News about important events for IT industry workers

On October 10, 2022, we proposed to write a letter to Mikhail Mishustin with a request to provide reservations to IT specialists from the mobilization call. Reading the comments to the article, it seems that many do not understand why this is necessary. If you think that you need to relocate and make political demands, and the union should only strike instead of writing any letters, then it’s time to tell you:...

Do you code in Python and always wanted to jump on the GraphQL hype train? Could not choose between Graphene and Ariadne? We suggest trying Strawberry. Strawberry is a code-first library with batteries included. 2.6k stars on GitHub. You can use dataclasses and pydantic-models for your types. Strawberry supports both sync and async by design. We’ll create an app for creating and retrieving users and their books in this guide....

“Socialny Rukh” (Social Movement) initialized the petition demanding the President of Ukraine to veto bills No. 5161 and No. 5371. The first law deprives employees of a stable income, and the second allows for unjustified dismissal. In these two laws, deputies voted to legalize zero-day contracts and permitted depriving up to 70% of the country’s workforce of the protection guaranteed by national labor laws. The latter measure means that the national labor code no longer applies to workers in small and medium-sized enterprises....

Corporate values ​​are very important! «It’s about taking care of our company and each other», this is how Mark Zuckerberg formulated the three values ​​of «Meta, metamates, me». But will one of the richest people on the planet really support his colleagues? According to our data, soon (August 2022), Meta plans to cut costs due to declining profits. Zuckerberg decided to boost performance goals and get rid of those «shipmates» who «shouldn’t be here»....

About a week ago we wrote about the Game Insight situation. Back then we only suspected that the company plans to avoid paying compensation to the downsizing employees. Now it is clear that they don’t want to follow the laws and rules: a liquidator representative has talked to the employees to clarify the situation. A liquidator is a private company that makes money by closing other organizations. And Game Insight has hired one in Russia....

Military conflict in Ukraine rages on. A nationwide tragedy makes Ukrainians cast aside their differences and unite in the face of a threat to their national identity and physical existence: spontaneous communities of mutual assistance are being formed, and volunteer initiative is off the charts. However, the laws of market competition take their toll even in such a terrible situation. While bombs are falling, local Ukrainian authorities are waging their own war - a war for IT people....

On May 6, 2,000 industry trade unions held a nationwide strike, which was attended by trade unions: medical workers, bank employees, railway workers, teachers, power engineers, port workers, postal workers, oil workers. The strikes have been going on since the beginning of April, but there is little information about the actions of the strikers. On April 28, The All Ceylon United Teachers Union (The All Ceylon United Teachers Union) brought 240,000 teachers and 16,000 school principals to the streets....

Kirill Ukraintsev made a great contribution to the development of the independent trade union movement in the Russian Federation. In June 2020, he became chairman of the Courier trade union. Kirill managed to organize more than 300 couriers, laying the foundation of a trade union that fights for its rights to this day. The first result of the union of couriers into a trade union was the full payment of salary debts under the threat of a strike....

Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, “used the occasion” to speak directly to software developers and IT workers on April 7th, 2022. He said: “Folks – developers, programmers, IT crowd – let’s make our ecosystem, we have everything we need for it! There are elements of this ecosystem that need some improvements. We have to make out own online shop because AppStore and GooglePlay can practically restrict us from downloading apps soon”....

A bit about Bitsy Hi all! If you’ve always wanted to learn how to make games but didn’t know where to start, I recommend you giving Bitsy a try. It’s a full cycle HTML-based game editor for creating simple games and small worlds. This means that your game is as undemanding and accessible as possible. It can be easily published on Itch.io or any other free platform and shared with a wide range of players....

На фоне оттока кадров и сокращения рабочих мест, глава РАЭК предложил создать профсоюз для IT-специалистов. Но такое предложение звучит не впервые, идея создания профсоюза в IT-отрасли звучала и на конференции в Иннополисе в ноябре 2021 года, и чуть ранее в интервью с гендиректором АНО “Россия – страна возможностей”, и даже на Хабре. В общем, предложение правильное и разумное, но как профсоюз, управляемый бизнесом, сможет нормально представлять интересы работников? Ведь бизнесу хочется нанять работника подешевле да с квалификацией повыше, а работник наоборот, хочет зарплату, соответствующую квалификации, ДМС получше да удобное рабочее место....

