase workers' power is far from hypocritical. It's a great way (perhaps the only reliable way) to hold companies accountable for their actions and improve companies' treatment of workers and society.
This is in fact the quickest way to ensure that this behavior immediately stops
Your analysis seems to assume that there's some fixed percentage of employees who think some action from their employer is bad, and if that percentage is high enough, then all those employees could quit, which would either somehow signal to the employer that their action was bad or would damage the company so much that they would need to change their actions.
I think that's wishful thinking, and of course the percentage of employees with a complaint is not fixed and can be directly increased by internal efforts to organize. That applies not just to internal awareness, but also public awareness: note that we're only having discussions about cases where employees attempted to organize other employees.
If a company knows you will return to work no matter how much you complain, they are not going to take you seriously. (This was the Walkout's mistake.) And if, as an individual, you make too much noise, you'll just get fired. (See numerous individual examples.) Decisive collective action works, and that's what unions figured out a long time ago.
More recently McDonalds workers went on a mass strike in the UK for a living wage, and got a pay rise:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/mcdonalds-w...
One of Google's biggest assets is their huge army of talented techies. I'd go so far as to say losing that would be an existential threat to the business.
Techies make a lot of money compared to other professions because we genuinely produce a disproportionate amount of value, but that doesn't imply we're in a seller's market.
One way you can tell that there's no dearth of labor is that most companies round an "unsure" in the interview process to "no," not "yes."
I sugggest you ask a non-tech friend about their experience getting a new job: how many applications they've sent out, how many responses they've received and how many interviews they've actually been to. Then compare that to a software dev's hit rates.
I submit to you that a halfway decent software dev will have a hard time being unemployed: they might not get hired by FAANG and they might have to code in $LANGUAGE_I_HATE, but they'll be able to get a job at a reasonable salary.
Also, consider the fact that there's been a large number of businesses focused on recruitment specifically in the tech area. That's because everyone wants to hire devs and they're willing to pay recruiters to channel the funnel their way.
Few other industries have that luxury.
Somebody who's thought more and more clearly about this could write something better about it, but I felt like pointing out what I think is overlooked.
When say, the teachers go on strike in Chicago, it's not that it's impossible to hire new teachers, it's that someone in the meantime of negotiation has to watch over (and ideally educate) all of the kids that those teachers are responsible for teaching.
Wherever you work, try to imagine a random 1 out of every 5 employees missing one day. How likely are you (and everyone else still there) likely to run into problems conducting your general work. And imagine that that is going to continue until your company manages to interview, vet, hire, onboard, and train all of those people back.
...Or, the corporation could just capitulate to demands. Collective action is incredibly powerful.
Most (white collar) employees are not as fungible as people assume, first of all. Two "Senior Back-end Developers" might have such different work experience that one would ramp up on a project in 5 days, and the other would take a couple of weeks.
Second, all turnover is expensive. For a large company like Google, turnover of 100 people could easily cost millions.
Unfortunately, unless those people worked on ads, Google's investors (and therefore C-suite) probably wouldn't miss them much.
If you do not have that critical mass, and resignation is the only moral choice, then all you achieve is eliminating that voice from the inside and eliminate any inside power to influence.
It's great when someone who quits has the resources to also try to bring some attention to the reasons why.
I think the political power can only be regained by pooling your labor with your peers.
https://mobile.twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1172279395035...
I wish there was another way, but I can't really think of one that's within our control... Unions are certainly not above corruption either. I see Republicans / Democrats as two opposing unions; instead of making rational decisions on each issue independently everything gets encoded into a binary choice. Red or blue and all the good / bad that comes with either choice.
The real solution is smaller companies. Local businesses that you can simply stop using / move away from. That seems like a pipe dream though; it's more convenient to buy your internet from Comcast and support a monopoly than start your own ISP - even if you do and it gains traction, Comcast will come knocking and you'll take the money and retire.
I think its likely hard to hire smart people who don't rock the boat; and thus it takes a long time to hire. It's of course possible (and reasonably likely) that there are only a handful of people that can do the work, but I dunno... with the kind of money that Google has you just open a school and start grooming people specifically for the roles that you have open. Build a pipeline of qualified workers, don't wait for them to come to you.
