Agree 100%. Daylight is the best disinfectant, especially in publicly traded companies. Every CEO, CMO, etc loves white-knighting ("We care about the environment/our employees!") until the shareholders start calling. Then they're the first to start covering up problems.
That's not to say that you can't have your cake and eat it too - the first place to start is that these corporations have to be honest with themselves and their shareholders about social commitments and financial returns.
Shame about all the deplatforming then
Providing a platform for vile attention-seekers doesn't make them less vile. They have no shame.
What worries me about content policing and deplatforming is that now the companies that run the platform become the de facto police. And as we see in this very post and many of the associated comments that is a very, very dangerous thing.
EDIT: clarity
Its that a dialog can happen and people change there minds.
But sadly like you shown its not about finding a solution but winning, feeling superior and dragging other people down.
I'd just want to point out that the workers who are in the middle are the ones who can afford to do so financially and have the power to make management change things. If you're a programmer and make decent money, consider not putting yourself in a position where you must compromise your morals, such as accepting the company you work for firing whistleblowers over poor work conditions. $100k in the bank makes it a hell of a lot easier to decide to organize.
When you pass on working on the new team that uses ML to predict the likelihood of workers knowing their rights based on resume and application cover letter, you may not make the $400k total comp next year, but it's not like you'll be unemployed either. There's plenty of work at pretty normal companies to be done. They won't pay as good, it may not sounds as impressive and you may have to explain at family dinners what your company does, but it's an option.
At a minimum, Facebook, Amazon and Google should be split up.
Apple are trying to kill general purpose computing.
Netflix - well, they're just selling sugar water, I suppose they're the best of a bad bunch.
You can clearly see from the comments that many people here are still very much on the "but they're employees ... why would they have any rights? if they complain just crush them into paste to oil the machines" camp.
The occasional high profile person quitting one of the big tech companies because of their constant illegal employee/whistleblower abuse happens regularly at this point. Is Tim Bray's particularly different in some way I'm not seeing?
I think a lot of people would say that at some level money is moral (don't pay terrorist organizations or render services for them) but that distinction blurs as we get closer to mundane, real-life concerns like spending money at Amazon, Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods. I think it gets blurry because of desensitization and the need for folks to feel like they're not screwing over others during the normal course of their life. But the fact is that capital enables behaviors in a capitalist economic system, so allocating the capital you have control over is necessarily a moral act.
It's become fashionable in tech among a certain crowd to bombard coworkers with divisive messaging about controversial social issues, to leak confidential information to sympathetic external press, and to demonize anyone who objects. This practice must end, and I admire Bezos for having the guts to end it. Companies have every right to ask employees to focus on work at work.
If being one of these "reputable people" you mention requires me to be a cheerleader for this kind of strident and obnoxious internal activism, I don't want to be "reputable".
For those in well paying, white collar jobs with plenty of other opportunities, even in the current climate, quitting with an exit statement is more appropriate than trying to burn it down from the inside.
I respect the exec in question, and the warehouse workers who speak out. The idological opportunists pushing an agenda, not so much.
I’m responding to this claim, maybe we’re talking about different things? My point is really: What if the “work” is running trains to death camps? Shouldn’t employees object? If you believe climate change is as big a threat as scientists claim, I think workers building tools to help fossil fuel extraction have a duty by this historical argument to not “run the trains” or not just “focus on work at work”.
Reminds of the classic and very public Amazon exec feud, Kivin Varghese v Munira Rahemtulla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716
Prominent VCs are calling for people to get back to work every day on Twitter. The rest of the world is waking up to these people, but we have a long way to go before Silicon Valley cares.
It's exactly what you should expect.
I suspect most of them who know about it appreciate Tim Bray standing up for them and consider it a "meaningful way".
I don't understand what you are saying is a "more meaningful way" than what. You are saying keeping your mouth shut at work and just calling your legislator is a "more meaningful way to change the conditions"?
That's a nice story to tell yourself when you want to preserve your good salary and safe working conditions that the workers in the warehouse don't have. I couldn't really say if most well-paid employees at Amazon agree or not, I'm not familiar with enough of them.
But if we can't learn to protect each other, we've got nothing. This is not a test.
That's not possible, the US has the worst worker protection laws in the world, it's really quite an undeveloped country in that regard.
I'm not taking the claim you replied to at face value (it's exceedingly extreme to even be plausibly true) but they at least included a "probably" to allow for some doubt.
do you mean "and something to be apologetic about"? the two clauses in this line seem to be contradictory the way I'm reading it.
Amazon, MS, Google, Apple, etc. rank among the most wealthy companies in the world and they've each had to deal with internal pressures where their employees voiced concerns about certain things or where there was some kind of whistle blower situation. And they each dealt with it in their own ways.
IMHO firing whistle blowers is the kind of action that should be called out as very negative and not something to be apologetic about.
So, I admire what Tim Bray is doing here and fully understand that he's having a hard time justifying working for what he's diplomatically not quite calling out as aholes; though the undertone is quite clear.
Of course as he is pointing out, he's in a position where he can afford to do so financially. But then, being able to and actually doing are two things and he's showing some back bone here by 1) walking away and taking a hit financially, and 2) writing about it in the hope that leadership steps up and acts to correct the situation: compensate individuals affected, offer to rehire them, and discipline executives involved in pushing this through. Unlikely to happen, but one can hope for someone with a backbone stepping up. It would be the right thing to do. At the minimum, they've just been exposed for what they are and that might have consequences elsewhere for them.