> Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-)
I think part of the problem is that we non-organized workers (i.e. most tech workers and our similar peers) have accepted the unfortunate media-fueled trope that collective worker action equates to organized-crime connected unions like those of the Hoffa-period Teamsters.
Unfortunately, many white collar workers also don't want to be associated with the image of people in hard hats, even though their power relationship with their employers is not that different from those of blue collar workers. Acknowledging this would mean acknowledging the existence structural impediments to their career advancement that make the chances of their entering the C-suite very low, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
The vast majority of worker unions (nurses, teachers, international brotherhood of X, etc, etc) are completely above-board organizations.
Also, this outcome demonstrates that there are many forms of collective action that are not full unions. The degree of organization needed depends on the circumstances (The early strong manufacturing labor unions emerged partially as a result of violent repression of worker protests by companies).
One could even argue that the anti-poaching class-action lawsuit against large SV companies many years ago was itself a form of collective action.
> The degree of organization needed depends on the circumstances
Not as much as you might think. Militant labor unions are still extremely beneficial despite the lack of Pinkerton assassins. The hardest part in organizing is going from 0 to 1. Once you've gotten to the point of collective action, the idea that you don't then go on to form a union is as wild as a startup building an MVP, getting funding, and then just disbanding.
Fun fact: Pinkerton is still around and is "the world's leading provider of corporate risk management solutions" [0]. Companies regularly hire Pinkerton muscle to handle "security threats" related to union organizing.
Interestingly, even Google retains Pinkerton to investigate internal leaks [1].
All you have to do is try to run a conference in Chicago to see how bad unions can make things though. Sorry, you can’t plug that in, only a card-carrying electrician is allowed to do that! And he’s on break.
My point here is that unions have done plenty to make a bad name for themselves, blaming everything on the media is simplistic.
>only a card-carrying electrician is allowed to do that!
Had I not experienced it directly (multiple times!), I would 100% think it was hyperbole.
My first 'real' job was flying around and recording conferences for a little shop. Chicago and Philly were by far the worst places to work. I was literally not allowed to plug my little hand held recorder into the wall without paying for a qualified union electrician to come in and oversee me.
Ignoring the over absurdity of it, on a personal level, how is it not completely embarrassing and demeaning for the electrician that gets called in? Is watching somebody plug in a cell phone charger fulfilling? I mean, I guess getting paid is getting paid, but damn, it just felt Kafkaesque every time. You take someone with talent and an actually useful trade, and then you make them watch other people plug things into wall sockets.
:-) wonder what would have happened if that happened when I worked at BT "sorry comrade, that is telecommunications equipment can I see your CWA card, oh and did I mention that I am branch secretary (president) of my branch.
Its more the rip off prices for lighting and network service that piss me off
You're talking about being "simplistic", yet you want to reduce all unions to one bad example (which seems to protect the members of the union) from a city nicknamed in part due to its overall political corruption[0]?
Plus, if you read more than one sentence of the parent post, you'll see it blames than just the media.
A few days after Kent State a group of construction workers head into a protest against Vietnam and pretty viciously attack a crowd of 1000 college students. There is plenty of blame to go around for this event (like any occurrence of mob action) and many sociological trends that led to this, but historians tend to mark this event as the “beginning of the end” for Union influence in the US.
You ignore the non-union organizations that also protect their own. ABA, AMA, etc. control the supply of doctors/lawyers and accomplish the same end result as unions: higher wages and less competition.
Most unions and guilds do this. I don’t find it unreasonable, and would still sign on to a technology workers union, dues and all. Credentialing? I’d be okay with that, otherwise if everyone can “be an engineer” just by saying so, no one is (and credentialing would be superior to the white board gauntlet mess tech interviews currently are).
Collective action is the only way to improve working conditions and dissuade abusive employer practices.
With the current hiring process mess I'm a strong proponent of more universal credentials. I would happily pay and test through some licensing option once than invest similar time for some of the current interview processes at each company. My time is more important than playing continual ambiguious and inaccurate qualification games.
