Tech sector has been very fortunate in the past to not have to unionize, but now as the workforce grows exponentially, wealth is concentrated, salaries relatively decrease, jobs become commoditized, and companies are overall too big. Most new devs today are not going to see the same autonomy. Devs are slaved in plenty of jobs already, and no they don't make enough nor can they just drop and make a startup using someone else's money. Those things are the top of the 1% of workers.
It's demonstrated time and again that outrage at companies works. Marketers run the show, and they don't like bad publicity. In this case it's probably not enough to do anything. Apple has their fingers in too many pies and people can't afford to drop their lock in ecosystem.
I don’t think this is what I would advocate for. Me not bitching on Twitter is not the same as me not allowing Apple to do whatever they want.
Smart engineers leaving is a big deal, even for Apple. There are ways to deliver constructive criticism. I’ve done it many times, sometimes successfully. And it never involved leaking to the press or talking bad about my org.
I think there are needs for corporate governance and don’t like the “you’re either with us or against us” or equating not speaking publicly with condoning or allowing behavior. There are many other options.
I can find no articles linking Janneke Parrish to opinions on Palestine, so I'm not sure how that's relevant.
(and of course this is a vapid test for sincerity of beliefs. Are all people who want to ban abortion but supportive of Israel similarly insincere and disingenuous?)
Who says that’s what will happen? Tom Cruise is a member of SAG, do you think he gets paid SAG union rates?
Union busters in tech have done a fantastic job of convincing engineers that all unions are blue-collar. Which is funny, because you only have to look to Hollywood to see unions like SAG, the DGA, and the WGA which exist to protect all workers from exploitation and not cap compensation at all.
The Wizard of Speed and Time is a great film about how difficult it is to be an independent creator in Hollywood due to the costs of getting anything started. The unions make it very hard to bootstrap anything without massive financing.
That said the very same union would frequently respond with that's not our responsibility when I pointed them to take up actual legal issues that they were responsible for.
A lot of the old union representatives were there for decades with no desire to change anything and enjoying the good relationship they had built with the leadership.
At the end of the day any human organization that grows too big seems to end up in its own lazy comfort zone, whether it's the employer side or the employee representing union side.
The thing about forming your own union is that major unions also have big lobbying institutions saying that their union is the only thing with real power, while the other side has their own lobbying groups pressuring workers into believing that all unions are bad.
Adding any security technology is a nightmare because they have an obsession about being spied on.
Take a standard EDR: the security team just wants the company to be safe from hackers. The unions think that all they wish is to spot on them. What will happen is that the company will crash after repeated hacks and they know they will be the last to be fired because they are there to protect people...
Of course this is just une side, unions are fantastic when they actually do their job and this is thanks to them we have the Labour Law we have. It is just that the people today are not the same as the ones who actually cared.
Take for example machine learning algorithms, a lot of the actual model definition you could just copy yourself even when there is DLP. What you can't take with you is the source data and the labeled data.
DLP allows you to prevent people from leaking sketchy and incompetent leadership from investors, SEC and law enforcement. I get the logic behind it, but most of the actual critical stuff you can just take with you in some fashion or another. The situation is obviously a bit different when you're talking hardware manufacturing, CAD models etc.
Don't want to operate a holywood-style guild? Then don't.
I want to add that disruption is what huge unions excel at, so if anybody wants to keep them out of tech, the best approach might be to fill the space they'd otherwise sweep into unchallenged with a compelling organization.
But I don’t see this as a problem in tech that needs to be solved. The barriers to entry and exit are so low to me as a programmer that I think organizations already have to compete to hire and keep me. So any unions wouldn’t do much to help me and seem like an extra layer of bureaucracy that would stop me from having fun while I work.
Also I have started prior tech company, it would have been hugely difficult if i had to make negotiations with unions.
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Your claims and arguments are against some imagined shitty union-like thing that does not much resemble an actual union.
Have you considered that a union could be good for all employees? What about setting minimum salary requirements? Maybe ensuring more of a company's profits are paid out to its workers?
This raises the question: if you only care about yourself, why should we care about you?
Many people would very much appreciate it if other members of society cared less about them. Care is not required for humans to participate in a mutually beneficial society.
Um, could you elaborate?
I'm assuming you come from a time where strong unions were still a thing. They were a hard-won victory for workers' rights, and a necessity to improve working conditions. Without them, any complaining employee was simply fired, because it's much cheaper for the organization to fire a few employees than to acquiesce to their demands. The latter is precisely what's happening here.
