I mean I don't know your situation but "I kind of hope I am not an "IT peon" either" is exactly how people who do have bargaining power end up peons to people with more power and/or information.
* 95 (no, sorry 99%) of Software Engineers are IT peons and
* therefore don't lose much by unionizing; however
* if you're one of the few lucky ones being recognized for what they do and making enough in compensation, don't bother
It seems to me that the biggest problem in this theory is the first assumption is wrong (at least the numbers are wildly off). Most software engineers tend to be highly compensated, work in fairly independent teams, are recognized for their contributions so don't have much to gain from unionizing.
A subset of software engineers work in the Bay Area, the rest do not and are not highly compensated. Therefore it makes sense for most software engineers to unionize and let the “highly compensated” fend for themselves.
Besides software engineers, there are plenty of sysadmins, help desk folks, and other technology professionals outside of developers who are also not highly compensated who would benefit from unionizing along with software engineers who aren’t outliers.
I'm a software engineer not in the Bay Area. It's true that my salary is not as high as it could be in the Bay area, but for my location my colleagues and I are highly compensated. The fact is, relative to most of the world, all software engineers are outliers.
You are free to your opinion. I am of the opinion that there are enough IT professionals out there who are undercompensated and/or treated poorly that unionization isn’t only feasible, but a superior option for those workers.
Do you work more than 40 hours a week consistently as a salaried employee and not compensated for that time? Wage theft. Are you on call and not compensated for being on call or when you have to respond outside of business hours? Wage theft.
Software engineers are not the only category of IT worker. You believing you’re highly compensated does not mean others are, and does not negate their right to seek a more equitable labor arrangement. Feel free to stand aside while others fight for better working conditions for themselves and the majority of their peers.
> The fact is, relative to most of the world, all software engineers are outliers.
(Relative to most of the world, developed country workers are highly compensated; that is no excuse for allowing worker rights to be clawed backwards, unless you’re prepared to attempt to live in the first world on a third world income)
Reminder that the majority (>51%, “most” as the article title states) of software engineers are not highly compensated. My points still stand. I have no doubt those highly compensated are comfortable with the status quo, and have quite a bit to lose from unionization. All the more reason for the majority to organize despite it being against the interests of a smaller privileged subset.
From the Bureau of Labor (“software engineer median salary”):
“The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $59,870, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $160,100. The median annual wage for software developers, systems software was $107,600 in May 2017.”
EDIT: I see you have updated your post with the same stat, but you don't seem to understand what it means. Even the lowest-paid software developers are the class enemy that solidarity is built to fight.
I’m comparing income distribution (~$100k delta top to bottom, not including ISOs and RSUs) within the software engineering domain, not software engineers to non-engineers.
That's even sillier. Of course only the top few people in the field enjoy the top few salaries in the field. A statistical tautology is not a political cause of action. If you define "highly compensated" as relative to the field, then we can never all be highly compensated.
You consider the existing compensation high compared to other non-engineer roles. I agree, but that is not my argument nor the reason I advocate for collective bargaining.
I consider SWE compensation low compared to the value delivered (we don’t need to argue that, right? That’s pretty clear IMO), and therefore desire more of the value be shared with the labor generating it versus it being captured by shareholders.
One wrinkle in the comparison is that software engineers outside the bay area get half the salary but live twice as well in terms of acreage, sqftage, and disposable purchasing power despite having infinitely more children. Austin and SLC for example.
> if you're one of the few lucky ones being recognized for what they do and making enough in compensation, don't bother
I would disagree with that. Of course I should still "bother" to make the world around me better, I still "bother" with solidarity. Even if it's just so I can enjoy my own luck freely, and be open when I meet new people. The less corpses I have in my basement, the less corners I cut because "fuck you got mine", the more free I am. The more free I am, the quicker and better I develop. Also, unused muscles atrophy, unused mental and social "muscles" do as well, and the primary reward for being in shape is being in shape, it just feels better than being out of shape.
If a system is working for you as you expect it to, you understandably have no real motivation to change it. That is the only point of that statement.
If you're concerned that your coworkers in the same company or in other companies are not being treated fairly by the system and want to help in changing it, sure, you can do that. But that's usually not the strongest force for change in these things.
