Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?
I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.
If they want to rock the boat who I am to tell them no to.
In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.
I think the point OP was making is that dozens of people died because executives as Boeing “shut down” concerns that some long time engineers had. I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products but I think the point is hoping that a half a trillion dollar monopoly will change its ways because lots of employees leave is wishful thinking and might only happen if it results in a catastrophe. Google can replace them easily and regardless a majority of their profit comes from search which only requires a small fraction of their employees to keep operating at profit.
>I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products
Google is experimenting with self driving cars and they are always interested in working for the military or the police. I want the employees to talk if they feel something is not right rather then do the Uber thing and disable the safety because the code was garbage and had too many false positives.
That is basically a union effort. The cognitive dissonance on display with regard to labor in tech is fascinating. Many have internalized the propaganda created by big business that "unions are bad, unions are expensive, you don't want to unionize" and they aren't willing to revisit that internally, but they're like "what if we just organize without a union, refuse to work unless our demands are met" failing to realize that's exactly what a union is.
Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.
The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.
FWIW, what's amazing to someone like me, who is anti-union (in tech, at least), is that pro-union people don't seem to understand why people who have succeeded by being highly differentiated from the rest of the talent pool would want to participate in a scheme where the entirety of labor is presented to an employer as a homogenous block.
My understanding is that actors don't typically have a choice whether to join a union. SAG-AFTRA has enough power and preference agreements that you can't really make it in the industry without joining, even if you don't otherwise want to.
Possibly, but it doesn't have the problem of treating the actors as a homogeneous equally skilled block; "10X actors" are definitely getting adequate compensation while at the same time all guild members benefit from the common protections.
I don't know where this perception comes from but it's not true. Collective bargaining isn't about the entire employee pool being represented as one skilled homogeneous block. It's about giving employees a voice at the decision-making tables in a company.
I'm sure you've heard the myriad stories about where the decision makers at a company have done some damn boneheaded thing, something so rock stupid that could only come from never having worked on whatever ground floor the business has. And what can the employees do? Nothing. They have to comply because they don't have a voice, because if they argue, they're fired. If they don't do it, they're fired.
THAT is what a union can fix, among tons of other problems. A smart boss is one that listens to his employees when they speak up about problems; a boss working with a union doesn't have a choice.
And that's not to say that unions are perfect, like anything else made by humans and run by humans they have flaws. But IMO, problematic representation is better than no representation.
Right. Unions have their problems, but they provide considerable protection against arbitrary actions by management.
Here's The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE, which represents Hollywood animators at the major studios.[1] Disney, Pixar, Warner, etc. This union is all creative people. They have salary floors, but not ceilings. Most usefully, they have overtime rules. Beyond 8 hours, time and a half. Weekends, time and a half. Crunches, double time. In Hollywood, management tries hard to avoid crunches, because they have to pay for them.
The Animation Guild has a pension plan, which has, they point out, outlived all but two animation studios.
The Animation Guild tried to organize game development companies. They got Pixar, but not EA. They used to send a labor organizer to Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings.
That's an overly idealized view of unions. In practice union leaders are often going to bat for themselves rather than the members. The level of corruption in larger unions is off the charts.
In principle I do support the right of workers to unionize. But the current implementation of unions in the US has a lot of problems.
And this is an overly cynical one, painting all unions as the same despite them being individual entities, all composed of different people.
Plenty of them have problems. Plenty more don't. Generalizing them all in this way is exactly how big business has demonized them to the average worker.
If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates. Can you say the same for your employer?
> If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates.
Really? I'd likely have very close to the same amount of say I have in my company, namely, zero. I might even have more in my company, depending on my position and the relative size.
Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.
Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves pro se (without a union).
I wouldn't categorize individual decisions to quit as union action. The whole point of unions is that collective action is massively more powerful than individual voluntary action.
I would argue that the cognitive dissonance regarding labor from pro-union advocates is more fascinating. Anyone can organize themselves already, independent of organized labor laws - it's called a company. If employees are so confident in their abilities, they could just as well form their own company and sell their labor as a service back to their former employer. It doesn't make sense to have a special allowance for unions that forces everyone into collective bargaining and effectively a second, parallel management structure.