Perhaps they have other grievances but I guarantee they pale in comparison to what the labor movement worked to solve years back.
I unfortunately never had the right guidance to get there and hopefully my kids one day will. I can’t complain as things worked out —- but still.
I see these employee issues pop up from time to time and I guess I just don’t understand it. I’m not trying to be cruel to the people speaking out.
Just I truly don’t understand it. Ungodly money. Ungodly benefits. Working interesting problems everyday. Changing the world. Impacting millions of lives. The best of some of the best teams.
No job is perfect and whatever beef exists at Apple right now is 1000x better than some of the trash jobs out there and what some jobs are like in the real universe. It’s not to say Apple should go without ridicule or improvement.
Just an outsider perspective who sees Lannisters killing each other in their perfect castle.
Not advocating anything. Just hard to imagine walking into Apple and having a tough time or not enjoying it. I suffered much worse for much less in my life.
Cheers to everyone trying to improve things though.
The pay is good, but the rest of it is not as good as you make it out to be. There are exceptions, but for the most part projects, teams and impact are usually pretty low.
If you want real tough, new, interesting work, join a startup or a non-tech company where you can have true impact. Alas the pay will be shit in comparison, that's the tradeoff.
Better, start your own startup. These days anyone who can build a weekend demo and talk coherently for 45 minutes to an investor can raise a few million. Not even throwing shade or joking, it's a literal free money fiesta right now, at least until interest rates go nonzero (which will be soon).
Sounds miserable!
In all seriousness, it’s awesome and better than most.
And you want to talk about ungodly money and ungodly benefits, yet there are suicides at Facebook and Amazon. Not to mention in investment banking. All of these things come at a cost.
That there are hard jobs everywhere and hard jobs are… hard?
I would also bet stats show suicide rates are higher in other industries.
These are some of the most balanced and progressive organizations between pay and lifestyle.
If your golden ticket is so toxic go get a job that is not at 1/3 the pay. You’ll still be richer than most and I would bet many still find a way to be miserable.
This sentence misses "for the better". Good payment and benefits are easy to achieve as an engineer, good problems/tech is also not hard if you look enough. Sorry if you had bad experiences, but it's not like there is a cruel world out there outside of FAANG, as your comment makes it seem. They may have more to give due to sheer scale, but after a limit, good goals are equally if not more important.
And it's at least doubious that the monopolistic, walled garden data-harvesting world that they build can provide those.
"Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future." - Yoda.
I was raised up believing I was somehow unique Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me
But I don't, I don't know what that will be I'll get back to you someday soon you will see
What's my name, what's my station? Oh, just tell me what I should do I don't need to be kind to the armies of night that would do such injustice to you Or bow down and be grateful and say, "Sure, take all that you see" To the men who move only in dimly-lit halls and determine my future for me
And I don't, I don't know who to believe I'll get back to you someday soon you will see
If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak Yeah I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself What good is it to sing helplessness blues, why should I wait for anyone else?
And I know, I know you will keep me on the shelf I'll come back to you someday soon myself
If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm raw If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm sore And you would wait tables and soon run the store
Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm sore If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm sore Someday I'll be like the man on the screen
Based on my own experience (albeit outside the US) the salaries don't differ much from their non-FAANG counterparts at the top of the market.
What if you found every other company were the same way?
> Or I’d just work into leadership and make executive decisions.
There are much fewer leadership positions than people in those companies. It can't be the general recommendation that if you want to make your workplace better you have to compete for one of a handful of positions.
That's like telling somebody living in a monarchy that if they want influence over their lives, they just have to marry into the royal family.
Then make your own company, or failing that, start to think critically about why every company is structured in the way it is. Maybe others have tried it your way and it didn't work?
> That's like telling somebody living in a monarchy that if they want influence over their lives, they just have to marry into the royal family.
Luckily, because of the freedom this country offers us, the solution is instead to (per the metaphor) go to another of the million monarchies, create your own monarchy, or, yes, work your way up in the monarchy. If you decide to start causing chaos and sowing discontent in your current kingdom, then you may be kicked out of it.
it's not surprising that efforts are being made today to decentralize power within the private sphere and create broader rights and democratic management of capital. it's the place people feel most pressure in their lives today, feel the most helpless, and unable to act in their own interests or make their own way.
and of course people who are invested in the current system of management will make arguments that it is perfectly rational and any other system cannot work.
maybe everyone trying this will get kicked out. but i don't think that will discourage or prevent groups like this, because that doesn't kill the motivation. it's simply selection pressure for tactics that are more decentralized, more direct, popular, faster, and harder to shut down.