In fact, the better compensated and happy workers would want to ensure the continuity of this system that treats them so well.
So in summary, I say I disagree and give my personal reasons for me personally disagreeing, and you give me permission to have them and act on them, and then reiterate what "most" people feel, as if I didn't know that, as if that wasn't the basis for me commenting in the first place.
The premise is that software engineers are underpaid. Not that their salary is bad or lower than the national average, only that the value they produce is worth more than their compensation. Ergo they should get paid more.
Fairness really has little to do with it. Work is a business transaction extract as much compensation as possible. One very effective tool to achieve that is collective bargaining.
Because the fairness argument is always so one-sided. It is always the worker that should mind if he or she is making enough, never the owner. Apple is making hundreds of billions in profits on overpriced products and no one bats an eye. But if Apple engineers unionize to try and increase their salaries, you'd get lots of calls about how they are selfish and already making enough money.
I felt the article is underwhelming, to put it mildly. It drones on and on, seemingly repeating the same point.
Under different guises article says that if you are a low-level code monkey with no freedom or an "IT peon" doing menial tasks, unionizing can give you job security (so you can be sure that you can keep doing those boring things forever) and maybe raise your salary, too. That is probably a true statement. But this setup is BORING. The article claims this setup describes 95% of software engineers and I think this is nonsense. IMO at least half of the software engineers either have some project freedom and can pretty easily switch employers if they find themselves under abusive management.
And this could be at risk if unionized: no firing often means greatly reduced hiring, too. Please count me out. My 2c.
What a dismal picture the author paints of our world:
"most software engineers are low-status workers whose jobs their bosses would gladly ship overseas, and who live under the surveillance described above. They’ll be fired as soon as their performance dips, or a cheaper worker comes on the market, or they piss the wrong person off. The adversarial climate exists. Again, nothing to lose."
What world is this author living in? Maybe 10 years ago, maybe, a lot of software jobs were like this. Everything I've experienced lately is that companies can't hire enough software engineers. You are not going to be fired if your performance dips a little. You are too hard to replace. Interestingly, this is very similar to the situation that Paul Graham described here: http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html
I mean really this whole post basically says, "unions kinda suck, but your job already kinda sucks, so why not try a union?" How...inspiring? Honestly, if you really feel that down about your career a union isn't going to fix it. It's probably time to try a different field.
It turns out that if you spend all of your time at work posting on mailing lists about your T7-9 vision instead of actually doing your work, your performance reviews suffer. Who would have thought?
You're overestimating the quality of software developers (which are not really engineers) or only seeing this through a limited perspective.
Many devs are low-end technical talent that can probably pound out some application under strict requirements but aren't building anything significant and definitely aren't creating new innovative products. The lack of professional degree or schooling requirements has only further decreased the overall quality in the field.
The reason for the high demand is because of the high-turnover and lack of productivity of this average talent which just creates more work from bad architecture, poor planning and all kinds of technical debt. There's also a race to find really good devs before they realize they're good and get a better job on their own terms.
The high-end environments at Google or SV startups only reflects a tiny isolated portion of the vast software industry. Even a cursory look at the IT/developer departments at Fortune 1000 companies paints a very different picture.
There's a tremendous amount of software that doesn't require the best talent to write. Maybe it's a website, or a device driver, or whatever. Similar software artifacts have been created hundreds or thousands of times, but someone still has to write it in order to have a product to sell. The programmers don't need to be the best out there, or even particularly creative. They do need to be competent and sufficiently knowledgeable in their area, but that's it. Those developers are easily replaced. They have to be, since so many of the better ones tend to leave.
Those jobs will tend not to be very much fun or very well compensated, as long as there's a ready supply of programmers willing to do the work, and the corporations doing the hiring regard software development as an expense that cuts into the budget for more important things, like dividends and stock buybacks.
In my experience/observation, companies are in at least some cases pushing the "we can't find enough programmers" narrative so they can justify outsourcing and H1Bs.
Unionization doesn't work well in high tech because traditionally the industry has changed so fast that a union would torpedo any company that fully embraced them. I think the tech industry also has among the most relaxed, easy going environments with some of the best perks.
