On Resigning from Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.alphabetworkers.org/resignation-letter/ <comment><USER3> Random thoughts:

1\. I applaud the fact that they are actually quitting the company to voice their disapproval of these policies. In my mind all the "internal activism" happening at Google and others is massively hypocritical. One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks fueled by those very activities they despise.

2\. If they think Google is discriminatory towards LGBT employees and minorities, contributing to climate change etc., they are in for a big shock once they are really out of the Google and SV bubble.

<comment><USER4> Consider what happens if everyone who has a moral complaint about their employer immediately quits rather than staying around and attempting to chase the complaint up the management hierarchy and/or educate and organize other employees to voice the complaint.

I think utilizing one's power as a worker and aligning other workers to increase workers' power is far from hypocritical. It's a great way (perhaps the only reliable way) to hold companies accountable for their actions and improve companies' treatment of workers and society.

<comment><USER3> > Consider what happens if everyone who has a moral complaint about their > employer immediately quits

This is in fact the quickest way to ensure that this behavior immediately stops

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's true, precisely because the employee with a complaint can potentially increase their leverage significantly by educating and organizing other employees around the cause.

Your analysis seems to assume that there's some fixed percentage of employees who think some action from their employer is bad, and if that percentage is high enough, then all those employees could quit, which would either somehow signal to the employer that their action was bad or would damage the company so much that they would need to change their actions.

I think that's wishful thinking, and of course the percentage of employees with a complaint is _not_ fixed and can be directly increased by internal efforts to organize. That applies not just to internal awareness, but also public awareness: note that we're only having discussions about cases where employees attempted to organize other employees.

<comment><USER5> If everyone who participated in the Google Walkout (20% of their workforce) stayed out until Google addressed their complaints, rather than returning to work after their lunch hour was over, all seven demands would've been met, instead of one. (And they probably would've still got paid!) I have my doubts that tech companies could operate with a sudden loss of 20% of their workforce and talent base.

If a company knows you will return to work no matter how much you complain, they are not going to take you seriously. (This was the Walkout's mistake.) And if, as an individual, you make too much noise, you'll just get fired. (See numerous individual examples.) Decisive collective action works, and that's what unions figured out a long time ago.

<comment><USER6> Considering the massive over supply of labor, I'd say they could very easily replace that 20% several times over before they had any problems finding more engineers.

<comment><USER7> Techies work in a seller's market (as evidenced by the comparatively huge salaries they command). There is definitely no "over supply of labor".

One of Google's biggest assets is their huge army of talented techies. I'd go so far as to say losing that would be an existential threat to the business.

<comment><USER8> Comparative to what? Big tech companies are wildly profitable for their owners.

Techies make a lot of money compared to other professions because we genuinely produce a disproportionate amount of value, but that doesn't imply we're in a seller's market.

One way you can tell that there's no dearth of labor is that most companies round an "unsure" in the interview process to "no," not "yes."

<comment><USER7> Comparative to most other jobs, of course.

I sugggest you ask a non-tech friend about their experience getting a new job: how many applications they've sent out, how many responses they've received and how many interviews they've actually been to. Then compare that to a software dev's hit rates.

I submit to you that a halfway decent software dev will have a hard time being unemployed: they might not get hired by FAANG and they might have to code in $LANGUAGE_I_HATE, but they'll be able to get a job at a reasonable salary.

Also, consider the fact that there's been a large number of businesses focused on recruitment specifically in the tech area. That's because everyone wants to hire devs and they're willing to pay recruiters to channel the funnel their way.

Few other industries have that luxury.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I currently work at Google, but I am a newbie, i.e less than 5 years at Google.

I frequently run in to people who are: 1) always been at Google and enjoyed the fruits of its rise or at another similar environment 2) never had to deal with frugality or lack of funding for anything 3) see themselves are superior to everyone else - in terms of how enlightened they are, how they know whats best for everyone 4) feel that they have an absolute say in anything Google does

These people do not know the realities of the world. Plain and simple. They had a good life and think that is it.

One thing they dont seem to realize is that almost everyone else has had to deal with growth challenges, lack of capital and access to resources. No one exists to only make the world better. Contrary to their disbelief, most people and organizations, including themselves and Google, have the first priority to survive, to grow, to flourish and to abide by all applicable laws. Once this is satisfied, they move on to grander things like charity, investing in the well being of others etc.

The very reason these people have the capability to leave their jobs for whatever reason is that they already took care of the first priority - <USER2> survive and thrive, courtesy Google.

Google is a business, and as a business it has the fiduciary duty to serve itself and its interests first.

If these people have any conscience that they claim to have, they need to stop pointing at Google, stop riding in their luxury SUVs, stop eating in insanely expensive restaurants, stop vacationing in luxury resorts, stop purchasing multi million dollar homes, and first go try to serve in the government to change the laws and society in which we all live and abide by.

Stop trying to tell a large corporation to stop doing business and make profits, go change the society in which it operates. Then we will talk.

Enough of the BS.

You dont like working here, move on. Let us have the opportunity to contribute and grow and be successful.

<comment><USER10> Hiding behind "it's a business" isn't an argument acceptable to most people.

Sure "it's a business" but does that give it a green card to act how it pleases?

We're getting into the philosophy of what we want businesses to be in our society. More and more people are realizing that the inhumane structure a business operates in isn't acceptable to them, and would like to have a say in what they're doing.

This person left Google because Google was getting into the business of killing people - sure you might be comfortable with that. But your opinion isn't any more valid than someone who doesn't work in Google.

So please, stop telling people how to behave and act and protest. We're not putting in 100 hour weeks because someone before you had the audacity to go say the current system is inhumane.

You don't have to be that person, but you also don't have to be the person who stands in their way.

<comment><USER9> > Sure "it's a business" but does that give it a green card to act how it > pleases?

of course, yes! As long as it stays within the boundaries set by the law. Do you not act as you please? Do you not eat a $40 meal while a homeless person is lying outside in the cold? DO you not send your kid to a private school at $100k/year while the kid down the street (down the highway) struggles for school supplies?

> So please, stop telling people how to behave and act and protest. We're not > putting in 100 hour weeks because someone before you had the audacity to go > say the current system is inhumane.

I am not tell you how to behave, I am tell you to not tell the company how to behave. You are free to leave and go do what you think is right.

<comment><USER10> You're telling me to accept the status quo and be fine with it.

That's telling me how to behave. The company is just an entity that needs to follow the set of guidelines set by people living in that society.

<comment><USER11> Please - quit your overpaid tech job and actually work to change the status quo. No one is saying you have to accept the status quo.

But your lectures while driving past the homeless in a $100K tesla on your way to swank vacations are tiresome - particularly as you build that money off the status quo you are so eager to say is terrible.

<comment><USER12> > Please - quit your overpaid tech job and actually work to change the status > quo. No one is saying you have to accept the status quo.

False dichotomy. You don't need to quit your job to work to change the status quo. Indeed, you can often effect change much better from inside an important organization than from outside it.

<comment><USER11> Please - cash your big checks built on the back of misery and then complain to the company about their violent attacks on your "physical security".

You don't need to change your job - but if you are getting paid very well to do a job, then posting long internet postings about how terrible it is to work at an "important organization" risks getting you some eye-rolls.

<comment><USER12> You're attacking a strawman. The people trying to effect change aren't merely complaining online. There has been substantial real organizing afoot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The post talks about Google supposedly persecuting LGBTQ employees for speaking up. But the linked articles only talk about them (possibly) getting retaliated against for protesting other issues, like border security or sexual harassment.

As an LGBT person (who does her fair share of activism), I'm not clear what the LGBTQ angle is here other than if the people involved happened to be LGBTQ. It seems like even if they are being retaliated against for their activism, it's not LGBTQ activism.

Did I miss something?

<comment><USER14> The angle is virtue signaling and potstirring. Its low hanging fruit to earn plaudits and make it seem like you're doing something. In reality like you said there is nothing to indicate the employees were fired for being gay or trans or whatever. The later reference to 'concentration camps' drives home the kind of person this guy is. Gay and trans people should be disgusted this person is using them in such a dishonest way to score points.

<comment><USER15> That is the unfortunate reality of a lot of activism today. I wonder if this behavior only serves to cause general resentment in the community against LGBTQ folks because the biggest loudmouths drag down the discourse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Oil and gas companies use cloud computing so I'm not going to work on cloud computing" doesn't seem much more valid to me than "child pornographers use encryption so I'm not going to work on encryption". It's a technology that exists, and people will use it to further their goals no matter what you personally do.

