luiscleto's comments

Perhaps I'm still too naive and innocent, but I don't think this represents the overall reality of the company. A lot of people participated in the protests mentioned and only two statements of retaliations were given (edit: or at least leaked to the media), with "more than a dozen" shared during the meeting in question. Given the sheer size of the company, if there was "systemic" retaliation I'd expect these to be in the order of a few hundreds, or many dozens at the least.

In addition, we're only seeing this from the perspective of those who feel they were retaliated against because of those protests, with absolutely no additional context or perspective of the managers/execs/peers (which I think we will never obtain for rather obvious reasons).

Personally, I have found Google to have a really open culture of communication. You're generally free to give your opinion. I'd be much more afraid of retaliation from peers due to something I said being considered offensive by some of them, than by an executive or my manager due to speaking out against the way the company does things (which happens all the time and by large amounts of employees). Of course that's just one experience and I may have been lucky with my own team.

disclaimer: I recently joined Google but I'm only aware of these incidents from media publications such as this and everything above is just my personal opinion on the incident.

Edit: Added that "more than a dozen" other stories were shared in the meeting according to the article, as I had originally missed that.

I don't think they're trying to cut on their headcount, but probably trying to cut on the cost per head.

> We need some regulations;

But the regulations are already in place. In the UK especially there are very strict and broad-range hate-speech laws. And most of the content referred to as problematic already breaches the ToS for the platforms mentioned. And evidence suggests those companies have already been pouring resources into trust and safety teams to detect and stop such content.

Getting rid of "problematic" user content on social networks for the masses is a very hard game of whack-a-mole as people quickly adapt their way of sharing content when it's being blocked. Ultimately you'd have to destroy the value of the social network altogether to ensure you block all of it.

This is just going to give legal power for government PR campaigns whenever a particular "problematic" opinion gains too much traction, since it's so vaguely defined that any website with user content could be penalized at any time at an official's discretion regardless of context and whether it's true hate speech or not. All the actual problematic crap (real hate speech, actual abuse/mutilation videos, etc.) will never gain that kind of spotlight and will continue to find new ways to circulate faster than it's stopped.

> But it also covers harmful behaviour that has a less clear legal definition such as cyber-bullying, trolling and the spread of fake news and disinformation.

So, basically any site with user content can be fined/blocked at any time at the official's discretion.

> This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?

If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.

I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.

> It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.

Yes, but there is a difference if it takes 20 devs to make it and there are only 10 available vs there being 200. Competition among the devs as to who gets to make it means each of them will tolerate worse conditions to get the offer over the other. Effectively driving down the costs of producing the game. With a union in play, the cost of production would be stopped from going down.

I'm not necessarily arguing that it is worse with a union than without. But an expected side effect of forcing high costs (high wages in this case) would be that it would make it much harder for aspiring game devs to enter the field.

> you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost

This is not true. Again, unions might produce a better outcome, I don't know otherwise for sure. But to think that you can tweak the economic system to behave exactly as you want it to, producing all the positive outcomes with no negatives, is absurd. We can often fail to achieve anything similar with simple software systems, much less with something as intricate and complex as humanity.

> I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either

If there was a shortage of game developers, employers would be forced to give much better benefits and compensation to retain and hire staff (and probably there would be a lot less games and studios). There may be more to the analysis, but I don't agree that you can ignore supply and demand and turn this into just oppressor greedy guy vs oppressed exploited worker instead.

I guess in that case it would come as a bigger surprise that I'm from the EU, and from a country where unions are quite well established, and have never been to, studied, or worked in the US.

They don't need it. They do it because it's more profitable. If you don't want those conditions they can easily find someone else willing to accept them due to the huge hiring pool available.

Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.

> Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated

This. Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

Ultimately I don't think there is a right answer and which way you choose is up to you. But it sounds like a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.

Lucky are those who are passionate about things the majority of the labor pool hates but many businesses need.

Edit: Just to prevent misunderstandings, this is my opinion on Unionisation in this particular industry where there are many (private) companies. It can be a different story if your only employers are not driven by profits and losses or are not in a competitive market (e.g. a government) and I wasn't trying to make a sweeping generic statement like "all unions are always bad"

I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions).

