We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
I joined a hungry machine that was desperate for my labor. I would love to be properly exploited like I used to be. Instead I'm expected to spend all my time faffing about talking about how i might actually do some work in some theoretical world. and that makes me miserable.
"We aren't like the other big companies," was a line I heard associated with some big tech companies circa 2006. Implication was that they saw the dysfunction at larger firms and chose to build something different.
Fast-forward twenty years, and they're just like them.
Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that.
I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed.
Software is also a broad industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred.
Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster?
The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach.
Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract.
Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
I work in a union shop and I admit that it doesn't seem to have all the problems I have with the big tech. People seem to care and have passion, but don't pretend to work 80 hours a week, some of them at least. Some of them are decades older then me. Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.
I don't take the 80 hours thingy at face value, I take it as something people bullshit one another about. I would not even buy 16 hours working week at face value. Nobody does that much actual software making day in day out for years.
You can think of it as buying yourself more free time to do things other that dealing with computers. One of the things in the union contract is literally the ability to buy yourself another month of vacation in addition to those twenty something days you get by default.
It makes even more sense if you take having children into account. I want to play dark souls with my son more than I want to deal with some css, form validation or api integration bullshit. Once he grows up, I will never have this moment back.
This was actually very popular with offshoring and the results spoke for themselves. I made a lot of money cleaning up those dumpster fires and it's hard for me to not encourage more of it.
I've picked up work that way too. There are two problems with it, though.
A) After a company has sunk a bundle into offshoring with nothing to show for it, it has less in its budget for me. They may be desperate at that point, but that doesn't mean their checkbook is bottomless.
B) The dream of cheap/subservient/good skilled labor dies hard in management sometimes, and it can take years before management realizes its mistake. Meanwhile, the company may go out of business before it has a chance to come home and pay me the big bucks to clean up its mess.
You get a nice piece of metal, come close and personal with coppers and live happily in exile in Europe ever after. Either that or you become a homeless drug addict. There are always exciting choices for these exciting times.
The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business.
The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
Correct. Devs need to stop believing that business acumen is some special skill they can't develop. It's not magic. Your CEO isn't a better human than you despite what LinkedIn tells you.
Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill. You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Building your own thing is a rough go (13 years deep myself), but hell if I don't wake up most days with a shit eating grin on my face.
> Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill.
Depends on your goals and your personality.
When I list the things I want to achieve in my life, working for myself drastically reduces the likelihood of achieving those things - unless my own business makes enough money for me to retire in a few years (extremely unlikely).
> You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Amusingly enough, I feel it's even more acute when you work for yourself:
"You can spend your entire life working hard for yourself, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a (tiny) bank account that you wouldn't want to take with you."
At least when you work for someone else (at about 40 hours a week), there's room for hobbies.
I recall a friend of mine - a local inventor (he had a PhD and kept building things, trying to make products out of them, etc). In his mid 50's, he had invented a lot, but his only success was that the business didn't go under. He qualified for food stamps, and hadn't taken a vacation in over a decade. He never had time for a meaningful relationship. He cut his losses and took a regular job. He misses doing deep technical work, but he's much happier.
Smart guy. I knew younger people who worked for him - did more fun technical stuff than I've ever done for a job. They took the lesson to heart and got regular jobs eventually, as well.
Out of curiosity, was he doing work on the side to fund his inventions/research?
I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in the "I have to go all in on this thing I'm not certain will work" vs. "I can do freelance/contract gigs on the side to fund my work and still have a decent standard of living until I prove out my idea(s)."
You're right that it comes down to goals and personality, but if you're in a position where you think a union is going to help save you, you may be better off working on your own thing.
I don't know if he had side work when he started, but by the time I knew him, he didn't. He made enough money to stay afloat and have some (cheap, but smart) employees. By that point he had no time for side gigs.
> Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what?
End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales.
Create your own SaaS or consult/freelance. Or if it's too stressful or not lucrative enough, start another type of small business. The "big business with lots of employees" thing is a relatively new phenomenon. Most people used to be solo operators or part of a family business.
And if you prefer, employers who need engineers aren't going away. They're being temporarily deluded into thinking that they can get rid of their teams due to the AI hype, but I expect that to change as "vibe coded" software starts to fall apart.
I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
> If you don't see how this can be useful, that's a failure of imagination on your part.
I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration.
But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
The issue is the idea that there’s something that can magically solve all your problems. If you believe in panaceas, everything will disappoint you.
Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.
Yeah but the question is "are there any examples where unions obviously helped the workers". You responded "blue collar unions", where there's a pretty common perception that they did help, but when it comes to white collar unions you can only come up with examples that aren't really known for having done anything. UAW isn't even white-collar.
the "tech industry" is somehow totally isolated and completely different from all other types of labor in the history of the united states? how?
here's an answer i gave to this question downstream: "the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions."
The whole conversation is about the novelty and usefulness of something that doesn't exist in the mainstream. Those who are skeptical can eternally say "show me more examples". Maybe your critique isn't as useful as you think it is.
Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.
We don’t have feathers in our caps. Blue, white, red, whatever - we are all resources working for the capitalists, and should try to learn whatever we can from each other.
So, why are there no major tech unions specifically? Tech is a “new” field (relatively speaking), is generally well paid, and comes with relatively better benefits compared to other fields. This is not something inherent to the field: it’s just a supply vs. demand thing combined with easy access to money (low rates, VCs, etc).
Unions will start to become more prominent as shit hits the fan for us tech workers. Because without a unifying threat, there is no realistic way to convince a bunch of people who are living relatively well to join forces - as demonstrated by this thread.
Unfortunately, the existence of a common threat is necessary imo but not sufficient (in the US at least), as we’ve witnessed over the past few years of layoffs and forced RTO.
Why is tech not blue collar? Because you use your brain instead of your hands? You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin, griping that you should be working 60 hours a week to develop AI to replace you for Alphabet shareholders.
Doctors have unions [1] ("among actively practicing physicians, approximately 70,000 currently belong to a union, representing 8% of physicians" [2]), lawyers have essentially guilds. If your wealth is closer to Brin’s than the median, than you’re an outlier whom I would not expect to need nor value a union (congrats on your luck). Unions are for the median, not the very wealthy and lucky [3].
The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.
I work in a data center with electricians, tower climbers, and systems and network engineers. ALL of us are blue collar. Including me, a systems/network engineer. I suggest you investigate this aspect of tech — there’s more to it than VS Code and JavaScript
Data Center and Operations people absolutely are blue collar in attitude and mindset, but you DC folks get to be isolated.
If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.
Let’s take the NYT Tech Guild. They negotiated a new contract following a strike last November. Here are some of the things they won:
> Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections
> Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract
> Additional compensation for on-call work
> Important protections that lock in guardrails on additional variable compensation (including stocks and bonuses)
> Improved protections for workers on visas
> Language guaranteeing flexible hybrid work schedules
> Process and transparency protections related to career growth, performance reviews and other workplace issues
As a fairly progressive news outlet attracting staff with certain sensibilties in the NYC area and selling views to people who are the same, the NYTimes board of directors has a vested PR interest in tolerating unions with the large amounts money they have to pay for the privilege. I'm not convinced the company is better served by unionized employees over the rest of the tech scene, which has to innovate to stay solvent.
Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.
> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.
> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.
> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
It’s funny how you have hard facts backed by citation, and the other poster has nothing but vibes and anecdotes. I don’t know if you convinced him, but you certainly make a compelling case for everyone else reading this exchange.
> Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
Hackernews poster go 5 minutes without insulting your peers challenge: impossible.
Forgive me if this is an overly-simplistic question – I'm a student, so there is a lot I don't know and this seems to be a complex topic, but I ask this in good faith: if the people that are members of the union are happy with it, what negative outcome is produced so as to make the union a bad solution?
From what I understand, the basic purpose of a union is to give its members more collective negotiating power with the employer. Its purpose isn't to better serve the company, necessarily, but to give the employees a more effective means of having their needs met – if employees feel these needs aren't being met, negotiating and making an agreement collectively could be a more effective route. Its job is to change the power dynamic between employees and companies, in favor of the employees. If this is the case, and the NYTimes tech staff who are union members like the outcome unionizing has had, then how is it a bad solution? What would be a better alternative of meeting the employees' needs?
I recognize my understanding is probably incomplete; I write this comment not to defend this position on unions, but to learn why it may be wrong.
A general problem is it can make the industries less competitive and the companies struggle as work moves elsewhere. See the history of Detroit for example.
I made $450k TC in my last job. In Atlanta. I don't think we need unions to be treated well.
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential. New employees are jealous of tenured employees with more benefits. Once people get tenure, they'll take advantage of their status. This leads to lower productivity, not higher productivity.
Without a union, you have people fighting to show their seniority and leadership at every level. The top 10% naturally sort themselves out. And the take home typically correlates with that.
Union jobs get easier and cushier with tenure.
Non-union jobs get harder the more you want from the job, but you are in control of your career progression and comp. And the strongest rise to the top.
Switching jobs or unions will fuck with seniority, dues, etc., so it will become a factor in choosing jobs. It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Businesses are probably more afraid of unions than they are high compensation.
> Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential.
> It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Funny, you just described basically every large company I have ever worked at. None of them were really unionized (one did have a union but it was very small).
1. Tech workers are currently treated as well as (or better than) we would be without unions.
2. Unions would cause companies to offshore jobs to developing markets with similar talent.
If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs? Conversely, if companies could acquire comparable talent in emerging markets for less money, why aren't they doing that already?
† Or, rather, they could be, but it would mean companies leaving a lot of money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts.
I suppose "treated well" is kinda nebulous. Personally, I'd say it encompasses job security, so if unions make it hard to fire people then they are improving treatment of workers.
Wake up. Engineers in other countries are just as good as we are. The only reason we don't hire remote is that the business functions here keep the same hours.
You throw unions into the mix and suddenly dealing with the time difference becomes the lesser evil.
I’m sorry, but you must not be paying attention to the current climate. To name one example, Facebook just laid off many workers and explicitly labeled them “low performers”.
Tech companies have already been caught colluding to suppress wages. They are sending as many jobs as they can overseas, and bringing in even more h1b workers.
It is clear to anyone that’s paying attention that they are doing their best to damage our negotiating position so that they no longer have to treat us well (read: fairly)
>If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs?
Because unions are a headache for management to deal with and that headache is much worse than compensation, which is a budget-line item, and doesn't personally impact anyone in management.
The AWU, for e.g, has political goals that represent what a small minority of Alphabet employees want but end up being a pain in a for anyone to deal with.
I assure you that management tracks budget-line items very closely, especially when they are the largest one (as is the case at almost all software companies).
But with tech unions, situations like the parent's become non-existent because individuals can't negotiate for themselves.
I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.
My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.
> Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career
People are offshoring right now, and increasingly so. A union is arguably one of the only tools left to prevent offshoring, short of government intervention.
how would that work? Maybe the current force is protected, but if there is no new US hires, then teams will slowly shift due to people retiring or leaving.
"sorry, no more open positions in the US... but don't worry, you are getting some helpers from India!"
There are simple location-based reasons why jobs wouldn't be offshored- longshoremen, electricians and plumbers, flight attendants (for USA based airlines), and also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored.
I'm still not sure that unions don't make sense for tech- it seems like the idea that tech workers need protection from their employers is gaining ground.
I also think there are still a lot of reasons why unions don't make sense.
> also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored
I agree with most of your list, but not this one. Tech staff is one of the easiest jobs to offshore. It has been happening since the early 2000s in the US to lower cost locations (mostly India, the others later). Is there anything special about the NYT tech staff that makes them less likely to be offshored?
Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.
Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems.
The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?
When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists.
Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).
We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question.
Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.
A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.
The following is my personal experience being part of a collective bargaining union (OPSEU local 598), which encompassed a few hundred workers for Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in Toronto Ontario, from 2007-2017. I worked in IT for the duration of my employment (although not all union members were IT - but a lot were.)
The good:
- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to
- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.
- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)
- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen
- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)
The bad:
- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay
- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band
- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)
- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.
So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.
Let me put it this way. If a rowing team spends their time infighting rather than coordinating, they’ll find it difficult to make progress even though they can in theory move very fast.
I think a lot of people might consider taking a pay cut in return for an easier tech job. In theory working in an equally profitable company by lowering stress and comp for everyone and hiring more seems possible, but I'm not certain that it'd work out in practice because of increased coordination overhead etc.,.
Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established union and a better bargaining position. Better than waiting until the job is shit and having to fight an uphill battle all the way.
i've recently been thinking about when in a start-ups lifecycle should employees consider unionizing.
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.
the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions.
> What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
One of the problems with real world union examples is all the laws that weakened and destroyed unions over the years. Even if there were few or no examples of thriving unions today because of issues with the legal regime, that does not strictly imply that better conditions are not possible. For example wildcat strikes and sympathy strikes have been illegal since 1947, putting more power in the hands of union management and taking power away from unions. That’s both unfair from a libertarian perspective (if workers want to strike there should not be a law preventing them from doing so) and it undermines the concept of worker power which unions otherwise aim to uphold.
So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.
I'd like to see unions negotiate better equity deals. For pre-IPO companies, it's typical that the equity is worth nothing, and employees can actually lose money on their equity by buying it during early exercise or when they leave. For a typical employee, equity is too risky and too detached from their individual activity to be part of compensation, and it makes more sense to have different incentives. E.g. SAFEs or convertible notes where you can get paid at the next funding round instead of the IPO between 10 years and never. Alternatively, a union would have leverage and scale to arrange tender offers that individuals wouldn't. Also, during an acquisition, the union can negotiate to waive liquidation preference, since an acquirer doesn't want to buy a company where the employees don't get paid and strike on the first day.
this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.
too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.
but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.
I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.
Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.
It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.
Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.