There is a simple, well-established way for society to discourage certain activities without damaging the shared infrastructure for other activities. It's called a tax. If the externalities you (we) are concerned about were reflected in a carbon tax, it would not be up to individual employees to disproportionately risk their livelihoods and families like this. The project spreadsheet would come out differently for a reason that directly corresponds to the societal problem.

So to me the moral imperative is to make sure that tax comes into existence, rather than making a not-very-impactful personal sacrifice that you may or not be able to afford.

<comment><USER17> Taxing externalities is great, and we should totally do that.

However, your ordinary political vote as 1 of 300,000,000 Americans is probably less impactful than your job as 1 of 100,000 Googlers. And you still get to vote regardless of your job status. Heck, this post is on the frontpage of hn getting viewed by thousands of people in relevant industries.

Certainly most ex-FAANG employees can afford more financial sacrifice than your typical person. I think there is a tradeoff here, and at certain levels it can make sense.

This reminds me of arguments about protests vs. legislation (e.g. "why are you making a protest instead of trying to change the law?"). You aren't a legislator. You can't just write a bill and conduct a vote on it tomorrow. Instead, you make public protests to bring attention to your cause and build support.

E.g. if Google can't get its employees to work for oil and gas companies, maybe they should lobby for a carbon tax so that they become acceptable companies again.

<comment><USER16> My reaction is specifically to _quitting Google_ , not just making a noise. You should always make noise. But quitting Google damages _every_ customer of Google, most of whom are probably doing beneficial things, so the effects are mixed. And doing it for this reason doesn't even directly address the underlying problem.

So if you're making a sacrifice like this to send a message, let it be "support a carbon tax", not "don't work for oil companies".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Attacks like this were an attack on people's jobs and physical security: if > you can strip a reform-oriented pastor of their PCUSA ordination, you also > strip them of their employment and their health insurance_

If I'm understanding correctly, the argument with regard to "physical security" is that if you try to get someone fired, which would result in them losing their employer-provided health insurance, that they would have less security in their physical body.

Is there some other linkage to physical security that I'm missing? Because if this is the only connection, then anytime someone tries to get anyone fired, it would be deemed "an attack on the physical security" of that person. That seems a bit of a stretch (and overlooks the fact that there are other ways to get health insurance, either via another job or via the health care exchanges).

To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the specific circumstances of the example — I'm just trying to understand how physical security was implicate, and how the term is being used.

<comment><USER19> I actually feel this way about attacks on employment in general, so I'll try to give some quick context about the belief.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. We declared bankruptcy once when I was young, and I was told to prepare to have "strangers come and take away furniture" (which, thankfully, never materialized). I never went hungry, but we did live paycheck-to-paycheck and frequently relied on the charity of our extended family to make ends meet. In short, money stress was a thing, and it was obvious from a very young age.

So I consider an attack on someone's employment to be a very serious road to go down because:

\- Most people don't have savings, and it isn't necessarily their fault.

\- Not everyone has a support structure, we were immensely lucky to have wealthy and generous relatives.

\- 4 weeks of unemployment is plenty of time for bills to pile up if someone doesn't have savings, I've taken longer than 4 weeks to find a job every time I've looked.

\- COBRA is insanely expensive and may be required if, for example, a close relative is very sick. Fighting with an insurance company as an individual is immensely difficult and interrupting someone's care to have that fight can be life-threatening.

\- Desperation breeds poor decision making. That individual may take a pay cut or change careers and never recover.

\- The various social consequences of being fired can make finding a job extra difficult.

Basically, I've seen my own family one fail-safe away from disaster, so its easy to imagine the bottom. In fact, that money stress from my childhood has haunted me as an adult -- even though I've never needed to worry about it from a factual standpoint.

I don't have any of these concerns if the individual is obviously wealthy, and I wouldn't go so far as to say one should never try to have anyone fired. But I do personally believe the bar to do so is very high.

Note: I'm not interested in convincing anyone of my point of view. Just giving context for why people think like this.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing. I can understand how losing a job can cause this stress, especially for people who do not have much savings.

However, if physical security is a concern that is intrinsic to job loss, then I'm not sure what the point is of saying that you're threatening "my job _and my physical security_ ", since the latter is solely a subset of the former. I think most people would interpret that statement to mean that you threatened their job and also threatened something else related to their physical security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The oil and gas industry is essential to the well being of billions of people. It's literally the fuel for the world's economy.

Without it we would have substantially less food, travel would be all but impossible, and the technology sector would grind to a halt.

Eliminating the industry would cause harm on a scale the world has never seen. An entirely predictable and preventable catastrophe done in the name of a naive environmental absolutism.

Maybe let's come up with solutions that don't require pushing millions of people into poverty because they can no longer heat their homes or grow their food.

Also FWIW, the moral accountability argument here is pretty shaky reasoning. A great many people use Google products for evil. That doesn't make Google morally responsible for it.

<comment><USER21> Your analysis isn't entirely incorrect, but you're kind of missing the point. Oil and gas companies one day were necessary and provided more value than destruction (as far as we knew). At this point though, it's clear that oil and gas will one day be a thing of the past, and these massive industries are desperately trying to cling on in the face of this.

Evidence of this is present in the lobbying efforts funded to the tune of billions of dollars a year (by these industries) to ensure regulations don't get passed, subsidies don't reach green technology, and information is suppressed. This is evil.

No one is contesting the fact that we needed oil and gas to reach where we are today. We're just contesting the fact that we still need to be _expanding_ these industries, which lobbyists are trying to do every single day.

> Maybe let's come up with solutions that don't require pushing millions of > people into poverty because they can no longer heat their homes or grow > their food.

Maybe let's come up with a solution that prevents inevitable mass migrations, famine, and wars. (This statement is just as fallacious as yours -- see, I can do it too.)

<comment><USER22> Do you know of an energy source that can completely replace oil an gas today? It is very much not only a thing of past, but necessary for our survival today.

<comment><USER21> Solar/Wind/Nuclear can easily replace Oil today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > www.alphabetworkers.org/

> The trouble with deep belief

> The reason it's unlikely to work is that although you can persecute the > prophets

Sounds a bit full of themselves. They worked for a company, they no longer like the company, they quit. Great, move on. No need to make a big deal about it. It's just a job.

<comment><USER24> Google (and, really, all of Northern California) has been actively courting these high-minded idealists for a long time. The problem with these types of people is that they invent windmills to tilt at when they run out.

<comment><USER25> The problem with these types of people is that they actually care about more than the paycheck. ;)

<comment><USER26> Didn't seem to care about more than a paycheck until they'd collected a big one for 15 years. Idealism is easy when there's no risk involved.

<comment><USER27> Now you're idealizing struggle. It's easier (doesn't mean easy) to influence a group from the inside than from the outside. Quitting Google to avoid its money would be just a nonsensical self-sacrifice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reads like a moral screed. That's fine. They're entitled to their own views, to voice those views internally, and if they aren't adopted to leave the company and write a polemic.

Ultimately, two thirds of their complaints involve taking a position counter to the stated national interest of the United States. Sure, maybe they believe that national interest is wrong, morally objectionable, or whatever, but the inference you draw from the writing is that it clearly is. That everyone at Google knows this is wrong, should be stopped, but isn't because of the monetary gains of doing these things.

> 2\. Google Cloud sales to the oil and gas industry

I mean, if Google Cloud makes the extraction of natural gas more efficient then that strikes me as a net good for the planet. A large part of the emissions decrease in the U.S. over the past decade is from the economic viability of natural gas relative to coal. Dream of a bucolic lifestyle all you want, but reality should be confronted in these matters.

3\. Expansion into the weapons industry and the business of killing

The business of killing terrorists - with increasing levels of precision - strikes me (and every administration in memory) as clearly being in the national best interest. The better targeting capacity available, the less collateral damage and need for U.S. boots on the ground abroad there will be.

You can, of course, find drone strikes morally objectionable. You can find killing what are deemed threats to the homeland as objectionable. That's fine. But to state this as an objective truth is to find yourself holding a position at odds with nearly all elected law makers.

If you, as a company, agree or disagree with U.S. domestic and national security policy, fill your boots. But Google working in concert with the U.S. domestic and national security policies isn't choosing money over morality per se.

People have different perspectives and these people clearly have perspectives unaligned with their former employers. Good on them for leaving. However, I have to say reading this screed makes it seem like the adults in the room are the executives they lambast.

