My Dad owns a construction company in a highly unionized region. He is an advocate for unions, although he acknowledges that quality varies among them. That said, many of the conditions where unions are beneficial don't seem to apply in tech:
* Vocational training: unions in our area run schools to train craftsman (e.g. carpenters). This increases productivity and screens for quality.
* Shifting workforce: Construction companies expand/contract as they get big jobs. The union is a clearinghouse that enables tradespeople to switch between companies as they expand/contract. The union also helps by running benefit programs that travel with the workers.
* Commodity-ish labor: Most carpenters have about the same productivity, so it makes sense to negotiate their compensation in bulk. Unions don't work as well when productivity/value varies greatly between workers.
I also worked as an apprentice carpenter for several summers during college. I wouldn't say that the carpenters I worked with had a glowing view of the union. They seemed suspicious that the union reps were corrupt, and talked about how they would "shut down the job" over minor union infractions. They also believed the "hall" was corrupt/political in how it matched carpenters who were out of work to jobs. Several were also contemptuous of what they saw as the union discouraging hard work (if you were working hard, you were "ruining the job.")
The main point I am trying to make is that unions are complex from both the employer and employee side.
Vocational training absolutely could be done in tech, web/app development is much closer to carpentry than it is to computer science in my view.
Unions are definitely complex, it's not a silver bullet to solve issues in the workplace. But at its core it's a group of people negotiating as a unit: the rest is just the natural evolution of a group where some power has been attained. More members means more organization needed to keep everything straight, and more organization means more barriers to joining. Once there's a real structure to the power a union gets, it's subject to the same people problems as an other organization.
Carpentry/electrical/plumbing/factory product and process is very standardized, but IT is still quickly evolving and requires adaptation and innovation, making it harder to predict how well someone will handle a new problem based on previous work.
Welders or house framers take designs from engineers and (mostly) work to spec. I have to be the architect, engineer, and builder, usually only based on the approved visible UI, or rough description of a problem.
True, but one difference is that the market for carpentry talent is local. So, a company that is supporting a union in city X has a reasonable expectation of benefiting from its training.
With remote work, computer science is much more global, so someone could easily be trained by a union and then go work for a company that doesn't support the union.
Interestingly, this is one of my Dad's main complaints about unions these days: That our city trains great carpenters, but then they are recruited away to non-union areas.
> Interestingly, this is one of my Dad's main complaints about unions these days: That our city trains great carpenters, but then they are recruited away to non-union areas.
Why do they take the offers? I don't want to write anything bad about your father, but I think people wouldn't leave if they were paid well / felt good all around at their current job?
The AMA basically does the same thing in certifying schools and capping spots (which allows the schools to charge several arms' and legs' worth of tuition)
Strong unions could do vocational training in software but the private sector is doing a more than reasonable job of that and their incentives are to increase supply, not restrict it. Lambda School has only existed for two years and is already educating an appreciable fraction of the software engineers in the US.
One of the economic failure modes of strong unions is excessive credentialisation and a dualised labour market. I’m most familiar with unions in Ireland and we definitely have some of that. A plastering apprenticeship is either three or four years. Learning to plaster is at most a six month job. Se situation with tiling. For a knowledge worker example more directly relevant to programmers the teachers’ unions really push credentialisation and dualistation. During the recent economic downturn the government wanted to decrease the wage bill so the teacher unions doubly shafted aspirant teachers. They negotiated a doubling in the length of teacher certification, from a one year Higher Diploma in Education to a two year M.Ed. and a lower pay scale for teachers hired after a certain date. Education in pedagogy doesn’t even have any demonstrable effect on teacher effectiveness so this was pure waste with no benefit. Even before that in Ireland a permanent job as a teacher is fantastic but it will take the average new graduate of a teacher training programme at three to five years of substitute work, with no paid holiday or other benefits to get one, if they ever do.
In the U.K. with its easier entry and lower credential requirements [1] getting a job is easy but the working conditions are comparatively dreadful.
Unions generally make things better for those on the inside by making them worse for those on the outside.
[1] Do you have a psychology degree and want to teach Math? Do a conversion course and you can.
Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on.
Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films.
It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...
If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.
I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.
I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.
If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...
Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.
It's less cut and dry as to who should covered by a union and who shouldn't. With SAG (IIRC) there are specific rules with respect to screen time / speaking parts and so on. Who needs to be in the software union? Anyone who writes code? Do SQL analysts count? SaaS admins?
One advantage of software as a relatively ill defined career is that you can acquire responsibilities that look like software engineering without actually having a software job. Would my first employer have let me tinker around with the server (when my job was mostly Excel based) if it would have run afoul of union rules?
Same could be said about all the young and hopeful people that show up in L.A.... Self taught or professionally trained they show up to casting calls/interviews and demonstrate their work. Sometimes self taught actors get a good gig and join SGA and continue in their career. SGA does not assure anyone success it's just there to make sure actors don't get abused in the process.
Imagine how many people have gone to Silicon Valley and worked their butts off in a startup that really went nowhere. It would be nice if they had a union that had resources to indicate if the developer should quit, go to another startup, or take another position. An intermediary that could assist with some analysis of the cap/gap tables would be helpful. A union that could indicate the daily minimum pay with a startup would be nice.
If you want to tinker with code no one would stop you. But if you got a gig and tinker with code after 3 paychecks you could join a union. Many actors don't join SGA when they start. They take on multiple gigs and then decide if the fee is worth it. Plenty of youtube videos go over the options. It seems very flexible. I don't understand why there is resistance to the idea. It's not some factory union. A Software dev guild similar to SGA seems most appropriate. Essentially most dev roles are contract roles for a short amount of time 3 months - 3 years.
Imagine if we got residuals from our code... Best incentive to document, unittest, and push some code library.
Your points make sense, but it stands in contrast to unions of other industries like voice acting (SAG-AFTRA) where voice actors/actresses can vary a lot in quality/desirability and aren't exactly a commodity. I actually honestly don't know how voice acting unions could be successful.
By getting the highest quality people into the union, setting minimum rates for union talent, and throwing people out of the union who work for people who pay lower rates (to them or anyone else.) Offer auxiliary services like health insurance, pensions, and anything else that can be gotten at a group rate at cost to your members. Organize training in the profession to your members, and facilitate networking between members. Form mutual relationships with other unions to support each other in times of conflict with bosses.
Unions are best when practitioners in a field vary a lot in quality and desirability. When anybody can be quickly trained to do work, unions have to rely on physical means to help their members. That's why Taylorism/Fordism destroyed the unions.
Tech is an ideal place for unions skillwise, the problem is how easily offshorable the work is. A tech union would have to be a world union.
> By getting the highest quality people into the union, setting minimum rates for union talent, and throwing people out of the union who work for people who pay lower rates (to them or anyone else.)
Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated?
This model has a problem in that programmers are closer to lawyers or accountants than electricians. An individual lawyer/accountant/programmer can be tens or hundreds of times more valuable or productive than another. So you can see professional services firms. You’re not going to see electricians doing that because the productivity differential isn’t that enormous. And those programmer professional service firms can either continue that way, as consultancies, or augment themselves with capital and make a product. That’s a startup. The economics of knowledge workers are radically different from production workers. Even voice actors and script writers are inputs into the final product, a film. Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.
> Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated?
Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.) If they refuse, I have as much sympathy for them as I do self-taught doctors. There's nothing that needs to be coordinated; if a business hires non-union labor, union members cannot work for them and remain union members.
As for the rest, if you are good enough that employers would be happy to ignore the union because you're worth 100x any of them, you shouldn't have a problem, and the people you work for shouldn't have a problem. The union doesn't affect either of you, because they're paying you a boatload, and you're giving them all the work they need. [edit: and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.]
> Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.
And should. Co-ops and the self-employed don't need a union, they are a union.
> Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.)
If the members have enough market power to enforce union exclusivity they have no incentive to allow self-taught developers to join and every incentive to keep them out. A union is a labour cartel and economically it works the same as a capital cartel by capturing more of the productivity than they would under free competition by reducing supply of the input they control.
> and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.
Because unions try to represent the average worker, in areas with low productivity differentials they generally aim for seniority based pay and last in first out firing. This is another instance of the general pattern of helping members at the expense of non-members. In areas with large productivity differentials line the SAG they set minimum wages while punishing employers of non-members.
Unions grab a bigger piece of the pie by taking it from someone else, either the employer or potential competitors and they often redistribute the pie from higher to lower productivity workers.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that SAG sets minimum rates. If you want someone particularly desirable you will probably be paying a premium.
I think the real point of value for a programmer union would be figuring out the logistics of setting up a really good retirement plan that works between multiple employers. This is one place where individuals on their own cannot effectively negotiate - they have to take whatever retirement plan prospective employers offer, and if they work at small companies you're just happy to get offered something reasonable, rather than something optimized.
If there was a programmer's union that let you join as a union employee, you could take salary concessions for the union-mandated retirement plan contributions, and have both parties wind up ahead simply on tax-efficiency metrics. $110k salary and $100k salary + $10k retirement plan contribution cost the exact same to the company, but the latter has a lower overall tax burden on the employee.
Though it may not seem like safety is a big concern in tech right now, there are areas where it will be of concern. For example, Unions may be a good method to force safety concerns in self-driving cars and in IoT devices. Unions may help with health-care data and privacy. Unions may help with other forms of sensitive information like in judicial work and military work.
I'm not saying that unions are the only way to force safety, but they have been an effective force for safety in other areas in the past. Their effectiveness should not be discounted out of hand.
Interestingly, for my Dad's business (employs between 100 and 300 people) the cost of worker's comp insurance is the main driver of safety. Accidents/injuries drive up your workers comp costs.