They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
> Software companies should be able to hire and fire.
Almost every company in every industry makes this dubious claim. Then we rediscover the benefits of team knowledge and stability.
> We often need to have 24/7 oncall
This feels completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand, nobody is claiming that a union will somehow make doing on-call impossible. Many other professions that do have unions, have an on-call analog.
> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.
I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.
I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
I live in the US and my employer provides excellent healthcare. I broke my collarbone last spring and had surgery to repair it followed by months of physical therapy. Zero dollars out of pocket.
That's the problem though, you're dependent on your company in order to not go bankrupt after your injury. If you get fired, you're screwed, if I get fired here in EU, it's not that big of a deal (plus it's harder to fire me in the first place)
>My (early) retirement is very well taken care [...] I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Where in Europe? Early retirement is a dream for the vast majority of European SW engineers. So you're in a very privilege position that's very hard to nearly impossible to achieve.
The union members (i.e., the employees) give that power to the "union boss." Not all unions work like that (some do not have a traditional union leader), and for those who do, having a powerful union leader can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who gets elected as the union leader by the union members.
> I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.
Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?
Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?
Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.
That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.
I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.
#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.
#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.
#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)
That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.
Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.
Unions need to stop marketing themselves as a way to get better work-life balance. The main benefit of unions is that employees are protected from individual abuse, because the entire union can put pressure on management in support of individuals who are being mistreated, underpaid, etc.
How do you then compete with companies from other geographies willing to overwork US companies? Sounds great on the surface, but if you slow down the treadmill too much, you risk falling off completely.
Not burning your employees out is good. Totally unclear that working "80 hour weeks" is any more productive than a standard 40 hour week. Keeping employees around by slowing things down and making things more humane means you can retain employees for longer, build institutional knowledge, build a good culture at the company, etc. You can have a company full of atomized, dehumanized, and miserable workers... or not? Not seems better.
Oh, you miss the point. Nobody wants to overwork. The sweet spot is billing US company for enough hours for them to think you work more than their engineers, undercutting them in the absolute terms and getting more due to purchase power you have in your locale.
Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance.
There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.
Conversely, software engineers are generating considerably more profit for their employers than they receive in compensation on average. I know it's not the only metric of exploitation, but it's a hard one to ignore.
Disagree. Class consciousness is about realizing that societal classes correspond to their relation to the means of production, not the concrete wage being earned. The majority of developers is part of the proletariat, at least according to Marx.
In an actual class conflict, when a group of working poor people knocks on your door and notices that you are a little too well dressed, a little too well fed, lacking the calluses and fatigue from working two low wage jobs, a little too well spoken and educated, a little too bourgeois, do you think they will be interested in discussing the minutiae of the Marxian definition of the proletariat or weighing the metrics of exploitation before they drag you out into the street?
That is why all vaguely successful revolutions have been based on a Leninist-type vanguard party based on an educated "elite" claiming to lead the masses. For better or worse, their implementation of Marxist ideas was fairly consistent.
I strongly feel that groups within the "classes" often have vast differences that make me question the idea of class consciousness. A well off tech emloyee has interests that align far more with those with wealth than a small business owner who might have interests far more aligned with blue collar workers. And don't even get me started on social differences, like LGBT right etc that divide people.
Social differences shouldn't make you question class consciousness. Quite the opposite is true, to be class conscious means to have recognized what economic class you are in regardless of any other features.
Hidden there is a good point though. Social differences can be leveraged as a means to deter class consciousness. Let's take the idea of the wage gap for example. Now both male and female workers can be underpaid. As a result, everyone is less likely to become class conscious and realize that, if they instead fight over a wage difference within their class.
I dunno, I live in a nice house in Kansas and work from home for a nice company and have nice benefits. What am I gonna be disillusioned about? My life is literally the best it has ever been.
More like people who work in some media companies have certain political beliefs that may or may not be out of touch of broader society. Witness their constant surprise at election results as an example.
It’s certainly one thing in the zeitgeist but I still have the sense that culture war stuff has a much firmer grip on a larger number of people and has a lot more power to swing elections.
That includes both its left wing “woke” form and its right wing reactionary form.
Very anecdotal but it also seems that the culture war stuff is stronger among those making less money, which would be the target audience for any class revolt rhetoric. Could be wrong though. Maybe my sample size is just small.
As an outsider, I'm astounded why workers aren't unionizing to a much higher degree. It's been proven to work [1] against the misinformation, discord, and wealth inequality that companies will, inevitably, cause. Despite the small union fee, the individual clearly stands to benefit[1]. Is it because people are cheap? Or not familiar with history? You'd think that tech workers were quite informed.
America != Norway. American labor unions have (had?) a reputation for corruption, dragging companies down with inefficient and parasitic practices and in some cases being controlled by organized crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_T...).
Isn't the question then about the lesser evil? It's wrong to deny unions on the basis that some people are corrupt. Some people in companies are corrupt too and the US lies squarely in the middle of the corruption index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w...
I don't see why America!=Norway is a relevant argument.
Maybe you will be less astounded if you read more about how large countries in terms of areas, population, ethnicities, immigrants have people with different and sometimes conflicting motivations about work conditions.
Conflicting motivations sounds like a very reasonable thing in large populations, in fact. But I have a hard time believing why workers wouldn't unanimously want better pay, better conditions, and more power. I would be curious to see any counter examples!
The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
Yeah that was my take away. I don't doubt there are many company cultures like that, and you see many highly influential tech bros advocate for it. But in my ~15 year career, most of my burnout was due to lack of progress and politics, not 80+ hour work weeks.
Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
> I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird.
Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life.
In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can.
I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it.
Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.
The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so.
Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them.
Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.
I strongly do not think that things like 80 hour weeks, abuse, uncaring managers, and especially AGILE of all things are super common at FAANG. If you join a startup (in any industry) I think there's an understanding that you will probably work over 40 hours a week and that things will generally be hectic. Many companies will openly advertise this and tell you if you ask.
I really found myself wondering who the audience was for this. The person who works hard, produces quality engineering artifacts, and DOESN'T have options at other companies? I don't think that person exists?
I have friends who are extremely smart where this is not the case. Some of them didn't know other options were available. Some did not have the bandwidth to interview.
> The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
> We’re in an industry where burnout isn’t just common - it’s expected. If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. The relentless churn of projects, the constant pressure to innovate, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence create a perfect storm of stress.
No, the author is generalizing what work at a billion dollar tech company is like to the whole industry. I've never worked for a company similar to the one described in this post, and I think that the vast majority of people in tech haven't either. Silicon valley is not the world.
I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day.
You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends. I do have to do oncall rotations, and it sucks, but I mark that up to "what the money is for."
My only point being, one of these rants makes it to the front page every few months. "Unionize" gets thrown around. People complain as though it must be done. I've only worked 2 legit 80 weeks in my life. I decided I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it.
That means I cannot compete inside of this place with the people that work non-stop, live on slack, and devote their lives to their job. And that's OK. They can have the Top Tier rating and the salary that comes with it. I prefer to just make my little slice of the world good during the hours that I'm paid to do it. Then I go do something else.
