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Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should no

Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to. I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
>> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
    - pizzetta 9y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Anything can be used for good or evil. Its the wrong place to attack the problem - we can't live in the stone age because "somebody might misuse fire".
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Someone did invent the fire extinguisher and come up with Stop, Drop, and Roll, though. I'm not saying don't do new things. For example, Bandcamp giving me a way to download a list of people who've bought my music is like a fire extinguisher. If Bandcamp burns, I don't lose everything with it. That's conscientious of them. Most places that sell music don't offer that.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      What are you talking about. Wiping out millions of jobs is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology. "Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody. Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again. Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet. At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
  - ashark 9y ago
    > Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability). Where tech directly touches my life, I wouldn't say today's tech makes me any happier or substantially improves my wellbeing over what 1999-level tech did. Worse in some ways. I do different stuff with 2017 tech than I would without it, but I doubt it's actually improving my life more than 1999 tech. I do have to remain up-to-date and immersed in it because it's an expectation of modern life and you'll drop out of what remains of shared culture and expectations of availability, et c if you don't (especially being a developer) but it's not per se especially appealing. Self-driving cars (though I expect their benefit to largely be eaten up by race-to-the-bottom behavior or some form of rents capture, same as wide availability of personal automobiles mostly destroyed their time-saving benefits) and (even better) affordable, highly capable general-purpose housework robots would be a big deal for my quality of life, but we don't have those yet. I'm sure industry and R&D applications of post-1999 tech improvements have been important, of course.
    - mtdewcmu 9y ago
      The canonical counterexample to "who needs progress?" is medicine. I wouldn't want to be limited to the medical care from 1999 if all else is equal. Who needs to live with hepatitis C now that there's a cure?
InTempWeTrust 9y ago
IT unionized? The Union of Loners.
- sctb 9y ago
  Continuing to comment like this will get your account banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
yequalsx 9y ago
I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored. A lot of it at universities which are unionized. Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  >I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.
csydas 9y ago
>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I could argue that if unions were strong and everyone had to belong to a union to participate in an economy the unions could see an advantage to controlling how you contribute to FOSS because your "free" contribution to FOSS impinges on the rights to another unionized worker's right to work. The FOSS developer would theoretically be undermining the union worker.
  - naravara 9y ago
    When unions are huge and cover large swathes of the workforce, they tend to be more focused on the long-term health of the industry/economy. It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
  - csydas 9y ago
    Well, you certainly could, but that wasn't the argument presented or responded to. The argument you put forth was Technology's advancement was due to IT businesses, and what would the world be like if there were more Unions; but this is not really a sensible proposition because major technological advances, indeed the majority of which are driving the backbone of the world economy and technology as we know it, were developed without any of the incentives provided by a business structure. Union or not is irrelevant to such forces because they operate outside the realm of business. The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best. What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
_jal 9y ago
I think there's an ordering problem. IT jobs have never faced union pressure because, in part, of massive, ongoing change and high wages. Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it. I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.
piva00 9y ago
I recommend looking up the union/labour movement model of Sweden. It's a three-way between unions, employers and government to get into agreements, doesn't seem to be hurting Swedish economy (nor its IT industry).
crdoconnor 9y ago
>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The following would likely happen: * Wages would be higher, tech behemoth profits would be lower. * Vastly more attention would be drawn to some of the worse outsourcing disasters (some of which are currently covered up). * Those egregious IP agreements would be less common. * Employee share options agreements would probably be fairer. Not like this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-... * Wage fixing cartels like this would be busted quicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... >they also have externalities we need to acknowledge. So acknowledge them?
- stale2002 9y ago
  Oooh how about these ones: Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age. You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats. Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back. Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work! Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day. You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that. Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks. Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!
arximboldi 9y ago
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I'll grant you that --but while that protects domestic workers it may hurt domestic industry in that some things would be cheaper to develop in locales with less unionization or simply lower labor costs.
blahblab 9y ago
I don't have to imagine, I'm a unionized programmer. I've worked in private industry too and switching out an individual vs collective contract hasn't degraded my skills one iota. I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

>> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.