Whenever Homer gives out advice the odds are its bad advice.
This sounds terrible. You're not increasing worker power as a whole you're just increasing the power of workers with similar political agendas. If successful, the unaligned workers don't even get the material benefit of a raise or added employee benefits like they would from a real union. The unaligned are basically just expected to roll with whatever mayhem the preachy workers cause.
Holocaust would not happen. Modernity and the Holocaust by Z. Bauman should be obligatory read for corporate workers.
You may "voice your concerns" all you like, but while you're an employee, it is your duty to ACT in accordance with the directions you're given, and in the absence of explicit direction, in the interests of the company.
If you're an employee of a company you are contractually obligated to fulfill the terms of your contract, but there is no legal -- or if you prefer, LEGAL -- requirement for you to do so. You may be reprimanded or even fired for spending too much time on Hacker News at the office, but you are not breaking any law by doing so. More to the point in this case, you are absolutely not breaking any law by telling your employer that you don't agree with their decisions, or even by trying to organize fellow employees to put pressure on management to change their behavior. If your employer fires you because of your speaking out or organizing, in fact, the law may very well be on your side, not theirs.
If you are flexible enough about what "maximizing shareholder value" means, then it's not an endorsement of any behavior anyone disapproves of. You could say the real issue is just that people do bad stuff and say that it is maximizing value.
Corporations often say they have to do stuff to maximize shareholder value, but they also often say they have to act in the worst possible way permitted by law, because that is the standard the law sets. That is, without referencing shareholder value. Maybe it's all just nonsense excuses by people who do bad stuff?
Bondholders (as well as employees and others) come before shareholders in bankruptcy, so it seems like in a very concrete way, maximizing shareholder value is not a feature of it and never has been.
There are certainly some economists who might argue that indeed it's become nonsense excuses, including The Economist, which wrote in 2016 that shareholder value theory had become "a license for bad conduct, including skimping on investment, exorbitant pay, high leverage, silly takeovers, accounting shenanigans and a craze for share buy-backs."
(Also, apparently I had the year wrong -- Friedman wrote in 1970, not 1975.)
I think whether that is a sufficient qualification depends on whether you are trying to break down or eliminate most of the "rules of the game" or instead make them better.
Lots of ideas make sense by themselves and then become toxic when combined with others.
This is a myth. The only time this applies is if there's an actual written contract of fiduciary duty. Running a company or having investors does not magically enact some federal law.
> In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.
Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not. Google employees provide a lot more value to Google than they are compensated for. They are well within their rights and should be encouraged to voice their honest opinions.
> 2. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.
So you would have them STFU, because the rest of the country sucks? This sounds completely backwards and doesn't make any sense to me.
This is because of the ethics those same employees are complaining about. An ethical Google makes less money, employees will necessarily have to be paid less, they will then go on to the next unethical company that can pay them more. It is completely ridiculous to bring home a huge paycheck and complain about the very thing that enables that huge paycheck.
They want a world where they make the same $$ at ethical as non-ethical companies. It doesn't work that way. If they can't give a shit enough about their own beliefs to sacrifice something - $$ vs ethics -- then how can they expect a faceless corporation to give a shit enough about that person's beliefs to make that sacrifice? It's a completely, ridiculously, unrealistic expectation.
The very reason Google is paying employees is that they are contributing to the company's goals, either directly or indirectly. So it isn't really Google the abstract entity that is causing climate change, it is all the employees working under the "Google" banner — including the people complaining about climate change. That is what is hypocritical.
For the second part — "have them STFU" is a bit extreme, but I think Google does have the right to be held to a similar standard than the companies they are competing with and the rest of the country/world. If the response every time they make some progress is "you aren't going far enough!" - even though they are miles ahead of everyone else - eventually they'll just stop making the effort altogether.
You're wrong. You have an opinion; not a fact. This is no different to the original commenter, but at least (s)he made that very clear.
how? can you justify what makes these people (you) so special? IN all honesty, they are probably overvalued in every sense.
>Absolutely incorrect. Paychecks have nothing to do with whether you as a person find the company's policies palatable or not
You are right because they already made their money and can afford to quit over whatever. Of course it has to do with money. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves. If money did not matter, they would have not worked at Google, there are other ways to make the world a better place than add snow effect on photos.