This is honestly naive, if I dump poison in the river your village is drinking from you should move the village. If a company is abusing the employees what is the danger in organizing and negotiating better conditions as a group and not as individuals . The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
I think you are glossing over the reality of how unions work. If someone is dumping poisons in the river, you have the chance to get laws passed against it. Others can organize to prevent those laws from being passed as well. Everyone is not compelled to take a single position on the issue or obligated to join a single party, and there is no mandatory fee either. It is a very different situation from being in a union (in the US, anyways).
Can't you have multiple unions in US? like teachers,medics have more then 1 union here in Romania and you are not forced to join,
I do not understand the rest of your comment, what I was trying to argue against is the idea of "leave if you don't like it" so it appears to me that some people are trying to suppress employees that complain, organize and demand improvements.
Are you suggesting that the only way for say game developers to get better condition is to lobby some politicians to pass a national law for the sector ?
The way the union regulations work out here, you may only work at a certain company if you belong to a certain union (a single organization). You can’t for example, choose between multiple competing unions or work without representation. I’ve heard this is different in other locations like Germany.
As a result, having a job at that company means you automatically adopt paying their fees, their organizational structure, the pay scale they’ve negotiated (often can turn into tenure-based, which is basically age-based), etc. This means you sort of have two management structures in a sense. Since unions participate politically and fund campaigns and such, you are automatically paying your salary to support political candidates you may disagree with, because union leadership makes the choice on how to spend the money it collects.
It can also lead to workplace inefficiency and frustrations that customers end up paying for. As an example, if you work at Boeing you may have some task you can finish immediately yourself (like screwing something in) but the union protects the job security of some people by saying that only those people may do certain tasks. As a result you might need to wait to coordinate with the screw guy to do something you could finish in 5 seconds.
I am wondering if years of anti union propaganda pushed to the surface the bad examples and all the good ones are just hidden. I am not in a union but what I know from my family that are in such jobs in public or private sector is that6 they get only benefits. Like if they have to work more hours you get paid double for those hours, you are forced to take your vacation days - this means that management can't put pressure on you to work on weekends because they are bad at managing, management will try to optimize to avoid extra hours. Where my brother works he is evaluated each year, there is company wide(multinational) scheme on how people are paid so you can get a raise but there are no 10X mechanical engineers that work 1 night and have the output of 10 good regular engineers.
Without this protections the company could promote the people that stay and work extra hours and from home for free or find different ways to abuse you.
> The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
And one could easily say this is a ploy by management-level people to show the other serfs that "You can make it too!" because paying one dev who's a little better than his peers costs a fraction of paying them all what they should be paid.
> "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
This is a valid concern for highly-paid/specialized individuals, IMO. Price's Law (https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/): 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Probably true but how many devs that think they are 10X are just regular devs with 10X ego that compare themselves with the lowest possible dev to feel superior.
I could see a union that won't put upper limit but would fight for fairness, extra hours paid double, no more then X hours a month etc.
Except that the very concept of a 10X developer, no matter what they themselves may say about it, is disgusting; it's a person who has, even if willingly, distorted their work/life balance to a point where they "go the extra mile" as management would put it; usually involving working off hours, working extra hours, working from home on weekends and evenings, or eschewing general life activities in favor of doing more work.
I know this is sacrilege to say this in our system and even moreso in our profession, but this is not good for you. I don't care how much you like it, I don't care how much money you're gaining from it, I don't care if you're the most willing of willing to have ever willed. You're abusing yourself in exchange for money, and that's the end of it and it shouldn't be allowed.
You should have a salary commensurate with your skill set, and you should not have to eschew anything resembling a proper work/life balance to do it.
You are assuming that greater value generation is only a function of greater effort in the form of more hours. It is also a function of other things like higher talent, smarter decisions, and past investment in one’s skills.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not name-calling ones and ideological battle ones. We're trying for better than that here.