<comment><USER29> First of all Google affects a lot more than just the USA and while HQed in the USA is in many ways an international company.

Secondly, even if you take a US centric view of things, just because someone at the Pentagon claims something is the US best interests doesn't mean it is. People say, "oh we need these dangerous AI based weapons or other countries will win an arms race". Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them. The USA does not build nuclear weapons anymore, instead it invests heavily in diplomacy to prevent other countries from building nuclear weapons. For some reason, few people seem to consider that we could take the same approach to AI weaponry.

People simply underestimate the dangers of AI weaponry. Suppose you are an evil dictator who wants to oppress and enslave a group of people, and you can choose between a nuclear bomb, or a drone that has enough intelligence to hunt down journalists, political opponents, and any other dissidents that dare defy you. Which weapon would this hypothetical tyrant pick?

Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.

<comment><USER30> > The USA does not build nuclear weapons anymore, instead it invests heavily > in diplomacy to prevent other countries from building nuclear weapons. For > some reason, few people seem to consider that we could take the same > approach to AI weaponry.

Because it didn't work with nuclear weapons. Just look at North Korea to name the most recent example.

> Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in > this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of > these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that > since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an > "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.

And your reflexive attitude towards "authority figures" strikes me as extremely adolescent.

Extremely intelligent people developing sophisticated technology for military applications is not an inherently bad thing.

> Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th > century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them.

Indeed, but I don't think you've learned those lessons yourself. During the Second World War, if it weren't for the countless Allied scientists and engineers who designed weapons, broke codes, designed manufacturing processes, invented such things as the Mulberry harbors--the war would have, at minimum, lasted much longer than it did, and may have reached a much worse conclusion than it did.

I agree that evil dictators would probably find some profitable uses for AI technology. That's exactly why evil dictatorships are going to develop that technology anyway, regardless of whether we do or not. Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Feynman, and others refusing to help with the Manhattan Project wouldn't have made a whit of difference to whether or not Heisenberg was going to develop an atomic bomb for the Germans. And if Turing, Browning, Garand, Mitchell, and others refused to build weapons for the Allies, Heisenberg might have had the time and resources necessary to complete that bomb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The solution to climate change is not to make energy producers like oil and gas companies go out of business. The way these companies became so successful was by providing something of value at a low cost. Do you really want to pay substantially more for heating/cool, gas, and almost every good?

Instead, the Tesla model is the way to go. Build products that are 10x better than their fossil fuel reliant competitors. This way, consumers benefit as well.

The government can impose a cost on carbon somehow, so the market is forced to consider the societal cost of carbon. Also, it can incentivize clean energy by providing loans, lower taxes, etc to companies. It can increase R&D spending on clean energy.

<comment><USER32> > Do you really want to pay substantially more for heating/cool, gas, and > almost every good?

 _Until_ carbon taxes become ubiquitous, this seems like the only viable option to combat climate change. The current model is functionally subsidizing goods and energy at the cost of future and current environmental damage. While I certainly agree that government solutions (carbon taxes, subsidies for clean energy) are optimal, they are not currently in place - that they may someday does not excuse inaction (or actively damaging action) in the present day.

Improving alternatives and choosing not to support fossil fuel companies are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER31> The solution isn't bankrupting fossil fuel companies.

The solution is finding viable replacements for these companies, whether it's solar, wind, nuclear, or something else, and then scaling them so they can serve everyone.

Finding viable replacements that people _want_ to use, along with carbon taxes, subsidies, etc should be sufficient to force some oil and gas companies to pivot to clean energy and make the rest die out or become substantially smaller.

And, this way, we would avoid a massive decrease in our quality of life, it would actually be practical, and consumers would benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Being principled and high minded is wonderful when you are financially independent. Given Google's amazing financial success, I'd imagine the author is or should be financially independent and can choose to do whatever he wants. Some of the rest of us are not in a position to be as ideological.

<comment><USER10> Which in turn gives way to changing the system which allows more people to be ideological.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting that Google was painted as a villain when it planned to re- enter the China, while Microsoft and Yahoo have been operating censored search engines there continuously from the beginning. The difference? You don't hear of Microsoft or Yahoo employees complain about it.

Similarly, Google was vilified by its employees for bidding on government and defense contracts, while Microsoft and Amazon (and nearly every other tech company) very publicly fight tooth and nail to land these contracts. Again, the difference is that you don't hear Amazon or Microsoft employees complain. They don't stage constant protests. They don't leak internal documents to the press. They don't quit in dramatic fashion and write blog posts about it.

Google doesn't have a worse track record on any of these issues than other tech companies. It just has the loudest, most critical employees, who create a public shitstorm whenever the company steps out of line with their progressive politics. Over time, this has gradually seeped into the public conscious. Now even progressives outside the company rally against Google, while ignoring the tech companies that actively support censorship and the military-industrial war machine.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _Well, it didn't work in the PCUSA, where activists eventually won the fight > to remove homophobia from the church constitution, and won the fight for > marriage equality; and it's unlikely to work at Google._

I go to a PCUSA church and have a different view of this. Churches that did not agree with the changes to PCUSA's position split from the denomination and created the ECO denomination, which retains the prior position on same-sex relationships. So it's not so much that PCUSA "won" as that there is effectively a schism happening, with some of the largest churches from PCUSA departing.

<comment><USER35> I think that's right. Our ECO church, which split from PCUSA, is a very large one, with 6 locations. The services are always full. The reason for departure, though, was the building/land ownership, not the same-sex issues. I don't think there was much (or any?) discussions of same-sex issues during the split process.

<comment><USER18> On the off-chance you're talking about Menlo Church, my impression is that it was both. The real estate issues were less divisive, and therefore easier to focus on. Many churches struggle with the SSM issue because they don't want to alienate members on either side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with.

Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that these "bad" companies use to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also to further their functions. Ford/GM probably supply them with vehicles. Farmers grow crops that get into the the meals that their personnel eat. Pilots and flight attendants probably have knowingly transported their employees.

Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Google employees? Why do Google employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is oil/gas the sector that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?

I get tired of people picking and choosing their annual causes to be outraged about. And the LGBT part of the manifesto is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why did it take 15 years for him to have this stance? Could salary, bonuses, 401K, home ownership, vesting, millions made have anything to do with it? I don't counter the arguments being made but the message is disingenuous to me. I ask why 15 years, because I knew Google was evil to a lot of markets, people and businesses well over 10 years ago and I don't even work for them. They have ruined people's livelihoods by simple business as usual decisions and it's nothing new. I wonder how these worker revolutions would hold up in other countries like China? Privileged people on their soapbox don't send the messages they think they do, regardless of the position. The common folk are just trying to survive and feed their kids and aren't exactly fond of the idea of doubling of their gas tax. They don't have millions of Google dollars in the bank.

</comment><comment><USER9> Conjecture:

* Worked at Google / FB / blah startup for long enough to put some serious $$ away

* Don't care about working becasue see above

* Pick a fight / select a topic that is niche enough to wrote a blog post about

* Quit (cough , retire,) young and afford to live luxuriously

* Stop working becasue now you are too lazy to give a shit about anything

* Bitch about how everyone attacks you

* Get a shitty rating in perf review becasue you stopped giving a shit

* Whine and whine

* Get a shitty rating again * Quit and make scene about how they were victimized

Here is a thought, * Quit

* thank the gods and Google for making you rich

* live life and relax

</comment><comment><USER38> He has made enough money to retire. For engineers still looking for work, GOOGLE is the best place to work. If you don't want to work at google, don't work there. Why do people keep blaming the company. This is not a dictatorship.

<comment><USER25> That depends on what one wants to do with one's labor.

They'll certainly compensate you well, and they have flexible hours and treat software engineers and SREs like royalty.

But Googlers who joined up 10 years ago really didn't have to also ask the question of whether their work was directly benefiting military AI projects (or merely providing an agnostic service that everyone was using; search is certainly something that benefited good and bad use alike, but partnering with the military and submitting contract proposals for drone targeting operations is a moderately different can of worms).

<comment><USER30> It's also a moderately different can of worms to work on projects like breaking enemy encryption during a war (Turing), building and programming more and more powerful computers to help design nuclear weapons (von Neumann), developing a network protocol for DARPA's national computer network (Cerf and Kahn), building microchips for bombers and missiles (Fairchild Semiconductor), and it goes on from there.