pizzetta 9y ago
I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Anything can be used for good or evil. Its the wrong place to attack the problem - we can't live in the stone age because "somebody might misuse fire".
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Someone did invent the fire extinguisher and come up with Stop, Drop, and Roll, though. I'm not saying don't do new things. For example, Bandcamp giving me a way to download a list of people who've bought my music is like a fire extinguisher. If Bandcamp burns, I don't lose everything with it. That's conscientious of them. Most places that sell music don't offer that.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    What are you talking about. Wiping out millions of jobs is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology. "Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody. Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again. Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet. At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
- ashark 9y ago
  > Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability). Where tech directly touches my life, I wouldn't say today's tech makes me any happier or substantially improves my wellbeing over what 1999-level tech did. Worse in some ways. I do different stuff with 2017 tech than I would without it, but I doubt it's actually improving my life more than 1999 tech. I do have to remain up-to-date and immersed in it because it's an expectation of modern life and you'll drop out of what remains of shared culture and expectations of availability, et c if you don't (especially being a developer) but it's not per se especially appealing. Self-driving cars (though I expect their benefit to largely be eaten up by race-to-the-bottom behavior or some form of rents capture, same as wide availability of personal automobiles mostly destroyed their time-saving benefits) and (even better) affordable, highly capable general-purpose housework robots would be a big deal for my quality of life, but we don't have those yet. I'm sure industry and R&D applications of post-1999 tech improvements have been important, of course.
  - mtdewcmu 9y ago
    The canonical counterexample to "who needs progress?" is medicine. I wouldn't want to be limited to the medical care from 1999 if all else is equal. Who needs to live with hepatitis C now that there's a cure?

InTempWeTrust 9y ago

IT unionized? The Union of Loners.

sctb 9y ago
Continuing to comment like this will get your account banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

yequalsx 9y ago

I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored. A lot of it at universities which are unionized. Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.

pizzetta 9y ago
>I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.

csydas 9y ago

>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.

pizzetta 9y ago
I could argue that if unions were strong and everyone had to belong to a union to participate in an economy the unions could see an advantage to controlling how you contribute to FOSS because your "free" contribution to FOSS impinges on the rights to another unionized worker's right to work. The FOSS developer would theoretically be undermining the union worker.
- naravara 9y ago
  When unions are huge and cover large swathes of the workforce, they tend to be more focused on the long-term health of the industry/economy. It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
- csydas 9y ago
  Well, you certainly could, but that wasn't the argument presented or responded to. The argument you put forth was Technology's advancement was due to IT businesses, and what would the world be like if there were more Unions; but this is not really a sensible proposition because major technological advances, indeed the majority of which are driving the backbone of the world economy and technology as we know it, were developed without any of the incentives provided by a business structure. Union or not is irrelevant to such forces because they operate outside the realm of business. The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best. What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

_jal 9y ago

I think there's an ordering problem. IT jobs have never faced union pressure because, in part, of massive, ongoing change and high wages. Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it. I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.

piva00 9y ago

I recommend looking up the union/labour movement model of Sweden. It's a three-way between unions, employers and government to get into agreements, doesn't seem to be hurting Swedish economy (nor its IT industry).

crdoconnor 9y ago

>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The following would likely happen: * Wages would be higher, tech behemoth profits would be lower. * Vastly more attention would be drawn to some of the worse outsourcing disasters (some of which are currently covered up). * Those egregious IP agreements would be less common. * Employee share options agreements would probably be fairer. Not like this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-... * Wage fixing cartels like this would be busted quicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... >they also have externalities we need to acknowledge. So acknowledge them?

stale2002 9y ago
Oooh how about these ones: Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age. You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats. Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back. Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work! Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day. You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that. Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks. Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!

arximboldi 9y ago

> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.

BoiledCabbage 9y ago

> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.

pizzetta 9y ago
I'll grant you that --but while that protects domestic workers it may hurt domestic industry in that some things would be cheaper to develop in locales with less unionization or simply lower labor costs.

blahblab 9y ago

I don't have to imagine, I'm a unionized programmer. I've worked in private industry too and switching out an individual vs collective contract hasn't degraded my skills one iota. I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.