> That dynamic doesn’t reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has.
What a shameful statement.
Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor, and a sub-50% CEO approval rating. A lot of reviews talk about a secretive, insulated management group.
You don’t see companies with 4.5+ stars on Glassdoor unionizing.
So I’d have to ask their leadership: who made this an “us versus them” situation? Perhaps your local superstore sells handheld mirrors.
You don’t want your employees to unionize? Offer highly competitive salaries, benefits, and opportunities to grow. Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.
or it could be even worse, the “us versus them” has gone to the next level.. its all up-to the mentality of management , if everyone flexes their muscle nothing good can come out of it.
Glassdoor's ratings are not terribly reliable. Here's something I wrote previously about my own experience with using it:
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I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.
One of my past employers did something like this. We had some negative reviews from job candidates that weren't hired. At an all hands our CEO encouraged everyone to leave honest feedback on Glassdoor. A lot of employees did, bumping our score up. It wasn't dishonest or misleading, all of the reviews were real.
Reviews are supposed to be from people who worked at the company, so if they were from rejected candidates they are fake reviews. If the company wouldn't remove the fake reviews, that further proves my point that the Glassdoor ratings are not reliable.
Every time I see this statement, I can't help it but wonder why people don't put some estimate what constitutes "highly competitive".
FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).
From the workers' perspective, why should we care exactly? That sounds like a you problem.
If you aren't able to pay your workers, I'm not sure why you think you shouldn't just go out of business. People aren't obligated to work for substandard wages so you can get rich.
I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners. But taking it out on workers isn't the answer.
I think businesses are able to pay their workers, just not absurd amount of money that FAANG pays their respective workers.
We're talking about 85k vs 200k for junior engineers here and probably 150k vs 500k for senior engineers.
Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?
> I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The NBA tried to level small market vs big market. UEFA tried with FFP. So far the result has been... _meh_
> I think businesses are able to pay their workers, just not absurd amount of money that FAANG pays their respective workers.
If the lower amount is reasonable and people are willing to work for it, then there isn't a problem. But you said, "FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions)." So it sounds like you think people aren't willing to work for the lower wage.
Given the numbers you're proposing, I think you may have a wrong impression about what engineers are being paid, both inside and outside of FAANG.
The salaries you're quoting might be true for the bay area, but that's because of the absurd cost of living there. Those numbers are certainly not accurate for the entire US or for the world. FAANG workers are paid that in the bay area, because that's what their skillsets are worth when you adjust for the bay area's cost of living. And if you make the decision to put your startup in the bay area, it's completely unreasonable of you to expect your highly-skilled workers to live in slums because you couldn't locate your business in a place where you can pay to support the cost of living. Maybe that means your startup fails, but that's on you: you're the one who came up with that crappy business plan, and it's not up to workers to prop up your crappy business plan by working for substandard wages.
> Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?
Ugh. Don't ignore half of what I said. If a business can't pay their workers the business should die, yes. But there are a lot of small businesses that seem capable of paying their workers, so I'm not sure why you think this is an undue burden, and I'm certainly not saying that those small businesses should die.
Again, why do you think that workers should prop up your insolvent business by accepting substandard pay? Pay fair wages or GTFO.
Whatever unfairness you think exists in competition between small and large businesses, exists tenfold between employees and employers. If small businesses are underprivileged, crapping on workers who are even more underprivileged is not the solution to that problem.
Austin, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, (and maybe London UK) branches of FAANG pays 2-3x from the top-10% market average in that area.
SDE1 @ Amazon Vancouver get at least 160-180k (CAD).
SDE3 @ Tableau Vancouver can hit $300k-$350k (CAD).
SDE3 @ Amazon Seattle can get paid 400-500k (USD).
I don't know how much Google Singapore, Zurich, and China pay compare to the market. I heard Alibaba pays $200k USD (if you're OK with 996) for Soft Eng (not in management).
All I said was that "competitive salary" is loosely defined because once FAANG landed in a specific location, they will absolutely "crushed" your notion of competitive salary.
This is the reason why I find the notion of "competitive salary" is interesting (and a bit funny). Employees will demand "competitive salary" and when we asked them, they will point out to the maximum TC that they can find in their area. That's not "competitive" salary. That's "I want to get paid the max".
Of course... it wouldn't be sexy to say "pay us fairly" since that equates to "market average".
If they can't afford the price of labor why should the business continue to exist? If the going rate for a plumber is $100 an hour, why should I be surprised if I get no responses when I'm only willing to pay $40?
And? My point remains: why should software developers willingly work for less pay? People aren't entitled to have software developers work on their projects. If companies not willing to pay the going rate for software development, then why are they surprised when they can't find workers?
> Is it what everybody else is paying you or FAANG level?
It depends on a variety of factors like domain and location. But if you're not finding developers, then its higher than whatever you're offering. And if it's in major tech metros (SV, Seattle + Eastside) it's close to FAANG levels.
> But if you're not finding developers, then its higher than whatever you're offering. And if it's in major tech metros (SV, Seattle + Eastside) it's close to FAANG levels.
This is not entirely true. People aren't finding developers because most of them failed the interview (unless you are digital agencies).
In major tech metros, nobody pay close to FAANG levels. Either you pay at FAANG levels (and they compete at that level) or you go down one-tier (Pinterest, Airbnb, etc) or you're the rest.
> In major tech metros, nobody pay close to FAANG levels. Either you pay at FAANG levels (and they compete at that level) or you go down one-tier (Pinterest, Airbnb, etc) or you're the rest.
Contrast this with your original comment in this chain:
> FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).
If what you say is true, that most companies don't pay close to FAANG levels, then why are non-FAANG companies having a hard time to compete?
Unemployment in software is near zero. You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels, yet at the same time say that non-FAANG companies are having trouble attracting talent. If a company is having a hard time attracting talent at their current compensation levels, then this indicates that their current compensation levels are not competitive (assuming other factors are the same).
Ultimately, the price of labor is whatever people are willing to pay. If workers can get better pay for the same work elsewhere, then the company is going to have trouble staffing - and that's natural.
> that most companies don't pay close to FAANG levels, then why are non-FAANG companies having a hard time to compete?
Hard time to hire engineers according to their bar. Their bar is high (FAANG level) but they don't pay FAANG level so this is interesting => They don't want to lower the bar (rightfully so) and nobody wants to be perceived as "FAANG" reject.
> You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels
Few? I'd say they're "exceptions" (like Uber... for a while before they laid people off) and the rest aren't even close.
Sometimes I wonder if in some instances a low approval rating is endogenous to the company's employee makeup. I work in the HE sector and I can tell you that the lowest levels of student satisfaction comes from departments or disciplines comprising of mostly people complaining about society, yadayadyada
I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.
The only downside I can think of is ageism, but then again, I have colleagues in their 50s and 60s where I work. But I suppose this isn't universal. (I'm in Atlanta and we have a lot of older workers. Age doesn't seem to be a thing here.)
Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people. We have the flexibility to find new work or create our own businesses.
Why introduce a new level of politics and collective bargaining? I don't want to pay union dues. If I don't like where I'm working, I'll go somewhere else.
Can someone explain why I should want this? (Or why I should empathize with those who do?) I don't understand it at all.
Just look at their employee reviews. The management there seems toxic.
I implore you to also think twice about the way in which you are demonizing unions. Sure, some unions aren’t the best, but what you’re saying is 100% discounting the benefits that a union can bring to employees. Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation. They can restrict overwork, unpaid overtime (see the special salaried overtime exemptions that IT employees and teachers get enshrined into US law), and unsafe working conditions.
Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.
The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”
Sure, life is nice for many tech employees right now, but what happens when the supply/demand situation inverts?
Tech employees often also have a very bad habit of pretending that more poorly compensated areas of their own company are enjoying the success in the same way. Ask someone in support or a junior graphic designer about what they think about the prospects of “working somewhere else.”
Graphic designers work at most tech companies I've worked at, and I've never worked at a game studio. They definitely can be classified quite reasonably as tech employees.
Also, here in Montreal, most people's list of well-known local tech employers would absolutely include at least one or two of the many game studios here.
What percentage of employees at Google/Apple/Microsoft do you think are "graphic designers", and what percentage are "software developers"?
Your argument to create a union is that the 1% of employees need protection. Honestly I agree video game industries could use a union. But the presence of a graphics designer at Google does not mean every employee needs to unionize.
Google has more software developers, no doubt, but still far more graphic designers than you seem to expect.
No, every employee at Google does not need to unionize. CEO Sundar Pichai certainly doesn't. But lots of Googlers have long wanted a union for good reason, including software developers. I would have happily voted yes in a union election when I was there, despite being a software developer myself.
I know of plenty of examples of misbehaviour and other harmful actions by Google toward software development employees, a number of which have been publicly reported. And the situation seems to have gotten worse since I left.
To be clear, Google is far from unique in this regard, and it's still probably a better employer than many of its peer companies. That just underscores how severe and widespread the problem is.
> The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”
Bingo. I've worked at enough places to know that the greener grass myth is indeed a myth in the industry. That doesn't mean you can't get a better job, but there's always a very real risk that things will be worse at your new job.
This, plus in the USA you can't quit your current job without another one lined up, because your access to healthcare is dependent on employer-sponsored health insurance. Especially if you already made enough money for the year that you don't qualify for a program like Medicaid or state-sponsored subsidies.
> Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation.
Those negotiations can also drag down your salary potential as well. You get paid what everyone else gets paid. If you warm the chair longer, you get paid more, regardless of any innovation or extra value you bring to the business.
You have incentivized mediocrity because what’s the point of doing anything beyond the minimum requirements? It isn’t like you’re going to get a raise for being especially clever.
> Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.
No, they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase the influence and power of the union leadership. You are directly paying the union to represent the union's interest, which may or may not align with your own.
E.g. a motivated, capable teacher has a portion of their salary deducted and spent on defending seniority based pay even if said teacher is in favor of performance based pay. The union directly acts against the desired of the employee.
The bigger issue is going from Salaried to Hourly employees. I assume (but don't know) that you need to be hourly in order to unionize.
I have been at a bunch of companies that reclassified employees from salaried to hourly. This always came after a single employee filed a lawsuit. It almost never impacted developers, sometimes impacted QA and often impacted other development support employees. I have never seen an impacted employee like it because they could not participate in stock options. I was only at companies with lucrative stock options.
If a company had poor stock options then I could see that somebody might like the change.
You don't need to be hourly to unionize. Salaried employees can do that. The exclusion is based on meeting the definition of supervisor, not by the payroll category.
Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs? It’s not true.
I live in the SF Bay Area, have worked as a SWE for 10+ years including at top companies like Google, and changing jobs is NOT easy and I’m sick of the implication it is.
There are also a LOT of younger kids on HN who have never worked through a recession.
Finally, just because you make an ok salary doesn’t mean a political voice is worthless. Why do doctors have the AMA?
Engineers desperately need to stop boxing themselves out of the discussions, we absolutely need to organize, badly.
I graduated 11 years ago when they were firing teachers because the school districts were going bankrupt. I had to take a job clerking in a warehouse to make ends meet. That was a lesson that all my prospects could go sour in a matter of a couple of months. So please tell me how I had an easy time because I'm an engineer now.
I'm always amazed that when people ask for dignity, respect and the ability to have agency in their own life, other people feel the need to put those people down, call them "spoiled" and assert that life is just fine for everyone, thank you.
What I usually can't figure out is "why". Do you own a company? Are you part of management? Do you think that life should stay as it is and not get better for everyone?
Having family who worked with the UAW as well is IBEW I can tell you that Trade Unions in general are much better at 'holding a standard' and truly keeping their trade-craft respectable.
However the UAW, the most worthless crap joke of a union that makes other unions look bad. Basically just protects people who show up to work drunk or drive forklifts into walls. Forces companies to do insane things to fire people who do nothing but drag down the common output of a factory.
Be careful what you wish for and who you choose to put in control a good union can be a blessing... a bad union can be a millstone around your neck that ends up just being owned and, in the case of the UAW, is just a puppet for whatever company they serve.
I will say that when with Amazon I talked to some of my peers in Germany and I was fascinated with the labor protections that were provided to staff over there vs. the USA. They have some kind of thing, like a "labor council" or something. This group had to be consulted before lots of things could be done. In this case I think that it kept the Amazon buildings across the pond much happier than the ones in the USA. (Obviously this is simply my opinion)
I am on the fence, I was raised in a blue collar union family- even went to a little UAW brainwashing camp as a kid (Black Lake anyone?). My family members in IBEW have shown me that there are some very dedicated unions that do very good things and keep a trade from turning into a free market shitshow where everything becomes lowest bidder. If a union exists to truly protect staff AS WELL AS uphold high standards I think it will survive. When its just US V. Them...gimme` free crap, you are asking to be burned to the ground by competition.
That's the thing with Germany, they have a management-labour relations regime that is collaborative rather than combative... Management has accepted that they can improve their productivity if they work with their labour unions rather than against them. Employees get treated better and management gets good productivity out of their workers. Everyone wins. I wonder what it would take to introduce this model to North American companies without state coercion...
> Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs?
If you were fired today you could walk into a new job by end of week, if you were any good. At least that's what Hackernews keeps telling me.
Everyone on HN is a Top Performer who is consonantly held back by the mediocrity that surrounds them.
Also, the hiring process is broken. Also, older workers have a hard time finding work. Also, I have work 60 hour weeks. Also, I have to be on call all the time even though they said it would only be one weekend a month. Also, it turns out the options I was given were worthless. Also, open floor plans are detrimental to my health.
Techworkers have absolutely 0 issues that could be solved by any organizing!
> I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.
There are dozens and dozens of threads on this site about the cancerous software engineering interview techniques in widespread use in the industry. Despite having 15 years of experience and a lot of accomplishments under my belt, I still had a bad streak a few years back where I had to interview 30 times before getting an offer.
So I have to say it's a fallacy to make this kind of claim.
This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.
Ah, the good old "those corporate boomers elsewhere are uncreative and therefore we'll beat them easily" trope. It's certainly possible, but I have doubts that the generation of scrum teams and open-space offices will solve unions. Innovation is hard no matter who is doing it, and most of the "innovation" seen in the valley is just applying existing solved problems to economies of scale, made possible by advancements in the supply chain (such as the SaaS paradigm).
Tech is an industry that believes it can disrupt everything from hotels and taxis to space travel to food and nutrition to the very concept of money. Not to mention the speculative life sciences companies, those who presume to be in the business of disrupting death itself.
I just find it amazing that a community so wrapped up in its own hubris always seems throws up its hands when the subject of labor relations comes up, insisting that no further improvement is possible. (Also of amusement is that KS, a crowdfunding startup, is ostensibly is about disrupting how goods are created and sold). So perhaps the industry is selective about what it believes tech is capable of inventing?
Also, a tech union wouldn’t be an advocate of open offices or the overuse of scrum, if the HN commentariat is representative of industry workers.
It's the same principle which professional organizations use to keep compensation high for doctors and lawyers: set a limit on the number of entrants.
Restricting entry is a fundamental feature of unions: it protects those who are already in industry at the expense of potential new employees who might otherwise come in and undercut wages.
That said if you want to standardize the admissions process, a professional organization is a tried and true way to accomplish this: doctors and lawyers take a standardized test, become accredited, and can take on any job without being grilled for their technical skills.
Perhaps, but all of this talk about forcing licensing and certification to restrict engineering labor supply seems to fly in the face of the actual unionization efforts in the OP- the workplace improvements are mostly about addressing HR-related complaints and building a better environment, not pay raises:
There's plenty of issues in the tech industry that a union or some other professional association or guild (or even the IEEE, with teeth) could address that have nothing to do with giving developers higher wages.
> This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.
Throughout human history, unions are one of the few ways that ordinary citizens can actually stand up against concentrated power (democracy, revolutions are some other ways). Rather than trying to invent something new, maybe study the past a bit more.
My point was more that the "if you don't like your job, you can easily leave" isn't as much of an option for people as many think. If you can manage to get through the interview cancer, you still run the risk of your next job being equally as bad, or worse than before.
I don't think unions are going to be much use here, however, and they may even make things worse. Raising the industry-average cost of an employee means fewer jobs in the industry, meaning even more difficulty for an employee to "just get a job elsewhere if you don't like it".
Well, for one thing, the good times won't last forever. Now's the time to prepare for the bad—it's much harder to organize when you're weak.
For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.
And then, software development and related jobs are not all at FAANG, or even close to that. Many of those working in software aren't negotiating, individually, from a position even a little better than a "normal" office worker. Probably most, in fact. There's a whole world of software developers out there beyond SV, Seattle, and New York—the average state of a worker in our industry, even just in the US, is probably much closer to the norm outside those places than in them.
It's also a proven avenue for putting a stop to all sorts of abuses that exist due to the uneven power of workers and employers, not just direct compensation. Lots of non-California workers in tech are under badly disadvantageous employment agreements, but without working collectively, either through unions or government, against them, they're so common that resisting them carries high individual risk and a low chance of benefiting anyone else who's in an even worse position to resist them. That flexibility to work or create our own businesses you bring up? Yeah, that could be assured for non-California, non-public-figure-rockstar developers, too, through union negotiations.
> For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.
At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO.
HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers.
Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.
My point is just that, despite high comp at some companies, rejecting a candidate is still considered a very "cheap" move from employers' perspective (so: their labor negotiating position is still strong, despite high comp)—I explicitly wasn't trying to get into the correctness of that sort of policy or the environment that creates it, beyond its probably not being viable if tech companies' negotiating positions were meaningfully weaker than a normal employer.
From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity.
It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar.
If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.)
Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.
Some things other than salary to consider: open-space offices, unpaid overtime, increase in managerial oversight (pointless standups etc.), erosion of work time/free time boundary, onerous non-compete/intellectual property clauses in employment contracts. Everybody is constantly bitching about those things but despite the claimed shortage of software engineers they seem to only get worse with time. I don't claim that unions are the solution but these problems don't seem to magically resolve themselves either.
You say "increase in managerial oversight", but then mention standups. That's about the least onerous oversight possible. I understand not liking standups, but... that's not at the level of excessive management oversight. Excessive management oversight is a whole different level. (And yes, I know, standups can be part of that whole different level. That's the one you specifically mentioned, though. If that's the excessive management that most grates on you, you don't have excessive management.)
So, do you agree that managerial oversight is increasing or not? Of course standups can be helpful and unobtrusive, but they also often degrade into shamefests with the sole purpose of forcing everybody to conjure up reasons why they are not done yet.
And of course I agree that they are not the most annoying thing possible. Let's wait a few more years until something like DingTalk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678571) becomes popular in Western companies.
Managerial oversight is increasing as a general trend? I have no data one way or the other.
Standups increase managerial oversight compared to not having them? True... as far as it goes. The thing is, management is going to make decisions based on something. Having them make decisions with no data leads to bad outcomes, so they've got to get the data somehow. If you've got a way for them to get the data that's less intrusive to workers' time than standups, I'd like to hear what it is. (Seriously. I've got standups now, and if you've got a better way, I'm not above copying it.)
As others say, one reason is that busts happen. I was reading the union contract for one of the local government unions (like you do…) the other day, and noticed they had a lot of provisions related to lay-offs. How much severance people get, how it's calculated, how it's decided who gets laid off, etc. This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.
The other thing is that not everyone experiences the supposed benefits of these careers. I talk to a lot of people who are exploited in the tech industry with long hours and salaries that aren't really that high for the high CoL we deal with. Talk to bootcamp graduates about their job experiences some time. PoC and women also report rampant discrimination—lower salaries for the same work, sexism, organizations providing cover and golden parachutes for harassers.
Finally, think of all the issues that we gripe about here on HN:
- Open office plans
- Horrible and overly-demanding hiring processes
- Lack of transparency or consistency around promotion processes and salaries
Fixing these types of issues are bread and butter for unions.
>This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.
Not if you're a top performer who switches jobs to find new interesting things. If you look into the details of the "who gets laid off", it's very frequently just all of the newest members of each department.
As someone posted previously, would you consider the possibility it's not the software developers that are leading the push to unionize? Perhaps there are people occupying roles in the company that don't pay as well or roles that aren't considered as valuable. Could it be that they feel they should be compensated on par with their software developer counterparts?
I'm kind of in the same boat, though I actually kind of lean toward some kind of organizing. Those I know who are members of a national union complain about the union spending most of its money on things unrelated to the employment of its members.
But at the same time professional organizations like the AMA and ADA seem to benefit their members (unfortunately sometimes at the expense of the public).
I think the questions to ask are what's the bigger picture? What is the framing used in the current discussion to limit our view of that bigger picture? Who is doing the framing?
