This may be an unpopular thought here but it seems to me that these momazonians may seriously consider unionizing. If executives at major tech companies are not willing to meet the needs of their female workforce (both current and future) then it seems that collective bargaining would be an effective means of making their position more convincing.
The risk is that companies may increasingly try and avoid hiring more women in the future; but it could also be that employers, who want to seem more socially responsible, may take the financial hit and invest in the up-front-costs in order to get access to a larger labor pool.
The underlying assumption here is that women take care of kids, while men work. That's what an union should address IMO. Instead of maternal leave, have parental leave that men, too, can take. That way, the playing field is leveled more.
Of course, there's no quick fix here - it's a deepset cultural issue, and getting men to take that leave when it's available to them still seems to take some pushing.
That's because it's not merely a cultural issue, it's a biological one.
By necessity, all women that have children need to take time off, at least in the pregnancy/birth stage. The productivity lost is generally less if you only need to coordinate one person taking maternal/paternal leave. So the obvious choice is to extend the leave of the person that absolutely must take it.
Breastfeeding is also a major issue. For the first six months of life it's far and away the preferred food source. And breastfeeding infants need to eat every 1-3 hours. Sure, women can pump, but then they have to do that every 1-3 hours to maintain their supply. Also while pumped human milk is better than formula, it's still not as good as direct.
Biologically speaking pregnancy, birth, and raising children makes serious demands on women that it doesn't on men. Treating people justly requires recognizing these differences.
And by necessity, some men take over primary parental responsibilities when their child's birth mother die in child birth or decide wifehood and mommyhood isn't for them and run off.
"Of course the mother doesn't HAVE to take time off - just do a planned c section on a Saturday and she can be back to work on Monday."
This isn't based on reality. Recovery time for a c-section is a week or two at least (planned or emergency). I would think 5-6 weeks before anyone would be talking about going back to work.
It's a major surgery.
Only way you could do a Saturday delivery and back to work on Monday is if you were a superhero and dropped the baby the classic way early AM Saturday.
One way I heard it described (from a medical student, years back), a c-section is like cutting up your thigh muscle (or other major muscle), you ain't gonna move for a while.
>Only way you could do a Saturday delivery and back to work on Monday is if you were a superhero and dropped the baby the classic way early AM Saturday.
Superheroes aren't based in reality. The only way humans could fly is if they weighed 80% less and had big wings.
Seriously have you ever heard of satire? This whole thread seems like a bunch of people just waiting for a chance to tout their in-depth knowledge of c-sections. And that it's flagged now is a shame, considering GP was clearly being hyperbolic to make a point about corporate/work culture.
> Of course the mother doesn't HAVE to take time off - just do a planned c section on a Saturday and she can be back to work on Monday.
This is a joke, right?
I'm a woman who had a C-section baby. I'm also super tough (not that that should matter here.) There was no way I'd be able to go back to work in 48 hours after a major surgery like that. I was in the hospital for 2 days past my surgery, then had 5+ days at home until I was even able to get out of bed and move around easily.
It was 4-5 weeks until I felt fully recovered again, and that's also counting the fact that we had my husband's sister who flew out to help us for a week (for which I am eternally grateful!) and a nanny after that. In other words, this was a pretty privileged situation compared to what many mothers go through.
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I'm not immune to satire (as opposed to apparently everyone else who replied just to vent their offendedness) and I understood your critique of the typical American 'work or die' mentality.
I thought we had it pretty good here in Austria, but this 75%-time deal in Sweden sounds great!
It's almost as if their government decided that happy lives matter more then happy stockbrokers.
1st half of your post: you should be ashamed of yourself. You shoud print that on a t-shirt and wear it for the next 3 months every time you meet friends (if you got any) and family (if they are still talking to you). For your safety don't wear it around people you don't know. And especially don't wear it in Europe. We don't like that.
2nd half of your post: Don't copy Sweden, because Sweden is Sweden. See what other progressive countries do (like Sweden, UK, France, Poland, Germany, Canada, etc), and pick and choose the parts that would make for a good plan both for the People and is financially viable. But your thought are not bad at all.
