Posted by reasonableklout 2 days ago
Meta employees have some of the strongest bargaining power in our industry. This particular imposition is undesirable to almost everyone. There is no upside in it for employees.
Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be. And you'd better believe that there will be a flood of companies happy to set this up for your employer at your workplace.
That's why, as someone who wouldn't consider working at Meta for ethical reasons, I'm hoping this pushback succeeds. A win for Meta here throws the floodgates wide open. A loss helps put the brakes on a bit.
Furthermore, collective action that starts like this (and keeps pressure up) is much more effective than a bunch of individuals quitting their jobs. That's why employers would much prefer the latter when they're up to no good.
Meta also has a strong bargaining position. The attractiveness of the job is almost entirely money, which is pretty universal, so they can quite easily replace individuals. Other (less wealthy) companies might rely on goodwill and sense of belonging or purpose to retain employees, which weakens their ability to do things like this.
I feel like labor organizers should offer employee verification as a free service to get people to sign who fear retaliation. Essentially upload your W2, get a token, sign petition with token. Or maybe just mail out a QR sticker to place in an employee-only area...
Ah yes, the companies that have ignored robots.txt to scrape your website for 20+ years will now not totally, most definitely not ignore (wink wink) polite requests to not use your data for AI training. Also, haven't Meta employees been complicit in getting teenagers addicted to social media and violations of PII until they got caught?
Respect goes out to mathematicians and their Leiden Declaration, which is an actual level-headed approach given the complexities of AI training and usage.
There is an entity that provides product/service and makes money. A lot of money. Like mind boggling sums of money. That entity has made a deal with a set of humans to give some of that money (which for the humans is very large and or at least hard to ignore) in exchange for their time and skills. The deal is mutual.
This entity is now changing the deal somewhat and the set of humans don’t like it. But not to the point of walking away from the deal. They are used to the money and walking away from it has severe repercussions that only some can absorb. Most can’t absorb. So these humans are doing what they can to alter the recently altered deal as much as possible.
The entity knows for the most part these humans have little to no leverage. There is an extremely rare (almost black swan event) chance that the entity could lose its leverage. The black swan event is that the almost entire set of humans that it made the deal with walks away from the deal. In other words the set of humans transforms from elements of a set in one homogeneous entity or at least behaves like one. Beside this the set of humans individually have very little real leverage. This letter which is from a subset of the original set of humans is an example of an attempt to become a relatively small entity.
Here is the kicker - the original entity is actually emergent entity that emerged from within the set of humans in the first place. Each human in the set has a weight and it’s unequal. And ultimately since from a set of humans multiple entities can emerge entities are simply the sum of weights of the humans that make up that subset. The entity with the most weight(not most humans) has the most leverage.
Does this situation really matter?? Especially since It’s just (largely) two entities and Given the number of entities that emerge and exist from the larger set of 7 or 8 billion humans?
Humans generally relate to other humans that Are like them. If you are a human who is part of a similar low leverage entity you will sympathize with the humans who don’t like the new deal. If you are a human part of a very high leverage entity you probably can’t sympathize with the low leverage entities as much. In the large scheme of things it really dosnt matter for us HN outsiders. And for those humans within meta all I will say is know which entity you are part and if you don’t like the leverage it has, keep working towards changing the situation you are in.
And meta engineers will never bargain collectively. If you’ve spent time there you understand that it is some of the least fertile ground in the world for such ideas. Anyone who entertained thoughts of collectivism, or in fact anything beyond naked self-interest, has probably left some time ago.
You missed mentioning a million new humans will gladly walk into the deal.
This is a list of 1600 people who should be alrady looking out because meta won't be after this signature.
No.
Indexing by search engines is fully suppressed by robots.txt and <meta> headers (not the company Meta, here it refer to an HTML tag). A potential employer searching your name will never see this page via search engines like Google or Bing."
I did a double take when reading that part too, but if you're a Meta employee then you should be able to understand the implications of those technical measures.
Would these employees understand "technical measures"
No.
Indexing by search engines is fully suppressed by robots.txt and <meta> headers (not the company Meta, here it refer to an HTML tag). A potential employer searching your name will never see this page via search engines like Google or Bing."
The author assumes some employees are not familiar with <meta> HTML elements and might confuse them with the name of their employer
HN commenter: "I did a double take when reading that part too, but if you're a Meta employee then you should be able to understand the implications of those technical measures."
Soz but zero sympathy if you chose to work there.