I don't have answers there, but it definitely seems like there's some important hidden variable that is omitted from the framing of either side of this debate.
Why do you assume software developers are leading the push to unionize? All we know is that Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize. The majority of Kickstarter employees don't write software. My cynical take is the non-dev employees feel they're not getting what they deserve in the form of let's say salary. Perhaps they would like compensation closer to or on par with the software developers at their company.
I've already mentioned this twice in other comments here, so I feel like I'm overdoing it, but I'm sincerely interested in your (and others') opinions:
About six years back it came out that the big tech companies were conspiring against their own employees:
Sometimes it's not all about money. People in the bay area may not understand that most people working at Kickstarter truly believe in the company's mission. The money is not great and we've been willing to accept that to feel like we're making a positive change in the world. Unfortunately upper management has used this (as well as Kickstarter's reputation) as a bargaining chip to treat employees poorly.
“A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of.”
Yeah, when you are in the top 5%. I’m not sure you realize just how shit most tech jobs are. Not everyone gets $300k a year in stock. Most people get nothing.
You don’t want it because you are in the top decile. That’s the same reason that everyone who is in the top decile of anything doesn’t want change. This is for the 90%, not for you. You shouldn’t empathize. You should oppose this because it will ultimately hurt you.
I was there a decade ago, nothing of the kind was transpiring within my earshot. I also have plenty of friends there and never heard anything like this.
The strength of labor unions in Europe is drawn in large part due to the fact that there are a multiplicity of unions representing workers for the same companies, and workers can choose who they want to represent them.
That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them. Anti-union propaganda is rampant.
It could be the case in the US. Having a single union is a good place to start.
> That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them. Anti-union propaganda is rampant.
Well, no, the fact that almost all unions in the US use exclusive representation contracts (compared to Europe, where such contracts are range from "unheard-of in most industries" to "illegal") is not due to anti-union propaganda.
Unions being weak in the US is due to anti-union propaganda though, which as you likely know was the point I was making. Very few industries have even a single union let alone competition.
Complaining about the lack of competition when union representation has been decimated, seems like pointless bikeshedding. I'll happily talk about the lack of union representation, but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.
> Complaining about the lack of competition when union representation has been decimated, seems like pointless bikeshedding
On the contrary, history shows us clearly that the fact that union membership has declined in the US and the fact that union membership in the US is typically on an exclusive representation basis are deeply linked.
In fact, you can still draw your same argument ("the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them") from this fact - it just has little to do with propaganda, as you claimed.
> but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.
If you want to have that argument, please find someone who said that and argue with them, instead of responding to my post, which is saying something different altogether.
As I said above I have no interest in diving into these trivial and frankly baseless arguments. Talking about inter-union competition when there are no unions is a huge waste of time and energy. Let's actually have unions first before we worry too much about unions being too powerful.
Using it as an argument against creating a single union seems like a distraction.
> Talking about inter-union competition when there are no unions is a huge waste of time and energy.
The same factors which led to the rise of exclusive representation are the ones which led to the drop in union representation across the board.
If you want to ignore that, fine, but don't be surprised or disappointed when you don't end up with the result you seem to want (more union representation).
Unions in Europe are usually optional and are thriving. Unions in USA are usually forced and are not thriving. Don't you think that USA should learn a bit from Europe about this since they are typically far ahead of USA on worker rights issues?
This is a fine comment except for the end. You unfortunately have a habit of taking swipes at people you're talking to here. Could you please up your game a bit and omit those? Your comments tend to be quite good otherwise, but it's not ok to break the site guidelines like this.
> This is a fine comment except for the end. You unfortunately have a habit of taking swipes at people you're talking to here. Could you please up your game a bit and omit those? Your comments tend to be quite good otherwise, but it's not ok to break the site guidelines like this.
I'll admit that that sentence is a bit dismissive, but it's a deflection in response to a comment which is itself dismissive and aggressive towards me and which is trying to bait an unnecessary argument over an uncharitable reading of my original (innocuous) statement. Hopefully that's evident in context.
I'll be honest: there are usernames I recognize by name. There are users who have made a habit of posting aggressive, dismissive, snarky replies to even my blandest comments, often trying to bait an argument and drawing the conversation towards a specific tangent. There are some users who post comments that are "civil" in tone but express racist or homophobic sentiments towards me. (In some cases, it's plainly obvious that they're trying to continue personal grudges from other threads; they've linked directly to the previous thread or copied sections of text verbatim!) In my view, either one goes against the spirit of the guidelines for this website - fostering productive conversation - as well as the letter.
Yes, it's true that trying to deflect or cut off an argument like this is a defensive response. But it's a defensive response that's been learned over years of participating on this site, and from seeing moderators take no visible action against people "civilly" directing bigoted comments at individuals, while publicly taking issue with the people defending themselves (albeit impolitely) from those exact comments in the same thread. While that might not be the intention, and while there may be reasons for this (e.g. engaging visibly with the people likely to be receptive feedback as opposed to those who won't), it's the pattern that I (and others) have noticed.
I very much appreciate the time and effort that you (and others) put in to running this site, which is exactly why I'm taking the time to write this comment and explain the broader context.
Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.
Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem with your comments that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information. It's much harder to see these patterns in oneself than it is in others, especially the people we most disagree with. The only way to fix that is to take on a higher standard for yourself—not because a higher standard applies to you, but as a compensation for the strong bias to always see the other person as the greater problem. We all have that bias, so we all need to apply that fix. It's a community-level effort.
That said, if there are other accounts repeatedly breaking HN's rules, we'd certainly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.
It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. We do that a lot. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, so we rely on users to help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
You can help by flagging such comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them. I took a look at the history of comments you've flagged, and in most cases there ended up being visible evidence of moderation. In egregious cases, it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com, because usually that will lead to swifter action.
> Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem in the past that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information.
Yes, I had seen that, which is why I mentioned that in my comment.
> Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.
I understand, and I'm not saying that it makes it okay. I'm explaining that, when people see patterns in which violations of rules get called out publicly and which don't, it sends a message. The reason I'm letting you know because I believe that's not the message that your team intends to send (if it were, I wouldn't be bothering).
> It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. I've personally done that hundreds if not thousands of times. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
The last time you and I interacted on here (Jan 2019) was in a thread where you took issue with a snarky comment I wrote, and I responded by pointing out the same thing - that I was responding to a person who was even more aggressive, clearly acting in bad faith, and accusing me of "racism" for explaining why a post was offensive to people of certain ethnic backgrounds (including my own). My comment apparently warranted a public moderator response; the parent that I responded to apparently did not. The other was eventually flagged, but only much later - long after the post had fallen off the front page.
Perhaps moderators don't necessarily read the parent post when responding to a comment, but because most readers assume that mods do, a situation like that makes it look like moderators are condoning one type of behavior over the other.
It doesn't help that, in any system that relies on user flags for reporting behavior, users from minority backgrounds ultimately are flagged at a higher rate, even if they adhere to the rules the same proportion of the time. There's peer-reviewed research that's explained this phenomenon, but most of it boils down to the obvious dynamic: people are less likely to report objectionable behavior if they agree with the content, and people are more likely to disagree with content that openly expresses viewpoints from minority groups.
> You can help by flagging those comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them, and in egregious cases it's helpful to email hn@ycombinator.com.
I have typically avoided flagging these comments because I've (perhaps incorrectly) been under the impression that they're not actioned - in all the years I've been on this site, I don't think I've ever seen moderators publicly calling out this sort of "civil bigotry" that I'm describing.
However, if that's not the case, I'll make note of that and will flag those from now on instead of responding myself.
>That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them.
No, it's actually because the government gave them more power and allowed agreements to be structured where all of the electricians in one company must come from the same union.
Unions in the US are able to prevent competition from other unions. You can not freely choose different unions if you don't like the one in your company. See every state that doesn't allow "right to work". Unions become mandatory.
That's not the case in Germany as well, there's practically only the DGB (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, German Trade Union Federation) that has member unions that have very little overlap. Yes, there are some small, competing unions (e.g. there is another union representing police officers and another federation for people working in government organisations) and some non-members (e.g. a union representing airplane pilots or medical personel), but there's not a lot of competition, the DGB represents about 85% of all union members and is very closely connected to the SPD, one of the major parties.
DGB is a choice though, you aren't forced to join it. Every worker at Kickstarter will be forced to join this union, so the situation is very different.
I didn't mean to imply one way or the other, just wanted to point out that "competition between unions" isn't really a thing in Germany, so "that's why it works that well in Europe" is questionable. I don't know how it works in France or the UK, so Germany might be the total outlier, but it would be an outlier of 80m people.
You can be a contractor with your own S-corp and still get the same benefits as union members if you are in an industry that has union workers like SAG.
“ I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
> Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.
Not really. It may be short-term better for the workers, but not likely long term as they are effectively constraining the growth of the business relative to what it would be if the union did not exist.
The whole entertainment industry is unionized in L.A.
I know an actor from Las Vegas who moved to L.A. and got a role in a TV commercial and was surprised to see somebody else standing in front of the cameras and was surprised to find that every actor has a "stand-in" who is there so they can set up the equipment, then the real actor is fresh when he does his scene.
These costs add up, but there are many specialists who are highly productive. For instance, setting up and tearing down sets is a special form of carpentry which the average carpenter would take a change of mindset.
Union labor helps maintain a productive and talented workforce that gives L.A. a comparative advantage. Being at times the the documentarian who travels light and feels it is extravagant to have a sidekick that sets up lights it heavyweight but it maintains a world-beating quality standard.
And if they want to negotiate collectively to change how the organization treats them, it's absolutely their right to do so. Unionization is also specifically enshrined in law.
I hope they pursue a path toward codetermination: getting workers a seat on the board. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that plays out in a US-based tech company; I believe it'd be for the good, but we'll know for sure if we can see it play out.
Edit: Oh, and not having a say in how your organization is run is a wretched existence. Time to raise our standards, if we don't see that.
That's why they have the leverage to organize and help reset the precedent for labor representation at a point in time when that representation is at a historic low.
The quote at the top of the comment chain is about living a wretched existence. Don't get me wrong, it's totally fine to form a union on the principle of "we're doing okay but we want more stuff", businesspeople are allowed to try and get richer with no higher principle in mind. But it's dishonest to pretend that it inherits some kind of inherent moral weight from the traditional labor movement.
It's dishonest to pretend companies aren't perfectly happy to make their employees live a wretched existence as long as profits are brought in.. and that is a fundamental issue of the labor movement.
The thing that gets me about Apple specifically is that they did this while sitting on huge cash reserves and being one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world, yet they still fucked over their own people to make more.
I used to think that, as a 733t programmer, I had no use for unions, but then this happened and showed that there's no particular reason to trust tech company management at all, at all. They'll screw you to make a buck and get a slap on the wrist if anything if they're caught.
Interview with Google and they will send you lovely little videos with folks sliding down banisters and such to show you how wonderful it is to work there. It won't mention the "wage-fixing cartel" that limits your job opportunities and take-home pay.
It's pretty sick when you think about it. I don't know it unions are the answer, it's complicated after all, but absolutely these folks are not your friends, and you should coe in with as much leverage as you can get if you want to work for "the man".
I'm sure this phrase inspired many, but it's talking about an extreme. What if the disadvantaged are not having a "wretched existence"? Is immense inequality ok then? That's the big question.
Workers assume risk taking on an opportunity cost with their employers, and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.
But the point is this part: "for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars" is irrelevant. Who has done this besides criminals?
It all depends on your definition of "useful", but anyone who's made that much money legally has probably put in a bunch of work (or put in work to educate themselves to be able to make good decisions), or assumed a lot of risk in an investment.
There's definitely something to be said for reducing income inequality, but we don't have to assume the ultra-rich have "done absolutely nothing that is useful" in order to be pro-workers rights. Capitalism is designed to produce ultra-rich individuals.
We also should not lionize wealth. There are many people who inherit a lot of money, have a family that has a business network, that have really contributed nothing but are massively wealthy.
There are massively wealthy individuals who have collected value in one area, and use that wealth to negatively influence many other areas. We really should not give money that much of an advantage.
In general, tilt the system away from favoring money concentrations.
Favor small business formation (and worker coop formation) with higher SBA loan funding. Put required worker representation on corporate boards (like Germany) of larger corporations. Do actual antimonopoly enforcement. Tax large corps more. Create more public ownership of housing and infrastructure.. it's all pretty mundane well trodden and reasonable practice for good governance.
Exotic stuff would be government backed individual loan lines for citizens. The limit could be expanded on repayments but zero consequence if never repaid. The idea would be to open a window for entrepreneurship when right now, wages have basically squeezed out the possibility of most people starting any sort of business from savings. If you can make things grow, you get a larger limit. Basically decentralize loans.
Banks were bailed out by quantitative easing to the tune of $4+T, so at the very least, one can draw a direct line from that government bailout from banks to bank stock shareholders.
Just to review: QE bought risky Mortgage backed securities off of banks and finance companies completely absolving them of carrying the negative effects of their bad investments...
I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.
I think you may be misunderstanding - "risk" here is a financial thing, not a personal risk of being tossed on the street. If someone is worth $10 billion and will lose $2 billion if their company fails, that's still a lot of risk being covered, even though it won't really change their life to only have $8 billion.
Doesn't that mean that all the employees taken on a much greater personal risk? Personal risk seems to have higher stakes than financial risk - so it's unclear why financial risk is so prized. When you lose $2 billion because your company fails, workers are thrown out onto the streets. What makes the $2 billion risk more valuable than peoples' livelihoods?
I'd rather be a multi-billionaire who loses $2 billion than a mid-level worker who loses their job (and for a proper comparison you'd have to aggregate all the trouble caused by all the job losses the closing of the company has caused), especially in a country with a smaller social safety net. That alone tells me enough about the value of this "risk" supposedly so greatly undertaken by the owners to entitle them to perpetual gains on it.
Financial risk isn't prized in some moral sense. It's just an instrumentally valuable service. If a factory costs $100m to build, someone has to put $100m at risk to build it; no matter how much the workers self-organize they won't be able to build the factory if they don't have the $100m.
It is prized in the sense of providing justification for huge salaries, which is the point of discussion here. Just as you couldn't build a factory without $100M, you couldn't operate it without workers - and sometimes, because they self-organize. In a capitalist economy, one needs capital and labour. Capital without labour is unproductive, and labour without capital is (usually) the same.
Each and every employee takes a risk by being employed at a company. At the moment, it seems they are only compensated for their labour. Why is the owner of the company compensated for risk, possibly in addition to being compensated for labour, but the employees aren't?
Switch "salaries" for "compensation", then. If the idea is that risk-taking is inherently useful and therefore deserving of constant income, it must be shown why that risk is compensated in some cases (investors, CEOs) but not in others (employees).
The argument was as follows:
* People who do nothing useful gain high compensation (Debs).
* Acutally, the high compensation is due to taking on "all the risk"
* But employees also take on a large amount of personal risk which is not compensated.
* Ah, but the kind of risk being discussed isn't personal risk, it's financial risk.
* But this means that when constructing an argument for high compensation, financial risk is prized and personal risk is not. Why?
The fact that investors don't take salaries is irrelevant to the discussion. The justification for their profit is still "financial risk" without regard for "personal risk".
Stock appreciation isn't really "compensation". When Bezos for example gets billions of dollars richer, that's an artificial number from multiplying a NASDAQ price by his holdings - there's no actual flow of billions of dollars which could be redirected to employee salaries. The only way for employees to get a piece of the pie would be to give them stock. And most large companies do try to give their employees stock; even Walmart part-timers have an ESPP.
Losing $2 billion is not 'no impact'. That's money that could have been pumped into the economy somewhere else and could have done much better for both the investor and society. The investor might get some extra tries, but going from 5 attempts down to 4 is still a big loss.
So if the risk was taken before, why does that entitle the risktaker to seek constant gains on it? If I wrote a program essential for the success of the company, before the success of a company, would it entitle me to a perpetual percentage of the company's profits? The benefits of that program, by current standards, belong to the company perpetually. Why does the risk, taken on behalf of the company, only belong to the person in charge?
By looking at employees, you're also looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who were able to gain employment). The person who took the initial risk (say, a founder) may often leave the company or sell it. Who in the company has then assumed all of the risk? The person who bought the company?
Even then, we're not living in a just world. What's admirable, or a social justification, for taking a risk in a business that operates in immoral ways, or illegal ways? I'm not saying this applies to Kickstarter, but it certainly applies to a great many other companies.
And when GP said "assuming all the risk", I can't think how that's possibly true. Workers in all professions assume some level of risk every day - either to their safety, career prospects, or continued employment.
According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less. Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.
Personal—not Tesla—burn-rate of $200,000 a month, and he still owned property.
Putting aside that if "I may get slightly less rich but still never have to do anything, whatsoever, that I don't want to, ever, and neither will the next two generations of my family" is the risk please fucking sign me up for taking that "consequence of failure", I don't even need the chance at up-side.
They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.
I hope then you're passing on pay increases and benefit improvements to stay competitive. If not, then you're applying different logic to single employee competitiveness then to group bargaining without any factual basis.
Seems like they did learn from history. Unions are they only thing that have proven consistently, across the world, to protect wages, rights, and give workers a say in their workplaces.
Those same people working for the same cheaper wages have existed for a long time before kickstarter got a union. Running with your logic, it's a wonder anyone is employed in this country at all.
I think that on the contrary, History has proven over the past few decades that wide outsourcing doesn't work. Companies tried it in the 90's and it was a disaster. This is why software devs in the US can command a salary of $100k+
Rockwell Collins, which became United Technologies, which became Raytheon, who was responsible for the 737 MAX's MCAS software and outsourced it to a low wage country, agrees.
> They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.
Then why didn't all start ups outsource all their IT jobs to India for instance already? They are considerably cheaper than US software engineers.
I mean what stopped all these IT businesses to do that yesterday? I know more instances of businesses that tried to outsource their IT overseas only to go back on that decision, than successful IT outsourcing stories.
I hope we can look back on this day as the first in a series of victories in which tech workers rest back control from their workplaces from their executives that have driven them off course. From sex abuse scandals to wage fixing to collaboration with authoritarian regimes, it’s clear that many of these companies have become unmoored from the vision, talent, and ideals of the labor makes that makes them possible.
Congrats to the Kickstarter folks. Here's hoping this is the turn towards increased workers rights in the tech sector.
Yes, this sector tends to pay fairly well, but that doesn't mean there aren't other areas to improve. From IP restrictions to overtime, oncall to transparency in promotions, there are countless workplace conditions I hear about needing to improve constantly.
In a lot of companies there's a sense that the promotion process is secret, unfair, or doesn't evaluate everyone equally. Especially at big tech companies (at Amazon, for instance, I often heard a sense that it was 'impossible' to get to L6. Additional transparency can help people understand why they are/are not moving to the next level.)
The same things as any other union? Improved working conditions (e.g. hours), protecting employees from abuses, and maintaining fair pay & benefits.
Unions as only a working class institution is mostly a US historic artifact. Other countries have unions in highly specialized and in-demand industries too.
What were the specific concerns of the Kickstarter employees though? Were they being worked extra hours or being abused by management? Or not getting proper market wages? This is quite a heavy hammer to a set of problems, so I'm curious how bad it really was.
Were they firing people arbitrarily making it a positive thing that the company will now have to jump through hoops to reprimand or get rid of the worst non-productive workers? Or the countless other limitations now imposed on the company from making decisions which benefit the existence of the company itself (and the fact they can even hire/pay for these workers)?
Will it make Kickstarter super cautious about hiring new people with their new extensive protections lowering the amount of people who would benefit from the success of various companies who have unions (and the taxation of these which benefits the wider community)? Turning them into mini-exclusive clubs of workers, while everyone else works p/t or on contract to avoid f/t hires?
How are extremely in-demand tech workers not "maintaining fair pay & benefits"? Surely if they were not being paid "fairly" (not sure what that means anyways, if not market price) they could just leave, as there are plenty of tech jobs in NYC where Kickstarter is based.
You're misquoting. I was explaining a union's purpose, I didn't claim tech workers were underpaid. Plus "fairness" could also refer to inter-employee compensation at the same company (e.g. men and women).
Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.
Re: enforcing fairness, that argument is still asinine, if women were underpaid relative to men at the same company surely they could find many other companies willing to pay them a fair wage (and hopefully they would sue their former employer as well)
It might behoove you to read a bit more about the well-documented nature of employment discrimination in the tech industry. Women are systematically underpaid and denied raises and promotions compared to men, which tends to make their cases weaker when going to a new company as well.