When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.

Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.

That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.

So, we won't find a correlation between people who go to prison and propensity to immoral behavior? Or even intentionally mislabeling immoral behavior as moral.

HN should be wise enough to know that correlation is not causation, and that statistical differences in behaviour between groups do not necessarily describe an individual from the group. But that does not invalidate OP's point.

While that's an interesting approach for compensation which might mitigate knowingly bad/irresponsible decisions, it doesn't look like it would address the core issue here of having to choose a metric to base compensation on.

Maybe the gaming effect would be lessened by that compensation approach, but at a very large scale org, I doubt that it would. Although, it would be interesting to see real life studies of this, in case such practices have already been tried out.

> employees themselves has to be responsible for their output in such a way that higher output leads to more money for them

But what metric would you use to measure output that solves the gamification problem?

Even for contractors or sales people (where you could use the sales volume), this could lead them to favor short term results and compromise the long-term health of the company (e.g. by favoring quick, low-quality solutions by contractors, or selling features that don't yet exist and creating unsustainable roadmaps by sales people).

Reminds me of Goodheart's law[1].

We have known this for a long time, but it is hard to have an alternative system which scales well with huge organizations. For startups and small companies, I could see an informal system working pretty well, but as the company grows to hundreds or thousands of employees, it becomes necessary to standardize and have some kind of metrics used for reporting and evaluations. This will inevitably shift the company's culture towards gaming those metrics.

Somewhat like grading systems in education. High grades don't necessarily mean you will be capable of generating more value to society than average grades or even low grades. And students often become good at improving their grades without that actually adding much value. But there is a correlation. And we don't have many better (non-experimental) alternatives that I'm aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

They can apply large pressure on the state, true. But so can labour unions (and probably so would guilds). It is still not true state ownership as competition does thrive (even if they still have obstacles).

Edit: There are probably even better examples of lobbying than climate change as that has a ton of confounding factors that make it hard to deal with besides just oil companies. But I see no reason to assume distributism would make the issue better. Taxi drivers protesting against Uber comes to mind.

I originally thought this was going to be an April fool's satire on using Microservices as a religion.

> "Distributism favors the dissolution of the current private bank system, or more specifically its profit-making basis in charging interest"

Does not sound very Swiss to me.

> "Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism"

This greatly resembles Karl Marx's criticism of capitalism, which has failed to hold up to reality so far.

Frankly, this sounds a lot like repackaged socialism using labor unions and guilds rather than a central government. Might not be as bad a state socialism (i.e. they might actually be able to manage the businesses better), but I sincerely doubt it would solve any of the major problems we see today.

While you do have inequality in capitalist systems the "elites" tend to rotate, with empires falling apart and new ones taking their place. Wealthy families maintaining their wealth and power are the exception and not the norm.

Introducing guilds or more unions will likely make it much harder for competition and innovation to thrive, introducing a huge barrier of bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the status quo for their own benefit.

I don't drive or cycle (on a regular basis), and I haven't been particularly exposed to generic rage towards cyclists. I don't think I see cyclists as any less human than cars and their drivers, or bikers for that matter. Yet of all the aforementioned groups, the only ones I've learned to be especially cautious of (and to which I linked negative preconceptions) are cyclists.

This was never a problem for me when living in the Netherlands, where there is good infrastructure and rules. (At least after getting past the phase where you simply need to adapt to the ridiculous number of bikes when compared to other countries).

After moving to Dublin, it doesn't matter if you're on the sidewalk, pedestrian-only bridges, or crossing a pedestrian crossing when the light is green, you always have to watch out for bikes because you never know when one is heading right into you, regardless of how many traffic rules they need to be breaking to do so. From my own anecdotal evidence I've learned to expect worse/reckless behavior from cyclists compared to any other road user.

I'm sure they aren't worse people that anyone else and this is probably aggravated by the severely lacking infrastructure over here, but I seriously doubt "dehumanization" is the root cause of the problem here (even if it may contribute to a vicious cycle). From a driver's perspective, better infrastructure would probably also make them stress less over accidentally causing serious harm to a cyclist over something that would otherwise be their fault.

That said, I don't have stats or studies to back any of this up and this is all assumed from my own observations.