And this shows exactly why many oppose unions in the tech industry, despite the incredulity of union supporters: they make it easier to impose rules which many of us profoundly disagree with.
AIUI, unions represent employees, guilds represent independent members of a profession or vocation. Said another way, neither the AMA nor ABA negotiates compensation for their members.
But that's horrible. I don't want to throw up barriers to entry, in order to keep out new comers.
There are many great engineers that I know who would have been barred from the industry, if we had anything at all similar to the barriers to entry in the medical or "real" engineering industries.
It is because of this that if there is ever a software union, I am going choose "defect" every single time.
I am not going to let these new-comers, that I know, be barred from the amazing jobs in tech, just because they didn't get a degree or pass a test or whatever.
When it comes to development and security engineering a certain demonstrated base qualification might not be a bad thing. It's pretty unbelieveable how quality is handled in software engineering...
When I think about self driving cars I can't help but think about the Therac-25.
Software bugs kill people. Not all software bugs, and not all software, but the lines are getting blurrier. It's not just medical equipment. Phones explode. A connected coffeepot could burn a house down.
The Toyota acceleration bug (where cars would accelerate uncontrollably) was preventable if industry standards were followed. These aren't things you'll find in a Martin Fowler book, there are specific best practices for reliable embedded systems.
If you want to say that people working in self driving cars should have to pass qualification tests or whatever, I don't care about that.
That is a small amount of people though. The vast majority of people are not working on anything at all to do with self driving cars or medical equipment or space X.
Instead, what I care about preventing, and will fight extremely hard to stop, is barriers to entry for the most common software out there.
This most common job being the web developer.
We do. It need Industry standards in order to stop people from making website or apps. If a button doesn't work, in some dumb app, it does not matter. At all.
You might come up with some weird edge case, but we both know that whatever example you come up with is going to be the exception, and not the rule.
The reality is that for the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there, the stakes and consequence of failure are very low.
Anyone handling PII is dealing with high stakes. That's not my opinion, that's the post GDPR world we live in. And that's pretty much everyone in the B2C space.
In America nobody cares about that. This isn't going to effect any of the major companies that matter, and is already causing companies to merely stop doing business in countries that have bad laws like this.
But also, I don't care. I will defect and fight every step of the way any of your efforts to keep out people from non-traditional backgrounds. (regardless of whatever misguided reasons you have to keeping people from non-traditional backgrounds out of the industry)
Your only options are to try to make some sort of law, which is extremely unlikely to happen in the US, or form some sort of union. And I will defect that union hard. Along with a whole lot of other people who do not want to see this industry destroyed. We will defect and sabotage any attempts to do this any way.
Fortunately for me, though, the anti barriers to entry side of the debate and anti union side of the debate is currently massively winning, and the people who are trying to throw up barriers to entry are losing.
All I have to do stop by the nearest tech bootcamp to see just how much the pro barriers to entry side of the debate has lost this war. And those barriers to entry are only continuing to be lowered.
It has never been easier to become a professional programmer. And it is only getting easier.
There have always been barriers to entry to be a programmer. For every self-taught coder, from both the pre-CS as a degree days to the modern day bootcamp devs, there several times as many employers who only want graduates from top-league schools or FAANG experience. Credentialism is not being advocated for by employees, but by employers. If anything, a union could be useful to combat restrictive hiring practices.
The tech world has changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. I know many people who got into the industry by merely going to a tech bootcamp, which got them into a junior engineering position.
Yes, there are still barriers to entry. But the barriers to entry have been massively reduced over the last 10 years. Going to a bootcamp, and getting a job within a couple months used to be unheard of.
Your opinions on what a union "could" be are vastly different than the opinions of what other people want. This whole thread is me responding to a person who literally wants to raise the barrier to entry to tech.
Credentialism is very much being advocated for, by many pro-union/pro-guild people. And history has shown that whenever a union, in every single industry in the world, gets enacted, the result is higher barriers to entry.
Go look at the American Medical Association. Go look at the American Bar Association. Go look at the actor's guild. Screen writers guild. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Pick any high skilled labor union/guild and you will see an organization that is creating barriers left and right, and making it harder for people to get into the industry.