No we lose fking everything. I just spent an evening to an electrician in his second year, excited the electrical union his giving him 8 whole days of vacation. His pay increases are on a fixed scale. And because senior members of the union are unemployed if he loses his job, those guys get hired first. And if you're unemployed and you take a non union sideproject you're moved to the back of the bus. Run far far away from unionization.
It's often fairly relevant who has produced some piece of content. But if you want to go purely by content, you'd probably also conclude the author is either unserious or a crank. A post that is ostensibly about unionization suddenly addresses the reader so:
Real talk: that meth-addicted, drunk scumbag does not care one whit for your pretty face, buddy.
And this is merely the beginning of a multi-paragraph digression that is some heady melange of fantasy and humble-brag about how the author knows kung fu.
This article has now been flagged, killed, resurrected and is now flagged again. It seems there's a core group who really hate it and don't want it discussed.
A good addition to the Hacker News platform would be a requirement to provide justifications for flagging an article and make them visible to all users. That way we wouldn't have to speculate (though I'm sure there'd still be speculation on if the stated reasons are the "true" reasons).
You already don't have to speculate and on top of that, the site guidelines ask everyone not to because it's repetitive and boring - same reason why it would be a terrible (and contradictory) addition to the site.
Seriously. If folks generally understand the idea that you shouldn't use the downvote button to mean "disagree" I think this should go double for using flagging. I'm far from convinced by the article but don't see how it falls in the category of something that should be flagged - it's not trolling or offensive.
IME flagging on HN is not what you think of as flagging on other sites. Flagging is often used for off-topic or "inappropriate" and is subjective based on the flagger. I don't believe you can apply general understanding of downvotes from other sites or assume allowed reasons for flags based on other sites.
People flag for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they just get tired-head on a topic, feel a site adds nothing new to the discussion, think it doesn't belong, etc. The only real hardfast rule about flagging is that you don't talk about why.
I'll trade - what about this article makes you finish reading it and go 'oh yeah, that is an interesting and insightful piece of writing that other people might benefit from reading and discussing'.
Let's not trade. If you feel so strongly that Hacker News should be prevented from being able to discuss an article, then it's on you to articulate why.
To humor you, though: it's a thorough representation of an opinion that relates to my career, and the resulting discussions are important to have, regardless of whether or not I agree with the article.
As a guess: It's a hot button topic that hits close to home for many people here, so a lot of folks will have strong emotional reactions.
My observation is that articles on such topics need an especially good title and have to be especially well written to not be flag-bait on HN. Even in cases where it's an excellent article, a bad title can get strong reactions. My impression is that a lot of flags happen based on title alone (or other info visible on HN without clicking into the article itself) without the article being read.
I’ve actually been in this exact situation quite a few times. I finally found a safe space to work where I’ve been able to prove to myself that I actually am a skilled developer.
PIPs have no appeal process. Many developers are forced to work on menial bugs while simultaneously being promised more freedom “soon”.
Every company is constantly hiring because every company has drastically high turnover. Burnout is a very real thing in the field, and it shouldn’t be considered the norm.
"If you’re the typical, low-status, open-plan programmer, forced to interview for his own job every morning in “Daily Scrum”, then all the bad things that unions can bring have already happened at your job"
Personally I think that if organized labor is to have a chance to be remotely successful in Software engineering it needs to break away from the old assumptions that don't hold any more including commoditization. They might have some luck if they established sufficient ground floors (limiting crunch time and death marches, setting rules for what they can be expected to be required for late changes - bonuses for rushes being fine, etc.) instead of uniformity.
I am not familiar with the fine details of labor but I suspect the Screen Actors Guild would be a better fit as a template. The actors are anywhere from minor extras to superstars.
Totally agree. While I am traditionally anti-union (I have seen too many rubber-room situations and ridiculousness,) SAG or the WGA are actually good models for software engineers. It recognizes minimums, but doesn’t have maximums and “merit” is determined by whatever the market is willing to pay. So a superstar first time writer can make millions of their script warrants it, while journeyman script re-writes are assured getting paid scale. The teachers unions are exactly the opposite: you get more pay for seniority and the implication is that seniority necessarily means “more valuable” when that isn’t necessarily the case.