His company employs one full time person whose job is to improve safety. The guy runs safety competitions (days without a serious accident) with prizes, does reviews, researches equipment and practices, etc.
He will also tell you that the biggest safety improvement they ever made was drug testing. He resisted it for a long time because he feared it would be difficult to hire people, but after they did it he became a big advocate of it.
And given the spate of sexual harassment and similar employee abuse stories from the past few years, it's not as if there aren't employee safety concerns in tech.
Nonetheless, this has been done in many places and it led to ridiculous results. For instance, if you have a booth at a convention center in Las Vegas somewhere, just try carrying your own box from your car to your booth. Just try! You will immediately get screamed at that it's a union job.
Sure, but you can't attribute that to unions and say that's a universal negative effect of unions, the same way that you can't say knives are universally bad because they've been used to stab people in the past.
This is an example of how it specifically is. The deal/law with the city/state/municipality/whatever is that they can't hire someone who's not associated with the union. That results in ridiculous shenanigans I just described.
It's more a function of a state or municipality's negotiation with a particular union, and can be a rational decision for a municipality to make. The choice is between hiring only union people, or not being able to hire any union people.
You could say that for ISP laws as well. "It's more a function of a state or municipality's negotiation with a ISP, and can be a rational decision for a municipality to make. The choice is between having an ISP/good broadband or not having one at all."
The point is that the mere existence of a union is not a sufficient condition for union-only laws; unions exist in places where such laws don't exist. As an argument against unions this is a slippery slope fallacy.
1. Tech is not a space where training can help improve worker's quality? Or is it just something that people are expected to do on their own and people who don't suffer?
2. You might be surprised to learn about the number of contractors in tech.
A 10x difference in productivity between apprentice and master carpenters is the absolute outer limit of what’s plausible for an individual worker. Any higher than that and we’re mostly discussing coordination and management. 10x is a lower bound on the plausible productivity differential between programmers. In terms of the technical complexity of tasks they’re capable of the continuum from someone who worked through Learn Ruby the Hard Way and David Hartl’s book, a Lambda School grad, an MIT CS grad and Peter Norvig will be over 100 if not higher. In terms of economic productivity Ruby guy on upwork, patio11 billing at $30,000 a week and Jan Koum or Notch encompasses well over 1000x differences in productivity. Billing rates within a consultancy will often be over 10x between a junior consultant and a principal, for the same company, in the same line of work.
I used to be all around anti-union. Now that I'm older I regret that position. There are bad unions and there are good unions. Sometimes they can be corrupt, but they never really exceed the corruptness of the corporate powers they negotiate with. It's an imperfect solution, but it's the only one that seems to work. The idea that we are all lone super stars that need to negotiate for ourselves is not only selfish, but more than likely wrong. Even if I considered myself a super-coder, should I be willing to sacrifice the well-being of everyone else in my field?
Tech workers feel pretty good here in the US because they are compensated better than most. The time to organize is now, not after worker supply has increased or during a recession when workers are more desperate. We have real issues (Ageism, Working Conditions, etc) that we'll never be able to address individually.
> but they never really exceed the corruptness of the corporate powers they negotiate with
I'm not convinced that is the case, nor is it an either or (union or corporate powers).
Your protection by the union depends on what the union negotiates... beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there. Then you are again at the mercy of your employer. I've had first had experience with "oh yeah they can do that" union situations.
Also premature organization IMO is much like premature optimization, more likely to be a bigger problem and miss any real issues.
IMO the question is--given the capacity for corruption and mismanagement in a union, is that better or worse than an individual negotiating with a corporation? Does the potential for a bad union outweigh the potential for a bad company?
I'll just say I don't think unions or the concept of a union needs to be perfect to generally have a positive effect. Maybe I'm naive.
I can see your point about premature unionization, but I do think we need to think about the future. I think there's a sense among tech workers that this period of high demand won't last. Maybe not unions now, maybe not unions in a traditional sense, maybe we do need to think of some kind of new paradigm better suited to tech work than say, a carpenter's union, but something.
>I'll just say I don't think unions or the concept of a union needs to be perfect to generally have a positive effect. Maybe I'm naive.
I can understand that.
Personally I've had experiences with two unions in different industries.
Each time the unions were IMO more of a hindrance to me than anything else. They were for me just another layer of bureaucracy with no more interest in me than a poor employer.
Worse yet they laid down policies that were so general that they were serious problems. Lots of protections for long time union members who simply didn't want to learn new things, etc.
Having said that, I would be interested in some "trade union" type things that maybe do things less traditionally compared to typical unions in the US.
You only have the current benefits because some sort of union fought for them. Call it government, call it whatever but it was an organization fighting on your behalf.
> beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there.
Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
Really a union fought for my unlimited vacation? I'm not being facetious but this perk is something that IME is unique (or at least originated in) silicon valley startups. Unions fought for more vacation but empirically speaking the free market led to even more.
And before we have the detractors of unlimited vacation coming in. Several of my colleagues take month long vacations, some multiple times a year, withiut reproach. It is objectively superior to my mother's union job
>You only have the current benefits because some sort of union fought for them.
I think that is a bit of a grand statement don't you think?
I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union... I wouldn't associate ALL benefits with a union, nor would that necessitate forming one simply if you thought those benefits were related.
I've worked for some nice people, I do belive they seriously want to provide their people benefits...
>Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
Negotiate what exactly? The Union and corporate relationship generally lays out what the lay of the land is, the the areas that the employer gets to decide are usually pretty obvious and the union isn't likely to call a general strike because an employer made a choice.
If you think that any of the labour laws, health benefits, vacation days, special leave (bereavement for example) or any of the other things you take for granted as part of your normal work day didn't come from unions continually pushing the envelope of worker's rights then I good luck with that.
The remuneration package offered by a business is typically dictated by the business sector (competitors) so saying "I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union." is faulty logic. If half the shops are union shops or competition for staff is fierce then pay/benefits will reflects.
Unions gave us 40 weeks (as opposed to 60+), no child labour, work place health & safety (maybe not such a big deal in tech but in other industry it's critical), etc... yes, government legislation made them law but unions applied pressure to get it done. While many aspects of unions have, or appear to have, outlived their usefulness they are still a very important tool in the employer-employee relationship.
Look at it this way, if unions were really just about the money then employers wouldn't care so much and attempt to keep unions out of their businesses (sometimes illegally). An employer could just say to the union "this is how much I have to spend on labour, how would you like it budgeted" and call it a day cause at that point it's just deciding on how big your slice of pie is.
I guess I sound like a union fanboy, which I'm not, but we shouldn't discount the very real impact and ongoing influence unions have.
I just don't buy into the idea that because unions have helped generally compared to decades ago ... that means you should consider one as a solution now.
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
This is an important and highly plausible scenario. Everyone in this thread who feels comfortable that they can get another job at the drop of a hat owes that feeling to the existing labor market, which is fueled nearly entirely by venture capital funding. If the economy goes through another Great Recession style downturn, funding will constrain, companies that aren't immediately profitable will reduce their workforces considerably, and hiring will drop.
If, today, you work for an organization with a few dozen or couple hundred employees, but it is really run by ten or twenty "Directors", "VPs" and "Executives", they likely have full control over the majority of the capital owned by the company. They are also likely to be highly paid, and own the majority of stock or RSUs. If a moonshot expansion plan fails, they will be fine. Executing on high-risk and high-reward business ideas is 100% in their best interests.
However, if employees organize, those who instead rely on the organization to feed and shelter their families will begin to have a say in whether it's worth dumping the organization's $30M Series C into some blockchain moonshot that may never pay off.
Frankly, I don't believe they'll be as inclined to say yes. The union may instead re-negotiate to redistribute that funding to workers salaries, or to invest it in training programs. This is a good thing if you're in this industry because you're an experienced and skilled worker who wants long-term stable employment, but perhaps a bad one if you're in it to hope you hit the startup lotto and get rich after selling our your stock at 26. If you run an organization, which would you rather have working for you?
Ironically, not only do tech workers aren't worried about this, they embrace it and encourage it. An enormous amount of work is being done to lower the bar, make things more accessible, reduce the need for diplomas and certifications, downplay the value of experience, etc. Basically ensuring that they'll see significant competition in the future (those initiatives don't help "a little". They literally change the landscape of the industry).
So it's a bit hard to convince people that they should work to protect their job when they're already working so hard to do the opposite (with the well being of others in mind, of course)
The problem is that there is a big difference in the effect Uber/Lyft had on places with functioning cab systems (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, DC--where Uber/Lyft should have gotten squashed by law) and those places where there wasn't (Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, etc.--where ridesharing was a boon)
While I'm not a big Uber/Lyft fan, prior to them the cab companies in the non-functional cities were atrocious.
I spent 40 minutes getting a bloody taxi at my lawyer's office in Las Vegas--and then had to wonder if I could get one back from the restaurant I went to. Getting from Monroeville to the Pittsburgh airport was a disaster. I can go on and on.
With Uber/Lyft in existence, a whole bunch of things don't happen with impunity anymore. Drivers can't refuse to pick you up. Drivers can't blow you off and not show up. Drivers can't refuse to take a credit card. etc.
Uber/Lyft aren't my favorite companies, but neither were the taxis.
Indeed, it is terrible that many more people can do a job now, with lower barriers to entry, and that the service is more easily available, more reliable and often cheaper. The medallion system of decreasing supply with employee drivers and a taxi regulator that did everything possible to protect drivers and frustrate consumer complaints about drivers not picking up black customers or refusing to drive people to places within the mandated service area was far superior for those who could buy medallions and rent them out to drivers, and for drivers who could refuse customers and still be able to pick up a fare.
