I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?
Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can quit and get a new one in a week.
It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
Congratulations if you honestly can "quit and get a new job in a week". This is not true for the vast majority of tech professionals. Even if it were currently true in general, it will not be true during the next inevitable tech downturn (I've survived two of them in 20 years so far, knock on wood).
Also, organizing is not just about protecting one's job. It's about collectively negotiating for stuff like pay, benefits, working conditions, etc. that are extremely difficult to negotiate as a single employee due to the vast power imbalance in the employee/employer relationship. I don't know about you, but my last few jobs offered almost zero room to negotiate anything--like most jobs, when you work in tech you work entirely on your employer's terms.
Indeed, and interviews are now a circus of multi-hour sudden death trivia sessions. I honestly don’t know how folks get hired quickly these days unless they have a big network that will let them bypass the bullshit.
That’s about the sum of it, yeah. At least for myself, every job I’ve had in the past 6 years has been through my network, and the interviews have been short and sweet formalities.
Maybe I have such a niche skillset, but the last few offers I've received (and turned down) were straight from inbound LinkedIn messages. It appears that times are changing.
> Congratulations if you honestly can "quit and get a new job in a week". This is not true for the vast majority of tech professionals. Even if it were currently true in general, it will not be true during the next inevitable tech downturn (I've survived two of them in 20 years so far, knock on wood).
This is a really important point to understand. Any time I hear people talk like the market will never get worse I'm reminded of San Diego in the early 90s. There had been a ton of great jobs there with all of the defense contracting jobs — whole suburbs full of highly-trained engineers who making great incomes because multiple companies were bidding for their skills.
Then the Cold War ended and the entire sector halted. None of those companies were hiring, anyone looking to move was selling a house in a neighborhood where many of their neighbors were doing the same thing, and if they tried to switch fields there was a lot of competition. My first employer had a $15/hour software QA job getting applications from people with engineering MS and PhD degrees who'd been out of work for a long time and were willing to take a huge pay cut just to have a job, only now that education and experience was seen as a negative because it was assumed that they'd leave as soon as the job market improved.
And, yes, the job market did recover but everyone affected still had to eat the cost of significant periods of unemployment or being forced to sell a house because they couldn't make the mortgage payments. IT has some differences in that the skills are more generally in demand but there are also some interesting risks like an entire profession becoming commoditized as e.g. a SaaS offering becomes a viable alternative to hiring staff — especially because the last couple decades have left a lot of tech workers are used to thinking of themselves as having more in common with senior management than we actually do and not everyone understands how quickly most companies would cut them lose if it fit the budget better.
If there's a tech downturn are you suggesting that we should still get privileges even when there aren't the jobs or demand to support it?
I believe that we are well paid because of the demand and the amount of money a good developer can make a company. If that equation changes, then why shouldn't developers get laid off or lose their jobs?
Currently, supply and demand is working very well for most of us, especially in SV. I would never trade my freedom for a union that, in all instances, become friction and the bureaucracy of the union benefits from my hard work.
It amazes me how entitled people can be. We are living well right now for sure, but if/when things change, we will need to adapt just like the truck drivers will have to after Tesla's self-driving semis put them all out of work (something this community will be paid a fortune to bring about, btw).
And will the teamsters union be able to save all those truck driving jobs? I doubt it, unless they do it through politics...
Even in a seller's market unions will still provide you with leverage you couldn't get otherwise. Unions aren't only so the dispossessed can bargain for more, they're so any group can bargain for more.
The one example I always give is of my mom starting out working in the 70's. Her employer was not unionized but had several unionized competitors in the city. Because her employer didn't want to bother with union negotiations all the time they paid a quarter more an hour than their competitors and so no union ever started up. My mom was benefitting from a union she wasn't even a member of. You could be in that same position if a programmer union ever started up.
I find there are more than enough people that want me (as a software engineer with 10+ years of low level linux / unix experience) and wish me to be very happy.
If I ever was forced to join a union, I'd quit on the spot and go find somewhere else to work. I worked for Comair (small airline owned by Delta) during a stewardess strike, which ultimately caused the company to sell planes and eventually go out of business. Big unions like the teamsters don't give a crap about their members, only their power and greed.
It was said a year or so later that the teamsters were talking to other airlines saying, "Don't give us what we want and we'll pull a Comair on you". All of the Stewardess union members, airplane mechanics union members, and pilots union members were furloughed aka given indefinite non-paid leave due to the profit imbalance that the highest paid stewardesses in the industry caused on a sub-par airline.
No thanks unions. There is enough free market for what we do that they aren't necessary.
Oh I agree. My opinion is massively different for smaller unions, but all humongous national unions have all become the power/greed and awfulness they were created to fight. Corruption at the core.
The difference being that you're free to leave a bad company. If the union gets any clout, however, it's not quite so easy to leave it behind...
EDIT: Hey everyone, I can't comment in this thread for several more hours now, because HN considers questioning the wisdom of deploying conventional databases on Kubernetes beyond the pale. They throttled my account because my posts that did that were too "boring" and "tedious". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 for details.
If HN's mods ran the union, would they limit your professional advancement for asking questions that may imperil their friends' VC investments, on the subjective basis of the question's technical implications being too "boring" and "tedious"? Because they limit HN accounts for it. Now imagine they could control your salary instead of your imaginary internet points.
You are likely confusing cause and effect. Comair was having issues before the union got involved. The union simply made the companies failure more obvious.
They were doing alright, they just had the highest paid stewardesses in the industry (by a large amount actually) for a solid mid-range airline when it comes to KPIs. If they'd have agreed to be paid more in line with what the industry was paying stewardesses there is a great chance the airline would still be open.
Also, no matter how you look at it. The result of the failed negotiations was them selling 90 planes to pay for the stewardesses. This resulted in the furloughing of 90 planes worth of employees, and ultimately in the company not being competitive enough to survive.