Clearly, optimizing targeted advertising on the internet is a higher moral calling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I like the tech labor movement idea, as long as it works on practical goals. It could be funded by membership fees and have lawyers on payroll to make some changes in the laws. Noncompetes should be outlawed, for example. Membership should be sufficiently anonymous because I don't trust you enough to disclose my name.

The author seems be dispersing anger over a very broad set of issues. That won't work.

The authors also pressing on existing employees that they should feel guilty and take some action. By this logic, when the US does some questionable things abroad, you should renounce citizenship and leave to Canada. When the Canada's gov makes a questionable move, you leave it immediately for Norway. Eventually you discover that humanity is still mostly driven by egoism and retreat to woods.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the line between 'voicing your concerns' and sabouteuring the business you receive paycheck from ?

Why do the think inflating their own believes over the beliefs of others needs to be encouraged, funded and praised by the company they work for?

Did this person object when google fired James Damore Or is 'selective outrage', is the norm? May be it is the norm for Burce Hahne, but then, how this can be this be universally just?

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm guessing they made enough money from google to retire. I'd imagine any company that may hire him would look at this website and probably pass on them.

<comment><USER42> Ha, right? Easy to talk about morality and such after they've already cashed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's hard to hear people object to Google on moral or ethical grounds when they don't mention the fallout from programmatic advertising. Google pioneered this technology, which has had an impact on both our security and privacy, and the company has been caught exceeding the public's data collection expectations repeatedly. Now, after looking at the company's most recent financials and noting the CPC declines, I wonder less about the fallout of programmatic advertising and whether it was all worth it. I'm now left thinking more about whether we've got the right measure of human smarts or intelligence. I mean, these were the smart people, right?

</comment><comment><USER44> > In January of 2020, the U.S. President assassinated Iranian General Qassem > Soleimani, risking the possibility of World War 3

I generally try to give the author the benefit of the doubt. The writer lost me here.

</comment><comment><USER45> I originally upvoted this, but "LGBTQ employees have been fired for their activism" implies the employees were fired for their activism around gay and lesbian or bisexual, or transgender, issues. The employees were fired over not supporting border control. It's fine to not support border control, but please don't imply this has anything to do with gay rights or gender identity when it clearly does not.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yet another post of someone that feels the need to explain why they had to quit Google. To me it looks like another level of narcissism.

</comment><comment><USER47> > if you can strip a reform-oriented pastor of their PCUSA ordination, you > also strip them of their employment and their health insurance, because you > can't serve as a Presbyterian pastor if you've been stripped of your > ordination as the result of a church judicial action.

...

>With the recent spate of Google firings of LGBTQ employees for their activism, including Laurence Berland, Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman, and Kathryn Spiers, I see far too many similarities to what we experienced in the PCUSA twenty years ago.

not advocating any specific position, just noting a pure logical difference - being fired from Google doesn't stop you from being software engineer at another tech company.

</comment><comment><USER48> What is this, Don Draper's "Why I'm quitting tobacco" letter?

</comment><comment><USER40> There seems to be at least 2 undercurrents

\- (a) righteousness of the process to go about internal activism that's critical of company's business partners, company's internal policies, company's hiring and firing practices. And Company's response.

\- (b) the actual position of an individual(s) on the above topics.

Would we have a problem with Google's actions if Bruce Hahne, (hypothetically) advocate bad things (eg polygamy, forced organ donations, child labor and so on) ?...

We would not have problem with Google STFU message to him and his supporters, in that hypothetical case ( a ), right?

Therefore, we should not really have problem with Google's action, if we accept that Bruce Hahne's positions ( b ) are not that good (and not shared by tens of millions of people that live in the country where Alphabet is headquartered), in the first place

About ( b ). Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence. This is not really presented in his writing. Eg. >"... I see far too many similarities to what we experienced in the PCUSA twenty years ago ..."

Is not an extraordinary evidence..

Therefore, I find that this type of high-volume, low-evidence activism is overall bad. They should be told STFU while on company's time, and get out of the company if they do not like it.

</comment><comment> pcj-github My anecdotal observation is that Google is currently experiencing a (slight) brain drain... Many highly qualified and experienced engineers have recently left. I wonder how many 1x engineers it is going to take to maintain all that software when the 100x and 10x engineers are gone. Not a simple math problem.

<comment><USER49> It's a knife that cuts many ways. Personally I wouldn't take a position there in 2020. Not because of what they're working on--I'd be fine working for a defense contractor--but rather because I don't want to deal with ideological drama on a regular basis. Work is work. If I decide to save the world, I'll do it on my own time with my own earnings, and my employer will be none the wiser.

<comment><USER50> Google positioned themselves to be in the business of saving the world from the get-go:

[https://www.google.org](https://www.google.org)

Founded in October 2005.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Most people joining Google or FAANG is not for the brand. It is for the financial compensation.

If <insert FAANG company here> doesn't pay almost double the market salary then majority of people won't work for that company.

It is futile to ask people not to work for a FAANG company. The reality is, majority of people need (not just want) the money. People who already worked at FAANG long enough to enjoy the benefit of being financially good can afford to quit or don't work for FAANG, or don't work at all.

Can non FAANG tech companies follow suit in increasing the salary? I mean, keep your interview DS&A hard and make it harder if you need to avoid bad hire, but increase the compensation too. Otherwise you will keep seeing major brain drain every year.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm curious. If employees are not supposed to hold their employers accountable, then who is?

The free market? Because as we've seen, the free market can easily be distorted through monopolies, lobbying, corruption etc.

The government? Because that's how you get regulations and those seem to be especially hated among those that dislike employees attempting to influence corporate direction.

Ultimately you have to accept someone has to provide a check against uninhibited corporate power and considering how they can rig market economics at scale, that power falls down to either the employees or the government.

</comment><comment><USER53> Alphabet is 70% held by institutional investors so those investors might ignore something like this. Insiders are reported to hold just under 6% of the shares and the remainders are out on the market. The holders of the 30% of shares not held by institutional investors may have a good question as to who exactly owns Alphabet and who gets to set its direction.

There are employee-owned companies and worker cooperatives out there. Alphabet isn't one of them. The cost of buying up all the shares to turn it into such a thing looks fairly large at the current market rate.

</comment><comment><USER54> moral high grounds are luxury decorations even google couldn't afford any more.

</comment><comment><USER55> Respect where it is due. I may not agree or know the veracity of the allegations but I will always support people who "live their beliefs".

</comment><comment><USER56> I suppose the author promptly returned all the money earned during those 15 years to Google?

</comment><comment><USER57> The author supports most of the outrageous conduct of Alphabet/Google in general, and is only disapproving of secondary (though not insignificant) issues.

The main concerns of the author are:

> 1\. Persecution and firing of transgender and gay employees for their > efforts to reform the firm > > 2\. Google Cloud sales to the oil and gas > industry > > 3\. Expansion into the weapons industry and the business of > killing

But Alphabet is much more problematic to begin with:

* It is a vast spying operation in favor of the US government and corporate and state allies around the world - going through your searches, your mail messages (even if you just send mail _to_ people with GMail), your geo-location.

* It is a significant gate-keeper of visibility of Internet content: It passively and actively promotes and demotes search results (not talking about the ads here) through its ranking algorithms, but also in direct near-censorship of undesirable information sources. This is true not just on platforms such as YouTube but also on Search, and in the US, not just China, and involves Google operatives actively screening search results. If you are not aware of this, see:

[https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest- quality-i...](https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality- improvements-search/)

and

[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html)

* I would also make the argument that, as a huge US corporation, it has significant responsibility for the maintenance of the current social order, with the ills of exploitation, huge disparity of wealth, high level of violence and violent homicides, poor health and other social services etc., degradation of the natural environment etc. in the US - and of the global order of dominance of the US over a lot of the world. Whether it goes into military products and services itself or just has the US government maintain its property rights and the financial systems on which it relies - is a matter of extent of culpability.

And while the author seems to touch on some of these points through a brief description of Google's nature as a corporation, it's strange that he stayed there for so long, and why those issues are the ones that broke the camel's back, so to speak. I guess there is some sort of a reality-warping bubble around Google somehow.

</comment><comment><USER58> Seems to be in a redirect loop:

        * Connection #0 to host www.alphabetworkers.org left intact
        * Maximum (50) redirects followed

</comment><comment><USER59> I admire people who follow their convictions. But, all the faith and all the good intentions in the world do not make for good policy and more importantly harmful policy if acted upon.

I am consistently amazed by the sanctimonious incoherence many people in this candy ass industry feel comfortable espousing.