Although I am economically very far right, I could get behind a WGA model for software devs. I would be happy to join such an organization. But a teachers union style union.. no way.
There are many good reasons to unionize, but aligning the argument with Jira and daily standups may not carry much weight.
The #1 reason is that HR no longer represents the best interests of employees. They serve to protect the company, leaving employees with zero representation.
a highly professionalized industry in which individuals have massive bargaining power and draw gigantic salaries, where furthermore we culturally are able to open source parts of the means of production (engineers have unprecedented levels of ownership over the fate of their labor) is literally the last place I would think to unionize. color me naive, though.
You're probably right. It's janitors and other low-skill/low-pay workers who need and benefit from unionization most because I've seen the results of union-busting environments: janitors working 16 hours a day without benefits and living in their cars.
> And, if you work in a federally-funded research lab that pays for your graduate education, and that allows you to publish papers, attend conferences, and perform original research on working time, then you probably don’t need a union.
These research labs are mostly unionized. That's why they have good benefits, working conditions, etc.
It's unfortunate most IT/engineering people buy into anti-union propaganda blindly. The fact is that organized labor, for better or worse, equals fairer pay than anarcho-capitalist gratituity. See also: Robert Reich, Richard Wolff.
As a child of two union parents and married to a union worker, it is clear to me that the only contact the author has had with unions is in his dreams.
Unions constantly have to deal with internal corruption (and often don't...). The seniority system is much more arbitrary than anything approximating meritocracy. Better hope that you've saved enough if/when the union decides to strike because you are going to have to suck it up even if you don't think it's worth it. You better buy in to all the politics your union supports because your dues go to it. Enjoy watching the union protect the most incompetent worker who will go on to put lives at risk with his drinking problem. Just don't count on the union going to bat for you against the company, if they don't like you they'll hang to out to dry.
Disappointed but not surprised that folks are down voting instead of replying.
The unionization discussion focuses way too much around compensation instead of on union-employee relations. People just assume unions are all roses in this department (the author likens them to some street fighting Batman) when in reality they're flawed and have incentives that work against workers too. If you don't think there's nepotism and favoritism in unions then you've probably never worked in one. Unions pick and choose the workers they stand up for, it's not some romantic all for one and one for all story.
In my experience you should trust the union just about as much as hr or management. If you're not on the same side as them in whatever issue, watch your back.
The "As a child of two union parents ..." argument in relation to unionization is the equivalent of the "As a mom of two children ..." argument in relation to child psychology. I also have two parents who are members of a union but that doesn't make me an expert!
Perhaps not, but it does give you exposure to a wealth of first-hand information. I don't think the mother-of-two-children's opinion is worthless relative to a child psychologist, either; both have insights that are valuable in different ways.
No, it gives you a lot of anecdotal evidence that is impossible to decouple from the specific circumstances of the situation. E.g my experience with my union has been the completely opposite of everything stated by bhawks. So + 1 - 1 = 0, words have been exchanged but nothing learned.
"Nothing learned" only if you don't care about those "specific circumstances". The anecdotal datapoints are useful specifically because Earth's population of 7+ billion humans is remarkably efficient when it comes to running across corner cases and confounding variables.
We're talking about something that does indeed have very-situationally-dependent impacts and effects. The anecdotes require filtering, sure, but they're vital if you want aggregate data that reflect the real world instead of theoretical conditions.
If it's impossible to decouple something from the specific circumstances of the situation, then that "something" is insufficiently understood.
But at most tech companies a meritocracy they ain't. They pretend to be but petty politics, brown-nosing, and fucked up compensation/promotions are every day fare. Unions aren't any worse or better.
Pessimistic = realistic here. Companies manage knowledge workers like they're fred winslow taylor and it's 1930. Managers & ed policy wonks are both trying to make programming blue collar (though for different reasons).
Nobody knows how the next recession will affect programmers. If adtech collapses will compensation follow? Why aren't more companies using offshore tech labor?
Can't comment on the union stuff but we should be wary of thinking devs are exceptional. Expensive labor isn't always valuable labor; as detroit learned in the 80s.