I saw this front and center as someone with no real view for or against unions sans the union dues were forcibly deducted from my salary whether I wanted to be in one or not. I came out seeing the teamsters for what they truly are. The teamsters unions are the thugs they were formed to prevent. They need to be broken up.
There was no picket line to not honor. I was in the backoffice IT department as a Unix admin, they were on the plane. My "union" of IT workers did not strike, and I didn't fly during that time, so there was literally no demonstration of my opinion. Perhaps you misunderstood my comment?
Its amazing that none of the replies (so far) have pointed out something in the very article that spawned this thread, the status of women and minorities. Literally in the title its noted that the publisher is being put on leave, if you read the article it goes on to note that was because of sexual harrassment and his attitude toward gay men. These are bread and butter union issues.
> Its amazing that none of the replies (so far) have pointed out something in the very article that spawned this thread, the status of women and minorities.
It's not that surprising; Hacker News comments tend not to sympathize with victims of harassment, sexism, or racism when stories about those topics come up. So it's not surprising that it doesn't become the focus of the thread here, since it's not the lede in the story.
> f you read the article it goes on to note that was because of sexual harrassment and his attitude toward gay men. These are bread and butter union issues.
In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on the workplace. If the workplace is mostly men who don't really have a problem with harassment of women, the union won't either, and women aren't going to have a great time there. That's sadly pretty common in blue-collar unions[0].
Fair enough to your second point, though I honestly doubt its more or less common in working class unions vs white collars. Sexual harassment doesn't seem to be something that respects class lines as much as people would like it to. I'm still waiting on a "This is what a Trump Voter looks like" profile pieces that covers, say, an intellectual living and working in Cambridge MA, or an upper middle class manager from Sugarland in Houston.
> though I honestly doubt its more or less common in working class unions vs white collars. Sexual harassment doesn't seem to be something that respects class lines as much as people would like it to.
Oh, I never said that it did. I'm referring to blue-collar jobs like Rust Belt manufacturing specifically because that's a historically heavily unionized industry where the workforce is disproportionately male and white.
Is it as much as we think? It seems that big companies in Silicon Valley had no qualms about talking among one another about not "poaching" developers (what a lame term poaching is).
I'm not terribly keen on the idea of unions either (or immigration restrictions for that matter), but we should damn well be sure that companies are not colluding.
Maybe you feel confident about your ability to get a job in a week, but there is a cost to your resume, cost to your work relationships, a risk of not being as successful in your search as you expect, and a limited number of buyers in your location. There are a lot of barriers that prevent the seller's market from working efficiently.
Because you're looking at this like a "grr i'm angery because i'm underpaid," which couldn't be further from the truth. I'm becoming frustrated in this position not over pay, but the complete tone-deafness from management over planning, estimation, and overtime. This has been consistent everywhere i've worked -- pay has never been a factor.
If programmers need a union, its not for pay. It's to get management and executive expectations back in line with reality. I'm tired of 60 hour work weeks, and poorly managed pet projects. And I damn well don't want to risk a career change.
I have seen people with computer science masters degrees working in support positions. I’m not talking about maintenance development, I’m talking about tech support.
When I graduated there were maybe 5 people in my class, but now the market is starting to get flooded with CS people.
Everyone is hopping on the CS train like there is no tomorrow.
You can get your resume evaluated and you can ask questions about your performance, maybe there's something you can do to make yourself more attractive to employers.
I did everything "right." I had a lot of side projects, I collaborated on big projects online with others, I knew a lot of languages, I got a 4 year CS degree and I had an internship. I applied to hundreds of places and heard back from maybe 3 places after months of trying. The best I could get before my current offer was one for 35k from a place that wasted two days of my time going half a state away to interview with them, and a return offer at the internship for $15/hr. I was "lucky" enough to eventually land this current job where I ended up being on more of a "support" team than being put on any real development, which is apparently all generally done offshore, so it's going to be more difficult down the road due to that, I'm sure. I don't recommend getting into tech to people anymore. The bubble is over.
For the sake of argument, you could ask for protected work hours, overtime, etc. I don't think we need it for this industry, mind you, but more so because there's no monopsony on the labor market from a select few large employers, not because of the supply and demand.
Also don't forget it would make it much easier for individual engineers to argue back at Management about employing dark patterns, or directives to make apps/websites addictive and generally harmful.
For as much as people like to gripe about LinkedIn and their variously deceptive practices, marketing heads and executives don't write code. There are engineers in there making that stuff happen.
Some of both. I'd imagine those that cared enough, and felt confident enough in finding another job left, whereas those who weren't in such a position shut up about it.
It's still supply and demand. When you have a monopoly on the demand side, you can significantly put downward pressure on the price.
Supply and demand doesn't cease to exist even when the market is screwed up. It just puts constraints on the curves. Google "supply and demand graph in a monopoly" to see more.
Unions do other things like maybe even require certain working conditions; standing desk or that they provide computers to you of sufficient power, licenses they'd have to buy etc, maybe they absolutely will not implement certain complex things like a new type of orbital interceptor idk.
Unions create a legal framework around repetitive work.
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work under onerous IP contracts that grant their employers rights to what they build in their spare time?
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building?
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers have stories about working late at night and on weekends to ship features on bogus accelerated schedules they had little hand in setting?
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers accept payment in the form of equity that has to be executed at great expense immediately after leaving the company, and offers no actual guarantee of return after making that investment?
If it's a "seller's market", why are developers forced to move to the most expensive real estate markets in the country to work every day from a particular office when their work can be done more productively from their own home offices?
If it's a "seller's market", why are so many developers compensated with equity whose terms they're not even allowed to fully understand? And why is it that their common shares are last in line after liquidation preferences and VCs take their rake?
