They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).
They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).
For organizations, they could at least hire a consultant / speaker to do a presentation every year on how people can effectively give negative feedback. The speaker could say "you all see bad things happening at the company, things you aren't happy about but don't want to risk speaking about, here's how you can speak about those issues without any risk". Teach people things like, studies have shown that proposing a solution along with your complaint makes it more likely to be accepted, etc. For the price of a speaker or two, you could train your company to effectively deliver and act on negative feedback. Too many people don't know how to effectively express their problems.
If someone wants to start a consultants / speaking tour you can have this idea.
also, the complaint can be perfectly valid and important without having any solutions for it. many times employees don't have the knowledge needed to know what are the possible solutions.
but individually their solution is to go where their needs are met (as much as possible of course)
You can still do something like offer to help or proposing a meeting as the "solution", or at least the start of a solution.
But more realistically, most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth or more generally speaking their minds, and individuals can often have a bigger impact than they would imagine. It doesn’t really make sense for a reasonably well run company to ignore such things from employees they clearly think are valuable.
That said, there are still exceptions, e.g. labour activism in the US is probably a good way to get fired (with a nice big severance), and if you work at Boeing and write some email like ‘this plane is designed by clowns and I won’t let my family fly in it’ (or perhaps even just reasonable concerns) that is also bad (because that email will show up in court if there’s an accident and you can’t say ‘we want to have a workplace where all engineers can raise concerns about the safety of our planes’ – better to just not do it over email, which is a bit of a silly incentive)
I agree. I gave that as an extreme example of "the fool's choice". More realistic examples include "I can tell the scrum master he talks to much in retrospectives and he will dislike me, or I can be quiet about it". Truth is you can probably find a good time and way to tell him that will not hurt his opinion of you.
As for raising safety concerns at Boeing (for example), maybe that's not a "fool's choice", but simply a choice. Are you going to do the right thing or not? Sometimes the "if I speak up, bad things will happen" mindset is the unfortunate truth, but not as often as many think.
This is an interesting idea, I have I feeling I know the what they’re getting at, but if you have any examples of how they put that into practice I’d love to hear it.
AI is currently shit (too resource intensive, too biased, lots of details still to be worked on) (Micro Pessimism)
So, let's work on addressing each of this