They have a thing called “sun-shining” that is essentially a maoist struggle session, but for when you harm the company.
What the actual fuck lol. Also all these tech companies trying to come with all these new functional organisational models is both extremely cursed and really funny. "Why yes my company uses agile development practices with a balanced matrix organisational structure and daily scrum meetings, how can you tell?"
Trashfuture did a nice deep dive a couple months back. It's up or out to an insane degree
Don't confuse people who work in industry with people who work in law enforcement, army and intelligence. They are not the same thing. But even then I don't really understand the need to "draw a line".
there's a guy on youtube admiting that 100% the decision is all based on their own personal impression of the interviewees. they can decide, on the spot, if candidates get to do an easy exercise or a hard one, and even if they succeed at doing a hard exercise, they can still reject them for "being awkward" or whatever. i dunno how i feel about FANG employees. You do need to be well-connected and come from a prestigious school and maybe swallow some pig blood in an ancient ritual to be able to get into one of these companies. Most of google's code is outsourced too, I don't think google workers do that much work. They probably write a pair of lines and some tests to go along with them and then discuss whether their architecture is SOLID enough or whatever.
Bad take. "Fuck every worker who works somewhere unethical" is dumb because there are no ethics in capitalism in the first place. Nobody is ethical if you go that route. Nobody.
Workers are workers. Period. Worker purity tests are bad and counterproductive
At the same time "no ethics under capitalism" cannot be used to excuse deeply immoral and unethical behaviour. If some software engineer works for the US military or Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or any other military contractor or weapons manufacturer and calls themselves a leftist you can be damn sure I'll look at them funny and "purity test" them. Like "no ethics under capitalism" does not mean do whatever you want and actively make life worse for others in exchange for personal gain.
Yeah due to all the murkiness and that I think sticking to clear obvious examples of deeply immoral behaviour is best at the moment. Like no need to go after some Google or tech worker whose work is indirectly used by the CIA without their knowledge. But working directly in the MIC as a software engineer = bad basically.
Even then, I would still ask: is making satellites or radios or waterproof clothing for the military worse than, say, what Nestlé or DuPont are doing? I would argue no. I don't think it's easy to draw clear lines with this stuff.
Mcdonalds is unethical but Mcdonalds employees don't get a special secret unmarked bus service while the rest of our stops and lines are cut or talk endlessly and loudly in public about inane tech shit like fuckin apps
How about not "fuck every worker who works somewhere unethical" but just fuck these ones in particular because they are really annoying. Like, the stereotype of a catcalling construction worker is an honorable laborer, and they are (unlike techies) even theoretically doing actual socially beneficial work, but if they are sexist and bothersome then still, fuck them
"Fuck people who annoy me." Yes, surely this is the way we'll achieve a worker's revolution. I think somewhere Lenin actually said that workers who annoy you don't need to be a part of a proletarian worker's revolution.
A worker's revolution needs. Every. Worker. You cannot leave out "workers who annoy you". Trying to leave out sexist bothersome workers sounds great until you take a step inside a unionized factory. You think tech bros are bad? Try spending a week in a warehouse. The change has to be for every worker, and it ABSOLUTELY MUST be intersectional. You cannot just ignore sexist workers, or racist workers, or rich workers, or anyone. You have to look those problems in the face and address them, and then you have to bring those workers into the fold. Deal with sexism while teaching class consciousness, deal with racism while teaching class consciousness, etc. It's not easy but we're absolutely not going to achieve anything even remotely like international socialism without everyone together. You can't just write off entire swathes of the working class because they annoy you.
I've only ever worked in unionized warehouses and I'll be honest, my collegues in them may have been crass but they were way less annoying or problematic than the average tech bro lmao
They can be part of the proletarian revolution if they like I guess, if we're talking about the Rev I would probably prefer some sort of icy arctic labor camp but you're right, that imminent international communist revolution will "need. Every. Worker." and "ABSOLUTELY MUST be intersectional", and include the "rich workers", and all that nice stuff but oh well, I guess the communist revolution is gonna have to be called off because I aint gonna lick techy nuts online, not ever
Fuck people who annoy me, they suck shit, I don't like them
Nobody in the world annoys you then, huh? View must be nice from up there
Sure, plenty of people annoy me, but that doesn't mean I want to murder them because I'm not a libertarian. How did you even find this site?