I was involved in a few outsourcing attempts. If you write a big check for a no-name company under a different legal system, you're going to get ripped off mercilessly ("deliverables" that don't even compile). If you open a serious branch office and interview and hire a team of your own, you might have a chance.
Don’t forget, and pay properly. Even places that are cheaper than the US are highly competitive for quality workers. For many companies it’s less hassle and overall TCO cheaper to hire in the US.
Software developers will be non-unionised until there are so many of us that supply outpaces demand. Then we’ll form cartels to demand better pay and conditions, much like everyone else.
Unions are usually equivalent to non poaching agreements, they set a price and most companies agrees to not pay significantly above that while most workers agrees to not work if they are paid significantly below that. It ensures that everyone is paid a mediocre salary, so if you want American engineer salaries to look like European ones start a union!
One of the problems that most unions try to address is that companies will often fire employees for union organizing if they can get away with it (generally they can make up some secondary excuse, like poor performance). In some unions, firing happens by seniority; the company can only fire employees in the reverse order they joined.
In software development, we obviously don't want to have to work with under-performing coworkers, so we need some way to remove those people that isn't based on seniority. If it can't be at management's discretion either, then what's a good solution?
I think one answer may be to have a union-negotiated peer-review process -- you can be laid off or fired if your coworkers don't vouch for your work, or consider you indispensable. Depending on the process, this could work okay or it could be awful. At best, it would seem to encourage a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies atmosphere and some unpleasant office politics.
Another approach would be market-based. Maybe projects within the company are allocated some sort of virtual currency units which can be claimed by employees when they finish units of work. Employees with a surplus of currency units but not enough time to finish their tasks by themselves can put bounties on subtasks. Worker's pay should be proportional to their credit surplus; if it's not, they can have their pay reduced or they could be asked to leave. This would less political and less personal, but working out the details could be tricky and it doesn't address the problem of highly productive people that no one wants to work with because they treat people badly.
I expect there are other possible solutions.
How does the Screen Actor's Guild, and screenwriter's and athletic unions deal with this problem?
> In some unions, firing happens by seniority; the company can only fire employees in the reverse order they joined.
No unions prohibit individual firing for cause (though they tend to require process for it); union contracts may require layoffs to be conducted by seniority, and companies not covered by union contracts may use allocation of what is notionally a not-for-individual cause layoff as a PR cover for targeted firings, but it is simply not the case that union contracts (at least commonly) require firing by seniority.
Unions were great for workers at one point. But for the majority of my life, they seem to have taken worker’s rights to the point that it is consistently enticing for CEOs to at least attempt to offshore huge amounts of jobs. No matter how terrible the results, they keep trying because unions kill companies in the USA.
I would like to avoid that happening to software jobs.
78 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadbut again whatever evidence you may have in your individual situation: the belief that "I'm getting a good deal" is exactly how a mark gets conned.
* 95 (no, sorry 99%) of Software Engineers are IT peons and
* therefore don't lose much by unionizing; however
* if you're one of the few lucky ones being recognized for what they do and making enough in compensation, don't bother
It seems to me that the biggest problem in this theory is the first assumption is wrong (at least the numbers are wildly off). Most software engineers tend to be highly compensated, work in fairly independent teams, are recognized for their contributions so don't have much to gain from unionizing.
Besides software engineers, there are plenty of sysadmins, help desk folks, and other technology professionals outside of developers who are also not highly compensated who would benefit from unionizing along with software engineers who aren’t outliers.
Do you work more than 40 hours a week consistently as a salaried employee and not compensated for that time? Wage theft. Are you on call and not compensated for being on call or when you have to respond outside of business hours? Wage theft.
Software engineers are not the only category of IT worker. You believing you’re highly compensated does not mean others are, and does not negate their right to seek a more equitable labor arrangement. Feel free to stand aside while others fight for better working conditions for themselves and the majority of their peers.
> The fact is, relative to most of the world, all software engineers are outliers.
(Relative to most of the world, developed country workers are highly compensated; that is no excuse for allowing worker rights to be clawed backwards, unless you’re prepared to attempt to live in the first world on a third world income)
From the Bureau of Labor (“software engineer median salary”):
“The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $59,870, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $160,100. The median annual wage for software developers, systems software was $107,600 in May 2017.”
