paperdropper

Kind of ironic to invoke a dead language in criticizing this essay, given its content.

> She told them she wanted confidental information

I understand this is only because upper management had chosen to anonymize their review of the paper, which is apparently quite unusual in Google.

> Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.

It's the threat of being able to strike and potentially cause that much damage to the business that makes it powerful.

No-one really wants to strike, actually going through with it is the final step when the company fails to meet the workers' demands - no point in making a threat if you don't demonstrate it when the circumstances arise, it's toothless otherwise.

I think it's good to remind people how terrible the US is when it comes to worker rights. Many people don't realize just how bad they've got it over there.

I hope this does encourage more workers in this industry to unionize.

It's unfortunate that people aren't sufficiently concerned that their employer holds a significant amount of power over them - or at least, not enough that they'll do anything much about it - even if they do happen to have a job that pays higher than average.

Unions can be valuable resources for all workers.

The other curious thing is, behind the pink-boxed redactions are the names of four other Google employees. I'm wondering why they haven't been reprimanded in the same way. At least, not that we know of.

A draft copy of the disputed paper was posted over in Reddit, if this is of interest to anyone:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF