Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmatized even though doctors/lawyers/police/actors/teachers unions all wield massive political power, engineers accept their market based compensation and micro kitchens and decide that’s enough then are shocked that on political issues they get pushed around by the execs and VCs. If you want to have any voice in what your work does in the world, step 1 is collective organization of Silicon Valley engineers, anything besides that is smoke and mirrors and a waste of time.
1. It's my understanding that doctors and lawyers have professional organizations, which aren't really the same thing as a union.
2. Unions and professional organizations, and really all organizations intended to consolidate power for one group over another, have both good points and bad. Obviously, unions have played an important role in improving worker safety and security, and that's great. But they've also contributed negatively in some ways. Not wishing to organize under as part of a union is not necessarily irrational; it may just be a different weight applied to the varies effects said organizations have.
That's not a very good argument in this case because the average Silicon Valley tech worker has a better take home salary than a programmer in those countries even after accounting for education/childcare and insurance costs.
Take home pay certainly isn't the metric that is improved here, but rather pay per hour. How many hours per year does a Silicon Valley tech worker work? Absolute pay e.g. in Germany is significantly less, but then the absolute hours worked in a full time job are probably 800 hours less per year than in Silicon Valley: 6 weeks of paid holiday are standard in tech here, plus e.g. 2 weeks paid sick leave because of the flu, plus 4 weeks of paid sick leave with the kids, and a work week is actually 40 hours (or less).
For the better part of a decade I have worked in SF at startups. You know what I say when I'm sick? "Hey, guys, I'm sick. I'm going to sleep it off." No doctor's note, no accou
This has never not been the case. Number of unions? 0.
Some of my co-workers from my previous employer are currently still on classes paid for by that previous employer.
Levels.fyi has median German comp at $95k (net $61k), median SF comp at $236k (net $151k). We'll just use your numbers for the time spent:
I think the main point was lost a bit once actual numbers got involved: Everyone gets these benefits in other countries, regardless of type of job. Of course you get paid holidays and good healthcare, but what about all the other people in your town enabling you to have your jobs - healthcare workers, cleaners, workers in the shops and warehouses and so on? The point of unions isn't maximized profits for a few, but a good living for everyone. That reduces income inequality, which sometimes lessens the options for the few at the top of the income pyramid.
I expect nothing except of myself that I am adaptable to uncertain circumstances. Certainly collective bargaining will allow me to extract a greater portion of the value should things go poorly for everyone. I think a union would be a useful tool to ensure that, say, the needs of the majority of participants are met as things fall apart. But that's for the majority, which given the ability will rent-seek over their sole control of employment by harming the minority: new participants, immigrants, those with relatively little power through ethnic/cultural/historical accident.
Of course, one could attempt to construct an organization that doesn't have these flaws, but I suspect the greater part of possible participants desire these things I call flaws. So, given institutional oppression vs. the natural oppression of the markets? I choose the natural oppression. We will both swim in the stormy ocean and luck and strength and perseverance will choose one of us. So be it.
> 1. It's my understanding that doctors and lawyers have professional organizations, which aren't really the same thing as a union.
False. Professional organization give licensure. The union represents those who have licenses and or work for an agency where majority of those license holders work.
> 2. ...Obviously, unions have played an important role in improving worker safety and security, and that's great. But they've also contributed negatively in some ways...
You can add a "not having a union" in that sentence and flip those contradictory sentences and they still don't mean anything. It's not about not wishing to organize. It's about coming up with a few set goals that the union can represent. Then the members vote on what else is there that is important to majority of the members. Unions work like a democracy. There's some shortcomings but the overall outcome is beneficial to the people being represented.
> False. Professional organization give licensure. The union represents those who have licenses and or work for an agency where majority of those license holders work.
Incorrect!
Most doctors are probably solo or group practice. This means one or a few doctors work together in a business that they own. This business then contracts with hospitals to provide services. Kaiser Permanente is different in that it hires doctors directly, but it is the minority.
The AMA (American Medical Association) is not a union and does not negotiate on behalf of doctors. It is more a lobbying and advocacy group.
Lobbying and advocacy is, besides collective bargaining, a core function of unions. At least in Europe. And yes, these associations, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, are wielding a lot of power and influence.
As most of these professionals aren't employees, collective bargaining doesn't make a lot of sense. Where they are, in the cade of hospitals, collective bargaining is very much a thing.
EDIT: In western Europe, we all live with things the nions achieved in the later 19th, early 20th century. in Germany, things like paid sick leave, vacation, labour hours, week-ends, etc... are all things union fought for, really hard, to get. As the world changes, which it did back then, employees need to have their say in how things will be handled. Last time, it was through unions. If these unions are up to the tasks regarding digitalization is disputable. But that employees, this time around white collor ones, need their voices to be heard is a given.
I never was in a union as an employee, being white collor made that always a difficult choice. And unions tend to play political and power games. Which I don't like. the alternative so, doesn't seem to be better.
The problem is that "other things" come out of it too. Being required to pay someone for an hour of time to vacuum the carpet around your display at a trade show or plug in a lamp (because you're not allowed to do it yourself). People being threatened with physical violence (or actually being subject to it) because they don't agree with the union. These things do happen and, to many people, they are a serious concern.
> There's some shortcomings but the overall outcome is beneficial to the people being represented
That is a matter of opinion, and also ignores what's best for society as a whole (which also matters to a lot of people). Just because something is best for the workers doesn't mean it's the best choice for a functioning society.
I'm not arguing for or against unions here, just point out that they're not all rainbows and birthday cakes. Deciding to consider the facts and come up with your own opinion doesn't mean you're a bad person, or irrational.
Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
So what you're saying is a union would try and prevent companies interviewing candidates to weed out the ones that can't code, would block its members from working in open offices regardless of their preferences (some people like them), protect workers who fix one bug per month just as much as those who fix ten and then ... the last parts I don't even understand really. Are you claiming that companies deliberately penalise education? That's not true at any company I've ever worked at.