I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working conditions. Not simply how much they're paid --- and make no mistake, plenty of developers have those complaints, and feel victimized by the way compensation is negotiated for in this market --- but also simply for how inefficiently and inhumanely their jobs are structured compared to what they so obviously could be.
Tech workers should organize. United they bargain, divided they write anonymous complaints on HN.
Honestly, IMHO it's because people immediately ratchet their expectations up to the highest level of of pay they can earn. If you use up all your market power on pay, you don't have much left for other conditions.
I get paid 60% of what I made at my last job because there were certain things I wanted to be different in my work environment. Too many people optimize only for pay and then complain that nothing else works the way they want it to. Cut some salary off of your top line and you'll find that the leverage that gives you in other areas is pretty huge, particularly at companies that aren't bogged down in bureaucracy. If your salary is too low to comfortably trade off against, then you're obviously not one of the examples of people with market power.
Now don't get me wrong: most of these things are positive-sum, and ideally they wouldn't trade off against pay because they might increase productivity. But that doesn't have much to do with being a seller's market.
Honestly the answer to all your questions is "because people traded those items for massive pay increases".
I've never had a problem negotiating any of those points with any of my employers in the tech industry. Perhaps work for smaller companies if these sorts of things are important to you?
If you want to max out salary in silicon valley, I guess your list applies. For almost everywhere else in the country it's simply not the case - if you are truly talented you can almost write your own job description.
> I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working conditions.
I suppose that's one reaction. My reaction is generally amusement at the ridiculous complaints. Once in a while a legitimate one comes through, but most of them are truly "first world problems" to the absolute utter extreme.
CA is one of the few places I've found where companies actually can't pull the we-own-everything-you-do-at-any-time trick...
But to the rest: this is a forum where people constantly complain about the shoddy standards of shipping software. Shit security. Shit privacy. Shit performance. Shit dependency hell. Right now people get paid a lot of money to make as-bad-as-possible-to-still-make-money products. It's interesting.
Maybe a group that could negotiate on a larger scale with companies to say "we're not making that shit" could have some use. Or maybe the jobs would all go overseas, but from my experience... good luck with that!
>Tech workers should organize. United they bargain, divided they write anonymous complaints on HN.
BRAVO.
We are the beating heart of this world. We have way more leverage than industrial workers ever did - yet they won the weekend, the eight hour day and workplace safety.
What could we win once we set aside the moronic idea that we are each embryonic billionaires whose assholes spray gold coins every time we update a git repo?
Civilized health care, for starters. That alone would make the disruption worth it.
Wish I could upvote this 1000 times. After ~ 10 years working as a developer, I don't think I want to do it ever again. Don't get me wrong, I love writing code (and I'm pretty good at it, too), but doing it professionally is beyond broken.
Working in product or in project management is literally 10% of the stress with the same pay. How does that make any sense?
It's far from the same pay, not even close. Going into PM, for any value of P, would require me to cut back dramatically on the lifestyle that software engineering work has afforded my family. Have a look at Glassdoor data for any company. Pay disparity between the two professions is obvious.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building?
You really think one form of sitting is better than another? I think I'd rather alternate between slouching for 40 minutes and then walking around for 10 then to sit at a desk. But, we'll see how my experiment pans out!
(I worked from a couch at WeWork for a year prior to this and it didn't seem to ruin me).
I've been told so by some back professionals. I don't think it's that one form of sitting is better than another, everything else being equal. It's more about the neck alignment to the direction of your hips, which couches are notoriously bad about.
It probably makes the difference that you have a swing arm, and aren't looking at a machine on your knees.
I've been doing the laptop and easy-chair thing for years. Posture isn't bad, pressure is somewhat easily distributed. It's great as long as you have a chair that supports the head/neck.
I had been working primarily remote (1-2 days in office for 6) alternating between standing and sitting in my recliner. Switched jobs where I was expected in office 5 days a week for 8+ hours. Friday night the first week I was there I tore a disc in my back. It wasn't until I left and took some time off that it fully healed and allowed me to strengthen my core.
Needless to say my current job is heavy remote with flexible time in the office that I took over a higher paying position.
No, I don't think so. I can have whatever office I want; I'm an owner. If you think the best rebuttal you can make to me is "you're arguing against your own interests", go right ahead.
To your first point: because a lot of people don’t actually negotiate their damned contracts. Drives me mental — over broad IP assignment clauses are the first thing I strike out/adjust, though it has meant passing on job offers where they refused to budge on it. Well worth it however. They don’t own me and don’t own what I do outside of their damned office hours.
Who are these "so many developers" you've referenced a dozen times? You've been spending too much time on internet forums listening to rants of the vocal minority. Truth is that most developers are happy and don't need a drastic change, and this can hardly be said about any other profession.
> But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts or extended options execution windows.
It's not that people disagree about them, it's that many developers don't suffer from them.
I'm a professional developer and, for me personally, everything in your list is a non-issue. I left BigCo where they were an issue. But I sure can think of a host of issues that I would be concerned about were I part of an organization, one of which being someone else saying what are and aren't issues to me.
If a time comes where a good dev cannot choose where they work and basically negotiate their own terms (e.g. I'm not putting up with any of that stuff in your list and I don't have to in our current market), then unionization may be warranted. But as it stands now, I think many of the issues you listed are avoidable and good devs call their shots.
The HN complaints you hear are an echo chamber and shouldn't be a basis for your opinions on the industry as a whole.
I’m not entirely convinced IP agreements are that big of an issue. The rare horror stories that I’ve heard and read are mostly about really predatory employers (and usually a somewhat legally-unsophisticated employee). “I went to my employer with an exemption to my AoI and they said no” isn’t a thing you often hear programmers grouse about, at least, I haven’t.