Woah woah woah, you said murder not me, I just think they suck bad. I think you may have overdosed on communist LARP.
You may not be a libertarian, but most google techies are and you are their defense squad, how very Communist of you to lay on the ground in front of technocapitalist shitheads and lick their kicks, and how very dirtbag-left chapo of you to throw yourself earnestly in front of a vulgar insult directed at a job
Fun tidbit, the guy who made 4chan now works for google.
Let's hire the guy that made the website that radicalized countless mass murderers for a bit.
believe it or not, there's a "socialist" employee group within google and it's mostly full of struggle sessions about whether or not they should even work there. It gets infiltrated a lot with liberals saying they all should quit and give their iphones away to homeless people.
Also there's an internal "reddit" for employees called memegen and optional biweekly all-hands TGIF meetings (every other Thursday). It's a weird place to work (not that I would know, I don't work there)
I feel like working there or at similarly high paying companies in tech is the path of least resistance for the average person to be able to build up enough capital to escape from being a wage slave and start worker-owned/non profit alternatives. Also, at least from what I've seen in social media and in the company I work at, there are a lot of well-meaning
libsfolks in the field with potential for radicalization.No line needs to be drawn right now -- there are no revolutionary tribunals, no truth and reconciliation commissions, and there's not even a large leftist party that needs to define what membership means. This is not a very helpful framework at the moment.
Right now the most useful framework is something like (1) people who won't even listen, (2) people who will listen but aren't moving left soon, and (3) people who will listen and become leftists pretty quick. I'm sure some Google workers are in Group 3, and probably are fair amount (if not most) are in Group 2. There's no reason to write those people off, and we can't afford to write people off too easily in general.
I can see the idea that some jobs are incompatible with being a serious leftist. But Google is way too big and way too removed from the most direct harms of capitalism to make a blanket statement about Google employees.
We should also be careful about making litmus tests for leftism that require enormous life changes (e.g., quit your nice job and find something else) solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone quitting their job at Google doesn't bring us any closer to socialism. If anything, stuff like the unionization attempts at Google (which wouldn't be possible without at least proto-leftists) moves the ball forward.
Oh yeah definitely not advocating just taking whatever job that pays the highest. Like I'd probably only take a job with the military if I thought I could get away with sabotaging it for a reasonable amount of time. But if the choice is between say joining the Google Docs team for $150k vs random local tech company for $70k, I'd take the Google job. Obviously, if there was a better company that paid highly or a company that didn't pay as high but is building an open source worker-owned Uber alternative, then that would be ideal but especially for new grads, those options often aren't available due to limited openings or lack of experience.
I guess the way I see it is that while $70k is good money, I'd still be exploited by capitalists and it would take me 8 years before I'm comfortable enough financially to start working full time on building open source, non-profit, worker-owned Uber whereas with $150k, it'd take less than 4 years. Also, for new grads, I imagine the experience that they'd gain at Google/FB would be more relevant to building open source worker-owned Uber than Random Local Tech Company.
While Google and FB are indeed the big bad, I'm not sure working for them, especially at entry level positions, will necessarily cause much harm. Like working on a product that got killed, you'd basically be paid to work on something that was causing them to lose money. Also, like I mentioned, I believe there are a lot of reasonable people working at these companies so if you do get put into a harmful project, then you could switch teams or at least blow the whistle/radicalize folks before getting canned.
I believe the actual working conditions there vary from team to team like with any other employer although I've heard Google is more chill in general compared to other places.
where do we draw the line?
I literally can't imagine thinking that is a luxury you have right now.
You really don't. The left is totally fucked and has no chance of even doing meaningful damage to capital in the west right now. That needs to change and that means taking anyone that will help in the fight.
Probably beatnik, who loves nothing more than apps and doing it on the computer and shit
I'm not really sure what the difference is. But I don't think it's good to be saying "oh, you can only be a leftist if you do these jobs to get by." Like, we all know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc. Leftist infighting hurts everyone.
