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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

Unions don't suck, Google sucks.

If Google does indeed suck, wouldn’t employees leave for a company that doesn’t? I wonder what the attrition looks like

Not if they are unaware of how things might be elsewhere. If they have only ever worked at Google out of college they could have no idea that things suck.

It's hard to believe that people working in one of the most seek-ed/desired jobs in the Valley / tech world, are unaware of how things might be elsewhere.

People still work for Amazon, so we can be sure it is nevertheless true that some people don't know how good things could be for them.

what does attrition look like for Amazon vs Google?

Money.

As soon as a lot of people leave a team or location in Google, Google responds by giving everyone bonuses. When a bunch of people started quitting from the Boulder office a few (5?) years back, they offered to send everyone on a trip to Hawaii.

Google's Do No Evil has been gone for a long while, but people stick around because they are making so much goddamn money.

That's exactly how it should work...? What's the issue, Google is evil because it increased the incentive for employees to stay?

I don't know where you got that from my reply. I was simply answering the question of why people stay at Google if they are evil. I was answering the retention question only.

Ok, so unions aren't designed to make companies not be evil. They're designed to increase comp. So since you have stated that Google pays lots of money, what's the point of a union.

Unions are also used to make working conditions safer, fairer and less exploitative. While money is definitely a key part of unions, it isn't the be all and end all.

The manifesto for the one union which attempted (is attempting?) to organize at GOOG is explicitly trying to reducing what they perceive to be evil, and aren't trying to increase comp.

I think that trip to Hawaii was a reward trip for one team which had a large presence in Boulder.

That sort of thing seems to be pretty clearly in the rear-view mirror.

Yes big tech employees are equivalent to the wall street bankers in the 80s. Sell their souls for money. They have no room to cry about morals, they know the deal.

In my experience google pays a bit undermarket and relies on both it's reputation for being a bit cushy (as far as private employers go) and having higher prestige than others.

The grass isn't really greener anywhere else, and since so many benefits are tied to employment in the US, leaving a job is often a lot of trouble. Corporations like Google know & lobby for this.

If other companies aren’t better then does Google suck?

Yes.

Why?

Well, for a while they colluded with other tech giants to prevent this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

This is a common response across hn for any post related to Google, it's great how you boiled it down to such few words. I just think it's interesting that if anyone posted the equivalent of this on any other topic it would be downvoted. Is this a thoughtful comment? Does it follow the guidelines of this community? I think not. Are you a grown adult or a 2 year old child? We will never know

Police unions have made it very difficult to fire bad cops.

From my European perspective it looks In the US the only unions left are the most hardcore, extremist unions.

All the "finding a common middleground", reasonable unions have been eradicated by anti-union policies. And yes, there are lots of unions like that in the countries that I can speak for (Denmark, Germany).

It is sad to see e.g. police unions being used as an argument against unions in general now.

That’s a problem with the implementation of US unions, not with unions in general. In other countries things work better.

Unions serve their members, not the public good. Teacher unions do not exist to advance the education of children--they exist to get better hours, pay, and benefits for their members.

Police unions aren’t labour unions.

Police break labour strikes, not join them.

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