I believe those original posts meant that employees often penalize engineers who come from nonstandard backgrounds in favor of those who come from well known universities with top CS programs. This was less common in the past, especially when there were many self-taught engineers in the era when CS was less common as a degree, but credentialism has become more popular in recent years and those from elite schools are often preferred especially over bootcamp grads.
Everything else you're saying is essentially bad faith readings of legitimate industry concerns that I deign to respond to unless evidence of non-trolling becomes manifest. Perhaps you genuinely have bought into the propaganda that unions are intended to protect mediocrity, or are ignorant that unions exist in industries where stark differences in worker performance exist (the SAG and professional athletes' unions), or believe that a union made up of software engineers- the supposed innovators of this age, making the world a better place, etc.- are doomed to repeat the same failures as past unions. And here I thought tech can disrupt and reinvent anything.
But I will mention that those issues you've caricatured aren't even the potentially most killer features of a union specifically for the software industry: anti-discrimination and anti-harassment. HR departments are notorious for protecting companies instead of individual workers, so an independent body that can provide the individual with legal representation and support would be useful in an industry notorious for ageism and issues with gender and race. Would Susan Fowler have endured as many indignities if there was a SWE labor union that had her back? We won't know until there's one to protect those who suffer from similar mistreatment in the future. And yes, such a union would be expected to protect workers from such abuse no matter how many bugs they fix in a month- that is how equality before the law should be, and a union is a way to ensure that labor laws are respected.
> It also lead to promotion based on years served. Pay scales. And the protection of low performers.
You do realize all of these things are standard at any large tech company already?
Commoditizing labor into pay bands is standard HR policy for all large companies (see levels.io). And people who get promoted tend to have more seniority with the company.
I’ve also worked at multiple FAANG companies, and low performers are absolutely not fired. You’d basically have to steal something or molest a coworker before they even think about firing you.
I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US.
As one example, look at training and employment. It takes three years to become a police officer in Germany or France. Once you are one, you are employed for life (after a probation period). A lot of the training is focused on legal work, de-escalation and so on. Is there still excesive use of force? Yes. Still racial profiling and protection of your felllow officers? Yes and yes. Do you have to be affraid of police? No. Does police have to be afraid of the population? No. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, as always.
Anohter, very big difference, between France germany and the US is, that in france there are two police organisations (Police and Gendarmerie), in Germany a federal one and one per state. All are follwing the same regulations with only minor differences between the states in germany, and differences in area of responsibility. Compare that to the US with city-based police departments, sherrifs departments, sate police and so on. The former makes it easier to implement common standards, the latter makes it harder.
> I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US.
Hard to say if it is the most important but it is a pretty important factor. See https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ for all research that indicates the unions are a key stumbling block.
That is true. On a meta level, that is kind of what a police union should protect interests of the police force. Shows how this, be it unions or any other association, can backfire.
Lots of different types of unions exist. Seems silly to throw the idea out because some unions fought for things that aren't popular with this crowd. Instead make a union that fights for the things you want. They are democratic institutions after all.
What examples do you think of where unions do not/did not lead to more formalized, static, equalized systems, which somebody that likes having impact, being paid and promoted based on his work and not his time with the company etc does not want?
Bewildering syntax aside, that sounds like every big company, ever. Unions don't change the core nature of large organizations, just the power dynamics.
The company aggregates the individual contributions and makes them stable to the outside. A union would make workers more stable when interfacing with the company: you pay everyone the same, you get the same amount of hours, you don't negotiate with individuals but with union representatives etc.
That's not necessarily desirable for somebody that currently has a compensation package that's far above the average.
I've never seen or heard of a union that handles this differently, even if they are "democratic institutions", so I wonder if there are any examples where you bargain collectively, but you don't get the negative side-effects of equal pay for unequal work, promotions based on time spent instead of contributions, essentially tenure for underperformers etc.
> That's not necessarily desirable for somebody that currently has a compensation package that's far above the average.
That doesn't happen in the SAG. Talent are expected to be paid a floor, but no ceiling is mandated. There's certainly stories in the news all of the time about incredible contracts getting signed by big stars.
> you don't get the negative side-effects of equal pay for unequal work, promotions based on time spent instead of contributions, essentially tenure for underperformers etc.
Given that a hypothetical software engineer union would be a brand new entity with no historical baggage to older, more archaic or corrupted unions, certainly its members can work to design an updated system that addresses some of these issues. Why, if tech is supposed to be about innovation, must a union representing its workers must necessarily be tethered to the same faults as older institutions?
> Why, if tech is supposed to be about innovation, must a union representing its workers must necessarily be tethered to the same faults as older institutions?
I don't really follow that tech is about innovation, but that aside: I'm not saying a union would have be the same as all the other unions, I'm asking why it wouldn't and how to ensure that.
The SAG is interesting, but I don't know whether it's very comparable to tech. I'm not anti-union, but I wouldn't join a union, I work too closely with them to believe that it's in my personal best interest. For the average (non-tech) worker, that's different, they'll most likely benefit. But they're also in a very different position than tech people, with very different hiring markets.
And they don’t feel strongly because they don’t have to care. I know I don’t. I could never open a newspaper or go to a protest and live quite blissfully. I’m white, I’m a man, I’m an engineer. So I’m safe. Everything seems to work just fine for me. I have friends struggling to pay rent, my girlfriend has trouble finding peers at school who will treat her like an equal, but I get an inbox full of emails all the time from companies begging to pay me amounts of money that boggle even my mind. I’m 27 and I make more than both my parents combined, of course you don’t see me fighting for a union. I can barely keep up with all the perks I already get! It’s rare to find someone willing to step outside their bubble and do work for someone else when they won’t benefit.