It might be a bigger thing in my field. People go work for security companies (and security software companies) because they're interested in the problem space. The stuff the work on in their spare time might not be directly related to their day job, but it's likely to be related to security. People get in trouble over this stuff --- or, more frequently, have to abandon side projects they worked on at their previous employer.
But I mean, it's obvious, right, that not all these issues have to be universal for them to be nucleation points for organizing? As has been photographically established downthread, I don't much care about open offices right now. But I would not be shocked to see a team of developers organizing around getting quiet offices for their startup.
I didn't mean it as some rebuttal to your overall argument - I'm pretty sympathetic to it, for what it's worth. But you did put 'IP contracts' at the top of your chant and then used it as an example of something universal. It seems to have generated a lot of pushback, as well.
My just-so-story understanding of this stuff - if you are a full-time employee in some brainy job, your employer does have some sort of non-zero claim to some kinds of your intellectual output, even when you're not on the clock. To disambiguate this, a standard approach is to let the employer own everything while making it easy for the employee to explicitly exempt personal projects. The onerous-sounding AoI comes with an escape clause and the understanding the employer isn't going to be a butthead about letting the employee use it and that's pretty much exactly how it works out. That way, as your career takes you from a kitten subscription service to a dev tools vendor to Unicron, your npm packages for Pokemon eugenics optimization stay yours.
I can totally see how this might not work that well if you're a specialist in a specialized and funky field like security or how such agreements might seem like utterly evil overreach if you're reading about them on HN from your digital nomad space van parked in Auerbach in der Oberpfalz. But as a general [US/software/SFBA/etc] thing, they don't feel like a top-of-the-list issue.
Probably a bit of debate here, there are for sure some absurd ones I've read about here. I understand why companies feel the need to protect themselves though, even if its wrong.
> extended options execution windows
This is just stupid and I'm not sure anyone thinks the current system is good, not employees, not employers and not even the IRS.
Would you like a link to a prominent venture capitalist saying that he prefers companies he invest in keep their exercise window short to improve retention? Because I can provide that link, but it'll be annoying to dig up, so you'll have to bet me $10 to my $100 to charity that I can't.
FWIW I've only worked for one employer that had a restrictive, overzealous IP contract and invention assignment (others have just had routine paperwork about acknowledging their ownership of things done during work hours, etc.). It was one of my first jobs and I left after six months. They can't keep good talent, and they either get hangers-on who never leave because they can't hack it anywhere else, or people just using it as a short-term stepping stone and are out the door in 6-12 months.
Options do suck, but I guess these are considered less pressing issues because anyone intelligent ignores options more or less completely. If you end up with a windfall from them, that's great, but no one should expect it. Working for equity is for chumps -- demand a decent salary. It's plenty attainable.
All of them but the IP contracts thing, which I agree is bullshit. But I've conversely never had a problem redlining that out of every employment contract I've ever been offered. You do hire an attorney and negotiate at contract time right?
I also don't apply to large fortune 500 companies either, since I know the drawbacks are not worth the pay increase.
Your IP contracts contention is pretty much hogwash. It's FUD trying to scare people when 99.99% of people aren't affected by it.
I know plenty of developers who worked part-time on their startup at well-known SV companies. Two different sets of coworkers subsequently quit, and each sold their company for ~500M. Another one has gotten several rounds of funding. Another one sold their company to an enterprise company for over $1B, and after the earnout period was over, they formed a new company.
There was nothing "onerous" about any of the contracts these people signed. Meanwhile I haven't heard the opposite at all.
"But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts "
Frankly, I don't care even a little bit about this.
I am not building any startups that are going to be worth anything. I do stuff for fun, sure, but none of it is going to be worth any amount of money ever.
Thats why I work for a big company who pays me a high salary, because I don't have any world changing, valuable startup ideas. If the big 5 tech company that I currently work for wants to have the IP rights to my worthless side projects, they can go ahead and have them. (They are certainly paying me enough for the privilege)
Or in other words, if I had the choice between "keeping my IP rights", and "getting paid 5k more in salary", I'd take the 5k every time. Or the 1k. Or merely to avoid an awkward conversation with a lawyer.
And I expect that the vast majority of other developers are in the same boat as me. They `might` have side projects, but they aren't kidding themselves about how much they are worth, and are correctly valuing those IP rights at near 0$.
Is it? What makes you think the balance of entitlements between owners and labor in tech is the right one? It's not as if the owners seem to be suffering.
They paid top bucks, 2-4 times more than those journalists could make(around 40k bucks a year), that is surely something to put into the balance of the entitlements.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work under onerous IP contracts that grant their employers rights to what they build in their spare time?
Most developers don't have any IP to lose. If you have IP to lose then you can find a company that won't ask you to sign onerous contracts.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building?
This is entitlement. Open office saves money. The only option that saves you from wearing headphones is a private office per programmer, which is rare (I think Microsoft still does this). The next common options is cubicles but you still need to wear headphones.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers have stories about working late at night and on weekends to ship features on bogus accelerated schedules they had little hand in setting?
We are well paid to get our work done. Doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, accountants all work as much or even longer hours. Also bad managers create bad schedules and bad cultures, this is across fields.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers accept payment in the form of equity that has to be executed at great expense immediately after leaving the company, and offers no actual guarantee of return after making that investment?
"Great expense" is an exaggeration. Other career paths don't have equity. 80% of the companies I've worked at gave me worthless equity. It's the game that we play. The other 20% made me ~$500k.
> If it's a "seller's market", why are developers forced to move to the most expensive real estate markets in the country to work every day from a particular office when their work can be done more productively from their own home offices?
No one is forced to move anywhere. People want to move here, still.
> If it's a "seller's market", why are so many developers compensated with equity whose terms they're not even allowed to fully understand? And why is it that their common shares are last in line after liquidation preferences and VCs take their rake?
