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'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies' (ft.com) 337

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.

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'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies'

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  • by llamalad ( 12917 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:33AM (#57642398)

    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?

    • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:41AM (#57642462)
      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.
    • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:43AM (#57642470) Journal

      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?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Every individual. It's not some legal definition that needs to be universally agreed on or dictated from up on high.

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          That doesn't quite work out. Each person having their morality can nearly be made into a logically consistent system, but not quite. Some people are griefers, to use the gaming term, and delight in hurting others or taking away their rights, and that's their morality. Corporate management seems to collect such people, so it's very relevant here.

          So, each person deciding on their own does require one important ethical principle dictated to all: moral systems that hold as a good causing harm to others are

      • Wonder if aasimovâ(TM)s three laws of robotics would be a reasonable guide to morality...

        Or would you think the standard too high?

      • by Nite_Hawk ( 1304 )

        The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?

        That one is easy. The answer is always: I do.

      • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:24PM (#57645052)

        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.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      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?

      Amazon recently decided to pay all its US warehouse workers a minimum of $15/hour. Senior developers at Amazon make more that JeffB does (all his money is from founder's stock, he declined any additional stock-based compensation last year, and his salary was $176k).

      Amazon is not a pleasant place to work, and has lots of problems, but they pay well enough.

  • >> 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.)
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:51AM (#57642528) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • by Fringe ( 6096 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:53AM (#57643104)

        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.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Open source is an interesting one. I'm pretty hard line when it comes to the GPL... But if someone submitted a patch to enable targeting Hellfire missiles from a drone I might be tempted to tell them to fork it instead of accepting.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        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.

        That makes sense for small projects, but not large systems. Mandatory car analogy:

        Some luxury cars now have a feature that uses IR to spot pedestrians at night and highlights them in a HUD to make them easy to see. Ethical? The same tech is used in tank gunsights, and a primitive version in pricey rifle sights. The technology to "see people better at night" has no moral color. But it can be used for good or for evil.

        Also, the talent pool of people willing to work on defense projects is plenty deep. Wh

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )
      "Rent-a-coder" probably wouldn't fly with secret projects. Also, what's to stop people with an interest in social justice from working for you and doing their best to give you flawed code.
      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        It's also worth pointing out that plenty of people who work for Amazon have top secret clearance (and need it for their job). I've known some. Presumably the quite elaborate clearance process serves some purpose, and just in general any good software dev shop will have processes to detect flawed code. Writing underhanded code that has plausible deniability so you don't go to jail is quite hard, and requires really top-notch skill.

        Do you follow the "underhanded C contest"? That is some impressive coding,

      • >> what's to stop (dorks) from working for you and doing their best to give you flawed code

        If that's an undetectable problem in your organization, then you've got other issues.
    • There are historical reasons for engineering ethics. Some of the ethics go beyond engineering into just being a good person, while other ethics are the kind that when not followed and people die, bad things happen to the company that failed to act ethically.

      https://www.nspe.org/resources... [nspe.org]

    • >> 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 have the right to be a dick with your company but you can't then complain that your employees are unpatriotic when they complain.

  • by lorinc ( 2470890 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:42AM (#57642468) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • the workplace is an bully & workers have no union to fight back ageist the 80 hour weeks.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:49AM (#57642520)
    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.

    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 :), they own multiple studios ). And don't get me started on Sinclair media, we'll be here listening to me rant all day.
    • Exactly: the "elites" aren't the educated class, they're the exploiter class (of which Bezos is a member).
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      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, q

      • and every right wing think tank. About the only folks who opposed it were the far left, what today we call the "Berniecrats". Same deal for the Iraq war.

        Right wing think tanks are a front for the billionaires. They realized in the 70s they needed to legitimize themselves so they hired folks like Bill Buckely to do just that. It gave them a veneer of respectability. It's the same reason they lean on Ayn Rand even though she hated them all with a passion.

        And yes, the Democrats have right wingers who u
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          Yeah, turning to the far left isn't the solution. I think that political Enlightenment is finding the Center. Today, it means realizing how society has shifted so far left that being in the Center means you've got to correct well towards the Right.

          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 d

    • by malkavian ( 9512 )

      I'd kinda disagree; you've come up with a wide spread of "Elites". Doctors, by and large are bashed by the left, who have the latest Woo treatment of crystals and odd vegetables that cure cancer and invoke world peace.
      Scientists are attacked from all sides, as we have the tendency to gather evidence, attack our own hypotheses, and what survives many people attacking the hypothesis is what ends up being considered firm enough to be going on with. And that tends to stomp all over people's nice world views o

      • but we've got an extensive network of people fighting our nut jobs. Go watch "Genetic Skeptic" or Aronra on Youtube.

        Meanwhile the Right wing elected a Dominionist to the office of Vice President. If you don't know, a Dominionist is someone who wants to spread their brand of Christianity across the world, by force if needed. They're the Christian equivalent to Sharia law.

        What I'm saying is the left's nut jobs are not even remotely comparable to the right's nut jobs. We actively fight to convert our nu
        • by malkavian ( 9512 )

          From your comment, you're identifying with the left. I don't hang my hat on any political wing, and would disagree with your assertion that the right aren't trying to educate their nut jobs into more sensible views.
          The left have a lot of pseudo science and ideology which fulfills pretty much the same drive as religion, and they have their ideologues who peddle their own misinformation. They're both as dangerous as each other when people get too far into it, and get too polarised. And the ideologues are p

      • by Average ( 648 )

        I'd kinda disagree; you've come up with a wide spread of "Elites". Doctors, by and large are bashed by the left, who have the latest Woo treatment of crystals and odd vegetables that cure cancer and invoke world peace.

