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Some Engineers Are Turning Down Tech Recruiters in Silicon Valley Over Concerns About Corporate Value (ieee.org)
Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have faced growing internal unrest from employees who raise ethical concerns about how the companies deploy their high-tech services and products. That chorus of dissent is now growing louder as outside engineers voice their concerns to recruiters working for those tech companies. An anonymous reader shares a report: The protests of tech workers have proven persuasive because Silicon Valley firms compete fiercely to recruit and retain relatively scarce engineering talent. For example, Google's leadership sought to reassure employees by declaring it would not renew its Pentagon contract and by issuing a set of ethical principles for future uses of Google-developed technologies. By the same logic, engineers who are approached by tech recruiters also have leverage. "I might be a one-off example, but it could be different if Amazon gets a lot of people emailing them saying, 'Hey I won't work for you because of this,'" Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, who declined a job offer from Amazon, says.
Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.
Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.
Amazon has it's 100 hours a week issues!
computer janitors and stack exchange code copy paste artists yes, engineers, fuck no
this is so stupid
... have been simply not bothering and/or avoiding a number of these firms for years.
...for every one person like that there are a thousand who would like to work for Google.
Right... Because it is unethical for America — uniquely among the world's nations — to fight its enemies and enforce its borders.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
but it wasn't about that. Google contacted me and I told them that I wasn't seeing a cultural fit.
I highly recommend reading the filings in the James Damore lawsuit: https://www.dhillonlaw.com/law...
You can see the statements from Googlers in their own words. To say that it's incredibly disturbing that they have created and promoted such a toxic work-place culture would be an understatement.
Avoid like the plague unless you are a blue-haired harpy trying to work out her daddy issues by hating on men.
Earth is a single point of failure.
The subject's title is, "Engineers Say 'No Thanks' to Silicon Valley Recruiters, Citing Ethical Concerns." And then the article calls out 4 companies: Amazon, Google, Facebook, & Microsoft. 2 of those 4 are headquartered in the Seattle area, not Silicon Valley. How about some simple fact checking?
My userid is prime!
Did you become an engineer to get rich? Engineering pays quite well, but to get rich you're better off in finance.
Most people become engineers to solve problems. To make life better for everyone. When corporate culture goes against that motive, engineers tend to rebel. This doesn't just apply to Silicon Valley.
I'm intrigued that engineers in Silicon Valley feel they are empowered enough to make such demands. Most engineers just bitch to management about not doing what's in the customer's best interest and move on.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'm glad to hear more people have ethics - now in SV.
I've been turning down Amazon recruiters for a while and did list my complaints about how warehouse workers are treated. It is also why I limit myself to a couple purchases a year - for things I can't find anywhere else.
Google... the hiring culture is definitely a bust for me. Guess I have to make a startup for them to buy...
captcha: pariah
With the Zuck in the news recently, speaking to Congress, and generally coming off like an a$$. I decided to delay my scheduled interview with Facebook. When I was asked why, I told them "I wasn't sure that Facebook was the type of company I could work for, based on recent news." The said they understood, and the recruiter let it slip that they had heard the same thing from many people. She said I could reschedule when I felt the time was right.
So later I did reschedule, did the day long interview, (which wasn't so horrible, but definitely in Seattle go on a rainy day, their building gets super hot in the interview rooms on hot sunny days.) got rave reviews, and was made an offer. The offer would be fine if I was applying for a starting position. But I've been doing this for 20+ years now, with 10 years of iOS development under my belt. Apparently they lowball people according to my friends, and then put them through the blender for two years, and see if you'll stick with it, then give you the real salary you should have gotten initially.
When they wouldn't budge, I told them, "This isn't enough to work in your environment, on essentially what is a gossip app." That didn't go over too well. Unfortunately FB's office environment has almost no privacy, and everywhere you look there is someone, you can't possibly stop from over hearing people talking about things you are also interested in. The only possible way to get work done, is to wait for your co-workers to go home, (except that they never go home,) or get there early (remember that they never go home?)