Edit: if you haven't noticed, in HN we (the people) prefer comments that excite dialogue, even if/especially when we disagree. But the 1st half of your post just made me hate you. Don't do this to us (and to yourself)
Ps: my wife had C-section. You know, women don't have C-sections "for fun" or "to avoid the pain", there are significant medical reasons that force a 'birth' like that, to safeguard the life of the mother and/or the baby.
Since I consider myself part of HN, please don't speak for me, since you're obviously incapable of understanding the most blatant satire and clearly have no business in telling people what to do or how they should feel about themselves.
EDIT: And telling people you hate them based on a comment they made on an internet-forum? Get real man!
Well, it’s not back and white. It is common in the EU to have a man take parental leave. Just because “The United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries in the United Nations that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave) does not mean anything.
Women should get more leave, because they need to physically recover Having a baby damages your body and often requires minor (sometimes major surgery) to repair.
I (as a man) just had a child a few days ago. I'm perpetually sleep deprived and miserable, but my wife? On top of being in an immense amount of pain due to (minor) complications, she is not able to take any real painkillers, and has to spend an hour breastfeeding every three hours.
there is nothing about her situation that I envy, or that any man compares to post-childbirth.
> Women should get more leave, because they need to physically recover Having a baby damages your body and often requires minor (sometimes major surgery) to repair.
This argument doesn't make any sense. You should really be arguing that "women should get some leave". What's wrong with her being off for 2 months (directly before and after birth) until she recovers, and then him being off for the next 4-10 months?
In order to make it work, I think you would have to force men to take the parental leave, otherwise the implicit value of a man would still be higher. If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.
Enabling should be enough. NY State has a paid family leave policy[0] that allows both parents to take advantage. The birth mother may be required from a health perspective to take more immediately but allowing the other parent the same opportunity for bonding and helping with child/family care is important. There's no forcing it at all, the parents can choose what is best for them which is the flexibility and independence that the rest of the USA should be enabling.
Enabling isn't sufficient to counteract the fact that the men who choose not to take leave will be more valuable to an employer.
If society wants men and women to be on equal footing, and society wants women to be able to have children, and the consequence of having children is not being able to work, which then results in being less economically valuable to an employer, then to "fix" this, society must also make men just as less economically valuable. It all depends how "equal" you want to make the game.
Although I disagree with your assumption (that it's valuable that men and women are equal in every, or at least this particular, dimension), I want to point out that you're forgetting another option - to make women (mothers) more economically valuable (so they compare favourably with fathers / childless individuals). You can simply reward companies whose employees have children! This would also correctly incentivize hard-working smart people to procreate (if rewards are proportional to taxes/salaries).
I'm not sure why the discussion is heading towards making companies value genders equally. Is "women get pregnant" a real concern from an employers perspective? Anecdotally I have not seen that be the case, and if it were a corporate truth I expect some discrimination lawsuits to emerge.
Yes, you probably need to push men into taking leave. Incentivizing may work better than trying to force them. For example, go a bit further than just having parental leave, and have some of that time be paternal leave that the mother can not take. You don't have to use it, but there's an incentive to.
Of course that's not going to fully even the books. Men don't get pregnant. They're not going to breastfeed or recover from giving birth. But that doesn't mean that you can't make things better.
Look at it from the perspective of the family: requiring women to bear the entire burden of childcare in terms of time off work puts a serious damper on their career prospects. By allowing and incentivizing the man in the family to also take time off for childcare, you improve the woman's chances at building a strong career. That should translate to higher income for the family.
How does trading one person's career for the other improve family income? If the woman has higher earning potential, the man can stay home thanks to her earnings. If they can't afford that, then they can't afford kids and economically the system is broken regardless
> If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.
What exactly is the point of this? All this does is penalize poor families. No amount of monetary hand out is going to ever devalue the wealth creation ability of work. You cannot pay out the social benefits of working. Women undertake a vital task in giving birth, and they of course need time to recover. However, in that situation, the best thing for their family is not for neither spouse to be uninvolved in the workplace. Forcing men to stay home (rather than choose what is best for their family) simply limits the family's overall ability to create wealth for themselves.