So if I say arbitrary stuff like what I was responding too but use enough words, it's all good? The "just make a company" is not just unsubstantive but also a completely fake idea :) it's comical propaganda dressed up in verbiage
Sounds like the issue isn't content but rather whether something is quippy or wordy.
Yes and no. The way to refute a bad comment is by respectfully providing better information, and this is very much a question of content. "This is some capitalist nonsense" obviously doesn't do that.
It may feel to you like you were refuting the GP as much as it deserved, but from the point of view of an open-minded reader who's here to learn and doesn't have a fixed position, your comment contains no information, only name-calling.
Don't forget that all this is a matter of degree. Degrees of badness matter; responding to a bad comment with a still-worse one is a step in the wrong direction.
Sounds good, doesn't work. No essential change was ever achieved by boycott. What works is enough people willing to stick their necks out and organize politically.
Yes, eventually it will leak to the press that developers at X are arguing if they should ignore pedestrians in the self driving cars because the code is too bad, or colleagues that work on other sections will find the shit that is happening and would intervene.
I understand that you are thinking at some stupid politic arguments but I am talking about larger topics like killing drones, self driving cars, law enforcement AI , I want the developers to be able to speak when they see something questionable then leave.
> Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?
Absolutely not. And if you leave, at least do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail. But serious as Googlers' misgivings may be, it's hard to compare their concern to what Boeing did.
Google is working on self driving cars and they were planing to work for military, so I would prefer Google employees to speak up then shut up and leave.
Airplane safety is fairly black-and-white compared to, say, the decision to partner with law enforcement or to censor certain kinds of content on YouTube.
Given that Silicon Valley engineers have attitudes that are not broadly representative of the general public, I think it's rather presumptuous for them to operate as moral crusaders within a company.
Aircraft safety is the opposite of black and white. Engineering is all about making compromises, in aircraft, you compromise with weight, otherwise, we would be giving every passenger an ejection seat/parachute.
> Engineering is all about making compromises, in aircraft, you compromise with weight, otherwise, we would be giving every passenger an ejection seat/parachute.
You forgot cost. The 737-MAX is fairly well documented to have been pushed by management for the purpose of increasing profits while compromising safety.
I think the difficulty was that it wasn't black and white. You can say "I think MCAS is a danger because it only relies on one sensor and has authority to make the plane uncontrollable" and someone can counter with "MCAS failing looks like and is fixed the same way as any runaway stabilizer trim, every pilot knows how to handle that".
Obviously the second hypothetical statement was wrong, but it's hardly "evil" to make that argument.
The 'unsafe culture' at Boeing is an overblown fear, IMO. The two crashes on the 737 MAX were both on airlines that are not known for adequate training or maintenance. Everyone got on the "bash Boeing" train while ignoring the reality of what happened. The NY Times finally wrote about it, after numerous articles presenting a one-sided story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/world/asia/lion-air-boein...
> Crash investigators were presented with photographs supposedly showing that a mandatory test was done after the vane had been replaced. But upon further inspection, investigators concluded the photos were from a different aircraft.
> “This is a test that Lion Air was required to do, and they didn’t,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant.
> If the test had been done, engineers likely would have realized the vane was calibrated incorrectly by 21 degrees. The misalignment would prove fatal because it mistakenly catalyzed Boeing’s anti-stall system, forcing the plane into its final plummet.
Please stop with false information, one of the companies has a good record. The safety concerns are real, documented and were ignored. There are many more issues with the MAX then the one causing the crashes, as an example while trying to patch the current software issue a new software problem was found that delayed the update.
What part of my post is false? If you are going to label my comment as false information, the burden is on you to point out explicit falsehoods (not just mere differences of opinion).
Your reference to unrelated issues such as the software patch can apply to numerous complex systems in many industries (not just aircraft), and I bet it applies to planes from other manufacturers as well. Your comment seems more like FUD, since it casts doubt in one instance (one aircraft) without a comprehensive understanding and comparison across other comparable aircraft or manufacturers. You can't just take one complex system, scrutinize it, come up with a wish list of things you would want (without knowing the tradeoffs/implications), and then say there is something systematically broken here.