If the question about why women just don't go work at another company when they're given unequal pay was legitimate, then I think it's fair to assume there was a knowledge gap. If it was a bad faith question, of course, there's not much I can do about that!
It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk.
Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less.
Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
> It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk.
> Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
You are misinterpreting my comment. It had been well documented that in job searches women prioritize benefits at a higher rate than men. So women might on average be getting $10,000 less in salary but also ~$10,000 less in benefits. This is not about utilitzation of the same benefits. This is about differences in men's and women's job preferences that result in unequal salary but equal overall compensation.
> Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less
Equal pay for equal work can also be violated by giving workers equal pay while allocating unequal work.
> Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
Google's analysis is conducted over all of their employees, for one. By comparison people typing their salaries into spreadsheets is 1) subject to people falsifying or misremembering their compensation, and 2) has a selection bias towards people who feel they are not compensated fairly. Furthermore, Google has the data to know the stock prices at the time equity packages are awarded, which affects compensation results (e.g. someone who started right before a rise in stock gets more money than someone after even though their original equity packages had the same dollar value).
Google does not generally engage in negotiation of benefits on being hired, so this would be a strange reason for women to make less than men in the same role at the company.
I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
> Google does not generally engage in negotiation of benefits on being hired, so this would be a strange reason for women to make less than men in the same role at the company.
Yet again, you continue to misinterpret the role of benefits that I explained in my comments. Women's prioritization of benefits over compensation does not mean they are receiving different benefits than men at the same company. It means they apply to different companies than men. Pointing out that Google does not negotiate benefits is not a valid line of criticism.
> I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
You assume that this is the company refusing to allocate more work to women. Typically, this is the opposite: the company is more than happy to give women 24 hour oncalls but a lower rate of women are willing to do so than men.
> Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
The onus is on you to provide proof of your allegations that Google is not being honest in its pay analysis. What proof do you have that they are lying? Like I said, employee compiled spreadsheets are rife with selection bias, and there's no guarantee that employees are even telling the truth. Why would we believe the latter over studies compiled by people who actually have the real salary data?
> Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
This is not what the research you linked claims. There is a promotion gap, in the same way that there is a wage gap: the average woman is less likely to be promoted than the average man. The existence of a gap is not the same as the existence of discrimination. Much like the wage gap, when normalizing for role and experience the disparity mostly disappears:
> The additional controls slightly reduce the gender difference in promotion rates but, controlling for all variables, including worker performance ratings, men's promotion rates were still 2.2 percentage points higher than women's.
And furthermore, your own study says that there is no wage gap once these factors are accounted for:
> However, in marked contrast, the authors find that after controlling for measured characteristics, promotions and expected promotions continued to yield comparable wage increases for both men and women. And, there were essentially no gender differences in overall wage growth at the establishment, with or without promotion
So this difference in promotion drops to 2% when accounting for differences in role and experience, and there is no wage difference with or without promotion between men and women. I'm not sure how you think this study supports your point.
> Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
I have. Many do note instances where they believed there were discriminated against on the basis of their sex. Most of them also detailed explicitly discriminatory policies aimed at allocating more opportunity to men. I'm more than happy to give you the details if you so desire. They want to be treated equal to men, not ...
The top earning actors and athletes in the country all have strong union representation, but for some reason it's software engineers who think "nah we are too well paid".
Professional athletes in the US need unions because the leagues are granted a legal monopoly. AFAIK most European soccer professionals (where there is more options and competition between leagues) do not have player unions / Collective Bargaining Agreements.
Interesting - as I said I'm not too familiar with the EPL/other euro leagues. When I had tried to google Football unions I did find that PFA wiki, but couldn't tell if they actually are involved in collective bargaining with the leagues. As far as I could tell, no such agreement existed?
Well, at the risk of getting all tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, I can’t help but wonder if the people posting these “you guys are too well paid to have any other concerns” types are really practicing software developers and not “startup founders”.
Advocating for better working conditions. For example (not saying that these are specific to Kickstarter, I don't know that culture, but they do occur elsewhere in tech):
1) Better IP restrictions. Working on open source, side projects, etc.
2) Better treatment around oncall.
3) Limiting hours (no expectations of 60+ hour weeks)
4) Transparency in hiring, promotion, and review processes
5) Transparency in company performance and benefits decisions
6) Better benefits, particularly things like parental leave, vacation, and health care
7) A greater slice of the value that workers provide
8) Representation at the board level, or at least a democratically elected representative to the C-level
9) A representative during disagreements with the company (e.g. making it harder to be singled out/fired just because)
There are probably a bunch more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head.
Many other specialized high demand workforces with intense disparities in skill and compensation between coworkers have done well with unions. Professional athletes, screenwriters, and actors are obvious reference points.
I think most Americans mostly have experience with blue collar unions, often ones that represent relatively unskilled labour. Consider though that even in the US, there are plenty of unions (or things which are effectively unions) which represent highly differentiated and skilled professions.
Notably, directors, actors, and writers in American film and television are unionised. That does not mean that everyone is paid the same, nor that there is any concept as "seniority" (very rare in unions that represent highly skilled workers), nor that it is assumed that everyone has the same level of skill.
While the AMA and ABA are not conventionally considered unions, they do effectively control entry into and regulation of their respective professions. (Medicine and Law).
If brain surgeons benefit from being in a union, javascript developers probably do as well.
> The tech unionization movement is full of people who favor open borders and the like
In my experience, tech unionists fall into one of two camps:
* The progressive camp, which is largely what you describe. Likes open border, diversity hiring and the like.
* The protectionist camp. Wants to limit immigration, require CS degrees, and clamp down on H1B hires.
The former seems to care more about influencing the politics of the company. The latter is more the traditional union stance, which is to increase the price of labor by restricting the supply.
Just off the top of my head: transparency in promotions and evaluations, greater pay equity, and just cause protections against arbitrary discipline and termination
You can actually stop your company from doing shady or unethical things. This can mean holding a person in power accountable to sexual harassment, preventing your company from selling user data to a shady third party, demanding better working conditions for contractors at your company (think apple and foxconn).
There's many benefits but one big one that would apply to tech workers is benefits/working conditions guaranteed by a contract where you have a union negotiating those benefits on your behalf.
For example, the vast majority of employers reserve the right to change benefits at any time, and they liberally do in a minor downturn. I've worked at places where an email was sent saying "as of tomorrow we will no longer match your 401(k)." That's it, one executive decided something, you just have to deal with it or quit. Another example is an email saying "this is the new PTO acquiral schedule." I lost a whole week of PTO that day, no apologies, just a "this is how it's going to be." If you're working under a union contract where the benefits are spelled out in the contract, they have to wait until the contract term runs out and then renegotiate another contract to change the benefits.
Some tech companies are known to demand unpaid overtime without prior warning. A union contract may have a provision where you must be paid for overtime or overtime can't be mandatory, etc.
Another example might be that allegations of misconduct must have a transparent investigation before adverse action is taken and the employee is entitled to be represented by the union during the investigation.
If you've only worked in a bull market environment with a massive amount of free flowing VC money you might not appreciate those sorts of things. I've worked outside SV during the Great Recession, during that time jobs dried up and benefits were dropped like a bad date. I was laid off and had to relocate to get a new job. I'm not saying that a union would have prevented that, I'm just illustrating that jobs might not be so plentiful at some point in the future.
Another thing is when a significant portion of a workforce is unionized then there is a tendency to improve the working conditions of non-union shops because they have to compete with unioned shops for employees.
Professional athletes are some of the the most highly specialized, highly paid, and highly demanded employees and the vast majority of them at the highest level are unionized.
Who, exactly, is highly in demand? There was a post on here last week from somebody who had gone on, I think, 40+ in-person interviews and hadn’t gotten a single offer. It’s well established that experience actually works against you in this profession; you can end up being too old long before you hit retirement age. Influential hiring authority Aline Lerner argues that people with Master’s degrees should be rejected in favor of those with just Bachelor’s degrees; education can work against you, too. There’s an unprecedented market for 30-year-old developers with specific education and experience; if you’re anybody else, you would have been better off getting a business degree. To paraphrase Bane, “Do you feel in demand”?
Assuming this is true, now is the time to form a union. Not when they are no longer in high demand.
There's a lot of hubris in the tech field that high salaries and a plethora of available jobs is the norm and will forever be that way.
I anticipate a lot of "Why Tech Needs A Union" posts on HN during the next recession or when the current crop of 25-35 year olds reach their late 40's and all of a sudden have trouble finding stable work.
It didn't happen in the US but back during the 2009 global financial crisis Nokia let about 15000 employees go. Many of those were employed in Germany (I am not one of those though) and I heard they were pretty well protected by their union and up for a generous allowance when their time came to leave the company. If it were not for the union, the company would have let them go empty handed.
Speaking as an IAM union member, congratulations! now comes the hard part.
You're probably (still) going to hear a lot of FUD from your employer but dont worry, things really do only get better from here. Once you get a union youll get more quarterly insight into your companies profits, losses, and a MUCH better picture of what the company intends to do in the next six to twelve months. Youll also get a direct say in almost anything you think will help the business. Im not just talking about a suggestion box for the snack-o-matic, but real input to people with actual power.
the hard part is the election period. Kickstarter is going to pull out ALL the stops to change your mind. youll get harassing phone calls at night, weird letters in email, meetings intended for one thing but that end up as an anti-union rant (EX: Safety meetings that turn into anti-union propaganda immediately) and of course lots, and lots, of direct mail from people and organizations no ones heard of outside a union busters office. Youll also get invited to a ton of after-work "pow wow" or "support" groups that sound like they are union related, but arent. Keep your eyes on the prize, ignore the fliers on your windshield, and vote.
I just formed a company back in December. Super easy to set up an LLC, C or S Corp. But I wanted it to be a worker co-op like Mondragon. And there's no real guidance or help.
Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.
As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?
Sure, it's hard/unfeasible for a startup to unionize in its formative years. But Kickstarter was founded in 2009 and is a relatively mature company in the tech sector.
I think they parent is asking more about how few resources exist helping people establish and manage worker co-op forms of businesses rather than LLCs or S-Corps.
> Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm.
Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.
However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality you would want for a project or company, especially if you (the founder) have a vision.
IMO, part of the reason Linux and Python were so successful was that they had a "benevolent dictator" with a strong vision. Imagine the gridlock that would occur with Linux development if we had a 2-party system that polarized on controversial issues and got mired at every vote.
Democracy is also a system that produces BETTER decisions. Sure tyranny can make decisions "efficiently" but that's not that great when those decisions are terrible.
Democracy: Fewer macro, more micro, better decisions
Command-Control: More macro, fewer micro, terrible decisions.
EDIT: Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making" vs command-control which is "centralized decision making". When I talk about democracy, I mean distributed decision making.
It also makes the orgs much slower moving, much less able to adapt quickly. Market conditions change while these companies are still debating decisions from months ago.
TL;DR: It works for some (and we should have more of them imo!) but not all or even most.
Non action is a decision. In general, I don't think there is even a possibility to ever make less decisions. A situation happens, and a decision needs to be made to resolved it, non-action is also just one of the possible decision.
I don't think I have ever heard, study or read about the claim of democracy making better decision (at the least, the common refrain about tyranny of the majority comes to mind), so I will have to ask for justifications of that statement.
First, most people misunderstand democracy. Democracy is that people have a say over in proportion to how much a decision affects them. Command-control hierarchies don't have this property. I like to call democracy 'distributed' decision making vs centralized like command-control.
Have you read studies that command-control hierarchies make better decisions?
"Wisdom of the crowd" was also a common refrain for a time. Somewhat trendy in the years before Twitter and Facebook blew up. I think it's widely regarded as naive nowadays, though.
I like to think that a democracy and good decision making are not particularly correlated. But democracy is technology for preventing violent revolution because power change is built into the system.
It's not obviously wrong. What has Democracy to do with "majority based decision making". Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making".
So why would "distributed decision making" be obviously worse than "command and control" like the way a corporation or tyrannical government is run?
Not necessarily. Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated. Which is not the case, specially in under developed countries; Most of the time, the ignorance and lack of a more developed consciousness in a country citizens benefits those that are in power, as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate so that it stays that way;
I'm talking about education in a much bigger scope. Not referring to the Kickstarter situation at all; Tech education is not enough. I'm talking about political, social, emotional, economical etc, education; This level of education is a life long pursue. Schools are not enough. Internet is not enough;
For business decisions, no. You'd be surprised at how many employees at Google don't really understand the process of how Google makes money. They offer little internal seminars so they can learn how.
The last thing you want is a bunch of smart engineers voting on business decisions they don't have the background to fully grok.
So I guess we should take the overwhelming majority in this threat rejecting the idea of democratizing private companies, and the at least skeptical attitude towards unions as indication that both are likely to be good ideas.
> Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated ... as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate
I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.
Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.
The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.
So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.
The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.
Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.
The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)
The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.
Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bott...
IMO with companies, the stakes are not so high that democracies (i.e. unions) need to be implemented right from inception. If a company demonstrates repeated abuse of employees, then sure, retrofit it with a union to keep future abuses in check.
But unions have several significant downsides too, and for companies with a clean record, strong leaders with a vision, good pay and benefits, high morale, etc. I don't see any benefit to encumbering such with a union.
If you haven't been in a position where workplace tyranny and abuse of power don't seem so high stakes, you are fortunate, but your experience is not universal or necessarily typical.
Not high stakes as in you won't be killed, your family won't be shipped off to a labor camp, etc. if the company president turns out to be a malevolent dictator.
You really think it's worth it to encumber all companies with unions because of a few bad eggs?
In the U.S., healthcare is tied to employer. That, coupled with low amount of savings most Americans have, does make it into a life and death situation.
No, at worst you might just might end up living on the street, without healthcare. Or just humiliated and broken down daily.
Sure I do. What's the downside, someone might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
You think it's worth it to have people spending the majority of their life in an environment of tyranny, abuse of power, humilation and degradation, no democracy in the environment you spend most of your waking hours in -- because some unions might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
Linus and Guido a) do not control anyone's paycheck b) cannot control who decides they're interested in working on Linux and Python.
The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they continually decide whether to endorse the dictator's vision. A dictatorship of a company is much more like an actual dictatorship of a country, where you control people's lives and decide who gets to join and leave. It's more efficient, yes - but it is both less just and less incentivized to point that ruthless efficiency in the right direction.
By all means, run technical projects at work like Linux and Python are run - but give people the freedom to vote no confidence in these projects without endangering their housing and their health insurance.
You don't get to decide who leaves. If people don't like a companies dictator then they are free to go join another company. It's this competition in the free market for labor that helps prevent the abuses of tyranny.
There are some H-1B holders and green card applicants I'd like you to meet.
Also some pregnant people, people who look like they could get pregnant, people with significant medical expenditures, .... Yes, obviously, the control that an employer has over these people is much less than the control a governmental dictator would have - but it's much, much more than the control Guido or Linus have over anyone.
Maybe what would improve these companies is not pure democracy, but rather a bill of rights for workers. This can include a mutual contract over pay and benefits, depending on how well the company is doing, with a legitimate appeals process for both sides.
You've got to think carefully about your metrics when it comes to government.
Look it's widely understood that, if the dictator or tyrant is good at his (or, very occasionally, her) job then things usually go well.
The old women of Bhutan cried when the King decreed democracy.
It's getting rid of the bad ones that's the big problem, and so: democracy. "The worst form of government except for all the others."
Edit to add: the ultimate government is "full consensus", but it's incredibly expensive in terms of the time it takes to get everybody's input and consensus. However, once full consensus is reached it's the most efficient at execution: everyone works together in harmony to achieve the ends of the group in the mutually-agreed fashion.
Needless to say, this form of government is very very rare on Earth, but hardly unknown.
Democracy is efficient at getting shit done. As uncareful as this metric is defined.
But I would say even more importantly, democracy is very efficient at limiting internal bloodshed. It provides a well-defined, peaceful process for people to grab power. The power is limited, but you don't have to kill people to gain it, and in turn you don't risk getting killed yourself by the next upstart.
I agree. One of the most important and successful aspects is the relatively peaceful transfer of power.
Personally I'm more concerned that the government remains responsive and, for lack of a better word, humble.
(That's part of why the Kingdom of Bhutan is so amazing: the don't measure GNP, they have a measure called Gross National Happiness that they take pretty seriously. Heh. They really seem to have their kit together. It's a Third-World country you can't emigrate to.)
Nice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure.
Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.
However you feel about unions (and I personally have many reservations), if tech workers unionize, management will have nobody to blame but themselves. They've had decades to listen to us, and they've responded with open offices, JIRA (or the equivalent) ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, whiteboard coding interviews and zero training. We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.
> We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.
Relative to other wage workers yes, but nowhere close to the ratios between wage and housing last seen 30 years ago. There are opportunities to negotiate for that sort of compensation again.
As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do.
Comparing yourself to other trades is not relevant. Wage growth in one not-so-rare trade will benefit many more trades and people.
Most of us would not be where we are today if we limited our aspirations to what other people do.
As if companies determine the price for housing. With Sillicon Valley wages, you could easily afford housing within 5 years somewhere else. It is not companies' fault that housing prices have gone up - it is politics preventing building of available housing. It is also an example that shows that no matter how much you pay the employees, housing prices will simply adapt if more housing is not being built.
The companies are at least partly culpable for choosing to aggregate themselves in these insanely high CoL areas, contributing to the rent jumps, and failing to engage in the proper corporate social responsibility of working with their ambient communities to alleviate these living situations for both their employees and their neighbors.
Well the people living there can vote, can't they? I don't see how it is corporate responsibility. Corporations can't vote.
Yes, the corporations are contributing to rent jumps, but that was part of the point: by paying higher salaries, as is being demanded by the pro union crowd here, they also increase the rents. So they can't simply pay enough so that "people can buy a house within 5 years", because housing prices rise along with salaries.
The union crowd isn't unilaterally asking for higher salaries. Hell, the Kickstarter employees in the OP aren't even focused specifically on compensation. There are issues at stake such as toxic environments, anti-age/race/gender discrimination, open offices, etc.
Even on matters of comp it needn't simply be "give raises to all the engineers", as pro-tech unionization efforts tend to also support non-technical workers such as the custodial and cafeteria staff, who would be in higher need of pay raises. The pay for engineers is usually more directed towards addressing unpaid overtime, which is more of a work-life balance/anti-death march measure more than a monetary one anyway.
Corporations can't vote, but they do have free speech when it comes to political expression, and tech companies already do plenty of lobbying. Perhaps they could have spent some fraction of those efforts on influencing the housing shortages in the places they set up camp in. Being a good, responsible neighbor should be part of CSR.
We are in a thread about the claim that "As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do."
That is what I was referring to.
I think companies are already trying to alleviate the housing issues. But their influence is not as high as you think. Google buses were attacked by locals, for example - they would have enable Google employees to live farther away, alleviating pressure on prices in the immediate neighborhood.
Corporate buses are helpful to their workforce (and at this point normalized to the extent that such backlash is far less common) but are also just a bandaid that can lead to extreme commutes [0]. Ultimately, the faults of development in the Bay Area, Seattle, and other high-growth/high-CoL areas are mainly on local governments and residents, but large employers share part of the responsibility because their presence is what drives up the desirability of a region in the first place, as well as prices.
Yes, you can't ask Google to solve everything themselves (even if their PR likes to paint them as being in the business of doing that), but they could at least explore more policies like opening larger offices in regions with more housing, embracing more remote work, working more closely with local communities, etc. You'd think megacorps with the resources and supposed strategic foresight that FAANGM possess would be more proactive about addressing an issue that impacts their workforce. Is it no wonder then that their workers will seek desperate measures like unionizing?
If they would open offices elsewhere, they would drive prices up there, too. In fact here in Berlin they cancelled their plans after protests by the locals.
You assume it is as effective as onsite work, just like that? If that was the case, why haven't remote work companies trounced on site work companies en masse?
We're not debating the efficacy of the practice, but whether or not it can help prevent rising costs of living caused by tech agglomeration. Certainly "taking remote work more seriously" would include investing in pilot programs, experiments, and innovating processes/technologies to make it better and better. And it's something that large megacorps could work with, if they cared about rising CoL.
more shares for everyone! immediate monthly vesting, no 1-year cliffs, refreshers 6 months in woooo! I hear some companies are already like this, but then you have other companies with like only 5% vesting on the first year and no refreshers.
Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the extreme.