"Not even allowed to understand"? That's a lie. If you work for a shitty company that isn't transparent, you can leave and work for another company that is. That's a seller's market.
Tech workers are generally much happier than other professions. Until that changes, you will never get unions. I hope it never happens, and I will never join a union, and I personally don't know a single programmer that wants to as well. Those that want unions are in the vast minority, and are much louder on forums like Hacker News, but it won't get much traction unless there's another dotcom bust.
On the other hand, my comment ranks (by votes) among the top 0.3% I've written on the site, while yours has been voted down so far after 13 hours that it's hard to read (I didn't downvote you). We're both software developers, we've both been in the industry for comparably long periods of time, but it feels like maybe one of us is saying something that better resonates with our peers.
It'd be interesting to see if, having pointed this out, the voting spread changes. I'd like a truer accounting, if there's one to be had!
Lol come on Thomas. That is probably the most pathetic comment I’ve seen you write. Worthless internet karma is a validation of your ideas? Did all your upvotes for starfighter on hacker news actually turn it into a real business or was it a failure in real life?
Why not try to publicize this ideaand see how much real traction you get? (spoiler alert: zero because most developers don’t want it)
1. Starfighter did not seem to me at the time to be beloved by HN.
2. Starfighter is one of 3 companies I've been involved in publicly on HN. The first one did pretty good. We're doing pretty good with this one. Thanks for asking! :)
3. There's an obvious difference between the question of whether something's a viable business (CTFs as contingency recruiters: probably not!) vs. whether an argument represents any kind of popular sentiment.
4. Do upvotes validate my argument? No. But they would seem to me to rebut your claim to speak for "most developers".
I’m glad your first and current ventures are successful. Hardworking people should be rewarded. My point is HN love has no bearing on success. Starfighter was pretty popular and everyone on HN wants a new way to interview. But it didn’t translate to a success.
A converse example is Uber. Uber is despised on HN and every anti-Uber comment is upvoted. But HN sentiment has had no consequence on Uber’s success and growth.
“Most developers” don’t comment on HN. Most developers also don’t want unions otherwise we would have had one in the 50 years of industry, despite all your precious HN upvotes.
Also, your misrepresentation of “publicize” into “publication” is strange.
Right, but no part of Uber's "argument" depends on the support of HN users. You can't say that, at least not cleanly, about organizing SFBA software developers.
I'm not saying "I'm right because I'm upvoted". I'm saying that his argument that I'm out in the wilderness on this issue is wrong because of that. He has more than one argument. I'm just refuting that one.
It felt icky writing that comment upthread, but, I figured, what the hell, let's see what happens.
Many have already replied here but I will respond in my own words.
Not everyone can do what you can do and those people in particular benefit from a union. Others have also listed why you may benefit but I wanted to make clear that you assuming everyone is like you is silly.
Job markets can be seller's markets only temporary, until large employers and investors realize this. At which point they can take away any power people had via secret anti-competitive agreements, artificial barriers for changing jobs, lobbying and investing into more supply, etc.
For software developers seller's market is long gone.
that's a silly question, isn't it? "for when it becomes a buyer's market", seems like an obvious answer. and when that happens, it'll probably be harder to unionize.
I think especially in a seller's market a union would have a strong negotiation position to raise salaries and improve conditions. I don't think a union can help much in a declining industry.
It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it. It's often described as being unnecessary, but when you go one or two posts down HN you find people decrying long hours, open plan offices, weekend callouts, etc. etc.
I suspect it's just that when the going is good, people don't really think they need a union. If the prophecies come true and AI starts writing code for us, you can bet people will suddenly be interested in unionisation.
I think part of it is because the gap between the skill floor and ceiling is absolutely gargantuan. Unions work best when the skill gap is narrow, and ascension to different levels easily measurable.
The more I think about it, software engineering is almost completely antithetical to the idea of unions. Traditional engineers have so much structure around their fields because the laws of physics govern a large part of their craft. Not so with SE.
They're not the fundamental constraint in work output differences. IQ/ability gaps matter way more than they do in programming than they do in construction work.
Let's not forget that there are unions for highly skilled labor as well. When I was a classical musician I belonged to a very robust and very helpful musician's union. Everyone I know _always_ had a preference for union gigs as they usually paid better and ensured that you didn't have to deal with all sorts of nonsense from your employer (like rehearsals running overtime, not getting paid in a timely manner, blind auditions, etc).
Professional classical musicians require a great deal more training (and talent) than programmers to get to the level where they can make a living doing it.
It does, but only at a very low level. Most in the profession are several layers removed from directly worrying about how fast the bits are moving on a CPU, and are more concerned with adhering to sound design and algorithm patterns.
The poster you replied to never said that. He said that the laws of physics matter far more to traditional engineering than software engineering. Unless a software engineer is working on algorithmic complexity, low level hardware/security, or distributed systems, real world physics usually don't matter too much.
I cannot disagree more. I see absolutely nothing in software engineering that is antithetical to unions. Much of what you claim could also be applied to acting, or to professional athletes, who do have unions.
> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it.
Mostly because our working conditions are not bad, we are more or less paid fairly, there are a lot of options to move around.
Also it'd be bad if we had other people negotiating on our behalf, for what we probably feel is less pay than we are worth, and the concept of seniority would ruffle and stop a lot of newer grads from getting higher paying jobs over people that have been working already for 25 years in the industry.
> the concept of seniority would ruffle and stop a lot of newer grads from getting higher paying jobs over people that have been working already for 25 years in the industry.
That's not a required part of a union. I think one of the misconceptions people have is that if you have a union it looks and operates exactly like one on a Ford factory floor. If you formed a union it could do exactly what you want it to do, and not do the things you don't want it to do. If you wanted a union to do nothing other than negotiate payment for overtime and a new Macbook every year you could just do that.