Exactly. Google even explicitly says that T4 is a terminal level, i.e. they're happy to pay you a high salary for 40 hours per week of protobuf copying and the occasional design doc.
He seems to have solved a mindset issue that eludes others like myself.
I reduced to 24hr billable hours a week thinking that it would help with burnout. Instead my ego is constantly deflated given that I am now the least productive developer on the team given all others work 40hrs+ and my meeting/coding ratio has become unbearable. The resulting competition anxiety ensures I think about the project all the time. The resulting lack of energy has affected my other projects/interests.
This is 100% in my head as my supervisor is happy with my output. But I can't escape it. I often lie down, stare at the ceiling for answers, only to find myself in a worse state.
> I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends.
This is reality, but we are expected to serve like dancing monkeys jumping through hoops to make up some cult-like zeal-for-productivity story to get through the interview.
Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.
I might agree from the tech worker’s perspective, except to someone working in fast food flipping burgers, a tech worker making $200k/$400k/$1M+ might as well be in the 1%.
I went from developer to "burger flipper". There is some mythologizing going on, but that is a lack of perspective. The people I work with don't have the time or money to graduate their skills.
Paramount, most of them could easily, easily train into tech roles given the opportunity.
On the other hand, your post "rinks" of a general ignorance of labor history in the US, where unions have (at least, historically) been able to support each other across industries and facilitate class solidarity amongst workers. Perhaps if you showed up to some picket lines in your city and worked to build connections with your fellow workers by providing support in their struggles, you'd find that they're supportive of yours in return.
Couldn't agree more. My friend broke his finger and I told him how privileged it is to go to the doctor when there are plenty of people in the world with cancer and other more serious diseases.
I think it is possible to acknowledge that privilege, while still highlighting the things that suck for us, and the ways unions can help. I wish the article did this. I firmly believe there is a strong case to be made here. It gets muffled by the narrowness of the author's perspective.
I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.
Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse.
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
> They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible
It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question
The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.
But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.
> It's not because they're evil, it's just good business
Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil
You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"
Edit: of course that is an exaggeration
But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"
Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
> You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.
> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.
Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.
It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.
> most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying
Unsustainably over-hiring to take advantage of low interest rates is viewed as a smart business decision. It may actually be a smart business decision, but it is still evil
Startups are risky and unionizing won't force them to keep you employed. In fact, it will create an environment of less startups and more large companies with less choices for the employee.
Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).
This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies. If you only want to work at the flashy unicorns in downtown San Francisco, you are signing yourself up for exploitation.
Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production!
I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
A union doesn't have to be "workers for company X employees". It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier.
They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient.
Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
I quite like the idea of a trade union or accreditation board for SWE. The idea that we all work by a shared set of standards and terminology is appealing.
Sounds like a group that captures credentialing in the industry and then winds up using it to push their own flawed ideology on the entire industry. Because who else would actually be interested in being part of such a board.
Civil, mechanical, electrical, and most other engineering disciplines have an accreditation board. I don't think they are pushing a "flawed" ideology in those disciplines. At least I don't see civil engineers constantly questioning why they would do load modeling for a bridge, like SWE's constantly question the value of unit testing.
Yeah and what are the numbers on how many employed engineers hold that accreditation? Just because it exists doesn't mean it's used.
I know for a fact that aerospace, electrical, and mechanical engineers working on designing rockets, nuclear reactors, space capsules, and electric charging infrastructure do not need this credential. And so most of them do not have it.
Consistent educational standards leads to a common shared understanding of what knowledge and training your engineering colleagues have. This also makes it easier right off the bat for an employer to know what a "junior" engineer is - and leads to more consistent experience levels afterwards.
And you didn't quite mix it up, a degree from an ABET accredited school is required to get your professional engineering certification, which is often required in cases where engineering designs carry legal liability.
I think there's still a lot of inconsistency and judgement that happens for gauging whether someone is junior and for what skills they might have. Many software engineers don't have CS degrees at all and even more have ones from different countries.
I am unable to find concrete numbers on this, but I would bet that the majority of employed engineers in the US do not carry a professional engineering certification.
I don't argue with your point regarding how many engineers have their PE. I don't have mine.
My point is that accreditation boards and trade unions can help set standard minimums of what an engineer (or trades person) will know going into a job. Of course employers can ignore them, but in general those standards help bring consistent expectations to a given trade.
And yet, that's what we do with CoderPad, Leetcode, Karat, etc.
Yes, of course you should still interview them afterwards, I'm sure that's what credentialed professions do as well. My point is just to have the Leetcode portion be done once rather than for every company's interview.
I don't trust someone else, especially some credentialing body to administer leetcode style questions. I'm still going to want to have a candidate prove they can actually write code.
Maybe you can ask them domain-specific questions more relevant to the actual position you’re hiring them for? System design? Pair programming session? Debug a code sample? Present a solution for a home coding assignment?
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.
Contracting out interviewing is nuts. IDK how a company can think that the level of validation you get in a coding interview is necessary and also think that it can be outsourced to someone else. They seem completely at odds with each other. I assume they're just cargo culting what other companies do though.
I don't think memorizing trivia is a useful signal for a job, which is what a lot of "domain expertise" looks like in interviews. If you're going to write software and solve problems for a job then you should be able to sit down and solve some medium difficulty coding problems. It's not that hard. Personally I'd much rather do that than a take-home coding assignment.
The number of people out there working as engineers who can't write basic code is too high to not check.
To be fair it’s just the phone screens, but this is the world we’re living in. Eventually someone will build another Triplebyte with AI evaluators and so on and it might actually catch on.
To go back full circle, if you get a decent credentialing system then people who can code can simply pass a test once (let’s say every 5-10 years) and be done with it instead of every single time they interview. DRY!
Do you perform interviews on potential doctors or lawyers you may choose to use? If you trust credentialing bodies for such important services why the distrust for something non-lifethreatening like an employee?
A second opinion comes after services are rendered. I don't think you put your doctor through a ringer like an employment candidate, was the point I was making.
No I do though, although the context is of course different since I don't know a bunch about medicine.
I ask a ton of questions and I've found that good doctors a) welcome the questions and b) do a good job of explaining. If q doctor doesn't really give me good answers then I'll go elsewhere. A lot of doctors appointments are ahead of some bigger procedure or an ongoing relationship, so the first meeting definitely is evaluative for me.
If it existed then we'd legally be forced to write awful enterprise-style OO-heavy Java, because that's what all the "software engineering" courses at university taught as best practice.
> It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
This is also how unions exist in most of the rest of the world as well. We take it for granted how weird the US labor recognition process is.
Most other countries following a long history of craft unionism. But in the US the laws were crystalized during a time of active conflict between traditional craft unions and socialist-inspired "industrial" unions. So all of the principles of the NLRB are this weird set of dated compromises.
> something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.
For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.