Engineer distaste or at least lack of enthusiasm for open offices is near-universal. It might not be the best reason to create a union, but its prevalence is probably rooted in the lack of something like a union to tell management to back off.
Engineer who works in an open office, can confirm. Open offices suck in a large variety of ways, not the least of which my personal health has deteriorated over the years in large part because of it.
this explains everything. you can stage a walk out in a meeting but you’re still on zuckerbergs payroll. and if 50% of the us based engineers quit based on some social principles there’s thousands of engineers ready to fill those spots around the world for a fraction of the price. covid has shown remote work works. unionizing and making the US more costly to work with will only accelerate how “remote” these jobs can be
The FAANGM types aren't hiring mediocre programmers out of Uzbekistan, they're looking for MIT/Carnegie Mellon/Stanford types. Plenty of primo talent coming out of Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, etc. as well.
Plenty of bodies to replace those who leave, for sure, but they're not about to start hiring random offshore types.
But there are brilliant IIT graduates from India who would much rather work from their home city in India than pay Bay Area landlords just so they can sit on an 80 year waitlist for a green card.
Extreme time zone differences are still a challenging problem that might actually be an insurmountable limit to remote work. (Depends on the level of asynchronicity of the job, of course.) Unless there starts to be a culture of remote shift work, which would just be dystopian.
this description of target candidates does not match what i have seen. i’m not implying random or mediocre. it’s purely bay area hubris to assume no one else in the world except some top university graduates can learn our crud microservice development skills or put together some components
It’s not clear to me that claiming political leverage would cost them dollars. Typically unionized employees make more once it’s said and done. I tend to think that there’s a shortage in engineering skill, which drives their cost up.
What have they been unable to enact? By my measure, Facebook has implemented "fact checking" with a jury stacked full of left-leaning organizations and has leveled bans and other measures against enemies of the genocide-denying ADL, a far-left organization with a long history of disgraceful incorrect accusations (which includes ruining innocent people's lives, later resulting in a court settlement).
The only reason FB takes marching orders from such organizations is lobbying by their own employees.
This is like saying a political party leads to what it members want it to lead to, since it's a democratic entity. In practice different members want different things, and it easily ends up as political games with mismatched incentives.
That's not necessarily a given. To be fair we also technically live in a democracy with a democratic process. Many would argue that the views of the majority are not reflected.
It doesn't work that way. Boeing employees don't get to dictate what Boeing as a business does, only how it interacts with and compensates its workers. No union is going to change that.
Well they do with Airbus, and Volkswagen, and Bosch, and DHL, etc., because in Europe it is not uncommon for unions to have board seats. In Germany this is mandatory for corporations of a particular size, regulated by the works constitution act.
The main thing I’ve been told consistently is foot in the door is the biggest thing. Once you’re in as long as you really did pass the interview and are at least okay, beyond that, chances of you being fired have to be low because no one ever brings that up. I’ve asked around. No one thinks that is even a possibility in normal circumstances.
I don’t think any companies do stack ranking any more in terms of firing. Layoffs are the only times you’d have to worry. And that comes down to politics as well no matter what.
Just invent a union and rebrand it as a guild. That could have greater appeal. Alternatively, shore up the ACM with lobbying power and give it teeth, similar to the AMA/ABA/APA.
You can't have a union of silicon valley engineers who weild power by deciding what is and isn't acceptable to say online.
The problem is that the judgement is to do with perceived 'impact'. No normal person is going to be prevented from saying 'when the looting starts the shooting starts', you prevent trump from saying this because its 'dangerous'. The situation is awful. Its a cluster fuck of people with too much power welding it in unprincipled ways.
Fb employees walking out in some display of outrage at the companies behaviour when what they should ACTUALLY do is NOT WORK FOR FACEBOOK I don't understand. These are not impoverished coal miners with no choice where to work. Get a different job you idiots. Stop working for an obviously not ethical company. You're part of the problem, don't pretend to be virtuous by 'protesting', you're achieving nothing apart from making yourself look stupid.
Good uses of a Union: maintain a high professional standard and high pay
Bad uses of a Union: protect incompetent members and get involved in political issues of interest to only a subset of union members. The threshold for getting involved in a political issue should be a minimum of 4/5s of members if not even higher.
I cannot agree more. If you make everything about politics, you will either force people who don't align with your politics to split off, or silently tolerate that you're using "the union" against them and their interests.
Single issue organizations are much better. You don't need to agree on how to run the justice system to promote safe drinking water, so don't use the Safe Water Now organization to weight in on prison reform or police laws. Start a new, unrelated org if you want to do that.
Depends on the state. In some they have actual power; in others they're a boogyman pushed by conservatives who want to push for private schools a la Betsy DeVos.
Particularly in blue states the public unions have massive power because they can turnout voting blocs in generally low turnout primaries. Since a Democrat is 99 percent likely to win, the primaries is where the power is.
Serious question: do you genuinely think he would care if 50% of the SREs went on strike, or even if they quit immediately? I find it hard to believe that he would be significantly distraught.
Facebook famously has dual-class shares that give Mark Zuckerberg a majority of the votes. The shareholders can't make him do anything he doesn't want to do.
Sorry, I'll make the connection which was obviously unclear because I skipped a lot of steps. Unions concentrate power. Concentrated power is easy to take hold of (cf. Coup d'Etat, E Luttwak). Lots of SWEs are incredibly xenophobic - can tell in any thread on HN and Reddit on H-1Bs. Xenophobes (of whom there are many) tend to be protectionist. Xenophobic protectionists are very good at holding power. Therefore, given sufficient time, probability of any power structure being taken over by xenophobic protectionists is almost 1. I don't want that. This industry flourishes because it is unbounded. No union. Will dedicate myself to scuttling the union if it gets any reasonable power.