Activision Blizzard анонсировала, что временные и внештатные сотрудники группы по контролю качества (QA) подразделений Activision Publishing (AP) и Blizzard переводятся в штат с 1 июля. Это примерно 1100 человек, занятых преимущественно тестированием игр и других продуктов компании. Джессика Тейлор, вице-президент Activision Blizzard по корпоративным коммуникациям, заявила, что с 17 апреля у них будет новая минимальная почасовая ставка в 20$ (по некоторым данным, оплата была $18,5 в час), а также эти сотрудники получат право участвовать в бонусном плане компании и получать полагающиеся штатным сотрудникам преференции....

On April 7, 2022, the KGB of the Republic of Belarus recognized the trade union of radio-electronic industry workers as an extremist organization. The REP trade union was founded in 1990, its founders were 93 primary trade union cells. Now it unites more than 2000 employees. In addition, the trade union is a member of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, as well as the international trade union IndustriALL, which unites more than 50 million workers around the world....

Good day, friends. I would like to briefly tell you about the technologies used for our website. Perhaps this easy-to-learn technology will help other start-up groups or trade unions easily organize an independent information distribution channel. We don’t have a lot of free human resources, so we chose the “cheap” option and built a website on the Hugo static website generator. This principle of building sites is interesting in the absence of a database and a backend transmitting data from the database to the front....

On March 29, The Verge reported that Yandex fired more than two dozen employees from its division in Ann Arbor (USA, Michigan), which was engaged in the development of unmanned vehicles and robotic delivery in partnership with GrubHub. The company calls the revocation of licenses the official reason for the dismissal. The Michigan Department of Transportation itself (MDOT) denies this fact. And the company presented a slightly different version of the situation to the dismissed employees, blaming the suspension of work and dismissals on the governor of the state, who was forced to ask for the revocation of licenses due to complaints about a Russian company collecting data on American roads....

Recently, a senior developer of a large oil company turned to our IT union for advice. After employment for remote work, it suddenly turned out that not all document flow takes place in electronic form. And to sign some documents, I had to go to the employer’s office from a neighboring region once or twice a month at the expense of personal time. The immediate supervisor could not or did not want to solve this problem....

Intel has announced that it is suspending all operations in Russia. And at the same time, it closes the Russian development office in Nizhny Novgorod and transfers 1,200 employees to idle with salary retention. Previously, the company had already received a warning from the Ministry of Labor about the inadmissibility of downtime, but this did not stop them. Many excellent open source tools were developed in this office, including: OpenCV, OpenVINO, CVAT and other libraries for machine learning and GPU computing....

Hi colleagues, Here is a first union digest, filled up with last month’s events in IT. Most of them are related to recent tragic events. IT Union is not a political organization. Our mission is to help employees fight for their rights, regardless of their citizenship. However, union is able to influence decisions taken by certain states if these decisions affect the rights of employees (e.g. in case of increase the retirement age), but it’s only possible if the majority of industry employees are the part of union....

On Monday, March 28, a nationwide two-day strike began in India, organized by the country’s ten central labor unions. It was attended by 200 million workers, farmers and concerned citizens, which constitutes about a quarter of the working population. People took to the streets of cities in the industrial and extractive regions of the country, dissatisfied with the antipeople government policies, people took to the streets of cities in industrial and resource-producing areas of the country....

The other day, the government issued a decree on support measures IT industry. The text of the decree on kremlin.ru IT companies: Allocate from the budget funds for grants. Provide preferential loans at a rate of up to 3%. Cancel income tax. Give tax benefits. Exempt from tax and other checks, apparently from labor too. To provide IT companies with a sales market by stimulating purchases. Employees of IT companies:...