Yes, paternity leave is important and nice, but the truth of the matter is that some women are going to need many months to recover from birth, and men simply do not. Why disadvantage entire families in the name of 'equality'. There is no equality to be had. The woman's body suffered through birth, and the man's didn't. The baby needs the mother nearby to feed it, not the father. What's the big deal then if the man goes back to work earlier?
Can anyone articular why it is better (for families) for men to not return to work when they feel ready, which is almost invariably going to be sooner than their wives? This seems to me a good thing that ensures children have their financial well being looked after.
It's not about having men stay at home so their unrecovered wives can get back to work. The assumption is that people are sane and that parental leave is long enough that by and large physical recovery is done well before the leave is over.
It's about making hiring a woman less burdensome to employers compared to men by letting men take care of the child when the mother is well but the child still needs at-home care. Of course, how realistic that is hinges very much on what the period of parental leave provided is in the first place. If it's just long enough to let the majority of women hobble back into the workplace after dropping their infants in daycare... well, maybe that's a whole other issue.
> It's about making hiring a woman less burdensome to employers compared to men by letting men take care of the child when the mother is well but the child still needs at-home care.
I understand that this is the purpose, but I'm questioning why that's a good thing. All this does is hobble the workforce artificially. This is like requiring a man who can lift 50 pounds for his job to take time off twice a week to make up for the guy who -- due to some bodily reality -- can only lift 25. Why is the man who can lift 50 pounds artificially limited in helping his family in the name of 'equality'.
A central point of the women's right movements was that women should work because husband's income was not always reliable. Plus, men could die, leaving a woman without any means of income. However, we have swung in the very opposite direction, where we are now limiting men providing for their families in the name of women working. If women in the workplace require men to take extra time off in order to be 'equal', then it's clear that the arguments used to keep women from the workplace were valid to begin with.
Now, I don't believe in any of this, but this is the underlying logic (whether admitted or not) of various schemes meant to hobble fathers returning to the workplace at whatever time they and their family decide is appropriate.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. It is certainly true in Sweden that while we have parental leave, men take a lot less, and the left wing parties are trying to create a law forcing men to take time off.
Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be taking more time off while the husband works in the overwhelming majority of families, at least those who are not fortunate to have millions in the bank where both spouses are able to take time off without any thought to financial impact.
Painting this as a "deepset cultural issue" and not a matter of practicality and biology is either missing the point, or intellectually dishonest.
I probably didn't put all the caveats in that post that I could have. To be clear, you're not going to change biology, and as long as women bear children and men do not, they will require more leave for childbirth. But that doesn't mean they have to take all the parental leave, and it certainly doesn't mean that childcare much later on should be a women's issue.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth - I said "Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be taking more time off while the husband works in the overwhelming majority of families" which CLEARLY implies I am talking about during pregnancy. Instead you attempted to paint it as some general remark where I am claiming the husband should work and the wife should stay at home. I resent this.
I don't know if you're intentionally being difficult, but it's a biological fact that the mother carries the child. As you may or may not know, late-term pregnancy carries very a heavy physical burden.
Late stage pregnancy can cause severe nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain, severe headache, mood swings, and other very tough issues to deal with. These kinds of symptoms may hinder or entirely prevent an employee from working, requiring them to take leave.
As it seems you aren't aware, the husband does not physically experience any these symptoms. This is not cultural. The husband literally does not have a child inside their body and suffers no physical burden. Therefore, there is no physical impact on the ability to work.
As it also seems you aren't aware, most couples don't have the luxury of having both spouses take leave at the same time, in other words, at least one spouse needs to be working. When the wife is suffering from severe nausea, bleeding, vomiting, cramps, and headaches, it will indeed be "the husband works in the majority of families" (prior to the birth of the child).
There's nothing cultural about it, it's entirely biological. Good day to you.
> I said "Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be
> taking more time off while the husband works in the
> overwhelming majority of families" which CLEARLY implies I
> am talking about during pregnancy.
> CLEARLY
Nope, not seeing you clearly imply anything about "during pregnancy". Especially when the explicit context of the rest of the conversation is what happens after pregnancy (at the top level, "childcare").