        As far as I know (and I could be wrong) there are absolutely zero crystals-and-kombucha Lefties elected in the US House of Representatives. There are actual anti-vax, evolution-rejecting, "Obama was born in Kenya"-believing Republican representatives. Dozens of them. False equivalence.

  • by stevegee58 ( 1179505 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:54AM (#57642554) Journal
    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.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )
      (2) Companies are run by humans. Humans have a duty to be moral, even if it reduces shareholder return. There was a company, I.G. Farben, in Germany, which knowingly furnished poison gas to the Nazis. Its chief chemist, Bruno Tesch, faced a firing squad for this in 1946 and rightly so.
      • Why the Troll (0) moderation -- I was discussing a legitimate historical case.
        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          You're making a trollish comparsion - taking a thread straight to Hitler is unneeded.

          Most real-life moral issues are not so black-and-white.

      • (2) Companies are run by humans. Humans have a duty to be moral, even if it reduces shareholder return. There was a company, I.G. Farben, in Germany, which knowingly furnished poison gas to the Nazis. Its chief chemist, Bruno Tesch, faced a firing squad for this in 1946 and rightly so.

        And if this involved anything like that, you would have some kind of point.

        Since it just involves more normal political differences between some employees and their employer, not so much.

    • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:35AM (#57642960) Homepage Journal

      The sole purpose of companies is to make a return on shareholder equity. Period.

      People often repeat this inaccurate meme, but the truth is that the purpose of companies is to fulfill their charter. You can found a company for a broad variety of purposes, and many of them have little to nothing to do with profit.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They are simply amoral and apolitical money makers.

      That's why engineers must refuse to do immoral things. Not just because they are immoral, but because it can make them personally liable or get blamed when things go wrong.

      I've refused to do things I felt would make critical systems unsafe. I've refused to do things that screw customers. Without wishing to blow my own trumpet too much, because I'm valuable and because I choose to work for companies that employ other people with a sense of morality I've always been listened to. In fact in every case the requ

      • I can offer one way to refuse to do immoral things: stop working for an immoral company.
        Back in the 80's I worked for a large defense contractor right out of college along with many others. Defense was booming and that's where the high starting salaries were. After a while there was an exodus of engineers that had misgivings about making radars for strategic nuclear bombers. Many went either to the finance sector or medical equipment sector. There was plenty of work in these non-defense sectors, thoug
    • 4) As an employee, you are basically operating under work for hire. When the company hires you, they agree to pay you a certain amount in exchange for owning anything and everything you do (includes copyrights and patents). This includes being able to assign you to work on what it wants, which may not necessarily be what you want. If you want control over what you're assigned to work on, you have to work as an independent contractor. If a company asks you to work on a DoD project as a contractor and you
  • You have the right (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You also have the right to get another job.

    Badmouthing your employers is an excellent way to remain unemployed.

    • You also have the right to get another job.

      Badmouthing your employers is an excellent way to remain unemployed.

      I also have the responsibility to make my company a better company, in my opinion. I work for a DoD contractor and am perfectly fine with it, but I'm going to tell them if a product isn't worth the cost. I think our country misuses the military and am vocal about it, I also think if the country had no military we would have a problem too. None of this is simple black and white. DoD products don't just kill people either: http://www.c-130.net/c-130-new... [c-130.net]

  • by forkfail ( 228161 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:56AM (#57642578)

    ... 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Bad tech and bad code often does very well in tech. Look at DOS and Windows. Javascript. XML. x86. They didn't succeed on technical merit.

        Which is why it seems strange that people assume that for some reason hiring and career progression in tech are somehow different.

      • by malkavian ( 9512 )

        We've standardised on some dodgy infrastructure as tech is new, and back in the day, some of the rubbish actually made sense with what was available, or what could be known (before the days of search, getting educated in tech was pretty tough, and quite expensive).
        I've had some pretty big companies as clients in the past, and worked at many levels. Yes, politics and shoutyness can have an impact (though usually at budgetary levels). Inside tech areas, it's more likely that just lack of experience, or edu

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Define merit.

      For a product it can include any or all of the following: quality, reliability, cost, profit margin, yield, time to manufacture, TCO, long term availability, certifications, MTBF, effectiveness of DRM, lack of DRM, compatibility, incompatibility, aesthetics, durability, weight, size, energy consumption, elegance, simplicity, complexity, development time...

      It's not that merit isn't valued any more, it's that more factors are being considered when determining merit, and we are realizing that what

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:59AM (#57642604)

    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.

  • âoeWhen you are privileged. Equality feels like oppression.â

  • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:45AM (#57643046) Homepage

    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. [archive.is]

    Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.

    "It's not that we're, like, against America per se. It's just that...well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we're just sitting here, can't even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what's wrong with a country that can't...sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They're okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That's sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!"

    I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people's heartfelt emotions of patriotism.

    Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation [huffingtonpost.com]. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats [pravda.ru]. Americans are [matadornetwork.com] ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose patriotism is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are [salon.com], and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People [slate.com].

    Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.

    Here's another great essay, "Revolt of the Elites" that also addresses this issue. [multics.org]

    When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today's elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, "Middle America" - a term that has both geographical and social implications - has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial.

    These privileged young people acquire advanced degrees at the "best [universities] in the world," the superiority of which is proved by their ability to attract foreign students in great numbers. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere, they overcome the provincial folkways that impede creative thought, according to Reic

  • I guess ðY¦' has to live with his choices. Like choosing a non Midwestern city to do business in, for painfully obvious reasons

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