This industry is where people with no work experience much less life experience are hired at 3-5 times the average American family's salary. This industry is where people who have the OP's 14 years of experience in that level of company can amass wealth that exceeds that of _generations_ of families who didn't have people in the lineage that wrote buggy software for a living. The author worked 14 years in a company that provides the decadence of shit like free food and free dry cleaning. Free food is fucking mind blowing to some people.

Not only that, but the company he's worked for has ALWAYS been about helping others manipulate people. It has _always_ been about taking some of the smartest people the industry has and pointing them at human manipulation because well they are lowly consumer apes and that's OK. Yet, like many on hnn he considers himself worthy of wielding the categorical imperative as if he was a fluffy bunny Thanos because he has joined the club that hates the orange man and supports the approved protected classes while defending the rights of street defecation. I guess 14 years enabling mind fuck INC. has all been cool because he goes to church and is a moral tourist.

The mind numbingly vast majority of techs especially at the major cloud provider level have never ever lived in an environment where physical harm or fatal consequences were the punishment for talking the wrong kind of shit to the wrong person or even being in the wrong area. Their pansy ass, horseshit view of the world is fueled by an existence where they have lived like kings in comparison to many. Yet in their proclamations they are comfortable blithely advocating policies that kill whole industries or leave young soldiers at a disadvantage because well they're good people and some hick who had to go into the military or works on a rig and feeds his family just isn't as noble as someone confused about their gender who would like others to be taxed so they could change it free of charge. Twice.

You can pretty much hear them thinking "Those kinds of people on those rigs vote Republican anyways so fuck them. Pretty sure that's what they said at church right before I took off to get my 6 dollar coffee on the way to spend a couple of hours with the the homeless."

Glad you quit your job. Also glad, you are just another deranged tech who thinks they are on the side of right and justice while being oblivious to their own shoddy and harmful positions instead of someone of consequence who does something like defend our country, farm or roof houses.

</comment><comment><USER60> Deeply moving and most courageous. Kudos for a direct, thorough exploration of motivation and conviction.

So glad I never went there.

</comment><comment><USER61> Good job you! I wish that many more principled folks were willing to _actually_ stand up for what they believe in. I think it would make this entire democratic+capitalism system work much better.

People who profess to have "strong beliefs", but are unwilling to back that up with, potentially scary economic, action are big giant hypocrites. And liars and other hypocrites aren't helping anyone.

P.S. I'm pretty sure googles' response starts with "don't let the door", MEH! let them swing.

</comment><comment><USER62> If this letter would have started with, _" I stayed at Google for 15 years even though I knew it was unethical. I'm a piece of shit. BUT I'm going to try and redeem myself..."_ then it would have been much better. Some kind of redemption arc.

The damage has already been done, man. You don't magically earn the moral high-ground for "quitting" after 15 years with an angry letter.</comment>


9th grader arrested after bringing a home-built clock to school - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/16/they-thought-it-was-a-bomb-ahmed-mohamed-texas-9th-grader-arrested-after-bringing-a-home-built-clock-to-school/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224747)

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe the title of this article originally included the word "Muslim," which has since been removed by a mod or the OP. This is unfortunate as it's highly relevant as evinced by these passages from the article:

        During questioning, officers repeatedly brought
        up his last name, Mohamed said.

        [...]

        Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed blamed
        the incident on Islamophobia.

        "He just wants to invent good things for mankind,"
        said the elder Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan.
        "But because his name is Mohamed and because of
        Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated."

Lastly, this quote from Ahmed at the very end of the article just galls me:

        "[The handcuffs] made me feel like I wasn't human,"
        he said in a video interview. "It made me feel like
        a criminal."

</comment><comment><USER4> He was interrogated without the presence of his parents or presumably a lawyer. Now, I'm not all that au fait with left-pondian legal stuff, but isn't that what Tommy Lee Jones kind of got in trouble for doing in The Client?

When I was eleven, I made a simple digital clock for an inter-school physics competition, and won. Only after the judges had demanded I scribble out a circuit diagram in front of them to ensure I hadn't got someone else to make it for me though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Back in the early 1980s I made a simple RC and comparator based bomb timer in electronics at school as an official project. How times have changed...

<comment><USER6> Considering the NASA shirt he is wearing; God forbid the kids wants to get into amateur rocketry.

It's a sad day when a system that is designed to protect us all is used as a platform for hate speech.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. It was the rocketry hobby that made me think about building timers and electronic things. Such an inspirational hobby when you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _But his questioner responded, "It looks like a movie bomb to me."_

Bombs don't have digital displays displaying countdown time. People are watching too much tv.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed...

> "They took me to a room filled with five officers in which they interrogated > me and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention," the > teen said. "They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?' I told them no, I > was trying to make a clock."

Yep.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sadly happened to me, too. White teen with german name in Germany. Brought a HiVoltage TV Transformer to school for science class (Mind me, I must have been 18 or 19, not 14). A teacher probably overheard my comment to another student "The voltage kills you immediately if you are not careful. An hour later I was nearly thrown out from acool for allegedly trying a "School Shooting" with that device. Luckily my science teacher recued my butt.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sad on all 3 sides.

The government over reaction by the school and police, infringing this kid's rights and creating a volatile situation.

The taking advantage of the situation by CAIR.

The family and kid in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER11> False arrest litigation. lack of due process. or is this a made up story?</comment>


Hestia Project: Quantifying carbon dioxide emissions like never before - <AUTHOR> http://hestia.project.asu.edu/index.shtml <comment><USER2> See also: [https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/](https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/) for some newer work.

</comment><comment><USER3> not needed:

1\. more money (we can't buy back the environment)

2\. more information (we already know)

badly needed:

1\. action to reduce consumption

<comment><USER4> information will remain useful, perhaps for verification, since the world is not run by a one world government. the majority of the world agrees on the problem and the scale of the problem, but we still disagree on how to verifiably account for each others excesses and hopefully someday large scale sequestration. dissolving carbon in the sea will be hard to verify, and hence hard to agree on. if we say store carbonates (say hermetically wrapped in plastic and uniquely numbered and mapped in a database) in abandoned mines etc, then at least it can be inspected by international visits: the host lists the number of packs, their average carbon content etc, and science delegates from around the world can choose random numbers, go the the designated spot on the map, locate the pack, verify the number, weigh it, each take a sample of the carbonates, independently measure and compare the measured weights and concentrations with the documented ones. This for multiple packs to be statistically significant.

Anyone (like even citizens like you and me) who is sceptic about bribery is free to submit salted hashes (commitments), say a hundred (or whatever the count of packs that will be inspected)

whenever a new pack is to be chosen randomly, everyone reveals their secret number and salt, the numbers are all added modulo total number of claimed packs in the store. If your revelation of your secret systematically fails to reach the inspectors before a deadline, it is probably rigged. You can safely discount wild claims of rigging by participating and observing your number be systematically be included.

As long as multiple nations in an adversarial world distrust each other of trying to get special treatment, action will be postponed till the last minute...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the last 'news' update on this is from 2015... did it fizzle?</comment>


Standups are Poisonous - <AUTHOR> http://garethrees.co.uk/2013/03/28/standups-are-poisonous/ <comment><USER2> This guy is seriously suggesting replacing stand-ups with management and paperwork? There's something very wrong here, but that was already clear from the objections.

"30 minutes", "action points", "notes", "weekly update"?

Seriously, I know that "you're not doing it right" is the standard lame excuse from Scrum-evangelists, but this paints a picture of doing pretty much the opposite of Scrum.

Especially the emphasis placed on the "weekly update" is a big red flag, suggesting this team is doing something that isn't even close to being Agile. Agile and Scrum are supposed to be about delivering working software, and in the case of Scrum it's strictly time boxed. Weekly updates suggest micro- management and/or not delivering anything shippable.

Only the 10:00 versus flex time is a genuine issue. We have a very simple solution for that: if you can't be there, mail it in (or use HipChat). Yes, this also applies to people who start early and are deep in the zone by 10am. It's not supposed to be a two-way conversation anyway, just quickly syncing up.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly how we do things where I work. We're a pretty big team (about 12) and our standups are finished in 10 to 15 minutes. It's strictly time- boxed and we don't go over.

If you can't make it, we have a phone set up in the middle of the table for people to call in, or you can email someone on the team and they will say your standup for you.

<comment><USER4> If this works for you it's awesome, congrats. But what I saw in the past (3 different companies) was more like 30m+ standups, because most people (funny enough especially project managers) tend to talk way too much during standups. Unfortunately.