Life is too short to work for a company that makes a gossip app, tests your loyalty, and pays you just enough. They have some great opportunities for learning, but those are outweighed by how they really treat their employees.
I live in the Seattle area and know lots of current /former "Softies" and "Amazombies". Those large tech companies have huge turn over and incredible burn out rates Both companies threw out Stack ranking some years ago, https://whatis.techtarget.com/... but the mentality that put it in place is still ingrained in the corporate manta. Ie: "for you to get ahead, someone else must fail". It's the major reason pay is so high, you have to pay ridiculous money to keep good people.
After the toxic culture at Google came to light during the Damore incident, why would anyone want to join a company that boos you when you get hired if you're not a SJW darling? You may get paid well but there are so many non hostile workplaces that you would be much happier in. Do you really want to work at a place where people claim they sexually identify as an expansive ornate building, and your employer gives them a microphone?
Curious, none of them would dare be seen taking a position like "I don't want to work with a company that relies on H1B visas."
If you want to talk ethics and activism, I have news for you. All that bullshit about diversity your corporate HR departments spew about hiring and visas is just a smokescreen around the fact that our immigration system is subtly more pernicious than indentured servitude.
Indentured servants had full recourse to the King's Justice in the colonies. H1bs don't have the equivalent of that in the United States.
This is why your corporation and its leadership support all of that immigration. It's to pit you and the immigrants against each other in a race to the bottom that lets them suck up that tasty arbitrage to achieve dizzying new levels of profit without having to pay you any more.
But sure, piss and moan about drones while supporting a company that makes great use of a system that is closer to the Peculiar Institution than a free market labor economy.
Good luck getting recent immigrants security clearances for military contracts :D
...Once upon a time, the best and brightest of the engineering, math and science students didn't dream of working in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. They dreamed of NASA, JPL & NOAA. Academia and government service. The reward was working on interesting, important things rather than stock options and snack rooms. Maybe that thinking is starting to come back.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The Pentagon contract involved adding AI to analyze photographs. People who want to make it seem worse than the same tech being applied to their Facebook pages to find friends made up the story about "AI to control drones", and continue to propagate it.
It's subcontractors all the way down.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, it's a real shame that you can't act like a giant douchebag at work these days.
From the source you are responding to:
“You can’t talk about sexual differences between men and women, (although) it’s OK if they favor women,” laughs Tierney. “You can say men are more likely to commit crimes, but you can’t suggest that there might be some sexual difference that might predispose men to be more interested in a topic.”
Yeah, you can act like a giant douchebag, but only to men. Pointing that out gets you fired. Standing up for yourself gets you fired. Not following a radical political agenda gets you fired...but only at a handful of insane corporations with too much power and not enough ethics.
Working as an engineer in the bay area I get unsolicited emails to my (relatively unpublished) personal email account directly by all sorts of companies, not to mention 10+ recruiter contacts a week via linkedin, etc.
I don't hesitate to let them know if a particular republican venture capitalist that financially backed Trump's presidential campaign that has invested in their company, has turned me off from their company (pick one, there's a couple of high profile ones). Or if they're heavily in bed with the defense industry, or tangentially attached to some other cause I'm against (there's a couple of banks that come to mind), I will let them know. Having enough experience in the industry to have options, it's nice to be able to flatly turn down offers. Obviously there is someone who will sell their soul to get their foot in the door, I am not slowing down their hiring process by any measurable degree, but it does mean that they will have to struggle to grow with less talented or less experienced talent. I'm ok with this.
Most of my friend share at least a somewhat similar view. But we've been here long enough to pick and choose our next job. There's a lot of immigrants from other parts of the world that will take the more morally ambiguous jobs in tech just to get here.
moox. for a new generation.
