• 7 Posts
  • 344 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I like this term, “billionaire media”, because right-wing media likes to use “mainstream media” as a slur to dismiss any other media source that disagrees with them. It’s a term that shuts down thinking and gets people to automatically dismiss any claim from “mainstream media”.

    “Billionaire media” doesn’t really work this way, because if Fox News starts criticizing “billionaire media”, eventually some viewers are going to wake up and realize, “wait, isn’t Fox News owned by a billionaire too?”


  • People, especially Republicans, love to talk about the “mainstream media”. That term needs to die.

    There is only “billionaire media” and “independent media”.

    You’re billionaire media if your owned or funded by a billionaire; I don’t care if you’re only on YouTube, if you’re getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from sponsors, you’re part of the billionaire media.

    If you’re funded by a bunch of small donations or have no funding at all, then you are independent media.

    Today my trust for billionaire media sank even lower.











  • How would you force someone to take time off?

    If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.

    As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

    If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

    I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

    I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.


  • When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

    A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

    A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

    I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

    1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
    2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

    Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

    Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

    1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

    Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.