I think that's an interesting discussion worth having -- supposing a tech union existed, what would we want it to negotiate for?
Some possibilities I can think of are: better pay, less work hours or paid overtime, better benefits, more vacation time, minimum office size / screen size / cubicle wall height, a cap on the ratio of employee pay to CEO pay, a right to say no to work that violates a professional code of conduct without risk of reprisal, access to training material, pay transparency, prohibitions against overly-broad intellectual property assignments and a right to work on non-competing projects in one's free time, prohibitions against anti-compete clauses, and mandatory prior notification of layoffs.
I imagine most people who work in tech would have a different list, but there would be some overlap.
I used to think that as well. The problem is that if you don't have an arbitrary employment security clause (seniority, aka LIFO), employers can find ways to fire you/lay you off arbitrarily for union activity under the cover of other reasons (e.g. unrealistic performance goals). I don't know how to resolve this problem. But without LIFO, you can be guaranteed that most people who use the union for its intended purpose doesn't have much of a future at the company.
The people with political influence in the union might not be those whose views align with the more technically proficient members of the group. I anticipate a developer union being another vector for leeches to grasp onto productive developers and (indirectly) siphon off their well earned money.
I've seen the types of developers that thrive in political climates. They manage to get paid way too much money to make poor decisions about subjects they read the wikipedia article on just before the meeting. I honestly believe these are the types that will rise through the union ranks and will use their power for harm and personal enrichment.
Union interviews will be all be standardized and will consist of: drawing UML diagrams, naming 24 design patterns in 30 seconds, and white-boarding a blockchain Rubik's CryptoCube solver implementation.
Points will be deducted if the solution is not an abstract OOP design that can extend to n-dimensional Rubik's CryptoCubes.
> Union interviews will be all be standardized and will consist of: drawing UML diagrams, naming 24 design patterns in 30 seconds, and white-boarding a blockchain Rubik's CryptoCube solver implementation.
So, like today's retarded interviewing environment for most SV companies?
Gamedev is the only sub-industry that comes to mind that could see a large benefit from a union. That said burnout is so high and there's so many people beating down the door for a job that its never really materialized.
>> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it
Software developers and people in IT are probably two orders of magnitude more likely to be libertarian / anarcho-capitalist and conservative in economic views than your average union worker in another field. That's definitely a large impact as well.
I think this is the gist of it. Most of the arguments I’ve seen against unionization seem to appeal to the inflated egos that a lot of developers possess.
Aside from dues: electricians, plumbers, carpenters... all sorts of highly skilled laborers both have unions and are basically freelancers, every bit as mobile as you could want.
Unions are romanticized a lot in the current culture, but we shouldn't just pretend that they're purely positive. The union is a middle man between the employee and the employer. Unions can and do extract dues, impose their own rules and stipulations, and add friction and bloat to employment. If you don't like the restrictions or the rates that have been negotiated, you have a lot less freedom to move around and do something about it. If you cross the union, well, good luck.
I'm not trying to argue that unions are wholly bad either, but there's a trade-off to be had here. It's not as simple as "people dislike unions because they're too dumb to realize that they want one".
My feeling is that a lot of knowledge workers look down on unionizing as a "blue collar thing" (ignoring the fact that actors, writers, orchestral musicians, etc. are all often in unions as well).
I think the realistic among us realize that creating a software developer’s union would lead to dramatically increased offshoring. Actors, plumbers, etc.? Can’t offshore those, so the dynamic between workers and management is a little different. Software development, you can offshore the hell out of that. Shoot, look at automobile workers, granted there’s still a sizable amount in this country but nothing like it used to be — and I think unions had a lot to do with that (“we’re paying them how much? Just make em in Mexico”).
Can you truly offshore the hell out of software developers? That was the big fear of the late '90s and '00s, but despite the rise of software salaries (and the knock on effects on the business expenses in Silicon Valley), that didn't seem to come to pass.
I've talked to people in the past who associate a union with factory work, and they don't feel like it applies to them.
I sometimes point out that every movie star they've ever heard of is a member of a union.
I think part of the problem comes from the decline in unions in the US over the last few decades. New industries aren't unionizing, and older unions are being undermined where possible.
The unions aren't for the A-list, they're for the struggling actors who would get paid minimum wage otherwise (or worse, you'd see a lot of "unpaid internships").
Getting into a movie industry union is very difficult and rather expensive to boot. You don't just get into these unions by showing up at the door.
The correlation to software would be having a list of progressively difficult things you have to do, so that, ultimately, only 10% of people make it in. The rest pay their dues by working minimum wage jobs and unpaid internships.
Yes. So much of this stuff is just credentialism and maintaining barriers to entry. A union will come with arbitrary requirements that some committee decided were must-haves before one was a bona fide programmer. This laundry list will include 5 years full-time practice in the language you personally most despise. Any attempt to argue that 5 years of experience in that language is non-essential will be met with scorn and mockery, and taken as proof that you are not a serious professional.
Unions, professional societies, licensing bodies, etc., all function primarily to shore up the in group. These groups then live off of annual license fees, dues, and other types of lechery. This group grows more and more detached, sitting in an office worrying about the meta-scale instead of actually doing any real work. Eventually the union and licensing bosses consume massive quantities of the otherwise-productive value just for sitting there in the middle. By this point, their approval has been codified into major corporate contracts if not literally made legally prerequisite. Good luck extracting them at that point. Right-to-work at least keeps that apparatus somewhat in check.
I knew a young woman aspiring to become a professional actor. She had spent years trying to earn her way into SAG, and had years left to go before she realistically had a shot of actually getting in. Unions are not charities. They exist to serve themselves and the people they decide to like, and no one else.
That's them. One thing that you seem to be forgetting is that, if we made a union, WE get to decide how it works. The Screen Actors Guild has conditions for entry. Most others don't.
