All of the communications on these channels are typically legally discoverable, so it makes sense you don't want to introduce potential vectors for political discrimination in an increasingly remote world.
There are plenty of non political topics to cover...Gardening, pets, clothing, home renovation, local music events and festivals, kids, etc. In all the teams I've been on, political topics never came up. It's okay to find friends outside of work and discuss politics with them; your social network doesn't have to center on the workplace.
Then read your contract. Discussing these things does not change what the contract you signed says. If you don't like it, renegotiate or leave. If your negotiation is an ultimatum on these points you should probably consider it equivalent to deciding to leave in most cases, but maybe if you have enough leverage you will win.
The "Google union" is a complete joke BTW. It's made up of half a dozen low-level employees that have no bargaining power at all. Half the company hasn't even heard of it (true story).
That's unnecessary. I'm simply demonstrating that unionization has occurred in businesses far larger and with arguably more difficult organizing environments than Basecamp (with a total of ~60 employees). 800 Google workers thought it important enough to join their union.
A Basecamp union organizer who was the only one to decide to join their own creation of a Basecamp Workers Union would already be 3 times as successful as the Google union on a per-capita basis.
A union derives its bargaining power from the amount of monopoly it has on the labor supply. (I don't say that as a bad thing; I mean it just as a factual thing.)
Tech industry turnover is around 13% per year, or 0.25% per week. The Google union could all quit at once and it would be like that week's turnover number was slightly higher than normal.
Google has more employees out sick on any given day than they have union members.
Yes, the Lou Bloom / Game of Thrones perspective exists and has a basis in our world. When you play with power, you win or you die.
But I don't believe that's why American gays have been experiencing more and more support. It is not persuasion by equity, but simply by asking people what kind of future they want to live in. Gay life also also improved among EU peers for the same reasons.
Politics is the negotiation of power, and yet strangely, gay people have been able to achieve wins at the negotiating table simply by asking, often without leverage. Sometimes people will listen to your story and simply agree.
except if your co-workers never know they they never have a chance to stand up for you and demand change. this is a great way to silence minorities because talking about the challenges they face is now forbidden.
Gardening: So are you a climate change wacko or a doomsday prepper wacko?
Clothing: Do you know where I can get my leather chaps repaired?
Home Renovation: I need to get a permit and inspection for my rec room renovation. They want confirmation that the beam can hold 400lbs in the sex-swing.
Any topic can be political if you are enough of a jerk.
I saw a thread of many women talking about similar issues in a pro-vaccine Seattle group (where younger people were looking to get extra vaccine doses before the vaccines were open to all ages). There are also threads in women's subreddits.
I wish, as someone who has been job searching, that I could use something like this...Have you reached out directly to employers or did you just post about it to hackernews?
Also note that the costs of flying someone in right now is mitigated by the fact that all on-sites are virtual right now. And unemployed people in 2020/2021 may not have the luxury of being picky about a higher salary. You tried launching this in a weird year.
I certainly can do more "things that don't scale" but so far the response has been limited, so that I'm not even sure if it's a matter of reaching more people or it's just not something employers want.
It was mostly, when looking at search results, "is this the right dataset for me?" Particularly when many datasets have similar names or the title of the dataset was unclear. So we added descriptions and "quick-peaks/expand" in search results.
This is in contrast to the original version which was very dense tabular view, having people scroll sideways to parse or click into many pages what a dataset was about.
At a glance, I'd be unclear on what set of scenarios they expect the site to help out with. The person would need to type the right search term and hopefully land on the right result. If they wanted to use the navigation, it seems hovering over the menu items doesn't show you the structure of the site-- you need to click into each individual tab. It's pretty but hard to gauge how useful it is.
Totally! I think the search term issue will get addressed as the datasets get tagged with more near and similar terms so it populates the search results with a wider net of results. (like misspellings, synonyms, topic and category terms, etc).
I feel like we talked about topics being a search result too, but there was some barrier to the search tool to get it to work with other page types. That'd fix a lot too.
My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.
The San Jose cop that caught controversy was found by public records to be getting paid over 200k a year: "According to Transparent California, a salary database of public employees, Yuen has worked for SJPD since at least 2014 and made about $153,000 in regular pay and overtime in 2019 as part of a total $226,000 compensation package." You can also look at Seattle police salaries (https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/databases/article2586102... it is normal for police to be getting paid 150k+.
I was between jobs this time last year, and started rooting around in my local town's salary publications. In the top 50 salaries for my mid-size MA town, about 50% were police (starting at places 2, 3, 4 and then like 8?), with the average salary (including overtime) at about 175k$.
There are also 54 people listed as working as "[XXX] police [XXX]", in a town of 41k.
For the record, there is an average of one violent crime a day in my town, and stats like 7 projected rapes in 2020 (0 murders).
Whether or not that's all justified, I leave as an exercise to the reader.
There are plenty of non political topics to cover...Gardening, pets, clothing, home renovation, local music events and festivals, kids, etc. In all the teams I've been on, political topics never came up. It's okay to find friends outside of work and discuss politics with them; your social network doesn't have to center on the workplace.