I’ve never been to lunch with one, although my son worked as a welder’s helper at a pipe-fitting company.

But having a union doesn't mean "never do layoffs" either -- it just means that they are negotiated. Usually that means severance packages are standardized and the layoff process is transparent. It also often means you have to try and place suitable employees internally, rather than let people go while you are actually still hiring for roles that they could be doing.

In general, even with a union, the company has far more leverage anyway (they control the money) -- a union makes it a negotiation between two organizations (one of which, the company, has more power) vs. a negotiation between the HR & legal departments of a company and one individual employee.

Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.

I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.

(edit: typo fix)

At the time it felt like a specific reaction to Shopify mining this information to compete. (I have no insider knowledge if they were or were not).

Of course, the answer can be many things -- now it's AI, back then it was 17track, Google, Shopify, etc.

For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.

For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.

On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!

This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.

Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.

IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.

I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?

It's a weird kind of guilt because it's not like we individually created these economic conditions; we were just there at the right time to take advantage of them before they were gone. I tend to think of this as "useless guilt" (vs. guilt about taking a transatlantic flight or other high-impact activity -- which I still do, but I think that guilt is societally useful)

This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.

(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?

It is frustrating for security to act like you’re a total idiot for following a process another terminal says is fine (like leaving very small electronics like Kindles in your bag).

Oh, well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770279

Points: 4

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685174

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

If you left comments, it was generally possible to figure out who said what based on idioms etc. but they were kept separate from the scores anyway.

I thought it was a good system but I'm pretty sure it was gone by the time I left in 2023. If nothing else, I don't think a system based on that kind of radical candor can survive the first or second round of layoffs at any company.