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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.
>> 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.
As long as I have the right to hire people who don't care about how what I just paid you to build is used instead of you, we have a deal.
(Rent-a-coder, FTW.)
You also have the right to get another job.
Badmouthing your employers is an excellent way to remain unemployed.
Groups of employees trying to defend rights it is a necessary part of society. Many times, company owners try to define things as if people working with there were not humans and this must be discouraged.
However.
Check what have been happening in Costa Rica these last months. We are in the middle of one of longest strikes in our recent history. Basically, current scholar year have been finished months before, because unionized workers are against several government tax definitions. And they are waiting for the judicial system to define if their strike it is or not a legal one (Costa Rica has a lot of worker protection laws).
The problem is that, in the middle, thousands of children, their families are suffering, and hundreds and hundreds of derived jobs are in peril.
Sometimes the unions pretend just to show that they are strong and they don't like to negotiate but to impose their way of thinking. This makes many employers to think if they must hire more people as permanent workers, as they know they could be growing a future "enemy" inside their company. Sometimes it is better to be small, or to hire by service and have no more legal links with people.
Unions are needed, but they must have very clear and have well specified goals and action paths. They must help workers (the ones like to receive their help, not by imposition), but they can't define what the company goals are because they are not the company owners. This is like many things in life ... if I have a job, one where my dignity it is preserved, but I don't like what my employer do, then I must find a different job. And, sometimes, some "clever" individuals with particular goals in mind (not the ones for the unionized people but their personal agenda), take the union control and they really become a danger for the companies. That is what owners are afraid of.
It is these elites who came up with ideas that devastated the working class in America. Whose idea was NAFTA? It was the Democrat elites who got that passed. Whose idea was the Iraq war? Neo-conservative elites. Whose idea was the TPP? Everybody's elites.
Long-term processes of income redistribution from working people to everyone else, non-working welfare recipients as well as the very rich, had been evident for at least two decades. Those who voted for Trump have legitimate grievances long ignored, quite cynically, by both parties. The only thing that really mattered to Americans: the urgent need to mobilize government policies to increase American jobs and wages, in firm opposition to all the competing international and planetary priorities continuously proffered by elite Americans and their core institutions, along with Pope Francis and other leading figures.
Everyday I get to hear ultra-wealthy, gated-community, coastal elite, cliquish, $9 per cup coffee, outsourcing types loudly wring their hands with each other over theoretical boutique issues like LGBT equality, illegal immigrant rights, or global warming in Africa or China, desperately hoping somebody notices how noble they are.
They seem completely ignorant (and if they aren't, are sneering, contemptuous and completely lacking in empathy) of the fact that their fellow citizens on the other side of the gate have resorted to opiates to escape hopelessness and economic despair. Most of the time, the talking points of these smug, circle jerks simply parrot Daily Kos or Huffington Post headlines, and demonstrate a significant lack of deep understanding of the issues. Their kids are at Yale and Berkeley, throwing tantrums like toddlers, because they heard something they don't agree with or challenges their beliefs.
They are the leftist versions of Donald Trump. Incredibly smug and condescending, supercilious, clinically suffering from late-stage Dunning-Kruger disease.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Did you fail History class when Prohibition was discussed???
Legality != Morality.
* Some things are legal that are moral
* Some things are legal that are immoral
* Some things are illegal that are moral
* Some things are illegal that are immoral
I'm selling something.
It's not my job to know if someone thinking of buying it can afford it. Their job, my job is getting paid for it.
Treating people like adults is not being an asshole, rather the opposite. If someone wants to interrogate me like when I was a middle schooler (looking for glycerin, fuming nitric acid and high molar sulphuric) they can fuck right off.
It is _immoral_ and _unethical_ to let a sucker keep his money (legalities be damned). The highest utility for the money (by definition) is for me to get it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Normally when something is ethical is when the Total Benefit to society is higher then the cost of the implementation/product.
I live near a Protected State Forest. There is also a Major road that twists and turns around it, where car accidents happen monthly. Including within the past decade a Gasoline Truck which flipped over and spilled into the creak, and a Natural Gas Truck which flipped over and caught on fire.
Now it would be ethical to cut down a bunch of trees to straighten out the road, so to save lives, and prevent further pollution of the environment.
However it wouldn't be ethical to cut down these same trees, just to put in someones personal house.
There is value to these trees to Society, however the cost of Tucks flipping over, causing loss of lives and polluting streams and rivers, is much higher then its value to society.
The persons house has some value to society. However its impact is just mostly to the resident, so the Trees in the forest is worth more.
A company if often thinking in terms of short sighted goals. While their total cost to society is often ignored.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.