Most estimates place wages for Uber and Lyft drivers at roughly the same as taxis after expenses are covered. And if you factor in the six (or at its peak, seven) figure cost of a medallion, it's basically impossible to claim that traditional taxi jobs are better than rideshare.
At the cost of billions in venture capital. The market is starting to correct itself now that most ridesharing companies are publicly traded profit seekers and cutting wages.
Not arguing its a bad thing that we make things more inclusive (my employer is very much into these initiatives and I fully support it and am involved in some of it!), but a lot of this growth happened in companies not exactly known for it. Netflix, Google, etc, were not paragons of fairness and inclusivity when they made it big.
I'm always amazed at the complete double standard between unions and companies.
Look at the discussion here: lots of people arguing against unions, saying they're just plain bad, or they're good in some industries but not in tech, or we just don't need them, or whatever.
And not to say that these arguments are wrong, but....
Hands up, how many of you think that it's a good idea to run a business with employees as a sole proprietorship?
I'm pretty sure there are no hands up. The first thing you do when you're going to create a business with employees is to organize. This is so ingrained that we don't even think about it. When was the last time you saw "Ask HN: do I need to incorporate?" Of course you do. There are many questions around where to do it and what type of corporation to create and what ownership structure you want to use and so forth, but there's no question about whether it's a good idea.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and we come up with many reasons why this may not be a good idea.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "corporation" and nobody takes even a moment to wonder whether or not this is a good thing to do.
If workers are better off without organization, maybe the same is true on the management side? Instead of big companies, we should have individual managers on their own, employing a team as a sole proprietor.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing.
Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to unions and are mostly created for legal reasons, not for anything related to collective negotiation?
Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual.
Corporations acting together are not analogous to a union because, legal fictions aside, corporations are not people.
But the activities of humans working together inside a cooperation to maximize some benefit, say a promotion or higher personal profit buy cutting employee costs vs a group of employees seeking a pay increases, seems a credible analogy.
I'm going to be controversial here. I don't think management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees. I mean, it happens occasionally, but it's not actually a normal conversation in a company.
Instead companies talk about how much they can afford to pay for salaries. Frequently they talk about increasing the cost of employees from the point of view of expanding. Should we hire more people? Will it improve the business? Should we increase salaries? Will it allow us to attract better employees?
When companies are talking about reducing or restricting the cost of employees, it's usually in the context of solving problems in the company. The company is losing in money in some areas. Should we lay off employees? Can we negotiate a pay freeze or a pay cut until the company can get in better shape? Will we lose too many employees if we do that? Will we lose our best employees if we do that?
The biggest problem I have with unions (being one of the few programmers who has actually worked as a programmer in a union) is that in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.
I honestly believe that the attitude of "They are doing it so we have to too!" is a thing that destroys companies. The Us vs. Them approach helps nobody. Yes, if you have no choice and the company you are working for has decided that they want "Us vs. Them" and you can't convince them to join you in making the company and it's employees successful, I can completely see the point of a union. For me, that's a last resort. I'll try everything I can to fix the problem a different way before I'll say, "We're going to organise so that we can effectively compete with you". This includes simply quitting my job and finding another one.
Or to be more clear: I greatly value working at a company where I wouldn't ever think of organising a union. I value working at a company where the company values me and sees it as a cooperative venture. I don't want to work for a company that views me as an adversary or as someone they need to manipulate. That's why I don't want a union. In my fairly long career I've worked for both kinds of companies, so I know both exist.
I agree that there is nuance and details that make it more useful in some cases than others. Conversely, unions can assist a companies survival. There are cases where even the teamsters(!) agreed to pay cuts to save businesses.
And of course it can occasionally go wrong and there can be incompetence just like everything else in this world. But there are some widely held beliefs that demonize unions more than should be.
For example[1], empirically the presence of a union does not correlates with a bad workplace or failing business because the bulk of last half of the twentieth century saw widespread union membership yet was dominated by enormous growth in both production and quality of life along side high job satisfaction. While the last 40 years with declining union membership has seen slower GDP growth and in some cases quality of life reversal. So unions can't be causing the problem.
And the Us vs Them attitude is certainly close to catastrophic. But people aren't going to go through the effort, stress and risk of forming a union unless there are already some never addressed grievances in the first place. The antagonism would have to precede the talk of unionizing not be caused by the appearance of the union. And after the fact, there is at least some small chance of discussing, explaining and solving the problems. But I too would bail long before it got that broken. But for tight labor markets, with few and poorly run industries, this choice doesn't exists.
> in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.
Those topics may dominate the discussions, but unions can be a way to leverage worker power for the good of the organization as well. How many times has a company turned out to have leadership that refuses to heed the concern of engineering, mandating development by sales bullet point and failing to allocate the necessary time to maintain product quality? How often does management order prioritize the wrong choices, leading to fiscal straits where the workforce suffers? How often are the concerns of the rank and file ignored, either dismissed at all-hands or filed away by powerless HR orgs? And how often do we hear stories of tech companies with toxic dysfunctional cultures?
There is at least some precedent for unions forcing leadership to be aware of market realities:
Everyone who works for a company is an employee of the company, with a wage (or an hourly rate), and potentially some equity as well. Every employee should be considering how to make the company more profitable, which could be by accelerating a development schedule, overdelivering in a new feature/performance, or hiring and retaining key talent.
The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market, and in a market as competitive as tech, this is particularly true. Management can decide what tier of employee they want to target when they set hiring budgets and salary ranges, they can decide how risk averse they want to be with losing top talent with retention bonuses and benefits, but they don’t get to directly “minimize the cost of employees” in that sense.
Only a set of companies colluding together can act to minimize the cost like that, for example what we saw in the past with anti-poaching agreements, which the big tech companies were sued for successfully.
The individual corporation vs union analogy is highly tortured. Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
>Everyone who works for a company is an employee of the company, with a wage (or an hourly rate), and potentially some equity as well. Every employee should be considering how to make the company more profitable, which could be by accelerating a development schedule, over delivering in a new feature/performance, or hiring and retaining key talent.
Absolutely. And in a sufficiently abusive environment, none of that will happen. It is a terrible thing when executive staff destroy a company by creating a toxic environment. But employees would rather be improving the orginization since they need the company to survive and everyone would rather work with smart people than someone they have to carry.
But I know of cases where employee pressure in tech has slowed AI use in warfare and stopped physical abuse toward workers. I hear theory about it being bad but where has it made things worse?
>The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market
If that were true then negotiating would be irrelevant. And previous salary would not be the primary determiner of your next offer. And there would not be formulaic pay raise percentages that rewards those people who changes jobs frequently over those who say on and so are in fact more valuable but less savvy.
More than that, labor prices have as much to do with housing prices as anything else (from which extra expense neither employer nor employee benefits). That is not the tech market.
So skill availability is only tangentially related to compensation. The market favors a set of behaviors other than technical skill such as negotiation and job hopping. And ironically for the job hopper, who is selected _for_ by this system, would have minimum interest in the companies success.
>Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
Being incorporated has nothing to do with analogy. Or even to being called a company. It has to do with some communication being acceptable while other similar communication is not. It's also a specific description of the friction that emerges anywhere only a subset of people decide the allocation of revenue to the whole group including themselves. In this case, in a work place.
Which becomes more suspicious when the opposition to full participation in decision making is on moral grounds or is followed by implicit threats rather than showing how the arrangement is best for everyone.
Why aren’t corporations analogous to unions? They’re an organization of people who work together as one. When was the last time you heard about a bidding war between two different managers in the same company trying to hire the same person? It doesn’t happen because the company organization doesn’t allow it to happen. This is exactly the flip side of two union members not undercutting each other on pay because the union organization stops it from happening.
You say that corporations aren’t created for collective negotiation. When was the last time you bought something from a corporation? Did you negotiate with individual members of that corporation on the price? Do you get individual cashiers to bid for your business? Of course not, because the organization they belong to insists on handling price negotiation in a consistent fashion across the company.
I suspect a lot of the negative attitude toward unions comes from an incorrect assumption that a union must be a monopoly (or perhaps monopsony is the right term). I think that’s why you immediately jumped to “cartel” for the analogous organization on the other side. There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.
> There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.
There is a reason for it, actually: unions are exempt from antitrust regulations. Combined with closed shop unions (where legal) it can be effectively impossible to form a second union.
Those would be reasons a union can represent all workers in a field, not reasons it has to.
This seems particularly pertinent when discussing the possibility of starting a new union in a field that traditionally hasn't had any: you're not going to suddenly get all tech workers to join up. There will be plenty of space for competing unions, and plenty of space for non-union workers.
Employers often have much more power than employees. That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google, and therefore Google has a lesser incentive to offer me better compensation.
The above is sort of a lie -- in the case of the tech industry, there is a lot of competition for workers. Since everyone wants to hire SWEs, I have more negotiating power than other industries. If Google doesn't hire me, I could (presumably) get a job at Amazon, Facebook, a startup, etc.. Since I could find other offers, I wouldn't have much to lose if I don't take Google's offer, and Google will therefore have an incentive to offer me better comp. Because of the above, it's not clear to me that tech workers need a union right now.
In other industries, labor is a buyer's market. If there is only one or two employers in a region, then those employers can choose to not hire any one laborer. Not hiring one laborer might mean that an employer's capital is deployed slightly inefficiently, which is again unfortunate, but nobody will lose sleep over it. But since that one laborer has no alternatives, they must work for a lower wage or risk destitution. This is a big problem in academia, where it's very difficult for grad students to switch schools (admissions offices reduce student mobility) and there is only one employer -- the school.
So unions are not analogous to cartels for selling labor -- they are not necessary when there is a balanced labor market, like in tech. But for markets which favor employers, they may often be necessary to protect workers.
Funny enough, when I was in grad school, the graduate student employees formed a union. In a sort-of-parallel to your narrative, my department, Computer Science, had pretty good support for its grad employees. But many other departments were highly exploitative – splitting hiring lines that should have gone to a single student across three or four.. meaning that none of the recipients got a living wage but each still had a full workload. These departments were effectively trying to create an indentured servant class.
The union ended a whole list of bad practices virtually immediately. Even better, they negotiated us into the same benefits (healthcare, etc.) package that faculty received, which was a significant bump up even for students in the better departments like mine.
None of this would have been possible had the employees not been able to organize to realize their power.
> That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google, and therefore Google has a lesser incentive to offer me better compensation.
You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job. The analogue to you failing to get any job is Google failing to hire any employees, at which point it ceases to exist, which isn't the case for even the chronically unemployed. The comparison as you've constructed it proves the _opposite_ of your claimed point (though I should note that I think the whole construction is weak; I'm certainly not drawing the conclusion that workers have more power than Google)
> You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job.
Yes, which is why I clarify in the second paragraph that my first paragraph is a lie. As a tech worker with a few years experience, it is unlikely that I can't find any job (i.e. it is likely I can find a job).
But my first paragraph is _not_ a lie if you replace Google with MIT/Princeton/Harvard/Columbia/other universities, at which there are currently unionization efforts among graduate students. Or industries/regions where there are fewer employers or high switching costs.
Cartels are not collective bargaining - they are collective price fixing by market suppliers. Employee unions negotiate with employers, while supplier cartels do not negotiate with market consumers. Not the same by a long shot.
Also, if you look at the history of corporations, they are originally created to give the capital contributors equal share in the control of the company. Hence the word shares.
For example, you could front your ship for a spice voyage to India, while other people front the crew and funds for supplies, and you would have a percent control of the endeavor equal to the value of your ship. Voting shares today are not much different, just scaled appropriately.
> When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "corporation" and nobody takes even a moment to wonder whether or not this is a good thing to do.
That's where the organizations themselves banded together. The companies involved in that lawsuit still collectively, within themselves, make hiring and firing decisions every day and we don't bat an eye.
There's no "banding together" or any sort of collective negotiation on the part of the employers. It's the employee negotiating with the employer. Why would we bat an eye at the fact that companies "within themselves, make hiring and firing decisions every day"? The only way that wouldn't be the case is if companies don't employ anybody.
Literally no one is against employees banding together. What most anti union people are against is laws mandating employers can only hire from one particular union. That is like a law that mandates one company as the sole provider of toilet paper.
>If workers are better off without organization, maybe the same is true on the management side? Instead of big companies, we should have individual managers on their own, employing a team as a sole proprietor.
The benefit in tech is options. Don't like your job, get another one. Don't like your boss, get another one. For many locations it's just the matter of turning a button on Linkedin or for many people sending some emails.
That keeps people idealistic, vocal and demanding of the behavior from their employer/bosses. This is not the norm in other business functions. Unfortunately.
This current state of affairs gives employees a lot of power, as you observed, but it's important to realize it will not last. The downturn will come. The question is whether we want to use our current ephemeral labor power to protect ourselves when the downturn comes, because organization will be 100x more difficult when things go to shit and people don't think they have the luxury of risking their career to build a union.
There's a dichotomy in software development between the developers who represent single points of failure in an organization and the increasing number of "replaceable" developers i.e. developers versed only in popular frameworks or who hold introductory/recent-grad levels of domain knowledge with no desire to go further.
I think right now were in a "golden age" where the latter group still holds power and can command decent salary. I'm convinced this will start to change in 2-3 years and a lot of people who came in for that golden age are going to face a shocking reality that they aren't as privileged as they thought they were.
With the fall of the second group software companies will have much more leverage across the board and we'll see darker and darker patterns prosper.
This exists in all industries. It is called experience.
Developers convincing themselves that they're single points of failure is arrogance, IMO. 99.9% of the time if you leave then someone can step right up and take your place. Oh sure there will be costs, lost productivity, maybe an outage, but the world keeps turning. So go ahead and take that vacation.
The OP here mentions that they can just go to another shop and get work if they do not like their current shop. That's fine, but the employers can do the same too. They can fire you and get another person as well. Granted, right now, the employee holds a lot more power in the market, but that will ebb over time, and it may even switch.
I don't know, on the one hand I agree that S.P.O.F. in the technical sense doesn't translate to the HR sense such that there will always be someone who can come in and learn everything needed to handle the job.
On the other hand its like a mediocre army doing a great job because of a great general. That general leaves/dies and the army falls apart or is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
Especially at smaller orgs with constrained resources, they may replace their technical lead but if the replacement flounders, and the replacement's replacement flounders, the whole org becomes FUBAR. In this sense that original technical lead becomes ipso-facto irreplaceable (IMO).
I think you're right. And we've had a "golden age" end twice already: first in the 1980s, which was double-whammied when they cracked-down on contractor labor practices, and again after the dot-com burst. Both times left a lot of carnage and a lot of bitter people who swore off the industry.
And both resulted in a labor shortage a few years later.
I suppose an argument could be made that unionization would increase the output of the technology sector by virtue of preserving the labor pool, along with all the expertise and domain that would normally evaporate, during down-cycles.
Also, lots of people seem to be equating unionizing to having some sort of fixed wage. In reality, it comes down to how the union decides to structure its contracts -- several unions simply dictate a minimum rate/wage, and leave room for negotiation. It's why SAG offers people minimum day and weekly rates and SAG movie star can negotiate a multi-million dollar contract.
I will share my thoughts. Happy to be challenged and discuss more.
I think instead of looking for a past era solution we should look for a completely new solution set. Why not work on creating open systems. May be instead of getting a leverage over employers, tech people should contribute and create parallel systems. Which instead of creating monopolies help anyone challenge the status quo easily. I think it already happens to a great degree with many engineers and even companies contributing their tooling, research and solutions to open source.
May be we just need to accelerate that trend?
We totally should walk away from zero sum view. So not employer vs us. But how do we make sure that engine for innovation and opportunities keeps on running and keep on creating new companies
The idea that unions exist only to get a larger slice of the static profits pie is, itself, a zero-sum view :)
When employees feel represented and empowered, when we have real ownership in the company - not just a few thousand $ in stock grants while billions are spent on dividends/stock buybacks, but an actual seat at the table where decision are made - then we want the company to succeed. We will work harder and become more invested in our product than any corporate morale-raising initiative could ever hope to achieve. This grows the pie.
Slackers exist whether there is a union or not. Whether it's an overburdened manager ignoring an employee, a nepotism hire, or an employee who gets lost in the payroll system and becomes their own manager, corporate waste is a very real thing.
If a downturn comes, it will be due to larger economic reasons. If firms aren't profitable and need to cut costs, having a union that makes that more difficult could actually exacerbate the downturn. I'd rather have to lay off under performers and keep the company in business, than go out of business and have everyone lose their jobs.
Corporations are run so they suck as many profits out of the company as possible during the boom times, then "cut costs" (aka dump overboard the workers who created those profits) at the slightest change of the economic winds. Unions change that equation; corporations won't be able to run that strategy, and will maintain a cushion to get through the inevitable downturn.
I have never in 20+ years of experience seen a company dump high performing engineers just to lower costs. It's those very engineers that engendered the success the company enjoys. I have seen good teams cut but that's only when macro issues have made it necessary.
What you say is true, however these things can be negotiated with a union.
All a union does is give centralized power to the employees. If employees need to be cut for survival or salaries need to be lowered temporarily than these are things that an employer can provide proof of to the union and together with employees as a union work something out.
A union prevents the laying off of employees as a profit boosting measure even when it IS'NT required for survival. That is wrong on every count.
The employees are a greater part of the company than shareholders, board members, owners and C-level executives combined. Employees are not sheep to be herded and they deserve a centralized voice.
Someone else made this point elsewhere in the thread but I think it's a good one: As engineers, we have the opportunity to move into management and become entrepreneurs at a rate much greater than traditional industries. I've moved between high level IC and senior management a lot in my career. I've also started my own company. I don't think that profile is unusual for senior people in our industry. As such I'm likely to look at solving problems from all sides and negotiating with a union to "prove" that I need to lay people off sounds extremely troubling from an operational and efficiency standpoint. As a high performing IC I'm never at risk of being laid off unless the company really is in existential danger. As a manager I need to be able to let under performers go or lower costs as needed.
> I don't think that profile is unusual for senior people in our industry.
This doesn't make much sense from a numbers perspective. If entrepreneurs and managers manage more than one person then at the very least there should be double the amount of engineers then there are leaders, meaning at best your statements apply to only a third of all software employees if managers all manage 2 people.
Usually this isn't the case. Managers manage up to 5 people so your statements apply to on average 1/6th of all employees.
>As such I'm likely to look at solving problems from all sides and negotiating with a union to "prove" that I need to lay people off sounds extremely troubling from an operational and efficiency standpoint.
The efficiency standpoint is equivalent to the corporate standpoint. There's an additional standpoint you failed to consider. The moral standpoint. A 47 year old father of 3 kids depends on his job as an engineer to support his kids then you come along and fire him to replace him with a kid fresh out of stanford because this kid knows reactjs and will code 12 hour days for half pay.
There is no question, the scenario above is more efficient but it is also ethically wrong. Managers need to take steps to help the employee improve and managers should have their power limited so they cannot fire a father of three just because they don't get along or the kid straight out of stanford is his cousin.
Engineers make up the majority and backbone of a company they are not sheep for you to herd, hire and slaughter based off of operational efficiency.