Collective bargaining is a powerful tool. I recognize that and think it would be good for good people to have. But the danger is too high here.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, really putting the liberal in neoliberal. Never mind that existing efforts to organize engineers, such as the Tech Workers Coalition, mostly comprise those who often have leftist sympathies, and the caricature nativist union member is mostly an artifact of the 19th century, the above comment both ignores that most modern unions don't end up being xenophobic- are the Teamsters or the SEIU xenophobic?, and international trade unions exist.
The problem with building a powerful weapon is that one day the weapon may be trained on you. Of course it isn't dangerous when it's just parts. But one day, when you've finished building it, someone will take possession of the weapon, and you won't control where they point it.
Jeremy Corbyn has taught me that closing borders and leftist sympathies are not in opposition. And what will you do when that weapon is trained on my friends? Apologize in shock at how your ideals have been usurped? Apologize and say that it was a trade-off that must be made? Say that your priorities have shifted? No, that's not nearly enough. The weapon must simply not be built.
Jeremy Corbyn lost the election, his chance for higher political power is over, so your fear would seem misplaced. Furthermore, you talk abstractions of political power (ignoring the fact that by participating in the forging of a weapon, you can put in the necessary safeguards and checks and balances to keep it a well-regulated arm), but fail to talk about the realities of working conditions and labor relations. By putting yourself in opposition to such a project, you cede any chance you have to shape the future of it, and stubbornly commit yourself to not building the aforementioned safeguards. You do you, but it sure sounds like an irresponsible abdication of power. At least libertarians who are anti-union because they perceive it as unnecessarily stifling to individualistic workers are honest about it, and don't bandy about some outdated bogeyman of Red Jezza as their excuse for being against unions.
He's an example to illustrate that leftist sympathies mean nothing. Not worried about Corbyn anymore, obviously, since he's a spent force.
I'm not a political wheeler-dealer. I know where I fall short and I'll be easily bypassed in any attempt to put these safeguards in (even were they possible) by people with vastly more experience and skill at this than me.
Anyway, you don't need me, or any of the 2% who are immigrants, to succeed. But go try them, see what they think, if you care. Everyone's seen USTW's Muni ads. Everyone knows that fear lying underneath them. Not a one is convinced by TWC ending up ultimately different. Think what you want if it makes you feel better. When push comes to shove, I'm sure we'll know the truth.
USTW are an inflammatory noisy bunch, but their influence- even the public's awareness of their existence- appears to be pretty limited. I've only encountered them before on Twitter because their name is so generic; your comment is literally the only result for "USTW" on this entire website. The current administration's protectionist policies likely do not stem from their lobbying efforts, if any, but from the general nativist attitudes of the incumbent. The U.S. Techworkers is also a very different organization:
> Not a one is convinced by TWC ending up ultimately different.
Are they even aware of the existence of the TWC? Or that they're very, very different from the USTW? It's not exactly as if those who might support the latter aren't already vehemently against the latter:
> I'm not a political wheeler-dealer. I know where I fall short and I'll be easily bypassed in any attempt to put these safeguards in (even were they possible) by people with vastly more experience and skill at this than me.
The whole point of a union, or a democratic republic, or any sort of participatory organization is that you can join like-minded people to influence the future of the organization. That way, at risk minorities can have their voices heard and participate in a larger project that can protect their interests.
That said, all of this academic because the libertarian/atomized individualist current of the tech industry makes the prospect of a tech worker's union more or less near-impossible, so your hysteria is largely baseless. Even if your opinion about U.S. software engineers being largely xenophobic is correct- an assertion that is complicated by the fact that SV SWEs include many immigrants, and an organization like the TWC welcomes H-1B workers into its ranks- it would seem that the USTW's almost complete lack of presence, xenophobic MUNI ads aside, would seem to indicate that individualist instincts trump xenophobia.
> The whole point of a union, or a democratic republic, or any sort of participatory organization is that you can join like-minded people to influence the future of the organization. That way, at risk minorities can have their voices heard and participate in a larger project that can protect their interests.
These groups have no intentional aim to enforce or protect any but their most dominant pressure groups. If the day comes when they have to save the union by discarding their minority participants, they will do it; and if they could do it by saving their minority participants, they will do it; and if they could do it by discarding some and saving others, no doubt they would do that too.
TWC's present welcome is no indicator of any future resolve and it will take no large amount of work for those same H1-B workers to find themselves within a brazen bull that they've built.
> ...individualist instincts trump xenophobia
Indeed, and would that it be that it is forever so. Constantly crushing the chauvinist collectivist keeps him from dominating the weak. Diffuse power strengthens the weak. Concentrated power oppresses.
> These groups have no intentional aim to enforce or protect any but their most dominant pressure groups.
That is a pessimistic view of human society, but valid. That said, you can say the same of any arbitrary organization, from a startup to a major corporation to a healthcare system. A critique of labor unions is incomplete unless you can prove that they are inherently predisposed to the tyranny you suggest. Otherwise it is just a philosophical opinion as valid as any other, an interesting abstract notion about the nature of power, but not really useful in a discussion about policy.
> Diffuse power strengthens the weak. Concentrated power oppresses.
One should also take care to remember that the market itself is not a state of nature, but a place where many entities of concentrated power already dominate, and that power is far less diffuse than one may think- and in the cases such as US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., these corporations are not above collaborating to dominate the weak!
I don't think they're any more inherently predisposed to tyranny. I just don't want to manufacture additional opponents when I have sufficient to deal with. Surely you understand that, being trapped in a sleeping lion's den, I would not ask you to throw in a cobra.
You are right, of course, large companies often cartelize to harm and employers inherently have more power in the relationship so it's already unbalanced. I have no objection to ad hoc organizations that form to fight singular causes, but a long-term group? It will, over time, dedicate more of its energies towards ensuring its existence and less to the cause it ostensibly espouses. And then, I expect to look in a window and see Mr. Pilkington and Napoleon arguing over their cards, and I doubt I will be able to tell which is which.