So does Joe the plumber whom you hired to fix the sink now have rights to determine how your household is run? Does he and Jimmy the electrician (who wired up the place) get to vote on who can live in your house or what the household budget should be spent on?
if he and Jimmy and the thousand other dudes that apparently come to my house every day all have feelings about something, it might end up looking like a democratic process
but it would be really silly to run a huge business like that out of my home. good thing Joe and Jimmy only come by once in a while and don't give a fuck what i do here.
anyway, strawmen like yours or mine are irrelevant, materially it's clear that workers in large companies are seeking to reform governance processes of those companies and gain more control. they will probably continue to try regardless of anyone else's opinion of it, they are systemically incentivized, because more control would benefit them.
That’s probably the best euphemism I’ve heard since “enhanced interrogation techniques”
I mean I’m fine with a democracy on the board of a company, I just don’t think it is wise to have everyone be on the board.
> I mean I’m fine with a democracy on the board of a company, I just don’t think it is wise to have everyone be on the board.
Some companies are co-ops and have made it work. It depends, and is perhaps worth trying more.
i don't think anyone would disagree that currently widespread models of management don't involve democratic processes.
a lot of the activism internal to large companies today is in direct response to perceived failures of management, and seeks to demonstrate broad internal support for specific actions. they would be satisfied if they had an institutional remedy instead of just petitions to the "king"
You are right. It's hardly surprising. Most revolutions fail. Yet as outsiders we can appreciate the try, cheer on, or maybe even help (like the French did?) Maybe one day that help will be returned.
In the US, people have protected rights to discuss and push for changes in their working conditions, and to organize, thanks to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
The "like we did in the old days" way of doing stuff, you watch on Mad Men, was pretty unkind to a lot of different folks.
That's just Apple's claim. And you don't seem to have noticed that employees also have rights. It's up to you if you willing to give up yours, but don't devalue others who don't stand idly by and watch giant corporations do whatever they want.
And actually, I try to improve and build with ideas.
These types of approaches seem dumb and ineffective so it’s odd to me that people would try them and be surprised at the outcome.
Doing a dumb thing doesn’t mean that I’m courageous. Conflating all dumb things with right things is weird to me.
Again, not to be old personish, but it’s ok to point out and not applaud ineffective, counterproductive techniques.
If someone comes to you and says “my goal is to improve apple” and the explains their plan to complain on Twitter and organize complaint groups inside apple, I think you would tell them that that approach is not likely to be effective (ie “dumb”). That doesn’t mean the person is bad or anything. Just that their plan is not good.
Also, using hyperbolic language like “it’s devastating” is weird to me. If this is devastating, then I want to find ways to protect you from truly devastating things in the world. It’s a great thing to be so privileged that internet discussions that you don’t agree with are devastating.
It's like asking a person to leave a country, instead of trying to make it better.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -JFK
And a decent gdp.
With recent moves like Walmart creating in-house health care options, and Salesforce offering to move people out of Texas because of their abortion laws, our late-stage capitalism is morphing into the cyberpunk dystopia predicted by sci-fi writers 30-40 years ago. It's starting to matter more what company you work for, rather than what country you live in.
”The GDP is the total of all value added created in an economy. The value added means the value of goods and services that have been produced minus the value of the goods and services needed to produce them, the so called intermediate consumption."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...?
(It is still true, of course, that management has the power to fire you and therefore picking fights with management is generally not good for your career. But that's a cold practical observation, not a statement about merit. There's a significant difference between losing a political fight and working against the company's interests.)
The organization is the best equipped to understand the best interests over a single employee.
The challenge is that many fired employees will think they are right and the company was wrong. If there’s lawbreaking then maybe a judge will decide.
It’s like asking prisoners if they are guilty. They all say not guilty. And some are right and the institution was wrong. But typically the institution is right.
With private companies that’s the trade off. Management will decide and fire.
I’d rather just quit than try to change a company this way. Or I’d just work into leadership and make executive decisions.
Or I’d start a company and do it my way.
I just don’t see leadership being convinced by me complaining on Twitter or starting an internal complaint slack channel. It’s good for complaining or winning a lawsuit, but don’t think it’s going to organically make change.
It’s sad this person lost their job, but seems reasonable to get fired if you delete things off company equipment when you’ve been directed not to do that.