Unlike many others we, if we observe carefully, know exactly how and when we can be replaced. And when not. This gives us massive leverage and a few critical points. "I don't like your business model" is a very neat audible objection by someone who has a rare and demanded skill. Tech illuminates are in the sweet spot of being able to do a bit of a priests job in deciding who gets my skills and experience and who gets the finger.
I like that we have some confident and self aware engineers. Keep it up!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the meantime, I design lame-ass consumer shit that provides no value to humanity at all - just more consumerism.
If it makes people happy, and isn't addictive or something, it's still doing some good in the world. My jobs have certainly varied over the years in how much good they've done, but in a long career I've only spent one year at a place I thought was a net negative for humanity. Not bad as jobs go.
Playing guitar in some shit-ass coffee shop would do more for people and humanity than what I do.
"What the world needs now is another folk singer ... like I need a hole in my head." - Cracker
work 80+ hours a week,
Shit man, the economy's booming. Now's the time to move to a sane company! Switch while the switching is good.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If I were a Chinese strategist, evaluating the strong and weak points of each side:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It goes both ways. I believe in national defense, and in protecting our borders. I'd be happy to work for a defense-related company, or for a company with neutral politics.
I wonder how many people would rather not work for companies whose management lobbies for liberal causes, and/or clearly prefers candidates who are not straight, white, conservative, and/or men.
I told their recruiter that I couldn't work for them because of how they work poor people damn near to death and they end up with permanent disabilities after working there. They just sound like a sweat shop in the vein of all these corporate weasel fucks. Hopefully my response added to others and they are starting to get the point. However, I really really doubt it. If there was one statement I could attribute to corporations it's "We don't give a fuck."
I've argued we in the tech industry need to do it for a long time. It shouldn't look exactly like older professions like engineering, law, and medical because those industries are tied the established formal education. We have the power to ground airlines, shut down power grids, automate out co-workers, sell snake oil security, and skew research data. When we are faced with ethical dillemas we should know we can fall back on professional regulation to refuse on ethical grounds and our employers will lose a massive amount of face and business if they don't respect that.
That said, this also remains one of the few knowledge industries where it is still possible for a highly intelligent individual and dedicated individual who is totally impoverished to avoid bias and debt in academia and to not only learn enough to practice but even become a leader in our field with nothing but a low end computer and an internet connection. We will never eliminate the advantages of being born to privilege but this has always been one field where the odds are more even for someone who is underprivileged but the merit and raw capacity that defines the right to be at the top.
"Some American Workers Try to Live Their Ethical Values"
Regardless of whether or not you agree with those values--and from the modding it looks like a lot of people hovering around this article don't--it is newsworthy that some engineers are willing to turn down lucrative, prestigious jobs because the work they'd be doing, or the company they'd be doing it for, doesn't mesh with their sense of right and wrong.
Of course, in a better world, this wouldn't be newsworthy at all.
Surprisingly, the statistics is suggestive: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/0... ..."
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so.
And also: http://www.slate.com/articles/... ..."
"It's true that eight of the 25 hijackers on 9/11 were engineers
Alternatives: "The Ethical Engineer: An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light" by Eugene Schlossberger
https://www.amazon.com/Ethical...
"On occasion, professionals need to use moral reasoning as well as engineering skills to function effectively in their occupation. Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry. The Ethical Engineer sets out the tools and materials essential to dealing with whistle-blowing, environmental and safety concerns, bidding, confidentiality, conflict of interest, sales ethics, advertising, employer-employee relations, when to fight a battle, and when to break the rules. The author offers recommendations and techniques as well as rules, principles, and values that can guide the reader. Lively examples, engaging anecdotes, witty comments, and well-reasoned analysis prove his conviction that "ethics is good business.""
And also: "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If a whole union exhibited a political bias to employers that might be a problem, but since individual employees are at such a disadvantage I see no problem with your behavior. The converse, where an employer discriminates or supports employees in discriminating against individuals with a certain set of politics is not OK.l, because the massive power imbalance in that direction.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.