Do you really think — if Facebook and Twitter hypothetically decided to ban him — that the President of the United States would have trouble getting a message out?
Did you read your own link? Deplatforming has been used for decades, by the right wing as well as the left:
> The University of California, for example, had a policy known as the Speaker Ban codified in university regulations under President Robert Gordon Sproul, mostly, but not exclusively, targeting Communists. One rule stated that "the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda." This rule was used in 1951 to block Max Schachtman, a socialist, from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley.
Let's just censor the protestors. Glorifying violence isn't a good thing. Fb and twitter should take a stance on it. They have roads to shout on, who needs social media?
He can and does use television now. Television takes longer to setup and doesn't reach the same people. You can't go on TV to share a one sentence thought but you can easily do that on Twitter.
So long as you think there's at least one person who he reaches by social media that he wouldn't reach with traditional media, it seems you are obligated to conclude that banning him from social media would reduce his reach, or in other words, trouble him getting his message out.
I'm sure he could still easily get huge messages out, but would have much more trouble getting out minor messages of the kind he uses Twitter for.
The President of the United States could set up a Mastodon or Pleroma instance or what-have-you. It's not like Twitter and Facebook are the only entities with the ability to put short messages on the Internet.
And yes, this would reduce his reach. So would a newspaper or TV channel not publishing something he said, and yet we'd be incredibly weirded out if newspapers and TV channels were required to publish every mundane thing the President sends their way.
Twitter and Facebook are clearly not like newspapers though. So long as you agree that it would reduce his reach, you agree with the point I've made here.
It would reduce his reach but it would not prevent him from writing these messages and publishing them, or interested people from finding them (pretty much everyone would know they can follow @donaldtrump@whitehouse.gov from one of the free speech Mastodon instances or whatever within a day), so I don't really see what the problem is. It's just that he wouldn't be promoted by Twitter.
No one is claiming that it wouldn’t reduce his reach, just that a “small group of Silicon Valley engineers” cannot unilaterally “control and censor” his communication. He would still be perfectly able to have his message heard by literally any citizen who wanted to hear it — in fact, he is the US least susceptible to censorship.
But this is a very dangerous argument, because those same tech companies also control web browsers, operating systems and even DNS hierarchies.
You're assuming that the convention of neutrality in these programs would be upheld, but it's just a convention and iOS already violated it a long time ago in the mobile space. It was after all, once a convention that tech platforms didn't attempt to decide the correctness of what people said, on the grounds that they were just platforms and not publishers.
Additionally the issue here isn't specific to some vague category of tech companies. This is happening because of activist employees like those at Facebook. They can and do crop up anywhere, they can and do impose very nasty demands. It's not merely about de-platforming their opponents, but also forcibly platforming their allies.
For example, Kickstarter's employees unionised in order to force Kickstarter to keep supporting a fundraising project that was openly advocating violence against conservatives. This broke all the rules of the site, which is why it got taken down, but such details didn't matter to Kickstarter's activist workforce - who via unionisation were successful in their goal of converting Kickstarter into a fundraising platform for leftist violence.
There's a clear pattern in which hard left employees seek to both erase their enemies and also make their allies immune to the usual rules. This behaviour is tribalistic and destructive. Judging from history it ends in total cultural cold war, and possibly even hot war. At some point people have to say enough is enough, and that not every company has to get into every fight because a few employees walked out.
I guess tech executives are hamstrung by Californian law and can't simply fire employees who don't turn up to work. This is just one more factor making Silicon Valley unattractive as a place to set up new businesses: set up shop in California and before you know it, you'll have ended up with some hyper-aggressive leftist employees trying to take over your company.
The claim I'm responding to asks if the President would have trouble getting a message out, and obviously the answer is yes for some types of messages.
I don't agree with "nominal". The President has reached huge numbers with his tweets and it's not clear how he would've reached the same numbers with same frequency otherwise.
The problem here is in letting a handful of social media companies have an outsized impact in our democracy. That's not worth booting Trump off Twitter.
I don't support unions because unions drag everyone's wages to an average (I'd rather be a top performer and be paid accordingly). Also, I've seen first hand the amount of incompetent teachers, police and government employees who are unfireable because of unions.
So the concept of a union for me personally means I'll be paid less, be surrounded by unfireable underperformers and have zero incentive to improve my craft.
I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work.
> I also truly don't understand how you can allow politics to be so deeply embedded in your work.
The president of the United States is threatening military violence against its own citizens and you criticize people for being "political"? Seriously?
Your comment removes so much context that it's nearly deceptive. He threatened military violence against rioting and looting, driven by terrorism.
Some of these rioters set fire to occupied buildings with children inside and prevented emergency services from accessing the location. In other words, property destruction and attempted murder.
Do you propose this behavior should be met with praise and not violence?
That's a weird stance. Law enforcement is always based on the credible threat of violence.
You can comply peacefully with everything they ask of you. That's because of the threat of violence. "No, we can't make this person come with us to present them to a judge, if they don't want to, they must be let go. No Violence!" sounds crazy.
"No violence, ever" just means "property should not exist as a concept".
You carefully cherry picked one aspect of my argument and didn't address the arson of occupied buildings with children inside. That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at.
Someone was nearly stoned to death on the street with bricks by rioters for protecting a business.
I didn’t cherry pick, I’m simply not defending assaults on people. Any violence by protesters against humans (other than in self defense) is not okay.
That said, violence by police against civilians is far worse. It shouldn’t happen in response to property damage, but it especially shouldn’t happen unprovoked — and we’ve been seeing a lot more of that than violence from protesters.
Do you believe in an "eye for an eye"? If not, how could you say that there's been more violence from police than protesters? By my count, more people have died in the resulting riots than the initial incident.
That doesn't mean police are "less bad". It means they fucked up badly, and then rioters and looters are responding badly to a bad situation (including with attempted murder, rape, assault, property destruction, arson, etc).
