The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.
Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.
Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?
I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.
I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.
Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).
A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…
…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?
I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.
Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.
I hate Google.
I think the word you are looking for here is “cowards”
Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.
I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.
Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….
The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.
But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.
I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.
Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.
Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.
There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.
We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.
There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.
It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).
Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
This is just textbook fascism.
It frustrates me that fascists like this can claim “this is the way of nature, the strong survive and the weak perish in competition” and no one challenges them. We are so primed to see everything through a fascist lens by neoliberalism because neoliberalism doesn’t provide any path forward but a broken, insufficient narrative.
Nature is full of cooperation, the interplay between fungi and trees for one is a dizzying network of relationships. In most ecosystems flourishing is a mutual process not a zero sum game, diversity begets stability, capacity to adapt and efficiency.
The ideology of fascists like Netanyahu will never lead a society to strength, because the point of adopting such a cruel and hateful ideology is a violent disinterest in understanding others, which is the precise opposite of an expression of strength.
The ultimate strength is realizing what others are capable of that you could never accomplish yourself and developing a mutual relationship to gain access to those things, the type of “warriors” Netanyahu are talking about here are just sad, isolated people with very little power to do anything meaningful in this world but needlessly kill and maim, they are incapable of even beginning to understand the rich, dizzying tapestry of different kinds of genius that a functional society requires to thrive and grow. They are incapable of doing actual work to retain status in their community so they clumsily fumble at violence and fear to try to fill that void of uselessness.
Seriously, Instagram and Facebook would also need to to delete the CIA’s account for this to make any sense (hating how extremist Iran is without acknowledging it was an explicit consequence of the CIA forcing regime change is just naive jingoism) but this is just about pissing on Iran to curry favor with other people.
I wonder if you took the comments of Iran’s evil leader and mixed them up with statements from conservative US politicians, removed obvious references to Christianity, Islam, and countries and then sat people down and tried to get them to guess who said what it would be pretty damn hard.
I don’t think you are listening, people were saying this over and over again BEFORE Biden stepped down, we didn’t need hindsight, YOU did because you refused to listen.
I love that y’all admit you were wrong superficially but then insult people who have been making strong arguments for quite a long time that Biden should step down and not run again with statements like “well, who could have known!” with a happy shrug.
We did and people like you almost cost us the election. Do you understand how dangerous a role people like you played in shutting down criticism of Biden and attacking concerned Democrats like they were all Russia trollbots or something?
You speak of the danger of divisiveness, of having democrats split up and fractured… hopefully you do realize that is PRECISELY what democrats shouting down concerns about Biden were doing? Can you at least see that in 20/20 hindsight?
What have you learned that will lead you into NOT making the same potentially catastrophic miscalculation next time around?
…because you realize y’all look like clowns in the wake of Harris raising 200 million and 170,000 volunteers in a week right?
Honestly, you need to stop commenting on politics until you dismantle your world view and understanding of how US politics works please, you don’t understand very basic shit here. I don’t know what more proof you need than the last month or so of politics.
Don’t give me this “Wow, happy surprise! Who woulda thought things could go so well!” nonsense, it is insulting and minimizing to those of us who have actually been paying attention and understood the political forces at play.