<comment><USER5> > project managers

There's your problem. That role is the antithesis of a self organising team. With someone responsible for "managing" that stand up turns into a very expensive way to keep the manager briefed.

<comment><USER4> True.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simple answer: You're doing it wrong.

The standup (in Scrum at least) should be three questions everybody answers: What you did yesterday, what you're doing today, any blockers? This should take a team less than 10 minutes easily.

These meetings are not supposed to generate actions points, or problem solve, or discuss anything. They are merely supposed to make sure everybody knows what's going on.

Follow up specifics later with only the people who need to be involved.

The time of the standup should be set by the team not imposed on them. Consensus is needed.

<comment><USER6> Right, the group I'm in often will have "coordinating members" join as well, from designers, QA, the PM, even the VP will stop by to see whats going on, and sometimes we get 10-15 people. The only times it takes more than 10 minutes are when there are tons of announcements being made.

Most folks just state what they're doing today, and announce significant deliveries. But not everyone has the instinct to keep it short, especially when asked questions.

Doing this takes some minor training. Someone does need to be active in "gently reminding" people to move the debate/discussion somewhere. (This usually takes the form of, "maybe you should meet at X to hash that out in 15".) Whenever there are new people, you have to get them comfortable asking "I'd like to talk to you about XYZ after the standup". A lot of folks are rather timid at first, and often need to get used to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who's dictating 10 o'clock? Standups can be e.g. just before or after lunch, or in the afternoon. The team should be able to agree on a time that works for everyone. And if that really is impossible, then use Skype or similar to include people who are still at home.

A six person team should be able to be done in less than 10 minutes. If someone gets off topic or rants on about details, stop them, and perhaps suggest a meeting afterwords.

You solution totally ruins the dynamics of the standup.

</comment><comment><USER8> You are missing the point of a standup somewhat.

>> Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00.

What's wrong with that? Surely 10:00 can be considered core hours for anyone who isn't a remote worker?

>> They always overrun. Rarely are standups shorter than 10 minutes. 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost.

They never last that long in my experience, but even if they did, 30 minutes per person per day to sync up the team sounds reasonable to me.

>> Action points are rarely produced, so the value of the outcome is questionable.

Standups aren't about acquiring 'action points'. They're about knowledge sharing, raising problems and impediments, making progress visible etc. You don't decide during the standup what people should be doing.

>> Others switch off if they're not interested in the current monologue.

That's why it's a short standup. Its whole reason for being is to avoid long meetings, status updates and overhead. Anyone who can't stay focussed for 15-30 minutes in a morning also has a severe case of ADHD.

>> Notes are rarely taken, so by the time the weekly update gets compiled the team have to scratch their heads about what they did over the last week.

If you have minutes (and agendas and notes etc) then it ceases to be a standup and turns into just another meeting! Again, the whole idea behind the standup is to avoid this kind of stuff.

There is lots you could rant about in agile, but a morning standup is definetly one of the things you should retain.

<comment><USER9> I've worked at two companies where the day starts at 10am. You'd be surprised how common this is. For people without families and who live in big cities like New York, flex time allows you to go out at night any given night, have a good time, not miss out on sleep, and still have a full day of work by waking up at 9am or 10am. When someone in your team suggests to start the standup fifteen minutes earlier so that no two teams' standups overlap, how do you respond? "I don't want to wake up 15 minutes earlier", or silence?

Morning stands up are a great way for management to ensure people are pressured into showing up for work at a given time without having to be the bad guy and actually say it.

My experience with morning standups is that people arrive to work right before the standup or a few minutes into it, are not in the right mindset to form coherent sentences about their work, and as a result the standup is a slow monotone monologue that no one pays attention to. The one day a week when the manager joins the standup to listen in, everyone faces him and it becomes a report trying to look good and sound like they accomplished a lot that day.

Bottom line, skip the physical standup and use Trello instead!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll chime in - _your_ standups are poisonous. I can sympathise though because I've been there too. It is a symptom of a junior team with weak team leadership/standup facilitation. Long monologues should be cut short and "taken offline". Action points aren't needed because they should be actioned immediately if they are quick or turned into cards on the wall. Your email "solution" likely won't be read or actioned.

</comment><comment><USER11> What you are saying here is: your standups are poisonous. Ours on a 8 man team only take 10 minutes on average, and we have no team lead. They don't all have to be, if yours are, change them.

<comment><USER12> Also, instead of fixing the stand up, his solution is to generate a whole bunch of crappy paperwork for the team lead (email, pdf stored somewhere, blah blah).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Standups are like brushing your teeth. If you don't understand it, it makes no sense. If you're just starting, your probably doing it wrong. Most of the time you do it the wrong way (with standups by making it take too long and/or turning it into a status report). There's a structure to it that if you follow it works much better. It's very easy to appear like you're doing it without getting anything from it. Even when you are getting the expected results, they can be invisible. It's a necessary part of your day.

I believe in a meeting-free workday for the team. To do that, the best way I've seen so far is everybody getting together briefly to describe what they've been doing, what they're going to do, and if they need help. Immediately after everybody has their turn doing this, people are all together in one room, they're all aware of who needs help and who is working on what, and they can begin the actual work. Maybe that means everybody grabbing a whiteboard and talking over a problem for an hour. Maybe folks chat for another ten minutes and then all work separately the rest of the day. Don't know, don't care. The team can figure it out. A standup is a dynamic way for a team to create its own daily agenda without using a bunch of calendaring apps and trying to mastermind everything ahead of time.

So when done well, it looks like the most totally natural thing in the world -- bunch of guys just listing what's up to each other and then doing a bit of work ad-hoc. Why would you need structure for that? (Even though there is quite a bit of structure and discipline involved) Aren't we just exchanging data? When done poorly, it's a god-awful thing that drags on, nobody is involved with, and serves no purpose. Blech.

The mistake we continue to make as technologists is to confuse working with data with working with people. When you're writing code, you're working with data. You use tools for data: spreadsheet, compiler, parser, etc. When you're talking about what folks are doing and how the project is going, you're working with people. You use tools for people: lightweight games, rituals, dinners, jokes, body language, etc. You don't use people tools for data tasks; you shouldn't use data tools for people tasks. If you think you could use email to accomplish stuff you do during the standup, you don't understand standups.

Sorry to run on like this, but I'm a big standup fan. In fact, if I had one thing I would want to do in any team, it'd be good standups. For many small teams, you could almost trash every other piece of process and do standups well and be fine.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's FUD, FUD, FUD.

 _"I don't understand how to do it right, I've had a bad experience therefore it's bad._ "

WRONG. Complaining about something you don't really understand is what is _poisonous_...

Real life counter-example:

* Standup with a 15 people team lasted 7 minutes every day (worst day, 10 minutes). This included 2 remote members.

* It ran at 10am, so people in flexi time could come as late as possible (core hours start at 10am).

* Scrum master noted all impediments, and those only, so action points were always taken if necessary and skipped if pointless.

The key is: do it right, with self discipline. _Agile is a practice_ , and as with any other practice _it takes dedication to master._

Simply doing stuff superficially and then complaining is... unuseful.

</comment><comment><USER15> All the other comments are basically saying the same thing - you're doing it wrong. I want to address your suggestions:

I've tried to do the whole "email instead of standup" thing. Guess what? No one reads the damn email. No one cares. Nothing happens. The stand up is meant to get people _talking_ and not reading emails.

Yes, I documented out standups. This was because, yes, people can't make every call, can't make it to the office, are on holiday and need to know quickly if there were people waiting on them for feedback. So they could review the daily "minutes" and see if someone needed to talk to them. This worked well, though it usually took an additional 10 mins of my time finishing the email before sending it out.

And yes, management needed to report on progress. I tried my hardest to keep my devs OUT of the weekly progress call, and insist only team leads be present, but management weren't happy (and tended towards micromanagement of issues, but that's a different story).

And whatever you do, don't ditch the stand up. It's the best part of the day if you're truly a team player, as you can find out where you can make the biggest contributions to your team. If you notice patterns of issues, you can work to solve them. I've worked in too many teams where you could go for days, that turned into weeks, without talking to a quiet and reserved team member about the specific technical problems they were working on. Not good.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's why you start your daily standups 10 to 15 minutes before lunch break. People will quickly state their point, everyone will have a good overview over everything that's going on, and more thorough discussions will go on during lunch. BTDT, and it worked really fine.