But there's another function to high pay: sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere. They basically hire a significant chunk of systems (and nowadays also AI) programmers available in the industry, and keep them for as long as they like. Left to their own devices, those programmers would be able to start companies, or help Google's competitors compete with Google. As things stand, everyone else (including the likes of Microsoft) gets the folks who have failed the FAANG interviews. They still sometimes get good people, but not as good as to show them the way from the corners they've painted themselves into.
Where it all goes wrong though is when they actively attract "activists". From direct observation, few, if any, of those activists actually pull their weight once hired. In fact they often prevent others from focusing on their work, so their productivity contribution is often negative. They mostly spend their days on activism on the internal Google+ and do little else. You can actually see everyone's commits at Google, as well as graphs of how much code they contribute. When I was there, I'd check those dashboards from time to time only to confirm my suspicions, without fail.
How do we know that employees provide more value than their compensation? Because Google makes profit.
How does a software engineer at Google worth more value than one at timbuktu? No, they are not. They just are not in the right place at the right time.
Do you think selling ads is changing the world? Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else? Wake up and smell the coffee.
The gas station down the street isn't paying its employees six figure salaries. That employee might be making $7.25 an hour, which is the federal limit. Assuming 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year (no time off!), that's 15k before taxes. Is that gas station clerk a better/more worthwhile person than a gas station clerk in timbuktu?
> Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else?
Getting paid more than someone else doesn't make you a better person than someone else. It just means you're earning more income, and that company is willing to pay you that income for any multitude of reasons. That's it.
Programmers can provide immense value to companies, and companies make handsome profits despite paying their engineers immense salaries. This also has to do with cost of living in some areas: chicago is more expensive than many places in the world, so if you want to base a company in chicago and pay someone who lives in chicago to work for you, you need more money. It's not rocket science.
I think many companies don't need to be based in SF or Seattle, etc, but that's another discussion.
Quitting one's job is disruptive enough that it's reasonable for one to make several good faith attempts to make changes from the inside before pulling the trigger. And that includes making public critiques as people from every industry do all the time.
There are of course cases where one only gives lip service in order to gain social karma points while continuing to rake in the dough. But separating those cases from the actions of reasonable, ethical people takes more than setting a "one bit" Manichean flag for hypocrisy.
Don't get me wrong-- skepticism should be used when assessing any critique by someone still collecting a paycheck. But rejecting all such claims out of hand strikes me as flip and extreme. Or at least doing so requires a persuasive argument, and you did not provide one.
I respect when people stay, too... they’re trying to make change from within where they have some power, rather than outside where they have none.
i.e. the world ought to look more like the leader, not the average; regression to the mean is not desirable.
leaving a job early is already tough, leaving a big profile name over politics even more so
2. didn't their datacenter carbon neutral though ? or is this Apple ?
Why is it that you think that the people who see the sausage being made are exactly the ones most unqualified to criticize it?
Ultimately, I think hypocrisy is the wrong lens to look at this through. Activists are not seeking purity or moral perfection, we're seeking change. Change requires organizing, which has to start within the company. An individual employee does fuck-all if they leave by themselves.
Absolutely no one at Google is doing that. What is happening is that these employees are telling their bosses "we would prefer not to shove rat shit into sausages" and the bosses are saying "no". Then these employees are going home and posting about it on social media and going back to work making the same sausage the next day.
No, that's not it at all.
He's saying you get together and tell the boss "Hey, there's some rat shit in this sausage, but I'm gonna go ahead and keep making it."
That's why it's perceived as illegitimate. You're expecting other people to sacrifice but not yourself.
This is a particularly subversive brand of whataboutism.
"Company has participated in Bad Thing."
"Ah, but Other Company also participates in Bad Thing! Your criticism of Company is therefore invalid!"
"Company took $1,000,000,000 from Bad Industry! We should scold that behavior!"
"Ah, but Other Company took $2,000,000,000 from Bad Industry! Company therefore shouldn't be criticized!"
One action can be bad without negating the badness of another action.
1. I applaud the fact that they are actually quitting the company to voice their disapproval of these policies. In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.
2. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.