Unions?
Almost want to send this as anonymous since I don't want to get banned from Amazon :P.
But I am curious as to what you all think (professionals and otherwise) of a software engineering union? I mean, salary is not exactly a problem for (most of) us. But we've had companies coordinating to lower salaries, and we've had companies coordinating to mass fire employees strategically.
So what do you all think of workers coordinating to prevent those scenarios? I mean the last beginning of the year mass layoff had substantial cause for concern for many of us. Just curious.
Edit: Honestly, still kind of scared s**less I might get flagged red by every job board on the planet after this.
32 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 87.8 ms ] threadAnd now look at how many well paid tech workers are being laid off or fired and now tech companies are re-hiring the same tech workers at a lower wage or as a contract worker with no benefits.
"Tech salaries dropped 3 percent year over year, from $161,000 to $156,000. Adjusted for inflation, salaries decreased 9 percent, from $141,000 in 2022 to $129,000 in mid-202"
In 6 months they've already managed to depress tech wages by almost 10%
It's sad to think that being a W2 employee is becoming a real perk. A privledge that only the best connected techies seem to get.
That's it. Just more work. Same/less pay.
We won't commit to anything if you work hard though, just vaguely hint that it's an opportunity.
As a result, the union would be known as a place that caters to midwits and incompetents.
In theory, yes. In practice, a union brings with it economic incentives to do more than just represent the workers. Many of its incentives are in conflict with the wellbeing of individual workers, the company, and the economic wellbeing of the jurisdiction in which they operate.
> What makes you less optimistic about it?
Corruption, bureaucracy, institutional inertia, incentives for rent seeking, and loss of agency for the individual worker.
You are, however, free to work for yourself or any other company.
I mean, look at us, we have OSS. And that might not sound like much for someone who's been industry long enough, but I feel like it's a statement of the freedom we all seek when we use our computers, the power we have (not me, I could stand to loose some mediocrity :P).
I know of no union that would give me the flexibility I currently enjoy--flexibility to bill hourly on some projects, lump sum on others. Flexibility to invest my retirement savings as I wish. Flexibility to work 12 hours days 7 days a week for 6 weeks, then take two months off to travel. Flexibility to tell clients "this is how _I_ do it, full stop. Flexibility to choose my own wage and benefits and career trajectory. Flexibility to work for equity alone, or barter, when it makes sense.
That's my reality, and I have yet to see a union that offers anything close.
Seems like every historical instance of individuals ceding their rights to an organization goes rotten. Maybe this time will be different.
> Minneapolis Public Schools defends policy to prioritize retaining educators of color when determining layoffs
> Effective in the spring of 2023, the contract provision states that teachers who are members of "populations underrepresented among licensed teachers in the district" may be exempt from district-wide layoffs outside of seniority order, deviating from the traditional "last-in, first-out" system.
> The stipulation is a part of a recent collective bargaining agreement between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and MPS, which concluded a weekslong teachers' strike in March.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/minneapolis-public-schools-defends...
I can't wait til I'm targeted as a software engineer for being of the "wrong" group!
If the point of a union is to protect me and my interest as a worker how does it do that by saying "you may be a higher performer but you're not the right <skin-color|religion|gender|sexual-orientation|etc>"?
Completely untrue
So much of what you've said is flatly untrue, and just more BS American anti-union propaganda. If you're on the west coast, I believe there are a lot of engineers at Boeing that would like to have a conversation with you.
I'm not sure I understand the question; can you rephrase?
Your view of unions is the result of relentless propaganda in the US for the last hundred years, and at best is only somewhat indicative of unions representing extremely homogeneous, low-qualification workforces.
You might also notice how none of these posters can point to any engineering unions (there's barely any in the US and it takes much more smarts to get an engineering degree than become a coder) or have the guts to use technical workers' unions like the Communications Workers of America as their example? Think very hard about why that is.
Please do let me know if those six unions would not be considered technical. And I'll try to keep looking. Perhaps we can find a good example of failing and a winning union (according to your definition) or get as close as possible, take the best of each, and build something better.
Also, no, I don't think you will get red flagged everywhere for such a question.
Forming a union at a software company is likely to be an uphill battle though. There is a lot of misinformation about unions, like the assumption that unions _must_ govern comp. And years of high salaries have enabled many SWEs to make investments or purchases such that they no longer depend upon a salary for their living; they're no longer working-class and unions hold no benefit for them.
Remember when all those companies had free lunch and 20% contribution time? Then over the years those lunches got harder to find and slowly that 20% time got turned into 0% time. I could leave the lunches, but would love for a larger org that can help fight to build up the contributor pipeline and sustain maintainers.
Would that interest you? What types of education or open source perks might?
But let's talk about my ideal world. I think allowing developers to work on open source (or eat a second lunch if they prefer) would be a tremendously good idea, not just for all the mental freedom it would give to developers, but also because it would help propel the _entire_ industry forward. Imagine if _half of every single dev_ did OSS during that time.
What a world that would be.
Our industry is different than any other. The factory floor we work on is in our editors. The man on the assembly line building cars is a part of the machine. We are the people that builds the machine.
We don’t want to lock terms between management and labor, because as we’ve built up our tooling, we’ve changed the game repeatedly.
When I got started, I was writing c/c++/assembly. I had to write my own standard library for every project. I was allocating and freeing all my buffers. I had a qa guy, an ops guy, a dba supporting me.
Then I was a Java guy. We realized the DBA wasn’t needed anymore. I didn’t have to allocate and free. I could now use other people’s software through packages. I got way more productive. Made more money for the company, and I got paid more for it.
Then I was a python guy. We realized all this OO crap was a waste of time. We realized the QA guy could be replaced with better tooling and monitoring. The dev ops and cloud revolutions replaced my ops guy with APIs I could manage. I got way more productive. Made the company more money, and I got well paid for it.
Now we stand in front of the AI revolution. I don’t know what my job will look like. But it won’t look like what I’m doing now. I’m using copilot a lot, and I’m way more productive. I can turn around UI for the first time! I’m hoping these new Ai features we’ll make my company a lot of money. I should get some of it.
I’ve seen a lot of people age out when the technology changed. I’ve seen a lot of people make good money for their work. What scares me more than the next technology pushing me out, is an industry that stagnates around “the way we do it”. Today we are on the road to infinity. But if we stop moving forward we are on the road to stagnation.