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a reason it's called a standup. Take it literally, which I doubt you're doing if meetings are running at 30 minutes.

(Yes yes you don't have to stand if you have a broken leg etc)

Action points aren't supposed to be produced. Standup's there to help people understand what everyone's working on and ensure there are no blockers. If there _are_ blockers such as someone has no tasks or is waiting on someone else, you set up a follow-up meeting with just those people. Then you get your action points.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00. Great when you're > supposed to have the benefit of flexi-time._

I once did an internship at a company where we would do the standup over a conference call, we would also sit. We were such rebels :P.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sounds to me like you are doing your standups wrong. The job of the facilitator (in your case, the team leader) should be to keep things moving, and ensure that you aren't taking 30 minutes.

The most important thing to get out of the meeting, IMHO, is challenges, as status should be evident by the location of your story tickets. The problem with providing an environment where "Others can skim-read or ignore." is that they often will, and peer challenges can easily go unresolved without adequate feedback.

You are standing for a reason - its uncomfortable (for those of us who sit all day). Your facilitator should be roping in the conversation (and if not you need to replace them - rotating among team members often works). If that doesn't work, then your teams are likely too large.

</comment><comment><USER20> To me the author seems to have linear view of productivity; that he seems to think time spent away from the keyboard is wasted time and worse still to waste that time communicating with your colleagues.

IMO the hidden goal of standups is to make sure a development team communicates, ideally face to face. Why? Because it's extremely valuable to shipping quality code / product etc. My experience has always been when standups over-run, the reason is there's some topic that needs discussing and preventing that discussion from taking place is usually a mistake.

Without standups, in a typical office environment with introverted personality types, communication doesn't happen. So in the end they're a compromise; perhaps not the best solution to the problem but good enough.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem section reads like: Agile meets corporate, and loses. (Perhaps an inevitably outcome.)

The solution reads vaguely like: We're already distributed (in time -- flexi- time -- if nothing else), so manage us like a distributed team.

The solution still strikes me as somewhat too bureaucratic, vis à vis the intent of a "standup" ("daily X", etc. -- choose your own name), as I see it. That being to informally, loosely, but effectively sync members' working states and awareness. Everyone should be free to take what notes are personally meaningful to them.

But formal documentation should be a separate track. That would include the "agenda / meeting notes" PDF CYA that appears to be going on and/or proposed, here.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hate meetings.

I feel that the entire concept of the standup forces face-to-face interaction where none is necessary. Time that I'm wasting sitting in a room is time where my fingers aren't on the keyboard making things happen.

You do not need voice and physical presence to organize a project, or ensure everyone is on the same metaphorical page, or to find out what everyone is doing.

Imagine the communications medium of your choice, and then ask if the meeting couldn't just as easily be coordinated via that system instead of forcing everyone to get in a room and waste valuable time? And get you benefits such as easy access and archivability?

<comment><USER23> You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by himself, right?

I've worked 5 years in an exclusively office environment, flexible time but we weren't allowed to work from home, for the last 2 years I've worked almost exclusively from home and I from my experience I can say that some days I would be more productive if I'd met some guy for a face-to-face conversation.

I do Skype meetings all the time, or Google Hangouts, none of the tools I use for remotely talk to people make me as dynamic as I can be face-to-face. I can't grab a piece of paper and sketch something to illustrate my point, I can't gesticulate to show something better than only my words or my webcam showing something can.

I have lost HOURS on meetings + sketching things with digital tools (Skitch, diagrams, etc) that I could've explained a lot better in person.

You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up. And that's what standup "meetings" are, just "gatherings" not meetings, if you think that meeting has a bad connotation. Standup meetings/gatherings just bring everyone to the same page in about 10 minutes, no e-mail, Skype or Google Hangout can do that, I'm sorry.

<comment><USER22> >You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by himself, right?

You know that "talking" as in using voice communication face to face is not the only way to make things happen, right? You know that I didn't mention _anything_ about being a lone hero or anything of the sort, right?

>You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up.

The social interaction isn't a problem, it's that the meeting is a fundamentally inefficient way to accomplish what can be done better in many different ways with other tools. If everyone is so prone to wander that it requires an inefficient and expensive (both in opportunity cost to time that could be spent solving other problems or actually doing _productive_ work, and the cost of paying someone to drop everything and talk about doing work instead of doing work), it would seem to speak to a larger problem, either with processes, procedures, or people.

This goes double when the content of the meeting doesn't require anything but status updates or some other kind of communication which translates mostly seamlessly to plain, searchable, referencable text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Our Weekdone (<http://weekdone.com/>) service is meant exactly for what you propose, although more on a weekly paradigm. Many of our users have switched from regular standup meetings to an online weekly process. And even if you do the meetings, distributing plans, progress and problems ahead to the whole team can be a huge timesaver.

We currently have only daily progress input via e-mail at Weekdone, but are looking at providing daily e-mail summaries as well.

Appreciate any input how to make a process like that better in a web/e-mail/mobile service.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you have a six person team and you all speak for half an hour then you are definitely doing it wrong. You should ideally speak for no more than a couple of minutes.

Standups that routinely last longer than 15 minutes need to be corrected. Either split the team, don't have everyone talk every day or find some other way to cut time.

An email is not a terrible substitute if someone is working from home, but part of the value of a standup is that you can quickly ask questions and get answers right there and then.

<comment><USER26> I think the original writer means 30min of wasted time for six people, not 30min ranting per person.

<comment><USER25> I really hope that was the case, but he did say this:

> 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost

<comment><USER27> 6 person team * 30 minutes = 180 minutes / 60 = 3 hours

All of this helps if he would have used the common term _man hours_ because 3 hours literally wasn't lost. In my experience the people that make these kinds of claims are the people usually confused about project management, at least for software development, in general.

Unfortunately at larger corporations everything comes down to how many _man days_ a project can fit in a _quarter_ without taking into account the fact that most phases in projects can't fire at the same time due to dependencies.

I actually think Gannt charts model this quite nicely for the higher ups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Solution: each persons update is 60 seconds or less. If you need more ask the parties affected to stay after the standup. Teams should be 7 or less in numbers. This way the PM can properly focus. Follow that ... And it works wonders. Also PMs need to be ruthless about the 60 second rule and with being on time. If your later to the stand up you owed a dollar to there team fund which gets donated to charity quarterly.

<comment><USER15> PM? Surely you mean the scrum master? :-)

My feeling is that Project Managers would only be involved in daily standups if there was an urgent issue/escalation, or serious team communication issue that they have the ability to help solve. Or as a stand it for the scrum master if they were on leave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is what usually happens when you have a poorly trained scrummaster. One of the reasons there are so many $AGILE_PROCESS_NAME sucks posts on the internet.

I respectfully disagree with all the "you are doing it wrong" replies. In this case, it's not your or your team's fault, but your scrummaster is definitely doing it wrong.

I've been scrummaster on teams over 12 people and our daily standup meetings lasted around 3 minutes and rarely got to 10 minutes or over.

In agile, the team self-manages itself. If 10 am is not working, change it. If meetings are taking too long, bring it up as a blocker on the standup itself or on the next retrospective (you guys do these, right?). Have the team agree on making adjustments but focus on one adjustment every iteration.

In short: Inspect and Adapt

</comment><comment><USER30> _6 person team x 30 minutes = 3 hours lost._

If you have daily stand-ups, why would you have 30 minutes worth of update per person?

This whole article is pretty extreme. Standups, just like any other process (light-weight or otherwise) is only good until its original intention is being served. If a standup is taking a long time, make it a point to cut it short. If someone is narrating a long story, ask that person to stop and take the rest offline.

Finally, everyone should understand that stand-ups are used to convey status and information about important things. It's not a recital of what each person did the previous day. Sometimes, you might have nothing to say and in that case, just say so. Nobody should be talking about details in standup.

<comment><USER31> _If you have daily stand-ups, why would you have 30 minutes worth of update per person?_

What he means is that a 30 minute standup that six people participate in results in 3 hours of lost productivity for the team. It's comparable to the effect of a team meeting for a consulting company. If everyone involved bills their time at, say, $100 an hour, a ten person meeting for an hour costs $1000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really enjoy the standups on my team; I find them to be incredibly useful. I suppose everyone's standup is different, but we each quickly go over what we had, are and plan on doing, then mention anything that's blocking us. If the blocking issues are something that affects everyone, we discuss for a few minutes, otherwise a few people agree to hang back after the meeting to talk about it. Suddenly your standup is only 5-10 minutes long for 12 people working on 3 or 4 different projects.