This seems to be more specifically about backup childcare, for when a kid is sick and can't go to school that day. I suspect that if no backup childcare is available, the mother takes a day off to stay home with the child much more often than the father does. (I'd love to see some data, though.)
So you can fight it two ways, change the culture so that the career harm falls more equitably on men and women both, or create solutions such as backup childcare benefits so the harm does not fall on either.
Not that it's fair, but women stopped washing clothes by hand not because men started, but because laundry machines were invented.
Even with parental leave, the need for day care doesn’t stop. Some of the companies I have been part of offer very generous (by US standards) parental leave - 6 months. But the need for day care is there at least until the kids are 2-3 years old.
If only it stopped so early. The first reprieve happens at kindergarten, age 5 or 6. And even then, you need after-school care another 5 years or so unless you can work out a schedule with your spouse (which is what I do -- I go in early, get home in time to walk the kids home from school, while my wife is the one that sees them off to school and then she works later).
Finland gives 9 weeks parental leave earmarked to the father (cannot be transferred to the mother), at about 70% pay of your salary. According to this (2017), about 80% fathers make use of it, but on the average only for 4 weeks, not the full 9.
what about people that'd don't want children? Where is our (full/part) paid time off? This is the same problem restaurants have with smoke breaks. You have to give equal breaks to non-smokers.
It seems the simplest solution would just be to offer X% paid time off per Y yrs of service regardless of children/no children with the rule the employee gives the company Z months notice. That way male/female parents can figure out who stays home with kid and childless workers get the same benefit. It is basically like a sabbatical university professors get to go refine their skills. Employees get a certain amount of time/pay to go do 'life' things based on service.
The time after a child is born is not a vacation in any reasonable definition of the word.
You want paid time off that's government mandated? Go break your leg. You'll get that time off, and it'll be about as enjoyable as maternity/paternity.
A union with fewer that 6k members worldwide and an extreme ideology seems like an insane place to start actually, unless your goal is to turn people off unions.
That seems like a ton noise with very little, if anything to show for it. It still seems like the IWW is a weird place to start a search for unionization, or a model to follow.
I don't know what "noise" means in this context, especially as interpreted though the lens of Wikipedia where you are certainly reading through editor biases.
You said the IWW has - as in the present day - "an extreme ideology". Where is your evidence?
Unions are also like macros for action. All the work that goes into organized action is streamlined when you do it permanently as a union. It makes little sense to stick your neck out, and then wait until something goes wrong again and having to do all of the legwork all over.
Major banks do a good job with this. They recognize that this is not just a matter of gender equality, but LGBT equality as well. They give equal parental leave to both sexes for both birth and adoption (for family bonding), which allows flexibility on how time off is handled in traditional male/female childbirths, but also in male/male and female/female adoptions/births as well. If companies like Amazon don't catch up soon, they're going to end up on the wrong end of some very serious PR attacks in the coming years.
As someone who was adopted, this seems excessive. Unless someone is adopting a newborn, adoption carries a significantly different set of requirements than childbirth.
Also, calling adoption birth for same sex couples is weird. My mother is my mother but in no world did she give birth to me.
It's not the same as birth, but it is the same as "we have a new child in our lives and we need time to bond and learn to live together" which is really what parental leave is all about. When my wife gives birth (I have a lot of kids), only the first couple weeks are really about recuperation from the birth itself. Most of that time together is about getting established in new routines. It's affording new families time to take their first steps as a family. That applies in both birth and adoption.
> "we need time to bond and learn to live together" which is really what parental leave is all about
I haven't had kids yet, but from what I hear from people who have, that very much not what parental leave is all about, at least in the very begining. It's all about being required to take care for an extremely helpless and vulnerable being who likely needs focused attention every 3-6 hours! It's exhausting (in the same way as working on an intensive care unit is exhausting, even if you don't even want to bond!)
It is exhausting. Lots of amazing experiences are.
I know many parents who lament the sleepless nights and dirty diapers and impossible choices they have to make, but apart from a few overly ambitious people who work too much and care too little about their own family anyway, I don't know too many that regret the decision.
