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'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies' (ft.com)
Silicon Valley employees have a right and duty to protest when we think projects are unethical, writes Laura Nolan, who recently left Google. From her opinion piece for Financial Times: Messrs Bezos and Bloomberg paint Amazon and Google as victims, pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism. This is absurd. Google and Amazon, and the DoD for that matter, are some of the most dominant institutions the world has known. Mr Bezos recently became the richest man in modern history. Mr Bloomberg is not far behind on the list of the world's wealthiest. Demanding that such power be held to account is common sense.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
It isn't bullying, but acting victimized has become the go to tactic of the day to gain attention or sympathy, so it's hardly surprising to see corporations utilizing this tactic. Once you've established that you're the victim in the scenario, it apparently grants carte blanche to be as much of a dick yourself as you care to be. Anyone who disagrees can be accused of victim blaming, being on the side of the bullies, or whatever other nonsense someone wants to spew.
The behavior is hardly new, but I think Twitter and other social media platforms handed it such a megaphone that no one is quite sure how to react.
Humans trying to make a profit out of the exploitation of other humans. Other humans say it's unfair and oppose resistance. News at 11.
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But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?
this is the same line of thinking that has working class people railing against "elites" at their local University in the form of doctors, scientists, economist and sociologists but then somehow convinced that the likes of the Koch brothers and Donald Trump are regular Joes like them.
:), they own multiple studios ). And don't get me started on Sinclair media, we'll be here listening to me rant all day.
It's a narrative used to manipulate the working class into accepting less pay and fewer benefits. It's easy to push that narrative because the actual elites, the billionaires who run things, also own all the media. Bezos for example owns the Washington Post. Koch media is huge (heck, if you play videogames odds are you're playing with your Koch
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Go ahead if you don't care about quality and consider engineers to be commodity items. In fact why not just shift your engineering department to India, save a few bucks at the same time.
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product. Some small subset will have no ethical qualms too, but that's a pretty shallow talent pool to hire from.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm sorry to be the one to burst your bubbles and safe spaces. Here are a few facts for young workers recently graduated from college:
1) Every single company wants a piece of the lucrative DoD pie. The money is simply too big to pass up. This includes FAANG and all the other tech companies.
2) Companies are not moral beings. The sole purpose of companies is to make a return on shareholder equity. Period.
3) The apparent liberal bias of Google and Facebook et al is only so much posturing to retain employees and fit in with the prevailing west coast US culture. They are simply amoral and apolitical money makers.
... be it mechanical engineering or quantum programming, as tech has always been, at the end of the day, and out of necessity, a meritocracy.
I'm told this is changing.
I've still got a few good years in me, and I love to mentor and teach the younger folks even more than I love to code these days. But when building things becomes more about "the feels" than actually building things, then the things that are supposed to be built, in short, won't be. Or at least, they won't be built anything as they should be.
I guess that I'm glad that I'll be done before things to through what I see an inevitable cycle through complete collapse to remind us that yes, merit matters, and getting the job done and well is, at the end of the day, the primary goal of being an engineer, or any sort of builder or creative in general.
Check your premises.
Society defines what is ethical and what is not.
And being ruled by plutocrats pretty much like they are kings, while not being allowed to organize yourselves in groups that are powerful enough to stand up to those kings, is unethical in our current Western society.
Of course worker unions themselves can become corrupt and turn into similarly unethical behemoths.
However that does not mean that we'd be better off without any unions. It means that everyone has to be vigilant, look for and expose corruption.
Unfortunately most people are too lazy to keep this up and there's plenty of people who see this as an opportunity for exploitation.
That's the first problem - laziness and irresponsibility.
Except you're wrong. Laws are not necessarily ethical or moral. Permissible by law doesn't mean it's "the right thing to do" at all.
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.
So, since when is Silicon Valley patriotic? As in, they care about America and their fellow Americans? Huh? Silicon Valleyites are "citizens of the world". They care far more about distant peoples from backwards cultures than their own neighbors in places like Texas, Idaho, and West Virginia. They regard us with mingled scorn and apprehension. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk. Here is a great essay I have bookmarked that discusses the issue very eloquently and precisely.
Here's another great essay, "Revolt of the Elites" that also addresses this issue.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product.
What a biased and self-serving proclamation! Most "good" engineers want to build cool stuff and get paid to do it. And their idea of cool varies by engineer, but often does not extend to the entire product. Take most open source libraries - they are cool, but don't constrain the product using them.
Being a "good" citizen has almost nothing necessarily in common with being a "good" engineer, especially as "good" is measured differently. Today's good citizen is very different from one a few decades ago, while good engineering is less dependent on society's capricious fads.
They're all playing victims. From Jeff Bezos, arguably the Rhodes-like colossus of 21st century America at the top down to Mx. I-am-an-ornate-office-building over at Google, to Candace Owens and Donald Trump and Spartacus and Fauxcahontas and Kamala Harris.
It's a cultural sickness and it's wide-spread. We have to think less in terms of victimization and more in terms of positive accomplishment. I've been fucked over lots of times when I was in school, on the job, whatever. Sometimes I fucked myself over with a combination of bad luck and suboptimal decisionmaking. If I dwelt on it, it'd be a death sentence. Don't dwell on the negative. Don't amplify the negative.
Think about what it took to get you called a Nazi 20 years ago vs. today. Then: Shaved head, swastika tattoo, white supremacist. Now: supports Freedom of Speech, supports strong borders, thinks we have a problem with Islamic extremists, and hates Sharia Law.
I don't think my political values have changed much. I've staid pretty much the same since high school, and society has shifted around me. Example: Back then I opposed electroshock therapy on children to "cure" them of being gay, and today I oppose hormone therapy on children to "cure" them of being the wrong gender.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Exactly that. I mean, you are showing the perfect example of someone who is playing the legal, not moral game.
Sucking money out of "suckers" is legal. Not moral -- you're making these people's life worse.
Usual arguments to make you feel like you're not an a**hole include : "if it's not me it will be someone else", "they deserve it because they're dumb" (everyone is dumb when it comes to some field), "not my role", ...
Morals are defined by a culture though some norms appear to emerge *nearly* universally: incest = bad, cannibalism = bad, rampant murder = bad, etc. Some of these are necessary to keep a stable society that can grow where people can interact etc.
In the past, in certain tribes, incest was only considered bad because it lead to certain conflicts based on tribe structure. In some societal structures, incest was a good thing to keep control/power. Today, most the world understands there's evolutionary problems with incest that leads to amplifying genetic disorders (which is bad for people and its society).
Most everything is relative. You probably think eating a cat/dog is terrible, many think you eating beef is terrible, some cultures are fine with eating certain insects. Scientifically speaking, none is all that bad in the right quantity if properly cooked, but it's pretty deeply embedded in our cultures and as a result, our psyches. These are not necessary for a culture but may be necessary in our own culture (cats are pets, they've been domesticated, and therefore we shouldn't eat them although we could).
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
In Vermont, it's illegal to leave them there. They have the only compulsory Good Samaritan law. (Which is then no longer a Good Samaritan, but who cares about words...). In 15 states, you should reach over them for your box of cereal and not touch them if you're not a licensed medical professional. Those 15 states have no Good Samaritan law for unlicensed bystanders. If you try to render aid and make any mistake, you would be liable and could be sued. The rest of the states, you can try to help without fear of being sued. They could sue, but you would win easily and cheaply.