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
EDIT: I see you have updated your post with the same stat, but you don't seem to understand what it means. Even the lowest-paid software developers are the class enemy that solidarity is built to fight.
I consider SWE compensation low compared to the value delivered (we don’t need to argue that, right? That’s pretty clear IMO), and therefore desire more of the value be shared with the labor generating it versus it being captured by shareholders.
I would disagree with that. Of course I should still "bother" to make the world around me better, I still "bother" with solidarity. Even if it's just so I can enjoy my own luck freely, and be open when I meet new people. The less corpses I have in my basement, the less corners I cut because "fuck you got mine", the more free I am. The more free I am, the quicker and better I develop. Also, unused muscles atrophy, unused mental and social "muscles" do as well, and the primary reward for being in shape is being in shape, it just feels better than being out of shape.
If you're concerned that your coworkers in the same company or in other companies are not being treated fairly by the system and want to help in changing it, sure, you can do that. But that's usually not the strongest force for change in these things.
In fact, the better compensated and happy workers would want to ensure the continuity of this system that treats them so well.
Fairness really has little to do with it. Work is a business transaction extract as much compensation as possible. One very effective tool to achieve that is collective bargaining.
Because the fairness argument is always so one-sided. It is always the worker that should mind if he or she is making enough, never the owner. Apple is making hundreds of billions in profits on overpriced products and no one bats an eye. But if Apple engineers unionize to try and increase their salaries, you'd get lots of calls about how they are selfish and already making enough money.
Under different guises article says that if you are a low-level code monkey with no freedom or an "IT peon" doing menial tasks, unionizing can give you job security (so you can be sure that you can keep doing those boring things forever) and maybe raise your salary, too. That is probably a true statement. But this setup is BORING. The article claims this setup describes 95% of software engineers and I think this is nonsense. IMO at least half of the software engineers either have some project freedom and can pretty easily switch employers if they find themselves under abusive management.
And this could be at risk if unionized: no firing often means greatly reduced hiring, too. Please count me out. My 2c.
"most software engineers are low-status workers whose jobs their bosses would gladly ship overseas, and who live under the surveillance described above. They’ll be fired as soon as their performance dips, or a cheaper worker comes on the market, or they piss the wrong person off. The adversarial climate exists. Again, nothing to lose."
What world is this author living in? Maybe 10 years ago, maybe, a lot of software jobs were like this. Everything I've experienced lately is that companies can't hire enough software engineers. You are not going to be fired if your performance dips a little. You are too hard to replace. Interestingly, this is very similar to the situation that Paul Graham described here: http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html
I mean really this whole post basically says, "unions kinda suck, but your job already kinda sucks, so why not try a union?" How...inspiring? Honestly, if you really feel that down about your career a union isn't going to fix it. It's probably time to try a different field.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_s...
Many devs are low-end technical talent that can probably pound out some application under strict requirements but aren't building anything significant and definitely aren't creating new innovative products. The lack of professional degree or schooling requirements has only further decreased the overall quality in the field.
The reason for the high demand is because of the high-turnover and lack of productivity of this average talent which just creates more work from bad architecture, poor planning and all kinds of technical debt. There's also a race to find really good devs before they realize they're good and get a better job on their own terms.
The high-end environments at Google or SV startups only reflects a tiny isolated portion of the vast software industry. Even a cursory look at the IT/developer departments at Fortune 1000 companies paints a very different picture.
Those jobs will tend not to be very much fun or very well compensated, as long as there's a ready supply of programmers willing to do the work, and the corporations doing the hiring regard software development as an expense that cuts into the budget for more important things, like dividends and stock buybacks.
The majority of markets, except very few select places like SV.
Real talk: that meth-addicted, drunk scumbag does not care one whit for your pretty face, buddy.
And this is merely the beginning of a multi-paragraph digression that is some heady melange of fantasy and humble-brag about how the author knows kung fu.
That's not how HN works - it's perfectly fine to downvote things one disagrees with.