How strange that the NYT article was about how they tried to pull other companies under the bus when they had privacy issues, and here Alex Stamos is pointing out that "most tech companies", "a lot of parties", "mass media", "NYT/WaPo/ESJ/TV", all failed too and should get the attention instead. The only thing missing is him saying Soros funded the GRU.
I know Alex Stamos left the company at this point, but he has every incentive to toe the party line on this, since his reputation could personally take a hit for his involvement.
The excellent and thorough NYT piece eviscerates FB leadership for employing the same sleazy disinformation tactics to defend themselves that FB failed to stop when weaponized by political actors.
Stamos has the gall to deflect Facebook's culpability by blaming responsible media outlets for getting compromised by the very disinfo that Stamos himself utterly failed to detect or stop during his tenure.
It's beyond irony or satire, it's fucking ridiculous that this guy still has a platform.
Yeah, I applaud his early efforts at uncovering some of this, but why didn't he do more? He should have taken his concerns to leadership sooner, pushed for more action, and notified authorities that a foreign entity was infiltrating the information pipeline. There's a new theme is all of this. It's not "too big to fail." Now, it's "too big to care."
"The mass media was completely played by the GRU and wrote the stories they wanted after the DNC and Podesta disclosures. You could argue that this was much more impactful than the IRA disinfo, and there has been almost no self-reflection by NYT/WaPo/WSJ/TV on their role."
That is really unbecoming of him. I'm already not a big Facebook fan, but that was for reasons outside of all of this continually unraveling tale.
To try and offload the blame for a specific matter to completely unrelated parties is just... well it doesn't look good on him at all. Quite frankly, the gesture inspires suspicion.
He's absolutely right. Publications like NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc. have played huge roles in exacerbating the damage caused by Russian interference, as well as blowing up non-Russia related stories that ended up being of little substance but were major factors in the election, such as the Clinton email fiasco. And there has been little to no signs of repentance from them. And I doubt there will be.
That said, absolutely none of that absolves Facebook of anything, and to bring it up is just deflection.
They fell prey to the same disinformation he knew about and failed to act on adequately. I can't fault those news outlets for failing to catch this problem at the time when they didn't have the knowledge Stamos did about it's true origins and intent. And if you think those news outlets haven't done some soul searching on the issue then, well, you haven't been reading them very closely these past two years.
Twitter needs some kind of negative feedback mechanism to allow for the discovery algorithm to correct for the sentiment of users. A downvote, dislike, un-heart, something along those lines, would be a good signal to allow users to signify what kind of content they deem objectionable.
Downvote-type systems aren't that effective since they usually end up becoming a "I disagree" button and multiply the effect of whatever mob is most active at the moment. It's one of the reasons HN locks them behind a karma wall.
Even that is not an effective way to avoid the negative effects of the downvote button, especially not here on HN where it actually is meant to be used as a "disagree" button:
The "karma wall" only keeps the downvote option out of the hands of those who follow short-lived "mobs", it does nothing to stave off the balkanisation of the platform.
I think the thing that people really like about Elon Musk is that he just doesn't care about the interpersonal social status dynamics at play with his position in the world. If you look at the interview, he's very dismissive of Kara's questioning about how others perceive him:
Kara: What’s Twitter? Okay, let’s start with Twitter. I have an obsession with Twitter, too, and an addiction. What happens with you and Twitter?
Elon: Well, I tweet interesting things pretty much as they come to me, and probably with not much of a filter.
Kara: And why?
Elon: I find it entertaining. I think, “Oh, other people might find this entertaining.” Sometimes they do.
Kara: Just at night? What are you, at home you’re doing this?
Elon: Yeah. Mostly at home. I spend a lot less time on Twitter than people probably think. It’s like maybe 10-15 minutes or something.
Kara: Yeah, well people pay attention when you do that.
And then he continues on to legitimize his tone by showing his prowess in entrepreneurship and science:
Kara: Do you take criticism to heart correctly?
Elon: Yes.
Kara: Give me an example of something if you could.
Elon: How do you think rockets get to orbit?
Kara: That’s a fair point.
Elon: Not easily. Physics is very demanding. If you get it wrong, the rocket will blow up. Cars are very demanding. If you get it wrong, a car won’t work. Truth in engineering and science is extremely important.