>As a high performing IC I'm never at risk of being laid off unless the company really is in existential danger.
Good for you. I admire managers who care about the people they employ over managers who are efficient. The best managers are the ones who take underperformers and make them great.
Honestly this is a pretty naive view of management. The moral solution is to do what's best for the team. It's also not ethical to keep someone due to their demographics. If someone is performing well, you keep them if you can afford them (and reward them well!). If they're not doing good, you let them go. That's the same if the employee is 21 or 51. Game theory plays a huge role in successful operations. Even from a ethical perspective, it's bad to make everyone suffer (or lose their jobs) just to save one poorly performing person.
> The best managers are the ones who take underperformers and make them great.
In my experience (successfully managing a large amount of people) you can't really turn around underperformers in most cases and expending the energy to do so is harmful to the rest of the team. You should focus on your best employees and let the underperformers go asap. As an IC I also appreciate this strategy as I strive to be a top performer.
This is an overly rude and personal reply, but I'll respond anyway.
Efficiency is important to the survival of a company. You're not taking an organizational view of the situation. If you're inefficient, your competitors will eat your lunch and the whole company will be looking for new jobs. It happens all the time. You have to run the organization in the most efficient state that you can. It's the only ethical thing to do (it's also your job description as a manager).
> Additionally in most cases keeping an underperformer does not actually harm the team. they're salaries don't change whether you fire or keep the underperformer. The only thing that changes is your budget.
You're grossly underestimating the cost of keeping someone who's not very productive employed. People get paid out of that budget, it's not for the manager to pocket themselves. If I can repurpose that salary to someone who works hard and performs well I'll do it every time because it's what's fair to that individual, the rest of the team and the company at large.
> One day you'll eat your own medicine.
The key to success is understanding the real mechanics behind business. It's not personal, it's just the reality of living in a world with limited resources and competition.
>This is an overly rude and personal reply, but I'll respond anyway.
Rude? Did you not think calling my view of management naive in your first line rude? Here's a better way to start your first line:
"I understand your opinions, but I disagree, here's why."
After your little declaration of my opinion "naive" of course the following reply would be rude. Not being able to see that indicates to me that your management skills are naive. Maybe operationally you perform, but I highly doubt people under you would call you a good leader. Maybe I'm wrong. Throw out an anonymous survey and see how much people like working for you.
>Efficiency is important to the survival of a company. You're not taking an organizational view of the situation. If you're inefficient, your competitors will eat your lunch and the whole company will be looking for new jobs. It happens all the time. You have to run the organization in the most efficient state that you can. It's the only ethical thing to do (it's also your job description as a manager).
Of course it's important. Slave labor is possibly the most efficient form of managing people with limited resources. But of course nobody does this anymore because it's not ethical. A company and economy can survive, function and compete with certain inefficiencies and these inefficiencies are already required by law.
We are humans, not computers, life isn't just about game theory. Studies on economics and many other things show that humans don't behave according to that theory. If you behave that way, the studies indicate that you are outside of the norm.
>You're grossly underestimating the cost of keeping someone who's not very productive employed. People get paid out of that budget, it's not for the manager to pocket themselves. If I can repurpose that salary to someone who works hard and performs well I'll do it every time because it's what's fair to that individual, the rest of the team and the company at large.
I am not underestimating anything. It varies by situation. Many, Many companies operate at rates of inefficiencies that are incredibly higher than your process of immediately canning all underperformers AND these companies survive. There are tons of examples in society. I mean the military, any company with a Union... come on.
Also I never said the budget is for you to pocket yourself. However it does make you look good from a political perspective to lower your financial expenses and increase performance at the expense of your employees.
That being said I am not advocating military levels of inefficiency. We aren't out to build an F-35. I am advocating enough inefficiency to protect people and give them time to search for another job, or give them time to improve. Even top performers suffer from burnout, are you going to fire a top performer due to that? In the long term terminating a top performer because of burnout is inefficient, the efficient and ethical solution here is to give him work at a rate where he won't burn out.
>The key to success is understanding the real mechanics behind business. It's not personal, it's just the reality of living in a world with limited resources and competition.
There are more than enough resources in the world for humans to act ethically. Your abilities will degrade with time and will eventually reach a point where you'd be a resource drain to the economy. This is true of all people as they get older. The ethical thing to do would be to care for these older people, the efficient thing to do is to exterminate them, but we don't do that and the united states is still the country with the highest performing GDP. There is room for ethics, business and success to happen side by side. Whether or not you'll eat your own medicine depends on the people who manage you... if they learned from and act as you do, you'll be eating it eventually.
I think it's because technology is incredibly powerful and code + hardware can act as not only organizational structure but as a sort of pseudo employee. When you code you are often designing and implementing business rules, thus acting in a managerial or executive capacity. Software also scales incredibly well. One person may be responsible for building a system that generates immense value (extreme example: Linux and Git both initially created by one person).
The level of responsibility and authority you have as the person responsible for a $10M system can be leveraged to move to different leadership career tracks. I think this bleeds out into the industry at large so VCs recognize that smart engineers make good financial bets.
My hypothesis is that this is a function of white collar office work, where one often works closely with management/leadership/mentors, and can build relationships, knowledge and skills that increase one's opportunities the further one progresses in their career, not only in terms of entering management, but also starting a small business or startup.
Unions historically stem from segregation between labor and bosses along multiple dimensions such as skills, day-to-day experience and class.
that's all fine and good but it won't last. once the labor supply catches up with the demand (and it will -> just look at the vast number of new engineers created in the last 5 years from 2019 Dev survey), it will be all over and all that bargaining power will go away. We're already starting to see the beginning of that with the awful hiring practices we've been seeing.
Their suggestion that you can "just" get another job is simply an illusion, when whiteboarding is universally hated, and senior engineers are failing several job interviews and have to humiliate themselves to solve FizzBuzz for the Nth time.
At the same time, companies endlessly bemoan that they can't find enough people, so there's a big push for immigration to fill the gaps, bootcamps, etc.
Maybe those people that are anti-union because they consider themselves too skilled really are skilled, however the two issues I described above will definitely hit anyone from mid level downwards.
You're describing what Beverly J. Silver's "Forces of Labor" [1] refers to as "marketplace bargaining power," one of labor's "structural" (ie endemic) sources of political leverage.
> Marketplace bargaining power can take several forms including (1) the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, (2) low levels of general unemployment, and (3) the ability ofworkers to pull out of the labor market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income.
Marketplace bargaining power is valuable, but it's not perfect, safe, infallible, or free to exercise--especially if one is here on a precarious visa.
Additionally, as the tech job marketplace expands into the global economy, marketplace bargaining power approaches 0 (think: outsourcing).
> Labor's marketplace bargaining power has been undermined by the mobilization of a world-scale reserve army of labor, creating a global glut on labor markets. Moreover, to the extent that the global spread of capitalist agriculture and manufacturing is undermining nonwage sources of income and forcing more and more individuals into the proletariat, marketplace bargaining power is undermined further.
Tech workers are then left with other sources of structural bargaining power, which we had better not neglect:
I look out my window and watch the birds fly by and wonder why a human like me needs a boss, or a "job creator" or some other euphemism.
It's hard for me to comprehend someone so slavishly minded to conceive of a concept like "don't like your boss, get another one". Sometimes I ponder what is going on in the minds of "men" who conceive such a notion, just like I sometimes see a homeless man in the gutter drinking a bottle of wine and wondering what is going through his mind.
Tangent - there was an article on the NYTimes the other day about how their editorial work was trivializing Bernie Sanders political impact the last election and actually using misleading headlines to distort the truth. I’ll try to find the link (on my phone now). It was pretty eye opening and had links to sources as well as exposing some of these editors and their role working for the Clinton camp.
I call this out because I see a steady stream of NYT articles that focus on big tech in a negative way.
Big tech has its problems and should be regulated. On the other hand, I question the NYT and their motive. This clearly isn’t honest journalism but NYT focusing on companies that are now directly competing with the NYT.
The problem is that Sanders is in a democratic primary. If people in the circle of democratic party thinking aren't valid sources for reporting on a democratic political candidate, who is? Clinton was the party nominee -- all of the players will have done something connected to that campaign.
The democratic party is a big-tent and demands consensus. When all of these connected folks eyeroll at the guy, it hints that he would have trouble governing. An "out-there outsider guy" persona works for the GOP because the GOP is a political machine party... some state senator from North Dakota would kill kittens on TV if instructed to.
The problem isn't that the democratic party is doing what's best for the democratic party. The problem is that The New York Times is doing what's best for the democratic party. They claim to be journalism but more and more, they are clearly biased political activism (as is the case with this story).
Journalists get stories, they do that by talking to people and getting information. The New York Times has a pretty obvious mainstream approach. Very few credible people in that community have anything to say about Sanders.
I didn’t notice lots of biased political activism when they were reporting on the prosecution of NY legislators and a governor. When did the switch flip?
> Very few credible people in that community have anything to say about Sanders.
He's consistently polled in the top three for the democratic primary. He's also consistently ahead of Warren who the NYT often promotes. The New York Times is trying to manufacture credibility by selectively covering candidates.
Well, yeah. First of all, tech is a threat to established media. They were asleep at the wheel in the 2000's and most of the 2010's and missed that many people started getting their news from online sources. Secondly, established-leftist-media such as the NYT is anti-tech because their belief that tech helped elect the current administration. You will see these calls to action dissipate when a new administration gets elected.
“In other cases, highly compensated engineers may see themselves as independent operators who have plenty of leverage on their own and thus do not need to join a union effort.”