Tyranny of the majority is considered a pitfall of democracy, or consider how to enforce "the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority"
Until law mandates that all labor unionize - and as closed shops, at that - the rights of the minority are hardly impaired when any one shop does so. Open shops exist, as do shops with no union of any sort, and employees need not remain employees at all, of anyone, if they no longer so choose; they are free to start their own businesses, of whatever sort best suits them. Those who decline to join a union, even at a newly closed shop, are constrained only in that they no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand - and the "right to work", so called, does not extend so far as to establish, regarding any given company with a union or without one, a right to work there.
The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest.
One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.
I'd imagine the 37 people who voted nay didn't even want to take a vote on the matter.
If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.
That comparison only holds up if you assume all unions are politically neutral. And I would be shocked if you could find any union that was politically neutral on anything.
It's not insurance. It actively changes how you can be compensated and takes very hands-on interference with the operations of the company (in US unions at least).
As opposed to insurance, which has a huge influence on who you can go to and what your options are if you get sick, to the point that your choice of insurance may end up becoming a turning point in your life? I don't think I ever heard of someone's life turning on joining the wrong union.
So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.
True, but most democracies also have some kind of founding document that sets out broad limits on the scope of the democratic or representative powers of government.
There are some glaring problems with federal law behind unions.
1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to.
2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work".
A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.
By your anti-union tone, one can assume you're American. As we all know, in America, the norm is that the minority forces the majority to support something they don't want to support. Lucky you, not having to deal with horrible things like "democracy"!
Comments like the above fascinate me. The emotional appeal of "choice" seems to have no end. You can employ it to fight unions, health care, public schools anything you want. Similarly if you can successfully attach "right" (as in "a right") to your rhetoric you can draw out pride, anger, indignation, all sorts of powerful emotions.
I recently learned that Frank Luntz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz) is one of the masters of this and came up with "Death Tax", using "choice" to fight universal healthcare, and "climate change" to soften the more frightening "global warming."
We seem to be highly susceptible to emotional language triggers that just bypass our rational minds.
Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me. Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it.
Like, OK, I'm losing some "freedom" of choice from a certain point of view, but damned if that wouldn't feel one hell of a lot more free.
Do left-leaning Americans truly feel this way about single payer healthcare? Do you really not understand that SPH fixes only one problem - poor people getting substandard healthcare for free, at the taxpayer's expense? Do you really think you won't have to "spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me" when dealing with poorly paid doctors and staff that can't get laid off due to insane rules of SPH? Do you really not know about the dirty secret of places with SPH, which is that whoever has the means still goes to a private healthcare because the service is 1000x better?
> Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me.
As you said, _to you_.
> Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it.
Well, this is a whole other can of worms, but here goes nothing. As a brief aside, possibly the only system more complicated than American medicine is the American tax code; both are horribly byzantine and have entire industries dedicated to wrangling the bureaucracy. Government involvement is what led to both being so messy. That aside, I oppose single-payer medicine for reasons out side of "which one costs more". I don't trust the government, and think it ought to stick to keeping the peace and enforcing property rights and contracts. There are a few other important things that can be done at the state and local level, and most things ought to be left up to the individual. I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens. Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?
Yeah, I like policies that benefit me over ones that don't, typically.
> Government involvement is what led to both being so messy.
Well considering one of the two things that "both" signifies is the tax code... well, yes? More to the substance, that such systems under other states are, in both cases, significantly less messy leads me to believe "it's messy" does not follow simply from "government was involved", such that I would believe "get government out" is a necessary step in fixing either (again, one's the tax code, so...)
> I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens.
Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.
> Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?
I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system. Any system I'm aware of from any other OECD state would be anywhere from somewhat to way better, from that perspective. Given those are proven in the real world I'd say just pick one of those. I'm pretty sure a few (e.g. Switzerland) do retain private insurance. All (AFAIK) employ price controls, strict pro-citizen rules about how insurance companies have to operate, and something like a "public option" so as long as those elements are present it's probably fine. Anything else is likely to be experimental or otherwise unproven so I'd rather avoid it, given a wealth of demonstrably-fine systems to choose among.
I do think we should "get government out of the tax code" to a serious extent in that it shouldn't be in the business of taxing income, payroll, capital gains, etc. Calculate expenses / adult population and send each adult a bill for that number. This would be about $15k/adult as of last year which will sting, but will quickly make people realize how much the free stuff they've been taking from others costs.
> Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.
Yes, there is a deplorable amount of crony capitalism and regulatory recapture. Part of the reason why we need to starve the federal government: it will always be abused by the most powerful. I do, however, trust a market with a thousand participants motivated by profit more than a government that has changing motives every few years, or depending on what the media prints.
> I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system.
Okay, pay a medical concierge firm to handle the paperwork for you. I don't care what you do or how you do it so long as you don't tell me what to do and don't make me pay for your choices.
The NHS just changed rules to allow refusal of "non-emergency" care to people who meet one of their non-PC criteria. This after people saying that it's a "human right".
The other side of this is "Oh good, now I can get my health outcomes managed by the same people and with the same level of customer service/personal touch as my Department of Motor Vehicles and will have literally no alternative but to take it." Arguing the worst case of either system and representing it as the most common case is rarely productive.
My description's the typical case for the US system, in my experience, not a worst-case, and I've not seen evidence that my experience is unusual—quite the opposite. At least we haven't been bankrupted by it yet, so there's that, but only because our family's pretty healthy.
As long as we’re sharing anecdotes and interpreting them as typical case outcomes: We’ve had two births, an uncomplicated broken arm, a complicated broken arm, another moderately complex issue that was many visits over a length of time, and countless pediatrics and adult GP visits and a few ER visits over the last decade with BCBS.
I’d say that 95% of all visits go off with zero interactions beyond paying our part of the bill and waiting for paperwork to cycle around. The 5% cases are about half billing questions and half “just confirm that subscriber XYZ visited doctor D on date Q (so that we [as BCBS] know we’re not being scammed by the doc)”.
We are nowhere near “tens of hours...every time [we] use medical care”. I doubt we’re even 10 hours per year on billing issues.
We've ended up with many bills, multiple EOB documents, et c., trickling in over a span of many months, coming from a bunch of different sources, each time we've had someone in the actual hospital (not just a doctor's visit), including three births. We've managed to miss some trivial bill and end up with it in collections because there's just so much damn paperwork and usually a few of them are in some state of error or dispute for some time. Seems to be normal. You in Kaiser or something? I understand that's smoother than... basically everything else, since it's all run by one entity (ahem).
Nope. Blue Cross Blue Shield. We have a high-deductible plan (just so we can qualify to use an HSA as an additional retirement account). In theory, that means we should have more billing hassles than with a typical HMO or PPO. I feel like they mostly get it right; we do have to be patient to let the billing and insurance people have a few rounds of figuring crap out, but I'm not involved other than opening the mail until it settles down to "OK, now pay this amount."
Comments like the above fascinate me. They dehumanize someone else by implying they are just spreading propaganda while never directly addressing the point they were raising.
I'm not making an emotional appeal, I'm making a logical one. Choice means I get to pick what I want to do and choose what's best for me.
For instance, many unions give money to the Republican party, the Democratic party, or both. I'm not interested in funding either. Janus only covered public-sector unions, so I'd still be stuck paying for political speech in which I don't believe.
As a second example, unions typically set the wage for a particular job with both a floor and a ceiling. This means that most employees get closer to the average wage for said job. That's great if you're a lower or average performer, but not if you typically make more. I do, and don't want my earning potential capped by the limits of my co-workers.
Third and following up on my prior point, unions often make it harder to advance. I've been quickly promoted in most places I've worked, but that probably wouldn't happen in a union job. They're all about seniority, and I don't believe some boomer who has worked the same job for twenty years should be promoted ahead of a less-senior person with greater merit.
Fourth, I don't want to be bound by the decisions of others. Unions often have the power to punish members who cross the picket line. If I'm happy with my job and others aren't, I shouldn't be stuck on strike.
There you are, four logical reasons I don't want to join a union. I don't have an issue with them existing, just people being forced to join them. You can't hardly call them "workers' rights" but then say everyone's forced to exercise those "rights". You didn't give any argument of your own, though, nor did you answer my question, you just said "that's emotional reasoning."
P.S. I've read Mr. Luntz' book, "Words that Work". I don't agree with him, but he's good at what he does, and it's worth reading. How you present things is just as important as what you present.
You led me to find a map of US anti-union "right-to-work" states on wikipedia[1]. I previously figured pretty much all of the US is under RTW legislation, but it seems like, outside of the folks in Texas, almost the entire tech industry is in non-RTW states.
Looks like a nice list of places where I'm willing to live and where I'm not. If my co-workers want to unionize, more power to them, but I'm not going to give the union a single cent. Even if they are officially responsible for representing me to my employer, that wasn't my choice and they don't represent my interests.
Why does it work that way in the U.S.? In my country everyone can freely join a union, all union employees can go on strike if the union allows it, and they’re not allowed to prevent others from working. At no point to my knowledge do all workers in a company have to decide to unionize. Why the collective decision?
This is the problem with the conversation around unions. The way they operate traditionally in the US seems to be very different than how they operate in Europe, and many of the negative externalities from how they operate in the US are just pissed away as anecdotal rather than a possible threat to their success.
If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US.
Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.
Anyone else think the phrasing in the title is a bit weird? Were there other people voting in this election who were not Kickstarter employees? How can a group which makes up 100% of the electorate not "win" an election? The outcome reflects the majority opinion, by definition.
That's kinda my point. A significant percentage of employees were against unionization, so it seems rather odd to treat "Kickerstarter Employees" as a monolithic group who "won" the election. It'd be like announcing the results of a political election with the headline: "U.S. Voters Win Historic Presidential Election."
It isn’t a win for those people that voted against it. I worked blue collar union jobs throughout my 20s in private and public sector. That experience has made me critical of unions. I will never vote to unionize and I will always buck unionization.
When employees vote against joining a union, that's generally called a victory for the company's management, so the phrasing contrasts against that. It's definitely loaded language, but it's common enough I can't get too worked up about it.
I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern.
Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.
One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.
About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.
Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.
Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.
I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back...
My colleagues and I ran a IBEW union shop for about a dozen years up through the dot-com bust. We had over 150 union electricians building out data centers, running fiber optics along railroad tracks, installing low-voltage datacom, etc.
We had a few electricians from the local pool who:
1. Would not show up on time.
2. Did sloppy work.
3. Lied about their work hours on timesheets.
4. Refused to stay updated on building codes, technology changes, fire protection codes.
5. Were rude to customers.
And we would fire them for cause and they would show up in our shop a year later as it was their turn to be rotated through again.
That said, the union gave us flexibility to scale up or down our workforce as needed to meet project deadlines. And provided us with trained, skilled and motivated workers.
I can't get too worked up that there are some bad electricians (and I'm imagining that this is true for any field) who are also union members.
My brother in law's a solo residential electrician who occasionally does a little commercial work. Been doing this for 20+ years. He works hard to keep up with codes, always spends the time on the job to do the work to good standards, etc. His observation is probably 80% of the homes he's come into, whether done by the homeowner or by a previous electrician, the work is shoddy to the point of being dangerous.
I'm honestly not at all surprised if there are bad union electricians, it seems like there are a LOT of bad electricians out there.
Sucks that they're rotating through the union hiring pool, though. I'm sure that was super frustrating.
While not the grandparent post, I can add some of my own experiences with unions:
Once, when workers in Chicago supported a general strike in support of an eight-hour workday, police shot and killed a number of workers. [1]. Someone threw dynamite into a crowd. A lot of people died, but we got that eight hour workday.
Another time, workers protested for higher wages, but the company owners hired private security and killed a hundred workers. The army was called in, and private planes hired by the company dropped bombs on the workers [2].
And who can forget the time the richest man on Earth hired private security as strikebreakers after a collective bargaining agreement failed? [3]? Interestingly, these workers were already part of a union, but the owner unilaterally withdrew recognition of the union. A few people died (private security...), and the collective bargaining agreement ultimately failed.
I suggest you make yourself aware of the trials unions have been through over the past two hundred years. Capital will always repress labor by any means necessary, and parroting the lines given to you by capital is implicit support. This makes you a de facto class traitor. United Bootlickers isn't a union, and even if they were, the benefits wouldn't be that great.
I mean this as politely as it can be meant. And, I'm not contributing this point to make a jab at you or your political ideology. I think you need to seek professional medical help. You're contributing "personal experiences" from 150 years ago. You're hand-waving domestic terrorism because it achieved a political end you agree with. You're accusing people of being "traitors" (a capital offense) for acknowledging the negative aspects of the union they were a member of.
At some point, you have spiraled out of control. You need to seek help. This is not a normal way to communicate with people.
I mean this as politely as it can be meant, but your comment is fucking disgusting. I hope it's not a reflection of your person, but your comment history indicates that it's but the tip of an iceberg.
Your points are an extremist grasping at straws to completely demonize and dehumanize another commenter. Your "most polite" is still quite rude and perhaps one of the most offensive comments in this entire discussion.
You were name-calling someone who presented their argument, implying them to be mentally ill. You accuse them of terrorism for merely citing centuries-old events. You're choosing to imagine them wishing for capital punishment of others, yet this willful ignorance of the terminology the other commenter used speaks more about you than them. For what it's worth, the other commenter did not call anyone a capital-T Traitor (an inciteful term defined by the Constitution and frequently assigned to people who criticize the US president).
We should be in the mines like the REAL working class. Its only through forced self-oppression that we can throw off the shackles of our own oppression.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That direction is predictable, nasty, and tedious, and therefore badly off topic here.
My wife's medical workers union won her 5 weeks of vacation, free health insurance, someone advocating for reasonable hours who she could report abuses to without fear of repercussion, healthy food in the cafeteria, oh and she got a stipend to buy whatever computing devices she wanted. No one locked away her monitor cable or prevented her from working for a week so they could plug in a power strip. No armed union rep came to her door to force her to sign the paperwork or hand over the fees. Her union fees were like a couple hundred bucks a year or something, but her pay in that position was also higher than it would have been at any other hospital in the region.
That's a cool anecdote. Meanwhile, unions across Europe won massive increases in standards of living for all workers, from better leave, healthcare, safety protections, to even blocking the wealthy from having control over their democracies through militant, labor-backed political parties.
Then you vote to change the positions, and if necessary the leadership.
When you work for a contractor working for a corporation, you work for the contractor. When you work for a union working for a corporation, you work for the union. The difference is that the contractor isn't even notionally on your side, and the union is, at least in theory.
A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.
Personally I had to wait a week to move desks until an electrician carried my desktop two desks over. He didn't move my monitor ... that wasn't included in the rules.
I ran into this sometimes when I worked conferences. We weren’t allowed to plug in our equipment, though we had paid for a power drop and it was sitting there. Of course, nobody was there to do it, so I would just plug it in. If they want to come by later and unplug it and plug it back in, they can feel free.
I had same issue at a large investment bank. I don’t blame the union so much as the negotiated rules. De minimis items shouldn’t need union unless there’s a safety or liability issue.
Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".
No, it's "union and company rules". The nature of a negotiation is that both sides have agreed on the result. Getting people to accept calling this sort of bullshit "union rules" is propaganda.
This is really a problem of unintended consequences. And it's not "union rules", it's a collective agreement that both the union and management sign off on. Union shop or not, we can all point at absurdities in work life - just as many come from management in my experience (which doesn't include much work with unions).
It's a bit like the tax code or some complicated piece of bureaucracy. Some of the stuff in there sure seems stupid but you can bet it was put in for a reason that, at the time at least, looked sensible. In the case of things like "only an electrician is allowed to do that", it's a pretty safe bet that at some point in the past management tried to do an end run around the agreement and have cheaper labor do something they weren't trained or compensated for. In the US at least the system is so adversarial you end up with hard lines being drawn on both sides.
The alternative to enforcing rules pedantically is enforcing them arbitrarily, which is what happens in non-union environments. One set of rules for Billy, another set of rules for Sally.
Think about where the company's interest lies. Without the union, of course they would want their employee to just plug the thing in. They wouldn't agree to such a silly stricture if it wasn't forced upon them by the union.
But if as a low-level manager I can gain sympathy and build relationships with my superiors by blaming my inefficiency on the union-devils, why not cause a petty delay with passive aggressive rules.
The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.
Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.
The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.
This is a very simplistic assumption that there’s one company interest which everyone understands and supports. I’ve seen many places where it would be as simple as department A owns that function and they care about making their lives easier, not your productivity. That’s basically the norm for large company IT departments, with nary a union in sight.
Remember, there’s been a well-funded campaign pushing back against the New Deal for longer than most of us have been alive. Unions are not perfect but there are a lot of misrepresentation and urban legends circulating and most of the stories you hear are likely either wrong or leaving out key details (e.g. the union got adamant about certain tasks after management tried to avoid honoring their contract). Unless you have first-hand experience or lots of documentation, be skeptical.
Again, you could be surprised by some IT departments.
There's this perspective that the best way to keep a system working is to make it unusable, so that nobody uses it, and thus nobody breaks it, and so you don't have to keep fixing it. It's something I've seen parts of organizations navigate into without any union-related involvement.
Again, “company” is not the same as “each distinct political group within the company”. Anyone with experience at a large company will probably have examples of groups behaving against the perceive global because that was better within their group’s incentive structure.
As a simple example, how often is purchasing inordinately expensive because something was abused in the past and that group was told to make sure it never happens again? Or a sales group setting engineering up for failure because they personally had a huge financial incentive to do so?
And without a union, employees might tell people who report sexual harassment to get bent.
Yes, unions can make things less efficient. Yes, unions can cause unnecessarily stupid systems that harm people. But so do employers! I'd rather have one I can at least vote in.
That is not the norm though, typically everyone gets their laptop together in a big room the first hours of orientation. You can even request a new laptop and get it within a couple of hours, so if the person didn't get a laptop their first day something must have gone very wrong somewhere...
Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.
> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.
There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.
There are ALL SORTS of inefficiencies and insanity and laziness and treating people like garbage most of us have experienced at non-union workplaces, of course.
That union shops may seem to be subject to extra risks of of certain types of nonsense doesn't mean they aren't a win overall.
But yeah, to be honest, some people with unions find they need to struggle with union leadership over some things. It's generally a lot better overall than struggling with your boss.
A union is simply an agreement between workers and management. Agreements can be modified to prevent such faults when both parties enter in good faith.
I had a uncle that was a bricklayer and moved somewhere that bricklayers were in demand so that he could get paid more. He was not a union member. When the union found out he was doing the same work for slightly less, they sent some people over to threaten his life if he didn't join union or leave. He left.
What's with the anecdotes on this thread? The OP was trying to make substantive statements about unions in general and why anecdotes are ineffective in describing them, and your counter was to provide yet another anecdote?
Anti-union astroturfing is to be expected in a thread like this. Other tech companies are terrified of something similar happening, and are going all-out with misinformation.
The best thing you can do is upvote factual information.
I had a father that worked as a fisherman for a small company which was not union. He ended up dying because the owners didn't properly inspect the boat and it capsized because of a fatal flaw in the design, killing everyone on board.
Using your same argument, we should abolish all corporations, correct? Since a poorly ran corporation can quite literally kill people due to negligence.
I find it honestly absurd that people attribute all of these negative qualities to unions and yet are not willing to do the exact same thing to the same corporate behavior which has zero checks or balances.
There are many businesses that, if I were to try to undercut them, would send tax payer paid police to harm me. They wouldn't even give so much as a warning before I would find myself significantly harmed and likely enslaved for a number of years.
Should we do away with businesses because of these bad actors?
I had a relative that many suspected was murdered way back in the day when my city was having one of its bridges built. Basically there was a strike going on and he was a scab.
I guess I should have mentioned the entire process in my previous comment instead of pointing out the conclusion.
Businesses use lobbyist to get laws to entrench themselves in their own monopolies. If I attempt to disrupt this business by avoiding their regulatory capture, police are sent to punish me. Depending upon which laws I violate, I can be sent to jail and end up with years in prison. Prison, where you are kept in stylized cages and your ever waking moment is controlled by others. That is a treatment that I do not see any significant difference from treatment that would be labeled as slavery.
I know people this has happened to, and I don't see why people treat it as being somehow justified just because the business went through the process of lobbying (and political donations which only seem different than bribery in name only).
And this is ignoring the history of business outright murdering people for protesting for workers' rights.
There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are. But maybe there is something inherent that makes them violent after all? It's simply not obvious at a glance that they're going to be violent.
I'm not sure that there's nothing inherent in unions that makes them promote mediocrity. There could be - the fact that unions add more layers to the bureaucracy and slow things down could very well have the effect of promoting mediocrity.
Generally, if you want people to do the best work, then the people need to be motivated and they need to have as little friction as possible. Unions add friction. In a company where things work, unions would probably add friction and cause more mediocrity.