I have to work at Google really that's what it's gonna take me to get laid
It sucks bc I am pursuing CS and that's the "goal" but not actually bc I'm a STEM major with morals and so I have cut myself out of a lot of potential opportunities (even if they are somewhat unlikely) bc I would feel like a POS if I worked at any of those places
i'm in the same boat, but i'm also studying (actually finished a degree) in earth sciences and geography so hopefully i can end up doing something better. I know someone that literally went to work for raytheon and others for banks and shit and damn no way could i do that
I know people who want to work for the Verfassungsschutz. And when i said that those are all Nazis and why on earth would you do that.
I was told those were single exceptional occurences and even if they were bad someone had to join to make it better.
My real goal is roblox, which surprisingly pays better than FAANG. by like a lot . Other STEM fields are a lot more bleak. Aerospace basically guarantees you're building missiles. MechE means some defense company (luckily my dad is mechE and didn't end up that path). It sucks that the money is in defense companies
Not that surprising then the US spends as much as it does on its military
That's a good point
Also the whole Roblox thing, wtf???? Interns make close to $60/hr
~looking at the r/politics megathread was a mistake~
edit: I got confused and replied to something in the wrong thread. I do still stand by the above statement though
Same boat, even if it's a little limiting there's so much value in not hating yourself for building evil things or building neutral things for companies who are going to use it for evil.
I got a cold recruiting email from palantir once :agony: so at least I know my opsec is okay
I mean a lot of the big tech companies have teams that work on open source projects that I wouldn't mind joining. Also especially for juniors, the big salaries and above average engineering practices will be useful in the future like if you want to start/join a worker coop for example.
The same with me, a lot of people with my kind of degree end up working for intelligence agencies. When i said i could/would never work for them, i was looked at real funny.
Naturally. Don't forget big pharma, corporate lawyers, anyone in the prison industry or pipeline, anyone who makes tech or tools for law enforcement (duh), anyone who is or was associated with the military, anyone who works for big agriculture (factory farms are undeniably evil), anyone working with any major food or clothing producers (child slavery is also undeniably evil), anyone who works for oil or gas industries (duh), anyone who works for the plastics and chemical manufacturers, anyone who works in the auto or trucking industry, and anyone who works for or with landlords...
The problem is that there aren't a lot of people left after that. There are some, for sure. But not a lot. Evil people and organizations have control overly nearly all resources. In the short term, in order to not be cut off from resources, including food and shelter, most people have to do things that benefit evil companies and evil people. That does NOT mean that we should just shrug our shoulders and say "I guess morality doesn't matter. Everyone is doing bad things anyway." But it does mean that we shouldn't fall into the sectarianism trap / puriry tests for leftists.
@kitten on this note, you're welcome to think I'm evil... I don't necessarily even blame you. I have major doubts myself. But I take the dirty money I get and try to make the best of it by, for example, providing rent free housing to homeless trans people and sexual assault survivors. (I'm not a landl*rd. I just manage to make enough to pay the monthly mortage on a house and I let people stay in my house rent free.)
Is it better that I not have the money and not be able to help? maybe it is. it's dirty fucking money. maybe I'm just rationalizing. But I don't think I am. I came to the conclusion that being able to help real people today is worth the risk of some amount of potential "butterfly effect" style harm to hypothetical people in the future.
I don't dislike google employees because they're evil or bad leftists, I dislike them because they suck and they ruin every good venue and bar with their techy stink, they are lame app nerds, and because of the special busses and teslas. They are allowed at the socialist meeting but not good to date or talk to, or sit near at a cafe, etc
Obviously an unfair generalization but oh well, I do the same for ad men and wall st types
I do appreciate you replying. and I appreciate what you're saying. I do get where you're coming from.
Drawing lines is tough. Is child labor worse or is adult slavery worse? Is it better to poison rivers or wipe out a species? you know what I mean? like, I'd rather work for Google than Nestlé, but I also completely understand why someone else might feel the exact opposite. I dream of a society where we have more than just bad choices in front us and are not constantly having to try and decide what the lesser evil is. And I know you feel the same.
Bad take. Have you actually talked to any google employees? There's a lot of legitimately left wing (not just lib) sentiment there.