The parent was discussing SAG / AFTRA, which I felt compelled to correct him or her on it.
The fact is that all unions start with some exclusions. This would have to be a critical piece of any unionization as employers would have no incentive to agree to the terms laid out.
Right, but there are no struggling software engineers. Even college kids won't touch an internship for less than $20/hour, much less be forced to take a gig for "exposure".
Are the "struggling actors" actually unemployed, or just not getting the roles they want? I don't know many people in the industry who can't find a job in programming (that pays better than the LA Times pays their journalists), but I know lots of people who are struggling to find a good job that matches their skills more accurately than "can program" and helps their career, and also lots of people who have had trouble keeping a good job once found because of layoffs / inability to deal with bad management or bad coworkers other than quitting / etc.
Actually unemployed. I have several actor friends (I live in NYC) who spend roughly half the year auditioning -- if they're lucky. On paper the jobs pay pretty well because they pay union rates but that's because they subsidize large stints of unemployment.
I don't know about SAG (movie/TV union) but I have known dozens of people in or trying to be in the NYC theater scene, and I never heard anyone say a good thing about Equity (theater union), only many complaints. Joining was an arcane process, but necessary to get roles. So one of the paths to joining was working for certain employers who had some arrangement with the union to grant membership after so many hours of work. What that meant for several of my friends is working for this now-defunct theme restaurant in Times Square with horrible & abusive management for the time required to get their Equity card.
> Yes, there are many non-union acting roles available. You aren't going to get rich from them.
You're not really going to get rich from any acting roles.
Even at the 99th percentile, most actors don't make a ton of money, and the employment is both sporadic and punitively taxed. So those who are rich are generally those who were independently wealthy to begin with.
For every actor you read about who's making multimillion dollar contracts year after year for franchise movies, there are literally thousands who are making a modest living at best, or barely scraping by at worst.
They could, and there have been rumblings about doing so for many years, including among sysadmins. It emerged from many corners: layoffs of the first dot com crash, unrealistic deadlines, afterhours work, general crappy management support, underpayage, etc. I think generally the attitude is "why would I want to be paid less?"
I will quit from any employer that forces all programmers to negotiate as a unit, because I believe that compensation should be based purely on your individual skills and the market.
I also believe that forced collective bargaining is unconstitutional, because it requires people to associate with a group that they don't want to associate with.
If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, that's wonderful. But, they can leave me out of it, and I can do without whatever pay schedule and benefits they manage to extract from the employer.
IMO the real issue with current law is that collective bargaining agreements must apply to all employees in a bargaining unit.
> I will quit from any employer that forces all programmers to negotiate as a unit, because I believe that compensation should be based purely on your individual skills and the market.
But that is the market, is it not? If your employer chooses to require all employees to negotiate as a unit, and is not required to do so by law, aren't they just doing that because they're a rational actor in the market?
The law is a different question, yes, but the fundamental motivation is to prevent 80% of the company from negotiating, say, "We all get 1-hour lunch breaks" and the remaining 20% from benefiting from the negotiation because that's the rational thing for the company to do in that situation, thereby providing an incentive for people to remove themselves from the "agreement" and coast on it nonetheless. What would you do to solve this problem in other ways?
And if the poster you replied to quits from his employer, isn't he just doing that because he's a rational (by his own metric of rationality) actor in the market? Presumably there is at least one un-unionized employer where he could get a job.
I mean, in a sense yes, but also his "rational" explanation is that he doesn't think employers should do X, he thinks employers should just behave as the market demands which clearly cannot include doing X, so I'm pushing back on whether that's actually a rational decision.
You're right that I think an employer should be able to choose who to hire or not hire. So, if an employer wants to be a union shop, that's fine.
But, unionization is not something an employer really has a choice in currently. If people vote to form a union, the employer must deal with the union representation (to my understanding).
What I'm saying is that an employer should be free to fire any employee (including for the explicit reason that they are a union member) and a group of employees should be able to strike and bargain as a unit if they like. But the union members shouldn't be able to force a non-member to strike or bargain with them.
Edit: and the non-member employee shouldn't get any of the pay rates, benefits, or work rules that the union negotiates for it's members.
> Edit: and the non-member employee shouldn't get any of the pay rates, benefits, or work rules that the union negotiates for it's members.
How does this work, though? Take the lunch-break example - it is economically irrational for a company that is giving a 1-hour lunch break to the vast majority of its employees to require a couple of employees to work through lunch, when you have no guarantee that you'll have a complete set of workers. It's easier to just put a "Closed for lunch" sign out front.
Or take health insurance, which is purchased in bulk. You can't give the vast majority of employees a better plan and keep the rest on the old plan. The old plan no longer is available to you with those enrollment numbers. You can either put them on a more expensive plan that resembles their old plan, or on the new plan, or on no plan at all.
And that's leaving aside the fact that the negotiating parameters change. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and none of my coworkers have it, that negotiation is hard. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and all of my coworkers have it, that's an entirely different conversation. If I want a better health plan than any of the ones my company offers, that's a huge uphill battle. If I want a better health plan than I'm on that all my coworkers are already on, I can probably just have that for the asking.
There is just no way that you can require that the non-members are not allowed to benefit from the union negotiations. It doesn't work like that.
It depends on the industry. When all the workers need to be working at the same time, the lunch break thing makes sense. For other industries (like programming), it doesn't matter if your coworkers are on break, you can keep working. I'm actually in this position, because I work remotely and only overlap a couple of hours with some team members.
For health care, there exists individual plans. So, the employer can choose to offer that to non-members if they think it's worth it. The employer could also have a standard non-union benefit package if the company had enough non-union employees. Or, it could choose not to offer health insurance (or any other benefit it offered to the union).