In fact, numerous businesses owned by black people were unfortunately torched during the rioting. What part of that is justice? Further, what good does it do to black neighborhoods to have their houses burnt down, critical supplies interrupted in the middle of a pandemic and other such egregious behaviour?
Anarchists are using this situation to cause chaos and destruction.
There are a lot of layers here; I’ll do my best to unpack things as I see them.
First, violence by police is always worse than violence by civilians, full stop. They took an oath to protect and serve their communities in a job they knew could be dangerous, so they are obligated to go above and beyond in preventing violence and deescalating conflict. If necessary, they must be willing to suffer physical trauma in order for civilians to be safe. This is an axiomatic belief for me; if you can’t meet me on it, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.
I think everyone recognizes that the protests have caused far more violence than the murder of George Floyd alone. But the best way to prevent further violence would have been to immediately arrest the officers (as any civilian would have been) and hold them accountable. As it stands now, the other three officers who helped restrain him and prevent bystander intervention have not even been arrested. It seems to me that police and politicians across the country are willing to accept thousands of arrests, thousands more injuries and millions of dollars worth of property damage all to protect four officers who should absolutely face trial.
That brings me to “acceptable” and “unacceptable” rioting. There are no doubt people using the protests as cover to sow chaos, or to do “riot tourism” — we’ve all seen videos of that. That is not okay. But plenty of rioting is happening because a group of people have been crying out in every which way that they are drowning and nothing seems to help. I’ve seen even staunch conservatives acknowledge that Floyd’s death was beyond the pale. And it’s not just him: it’s Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. And those are just the deaths that make the news — that’s a small subset of all the times when someone was “just” beat up, or profiled, or arrested for no good reason. Plenty of black people feel that society is not honoring its contract with them; given that, can we really blame those protesting for feeling that they don’t need to honor their contract with society?
Police and politicians are not supposed to be involved in decisions of whether to prosecute crimes, so the fact you lay guilt on them for not prosecuting is puzzling.
Prosecutors are supposed to be making those decisions on behalf of the state or federal government.
The police did everything in their power (immediately firing them). It's up to prosecutors to do the rest.
Do you think police generally support what happened?
Please point out exactly where I justified police behavior or said they're all innocent, or downplayed the initial incident. I saw the video, it's disgusting.
But torching a residential building with children inside as a response? How is that okay?
Which acts of destruction and rioting would you condone, if any?
Torching black-owned businesses? Looting critical supplies from pharmacies, supermarkets and other retailers? Stoning people nearly to death in the street? Murdering a federal officer in California?
Where's the line? What's acceptable?
FWIW, the vast majority of protesters involved are not involved in the aforementioned acts.
Yes. Do you have ANY examples in history where protests were met with violence didn't end poorly? Hell, America celebrates the Boston Tea Party in school.
> Your comment removes so much context that it's nearly deceptive.
How much more "context" do you need? You don't go around dispatching the military to shoot at your own citizens, not in a state governed by the rule of law. No amount of civil unrest will let an accountable government get away with that.
> Do you propose this behavior should be met with praise and not violence?
It's the job of the police to de-escalate. Sometimes, this may fail and some harm might be done in the hands of the police. However, being a police officer should never be a free ticket to inflict violence with impunity, and this is what people are advocating for. As for the military, it simply isn't their job to police their own citizens.
Frankly, I don't know why I'm having to say this. I'm just stating the obvious here.
How do you de-escalate an occupied building on fire with violent protestors preventing emergency services from saving children?
The police are obviously totally overwhelmed, and like it or not the military has the legal authority to operate domestically and without them being there more people could've died.
I don't understand your position. There's an occupied building on fire, with children inside. Protesters are attacking fire crews. What is the ideal outcome? I didn't see a fireman with his knee on anyone's neck. Why attack them, if not to cause destruction and murder people?
Arson against residential buildings is terrorism. That's it.
How do you stop civil unrest by ordering (or threatening to, at the moment) the military to shoot at people? You're making it sound like shooting is the only solution, but it's not. There are many forms of non-lethal force you could use to deal with the kind of situation you're talking about.
Anyways, you're ignoring the bigger picture, the mountain of bodies that led to this situation in the first place. The civil unrest we're seeing wouldn't have happened at all if policing across the country was done in a sane manner. The numerous reports of unjustified police violence in the midst of this crisis is already making things worse, and there's no need for the military to add to that.
This viewpoint always seemed silly to me. Actors have a union, yet the variation between highest paid actors and low paid actors is in the hundreds of millions.
Unions fight for what their members want them to fight for. Some unions fight for things i wouldn't want. Some unions fight for things that i would want in some jobs but not in the tech industry. It doesn't follow that just because one union did X all unions would do X.
Not when there's so much public information on wages. Compare your wage to the average among others in your location with your title. In my case, I earn about 110% more than the average salary for my title in my location. If I earned the average salary, I wouldn't be so high performing. I wouldn't care about my work beyond the minimum required to not be fired.
Why do you assume that a union would drag everyone's wages down to the pre-union average?
Even assuming (which is an incredible leap of logic) that a union for people who are famously a highly-paid and highly-competitive sector would want to "pay everyone the same" (which, frankly, no union on the planet actually does; the absolute worst in that vein is pay based purely on seniority), it would be vastly more likely that the union would be able to bargain with employers to increase that average salary—perhaps not to match the very top, but well above what it was before the union was formed.
What's with the cynicism in this posts? They're trying to make a point and bring awareness. Who cares how hard it is. At least they're doing something.
To give them credit they're making a political statement at work when we're told not to talk politics at work.
Because they're being hypocrites: they're not putting skin in the game, they're not resigning, they're just virtue signaling. So they don't actually care about what FB is doing.
This is why they're being dismissed while Tim Bray received mostly applause.
