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What I meant is that it does change conditions for the worker as they leave for better conditions. I think working in tech, it’s been a luxury to line up a new job and go to that job with zero down time. I’m not suggesting people do brash stuff like walk out without new employment lined up.

This is a huge change, the biggest I think, as I can change all of my conditions by finding a company that gives me what I want.

I think to a lesser extent since I’ve frequently seen that smart people leaving for specific reasons changes company policy.

I was just trying to show a simple contra to parent’s comment saying that leaving changes nothing as that seems simply false to me.



>What I meant is that it does change conditions for the worker as they leave for....

As they leave for, perhaps, a unionized job?

I was with you on the parent comment, but then had a think about it and I agree above, someone who leaves the company is a non-worker for the purposes of this argument


I think it’s important to consider that the plight of the worker is important both to the individual directly and to understand the motivations of employees.

Thinking that benefit to employees isn’t relevant because they don’t exist for purposes of the argument will leave out many interesting possible solutions.

I don’t think the goal is to maximize for a single company as it’s possible to maximize for the system that has both the company, other companies, and other workers.


I suppose the contra seemed a bit hollow, as the bit you quoted has an implicit “in the company” attached based on the context of the post. It was less that your statement was strictly false and more “Well yes, but that isn’t really addressing the actual topic”.


I should have provided more thought in my response. I was trying to reframe that the actual topic shouldn’t be so limited.

But it’s not reasonable for me to assume that readers would get that from my quip.

I think that I try this to try to break out of the paths where we inappropriately limit the scope to the point we can be sound in designing a solution that fits our narrowed scope but missed the goal that we were trying to achieve. I think in this case that the assumption that the goal is to fix google leaves out the individual who has mixed duties to the organization and themself. I probably get too emotional when I frequently see discussions that try to box me into being part of the solution and I see this quite a bit in product design. I see discussions around products where a complaint is met with discussion around the need to provide a solution. So the discussion spirals around kind of assuming the only options for users are: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using. But there are three options: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using, 3) stop using. And assuming that all users operate with only the first two options makes it more likely to only design around those two.




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