Of course, we haven't solved the "you must be in my X:XX" problem, but doesn't every meeting get I the way of flex time?

</comment><comment><USER33> To curtail the length, have you tried using the "parking lot" option?

If someone starts to get off on a topic that isn't related to "what i completed yesterday", "what im going to complete today", "any impediments" then raise your hand and call "parking lot". This informs the person to wait until after standup to have the conversation.

The first time I did it people thought I was crazy. I got looks like, "who the heck is this guy to cut me off?" but the next few times I start to raise my hand, the person realizes and ends their talking.

Give it a shot. Google "stand up parking lot" for more info.

</comment><comment><USER34> My team right now has around 30 members in the sprint. I've checked with some of the experienced Scrum master in my company, the ideal member is around 4 - 6 person. Even having 7th member's slow things down in his experience. And this is not on just the standups, it applies to daily operations as well.

My take here is that we should have much smaller teams and if possible have Scrum of Scrums to handle bigger project. However, I know that this might not be possible for some since some project tends not to have a good demarcation on what should be in which teams.

</comment><comment><USER35> Having been a project lead and scrum master in the past, I've found there are a few real purposes to scrum imho.

1\. It should be a place were the lead helps people coordinate. Not just work, but their schedules. If dev A will be finishing up widget A on Wed. then dev B knows he needs to hustle, etc.

2\. It's a place where QA can get a grip on what's happening in development. Most of the time QA has no idea what's going on in dev, and having the QA guys in scrum helps them.

3\. It forces lazy devs (who spend all day on youtube) to actually report status the next day in front of all the other devs.

A few more thoughts.

1\. It should be around 15 minutes. Too short and it just becomes a round robin. That's great, but a lead should be able to adjust the work and coordinate at scrum. You can't really do that in 3-5 minutes. If it's too long, the devs get cranky because you're killing their dev time.

2\. No PMs. Project managers imho should not attend scrums because they speak a different language (it's called powerpoint) and they usually a) don't understand what's being said b) freak out when qa says there's a bug c) like to get on a soapbox about schedules and releases when it's not appropriate.

It's far better to have the lead/leads manage the PM separately be delivering separate status reports to him directly (either through email or a formal report-like deliverable).

3\. No more than 10 people. I would say around 6 is best, but you can't have a 15 minute scrum, when the number of people is too large. If you have more people, you need to split them into groups of 6-10 and then have a 'superscrum' for the leads. This type of 'superscrum' is great for have the PM join in, because it can focus mainly on resource management and schedules (which is what PMs love to talk about).

@OP I've actually have asked for people to report status via email (particularly when I have a bunch of remote guys), and it's really terrible. You end up getting a bunch of emails which you have to respond to. That's great if your a developer and you can put you AD LIB email on a cron job for the lead, but for the lead, the coordination of the team via email will eat up most of your morning. It simply better to call in or show up and everyone be in the same room for 15 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER36> Useless blog post: "X is a dumb idea, when we tried it Y happened which is bad."

Useful blog post: "We tried X expecting Z, but instead Y happened. I wonder what's going on, please chime in."

The mistake here isn't "negativity", it's Z-blindness. It's missing out on an opportunity to revise your model of how the world works, by noting that there is a discrepancy between your expectations and how things actually turned out.

(Of course, the "useful" approach results in less sensational titles, which may be why we see fewer of those.)

</comment><comment><USER37> This is why I moved our standup to Skype. Even if people are away from their computer, you can join a group chat via Skype mobile from the car (handsfree of course). I agree with some of the other points, but if you start to get a good rhythm on how the meeting is run, overages can be minimized. I couldn't imagine not doing this meeting at least as virtual meeting. The last thing I need is to be archiving E-Mails as PDFs.

</comment><comment><USER38> One of the most telling things I've ever heard about the daily standup was its a way to get introverted people to speak just once a day...

</comment><comment><USER39> Inaka does daily standups, at 11, in a HipChat room. You should know what you're working on in the morning before then, that gives you time to get some work done, take a 1 minute break and announce what you're doing. It's pretty rare we don't know what that list is anyway but it's a good synchronization point. If something is off or questions ensue, we meet in person.

</comment><comment><USER40> In my experience while standups are often tedious and need to be kept short, if someone wishes to stop having them or seeks to avoid them it is a worrying sign for a team player.

If the person in question can't be coached to collaborate with others then a role where they can be a sole contributor may be better.

</comment><comment><USER26> The best "agile" project I've been on had standups around lunch. The team was geographically scattered so this meant early afternoon for some. Worked fine.

In my experience keeping standups under 15min is the easiest part of the process.

Turning the standup into paperwork seems insane to me.

</comment><comment><USER41> A group email to the team asking, "What are you working on today? What are your obstacles?" with a reply-all is actually pretty helpful. Even better, character limits (like less than 300 char) and time limits (like reply by noon).

</comment><comment><USER42> Um am I the only person who is surprised that the OP doesn't know that flexitime has the concept of core hours a 10 oclock start is not unreasonable.

Though he's right teams should know how how to run meetings and Action Points.

</comment><comment><USER43> It seems like everyone is arguing about macro issues. Point, some team members know how to communicate and make standup effective and others blab.

Sounds like all of you have developer communication issues, not standup issues.

</comment><comment><USER44> So Gareth...tell me about your retrospectives...

</comment><comment><USER45> Wanted to subscribe, no RSS :/

</comment><comment><USER46> They work for us.

</comment><comment><USER47> I am pretty strongly against micromanagement and process-for-authority's-sake. However, I think Standup is a necessary evil. It sucks. But it just might suck less than the alternative, which is opacity (which gives power to management). Standups deserve some kind of timer, though. One minute per person, and split the standup if it gets beyond 10-15 people. Everyone should also have the right to opt-out.

Here's why Standups can be powerful and, actually, a bit subversive. They create Common Knowledge (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)> ) of what you are doing. That's different from shared knowledge. Shared knowledge means everyone knows it. Common knowledge means everyone knows everyone knows it (and, recursively, everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows, and so on...). Bob knows you are getting useful work done. So does Tom, your boss. But, thanks to Standup, Tom also knows that Bob knows you are getting your work done. At least in theory, this limits Tom in his ability to isolate, disempower, disparage and ultimately create cause to fire you. Standups move authority _away from_ managerial hands. They're not intended toward that effect, but if they work well, that is something they accomplish.

(Of course, in a closed-allocation company, your boss can just give you impossible or extremely boring work if he wants to flush you out.)

It also needs to be made clear and constitutional that the daily standup is the _only_ status-reporting overhead, except in a production crisis. If there's Daily Standup _and_ your boss gets to interrupt you regularly with status pings (which is a show of power; he probably won't even remember that he asked you, just like people look at their watches but forget to read the time) then you're just getting screwed.

Also, I agree that standup before 10:00 or after 4:00 is just shitty. I'm usually up at 6:00 am, but the idea that you have to have the same schedule as the boss to be a worthwhile human being is just garbage.

<comment><USER48> >(Of course, in a closed-allocation company, your boss can just give you impossible or extremely boring work if he wants to flush you out.)

I found your post very insightful until you brought in your standard and (imo) off-topic closed-allocation rant.

<comment><USER47> It's not off-topic. To assess whether managerial power exists (and whether it is toxic) one must know that form it will take when it is expressed.

Standup prevents a manager from saying, "This guy isn't getting any work done". In a closed-allocation company, there's nothing to prevent the manager from assigning terrible or impossible work. It's still unilateral firing; it just takes longer.</comment></comment></comment>


Founder of Drupal - Why PHP and not Java? - <AUTHOR> http://buytaert.net/why-php-and-not-java

<comment><USER2> To me, this question sounds like: "You moved your furniture by foot across town? Why didn't you use the bus?"</comment>


CNN Relaunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/interactive/relaunch/

<comment><USER2> I really like the new look, seems a bit faster too.</comment>


Abusing Generative Adversarial Networks to Make 8-bit Pixel Art - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ageitgey/abusing-generative-adversarial-networks-to-make-8-bit-pixel-art-e45d9b96cee7#.6n9hqto18 <comment><USER2> The initial image presented is pretty deceptive considering the author doesn't explain until the very end that all the characters, health bars, etc., were all added by them, and the only "generated" part of the image is the tiles, which they manually sampled and arranged in to a level.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article, and description of GANs. Thanks!</comment>