An awful lot of unions exist in spaces where "compare the widget to the template" is an impossibility. Some examples:
SAE standardizes the labor cost for a given task, although an individual mechanic may go faster and slower than the proscribed hours. The same mechanaic will have different times for multiple instances of the same task based on details of the job.
Police unions effectively require arbitration on an employee by employee basis, since police work is so highly situationally dependent.
Creative unions like SAG and screewriters guild often don't have the notion of measuring quality of output. They exist to ensure various workplace rules (safety, breaks, sane environment, etc) and minimum compensation standards are followed.
The union is not a template of how to be an assembly line worker - its a way to equalize the power between an employer and employees. The specifics of how one union negotiates its collective bargain don't dictate what a union for an entirely different group of people will negotiate.
> This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies
Indeed.
80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it).
Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview: "I turn off my laptop at the end of my work day, and don't install any work related items on the phone. Is that OK?"
On call? Lots of jobs that either don't involve running an online/web service, or if it does is for some internal company tool where the cost of it being down is low. I've never had on call. However, I did interview at places that did, so the questions to ask in the interview:
"What is the on-call rotation look like?" Typically it's one week per person, rotated by the number of people in the team. Team has 4 people? That's once every 4 weeks (too much for me).
"How often are people called during on-call?" I interviewed in one place where they got 2 calls out of work hours in the whole year. I can live with that.
"What's the process of evaluating those calls?" Do they just expect you to take care of it and move on, or do they have a process to analyze and prevent it from happening again? Some teams move too fast and there will always be calls - they don't want the hit in fixing things.
Incredible idealism. If you work in infrastructure, even development, there's no such thing as shutting down at the end of the day or weekends. 'You never know' if someone senior gets agitated off hours because something is broken, and is expecting a big group on a zoom call
I do work in infrastructure and never had to work out of working hours unless I was oncall. Our on-call rotation is 12h a day for a week, because we have an oversea team taking over. I get oncall every 5 weeks.
You can absolutely find places with good working condition and with a good salary
In New York I am finding the expectations getting higher and the salaries stagnating, to the point that I'm considering taking the plunge into consulting.
There's not a lot of infrastructure job talk on HN as everyone is a software developer or academic type.
> you're going to personally be better off changing companies
Job mobility for tech workers is a fluke of current economic conditions. If interest rates spike, or a recession happens, or a bubble bursts, this benefit would go away and you'd be stuck at that exploitative company or unemployed.
Unionization and labor laws can make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
> make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
Sorry, but you shot your argument in the foot with this example. The last two months of Europeans trying with great difficulty to replace US tech with local tech have shown just how little tech has grown in Europe relative to the US. Is that because of their labor laws? Unclear. But it's certainly not a shining example of success.
The effort to replace US tech is not anything similar to the European tech industry.
US technology has a hegemony because we were first to the party, our economy is larger, and our laws are hostile to newcomers (lack of interoperability requirements, lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws, strong defense of DMCA laws, non-competes, and trade secret laws).
I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy. Their stricter labor laws don't get in the way of that.
The hyper-growth, VC-funded startup model is itself quite exploitative, but if it's still possible with stricter labor laws, then fears about them impacting growth are unfounded.
>I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy.
Oh, we're talking about bubbly VC growth and not actual GDP growth or growth of sustainable businesses or new useful products. In that case, I suppose I concede.
A lot of these pro-labor-reg people argue (and I agree with them!) that the ROI on additional hours worked past 40 is pretty bad.
If this is the case, then someone working an extra N hours a week won't actually move the needle that much when it comes to performance ranking.
My experience has been that the people who choose to work super long hours do not actually perform much better, if at all, than those who don't.
Caveat is that this could, of course, be selection effects a la Berkson's paradox. Maybe those who work very long hours do so because they must to reach the expected output level for the firm they work at.
I agree with this, but I think we need to keep in mind that oftentimes managers and executives aren't aware of how this works in our domain. When it's time to cut someone short, they have to decide between you and me doing 40 hour weeks vs. some other employees putting in overtime. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
right, but a lot of people at Big Tech are looking for the sweet spot of productivity, and it very well may be 45 hours a week or 48 or something, and to others that is unacceptable.
I don't see very many senior level folks in FAANG who are "5:01" engineers. There is pressure, but you're compensated quite generously for it.
Exactly. As usual, HN commenters are rat-holing on the precise meaning of "demanding 80 hour weeks" and trying to refute it by saying "Well, ackshually, companies don't spell out an explicit requirement for exactly 80 hours, therefore there exists no pressure to work long hours!"
Example given: When one of your co-workers gets visible praise and maybe a small spot bonus for burning the midnight oil, working a heroic 100 hour week, and saving a production outage, this sends a clear message to everyone else: more working hours will be rewarded and normal working hours is just doing the bare minimum. This message is unwritten but clearly sent/received.
When you are stack ranked against your peers in the company, most are working 80 hour weeks and some are working 40 hour weeks, and the 40 hour guys get PIP'ed, this sends a clear, yet unwritten message, too.
There doesn't have to exist a written policy that says "You must work 80 hour weeks" for it to be an unofficial, coerced part of the culture.
It's as if nobody here saw the "15 pieces of flair" scene in Office Space.
These companies attract hyperanxious and/or hypercompetitive types (among many others, e.g. the hyperdeluded "save the world" types, the hypermaterialistic "drive to work in cars worth 6 figures" types, etc). You don't accidentally end up in a big tech job. Most people have to grind leetcode in order to get into these companies -- you know full well what you're getting into. Your offer letter may actually state "people come to this company to do the best work of their lives".
How many tech jobs are 80 hours a week? My work life balance is pretty good at a smaller tech company, so is it the FAANG jobs expecting 80 hour weeks?
I've never heard of hours like that outside of early high-growth startups. Have worked at FAANG and know many people who've worked at many of the FAANG companies.
I’ve worked 80 hours in a week at Microsoft; before a paper deadline. After though, I was able to work less and regain balance. It’s certainly not unheard of before any kind of deadline at many companies.
I think we should normalise talking about average (median) working hours, not the extremes. I probably worked 100+ hours on paper deadlines, but working 60 hours in startups is about my sustainable limit, and when coding it’s more like 45.
People lie about their average working hours so much. If you listen carefully, it usually becomes apparent that their claims are physically impossible, eg they mention that they went to the gym each evening when the hours imply they should have been working. Generally, anyone who states above 55 hours should be treated sceptically.
I worked for 8 different companies over my 35 year career. Not once did I feel exploited and wanted a union to come to my rescue. But that is just my experience.
Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"
The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.
A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
Why should I as an individual software engineer not support this? We’re already in this profession and pulling the ladder up could help us maintain our salaries and working conditions
> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
Part of it was "most software developers don't have enough experience in other engineering disciplines to be able to pass the FE exam"
> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.
> NCEES Director of Exam Services Tim Miller, P.E., says there was a lot of discussion about the exam’s impact, including how many people with software engineering degrees were taking the FE exam. “If they’re not even taking the FE exam, they’re probably not going to take the PE exam,” he says. “In addition, if the boards aren’t regulating the [software engineering profession], it’s tough to get people to take the exam.”