Note that I'm not saying that unions necessarily cause this, but I am saying that they might be a cause for it. Claiming otherwise with no supporting arguments isn't convincing.
Unions operate financially like churches. They depend on the dues (tithes) paid by their membership. The more members you have, the more influence and power you have.
This incentivizes unions to never voluntarily reduce their numbers. The more mediocre the employees, the more protection they need from the union, and thus the more power the union has over the employee population.
The ideal union employee to a union boss, based on how unions are funded and run in the US, is a minimally competent drone that regularly pays dues.
Unions also consistently advocate credentialism over performance. If an employer wants to improve performance the union will fight any outcome based benchmarks, and will instead push for everyone to be educated and certified. In truth it would be best for the business to do both, educate and measure outcomes. What is more important, that every teacher in the US have a masters degree, or that every teacher be good at teaching. The union will always advocate for the former.
I like unions, particularly in the private sector. I wish they operated differently and were more pro-active in cultivating skill (like old school guilds) and less about body count.
Millions of people across the U.S. benefit from collective bargaining, such as increased wages, health benefits and retirement security, yet one anecdotal off-topic post gets upvoted.
It matches my own experience and anecdotes that others have told me from their experiences. I don’t think it’ll be hard to find similar stories out there...
Is there any wonder why this is the case on a site where business owners and wannabe business owners congregate? They don't benefit from unions after all, some even hate them.
That’s not the correct comparison. Unions are a hedge against abusive employers when employees lack other options. They are a blunt instrument with many downsides. They make sense when the downsides are not worse than the abusive employer. This does not describe the situation with kickstarter employees, and any real union job would find this entitlement laughable.
Tech industry is full of entitled prima donnas living in an alternative reality valid only in their heads. US median wage according to data for 2016 was about $32k [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...]. According to Payscale Kickstarter pays its employees an average of $96,897 a year. Salaries at Kickstarter range from an average of $62,662 to $142,634 a year.
Deciding to treat tech management in an adversarial fashion or being more woke than the management while making 3x is going towards the mean, not away from it.
Not recognizing that making over 100k/year sitting in $800 chairs, eating company provided organic snacks, having subsidized meals ( or fully free ) in lovely offices and complaining that the management is not woke enough that it dared to pull the "It is always a good time to punch a nazi" project before reinstating it not to offend the woke employees is the definition of privileged set.
Yes. Compare it with an average office in Manhattan:
Windows 10 on computers with 4Gb RAM slinging Acrobat Pro, where you are in NYC and your files are on a network drive in France, company does not do Dropbox or Google drive, there's one printer on the other side of the 25k sq feet office full of cubicles, you pay for your own coffee, there are no snacks, the chairs are $50 ones you typically see in the office supply stores and you are paid cool $49k/year.
As discussed recently, cubicles would probably be preferred by most engineers to open offices. However, they are virtually an industry standard at this point and it's not exactly something that a tech worker can escape by changing companies:
As far as snacks and coffee go, this subthread goes into a good discussion about how most of the perks are relatively cheap for management to shell out for, and elides that the money could instead go into providing individual offices as was the case in the industry in the '90s- or just paying employee salaries:
Tech workers are relatively compensated well, no doubt- but as mentioned in the Quora link, they are not exactly paid commensurate to the value they bring. Perks such as snacks or fancy furniture are simply window dressing, not to mention provided meals are also seen as a way for the company to maximize time spent in the office. The tech industry is very good at providing double-edged benefits- unlimited PTO is another example, as it nearly always comes with some strings attached and often leads to less vacation time taken than if allotted vacation time is given. It's an industry that's very good at selling products that are only free at first glance- is it any wonder that many employee perks/benefits are no different in principle?
I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance.
Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone.
Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.
The search results I'm seeing for that don't seem relevant to the discussion. Did you actually have any evidence to the "This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US." or were you just taking a shot in the dark here to support your own bias?
No evidence that you would (or should) be satisfied with, just direct personal experience as a member of the Teamsters (Local 284), years of indirect personal experience working in HVAC and building two homes (IBEW and Carpenters union) and many personal anecdotes from my brother (CWA) and wife (NEA).
My point is this. There are some common pathologies in the way unions tend to operate (or at least old unions that have ossified over time) in the US that have nothing to do with the underlying objectives of collective bargaining. This step for Kickstarter is a huge victory for organized labor in the USA and they are likely to receive aggressive input from other American labor unions as to how they should operate. In my opinion the employees at Kickstarter accept this input at their own peril. This shouldn't just be a new union, this should be a new type of union and one indicator of success would be strong objection to their charter from one or more existing unions in the US.
For the record I have no philosophical objection to unions or collective bargaining at all. I do have material concerns around how they tend to operate in the US.
Any union in the tech industry is going to resemble professional unions such as Hollywood unions or sports unions much more than the punch-clock unions seen in manufacturing and government.
This goes against the anti-union propaganda, though. I'm sure if we unionize, some mafioso from "corporate" will come down to my home office 8 US states away to plug in my monitor before I'm allowed to work.
/sarcasm
What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.
They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change.
I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare.
Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do.
I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.
The experience I have had with UK unions is very different from this, and the other descriptions of unions in the US.
I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch".
I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.
It's certainly a more antagonistic relationship from what I've heard from folks in Europe. The worst part is IMO that least with my experience Union leadership is often pretty poor and despite being people who actually work those jobs, they're not very knowledgeable or capable about even the job.
>Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.
It likely stems from the fact that the birth of the unions in the US was a super violent affair (grotesque murders of both union organizers and union busters). All of the old unions born around that time were founded in an environment where the company was a hostile enemy you negotiated every minute thing with.
This 100%. I'm generally against unions in tech, but the right to have a union was earned in blood here in the US. I hope it stays around at least as a remembrance to those that died for it. We all benefited in some ways.
Not just those. One of the more powerful unions famously bombed the Los Angeles Times building and killed a bunch of journalists because it was opposed to unionization.
That sounds like a much better relationship. But in that case isn’t the role of the Union almost redundant? I mean what’s stopping the workers and management from just having a dialog without a union?
Another thing is I don’t want the same X% increase as everyone else. What if I’m better or worse employee? Why should I get the same output for variable input?
Same reason that when you and your friends reserve dinner at Hakkasan you don't all go and call Hakkasan - it's better for everyone if the group manifests as one. Your rep is your designated guy in charge of following up on your requests.
Just to take Sweden as an example. For public companies with more than 25 employees the workers have the right to two members and two substitutes on the companies board. Usually these come from the union working with the company.
The goal of this is to create a dialog of how the company is run and similar on every level of the company.
Regarding your question about the salaries, that is mostly blue-collar work here. For white-collar workers the unions mostly exist to enforce regulations and allow the workers to have the legal clout and information necessary when disputes arise, creating more of a do it right the first time rather than try to bend the rules to see how far you can go environment. Salaries are individually negotiated.
Maybe the differences between how unions are implemented. I've worked at a white collar union shop (electrical engineering) where salaries are collectively negotiated. i.e. x% increase per year. The net result at this particular place has been that outside of promotions, salary increases are tied to tenure.
I mean in theory nothing. But then that dialogue would have to be called something, and it would basically be the union at that point.
I mean that's all the union is, a group of employees having a unified relationship with the company.
I was working in a factory at the time, and the nature of that work didn't lend itself to individual bargaining, like say software engineering. That said I don't see why you couldn't ask for more if you're a better employee, I never got told I couldn't ask. It might be down a different path, like a promotion. And not every union would necessarily do any salary negotiation.
It’s all pros and cons. This is very much one of the big negatives of unions. That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. In an era of massive income inequality, it’s a loss. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds.
—-
I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.
> That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time.
Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.
It’s a relatively nascent industry, and this wealth is not equally distributed. We don’t know what it’ll look like in ten, twenty years. You cannot assume the world will continue to be as is.
Yeah, and look what happened to the auto unions. They made a deal to protect the income of the senior members and hung the junior members/new hires out to dry.
Tech companies in NYC (the likes any one would recognize) who have DCs in NYC area are affected.
If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this reads like poorly disguised anti-union propaganda, but it does. In my experience with startups--which is a bit more extensive than yours is with union workplaces--"ambition and taking on responsibility" are rewarded only when it's convenient, and those rewards are often removed or withheld for arbitrary or personal reasons that have nothing to do with your quality of work. The fact that your bosses can (and do) fire startup employees at a moment's notice without any real consequences to themselves would probably concern you more than whether the employees... worked regular eight hour days (wait, why is this being spun as a negative?), were you in an industry where jobs were tighter.
Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.
> One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served"
I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options.
I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.
Everything is a trade-off between priorities. You can optimize for anything, but not everything.
There's nothing "wrong" with stable employment for unproductive people, but when you optimize for that as a goal, then you're paying for it with things like decreased productivity and immense frustration for the creative people who actually want to solve problems. Detaching employment from productivity reduces it to ritual, which is incredibly demotivating for the good workers who see through the farce. They can't even go off on their own to volunteer their skills for the common good, because they still rely on employment--but their hands are tied within that sphere due to a fundamental distortion of its meaning.
The current system was designed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for factory labor. Instead of pretending that we can force it to be relevant into the future, we need to accept that productivity is moving into the realm of cognitive work. Part of this means educating people from the ground up to use information tools and reason abstractly, but we also have to admit that not everybody is going to have the innate ability to contribute in the future, and handle that in a way that doesn't hamstring the people who can.
Because now other employees have no motivation to put in anything more than mediocre work. The reality is people are motivated primarily by self interest. If advancement and retention is based on seniority rather than merit, people have no incentive to put in more than the minimum work.
This is assuming they were already based on merit and not on nepotism and favoritism. In comparison to those, seniority might be a reasonable alternative.
Competition will bring success to the company that fosters an engaged and motivated workforce. Even in national unions, they are still subject to foreign competition.
Sure, the free market isn't immune to nepotism or favoritism. But unions more often than not institute practices that give the same rewards to mediocrity as excellence - to the effect that the latter either put in less work or change jobs.
In either case the company risks losing to a more focused company valuing meritocracy and contribution over either nepotism or seniority. And we see this happen when starts rise up to the top. But our current system gives a lot of protection to existing players, be it through regulatory capture or be it through more natural phenomena like brand recognition taking time to decay even in the face of numerous bad products (in the world of games, look at how many people are still looking forwards to TES6 despite the issues with FO76).
There is also some cases where valuing meritocracy is only the best option when employees are willing to leave, but many employees are very stuck to their existing jobs. This is why pay raises do not keep up with the price of new hires. Consider the case where the cost to hire a new employee goes up 6% year over year while the company raises go up 1% year over year, potentially losing out to even inflation. The reasoning is that the extra costs to hire the few people who leave to another company to capture the 5% difference is smaller than the 5% savings for each person who does not leave.
To some extent, unions help to balance out the issue where most people are not perfectly rational actors.
It takes time, but you'll find that most of the ambitious and motivated people you'll meet are also mediocre. The successful ones tend to also have had luck on their side.
In the UK unions have generally become thinly-veiled extortion rackets. Rail workers unions are the most infamous example, whose train drivers generally receive massively inflated salaries and working conditions compared to similarly-skilled peers thanks to decades of legalised blackmail. The strikes are always about working conditions or health & safety on the surface, but they always end with a whopping pay rise, quietly accepted.
I also have direct experience of a very historic and well known union which repeatedly issued false statements in the national news media a couple of years ago with the intention of removing a government minister. Of course they claimed it was about health & safety, but internal documents showed it was purely to force him from his job because he was messing with their overtime bonus rates.
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.
> 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.
Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.
Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't insinuate shillage or astroturfing on HN. I know you probably didn't mean it literally, but it's still against the guidelines.
Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.
I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was:
- hours go out by seniority
- raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work
- that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken
- 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union.
- I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart.
Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.
Yep. I had this same experience when I was working at a grocery store.
I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine.
Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours.
So I joined just to get hours, and lost a few hundred bucks that summer so the old women who had been cashiers for 30 years could get their raises.
Remarkably similar experience. I worked as a bag boy at a grocery store many years ago. The guy who hired me told me he strongly encourages everyone to join the union and I didn't realize at the time it was an implicit threat. After four months I kept wondering why there were five bag boys on duty and I was the only one working and where they went. One of the store managers came over to me during one of my shifts to thank me for my hard work. I was literally just doing my job while the other kids weren't. Less than two weeks later I had no hours on the schedule. Assuming it was a mistake I asked the guy who scheduled the hours (Mr. "Strongly Encourage") and he said he'd look into it. It was the end of my week so I needed to know what time to show up on Monday and so I persisted and said I needed to know when my next shift was so I wouldn't be late. He kept feigning ignorance. After my third inquiry he turned and said "Look, someone else transferred in so they got the hours, okay?"
I might still be on the payroll with no hours scheduled at that company for all I know.
This was definitely a case where a union wasn't good for workers -- it was good for the lazy bums who didn't want to work.
Okay so my comment was a bit rude, but it from reading this thread it seems many US citizens are so entrenched in an anti Union stance they can't even think of what could be.
In my country the unions negotiate a framework for pay rise based on performance management. They make sure people working (night) shifts have enough time off, can't be rotated at will by management and get compensation.
People who are forced to leave due to downsizing get a proper retraining budget first and are transitioned to other jobs in or outside the company.
It just seems every time Unions are brought up here on HN someone says "my train was late once so all trains are bad form of transportation". But this is too simple, and it doesn't account for the fact that highly skilled IT people can easily negotiate good wages but that low skilled people can't, and they need unions the most.
I've worked once in a non-union shop, where I wasn't allowed to move my computer from my old desk to another. I was expected to unplug all my stuff, label it, put all my personal effects and peripherals into a crate, label it, and sign out. Then, I was supposed to come back the next day, and set everything up.
In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.)
What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?
> About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.
I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through:
It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen.
Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?
> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.
Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.
> Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?
They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it.
If I make a small mess, I can:
1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or
2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working
In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.
I think you missed the point of adding additional responsibilities.
In my example the electricians did not make the mess, but they, however, walk around the facility a lot so why not give them a broom so they can clean up messes on their way.
Unchecked is how you lead to companies squeezing 3 jobs out of one person.
Sounds more like the union added contract terms preventing the business from hiring somebody for position X and "asking" or even "allowing" them to do the tadks if position Y (which might pay more than X).
A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.
Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.
A union is run rather democratically. It will tend to reflect the attitudes of its membership, i. e. your coworkers. In some old industry on a downward slope, employees will tend to be older and risk-averse, and so will the union. Tech Unions will tend to be rather different.
Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management.
It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...
But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?
I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie.
Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters.
Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc.
But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).
> But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?
I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own.
I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.
That is the reasoning, and it's exactly why it concerns me. I'm imagining a world where the national SRE union comes by, and tells me I should never write any monitoring code or change any configuration flags because that's an SRE's job I'm taking.
Companies inject themselves into people's lives and exert whatever power they possibly can, so I'm not sure what your objection is to workers doing exactly the same thing.
How do unions operate in organizations where voluntary turnover is relatively high? A small % of people in tech stay at one company for more than a couple of years. I guess there's nothing about a union that stops you from voluntarily quitting for something else in that case, other than paying whatever fee you pay for the time you do stay?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that question; but, I believe the fees are usually prorated and split between each pay period. Also a lot of job switches are because that's the best way to get a decent raise, and frankly I haven't seen great benefits outside of the really big tech commpanies. Perhaps collective bargaining would disincentivize some of that turnover.
The model you are asking about is similar to SAG-AFTRA. This how actors work. This is the preferred model. Kickstarter employees should have used this as an opportunity to push for something like that.
The reason SAG started was because production companies made an agreement amongst themselves not to bid competitively for talent. (Remember that just ocurred in tech...)
Without a union, you can ask management for stuff, but they can just say no. Your only recourse then is to quit, which wouldn't change anything when it's just one person.
With a union, a work stoppage is a possibility. Suddenly management have a reason to come to the negotiation table and make concessions.
First of all "asking for stuff" implies a negotiation between two parties. A negotiation implies that either party can walk away from a deal. You're implying management shouldn't be able to say no. Management is not necessarily out to get employees and excessive compensation or regulation around hiring and firing leads to either insolvency or stagnation. It's a balancing act.
A union can be just as exploitative as a company can. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.
The software industry has been regulated by demand over the last few decades. Demand is still extremely high for software devs. Managers know that employees can make moves because unemployment in our sector is something like 2%. I've worked in many industries in my life and I've never been chased down or marketed to move jobs as much as I have in software development.
Neither is a union entitled to my labor. I would purposely avoid unions to maintain my agency as an individual and to work at more agile and flexible institutions.
Of course there are negotiations involved. Having workers be organized provides a better ability to ask for (and negotiate) things by banding together. As well as protections. Without, sticking your neck out—alone or in a small non-unionized group—can be a major risk.
High demand does not mean workers are not exploited (hi amazon), and employees organizing can provide protections and benefits for all staff, some of which may not be in the same “high demand” group.
A negotiation is also done in good faith with both parties willing to listen and discuss options. An individual almost never has the advantage when negotiating with a company.
For 99% of employees out their quitting isn't the threat you make it seem to be. As easy you make it sound to get a new job, its that easy for them to replace you. Then that new employee gets to deal with the same shit you left over. It never gets fixed.
Leaving and going somewhere new doesn't solve anything. for most people job hunting is just looking at piles of shit and finding which one stinks less.
Insurance at my current job is not great. I can't go to my boss and say I want better health insurance he would laugh me out of his office, but even if he could, why would he not just give me the better insurance from the start? If a Union went to management and said we demand better health care that carries weight. That would get something done.
Yes they do, when you are in a high demand industry with low supply of skilled workers, you are in the driver's seat of a negotiation. You have options. You're the one being bid on by multiple employers. You absolutely have the leverage there. This is similar to the real estate market, by the way. There are so-called "buyers markets" and "seller markets" where one trend or another is dominant at any given time depending on if there are more buyers than sellers or more sellers than buyers.
It's not easy to replace tech employees at all. Even if there was an abundant supply of expert software engineers (there's not), it takes many months to ramp up on a new code base to optimal productivity and to learn the organization and domain requirements of a software product. That will never change.
An average tech company will spend tens of thousands of dollars to fill a position, not even counting initial salary and bonuses.
Leaving for somewhere better often does solve quite a bit. On my last job move my pay increased by 50%. If I had stayed at my previous company I'd be skating by with 4% raises.
On the whole the aggregate effect of employees moving around in a dynamic market creates the cush benefits and pay we see in this industry.
The reason they wouldn't give you specifically better insurance is because they have to negotiate a plan for everyone in the company. What is that costing them on paper? I don't know how many employees your company has or what their margins are or any details really, but it can be as much as $700-$1000 a month per employee for health insurance. If you've got 100 employees that's $100K a year.
No boss should "laugh you out of the office" for requesting that. But really, its an HR and Corporate leadership issue so you should take your grievances to those with the power to make the change and not your boss (unless you work directly for the CEO).
It gives workers a way out of their job. With a union, Kickstarter will be less likely to compete with similar companies that come out of China or anywhere else who realizes that a free market provides better outcomes for the majority of constituents.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadWhat a shameful statement.
Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor, and a sub-50% CEO approval rating. A lot of reviews talk about a secretive, insulated management group.
You don’t see companies with 4.5+ stars on Glassdoor unionizing.
So I’d have to ask their leadership: who made this an “us versus them” situation? Perhaps your local superstore sells handheld mirrors.
You don’t want your employees to unionize? Offer highly competitive salaries, benefits, and opportunities to grow. Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.
Glassdoor's ratings are not terribly reliable. Here's something I wrote previously about my own experience with using it:
-----
I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.
At some point people really started to rate them. Ended up with a 3.2 rating.
Every time I see this statement, I can't help it but wonder why people don't put some estimate what constitutes "highly competitive".
FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).
If you aren't able to pay your workers, I'm not sure why you think you shouldn't just go out of business. People aren't obligated to work for substandard wages so you can get rich.
I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners. But taking it out on workers isn't the answer.
We're talking about 85k vs 200k for junior engineers here and probably 150k vs 500k for senior engineers.
Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?
> I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The NBA tried to level small market vs big market. UEFA tried with FFP. So far the result has been... _meh_
The BIGS will be too big to accept union and the less BIGS will have to accept their fate to live with unionized workers.
Employees will choose between: get paid tons of money but sacrifice your life vs unionized and accept market average pay (or a little bit above).
Just like life: high-risk high-gain, low-risk low-gain.
If the lower amount is reasonable and people are willing to work for it, then there isn't a problem. But you said, "FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions)." So it sounds like you think people aren't willing to work for the lower wage.