People flag for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they just get tired-head on a topic, feel a site adds nothing new to the discussion, think it doesn't belong, etc. The only real hardfast rule about flagging is that you don't talk about why.
To humor you, though: it's a thorough representation of an opinion that relates to my career, and the resulting discussions are important to have, regardless of whether or not I agree with the article.
My observation is that articles on such topics need an especially good title and have to be especially well written to not be flag-bait on HN. Even in cases where it's an excellent article, a bad title can get strong reactions. My impression is that a lot of flags happen based on title alone (or other info visible on HN without clicking into the article itself) without the article being read.
PIPs have no appeal process. Many developers are forced to work on menial bugs while simultaneously being promised more freedom “soon”.
Every company is constantly hiring because every company has drastically high turnover. Burnout is a very real thing in the field, and it shouldn’t be considered the norm.
Seems like a rather cynical take.
I am not familiar with the fine details of labor but I suspect the Screen Actors Guild would be a better fit as a template. The actors are anywhere from minor extras to superstars.
Although I am economically very far right, I could get behind a WGA model for software devs. I would be happy to join such an organization. But a teachers union style union.. no way.
The #1 reason is that HR no longer represents the best interests of employees. They serve to protect the company, leaving employees with zero representation.
These research labs are mostly unionized. That's why they have good benefits, working conditions, etc.
Unions constantly have to deal with internal corruption (and often don't...). The seniority system is much more arbitrary than anything approximating meritocracy. Better hope that you've saved enough if/when the union decides to strike because you are going to have to suck it up even if you don't think it's worth it. You better buy in to all the politics your union supports because your dues go to it. Enjoy watching the union protect the most incompetent worker who will go on to put lives at risk with his drinking problem. Just don't count on the union going to bat for you against the company, if they don't like you they'll hang to out to dry.
The author is out of his depth.
The unionization discussion focuses way too much around compensation instead of on union-employee relations. People just assume unions are all roses in this department (the author likens them to some street fighting Batman) when in reality they're flawed and have incentives that work against workers too. If you don't think there's nepotism and favoritism in unions then you've probably never worked in one. Unions pick and choose the workers they stand up for, it's not some romantic all for one and one for all story.
In my experience you should trust the union just about as much as hr or management. If you're not on the same side as them in whatever issue, watch your back.
We're talking about something that does indeed have very-situationally-dependent impacts and effects. The anecdotes require filtering, sure, but they're vital if you want aggregate data that reflect the real world instead of theoretical conditions.
If it's impossible to decouple something from the specific circumstances of the situation, then that "something" is insufficiently understood.
Nobody knows how the next recession will affect programmers. If adtech collapses will compensation follow? Why aren't more companies using offshore tech labor?
Can't comment on the union stuff but we should be wary of thinking devs are exceptional. Expensive labor isn't always valuable labor; as detroit learned in the 80s.
In software development, we obviously don't want to have to work with under-performing coworkers, so we need some way to remove those people that isn't based on seniority. If it can't be at management's discretion either, then what's a good solution?
I think one answer may be to have a union-negotiated peer-review process -- you can be laid off or fired if your coworkers don't vouch for your work, or consider you indispensable. Depending on the process, this could work okay or it could be awful. At best, it would seem to encourage a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies atmosphere and some unpleasant office politics.
Another approach would be market-based. Maybe projects within the company are allocated some sort of virtual currency units which can be claimed by employees when they finish units of work. Employees with a surplus of currency units but not enough time to finish their tasks by themselves can put bounties on subtasks. Worker's pay should be proportional to their credit surplus; if it's not, they can have their pay reduced or they could be asked to leave. This would less political and less personal, but working out the details could be tricky and it doesn't address the problem of highly productive people that no one wants to work with because they treat people badly.
I expect there are other possible solutions.
How does the Screen Actor's Guild, and screenwriter's and athletic unions deal with this problem?
No unions prohibit individual firing for cause (though they tend to require process for it); union contracts may require layoffs to be conducted by seniority, and companies not covered by union contracts may use allocation of what is notionally a not-for-individual cause layoff as a PR cover for targeted firings, but it is simply not the case that union contracts (at least commonly) require firing by seniority.
I would like to avoid that happening to software jobs.