from Hacker News

How to go to war with your employer

by samename on 6/16/23, 4:51 PM with 35 comments

• by testacct22 on 6/16/23, 7:32 PM

  Just something I've noticed here on this site: the sentiment is highly "pro-employer" (kinda like the wsj). It makes sense really, considering who finances the infra for this website. Not surprised this article was flagged

  The post connects two things I didn't consider before: collective action and internal tooling

  Something that I've seen: management mandates that everyone use shitty tooling. Using collective action to challenge this and put a fire under management's ass to make internal tooling not shit isn't a bad idea imo

  Really, I'm just happy I see an article here that speaks positively about organized labor and the adversarial relationship between employer and employee. The only flaw with this article is that it spends too much time talking about HR and not enough about litigation

• by cj on 6/16/23, 5:29 PM

  > You don’t like agile/scrum and want to interact with it from the other end of a six foot pole and/or replace it with another system

  Honestly, if you disagree with fundamental ways your company operates, it’s usually a lot less effort and a lot less stressful to find a new job that is aligned better with how you like to work.

  I think one mistake a lot of job candidates make is accepting offers too quickly before making sure there’s a mutual culture fit.

  The same mistake is made by a lot of employers: not making sure there’s mutual culture fit from the employer’s perspective prior to extending an offer.

• by joezydeco on 6/16/23, 6:30 PM

  If you install Linux on your work laptop because it allows you to work more efficiently, then you are doing your job better and making more money for the business; they have no right to object to this and you have a very defensible position for exercising agency in this respect.

  From my experience, this is becoming an area where you have no traction. Companies have increasingly complex security and record retention policies, your choice to use Linux (when the company is a sea of Windows machines) creates more work for your IT group to support. So guess what their blanket answer is going to be?

• by tracerbulletx on 6/16/23, 5:40 PM

  I think this is a delusional take. The fact of the matter is you do not have any leverage at all and your only option, like everyone else's, is to be a political entity operating in the confines of the system to effect change. This author is acting like some kind of primadona who is above it all and such a sneaky snake because he totally knows HRs game and is going to tattle to them to get his boss fired.

• by erehweb on 6/16/23, 5:40 PM

  Note though that the marginal value of an employee is typically < the average value, and that managers may value control more than profits.

• by chrisdbanks on 6/16/23, 6:35 PM

  If your company is not asking you to do the things that are most likely to make it money then I'd worry about your long-term job security. In my experience, most employees lack the context to understand what the best way to make their company money is. Therefore this argument seems flawed. However, if you have a better way to make money for your company than your boss does, then you should be promoted. A good company listens to bottom-up feedback and adjusts its approach accordingly.

• by samename on 6/16/23, 7:23 PM

  Why was this flagged?

• by glimshe on 6/16/23, 6:54 PM

  This is not a good article. It basically thinks about the employer in Marxist-like ways (class relations, owner of means of production etc).

  Within the legal framework, here is what you have to do: whatever your employer asks you to do. No, if your employer believes that Linux isn't right for their business, or that you can't work from home, you are not supposed to do that.

  I think smart employers will give a lot of agency to engineers to make some of these decisions, but it's not your call. If you want to make these decisions, become an employer yourself.