This is not 0% or 100% stuff. 1% is alright here, 99% is alright too. However you feel about this issue, you can participate in any amount you'd like to, and that is ok.
They dont have a god-given right to have all their actions applauded just because they work for a FAANG. For many people this amounts at best to an empty gesture, and at worst a hypocritical take because if you were OK with all the fiascos of that terrible terrible organization you wont get now brownie points by setting today a BLM signature in your OOO reply.
Yeah this comes off as overly cynical, they don't have to burn facebook to the ground to make a point. I don't see how something no matter how small is just like doing nothing. Their actions made the news. Realistically you cant just go quit your job. People do have tipping points, maybe this is finally it. Maybe enough people are finally coming together and uniting around this cause. Maybe they thought they could make change before, we don't know what was happening behind the scenes. Humans are complex creatures especially in social situations, i think its harsh to judge them like this. Your post is one of the posts assuming a lot and making very cynical statements for no reason.
Talking about any issue should be encouraged, especially in the workplace. Heck, how many hours do we spend there? [0] Our lives do not stop at some door or sign-in page. Yes, reality is much different. But we should strive to hear all voices, especially in times of divisiveness. Shouting is a lot better than punching. And if that doesn't show how far we are down this slippery slope ... man oh man.
[0] Yes, this gets complicated. Yes, it has been complex for a long time. Yes, law is mostly settled on this. Yes, lawyers are expensive.
People don't support what they're doing but don't think that's as strong of an argument so they use different tactics to try to minimize these actions.
On Reddit there were a lot of "why don't they just quit their job" comments. I am just rolling eyes really hard. To be fair, when I was younger, before I had all these adult responsibilities, that would have probably been my answer as well.
It's still true though. Engineers, specially, have had the power of voting with their CVs for a long time. The only reason Facebook is able to pay ridiculous salaries today is because engineers voted with their CVs continuously for the past 10 years.
Reddit's been terrible lately. the "discussion" on there is dominated by extremes and immaturity, im worried it's not just young kids that don't know better. A rant for another time though...
What is their end goal here? I certainly don’t want Mark Zuckerberg or any of his employees making decisions on what is considered newsworthy, especially on really important stuff like this. Even if you don’t personally like what is being said, the fact that it _is_ being said - and who is saying it - is an important point for people to know.
The next time, it may be your own opinions that they’ll censor: Facebook has far more reach, and has much less journalistic pretensions than any of Murdoch’s properties... you really really don’t want them to start getting involved in politics.
Just to drive the point home, what would have happened if a facebook moderator had decided to remove the initial video of Floyd's murder because, hey, the official reports said he was doing something wrong and the video had the potential to incite violence? I'm fairly sure we would not be having the discussion we're having today, and we would have lost the opportunity to improve our democracy.
Isn't the context also important for people to know?
Like, if the President of the United States is saying something that's factually incorrect and might cause people e.g. not to register to vote (because they expect every Californian will be getting a ballot), is that context not also significant?
Or, hypothetically -- but really if you think at this point that this is a stretch, come on -- if Trump claims without evidence on November 3 that he was the victim of massive voter fraud and the election was stolen, and calls for his supporters to take up arms against their state and local governments, should that be broadcast without context or commentary?
Facebook should provide the platform and stop there. When they act as publishers and start editorialising or adding "platform opinions" to the user generated content, they can rightly be asked why they endorse everything else on their site that isn't "edited" or "added to".
We need to think real hard about what we want in 5 years and beyond from now... not just what we want now. Breaching the divide of platform and publisher for anything beyond light moderation to keep the platform usable, no matter how well intentioned, is bound to have a devastating result on future political expression.
Nice idealism. But human beings have trouble managing that kind of platform. Every idiot's lies look just as legitimate as expert opinion. Other idiots can search for confirmation of their biases and find any number of hits that way.
Call it what you like; we're not coping very well with unrestricted dissemination of disinformation. Folks have gamed it at the highest levels.
Aren't zuck and his company made of humans? What magic powers do they have to suddenly curate things accurately and deem the destiny of mankind? I have trouble following what you are trying to say. Maybe you are asking for all social media to be shutdown altogether.
The real protest will be to quit unless one genuinely thinks they can make a change in the ideology of a company (so somebody in upper management or with some pull). If you are a senior or lower engineer, I don't imagine this has any effect on anything. Just look on "who's hiring" every month here. Lots of local companies (and many remote) that pay good salaries and work towards great goals. If somebody disagrees with facebook's ideals, there is no shortage of jobs out there for them to apply for that pay well and have a net positive effect on the world (as far as I can tell, I could be wrong about some of these companies).
I think it's fair for private companies to provide curation as a service. I don't think it's a good business model to be both a curator and a platform at the same time outside of maintaining an overall level of safety and decency (pornography, snuff, overt racism, etc.).
I don't see why it's wrong for facebook to stay out of it other than reporting violent language to relevant law enforcement. Seems like assault is already a felony.
FB/Google/Twitter/... are already the arbiters of the truth through their algorithms deciding what to show to people. I don't think they should censor posts though, instead they should make their algorithms transparent and reduce the reach of posts and ads.
Yes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).
> These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time
Classical liberalism has never been a majority position. The reason it exists is due to smart people thinking hard about the problem of governance, and imposing its rules top-down. But maybe thats just me being european.
If you say something, and I say, here's some evidence that you're wrong, does that make me an arbiter of the truth on the Internet? I mean, how is what you did (saying something) any different from what I did (also saying something)?
In that scenario you're a regular participant in a discussion, presumably as another user of a platform, standing on equal footing with others.
This NOT what this is about!
If you're the owner of the platform, and prominently inject your POV, thats starting to get problematic. I understand the impulse to do that, but people aren't thinking about the 2nd order effects.
Social media is a dead end. The results are depression and misinformation.