This is definitely my feeling. When I can just open up LinkedIn and browse all the unsolicited interview requests I get, I don’t end up feeling like I really need a union to protect my current job - I can always just leave and go somewhere else if I’m unhappy.
That said, if someone asked me to vote for it I might do that, but I wouldn’t put the effort into organizing myself.
And staying at the same employer indefinitely is a sort of soul crushing purgatory in my mind. Software work is one of the few industries where you can completely change the business problem you're addressing by changing employers without your skill set being irrelevant. I love the fact that if I grow tired of the industry the company I'm working at is servicing, I can easily move to another employer with a totally different business problem.
I'll expand on that slightly - the point is that employers are not beyond illegally getting together to restrict our access to alternative jobs. While it feels like we can just get a new role with a couple of phone calls, we might not be getting the best deal for ourselves regardless.
> I can always just leave and go somewhere else if I’m unhappy.
A common refrain, and not entirely incorrect. It's true that I personally lean on marketplace bargaining power when making politically risky workplace decisions, e.g. pushing for a product or process change.
Yes, absolutely. And if the amount of bargaining power I felt I have begins to change, I might feel more strongly about being in a union and regaining some of that power through collective bargaining.
Right now, I’m not on a visa and the job market only seems to get hotter and hotter, so for now I feel pretty good about it. Definitely recognize that could change.
This is going to be a unpopular opinion. I think a tech union would likely be good for the average tech worker - and bad for absolutely everyone else, broader society included.
Cartels and price-fixing agreements are extremely lucrative, which is why they were commonplace until outlawed by antitrust legislation, and why cartels like OPEC still operate today. Unions and collective bargaining are no different. Unions are equivalent to a cartel of labor-suppliers, and collective bargaining is identical to price-fixing.
Just like with cartels and price-fixing agreements, unionizing would likely benefit the average tech worker. It would also have an extremely bad effect on innovation, bureaucracy, and cost-of-tech-development which would spill over to consumers in the form of higher prices.
I'm in favor of breaking up big corporations, as well as implementing a wealth tax, raising the top tax rates, and strengthening the social safety net. But I don't think encouraging the formation of cartels and price-fixing agreements is in society's best interests.
The only parties that I'm aware of which are forming cartels (and getting slapped on the wrist for it) are American software companies.
Seems odd to accuse not yet existing entities of the same crime that their opponents have been already convicted for.
Furthermore, a lot of software companies are filthy rich. If anything, American corporations are squeezing the last drops of profit through creative (read borderline criminal) accounting, outsourcing, faux-contracting and other creative arrangements. Said additional profit is not shared with the employees, invested in society or used in any productive way.
How is it benefiting anyone that Apple is buying back stock for example or that they have hundreds of billions parked somewhere?
Just because corporations are getting away with bad behavior doesn't mean we should encourage a free-for-all. I've already endorsed breaking up big corporations, more vigorous antitrust enforcement, and increasing taxes on the wealthy. There is such a thing as a right way and a wrong way to fix a problem.
This comment is worth discussing about because it actually criticizes the macroeconomic effects of unions, not just another "well I don't need a union and I don't want to be stuck paying dues" personal complaint. It's an interesting point for union proponents to debate, and perhaps a next-gen tech union should try to address the concerns.
Another solution to add to the ones you mentioned can be the promotion of founding tech companies run as worker cooperatives, similar to Mondragon in Spain. If tech companies leadership will flirt with anti-hierarchial management fads like flat organizations and holocracy, why not putting their equity where their mouth is and allowing the workers themselves to own the means of production?
The macroeconomic effects of unions have been overwhelmingly positive. Workers across the entire spectrum of the workforce enjoy and take for granted many labor rights and leisure opportunities today that simply would not have come into existence if it wasn't for heavy activism by unions back in the day. For example, did you know that the 40-hour workweek became standard in 1937 because of a militant labor movement?
Maybe that shows that its the right level to address these issues? Were unions the right way before because doing things globally wasn't realistic. But could it be today?
Like, if employers don't give enough vacations, is the solution to unionize and bargain for better vacations, or could we agree that everyone needs more vacations and just encode it as labor right?
Sure seems to work well for my colleagues in Dublin, for one.
Then you get your cake and eat it too. Everyone's better off, and we don't have to deal with the negatives of unions.
How do we agree that everyone needs more vacations? Too many voters are swayed by the talking points of the wealthy who tend to have a lot of influence in the media we consume. The counterargument can even be phrased in ways that are made to look like it supports the "little guy" rather than the oligarchs that are promoting the message, for example: "More paid vacation means small businesses will have more difficulty remaining competitive, and they are the cornerstone of the US economy. Don't limit our freedom by imposing this unamerican law"
Unions were the right way in the past because employers were typically the most powerful actors in society, with the ability to sway the actions of government. Unions represented an opposing force to their employers, reigning in that power. Today, employers are still the most powerful actors in society -- arguably even moreso than before -- and some kind of worker organising or other form of bottom-up/grassroots power is needed to counter the abuses of power by the wealthy. There are already good examples of gains being won by unions or similar organisations in tech. A good example of a modern conception of worker power in tech is the tech workers coalition:
> How do we agree that everyone needs more vacations?
Certainly not at the major tech employer level with their tech workers? A software engineer can already work at any of these and get vacations benefit similar to what's law in those European cities, and that's not doing any movement at the government level. And my non-tech colleagues at the same companies have the same benefits for the most part (commission sales folks probably excluded, but that field is unique)
So you're suggesting we organize to even out the power with our employers to...get something we already have so that...this influence that's currently not spreading will bubble up?
In the past, these things happened on a scale larger than the union itself, but in which the union took part. Things like the eight-hour day were achieved by movements led by coalitions of multiple unions. Having a powerful tech union that supports such movements would make it significantly more likely that we could get legislation for more progressive reforms passed.
By macroeconomic I'm referring to the post upstream about how unions function as cartels and price-fixers. I do not believe that is true, but it seems like an argument that union supporters ought to debunk.
This reads like you're equating collective bargaining with salary negotiation, but there are a ton of other dimensions where negotiating as a group would be beneficial. I've worked at a number of companies where I was well paid, but had an expectation of overtime. The environment of crunch produced a product that was so unstable I had to be on call, and was occasionally awoken in the middle of the night by things that would never have made it to production if there had been industry-standard practices in place.
That's where collective bargaining could come in handy in software. There needs to be some recourse for when shitty companies abuse its employees.
You know all the advanced research and tech used in the UK telecom industry system post ww2 (first electronic exchange etc) was built by union employees.
In my opinion, unions are very valuable in cases where employees cannot effectively realize market value for their skillset.
This can happen for a number of reasons:
1. In cases of specialized skills (like working at a factory where you've trained on a particular machine).
2. In cases of natural or artificial monopolies (like working for a federal government).
3. In cases where companies and workers incentives are misaligned (like that of a construction worker).
Probably more that I'm missing.
I don't see how the current software engineer market meets this condition.
There are more open software engineering jobs than there are software engineers. If my employer mistreats me, I'll leave and go to a different company, and likely I can find a job just as good very easily.
I'm not sure how a union would benefit me personally.
How confident are you that this climate will continue for the rest of your working life? How confident are you that this climate will extend past your working life?
We can form a union when we need to form a union. There's no point in forming one just in case software engineering no longer becomes a sought-after skilled job.
How shortsighted: "We can form a union when we're in a disadvantageous position."
There's plenty of stuff that software engineers could want to improve today around oncall, long hours, IP restrictions, non-competes, pay transparency, parental leave, equity, promotion and career management, educational benefits, age/gender/racial/etc discrimination, health care, etc.
When we're in a position of power is a great time for us to form a union and start tackling some of the second tier of issues (like non-competes). If not now, when?
Totally! I see engineers complain all the time about issues like space and basic amenities, and never once hear, "Actually, come to think of it, if we got together and bargained collectively over this issue we could maybe get our company to fix it."
See also: Minimum product security standards and product excellence.
>If I'm not happy with my company, I leave the company.
This presupposes that you'll have a list of companies to join that have all the benefits that you want.
> Non-competes are unenforceable in California.
Great. Tech work happens nationwide. You could say, "I got mine in California" or you could help pull up others. I believe that it's worthwhile, sometimes, for me to spend some of my income to help others reach a better station.
> Do you actually think that writing software is going to be come an unskilled job some day?
Do you not? Also, there are plenty of workers in tech who aren't software developers. We should be helping them get benefits as well.
> This presupposes that you'll have a list of companies to join that have all the benefits that you want.
Does anyone, anywhere, have a list of companies that checks literally all their boxes?
> I believe that it's worthwhile, sometimes, for me to spend some of my income to help others reach a better station.
Again, I don't think that software engineering is in a position that needs unionizing. This argument is nil to me. You're asking me to spend my income for something I don't see as a net gain.
> Do you not? Also, there are plenty of workers in tech who aren't software developers. We should be helping them get benefits as well.
You've suddenly moved the goalposts to be about something other than software engineers, which is not what we were talking about. If another profession wants to go unionize, more power to them. I don't see my profession as benefiting, hence I'm arguing against it.
> You're asking me to spend my income for something I don't see as a net gain.
Less than $100 a month to have an organization fight open floor plans and to provide legal services on your behalf for when HR fails you seems like a small price to pay.
> I don't see my profession as benefiting
Say you're working in the game industry, and management keeps on slashing the QA org. Enjoy the additional stress of having to write all of the automation tests yourself on top of fiendish deadlines when you're already working 50 hour weeks with unpaid overtime.
> You're asking me to spend my income for something I don't see as a net gain.
Ok, that's fine. Depending on your reasoning a bit myopic/solipsistic/sociopathic, perhaps, but I recognize this is a widely held position that I happen to disagree with.