Given the numbers you're proposing, I think you may have a wrong impression about what engineers are being paid, both inside and outside of FAANG.
The salaries you're quoting might be true for the bay area, but that's because of the absurd cost of living there. Those numbers are certainly not accurate for the entire US or for the world. FAANG workers are paid that in the bay area, because that's what their skillsets are worth when you adjust for the bay area's cost of living. And if you make the decision to put your startup in the bay area, it's completely unreasonable of you to expect your highly-skilled workers to live in slums because you couldn't locate your business in a place where you can pay to support the cost of living. Maybe that means your startup fails, but that's on you: you're the one who came up with that crappy business plan, and it's not up to workers to prop up your crappy business plan by working for substandard wages.
> Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?
Ugh. Don't ignore half of what I said. If a business can't pay their workers the business should die, yes. But there are a lot of small businesses that seem capable of paying their workers, so I'm not sure why you think this is an undue burden, and I'm certainly not saying that those small businesses should die.
Again, why do you think that workers should prop up your insolvent business by accepting substandard pay? Pay fair wages or GTFO.
Whatever unfairness you think exists in competition between small and large businesses, exists tenfold between employees and employers. If small businesses are underprivileged, crapping on workers who are even more underprivileged is not the solution to that problem.
SDE1 @ Amazon Vancouver get at least 160-180k (CAD).
SDE3 @ Tableau Vancouver can hit $300k-$350k (CAD).
SDE3 @ Amazon Seattle can get paid 400-500k (USD).
I don't know how much Google Singapore, Zurich, and China pay compare to the market. I heard Alibaba pays $200k USD (if you're OK with 996) for Soft Eng (not in management).
All I said was that "competitive salary" is loosely defined because once FAANG landed in a specific location, they will absolutely "crushed" your notion of competitive salary.
This is the reason why I find the notion of "competitive salary" is interesting (and a bit funny). Employees will demand "competitive salary" and when we asked them, they will point out to the maximum TC that they can find in their area. That's not "competitive" salary. That's "I want to get paid the max".
Of course... it wouldn't be sexy to say "pay us fairly" since that equates to "market average".
Let me rephrase the situation: Majority CAN pay plumbers vs Majority CANNOT pay FAANG level.
So let me ask you back: what is the going rate for developers? Is it what everybody else is paying you or FAANG level?
Whatever people are willing to pay.
> Is it what everybody else is paying you or FAANG level?
It depends on a variety of factors like domain and location. But if you're not finding developers, then its higher than whatever you're offering. And if it's in major tech metros (SV, Seattle + Eastside) it's close to FAANG levels.
This is not entirely true. People aren't finding developers because most of them failed the interview (unless you are digital agencies).
In major tech metros, nobody pay close to FAANG levels. Either you pay at FAANG levels (and they compete at that level) or you go down one-tier (Pinterest, Airbnb, etc) or you're the rest.
Contrast this with your original comment in this chain:
> FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).
If what you say is true, that most companies don't pay close to FAANG levels, then why are non-FAANG companies having a hard time to compete?
Unemployment in software is near zero. You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels, yet at the same time say that non-FAANG companies are having trouble attracting talent. If a company is having a hard time attracting talent at their current compensation levels, then this indicates that their current compensation levels are not competitive (assuming other factors are the same).
Ultimately, the price of labor is whatever people are willing to pay. If workers can get better pay for the same work elsewhere, then the company is going to have trouble staffing - and that's natural.
Hard time to hire engineers according to their bar. Their bar is high (FAANG level) but they don't pay FAANG level so this is interesting => They don't want to lower the bar (rightfully so) and nobody wants to be perceived as "FAANG" reject.
> You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels
Few? I'd say they're "exceptions" (like Uber... for a while before they laid people off) and the rest aren't even close.
This was the main driver for unionization. Outrageous incompetence from upper management.
Source: I work at Kickstarter
The only downside I can think of is ageism, but then again, I have colleagues in their 50s and 60s where I work. But I suppose this isn't universal. (I'm in Atlanta and we have a lot of older workers. Age doesn't seem to be a thing here.)
Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people. We have the flexibility to find new work or create our own businesses.
Why introduce a new level of politics and collective bargaining? I don't want to pay union dues. If I don't like where I'm working, I'll go somewhere else.
Can someone explain why I should want this? (Or why I should empathize with those who do?) I don't understand it at all.
I implore you to also think twice about the way in which you are demonizing unions. Sure, some unions aren’t the best, but what you’re saying is 100% discounting the benefits that a union can bring to employees. Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation. They can restrict overwork, unpaid overtime (see the special salaried overtime exemptions that IT employees and teachers get enshrined into US law), and unsafe working conditions.
Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.
The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”
Sure, life is nice for many tech employees right now, but what happens when the supply/demand situation inverts?
Tech employees often also have a very bad habit of pretending that more poorly compensated areas of their own company are enjoying the success in the same way. Ask someone in support or a junior graphic designer about what they think about the prospects of “working somewhere else.”
I don't think anyone says tech employee and is referring to graphic designers/anyone in that area.
99% sure anyone who hears tech employee is thinking software development.
EDIT: How on Earth can anyone downvote this statement? If you ask 10 people to name 10 tech companies, not one of them is going to pick a game studio.
Also, here in Montreal, most people's list of well-known local tech employers would absolutely include at least one or two of the many game studios here.
What percentage of employees at Google/Apple/Microsoft do you think are "graphic designers", and what percentage are "software developers"?
Your argument to create a union is that the 1% of employees need protection. Honestly I agree video game industries could use a union. But the presence of a graphics designer at Google does not mean every employee needs to unionize.
No, every employee at Google does not need to unionize. CEO Sundar Pichai certainly doesn't. But lots of Googlers have long wanted a union for good reason, including software developers. I would have happily voted yes in a union election when I was there, despite being a software developer myself.
I know of plenty of examples of misbehaviour and other harmful actions by Google toward software development employees, a number of which have been publicly reported. And the situation seems to have gotten worse since I left.
To be clear, Google is far from unique in this regard, and it's still probably a better employer than many of its peer companies. That just underscores how severe and widespread the problem is.
Bingo. I've worked at enough places to know that the greener grass myth is indeed a myth in the industry. That doesn't mean you can't get a better job, but there's always a very real risk that things will be worse at your new job.
Those negotiations can also drag down your salary potential as well. You get paid what everyone else gets paid. If you warm the chair longer, you get paid more, regardless of any innovation or extra value you bring to the business.
You have incentivized mediocrity because what’s the point of doing anything beyond the minimum requirements? It isn’t like you’re going to get a raise for being especially clever.
No, they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase the influence and power of the union leadership. You are directly paying the union to represent the union's interest, which may or may not align with your own.
E.g. a motivated, capable teacher has a portion of their salary deducted and spent on defending seniority based pay even if said teacher is in favor of performance based pay. The union directly acts against the desired of the employee.
I have been at a bunch of companies that reclassified employees from salaried to hourly. This always came after a single employee filed a lawsuit. It almost never impacted developers, sometimes impacted QA and often impacted other development support employees. I have never seen an impacted employee like it because they could not participate in stock options. I was only at companies with lucrative stock options.
If a company had poor stock options then I could see that somebody might like the change.
I live in the SF Bay Area, have worked as a SWE for 10+ years including at top companies like Google, and changing jobs is NOT easy and I’m sick of the implication it is.
There are also a LOT of younger kids on HN who have never worked through a recession.
Finally, just because you make an ok salary doesn’t mean a political voice is worthless. Why do doctors have the AMA?
Engineers desperately need to stop boxing themselves out of the discussions, we absolutely need to organize, badly.
What I usually can't figure out is "why". Do you own a company? Are you part of management? Do you think that life should stay as it is and not get better for everyone?
Genuinely curious.
However the UAW, the most worthless crap joke of a union that makes other unions look bad. Basically just protects people who show up to work drunk or drive forklifts into walls. Forces companies to do insane things to fire people who do nothing but drag down the common output of a factory.
Be careful what you wish for and who you choose to put in control a good union can be a blessing... a bad union can be a millstone around your neck that ends up just being owned and, in the case of the UAW, is just a puppet for whatever company they serve.
I will say that when with Amazon I talked to some of my peers in Germany and I was fascinated with the labor protections that were provided to staff over there vs. the USA. They have some kind of thing, like a "labor council" or something. This group had to be consulted before lots of things could be done. In this case I think that it kept the Amazon buildings across the pond much happier than the ones in the USA. (Obviously this is simply my opinion)
I am on the fence, I was raised in a blue collar union family- even went to a little UAW brainwashing camp as a kid (Black Lake anyone?). My family members in IBEW have shown me that there are some very dedicated unions that do very good things and keep a trade from turning into a free market shitshow where everything becomes lowest bidder. If a union exists to truly protect staff AS WELL AS uphold high standards I think it will survive. When its just US V. Them...gimme` free crap, you are asking to be burned to the ground by competition.
If you were fired today you could walk into a new job by end of week, if you were any good. At least that's what Hackernews keeps telling me.
Also, the hiring process is broken. Also, older workers have a hard time finding work. Also, I have work 60 hour weeks. Also, I have to be on call all the time even though they said it would only be one weekend a month. Also, it turns out the options I was given were worthless. Also, open floor plans are detrimental to my health.
Techworkers have absolutely 0 issues that could be solved by any organizing!
There are dozens and dozens of threads on this site about the cancerous software engineering interview techniques in widespread use in the industry. Despite having 15 years of experience and a lot of accomplishments under my belt, I still had a bad streak a few years back where I had to interview 30 times before getting an offer.
So I have to say it's a fallacy to make this kind of claim.
I just find it amazing that a community so wrapped up in its own hubris always seems throws up its hands when the subject of labor relations comes up, insisting that no further improvement is possible. (Also of amusement is that KS, a crowdfunding startup, is ostensibly is about disrupting how goods are created and sold). So perhaps the industry is selective about what it believes tech is capable of inventing?
Also, a tech union wouldn’t be an advocate of open offices or the overuse of scrum, if the HN commentariat is representative of industry workers.
https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/...
It's the same principle which professional organizations use to keep compensation high for doctors and lawyers: set a limit on the number of entrants.
Restricting entry is a fundamental feature of unions: it protects those who are already in industry at the expense of potential new employees who might otherwise come in and undercut wages.
That said if you want to standardize the admissions process, a professional organization is a tried and true way to accomplish this: doctors and lawyers take a standardized test, become accredited, and can take on any job without being grilled for their technical skills.
https://kickstarterunited.org/#faqs
The first and only point related to pay is "equal pay for equal work", which is more about gender pay gaps than anything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_equal_work
There's plenty of issues in the tech industry that a union or some other professional association or guild (or even the IEEE, with teeth) could address that have nothing to do with giving developers higher wages.
Throughout human history, unions are one of the few ways that ordinary citizens can actually stand up against concentrated power (democracy, revolutions are some other ways). Rather than trying to invent something new, maybe study the past a bit more.
> I'm firmly convinced that tech workers will come around to unionizing once they accidentally reinvent it under a different name
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17881029
I don't think unions are going to be much use here, however, and they may even make things worse. Raising the industry-average cost of an employee means fewer jobs in the industry, meaning even more difficulty for an employee to "just get a job elsewhere if you don't like it".
For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.
And then, software development and related jobs are not all at FAANG, or even close to that. Many of those working in software aren't negotiating, individually, from a position even a little better than a "normal" office worker. Probably most, in fact. There's a whole world of software developers out there beyond SV, Seattle, and New York—the average state of a worker in our industry, even just in the US, is probably much closer to the norm outside those places than in them.
It's also a proven avenue for putting a stop to all sorts of abuses that exist due to the uneven power of workers and employers, not just direct compensation. Lots of non-California workers in tech are under badly disadvantageous employment agreements, but without working collectively, either through unions or government, against them, they're so common that resisting them carries high individual risk and a low chance of benefiting anyone else who's in an even worse position to resist them. That flexibility to work or create our own businesses you bring up? Yeah, that could be assured for non-California, non-public-figure-rockstar developers, too, through union negotiations.
At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO.
HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers.
Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.
It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar.
If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.)
Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.
And of course I agree that they are not the most annoying thing possible. Let's wait a few more years until something like DingTalk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678571) becomes popular in Western companies.
Standups increase managerial oversight compared to not having them? True... as far as it goes. The thing is, management is going to make decisions based on something. Having them make decisions with no data leads to bad outcomes, so they've got to get the data somehow. If you've got a way for them to get the data that's less intrusive to workers' time than standups, I'd like to hear what it is. (Seriously. I've got standups now, and if you've got a better way, I'm not above copying it.)
The other thing is that not everyone experiences the supposed benefits of these careers. I talk to a lot of people who are exploited in the tech industry with long hours and salaries that aren't really that high for the high CoL we deal with. Talk to bootcamp graduates about their job experiences some time. PoC and women also report rampant discrimination—lower salaries for the same work, sexism, organizations providing cover and golden parachutes for harassers.
Finally, think of all the issues that we gripe about here on HN:
- Open office plans
- Horrible and overly-demanding hiring processes
- Lack of transparency or consistency around promotion processes and salaries
Fixing these types of issues are bread and butter for unions.
Not if you're a top performer who switches jobs to find new interesting things. If you look into the details of the "who gets laid off", it's very frequently just all of the newest members of each department.
edited for grammar
I'm kind of in the same boat, though I actually kind of lean toward some kind of organizing. Those I know who are members of a national union complain about the union spending most of its money on things unrelated to the employment of its members.
But at the same time professional organizations like the AMA and ADA seem to benefit their members (unfortunately sometimes at the expense of the public).
I think the questions to ask are what's the bigger picture? What is the framing used in the current discussion to limit our view of that bigger picture? Who is doing the framing?
I don't have answers there, but it definitely seems like there's some important hidden variable that is omitted from the framing of either side of this debate.
"Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide"
Seems like you came up with another downside in pretty short order. I believe you can come up with even more if you peruse the comments here.
About six years back it came out that the big tech companies were conspiring against their own employees:
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
Source: I work at Kickstarter
that's exactly like the current one.
And compared to Africa everyone in the US is overpaid. Janitors are welcome to try and raise their wages too. I will not lower mine on their behalf.
Yeah, when you are in the top 5%. I’m not sure you realize just how shit most tech jobs are. Not everyone gets $300k a year in stock. Most people get nothing.
You don’t want it because you are in the top decile. That’s the same reason that everyone who is in the top decile of anything doesn’t want change. This is for the 90%, not for you. You shouldn’t empathize. You should oppose this because it will ultimately hurt you.
The strength of labor unions in Europe is drawn in large part due to the fact that there are a multiplicity of unions representing workers for the same companies, and workers can choose who they want to represent them.
That's not the case for labor unions in the US.
It could be the case in the US. Having a single union is a good place to start.
Well, no, the fact that almost all unions in the US use exclusive representation contracts (compared to Europe, where such contracts are range from "unheard-of in most industries" to "illegal") is not due to anti-union propaganda.
Complaining about the lack of competition when union representation has been decimated, seems like pointless bikeshedding. I'll happily talk about the lack of union representation, but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.
On the contrary, history shows us clearly that the fact that union membership has declined in the US and the fact that union membership in the US is typically on an exclusive representation basis are deeply linked.
In fact, you can still draw your same argument ("the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them") from this fact - it just has little to do with propaganda, as you claimed.
> but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.
If you want to have that argument, please find someone who said that and argue with them, instead of responding to my post, which is saying something different altogether.
Using it as an argument against creating a single union seems like a distraction.
The same factors which led to the rise of exclusive representation are the ones which led to the drop in union representation across the board.
If you want to ignore that, fine, but don't be surprised or disappointed when you don't end up with the result you seem to want (more union representation).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll admit that that sentence is a bit dismissive, but it's a deflection in response to a comment which is itself dismissive and aggressive towards me and which is trying to bait an unnecessary argument over an uncharitable reading of my original (innocuous) statement. Hopefully that's evident in context.
I'll be honest: there are usernames I recognize by name. There are users who have made a habit of posting aggressive, dismissive, snarky replies to even my blandest comments, often trying to bait an argument and drawing the conversation towards a specific tangent. There are some users who post comments that are "civil" in tone but express racist or homophobic sentiments towards me. (In some cases, it's plainly obvious that they're trying to continue personal grudges from other threads; they've linked directly to the previous thread or copied sections of text verbatim!) In my view, either one goes against the spirit of the guidelines for this website - fostering productive conversation - as well as the letter.
Yes, it's true that trying to deflect or cut off an argument like this is a defensive response. But it's a defensive response that's been learned over years of participating on this site, and from seeing moderators take no visible action against people "civilly" directing bigoted comments at individuals, while publicly taking issue with the people defending themselves (albeit impolitely) from those exact comments in the same thread. While that might not be the intention, and while there may be reasons for this (e.g. engaging visibly with the people likely to be receptive feedback as opposed to those who won't), it's the pattern that I (and others) have noticed.
I very much appreciate the time and effort that you (and others) put in to running this site, which is exactly why I'm taking the time to write this comment and explain the broader context.
Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem with your comments that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information. It's much harder to see these patterns in oneself than it is in others, especially the people we most disagree with. The only way to fix that is to take on a higher standard for yourself—not because a higher standard applies to you, but as a compensation for the strong bias to always see the other person as the greater problem. We all have that bias, so we all need to apply that fix. It's a community-level effort.
That said, if there are other accounts repeatedly breaking HN's rules, we'd certainly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.
It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. We do that a lot. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, so we rely on users to help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
You can help by flagging such comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them. I took a look at the history of comments you've flagged, and in most cases there ended up being visible evidence of moderation. In egregious cases, it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com, because usually that will lead to swifter action.
Yes, I had seen that, which is why I mentioned that in my comment.
> Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.
I understand, and I'm not saying that it makes it okay. I'm explaining that, when people see patterns in which violations of rules get called out publicly and which don't, it sends a message. The reason I'm letting you know because I believe that's not the message that your team intends to send (if it were, I wouldn't be bothering).
> It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. I've personally done that hundreds if not thousands of times. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
The last time you and I interacted on here (Jan 2019) was in a thread where you took issue with a snarky comment I wrote, and I responded by pointing out the same thing - that I was responding to a person who was even more aggressive, clearly acting in bad faith, and accusing me of "racism" for explaining why a post was offensive to people of certain ethnic backgrounds (including my own). My comment apparently warranted a public moderator response; the parent that I responded to apparently did not. The other was eventually flagged, but only much later - long after the post had fallen off the front page.
Perhaps moderators don't necessarily read the parent post when responding to a comment, but because most readers assume that mods do, a situation like that makes it look like moderators are condoning one type of behavior over the other.
It doesn't help that, in any system that relies on user flags for reporting behavior, users from minority backgrounds ultimately are flagged at a higher rate, even if they adhere to the rules the same proportion of the time. There's peer-reviewed research that's explained this phenomenon, but most of it boils down to the obvious dynamic: people are less likely to report objectionable behavior if they agree with the content, and people are more likely to disagree with content that openly expresses viewpoints from minority groups.
> You can help by flagging those comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them, and in egregious cases it's helpful to email hn@ycombinator.com.
I have typically avoided flagging these comments because I've (perhaps incorrectly) been under the impression that they're not actioned - in all the years I've been on this site, I don't think I've ever seen moderators publicly calling out this sort of "civil bigotry" that I'm describing.
However, if that's not the case, I'll make note of that and will flag those from now on instead of responding myself.
No, it's actually because the government gave them more power and allowed agreements to be structured where all of the electricians in one company must come from the same union.
Unions in the US are able to prevent competition from other unions. You can not freely choose different unions if you don't like the one in your company. See every state that doesn't allow "right to work". Unions become mandatory.
https://www.wrapbook.com/how-to-set-up-a-loan-out-company/
I have an LLC operating for tax purposes as an s-corp. I can't think of any benefits a union would give me that I couldn't otherwise get for myself.
-Eugene Debs
What's much more interesting is the labor status of the people who work on the Kickstarted projects.
Not really. It may be short-term better for the workers, but not likely long term as they are effectively constraining the growth of the business relative to what it would be if the union did not exist.
The whole entertainment industry is unionized in L.A.
I know an actor from Las Vegas who moved to L.A. and got a role in a TV commercial and was surprised to see somebody else standing in front of the cameras and was surprised to find that every actor has a "stand-in" who is there so they can set up the equipment, then the real actor is fresh when he does his scene.
These costs add up, but there are many specialists who are highly productive. For instance, setting up and tearing down sets is a special form of carpentry which the average carpenter would take a change of mindset.