Kara: Right. And therefore?
Elon: I have a strong interest in the truth.
Kara: All right. And you are —
Elon: Much more than journalists do.
I think people find this kind of backed-up braggadocio incredibly entertaining and exciting to watch, it makes Elon musk an irresistible personality to follow.
> I think people find this kind of backed-up braggadocio incredibly entertaining and exciting to watch, it makes Elon musk an irresistible personality to follow.
I think they follow him because he created Tesla, Space-X and other things. Braggadocio without results to back it up won't take him as far.
> I think the thing that people really like about Elon Musk is that he just doesn't care about the interpersonal social status dynamics at play with his position in the world
At least from what you've quoted, I have a hard time seeing your point. Seems to be a fairly conservative conversation from a 47 year-old entrepreneurial billionaire physicist, and an interviewer. She asks questions and he gives her straightforward answers with no fluff.
While I would agree that he (clearly) doesn't play by the rules of mortals (how could you, and get to where he's gotten?), I'd hardly call this a matter of he just doesn't care about the interpersonal social status dynamics at play
My read from the interview is that he is just had no patience for how Kara was conducting the interview. My point is that the dismissive attitude he expresses is kind of funny and impressive considering all the pressure he (and his companies) are under.
He's the CEO of one of the most valuable car companies and the words he speaks affect those trading on that information. Saying whatever he wants for entertainment is horribly irresponsible when his words have financial consequences for real people.
The "funding secured" tweet wasn't harmless, it was a lie that gave a false valuation basis for Tesla at $420. If he was just an employee or outsider that wouldn't matter, but as the CEO he should know better.
Unpopular opinion but I’m coming up pretty short on sympathy for someone trading stocks based on a few words in a tweet and then losing their shirt. These people are grownups and fully aware of the risks they are taking when they walk into the casino. Nobody is forcing them to read twitter or take it seriously as a source of investment advice.
The $420 thing didn’t hurt grandma’s pension fund or long term buy-and-holders. It hurt day traders, options traders, shorts, and other gamblers.
I'm sorry but this kind of thinking is so dangerous. Pumping hurts anyone who buys it after the pump, including grandma's pension fund, because now they're buying it at an artificial value.
Traders have a right to accurate information from the officers of the company, which is the whole reason we have regulations in the first place.
Pension funds don't buy the most shorted equity on the market, typically. He's right that the people most affected were in effect gamblers. They gambled on the 5k number happening or not and got creamed in aftermath.
You don't want to live in a world where corporate officers of publicly traded companies can make completely false statements about funding events without severe consequences.
I trust his physics knowledge. But 'truth' is very dependent on how you model your world. If he was so rigorous he probably would have done his factory design properly instead of rushing things somehow randomly.
Sounds like he just took notes of his PR management lessons, do you think they throw a CEO without teaching him how to interact with journalists? That's not his personality, see early videos of CEOs to see how their personality really was before all the PR makeover (make them go to the gym, get hair plugs, pick their clothes, train them how to talk, what to say, when to say it, etc). Another perfect example is Zuckerberg, he was basically trained to be someone else after the (coincidentally) Kara interview where he cracked and almost died of dehydration from sweating.
>I think people find this kind of backed-up braggadocio incredibly entertaining and exciting to watch, it makes Elon musk an irresistible personality to follow.
I can only speak for myself but yes, exactly this. Didn't they model the movie Tony Stark after him? I like that character for the same reason; he's confident, he's cocky, he does what he wants, he doesn't really care what others think, he's not afraid to offend and he's generally entertaining.
Sometimes he crosses the line, example being calling that guy a pedo, but come on... we've all crossed a line before and said something out of frustration or misguided hate. When my father was terminally ill, he died 12 days before my 13th birthday, I wanted one of those WWWJD (what would Jesus do) bracelets that were huge in the mid to late 90's while we were at a checkout counter somewhere. He said no and absolutely would not buy it for me, I lashed out and said "I hate you!" which legitimately hurt my father, I didn't mean it, I didn't even think about it, it just flew out of my mouth. Musk does the same thing, sure he doesn't seem to show remorse when he does but ehhhh when you're as high profile as him sometimes it might be worse for you personally to apologize and retract something because the fallout might be greater than if you just wait for the next news cycle.