Unless you believe truth can easily be determined, there is no tweak that Zuck and Jack can do to fix their platforms. At least Zuck is honest about it.
Reddit is not different with respect to this. HN, mostly, so far, but it does consider certain things more or less off topic, so it's not trying to be a general platform as such.
Sure is. I doubt there s anyone who got depressed because their reddit karma was low. Posting an instagram selfie, however, and getting no likes -- that's tough.
"Social media" is a misnomer, in reality it's skinner boxes for humans
This is probably the wrong time for Facebook software engineers to try to flex their muscles. Most large firms have put their hiring on hold due to COVID-19. A lot of engineering talent is now on the market looking for jobs due to layoffs by startups and many other companies. Facebook is gearing up for remote work which will expand the talent pool beyond Silicon Valley.
The situation on the ground has changed a lot in the last few months.
I am not sure how much real leverage they will have from the walkout.
They'll find out how much of the rhetoric the company feeds them is true or not. They'll know for themselves when they deemed it important to draw a line.
As a matter of calculation, the timing isn't ideal. None of them seem to be saying it is a matter of calculated timing to leverage their market value though.
Your account may be shadowbanned. I vouched for this comment though. It describes what I feel. Not that the workers perhaps aren’t doing anything else. But solely this action doesn’t mean much at all.
Hasn't FB always been the company where pragmatism and competitiveness trumps justice, moral and general decency? Why did these 600 people start working there in the first place? I'm confused. No judgement, just trying to understand.
I support this walkout. As a small business owner all I've been able to do was purge my FB page profiles. I'm proud of them for taking a bigger step than I'm able to make.
Working people of all countries unite. Seize the means of production!
Marx makes a difference between the tradesman who has a small business employing other tradesmen and the oligarch who's salary is 300% greater than the workforce average.
You know that Marx isn't against all business right? It's the extreme inequality that's the problem.
So, like most small business owners we'd be seized well after the 1% (and even the 5%).
False. Not all business owners are bourgeoisie against which the communist proletarians struggle. In the USA for example most businesses are owned by other proletarians.
Many employers give away the means of production via RSUs, and the standard advice is to sell them and buy index funds so that you're diversified across multiple means of production.
Don't know if Marx would approve, but it seems clearly better to me that Microsoft workers can own some Amazon and vice versa, so if one company goes down the workers don't end up losing everything (as they would if they only owned the company they work for).
Social media companies have put themselves there, by becoming de facto "public squares" for general communication, while still being de jure private companies with a civic responsibility to the truth and to human rights.
Honest question: what power does Zucherberg have with regards to allowing or not a post of the president? I mean even if he asks people to delete it, the president surely will demand him to put it back online.
A strike would be more effective in my opinion. Organize and take the site down. Keep it down for a few hours. That's easily a few hundred million in lost profits.
It's probably time for TheFacebook to die. Or just become a zombie like Yahoo. But here's the sad thing: Nobody will be sad when it happens.
If Apple died I'd be sad. Likewise Stitchfix and Digital Ocean and Github and Airbnb. Hell, maybe even Microsoft a little bit. But not Facebook or Google.
If I started a company one of my goals would be to create a lasting culture providing enough real value that at least a few people other than the employees would be sad when it died.
It's not about censoring or not censoring. It's about Facebook actually giving a shit about the state of the world it's in, and not just Mark Zuckerberg's incessant handwringing about "feeling disgust" but... doing nothing about it.
Too long have abhorrent actions by Donald Trump gone completely unchecked by major platforms and, if Facebook won't even do the token step of doing something about a clearly racist and disgusting message, then they are truly spineless and complicit.
What's the common standard then? Does it ban leaders of countries that oppress homosexuals and other minorities as policy? Leaders who actually imprison political dissenters?
Donald Trump is a bad president IMO, but there are far worse people (and their spokespeople) active on social media. The inconsistent standard makes this seem more like virtue signalling, which isn't quite "giving a shit about the state of the world".
EDIT: Corrected a typo. I think Trump is a bad president.
So? Flag their messages too. You and I are both agreeing what Trump is saying is horrendous.
And, for what it's worth, I'm gay and a part of a minority and I am privileged to live somewhere where there's little repression for who I am. I absolutely want to see people pushing back on countries that have terrible leaders who would repress my life: if you're going to shrug then say "well that's just policy", that honestly sucks.
I'd take "virtue signalling" any day over whatever this response from Facebook is.
Open your eyes and you will see a world filled with equally terrible or worse leaders. Once Facebook opens the box they need to draw an arbitrary line for every country in the whole world.
Given how Facebook has literally been used to incite genocide in Myanmar and how quickly they had to backpedal on that, they've already been drawing these lines.
If they're as opposed to violence as they say, it shouldn't matter if it's a leader or not.
> Too long have abhorrent actions by Donald Trump gone completely unchecked by major platforms
Why blame the platforms? What have the society, people, leaders done about it? He is the elected president after all. Hint: maybe there is a very large chunk of population that agrees with him. This might disgust you but I don't know what the fix is if a huge number of people are "backward"
They actually don't have to take a personal day - they get a day off work paid by facebook as a regular day. They can go on strike from home, set their auto-reply, and not even have to use vacation time.
thanks, i always wondered how these work. so people would normally walk out of the office, and go home? Do they walk down the stairs instead of taking an elevator? How far out do they walk? What if it's raining out? Would they answer emails before leaving? would they leave after lunch? do they leave all together? Do they use corporate buses to go home? I feel these are important subtleties
The key point is that a typical walkout is a public act where you leave work and then demonstrate. It is a situation where people can see you and where you can see the other people walking out with you. You can even do things like picket or articulate demands! This is... not that.
I think Facebook's way of handling the political messages by not interfering is much better than Twitters. I do not want some random person inserting a fact note which corresponds with their view of the world. Facts are very seldom only one sided and it should be up to the readers to comment the tweet or do a google search.