Union labor helps maintain a productive and talented workforce that gives L.A. a comparative advantage. Being at times the the documentarian who travels light and feels it is extravagant to have a sidekick that sets up lights it heavyweight but it maintains a world-beating quality standard.
I hope they pursue a path toward codetermination: getting workers a seat on the board. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that plays out in a US-based tech company; I believe it'd be for the good, but we'll know for sure if we can see it play out.
Edit: Oh, and not having a say in how your organization is run is a wretched existence. Time to raise our standards, if we don't see that.
Or perhaps they are justified to want a better share of the value created at kickstarter by their labor.
"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
The thing that gets me about Apple specifically is that they did this while sitting on huge cash reserves and being one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world, yet they still fucked over their own people to make more.
I used to think that, as a 733t programmer, I had no use for unions, but then this happened and showed that there's no particular reason to trust tech company management at all, at all. They'll screw you to make a buck and get a slap on the wrist if anything if they're caught.
Interview with Google and they will send you lovely little videos with folks sliding down banisters and such to show you how wonderful it is to work there. It won't mention the "wage-fixing cartel" that limits your job opportunities and take-home pay.
It's pretty sick when you think about it. I don't know it unions are the answer, it's complicated after all, but absolutely these folks are not your friends, and you should coe in with as much leverage as you can get if you want to work for "the man".
Assuming all of the risk is useful. I understand the point, but it's undercut by that woefully inaccurate jab.
It all depends on your definition of "useful", but anyone who's made that much money legally has probably put in a bunch of work (or put in work to educate themselves to be able to make good decisions), or assumed a lot of risk in an investment.
There's definitely something to be said for reducing income inequality, but we don't have to assume the ultra-rich have "done absolutely nothing that is useful" in order to be pro-workers rights. Capitalism is designed to produce ultra-rich individuals.
There are massively wealthy individuals who have collected value in one area, and use that wealth to negatively influence many other areas. We really should not give money that much of an advantage.
What do you suggest as an alternative?
Favor small business formation (and worker coop formation) with higher SBA loan funding. Put required worker representation on corporate boards (like Germany) of larger corporations. Do actual antimonopoly enforcement. Tax large corps more. Create more public ownership of housing and infrastructure.. it's all pretty mundane well trodden and reasonable practice for good governance.
Exotic stuff would be government backed individual loan lines for citizens. The limit could be expanded on repayments but zero consequence if never repaid. The idea would be to open a window for entrepreneurship when right now, wages have basically squeezed out the possibility of most people starting any sort of business from savings. If you can make things grow, you get a larger limit. Basically decentralize loans.
No they don't. Not even in the wall-street bailouts did shareholders get money from the government.
Just to review: QE bought risky Mortgage backed securities off of banks and finance companies completely absolving them of carrying the negative effects of their bad investments...
I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.
I'd rather be a multi-billionaire who loses $2 billion than a mid-level worker who loses their job (and for a proper comparison you'd have to aggregate all the trouble caused by all the job losses the closing of the company has caused), especially in a country with a smaller social safety net. That alone tells me enough about the value of this "risk" supposedly so greatly undertaken by the owners to entitle them to perpetual gains on it.
Each and every employee takes a risk by being employed at a company. At the moment, it seems they are only compensated for their labour. Why is the owner of the company compensated for risk, possibly in addition to being compensated for labour, but the employees aren't?
No it's not. Investors don't take salaries. Many stocks don't even pay a dividend (e.g. most tech stocks).
The argument was as follows:
* People who do nothing useful gain high compensation (Debs).
* Acutally, the high compensation is due to taking on "all the risk"
* But employees also take on a large amount of personal risk which is not compensated.
* Ah, but the kind of risk being discussed isn't personal risk, it's financial risk.
* But this means that when constructing an argument for high compensation, financial risk is prized and personal risk is not. Why?
The fact that investors don't take salaries is irrelevant to the discussion. The justification for their profit is still "financial risk" without regard for "personal risk".
By looking at employees, you're also looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who were able to gain employment). The person who took the initial risk (say, a founder) may often leave the company or sell it. Who in the company has then assumed all of the risk? The person who bought the company?
Even then, we're not living in a just world. What's admirable, or a social justification, for taking a risk in a business that operates in immoral ways, or illegal ways? I'm not saying this applies to Kickstarter, but it certainly applies to a great many other companies.
And when GP said "assuming all the risk", I can't think how that's possibly true. Workers in all professions assume some level of risk every day - either to their safety, career prospects, or continued employment.
https://venturebeat.com/2010/05/27/elon-musk-personal-financ...
Personal—not Tesla—burn-rate of $200,000 a month, and he still owned property.
Seems like they did learn from history. Unions are they only thing that have proven consistently, across the world, to protect wages, rights, and give workers a say in their workplaces.
Then why didn't all start ups outsource all their IT jobs to India for instance already? They are considerably cheaper than US software engineers.
I mean what stopped all these IT businesses to do that yesterday? I know more instances of businesses that tried to outsource their IT overseas only to go back on that decision, than successful IT outsourcing stories.
Yes, this sector tends to pay fairly well, but that doesn't mean there aren't other areas to improve. From IP restrictions to overtime, oncall to transparency in promotions, there are countless workplace conditions I hear about needing to improve constantly.
Or, for that matter, doctors, who are frequently members of professional organizations that are unions in all but name.
Unions as only a working class institution is mostly a US historic artifact. Other countries have unions in highly specialized and in-demand industries too.
Were they firing people arbitrarily making it a positive thing that the company will now have to jump through hoops to reprimand or get rid of the worst non-productive workers? Or the countless other limitations now imposed on the company from making decisions which benefit the existence of the company itself (and the fact they can even hire/pay for these workers)?
Will it make Kickstarter super cautious about hiring new people with their new extensive protections lowering the amount of people who would benefit from the success of various companies who have unions (and the taxation of these which benefits the wider community)? Turning them into mini-exclusive clubs of workers, while everyone else works p/t or on contract to avoid f/t hires?
Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.
As a concrete example, when Google analyzed their wages they actually noticed that they were underpaying men.
Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less.
Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
> Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
You are misinterpreting my comment. It had been well documented that in job searches women prioritize benefits at a higher rate than men. So women might on average be getting $10,000 less in salary but also ~$10,000 less in benefits. This is not about utilitzation of the same benefits. This is about differences in men's and women's job preferences that result in unequal salary but equal overall compensation.
> Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less
Equal pay for equal work can also be violated by giving workers equal pay while allocating unequal work.
> Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
Google's analysis is conducted over all of their employees, for one. By comparison people typing their salaries into spreadsheets is 1) subject to people falsifying or misremembering their compensation, and 2) has a selection bias towards people who feel they are not compensated fairly. Furthermore, Google has the data to know the stock prices at the time equity packages are awarded, which affects compensation results (e.g. someone who started right before a rise in stock gets more money than someone after even though their original equity packages had the same dollar value).
I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
https://www.nber.org/digest/feb07/w12321.html
https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2018/05/new-research-pr...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/19/health/women-work-harder-...
Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
Yet again, you continue to misinterpret the role of benefits that I explained in my comments. Women's prioritization of benefits over compensation does not mean they are receiving different benefits than men at the same company. It means they apply to different companies than men. Pointing out that Google does not negotiate benefits is not a valid line of criticism.
> I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
You assume that this is the company refusing to allocate more work to women. Typically, this is the opposite: the company is more than happy to give women 24 hour oncalls but a lower rate of women are willing to do so than men.
> Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
The onus is on you to provide proof of your allegations that Google is not being honest in its pay analysis. What proof do you have that they are lying? Like I said, employee compiled spreadsheets are rife with selection bias, and there's no guarantee that employees are even telling the truth. Why would we believe the latter over studies compiled by people who actually have the real salary data?
> Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
This is not what the research you linked claims. There is a promotion gap, in the same way that there is a wage gap: the average woman is less likely to be promoted than the average man. The existence of a gap is not the same as the existence of discrimination. Much like the wage gap, when normalizing for role and experience the disparity mostly disappears:
> The additional controls slightly reduce the gender difference in promotion rates but, controlling for all variables, including worker performance ratings, men's promotion rates were still 2.2 percentage points higher than women's.
And furthermore, your own study says that there is no wage gap once these factors are accounted for:
> However, in marked contrast, the authors find that after controlling for measured characteristics, promotions and expected promotions continued to yield comparable wage increases for both men and women. And, there were essentially no gender differences in overall wage growth at the establishment, with or without promotion
So this difference in promotion drops to 2% when accounting for differences in role and experience, and there is no wage difference with or without promotion between men and women. I'm not sure how you think this study supports your point.
Not to mention, there's plenty of evidence of discrimination against men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/
> Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
I have. Many do note instances where they believed there were discriminated against on the basis of their sex. Most of them also detailed explicitly discriminatory policies aimed at allocating more opportunity to men. I'm more than happy to give you the details if you so desire. They want to be treated equal to men, not ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Footballers'_Asso...
Well, at the risk of getting all tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, I can’t help but wonder if the people posting these “you guys are too well paid to have any other concerns” types are really practicing software developers and not “startup founders”.
1) Better IP restrictions. Working on open source, side projects, etc.
2) Better treatment around oncall.
3) Limiting hours (no expectations of 60+ hour weeks)
4) Transparency in hiring, promotion, and review processes
5) Transparency in company performance and benefits decisions
6) Better benefits, particularly things like parental leave, vacation, and health care
7) A greater slice of the value that workers provide
8) Representation at the board level, or at least a democratically elected representative to the C-level
9) A representative during disagreements with the company (e.g. making it harder to be singled out/fired just because)
There are probably a bunch more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head.
3) The expectation finishes when you leave at 5pm every day. Don't worry, you won't get fired.
4) Which is none of employees business.
...
Notably, directors, actors, and writers in American film and television are unionised. That does not mean that everyone is paid the same, nor that there is any concept as "seniority" (very rare in unions that represent highly skilled workers), nor that it is assumed that everyone has the same level of skill.
While the AMA and ABA are not conventionally considered unions, they do effectively control entry into and regulation of their respective professions. (Medicine and Law).
If brain surgeons benefit from being in a union, javascript developers probably do as well.
In my experience, tech unionists fall into one of two camps:
* The progressive camp, which is largely what you describe. Likes open border, diversity hiring and the like.
* The protectionist camp. Wants to limit immigration, require CS degrees, and clamp down on H1B hires.
The former seems to care more about influencing the politics of the company. The latter is more the traditional union stance, which is to increase the price of labor by restricting the supply.
Focused on global markets rather than focused on capturing as much as possible from the lucrative American market.
For example, the vast majority of employers reserve the right to change benefits at any time, and they liberally do in a minor downturn. I've worked at places where an email was sent saying "as of tomorrow we will no longer match your 401(k)." That's it, one executive decided something, you just have to deal with it or quit. Another example is an email saying "this is the new PTO acquiral schedule." I lost a whole week of PTO that day, no apologies, just a "this is how it's going to be." If you're working under a union contract where the benefits are spelled out in the contract, they have to wait until the contract term runs out and then renegotiate another contract to change the benefits.
Some tech companies are known to demand unpaid overtime without prior warning. A union contract may have a provision where you must be paid for overtime or overtime can't be mandatory, etc.
Another example might be that allegations of misconduct must have a transparent investigation before adverse action is taken and the employee is entitled to be represented by the union during the investigation.
If you've only worked in a bull market environment with a massive amount of free flowing VC money you might not appreciate those sorts of things. I've worked outside SV during the Great Recession, during that time jobs dried up and benefits were dropped like a bad date. I was laid off and had to relocate to get a new job. I'm not saying that a union would have prevented that, I'm just illustrating that jobs might not be so plentiful at some point in the future.
Another thing is when a significant portion of a workforce is unionized then there is a tendency to improve the working conditions of non-union shops because they have to compete with unioned shops for employees.
Professional athletes are some of the the most highly specialized, highly paid, and highly demanded employees and the vast majority of them at the highest level are unionized.
Who, exactly, is highly in demand? There was a post on here last week from somebody who had gone on, I think, 40+ in-person interviews and hadn’t gotten a single offer. It’s well established that experience actually works against you in this profession; you can end up being too old long before you hit retirement age. Influential hiring authority Aline Lerner argues that people with Master’s degrees should be rejected in favor of those with just Bachelor’s degrees; education can work against you, too. There’s an unprecedented market for 30-year-old developers with specific education and experience; if you’re anybody else, you would have been better off getting a business degree. To paraphrase Bane, “Do you feel in demand”?
There's a lot of hubris in the tech field that high salaries and a plethora of available jobs is the norm and will forever be that way.
I anticipate a lot of "Why Tech Needs A Union" posts on HN during the next recession or when the current crop of 25-35 year olds reach their late 40's and all of a sudden have trouble finding stable work.
All workers deserve a voice in their workplace and that's exactly what the solidarity of a union provides.
You're probably (still) going to hear a lot of FUD from your employer but dont worry, things really do only get better from here. Once you get a union youll get more quarterly insight into your companies profits, losses, and a MUCH better picture of what the company intends to do in the next six to twelve months. Youll also get a direct say in almost anything you think will help the business. Im not just talking about a suggestion box for the snack-o-matic, but real input to people with actual power.
the hard part is the election period. Kickstarter is going to pull out ALL the stops to change your mind. youll get harassing phone calls at night, weird letters in email, meetings intended for one thing but that end up as an anti-union rant (EX: Safety meetings that turn into anti-union propaganda immediately) and of course lots, and lots, of direct mail from people and organizations no ones heard of outside a union busters office. Youll also get invited to a ton of after-work "pow wow" or "support" groups that sound like they are union related, but arent. Keep your eyes on the prize, ignore the fliers on your windshield, and vote.
Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.
As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?
Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.
However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality you would want for a project or company, especially if you (the founder) have a vision.
IMO, part of the reason Linux and Python were so successful was that they had a "benevolent dictator" with a strong vision. Imagine the gridlock that would occur with Linux development if we had a 2-party system that polarized on controversial issues and got mired at every vote.
Democracy: Fewer macro, more micro, better decisions
Command-Control: More macro, fewer micro, terrible decisions.
EDIT: Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making" vs command-control which is "centralized decision making". When I talk about democracy, I mean distributed decision making.
TL;DR: It works for some (and we should have more of them imo!) but not all or even most.
I don't think I have ever heard, study or read about the claim of democracy making better decision (at the least, the common refrain about tyranny of the majority comes to mind), so I will have to ask for justifications of that statement.
Have you read studies that command-control hierarchies make better decisions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems
Except for all others.
So why would "distributed decision making" be obviously worse than "command and control" like the way a corporation or tyrannical government is run?
Certainly if you're looking at tech jobs, the "population" is reasonably well educated.
The last thing you want is a bunch of smart engineers voting on business decisions they don't have the background to fully grok.
I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.
Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.
The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.
So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.
Another way to look at "fitting in" is "wanting the right things." Get the elites to want what you want and the broader population will tend to follow. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desir...
The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.
Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.
The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)
The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.
Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bott...
But unions have several significant downsides too, and for companies with a clean record, strong leaders with a vision, good pay and benefits, high morale, etc. I don't see any benefit to encumbering such with a union.
You really think it's worth it to encumber all companies with unions because of a few bad eggs?
Sure I do. What's the downside, someone might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
You think it's worth it to have people spending the majority of their life in an environment of tyranny, abuse of power, humilation and degradation, no democracy in the environment you spend most of your waking hours in -- because some unions might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they continually decide whether to endorse the dictator's vision. A dictatorship of a company is much more like an actual dictatorship of a country, where you control people's lives and decide who gets to join and leave. It's more efficient, yes - but it is both less just and less incentivized to point that ruthless efficiency in the right direction.
By all means, run technical projects at work like Linux and Python are run - but give people the freedom to vote no confidence in these projects without endangering their housing and their health insurance.
The majority of developers out there hold down "real" jobs like everyone else at giant faceless corporations where they have no say and no power.
Also some pregnant people, people who look like they could get pregnant, people with significant medical expenditures, .... Yes, obviously, the control that an employer has over these people is much less than the control a governmental dictator would have - but it's much, much more than the control Guido or Linus have over anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
You've got to think carefully about your metrics when it comes to government.
Look it's widely understood that, if the dictator or tyrant is good at his (or, very occasionally, her) job then things usually go well.
The old women of Bhutan cried when the King decreed democracy.
It's getting rid of the bad ones that's the big problem, and so: democracy. "The worst form of government except for all the others."
Edit to add: the ultimate government is "full consensus", but it's incredibly expensive in terms of the time it takes to get everybody's input and consensus. However, once full consensus is reached it's the most efficient at execution: everyone works together in harmony to achieve the ends of the group in the mutually-agreed fashion.
Needless to say, this form of government is very very rare on Earth, but hardly unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus
But I would say even more importantly, democracy is very efficient at limiting internal bloodshed. It provides a well-defined, peaceful process for people to grab power. The power is limited, but you don't have to kill people to gain it, and in turn you don't risk getting killed yourself by the next upstart.
Personally I'm more concerned that the government remains responsive and, for lack of a better word, humble.
(That's part of why the Kingdom of Bhutan is so amazing: the don't measure GNP, they have a measure called Gross National Happiness that they take pretty seriously. Heh. They really seem to have their kit together. It's a Third-World country you can't emigrate to.)
=/
https://www.usworker.coop/home/
They hold conferences and workshops.
Edit: And if you're looking for a higher level approach:
https://democracycollaborative.org/
It’s funny that we value democracy in name, but still enforce a rigid, top-down, and winner-takes-all hierarchy in most of our businesses.
Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.
didn't they just complete the election?
https://www.wrapbook.com/how-to-set-up-a-loan-out-company/
Relative to other wage workers yes, but nowhere close to the ratios between wage and housing last seen 30 years ago. There are opportunities to negotiate for that sort of compensation again.
As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do.
Comparing yourself to other trades is not relevant. Wage growth in one not-so-rare trade will benefit many more trades and people.
Most of us would not be where we are today if we limited our aspirations to what other people do.
Yes, the corporations are contributing to rent jumps, but that was part of the point: by paying higher salaries, as is being demanded by the pro union crowd here, they also increase the rents. So they can't simply pay enough so that "people can buy a house within 5 years", because housing prices rise along with salaries.
Even on matters of comp it needn't simply be "give raises to all the engineers", as pro-tech unionization efforts tend to also support non-technical workers such as the custodial and cafeteria staff, who would be in higher need of pay raises. The pay for engineers is usually more directed towards addressing unpaid overtime, which is more of a work-life balance/anti-death march measure more than a monetary one anyway.
Corporations can't vote, but they do have free speech when it comes to political expression, and tech companies already do plenty of lobbying. Perhaps they could have spent some fraction of those efforts on influencing the housing shortages in the places they set up camp in. Being a good, responsible neighbor should be part of CSR.
That is what I was referring to.
I think companies are already trying to alleviate the housing issues. But their influence is not as high as you think. Google buses were attacked by locals, for example - they would have enable Google employees to live farther away, alleviating pressure on prices in the immediate neighborhood.
Yes, you can't ask Google to solve everything themselves (even if their PR likes to paint them as being in the business of doing that), but they could at least explore more policies like opening larger offices in regions with more housing, embracing more remote work, working more closely with local communities, etc. You'd think megacorps with the resources and supposed strategic foresight that FAANGM possess would be more proactive about addressing an issue that impacts their workforce. Is it no wonder then that their workers will seek desperate measures like unionizing?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362271
I'm guessing you've never worked a job in the retail, warehouse or food service industries :)
The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest.
One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.
If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.
Are we all affected by wallet-carrying management?
Do our choices in wallet-carrying communally affect this wallet-carrying enterprise?
Is corporate wallet-carrying management trying to convince us to carry wallets for longer than the usual 8 hours or wallet-carrying?
It would be unusual in the extreme for a modern western democracy that was 75% christian to force the 25% minority to convert.
So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.
1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to.
2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work".
A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
I recently learned that Frank Luntz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz) is one of the masters of this and came up with "Death Tax", using "choice" to fight universal healthcare, and "climate change" to soften the more frightening "global warming."
We seem to be highly susceptible to emotional language triggers that just bypass our rational minds.
Like, OK, I'm losing some "freedom" of choice from a certain point of view, but damned if that wouldn't feel one hell of a lot more free.
As you said, _to you_.
> Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it.
Well, this is a whole other can of worms, but here goes nothing. As a brief aside, possibly the only system more complicated than American medicine is the American tax code; both are horribly byzantine and have entire industries dedicated to wrangling the bureaucracy. Government involvement is what led to both being so messy. That aside, I oppose single-payer medicine for reasons out side of "which one costs more". I don't trust the government, and think it ought to stick to keeping the peace and enforcing property rights and contracts. There are a few other important things that can be done at the state and local level, and most things ought to be left up to the individual. I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens. Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?