> You've suddenly moved the goalposts to be about something other than software engineers, which is not what we were talking about.
You are right, you said software engineers. But the article discusses tech workers.
There's a whole universe of sys-admins, SREs, technical writers, TPMs, QA folks, programmer analysts, devops folks, etc. who are essential to writing and shipping systems at scale who don't call themselves "software engineers".
Even if you don't think it's morally right to do so, isn't it in your self interest to ensure those people are as productive, well trained, and happy as possible so less of their work lands on your plate?
==We can form a union when we need to form a union.==
In my 35 years of life, it has become harder to start a union, so it isn't out of the question that it becomes harder and harder to start a union when software engineers "need to". There's no guarantee that what exists today will exist tomorrow.
==Do people actually think that software engineering is going to become a job that isn't skilled, and isn't sought after?==
I'm not sure why you would be so sure it wouldn't. Are the software engineers of today truly that different from the machinists of yesterday?
If you believe in the free market, then it is elementary that more people will flood into these careers which will lower the wages and diminish the bargaining power of existing software engineers.
If your argument about it being elementary for people to flood into the career were true, then why have far older and desirable professions like law and medicine continued to be incredibly well paying?
Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.
==then why have far older and desirable professions like law and medicine continued to be incredibly well paying?==
These are actually two perfect examples to illustrate my point. Both industries are represented by organizations that systematically make it harder for more people to enter the profession (AMA for medicine and Bar Association for legal). They have eschewed the free market in favor of regulatory capture in order to maintain their market advantage.
==Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.==
Same could have been said of building cars and planes 50 years ago.
The problem is you can't form one when you need it, because then it's too late. You have to do it ahead of time, when you think you probably don't need it, because that's when you have the upper hand.
Is the ideal model of employment the "job-for-life," or not. If not, how many of a "traditional" union's norms still make sense?
Personally, im not really sure where I stand on tech unions. I suspect that certain things would be better if unions were more present. Work-life balance, unpaid overtime and always-available-on-email problems would probably be better. I suspect on-the job training would be better too. This is an area where our industry is insane. How is it even possible that tech companies do less training than wharehouses?
I was trained to drive a forklift for a part time summer job. 6 days paid training out of a total<60. 13 years in tech, and at best I've been offered "do a MOOC or something in your spare time."
OTOH, I don't think most of us want unions deciding who gets hired/fired/promoted, want seniority systems or a lot of traditional union stuff like that.
The traditional structure of unions is probably outdated in most or even all industries today but it certainly is inappropriate in tech. This doesn't mean worker organising is unnecessary, as you say. Fortunately, many people are already organising in non-traditional ways. Check out tech workers coalition:
On training, in a warehouse you have be fully trained and competent to drive a forklift because your decisions are implemented in real time and you can hurt someone if you mess up. In software you can be given low risk problems to figure out, and your decisions and implementations are (ideally) reviewed before they go live.
I know many people leave because of pay reasons, and maybe a union could address that.
But I also find my self largely wanting to leave out of a desire for a new challenge, learn something new. It would be way to easy to stay stagnant at a company and than find yourself forced to deal with new technology in a new role, that for everyone else is old technology (and there is a limit to how much you can realistically do that for side projects). Not that it does not happen anyways.
I don't see any way a Union could (or should) address this.
I don't know how often unions actually impact what the business does instead of how it operates, but here's an example: "Audi's unions demand electric model for main German plant" [0]
> Mosch, who sits on parent VW’s supervisory board, asked top management to provide specific information as to how the growing shift to electric cars and digital services will affect employment at Audi, which has 88,000 workers globally.
Having worked at places where management was deaf to employee concerns about the direction of the business, and seen the consequences of bad management fall upon those employees, I can clearly some sort of leverage would be good for engineers. Perhaps that could involve forcing a company to invest in new technology, thus allowing you to grow as an engineer- and perhaps making your job more secure by making the business more competitive.
Because after 2-3 years you can move for (on the very low end) a $10-20 grand pay increase without much pain at all. A raise you'd be unlikely to get at your original job. I am unsure of how a union could address that problem. It's a sellers market for software developers.
What I'm hearing you say is "Employers are not providing raises commensurate with employee experience and value, leading to churn and a lack of mutual investment".
My understanding is that some leave to get out of shitty working conditions, and many others leave because switching jobs every 2-3 years is the most reliable way to increase your salary.
Pretty easy to see how unions could address both of those issues. This might not work in favor of aggressively job-hopping careerists, but would probably work for everyone else in the International Brotherhood of Codeslingers.
Its employee choice. People get bored, they get tired of processes, and there are plenty of companies willing to hire them that will allow them to try something new, do something different, and deal with different processes.
Please don't move the goalpost. My comment was responding to your comment about average tenure, not unions specifically. You didn't raise any questions on how unions played into average tenure or provide any example of how they could help.
No goalposts were moved. I questioned the premise of OP's comment on whether unions can exist in a world where employees choose to switch jobs every 2-3 years.
You responded with an authoritative answer backed up with zero evidence or supporting data. That it was about unions is an embedded assumption based on that fact that the entire discussion is about unions.
There is no help needed. People are perfectly happy switching employers, and companies are perfectly happy paying to get or retain talent. This ecosystem has made Silicon Valley what it is today.
==This ecosystem has made Silicon Valley what it is today.==
I assume this is referring to the technological innovation and corporate profits of Silicon Valley. I would ask you to consider, from a broader perspective, what Silicon Valley is today. Specifically, in relation to elevated levels of depression [1], suicide [2] and inequality [3].
Isn't it worth exploring whether the same working conditions that benefit the top 10-20% are having a negative effect on the other 80-90%?
I believe it's the result of the system we've created. Frogs leap from boiling water, and there's no sense in calling that "frog choice": obviously, the water is too hot.
That workplaces are universally intolerable after 2-3--as is accepted industry common knowledge--is not a matter of individual preference, but systemic inadequacy of workplace conditions.
Burnout is not a personal problem, it is an institutional pandemic.
> One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
-- Carol Hanisch, "The Personal Is Political", in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation
Good point. Employees are often promised very interesting projects, career growth and salary increases. Very often it turns out to be a bunch of lies and people move on and the cycle continues.
Despite all the claims on HN on how good life is for software engineers, our field has very high burnout rates and it's very ageist.
When your only reliable way to get a pay bump is switching jobs adopting any system that ties pay to tenure seems awfully synonymous with pulling up the ladder behind one's self.
Not sure where "tying pay to tenure" came up, unless that's how you view what unions do? A union just means a group of employees negotiating as a unit, what changes they ask for isn't dictated in advance.
Surely a next-gen labor union based in the tech industry could find a new way to fight ageism without mandating a seniority system. Why does tech have to act the same way as before? I thought we were supposed to be innovators?
When there is a proposal that is suggested, there are proponents and detractors. That is tautological. Blankly insisting that things are good enough is just as empty as blankly insisting that things aren't.
There has to be a balance of power between labor and management. When management has too much power, that power will be abused. When labor has too much power, that power will be abused.
Unions make sense when labor doesn't have any power. Do programmers have enough power? I'd say yes. Maybe not across the board but -- in general -- yes. We aren't coal miners, that's for sure.
The gaming industry has an interesting problem: a lot of fresh college grads that want to work on games because they are passionate about games.
In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.
> In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.
and game development work is probably the most trivial software development to move to foreign jurisdictions. unless the union promoters would like video game tariffs.
This may seem snide, but it's extremely rare for a union not to be protectionist. Mostly on account of how unions join together with unions for adjunct industries.
That said, I'm not convinced game development would be easily outsourced. Games are some of the most highly optimized pieces of software out there, as it's in their interest to squeeze every bit of performance out of consumer hardware. You can think of their target as an intersecting line between the game being playable on consumer hardware vs. the graphics quality users expect that would lead to the game selling. Optimization has a big payoff to increase the possible market to buy a given game.
And even still where tech workers do have a lot of power, there are plenty of issues that we could use that power to improve (IP restrictions for off hours/open source projects, non-competes, parental leave, etc.)
But not all tech workers are programmers. To compare to another union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) represents machinists from Boeing and Harley-Davidson, distribution center workers at IKEA, and also wood, pulp and paper workers.
The countries with the best human welfare indicators also have the highest percentage of people in unions. It’s the only countervailing force against plutocratic power.
I’m talking about the Nordics at the top, with 70% of people in unions, followed by Germany/France/Benelux. Transparency doesn’t give create political power. Coordinating the interests of millions of workers takes organization, and a broad and politically active trade union movement is the only successful example in history of delivery widely shared prosperity.
Maybe unionization needs a disrupt? I'm not against unionization in a lot of industries, but it just doesn't make sense in its current form for the tech scene or any other high demand position. It feels like an outdated mechanism used for people who were happy to sit in the same role, doing the same thing, for 45yrs.
Modern unions that only represent one type of skill or workers in one company (or both!) are far less effective than historical unions that aimed to unionize as many workers as possible under the same umbrella. Being able to represent your members even if they switch companies gives you a lot more opportunities.
Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same position for 45 years until they can collect a pension, their union doesn't need to negotiate for that. They can use that leverage for something else.
Putting that together, your modernized union might be an industry-wide organization that acts both for collective bargaining and as a placement agency. They could bargain for making switching companies easier - maybe employers need to support specific benefits providers so workers don't need to switch. And they could use their network to improve bargaining - a big part of strike preparation is making sure everyone is taken care of ahead of time; the union could secure job offers for workers who can't afford to go on strike.
That's the difference between a craft union and an industrial union. A long time ago, there was the American Federation of Labor, the group for craft unions, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the group of industrial unions. The AFL had the Plumbers, the Electricians, the Machinists, etc. The CIO had the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, the United Mine Workers, etc. They merged in 1955.