When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway, and the difference was that they didn't let you vote. I felt that about 90% of the dues were used against me and the students. That was the other big reason I quit, besides the low pay, which the union didn't fix. So I moved on to become a much higher paid developer who has zero pressure to join a union.
My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business.
If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
> When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway
The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.
It's almost like humans universally will use systems of power to further their own aims, rather than altruistic ends. And those who do have an advantage in the accumulation of that power.
There's a bit of strawman going on where for example when author says "Not taking 12am slacks makes you not a team player". Never in my life have I heard that one.
Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
Please can you give us a typical daily schedule of these 80 hour week folks?
Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?
Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?
I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.
Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.
Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.
Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.
It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
No time like the present, and I know that the tech labor movement has been going on for a while, but it's a real shame that this idea didn't get more traction a few years ago at the peak of worker power.
LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
There is nothing wrong with unions, but they are a response to an imbalance in bargaining power. In places with lots of smaller employers, there is much less benefit.
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadIt became significantly worse, with way more micromanagement, less productivity and lower quality products.
We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
Fast-forward twenty years, and they're just like them.
Large firms back then were dysfunctional and unproductive, but the amount of stress was minimal compared to tech today.
I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed.
Software is also a broad industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred.
Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster?
The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach.
[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union...
Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
Even participated on a strike once.
So why would good people want to join this union when they could have a better life elsewhere?
It makes even more sense if you take having children into account. I want to play dark souls with my son more than I want to deal with some css, form validation or api integration bullshit. Once he grows up, I will never have this moment back.
Are you going to picket an AWS DC in Ashburn?
A) After a company has sunk a bundle into offshoring with nothing to show for it, it has less in its budget for me. They may be desperate at that point, but that doesn't mean their checkbook is bottomless.
B) The dream of cheap/subservient/good skilled labor dies hard in management sometimes, and it can take years before management realizes its mistake. Meanwhile, the company may go out of business before it has a chance to come home and pay me the big bucks to clean up its mess.
The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
Building your own thing is a rough go (13 years deep myself), but hell if I don't wake up most days with a shit eating grin on my face.
Depends on your goals and your personality.
When I list the things I want to achieve in my life, working for myself drastically reduces the likelihood of achieving those things - unless my own business makes enough money for me to retire in a few years (extremely unlikely).
> You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Amusingly enough, I feel it's even more acute when you work for yourself:
"You can spend your entire life working hard for yourself, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a (tiny) bank account that you wouldn't want to take with you."
At least when you work for someone else (at about 40 hours a week), there's room for hobbies.
I recall a friend of mine - a local inventor (he had a PhD and kept building things, trying to make products out of them, etc). In his mid 50's, he had invented a lot, but his only success was that the business didn't go under. He qualified for food stamps, and hadn't taken a vacation in over a decade. He never had time for a meaningful relationship. He cut his losses and took a regular job. He misses doing deep technical work, but he's much happier.
Smart guy. I knew younger people who worked for him - did more fun technical stuff than I've ever done for a job. They took the lesson to heart and got regular jobs eventually, as well.
I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in the "I have to go all in on this thing I'm not certain will work" vs. "I can do freelance/contract gigs on the side to fund my work and still have a decent standard of living until I prove out my idea(s)."
You're right that it comes down to goals and personality, but if you're in a position where you think a union is going to help save you, you may be better off working on your own thing.
> Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43379353
And if you prefer, employers who need engineers aren't going away. They're being temporarily deluded into thinking that they can get rid of their teams due to the AI hype, but I expect that to change as "vibe coded" software starts to fall apart.
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration.
But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.
pretty much every team in blue collar industries which have been able to negotiate better working conditions, better pay, and more time off.
IFPTE, UAW, CWA (which just recently welcomed workers in the video game industry: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...)
edit: Alphabet Workers Union under CWA, Riot Games under UAW, Tech Workers Coalition
here's an answer i gave to this question downstream: "the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions."
How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry ( 190 points | Oct 7, 2020 | 369 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24711814
Kickstarter Union voted 97.6% to ratify one of the first tech union contracts ( 179 points | June 17, 2022 | 305 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780972
So, why are there no major tech unions specifically? Tech is a “new” field (relatively speaking), is generally well paid, and comes with relatively better benefits compared to other fields. This is not something inherent to the field: it’s just a supply vs. demand thing combined with easy access to money (low rates, VCs, etc).
Unions will start to become more prominent as shit hits the fan for us tech workers. Because without a unifying threat, there is no realistic way to convince a bunch of people who are living relatively well to join forces - as demonstrated by this thread.
Unfortunately, the existence of a common threat is necessary imo but not sufficient (in the US at least), as we’ve witnessed over the past few years of layoffs and forced RTO.
I'm also a lot closer to a lawyer or a doctor than I am to a plumber. And very likely on the Sergey Brin side of the distribution.
The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doctors-unionize-as-health...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9616465/
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.
Edit to add: I’m never allowed to forget that I don’t belong.
Good luck and keep your head down, but also once you get to a comfortable position, find a good exit.
There are better environments and finance isn't at the top of the pay pyramid anymore.
Appreciate the advice! Glad to know my plan is sane :)
"Java is a blue collar language." - James Gosling
> Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections
> Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract
> Additional compensation for on-call work
> Important protections that lock in guardrails on additional variable compensation (including stocks and bonuses)
> Improved protections for workers on visas
> Language guaranteeing flexible hybrid work schedules
> Process and transparency protections related to career growth, performance reviews and other workplace issues
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/11/24319022/nyt-times-tech-...
Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.
> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.
> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.
> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
Hackernews poster go 5 minutes without insulting your peers challenge: impossible.
From what I understand, the basic purpose of a union is to give its members more collective negotiating power with the employer. Its purpose isn't to better serve the company, necessarily, but to give the employees a more effective means of having their needs met – if employees feel these needs aren't being met, negotiating and making an agreement collectively could be a more effective route. Its job is to change the power dynamic between employees and companies, in favor of the employees. If this is the case, and the NYTimes tech staff who are union members like the outcome unionizing has had, then how is it a bad solution? What would be a better alternative of meeting the employees' needs?
I recognize my understanding is probably incomplete; I write this comment not to defend this position on unions, but to learn why it may be wrong.
A lot depends on the details.
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential. New employees are jealous of tenured employees with more benefits. Once people get tenure, they'll take advantage of their status. This leads to lower productivity, not higher productivity.
Without a union, you have people fighting to show their seniority and leadership at every level. The top 10% naturally sort themselves out. And the take home typically correlates with that.
Union jobs get easier and cushier with tenure.
Non-union jobs get harder the more you want from the job, but you are in control of your career progression and comp. And the strongest rise to the top.
Switching jobs or unions will fuck with seniority, dues, etc., so it will become a factor in choosing jobs. It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Businesses are probably more afraid of unions than they are high compensation.