I don't agree that seeing your union colleagues get a benefit means that an individual negotiator be more likely to get a benefit. This knowledge does reveal that the employer is willing to give that benefit to the union. But, the union has the weight of it's members to extract that benefit. The non-member has only their individual contribution. So it depends on the individual's value to the business versus the union members' value.
I suspect that there would still be a strong incentive to bargain collectively in jobs where an employee is easily replaced. These workers would see that they can get better compensation by banding together than going it alone.
Meanwhile, it would basically not be feasible to unionize in areas where there is a significant difference in the productivity of individual employees. Most programming falls into this category in my opinion.
More broadly, I think you've kinda missed my position a bit. I'm thinking about freedom of association as a negative right (as in "government can't force you to {x}"). So, if that right was interpreted the way I would like it to be, it doesn't really matter what the actual outcome is. It shouldn't be legal to force a non-member to associate with a union (unless the employer chooses to contract exclusively with that union).
Obviously, you're arguing that my interpretation is not desirable b/c it would cause a free-rider problem (which I don't think is as strong of a possibility as you do).
Except collective bargaining won't exist without that law. The free rider problem will destroy any possibility of collective bargaining. That's why I think it's disingenuous to say:
If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, that's wonderful. But, they can leave me out of it, and I can do without whatever pay schedule and benefits they manage to extract from the employer.
Well you can't really 'opt out' of the benefits of their negotiation in that way, and for the same reason you can't opt out of the union. You're not talking about a future with some unions where people can also choose to go it alone, you're talking about a future with no unions at all. At least be honest about that.
Not necessarily true. If enough people find the union valuable, believe in its aims, and want to participate in it, then the employer can't afford to lose or alienate the union employees, so the union has negotiating power (proportional to the employees that participate). If enough people don't find the union valuable, don't believe in its aims, and don't want to participate in it, then the union will correctly have less negotiating power because it represents fewer people.
People should be free to voluntarily associate with groups that represent them and their interests.
Any corporation can break any union simply by refusing to negotiate only for union members. So say the union is fighting for a $1 raise and more pto. The corporation just says "okay, everyone, including non union members, gets a $1 raise and more pto." At that point why would you pay union dues? You can just freeride. To think that corporations won't behave this way is naive, they want to maximize free-riding benefit so that the union crumbles.
Absolutely. And an employer can choose to only hire union workers, too. I've seen a couple digital agencies that enthusiastically support unionization of their employees. They market to clients that they are a "union shop" and get business from people who support unionization. That's cool! People get to stand up for what they believe in and support businesses that operate according to their beliefs.
I thought union shops were illegal in the USA per the NLRA. As I understand it, they can force you to pay a portion of dues (only stuff related directly to bargaining with your specific employer), but that's about it.
> I thought union shops were illegal in the USA. As I understand it, they can force you to pay dues, but that's about it.
No, closed shops are illegal, but union shops aren't. An employer can no longer agree only to hire people who are already members of a union (that's a closed shop, which used to be legal), but they can force you to join a union after you are hired. If that's the case, if the union terminates your membership, the employer is forced to terminate your employment as well.
(Ironically, the union can force you to pay dues even if you're not a member, but that's a separate matter.)
Right, this is what I'm talking about. I've mentioned this in another thread, too.
If an employer chooses to require it's employees be members of a union, I think that's their right. But, I dislike (and think should not be legal) a group voting to unionize and then forcing their agreement onto other employees that don't want to be represented.
To my current understanding, there are 2 stumbling blocks to that way of doing things. 1) Employees can force an employer to deal with a union and 2) the union must cover everyone in the bargaining unit.
In my opinion, ideally both of those things would stop. A union can operate and negotiate on behalf of it's members. The union contract wouldn't cover non-members. And an employer can choose not to hire union workers.
"employer chooses to require it's employees be members of a union" and "a group voting to unionize and then forcing their agreement onto other employees that don't want to be represented."?
So you're cool with unions enforced by dictators but not unions enforced by democracy?
>>compensation should be based purely on your individual skills
First: Profit seeking organizations don't care about skill they care: about wait for it... profit which is the money you add vs the money you cost, which may be completely divorced from skill.
Second: Literally nobody can accurately measure a specific individuals contribution, through skill or otherwise.
Well... you can try, to varying degrees of success. Commits, tickets, MTTR, sLOC. Not that any of those things can't be gamed if the culture demands it
I 100% agree. I'd quit immediately from any job that forced me to join a union. I will not have someone else negotiating for me. I can do that on my own, thank you very much.
I think a lot of people are worried that being part of a bad union would be worse than no union at all, and existing unions don't seem like an obvious fit for tech jobs.
If there were a well-run union for tech workers that is responsive and accountable to its members and has a mission to negotiate in favor of goals that I share then I'd be interested in joining.
I think the tech group that ought to unionize is sysadmins. We run the world yet get shit on by management left and right, and it's high time to take some of that power back.
LOPSA is innefective and does nothing and doesn't count in my book.
Of course unions in general have become what they were formed to prevent in many ways, and need massive amounts of reform internally themselves.
> I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?
Because unions have no standing across international borders.
Because Programmers as a profession can be easily outsourced? Can't really think a profession, where location is as unimportant as programming. Union will drive employers away, which is a fact. To prevent this, there has to some regulation in place, where forbid employers to hire unlicensed programmers from doing programming job. Pretty much the whole programming culture will need to be overhauled for union to be a real option.
I'm a programmer who's currently in a union position - I want out. I pay dues and get basically nothing for them, as developers we're generally in decent negotiating positions. Unions are great when you're not in that position, but just an extra cost when you are.
I've always been in a fine negotiating position for pay, but I've never felt like I had any negotiating position for things like getting a cubicle or office instead of an open floor plan, getting IP rights to things I do in my spare time that are not related to my own job but related to something my employer is doing somewhere, running an interview process that doesn't suck for both candidates and interviewers, etc.