> Didn't they model the movie Tony Stark after him?
Iron Man the character was created in 1963.
Elon Musk was born in 1971.
The actor of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) did say in 2011 he was inspired in part by Elon Musk when developing his character, but that was 7 years ago now and certainly predates some of Elon Musk's more notorious antics.
We all certainly cross the line and should be forgiven for it, but the standards are different when you're a public leader.
This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society. I think many (not all) of us who work in software believe that the innovations we unleash, in-and-of themselves, make up for nearly any negative externality caused as consequence. We have brought services or experiences that have made life more convenient, faster, more accessible, etc.; that should be more than sufficient to legitimize our existence and effort.
Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.)
However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor.
Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box.
I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.
> I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris."
Close. But I would say it's ultimately a lack of empathy that is doing the most damage. It manifests itself in so many (negative) ways. It doesn't have to be this way. But that's the irony of lacking empathy.
> This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society.
I think that's fair. I mean, since we get credit for the positive social outcomes, we should accept that we'll be blamed for the negative ones.
> However, the outside world looks at us with disdain
The only people that view the tech industry with disdain are journalists and old media.
Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB...
Just because a lot of ink is spilled trying to keep outdated media models alive, it doesn't mean the general population feels this way. The success of all of these services is proof enough that people are not bothered.
Yeah, they are too busy being addicted to candy crush without realizing that was precisely the intention. My wife, who is not an engineer (she works in applied science) is disgusted with how the technologies have been used to take advantage of the general public. She hates how airbnb has caused a town we wanted to live in to now lie around 24% of homes unoccupied outside of summer while housing prices continue to rise because Airbnb has made it a better value to keep houses away from long term rentals. You are being incredibly naive to even have a catogory called regular people. I am an engineer who builds infrastructure and manages projects each day. I can code but I am not a "software engineer". I am baffled how people at google, facebook, and the like who are funded by ad revene (from ads no one really clicks on or views) can sleep at night knowing how their products have caused so much harm.
There's absolutely nothing morally wrong with using heroin.
People want cheeseburgers, they're provided. People want marijuana, it's provied. People want alcohol, it's provided. People want sugar, it's provided. People want to gamble, it's provided. People want pornography, it's provided. People want violent movies and video games, it's provided.
You can outlaw so called sins, negatives, or you can properly regulate them and treat people that become addicts. Heroin is obviously an extreme example of that context. There is only one effective solution to heroin addiction: treat addiction, do not outlaw heroin use. It should be safely, legally provided to people that need it.
> Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB...
So when Uber circumvented the law to allow anybody to become a taxi driver, thereby hurting drivers who played by the rules, and the media reports on that, they can be safely ignored because they didn't interview a happy user of the app?
Regular people happily use non-biodegradable plastic bags. Maybe the old media should hold off on reporting on its consequences until the oceans have been completely liberated of marine life.
Taxi drivers played by the rules written by and for existing taxi drivers. It was a government protected racket badly in need of some free market forces and Uber/Lyft have provided just that.
When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.
> Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies in San Francisco, tweeted: "In a normal world this would mean Rubin is done, but tech has not just been forgiving, some tech sees little wrong with this.
I work at a pretty large tech company, the number of trainings I have had to go through regarding sexual harassment (especially lately) is impressive. I suspect that such standards may not be as common in small and mid sized companies? I think it is going to take pressure from the VC/funding side to draw clear lines in the sand that even the small guys need to abide by harassment rules.
One of the benefits of contracting/consulting is not going to those. Just sign something saying you can be fired for it and you're good to go (well, and don't do that stuff, too).
My understanding is that the conditions inside of Tesla's manufacturing are brutal. I have friends who work on the production side and they effectively tell me corporate culture is driven by fear. I am definitely cheering Tesla on for global warming reasons but I worry that Musk is running a Faustian bargain that may bite him in the backside long term.
I've got a friend on the assembly line in Fremont. He says he doesn't mind the hours too much. However, they basically keep adding extra or overtime shifts to his schedule. I think right now he might be working 5 or 6 day weeks, and I'm fairly sure they're minimum 8 hours, and obviously with overtime could be several hours above that.