Nobody cares much about that any more.
If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.
It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.
It's hard for me to envision unions in a white collar environment when there's a pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management. In factories, there's usually a separate management class of people who are engineers or college grads who are brought in to lead, so the whole worker vs management dichotomy is much clearer.
"pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management"
1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.
2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.
3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.
Unions exist in high demand positions too - sports, entertainment etc. Can tech unions be modelled closer to those, and less on the style of jobs you mentioned?
Yes, and professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all. Some do become managers or other executives but that requires them to retire as a player and then negotiate an entirely separate contract for the management job.
"professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all"
Neither do most employees either, what does that have to do with anything? We can't organize because there's a 5% chance that we're promoted to management?
We can't organize because the people with good leadership qualities and other important organizing skills tend to get promoted to management. It's very difficult for people to spontaneously organize without a leader.
To me it seems that we can't organize because we're selfish and naive. I don't see anyone except you fretting because of our collective organization skills :)
Startup idea: an app for employees to organize anonymously. Not a legal union. But an app that can send to an employer this message: "95% of your employees disagree with this issue" Basically centralized communication through voting without the need for union bureaucracy.
The app can optionally take the next step and help employees become a legal union but before that it can function as basically anonymous Slack with polls that allow for majority opinions to be discussed openly and safely.
Even issues like "95% of employees think the coffee machine is shit we need it fixed" can be addressed more quickly.
2 issues have to be solved to get this to work. The app and idea itself is trivial.
First I need a full updated roster of employees of a company to confirm that an anonymous user is actually an employee of said company. Not sure how to do this in a fully secure and updated way.
Second user engagement. If I can figure out how to get one full company to use this as aggressively as they use slack, we'd be good to go to launch this in other companies.
Both are hard questions that I'm not sure how to answer or execute.
Blind already solves the first by mandating you use your company email to register. Of course, that means privacy is paramount, and you'd have to prevent situations where say management floods your system with dummy accounts. But that's at least a starting point.
The second point is definitely important. The problem too with having an anonymized place where users can vent and gossip, is that it can quickly become a toxic dump of FUD, similar to how Blind is now. And the smaller the organization is, the less likely people will want to speak out, for fear their anonymous words will be traced back to them.
I don't know how to feel about it. There are some really bad employers out there. Tech culture is fairly liberal and new. I remember reading a book long ago where managers would sit on a higher chair in negotiations. It was a different atmosphere.
I agree. I think the answer is to improve salary transparency to help alleviate the information asymmetry between employer and employee. Things like https://levels.fyi are making good progress here.
I have no interest in joining a union but I absolutely take all of the salary information I can get my hands on into account when negotiating my pay.
It’s generally my understanding that unions tend to decrease labor mobility, and are most effective for improving working conditions when labor mobility is naturally very low, as in industries dominated by a few players (shipping, auto) or where company-specific knowledge becomes very important (retail, maybe construction?). Industries with a high proportion of freelancers tend to form guilds, which are slightly different and often focus on licensure (barbers, doctors, lawyers). But programmers — like managers, accountants and bankers — have highly transferable skills that give them lots of employment options. Additionally, programming creates its own communication skills by (literal) networking, which aids programmers searching for jobs (they can send code samples over a wire). As such, competition for labor is more effective in tech than in many other fields.
How come the NY Times doesn't push for unions for Wall St? Surely these guys slaving away over spreadsheets for Silicon Valley level pay should be unionized too, right?
> “Associating unions with blue-collar work and making it a stigma to talk about unions in white-collar circles, that’s very deliberate”
This is my observation too, right now there is simply a correlation that doesn't have to be.
It doesn't matter that you get paid a comfortable amount, and that another startup delivers snacks all day, and another startup delivers catered food to you: you aren't getting paid what you are worth to these companies.
The board members are just the VCs and the founders and they aren't in a position to change that. The fraction of a fraction of a percent equity that they told you "was a generous amount" after feeding your face has nothing to do with what a more equitable amount could be. Doesn't give you any information about all the scenarios in which you would get nothing because the strike is too high and the preferred shares liquidity preferences are too onerous.
Even the cash component of tech compensation could likely be 75-150% higher. This has nothing to do with the stagnating wages in other sectors, we are working with this generation's largest and fastest growing companies and could accelerate comp growth and other changes.
I think that's not the only factor. Unions will also cap wages for the highest earners. And everyone thinks they are going to end up in that 1 percenter salary.
> Unions will also cap wages for the highest earners.
its okay if the average moves up, and transparency increases on stock options and the liquidity preferences of preferred shareholders. this is only currently relevant to non-public companies, and this article was about startups so thats fitting
I acknowledge that there are definite issues at play with employment in the tech industry, but, come on; we are one of the most coddled and well-payed segments of the entire laboring economy. Maybe unions aren't being organized because we aren't forced to work graveyard shifts with few to no breaks for very little pay? I'm not sure the actual issues at hand in the tech industry are best addressed by unions (at least in the traditional sense).
I already feel distrust for my outspoken colleagues who purport to speak for me when making demands of management, but would treat me like James Damore if I dissented from their opinions.
The last thing I want is to let those same people formally represent me in a union. Given the current climate, those are very likely to be the people who would be running it.
Tech unions are a way for bureaucrats to take a tax off the backs of hard working tech workers with no benefits.
I am well off, have a flexible work life balance, and I enjoy my job. There is nothing that a union would bring to the table for me.
If there was a union in Silicon Valley in the early 80s, we would be no where close to where we are today. Look at the stark difference between a Silicon Valley worker vs someone working at Boeing or other unionized shops.
I believe people are different and there needs to be differentiation between those that are more skilled than those that are less skilled. I support that more skilled people getting paid more than those that are less skilled. I think it's fundamentally fair.
In Silicon Valley, most tech jobs are not nooses around anyone's neck. And that's a great environment to live in that would have been ruined by unions. In fact, things like progress would have been thwarted by greedy unions that slow everyone down.
I don't believe that seniority deserves more rewards than younger people. I believe the best person should win. If I can't compete anymore, I'm okay with being out of a job. As I hit 50, I'm aware that my skills are getting out of date but it's fair. I would rather live in a fair environment where I'm out of a job because I'm not as skilled than others rather live in a blunted, slow, environment where union execs make money off my back for decades and decades.
That's the crux of the disagreement here. You assume that something fair is happening, and others don't. A meritocracy sounds great, but I've yet to see one actually implemented at any scale. Or rather, the skills that get rewarded don't feel like the skills that are actually important to the job (networking and personal skills often times up your earning ability more than your coding abilities).
>>I would rather live in a fair environment where I'm out of a job...
Sure you would, because you believe that you'd be able to find another job. And as long as that thought exists, you can rationalize that management is "fair" and a meritocracy is in place. Some of us think the system is broken and benefits the few at the expense of the many, and that doesn't seem "fair" to us.
There isn't a true meritocracy but it's "good enough" in Silicon Valley. Nothing will be perfect but what we have right now is better than any union. Unions will select for those workers with more seniority which is objectively worse than selecting for those with more skill.
>>Sure you would, because you believe that you'd be able to find another job.
No, I don't. I honestly believe that if I can't keep up I don't deserve a job. Period, end of story.
>> Some of us think the system is broken and benefits the few at the expense of the many, and that doesn't seem "fair" to us.
I don't see this in Silicon Valley at all. I think underperforming tech workers deserve to not reap the same benefits as the performing engineers. The bar keeps rising every year, I know this because I've been here 25 years, but it's fairly applied, or at least as fair as can possibly be applied.
You speak in absolutes "Unions will..." "...better than any Union" as if these things are known quantities. There are many ways a union could function. It could set salary ranges based on all sorts of things (seniority, certifications, etc) or it could just act as a collective voice in negotiating the availability of remote work or hourly limits or other perks. A tech union doesn't have to operate the ways you're describing at all. Think about the sports leagues. They're unionized, and it's the best players who get the biggest contracts, not the one's who've been in the league the longest. There's no reason you couldn't do something similar in a tech union.
Right now things are great because this is a relatively new space with more demand than supply. That's great NOW. Long term nobody knows what could happen. Kodak thought film would always be important. Cooper isn't a profession. The idea of having a collective labor voice established during the period where labor is at its strongest could be seen as hedging your bets.
>> I think under performing tech workers deserve to not reap the same benefits as the performing engineers.
Who determines what "under performing" is? It makes more sense to me that labor's peers determine that definition, but currently it's management. This is again a place where a union can help.
You admit your system isn't perfect. I admit Unionization has flaws. I'm just of the opinion that it could help improve working conditions across the board.
* Vocational training: unions in our area run schools to train craftsman (e.g. carpenters). This increases productivity and screens for quality.
* Shifting workforce: Construction companies expand/contract as they get big jobs. The union is a clearinghouse that enables tradespeople to switch between companies as they expand/contract. The union also helps by running benefit programs that travel with the workers.
* Commodity-ish labor: Most carpenters have about the same productivity, so it makes sense to negotiate their compensation in bulk. Unions don't work as well when productivity/value varies greatly between workers.
I also worked as an apprentice carpenter for several summers during college. I wouldn't say that the carpenters I worked with had a glowing view of the union. They seemed suspicious that the union reps were corrupt, and talked about how they would "shut down the job" over minor union infractions. They also believed the "hall" was corrupt/political in how it matched carpenters who were out of work to jobs. Several were also contemptuous of what they saw as the union discouraging hard work (if you were working hard, you were "ruining the job.")
The main point I am trying to make is that unions are complex from both the employer and employee side.