> It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Funny, you just described basically every large company I have ever worked at. None of them were really unionized (one did have a union but it was very small).
1. Tech workers are currently treated as well as (or better than) we would be without unions.
2. Unions would cause companies to offshore jobs to developing markets with similar talent.
If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs? Conversely, if companies could acquire comparable talent in emerging markets for less money, why aren't they doing that already?
† Or, rather, they could be, but it would mean companies leaving a lot of money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts.
1. Tech workers are currently treated well - good hours, good salary, great benefits, etc... (until they are fired / position is eliminated).
2. If unions appear which make firing people hard, companies would stop hiring in US, and switch to India or temp contractors.
You throw unions into the mix and suddenly dealing with the time difference becomes the lesser evil.
I promise you that capitalists aren’t really concerned with time differences.
I’m sorry, but you must not be paying attention to the current climate. To name one example, Facebook just laid off many workers and explicitly labeled them “low performers”.
Tech companies have already been caught colluding to suppress wages. They are sending as many jobs as they can overseas, and bringing in even more h1b workers.
It is clear to anyone that’s paying attention that they are doing their best to damage our negotiating position so that they no longer have to treat us well (read: fairly)
Because unions are a headache for management to deal with and that headache is much worse than compensation, which is a budget-line item, and doesn't personally impact anyone in management.
The AWU, for e.g, has political goals that represent what a small minority of Alphabet employees want but end up being a pain in a for anyone to deal with.
I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.
My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.
People are offshoring right now, and increasingly so. A union is arguably one of the only tools left to prevent offshoring, short of government intervention.
"sorry, no more open positions in the US... but don't worry, you are getting some helpers from India!"
I'm still not sure that unions don't make sense for tech- it seems like the idea that tech workers need protection from their employers is gaining ground.
I also think there are still a lot of reasons why unions don't make sense.
The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).
We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
Well...
A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day
International workers day started as a protest to get 8 hour days.
The good:
- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to
- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.
- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)
- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen
- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)
The bad:
- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay
- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band
- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)
- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.
So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.
This sounds awfully similar to when people were holding their iPhones wrong.
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
South Korean search giant Naver. Union website here: https://www.naverunion.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.
https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
It helps because at the end of the day you are just an excel sheet with numbers to your employer.
too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.
but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.
It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.
Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.
They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
The problem is 100% big tech.
We need to break up big tech.
> Software companies should be able to hire and fire.
Almost every company in every industry makes this dubious claim. Then we rediscover the benefits of team knowledge and stability.
> We often need to have 24/7 oncall
This feels completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand, nobody is claiming that a union will somehow make doing on-call impossible. Many other professions that do have unions, have an on-call analog.
Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.
I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
Where in Europe? Early retirement is a dream for the vast majority of European SW engineers. So you're in a very privilege position that's very hard to nearly impossible to achieve.
That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.
Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?
Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?
Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.
That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.
The book The Logic of Collective Action helped me understand.
TLDR: Collective bargaining helps prevent the free rider problem. It's just game theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
--
I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.
#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.
#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.
#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)
That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.
Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.
And I have no clue where to start.
There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
Hidden there is a good point though. Social differences can be leveraged as a means to deter class consciousness. Let's take the idea of the wage gap for example. Now both male and female workers can be underpaid. As a result, everyone is less likely to become class conscious and realize that, if they instead fight over a wage difference within their class.
More like people who work in some media companies have certain political beliefs that may or may not be out of touch of broader society. Witness their constant surprise at election results as an example.
That includes both its left wing “woke” form and its right wing reactionary form.
Very anecdotal but it also seems that the culture war stuff is stronger among those making less money, which would be the target audience for any class revolt rhetoric. Could be wrong though. Maybe my sample size is just small.
[1]: https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic...
Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird.
Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life.
In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can.
I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it.
Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.
You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so.
Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them.
Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.
I really found myself wondering who the audience was for this. The person who works hard, produces quality engineering artifacts, and DOESN'T have options at other companies? I don't think that person exists?
> We’re in an industry where burnout isn’t just common - it’s expected. If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. The relentless churn of projects, the constant pressure to innovate, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence create a perfect storm of stress.
No, the author is generalizing what work at a billion dollar tech company is like to the whole industry. I've never worked for a company similar to the one described in this post, and I think that the vast majority of people in tech haven't either. Silicon valley is not the world.
Either ways, unionizing sounds like a great idea.
You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends. I do have to do oncall rotations, and it sucks, but I mark that up to "what the money is for."
My only point being, one of these rants makes it to the front page every few months. "Unionize" gets thrown around. People complain as though it must be done. I've only worked 2 legit 80 weeks in my life. I decided I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it.
That means I cannot compete inside of this place with the people that work non-stop, live on slack, and devote their lives to their job. And that's OK. They can have the Top Tier rating and the salary that comes with it. I prefer to just make my little slice of the world good during the hours that I'm paid to do it. Then I go do something else.
Balance is a choice.
Most of us would trade our jobs in an instant for a nice fang role where we had 0 oncall. I don't think that option is on the table for everybody.
I reduced to 24hr billable hours a week thinking that it would help with burnout. Instead my ego is constantly deflated given that I am now the least productive developer on the team given all others work 40hrs+ and my meeting/coding ratio has become unbearable. The resulting competition anxiety ensures I think about the project all the time. The resulting lack of energy has affected my other projects/interests.
This is 100% in my head as my supervisor is happy with my output. But I can't escape it. I often lie down, stare at the ceiling for answers, only to find myself in a worse state.
This is reality, but we are expected to serve like dancing monkeys jumping through hoops to make up some cult-like zeal-for-productivity story to get through the interview.
The post reeks of privilege.
Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
I went from developer to "burger flipper". There is some mythologizing going on, but that is a lack of perspective. The people I work with don't have the time or money to graduate their skills.
Paramount, most of them could easily, easily train into tech roles given the opportunity.
Admittedly not like cancer. But, a broken finger can be a serious long term injury if not treated correctly.
I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.
Did everyone feel that way?
Or maybe pay that’s proportional to the value we provide
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Either they can/will answer the question or they can’t/won’t.
Read up a bit, man. Even a capitalist would agree with this.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
So... you're describing the current system?
This is so loosely defined as to describe any system, really.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
The whole discussion stems from someone saying that they should be paid relative (in proportion to) their value.
All I want to know is what proportion (i.e. a percentage between 0 and 100) someone would deem fair. Why is that so hard to provide?
It means that when looking at all employees, compensation is strongly linearly correlated to provided value.
And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.
But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.
Yes, this is literally what I replied to in the first place.
Both sides want to get the most for the least.
It doesn’t matter how tilted the playing field is or is not, both sides have the same goal.
I never said that both sides have equal chances to get their goal.
Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil
You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"
Edit: of course that is an exaggeration
But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"
Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.
> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.
Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.
It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying
Unsustainably over-hiring to take advantage of low interest rates is viewed as a smart business decision. It may actually be a smart business decision, but it is still evil
Yes (often)
Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).
