Good for them. The structural change needed in our industry is for labor (or, to use a term we're apparently more comfortable with, "talent") to reassert itself, and for tech giants to reconcile themselves to the fact that they're accountable not just to their shareholders but to their employees. I hope this gets nasty, and that these FB employees ultimately find recourse in the NLRA.
We forget that this industry is still young. It's probably not even in its adolescence. When I started working, there was no such thing as an Internet giant. There was Intel and Microsoft and 30 different PC clone vendors and a bunch of small software shops competing to get their boxes on the shelves at Microcenter. A lot of ideas we take as axioms --- for instance, the idea that developers can't organize to coerce changes in their working environment --- haven't earned that status, and deserve to be challenged.
We forget that this industry is still young. It's probably not even in its adolescence. When I started working, there was no such thing as an Internet giant. There was Intel and Microsoft and 30 different PC clone vendors and a bunch of small software shops competing to get their boxes on the shelves at Microcenter. A lot of ideas we take as axioms --- for instance, the idea that developers can't organize to coerce changes in their working environment --- haven't earned that status, and deserve to be challenged.