Sounds awful, but in some ways isn't that how manufacturing has sort of always been?
Sounds better than bustin' ass for 60 hours/week for my base salary. Your friend is getting paid 1.5X for every hour over 40. And, yes, it is not uncommon over the years. My dad would seemingly work every overtime hour given. And at time-and-a-half, so would I.
The person I was responding to was expressing gratitude at having the opportunity to earn 150% ones normal wage per hour. My point is that it’s not enough to offset the opportunity cost. If anything, employers should be discourage from asking for overtime pay at all, and make it 10x regular pay or something instead of 1.5x so that people can enjoy a better work life balance.
I understand what you’re saying, that 50% is better than nothing. Which obviously, I agree with. My contention is that even 50% is not enough to make up for what the worker gives up. Obviously the lack of opportunities may force the employee to accept the arrangement, but I’m speaking about a work life balance overall.
And there are many positions where the cost of hiring/training/retaining employees is higher than 50%, so it’s more advantageous for employers to just give overtime, which employers obviously utilize. But because an employer can force the employee to work overtime, it’s not clearly a beneficial arrangement to both.
Meh, we're just talking past each other, probably were from the start. I'm saying, "time-and-a-half beats working on games at EA for 80 hours/week for base, your factory-working friend has it better than a lot of tech workers" and you're saying "overtime sucks". Both statements are true, we're just negotiating the price...er, wait, wrong metaphor.
Yeah, I worked for a while for an electronics component manufacturer that had a monthly hockey stick production schedule. For the first half of the month, I came in to work to wipe down my desk and bullshit with my coworkers. For the last week of every month, it was all-hands plus overtime. If the last day of the month happened to be a Monday, the production manager would try really hard to talk you into coming in for the weekend.
It was absurd. Sensible people hated that place, while a lot of other folks just accepted it as normal.
I suspect the conflicting accounts of life at Tesla work out similarly.
I worked on the line at GM, and it seem half the worker were always looking for some way to get less work or have someone else do part of their job while they get paid the same.
I was personally told to slow down because I was making my job look too easy, IE not as many workers were needed.
Those type of people would find working for Tesla a living hell where you are expect to work and not laze off. I am sure working at Tesla is hard work, but lots of people love working like that, however there are tons of people who will whine and complain if you try to get them to work properly.
I'm sure a lot of that will go away as their manufacturing process settles down. I like the recent announcement that they're going to simplify interior options, and that tells me that they're taking a look at optimizing their process.
Simplifying the process means better quality control, which means more predictability, which means less stress for employees.
I'd love to see them get on par with other car manufacturers on cars produced per employee per factory.
They're simplifying the Model X interior choices, that's a lower-volume model. Model 3's only interior option is color, black or white.
Tesla is not planning to get on par with manufacturers that outsource a lot more than Tesla does. In fact their new Chinese factory is planned to be even worse, because it will produce battery cells and car motors in-house.
So, less options for customers (not saying that e.g. Audi is exaggerating on that front) and full vertical integration. There are reasons why oitsourcing happened, I did not see a convincing explanation why it is good for Tesla not doing it.
And they keep hiring amazing people, so what's the problem? Isn't it great to have people come and go if they remain strong believers in the company and are ready to work again with Tesla?
For instance, John McNeill was Tesla's global sales and service VP and is now COO of Lyft. I wouldn't be surprised to learn about some deals between the two companies in the future.
My understanding is that the conditions inside of Tesla's manufacturing are brutal. I have friends who work on the production side and they effectively tell me corporate culture is driven by fear. I am definitely cheering Tesla on for global warming reasons but I worry that Musk is running a Faustian bargain that may bite him in the backside long term.
Well, at least until now there actually was something to fear considering the threat of default on Teslas upcoming loan fulfillment. Hopefully with long term profitability in the horizon the working conditions will ease.
The risk is that companies may increasingly try and avoid hiring more women in the future; but it could also be that employers, who want to seem more socially responsible, may take the financial hit and invest in the up-front-costs in order to get access to a larger labor pool.