According to this crunchbase data [1] it has a lot per capita.
[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/countries-most-startup-...
This doesn't generalize to all companies! After all, if you started a company, certainly you'd do things differently... Right?
Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production!
I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier.
They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient.
Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
No thank you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABET
I know for a fact that aerospace, electrical, and mechanical engineers working on designing rockets, nuclear reactors, space capsules, and electric charging infrastructure do not need this credential. And so most of them do not have it.
I'm not sure ABET is the most relevant here? What would making CS programs accredited change?
And you didn't quite mix it up, a degree from an ABET accredited school is required to get your professional engineering certification, which is often required in cases where engineering designs carry legal liability.
I am unable to find concrete numbers on this, but I would bet that the majority of employed engineers in the US do not carry a professional engineering certification.
My point is that accreditation boards and trade unions can help set standard minimums of what an engineer (or trades person) will know going into a job. Of course employers can ignore them, but in general those standards help bring consistent expectations to a given trade.
EDIT: i.e. I'm still going to want to interview them and have them prove to me that they can write code.
Yes, of course you should still interview them afterwards, I'm sure that's what credentialed professions do as well. My point is just to have the Leetcode portion be done once rather than for every company's interview.
I don't trust someone else, especially some credentialing body to administer leetcode style questions. I'm still going to want to have a candidate prove they can actually write code.
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.
I don't think memorizing trivia is a useful signal for a job, which is what a lot of "domain expertise" looks like in interviews. If you're going to write software and solve problems for a job then you should be able to sit down and solve some medium difficulty coding problems. It's not that hard. Personally I'd much rather do that than a take-home coding assignment.
The number of people out there working as engineers who can't write basic code is too high to not check.
To go back full circle, if you get a decent credentialing system then people who can code can simply pass a test once (let’s say every 5-10 years) and be done with it instead of every single time they interview. DRY!
The phrase "get a second opinion" is so intrinsically tied to medicine that it's a little weird that you'd imply that any doctor will do.
I ask a ton of questions and I've found that good doctors a) welcome the questions and b) do a good job of explaining. If q doctor doesn't really give me good answers then I'll go elsewhere. A lot of doctors appointments are ahead of some bigger procedure or an ongoing relationship, so the first meeting definitely is evaluative for me.
This is also how unions exist in most of the rest of the world as well. We take it for granted how weird the US labor recognition process is.
Most other countries following a long history of craft unionism. But in the US the laws were crystalized during a time of active conflict between traditional craft unions and socialist-inspired "industrial" unions. So all of the principles of the NLRB are this weird set of dated compromises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_federation_competition_i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_unionism
I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.
For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.
SAE standardizes the labor cost for a given task, although an individual mechanic may go faster and slower than the proscribed hours. The same mechanaic will have different times for multiple instances of the same task based on details of the job.
Police unions effectively require arbitration on an employee by employee basis, since police work is so highly situationally dependent.
Creative unions like SAG and screewriters guild often don't have the notion of measuring quality of output. They exist to ensure various workplace rules (safety, breaks, sane environment, etc) and minimum compensation standards are followed.
The union is not a template of how to be an assembly line worker - its a way to equalize the power between an employer and employees. The specifics of how one union negotiates its collective bargain don't dictate what a union for an entirely different group of people will negotiate.
Are police unions real unions? Or just a vehicle for them to further avoid accountability for their wrongdoings?
Indeed.
80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it).
Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview: "I turn off my laptop at the end of my work day, and don't install any work related items on the phone. Is that OK?"
On call? Lots of jobs that either don't involve running an online/web service, or if it does is for some internal company tool where the cost of it being down is low. I've never had on call. However, I did interview at places that did, so the questions to ask in the interview:
"What is the on-call rotation look like?" Typically it's one week per person, rotated by the number of people in the team. Team has 4 people? That's once every 4 weeks (too much for me).
"How often are people called during on-call?" I interviewed in one place where they got 2 calls out of work hours in the whole year. I can live with that.
"What's the process of evaluating those calls?" Do they just expect you to take care of it and move on, or do they have a process to analyze and prevent it from happening again? Some teams move too fast and there will always be calls - they don't want the hit in fixing things.
In New York I am finding the expectations getting higher and the salaries stagnating, to the point that I'm considering taking the plunge into consulting.
There's not a lot of infrastructure job talk on HN as everyone is a software developer or academic type.
Job mobility for tech workers is a fluke of current economic conditions. If interest rates spike, or a recession happens, or a bubble bursts, this benefit would go away and you'd be stuck at that exploitative company or unemployed.
Unionization and labor laws can make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
Sorry, but you shot your argument in the foot with this example. The last two months of Europeans trying with great difficulty to replace US tech with local tech have shown just how little tech has grown in Europe relative to the US. Is that because of their labor laws? Unclear. But it's certainly not a shining example of success.
US technology has a hegemony because we were first to the party, our economy is larger, and our laws are hostile to newcomers (lack of interoperability requirements, lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws, strong defense of DMCA laws, non-competes, and trade secret laws).
I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy. Their stricter labor laws don't get in the way of that.
The hyper-growth, VC-funded startup model is itself quite exploitative, but if it's still possible with stricter labor laws, then fears about them impacting growth are unfounded.
Which are those EU start-ups growing like crazy?
If this is the case, then someone working an extra N hours a week won't actually move the needle that much when it comes to performance ranking.
My experience has been that the people who choose to work super long hours do not actually perform much better, if at all, than those who don't.
Caveat is that this could, of course, be selection effects a la Berkson's paradox. Maybe those who work very long hours do so because they must to reach the expected output level for the firm they work at.
I don't see very many senior level folks in FAANG who are "5:01" engineers. There is pressure, but you're compensated quite generously for it.
Example given: When one of your co-workers gets visible praise and maybe a small spot bonus for burning the midnight oil, working a heroic 100 hour week, and saving a production outage, this sends a clear message to everyone else: more working hours will be rewarded and normal working hours is just doing the bare minimum. This message is unwritten but clearly sent/received.
When you are stack ranked against your peers in the company, most are working 80 hour weeks and some are working 40 hour weeks, and the 40 hour guys get PIP'ed, this sends a clear, yet unwritten message, too.
There doesn't have to exist a written policy that says "You must work 80 hour weeks" for it to be an unofficial, coerced part of the culture.
It's as if nobody here saw the "15 pieces of flair" scene in Office Space.
Seems made up tbh
The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
Would you need a JSON loisence? A bash loisence? Is Javascript ok but only in the browser, and only under 500 lines?
At what point does the bobby say Oi! ?
Therac-25.
Toyota unintended acceleration.
Tesla full self crashing.
Tesla software locks trapping people in lithium fires.
The federal government classifies most software people as a computer specialist, not an engineer.
But there was zero demand for software PE at the time.
My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business.
If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
And i bet your boss is even happier!
The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.
Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?
Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?
I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.
Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.
Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.
Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.
It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
There might be good content there, but it’s full of AI slop.