Yeah, I like policies that benefit me over ones that don't, typically.
> Government involvement is what led to both being so messy.
Well considering one of the two things that "both" signifies is the tax code... well, yes? More to the substance, that such systems under other states are, in both cases, significantly less messy leads me to believe "it's messy" does not follow simply from "government was involved", such that I would believe "get government out" is a necessary step in fixing either (again, one's the tax code, so...)
> I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens.
Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.
> Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?
I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system. Any system I'm aware of from any other OECD state would be anywhere from somewhat to way better, from that perspective. Given those are proven in the real world I'd say just pick one of those. I'm pretty sure a few (e.g. Switzerland) do retain private insurance. All (AFAIK) employ price controls, strict pro-citizen rules about how insurance companies have to operate, and something like a "public option" so as long as those elements are present it's probably fine. Anything else is likely to be experimental or otherwise unproven so I'd rather avoid it, given a wealth of demonstrably-fine systems to choose among.
> Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.
Yes, there is a deplorable amount of crony capitalism and regulatory recapture. Part of the reason why we need to starve the federal government: it will always be abused by the most powerful. I do, however, trust a market with a thousand participants motivated by profit more than a government that has changing motives every few years, or depending on what the media prints.
> I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system.
Okay, pay a medical concierge firm to handle the paperwork for you. I don't care what you do or how you do it so long as you don't tell me what to do and don't make me pay for your choices.
With respect to my not-trusting-gov't point, here's why: https://news.sky.com/story/nhs-staff-can-refuse-to-treat-rac...
The NHS just changed rules to allow refusal of "non-emergency" care to people who meet one of their non-PC criteria. This after people saying that it's a "human right".
I’d say that 95% of all visits go off with zero interactions beyond paying our part of the bill and waiting for paperwork to cycle around. The 5% cases are about half billing questions and half “just confirm that subscriber XYZ visited doctor D on date Q (so that we [as BCBS] know we’re not being scammed by the doc)”.
We are nowhere near “tens of hours...every time [we] use medical care”. I doubt we’re even 10 hours per year on billing issues.
For instance, many unions give money to the Republican party, the Democratic party, or both. I'm not interested in funding either. Janus only covered public-sector unions, so I'd still be stuck paying for political speech in which I don't believe.
As a second example, unions typically set the wage for a particular job with both a floor and a ceiling. This means that most employees get closer to the average wage for said job. That's great if you're a lower or average performer, but not if you typically make more. I do, and don't want my earning potential capped by the limits of my co-workers.
Third and following up on my prior point, unions often make it harder to advance. I've been quickly promoted in most places I've worked, but that probably wouldn't happen in a union job. They're all about seniority, and I don't believe some boomer who has worked the same job for twenty years should be promoted ahead of a less-senior person with greater merit.
Fourth, I don't want to be bound by the decisions of others. Unions often have the power to punish members who cross the picket line. If I'm happy with my job and others aren't, I shouldn't be stuck on strike.
There you are, four logical reasons I don't want to join a union. I don't have an issue with them existing, just people being forced to join them. You can't hardly call them "workers' rights" but then say everyone's forced to exercise those "rights". You didn't give any argument of your own, though, nor did you answer my question, you just said "that's emotional reasoning."
P.S. I've read Mr. Luntz' book, "Words that Work". I don't agree with him, but he's good at what he does, and it's worth reading. How you present things is just as important as what you present.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_...
If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US.
Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.
Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.
One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.
About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.
Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.
Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.
I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back...
Yet 'in your experience' they are not optimal.
;)
My colleagues and I ran a IBEW union shop for about a dozen years up through the dot-com bust. We had over 150 union electricians building out data centers, running fiber optics along railroad tracks, installing low-voltage datacom, etc.
We had a few electricians from the local pool who:
1. Would not show up on time. 2. Did sloppy work. 3. Lied about their work hours on timesheets. 4. Refused to stay updated on building codes, technology changes, fire protection codes. 5. Were rude to customers.
And we would fire them for cause and they would show up in our shop a year later as it was their turn to be rotated through again.
That said, the union gave us flexibility to scale up or down our workforce as needed to meet project deadlines. And provided us with trained, skilled and motivated workers.
YMMV.
My brother in law's a solo residential electrician who occasionally does a little commercial work. Been doing this for 20+ years. He works hard to keep up with codes, always spends the time on the job to do the work to good standards, etc. His observation is probably 80% of the homes he's come into, whether done by the homeowner or by a previous electrician, the work is shoddy to the point of being dangerous.
I'm honestly not at all surprised if there are bad union electricians, it seems like there are a LOT of bad electricians out there.
Sucks that they're rotating through the union hiring pool, though. I'm sure that was super frustrating.
Once, when workers in Chicago supported a general strike in support of an eight-hour workday, police shot and killed a number of workers. [1]. Someone threw dynamite into a crowd. A lot of people died, but we got that eight hour workday.
Another time, workers protested for higher wages, but the company owners hired private security and killed a hundred workers. The army was called in, and private planes hired by the company dropped bombs on the workers [2].
And who can forget the time the richest man on Earth hired private security as strikebreakers after a collective bargaining agreement failed? [3]? Interestingly, these workers were already part of a union, but the owner unilaterally withdrew recognition of the union. A few people died (private security...), and the collective bargaining agreement ultimately failed.
I suggest you make yourself aware of the trials unions have been through over the past two hundred years. Capital will always repress labor by any means necessary, and parroting the lines given to you by capital is implicit support. This makes you a de facto class traitor. United Bootlickers isn't a union, and even if they were, the benefits wouldn't be that great.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
And please take inflammatory terms like “bootlicker” to your antifa meetup. We are adults.
At some point, you have spiraled out of control. You need to seek help. This is not a normal way to communicate with people.
Your points are an extremist grasping at straws to completely demonize and dehumanize another commenter. Your "most polite" is still quite rude and perhaps one of the most offensive comments in this entire discussion.
You were name-calling someone who presented their argument, implying them to be mentally ill. You accuse them of terrorism for merely citing centuries-old events. You're choosing to imagine them wishing for capital punishment of others, yet this willful ignorance of the terminology the other commenter used speaks more about you than them. For what it's worth, the other commenter did not call anyone a capital-T Traitor (an inciteful term defined by the Constitution and frequently assigned to people who criticize the US president).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you really over 130 years old and personally experienced these historical events?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My wife's medical workers union won her 5 weeks of vacation, free health insurance, someone advocating for reasonable hours who she could report abuses to without fear of repercussion, healthy food in the cafeteria, oh and she got a stipend to buy whatever computing devices she wanted. No one locked away her monitor cable or prevented her from working for a week so they could plug in a power strip. No armed union rep came to her door to force her to sign the paperwork or hand over the fees. Her union fees were like a couple hundred bucks a year or something, but her pay in that position was also higher than it would have been at any other hospital in the region.
There are such things as professional unions (think old European guilds) that also enforce competency and much more.
When you work for a contractor working for a corporation, you work for the contractor. When you work for a union working for a corporation, you work for the union. The difference is that the contractor isn't even notionally on your side, and the union is, at least in theory.
It's a bit like the tax code or some complicated piece of bureaucracy. Some of the stuff in there sure seems stupid but you can bet it was put in for a reason that, at the time at least, looked sensible. In the case of things like "only an electrician is allowed to do that", it's a pretty safe bet that at some point in the past management tried to do an end run around the agreement and have cheaper labor do something they weren't trained or compensated for. In the US at least the system is so adversarial you end up with hard lines being drawn on both sides.
The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.
Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.
The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.
Remember, there’s been a well-funded campaign pushing back against the New Deal for longer than most of us have been alive. Unions are not perfect but there are a lot of misrepresentation and urban legends circulating and most of the stories you hear are likely either wrong or leaving out key details (e.g. the union got adamant about certain tasks after management tried to avoid honoring their contract). Unless you have first-hand experience or lots of documentation, be skeptical.
There's this perspective that the best way to keep a system working is to make it unusable, so that nobody uses it, and thus nobody breaks it, and so you don't have to keep fixing it. It's something I've seen parts of organizations navigate into without any union-related involvement.
As a simple example, how often is purchasing inordinately expensive because something was abused in the past and that group was told to make sure it never happens again? Or a sales group setting engineering up for failure because they personally had a huge financial incentive to do so?
Yes, unions can make things less efficient. Yes, unions can cause unnecessarily stupid systems that harm people. But so do employers! I'd rather have one I can at least vote in.
I knew a guy who came to work at Google and didn't get a laptop for two weeks. No unions were involved.
Thinking about it, this anecdote isn't a great counter-example to systemic foolishness after all, d'oh!
Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.
There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.
That union shops may seem to be subject to extra risks of of certain types of nonsense doesn't mean they aren't a win overall.
But yeah, to be honest, some people with unions find they need to struggle with union leadership over some things. It's generally a lot better overall than struggling with your boss.
The best thing you can do is upvote factual information.
Using your same argument, we should abolish all corporations, correct? Since a poorly ran corporation can quite literally kill people due to negligence.
I find it honestly absurd that people attribute all of these negative qualities to unions and yet are not willing to do the exact same thing to the same corporate behavior which has zero checks or balances.
Should we do away with businesses because of these bad actors?
Businesses use lobbyist to get laws to entrench themselves in their own monopolies. If I attempt to disrupt this business by avoiding their regulatory capture, police are sent to punish me. Depending upon which laws I violate, I can be sent to jail and end up with years in prison. Prison, where you are kept in stylized cages and your ever waking moment is controlled by others. That is a treatment that I do not see any significant difference from treatment that would be labeled as slavery.
I know people this has happened to, and I don't see why people treat it as being somehow justified just because the business went through the process of lobbying (and political donations which only seem different than bribery in name only).
And this is ignoring the history of business outright murdering people for protesting for workers' rights.
I'm not sure that there's nothing inherent in unions that makes them promote mediocrity. There could be - the fact that unions add more layers to the bureaucracy and slow things down could very well have the effect of promoting mediocrity.
Generally, if you want people to do the best work, then the people need to be motivated and they need to have as little friction as possible. Unions add friction. In a company where things work, unions would probably add friction and cause more mediocrity.
Note that I'm not saying that unions necessarily cause this, but I am saying that they might be a cause for it. Claiming otherwise with no supporting arguments isn't convincing.
They are violent in the same way Democracies are violent. If you break some arbitrary rule, we put you in a cage. If you resist, you die.
This incentivizes unions to never voluntarily reduce their numbers. The more mediocre the employees, the more protection they need from the union, and thus the more power the union has over the employee population.
The ideal union employee to a union boss, based on how unions are funded and run in the US, is a minimally competent drone that regularly pays dues.
Unions also consistently advocate credentialism over performance. If an employer wants to improve performance the union will fight any outcome based benchmarks, and will instead push for everyone to be educated and certified. In truth it would be best for the business to do both, educate and measure outcomes. What is more important, that every teacher in the US have a masters degree, or that every teacher be good at teaching. The union will always advocate for the former.
I like unions, particularly in the private sector. I wish they operated differently and were more pro-active in cultivating skill (like old school guilds) and less about body count.
So its not easily solved...
Deciding to treat tech management in an adversarial fashion or being more woke than the management while making 3x is going towards the mean, not away from it.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...
Yes. Compare it with an average office in Manhattan:
Windows 10 on computers with 4Gb RAM slinging Acrobat Pro, where you are in NYC and your files are on a network drive in France, company does not do Dropbox or Google drive, there's one printer on the other side of the 25k sq feet office full of cubicles, you pay for your own coffee, there are no snacks, the chairs are $50 ones you typically see in the office supply stores and you are paid cool $49k/year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256872
As far as snacks and coffee go, this subthread goes into a good discussion about how most of the perks are relatively cheap for management to shell out for, and elides that the money could instead go into providing individual offices as was the case in the industry in the '90s- or just paying employee salaries:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359927
Tech workers are relatively compensated well, no doubt- but as mentioned in the Quora link, they are not exactly paid commensurate to the value they bring. Perks such as snacks or fancy furniture are simply window dressing, not to mention provided meals are also seen as a way for the company to maximize time spent in the office. The tech industry is very good at providing double-edged benefits- unlimited PTO is another example, as it nearly always comes with some strings attached and often leads to less vacation time taken than if allotted vacation time is given. It's an industry that's very good at selling products that are only free at first glance- is it any wonder that many employee perks/benefits are no different in principle?
I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance.
Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone.
Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+...
My point is this. There are some common pathologies in the way unions tend to operate (or at least old unions that have ossified over time) in the US that have nothing to do with the underlying objectives of collective bargaining. This step for Kickstarter is a huge victory for organized labor in the USA and they are likely to receive aggressive input from other American labor unions as to how they should operate. In my opinion the employees at Kickstarter accept this input at their own peril. This shouldn't just be a new union, this should be a new type of union and one indicator of success would be strong objection to their charter from one or more existing unions in the US.
For the record I have no philosophical objection to unions or collective bargaining at all. I do have material concerns around how they tend to operate in the US.
They negotiate them with the employer. What comes out of those negotiations like all compromises sometimes gets really wonky.
/sarcasm
What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.
They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change.
I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare.
Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do.
I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.
I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch".
I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.
It's unfortunate.
It likely stems from the fact that the birth of the unions in the US was a super violent affair (grotesque murders of both union organizers and union busters). All of the old unions born around that time were founded in an environment where the company was a hostile enemy you negotiated every minute thing with.
Another thing is I don’t want the same X% increase as everyone else. What if I’m better or worse employee? Why should I get the same output for variable input?
I'm not pro-union but the use case is meaningful.
The goal of this is to create a dialog of how the company is run and similar on every level of the company.
Regarding your question about the salaries, that is mostly blue-collar work here. For white-collar workers the unions mostly exist to enforce regulations and allow the workers to have the legal clout and information necessary when disputes arise, creating more of a do it right the first time rather than try to bend the rules to see how far you can go environment. Salaries are individually negotiated.
I mean that's all the union is, a group of employees having a unified relationship with the company.
I was working in a factory at the time, and the nature of that work didn't lend itself to individual bargaining, like say software engineering. That said I don't see why you couldn't ask for more if you're a better employee, I never got told I couldn't ask. It might be down a different path, like a promotion. And not every union would necessarily do any salary negotiation.
—-
I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.
Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.
As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".
Conditions change.
> As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".
and to the extent that unions protected those jobs any longer than they were necessary, society as a whole was harmed.
If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.
Please keep HN comments substantive.
Large/medium sized companies are run with tiny fiefdoms where the more people working under you means more power.
You don't need unions to have people do bullshit and useless wasteful work.
Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.
I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options.
I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.
What's wrong with "mediocre" employees staying employed?
There's nothing "wrong" with stable employment for unproductive people, but when you optimize for that as a goal, then you're paying for it with things like decreased productivity and immense frustration for the creative people who actually want to solve problems. Detaching employment from productivity reduces it to ritual, which is incredibly demotivating for the good workers who see through the farce. They can't even go off on their own to volunteer their skills for the common good, because they still rely on employment--but their hands are tied within that sphere due to a fundamental distortion of its meaning.
The current system was designed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for factory labor. Instead of pretending that we can force it to be relevant into the future, we need to accept that productivity is moving into the realm of cognitive work. Part of this means educating people from the ground up to use information tools and reason abstractly, but we also have to admit that not everybody is going to have the innate ability to contribute in the future, and handle that in a way that doesn't hamstring the people who can.
Sure, the free market isn't immune to nepotism or favoritism. But unions more often than not institute practices that give the same rewards to mediocrity as excellence - to the effect that the latter either put in less work or change jobs.
There is also some cases where valuing meritocracy is only the best option when employees are willing to leave, but many employees are very stuck to their existing jobs. This is why pay raises do not keep up with the price of new hires. Consider the case where the cost to hire a new employee goes up 6% year over year while the company raises go up 1% year over year, potentially losing out to even inflation. The reasoning is that the extra costs to hire the few people who leave to another company to capture the 5% difference is smaller than the 5% savings for each person who does not leave.
To some extent, unions help to balance out the issue where most people are not perfectly rational actors.
https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate....
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...
https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c....
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.
Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.
Why would one have no incentive to excel? Our union creates entire promotion matrixes for excelling employees.
Comparing it to a prison... Are you a worker or a shill for corporate?
Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hours go out by seniority
- raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work
- that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken
- 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union.
- I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart.
Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.
I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine.
Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours.
So I joined just to get hours, and lost a few hundred bucks that summer so the old women who had been cashiers for 30 years could get their raises.
I might still be on the payroll with no hours scheduled at that company for all I know.
This was definitely a case where a union wasn't good for workers -- it was good for the lazy bums who didn't want to work.
In my country the unions negotiate a framework for pay rise based on performance management. They make sure people working (night) shifts have enough time off, can't be rotated at will by management and get compensation.
People who are forced to leave due to downsizing get a proper retraining budget first and are transitioned to other jobs in or outside the company.
It just seems every time Unions are brought up here on HN someone says "my train was late once so all trains are bad form of transportation". But this is too simple, and it doesn't account for the fact that highly skilled IT people can easily negotiate good wages but that low skilled people can't, and they need unions the most.
In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.)
What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?
I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through:
It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen.
Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?
> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.
Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.
They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it.
If I make a small mess, I can:
1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or
2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working
In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.
In my example the electricians did not make the mess, but they, however, walk around the facility a lot so why not give them a broom so they can clean up messes on their way.
Unchecked is how you lead to companies squeezing 3 jobs out of one person.
A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.
Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management.
It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...
I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie.
Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters.
Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc.
But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).
I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own.
I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.
Why is it OK to shit in somebody else's house?
The reason SAG started was because production companies made an agreement amongst themselves not to bid competitively for talent. (Remember that just ocurred in tech...)
If they gain some advantage by being in a union but practically lose out due to outsourcing, what good would it be?
Do they have any options to protect against that scenario?
I recall a few years ago one of unis in SF outsourced many of their IT ops overseas. That is a progressive city also ships off jobs.
Is there any way to attenuate that?
Without a union, you can ask management for stuff, but they can just say no. Your only recourse then is to quit, which wouldn't change anything when it's just one person.
With a union, a work stoppage is a possibility. Suddenly management have a reason to come to the negotiation table and make concessions.
A union can be just as exploitative as a company can. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.
The software industry has been regulated by demand over the last few decades. Demand is still extremely high for software devs. Managers know that employees can make moves because unemployment in our sector is something like 2%. I've worked in many industries in my life and I've never been chased down or marketed to move jobs as much as I have in software development.
A corporation is not entitled to anyone's labor.
If the union benefited from your LABOR then there would be no incentive for unions to strike.
Of course there are negotiations involved. Having workers be organized provides a better ability to ask for (and negotiate) things by banding together. As well as protections. Without, sticking your neck out—alone or in a small non-unionized group—can be a major risk.
High demand does not mean workers are not exploited (hi amazon), and employees organizing can provide protections and benefits for all staff, some of which may not be in the same “high demand” group.
For 99% of employees out their quitting isn't the threat you make it seem to be. As easy you make it sound to get a new job, its that easy for them to replace you. Then that new employee gets to deal with the same shit you left over. It never gets fixed.
Leaving and going somewhere new doesn't solve anything. for most people job hunting is just looking at piles of shit and finding which one stinks less.
Insurance at my current job is not great. I can't go to my boss and say I want better health insurance he would laugh me out of his office, but even if he could, why would he not just give me the better insurance from the start? If a Union went to management and said we demand better health care that carries weight. That would get something done.
It's not easy to replace tech employees at all. Even if there was an abundant supply of expert software engineers (there's not), it takes many months to ramp up on a new code base to optimal productivity and to learn the organization and domain requirements of a software product. That will never change.
An average tech company will spend tens of thousands of dollars to fill a position, not even counting initial salary and bonuses.
Leaving for somewhere better often does solve quite a bit. On my last job move my pay increased by 50%. If I had stayed at my previous company I'd be skating by with 4% raises.
On the whole the aggregate effect of employees moving around in a dynamic market creates the cush benefits and pay we see in this industry.
The reason they wouldn't give you specifically better insurance is because they have to negotiate a plan for everyone in the company. What is that costing them on paper? I don't know how many employees your company has or what their margins are or any details really, but it can be as much as $700-$1000 a month per employee for health insurance. If you've got 100 employees that's $100K a year.
No boss should "laugh you out of the office" for requesting that. But really, its an HR and Corporate leadership issue so you should take your grievances to those with the power to make the change and not your boss (unless you work directly for the CEO).