We know that both airlines are bad so this implies the airplane has no fault.
First of all even if the pilot crashed the plane ntentionally this does not invalidate the reality:
- MCAS was hidden and pilots were not trained because of economic reasons.
- MCAS had too much autority then the regulation allowed , so basically this is a black and white situation no shifting the blame on a third-world country company
- after the first crash and even after the second crash Boeing failed to consider the safety of people and ground the planes until the MCAS is fixed or pilots were trained.
- the MAX can enter in a state where you don't have enough power to control, the warning messages were a paid DLC and there was no training on how to handle this cases.
Even if you did not intended your comment is sounding racist, those poor country companies used the plane wrong.
Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%. If you care that much about this topic please put a reminder in your calendar and get back to me when the investigations are over and MAX is back in the air and tell me "I told you so"
> Even if you did not intended your comment is sounding racist, those poor country companies used the plane wrong.
This is an uncalled for exaggeration, and not based on anything I said. Lion Air lied about testing their angle of attack sensor, per that NYT article. It isn't racist to point out that fact.
And Ethiopian also had issues - for example, the copilot had just 200 hours of experience (https://www.businessinsider.com/ethiopian-airlines-flight-30...). Pilots have commented on how the gap in experience between the pilot and copilot can be confusing in an anomalous situation.
> Still, 200 hours of flying experience is far below the requirement to copilot a plane in countries including the US. In 2013, the FAA upped its copilot (also called first officer) qualification requirement to 1,500 hours from 250 hours, while European airlines often require at least 500 hours.
> And having just 200 hours of experience is especially cumbersome when flying a massive jet like the Boeing 737 Max 8, which was the plane involved in the March 10 crash, said Ross Aimer, the CEO of the airline consulting and legal firm Aero Consulting Experts.
> "Two-hundred hours is extremely low," Aimer told Business Insider. "In an emergency, it becomes a problem. If you have a complicated airplane and you basically put a student pilot in there, that's not a good thing. Even if the guy in the left seat has so much experience, if you have so much imbalance of experience, that can be a problem."
-------
> Maybe you can argue that Boeing has less then 100% blame but it is a lot more then 50%.
Yes I think there is blame on both sides. I don't think Boeing is "a lot more than 50%", personally. And I don't know that their safety culture is "completely broken" as is often claimed. I think there may be room for improvements, but these are highly-complex machines, and highly-complex organizations, that work hard to strike a balance between being economically-efficient and perfectly-safe (since no system is truly perfect). If we pull back the covers, I bet we will find similar tradeoffs and decisions being made regularly in most industries, for most manufacturers, and for most aircraft.
There are always things under the average so it is not surprising that some co pilot has less experience then US average or minimal, Your argument sounds like this
Say my Ford brakes stop working while I am speeding, then we find that there was a software bug but we blame the driver because if he would have driven with 10 km less speed maybe he would have survived and if he would have been above average the diver would have known how the transmission works under the hood and in an instant would have executed an engine brake by shifting the transmission into lower gear (thing that was not learned in driving school and tested for)
Basically the airplane should never had placed the pilots in the situation they were in.
Because some super hero american pilot could have saved the plane does not excuse the fact that every pilots that is given a license should be able to safely operate it.
While that CHP officer that died in one of the Toyota unintended acceleration crashes apparently was too panicked to shift into neutral, I want to take exception to your specific example. Do I want a driver who never even bothered to ask themselves what the lower gears were for?
We all want the best drivers and pilots, but all the drivers or pilots have to pass an exam, if there is no fraud then all the drivers and pilots that are licensed are capable to operate the vehicles and you can't demand that only race/rally drivers and military grade pilots would operate this machines.
Anyway the fact that the pilot could have done more or not is a completely unrelated topic with all Boeing issues, MCAS or non-MCAS. I will patiently wait for the full reports, I hope there will be record on how did Boeing decided to make the warning that the sensors are malfunctioning a paid DLC, who was the person that decided or what were the procedures that decided that a malfunction warning should not be the default.
I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.