Yes, the current tech industry could be better. But the pro-union people are the ones who are most advocating in favor of keeping out competition/newbies/immigrants, you name it.
The way of "getting around it" is to block all traffic coming from certain countries.
Sure, they might sue you anyway, but just imagine how many tens of billions of dollars in damages would be caused to European countries if Google or Facebook started blocking all traffic going into and out of these countries.
There would be huge negative political consequences, that the citizens of these countries would not stand for.
Also, it doesn't matter if they sue you, if your company is entirely based in the US. american companies don't worry that it is illegal to be gay in Saudi Arabia, so I see little reason why they would worry about bad laws in Europe.
But anyway this is completely irrelevant to the topic of conversation, which is barriers to entry in the tech industry.
And in order to fight these barriers to entry, I will defect, and sabotage any unions that try to do this, at every step of the way.
Security is an economic choice of the producing firm for the most part, and there are plenty of certifications and degrees that employers can discriminate on but do not. They even might have the security training and still fuck up.
Reality is, most customers do not want to pay the price for extra security, other than the CYA (Cover Your Ass) kind and it shows.
There need be no credentialing or collusion or universal contract requirements or wage demands. Credentialing/licensing would be particularly ridiculous. A tiny organization with just a lawyer, phone and a website to share info would likely be completely adequate. After all, we are not a group as vulnerable to abuse as coal miners etc.
This is the thing. I'm never going to be stopped from working with a guy who wants me to work with him simply because some moron in an ivory tower thinks I don't have the credentials. This is good. I won't accept the alternative.
The way quality assurance works in software engineering is way below any other industry - so I wouldn't be surprised if at one point some base qualifications are needed, much like a doctor, architect, nurse or teacher...
Oh I'm of the opinion that it will happen. But I aim to delay it as long as possible until my career ends. After that y'all can turn into a super-IBM. Be my guest.
I don't build things that will kill people if they're wrong. If I get this slightly wrong, the wrong people will be advertised the wrong car. The world won't end.
There's a new story about passwords getting hacked and leaked every month, if not every week. This industry needs stronger standards, and if the industry doesn't come up with it ourselves, the law will.
Don't complain to me, complain to all of the Facebooks that resell data to third parties, and all of the Googles who store that so that the NSA can tap into it, and all of the Equifaxes that leak all the data so the criminals can make use of it.
> many white collar workers also don't want to be associated with the image of people in hard hats, even though their power relationship with their employers is not that different from those of blue collar workers
I'm not sure that it's reasonable to bucket the bargaining position of all white-collar workers together. The negotiating strength of an employee is strongly tied to the supply and demand of other workers with a similar skillset, which varies widely within "white collar" industries.
> Acknowledging this would mean acknowledging the existence structural impediments to their career advancement that make the chances of their entering the C-suite very low, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
No amount of collective action is going to significantly increase an individual worker's chance of making it into the C-suite. It's a simple question of numbers.
Also, tech workers willingly buy into a very harsh libertarian ideology. It is hard to accept that as an employee in a company, we are more likely the blue-collar Joe Six-Packs, not the John Galts.
I think part of the problem is that we non-organized workers (i.e. most tech workers and our similar peers) have accepted the unfortunate media-fueled trope that collective worker action equates to organized-crime connected unions like those of the Hoffa-period Teamsters.
Unfortunately, many white collar workers also don't want to be associated with the image of people in hard hats, even though their power relationship with their employers is not that different from those of blue collar workers. Acknowledging this would mean acknowledging the existence structural impediments to their career advancement that make the chances of their entering the C-suite very low, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
The vast majority of worker unions (nurses, teachers, international brotherhood of X, etc, etc) are completely above-board organizations.
Also, this outcome demonstrates that there are many forms of collective action that are not full unions. The degree of organization needed depends on the circumstances (The early strong manufacturing labor unions emerged partially as a result of violent repression of worker protests by companies).
One could even argue that the anti-poaching class-action lawsuit against large SV companies many years ago was itself a form of collective action.