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Question for the HN crowd: do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize? It seems to me that (in general) they've got such a nice position in the economy th

Question for the HN crowd: do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize? It seems to me that (in general) they've got such a nice position in the economy there's probably a bit of an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Is that correct?

readams 9y ago
Working in a union would be terrible. Can you imagine having to deal with seniority rules?
- ryanworl 9y ago
  A union is whatever the members want it to be. Just because traditional unions operate a certain way does not mean a union for tech workers has to operate the same way.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    How would a union help me at all?
    - eli 9y ago
      Is there anything you want from your employer that they don't already give you? If a lot of your fellow employees agree, it would be more powerful for you all to ask as a collective group rather than you to ask as a single employee.
    - AndrewDucker 9y ago
      Legal support if your company does something unpleasant to you. Pushing for better conditions/pay for you as part of improving them for everyone where you work.
    - ryanworl 9y ago
      I don't know if a union would help you specifically because I don't know who you are or who you work for. But in general, a union could negotiate the development practices you and your co-workers want. As an example, if you and your co-workers wanted one week per quarter devoted solely to paying back technical debt, your union could demand it. There is no reason why a union has to do anything in particular at all if you don't want it to. I'm not trying to tell you to join a union or not, just saying that a union as a legal structure does not require any of the tactics or goals as 20th century manufacturing or public sector unions.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        "There is no reason why a union has to do anything in particular at all if you don't want it to." Yes there it. If a union takes over the workforce of your company, now you have to follow the union rules. If unions were just opt in, them yes you'd be right. But unions are NOT opt in for many states. One you are a union shop, you are screwed if you disagree with the union.
        Frondo 9y ago
        A union is also a democratically-run organization, so if you disagree with it, you have some recourse. A workplace is not democratically run, so if you disagree with it, you are also screwed, only this time you have no recourse.
        stale2002 9y ago
        I'd rather only get screwed by 1 group than have the possibility of being screwed by 2 groups. Voting and democracy doesn't help anything. I am just 1 vote. I'd rather have things negotiated between me, and only me and the other party.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        So between you, and the entirety of the company.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      One way to look at Hacker News is as a part-time ranked inventory of labor grievances for tech workers. Open offices. Draconian IP clauses. Opportunities for developers to become founders. Work-life balance. Remote work. People get hung up on this because most developers feel like their profession is well-compensated. And, they are. But so are doctors and lawyers, who also belong to professional associations. There's much more to bargain for than just wages.
      - TheCowboy 9y ago
        Adding another couple that are popular: better hiring and interviewing practices that don't over-burden applicants. Eliminating the number of rounds, better transparency about the overall hiring process, avoiding tests that are completely irrelevant to job performance. Better transparency regarding salary offerings, and a framework for individual negotiation that doesn't disadvantage certain groups. There are plenty of things a professional organization could excel at that don't require full-blown unionization.
      - euroclydon 9y ago
        Doctors are miserable from the micromanagement and metrics these days.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Legal backing if, say, you worked for Equifax, and refused to certify that their systems were secure, and they wanted to terminate you to shut you up.
  - ryandvm 9y ago
    All unions, nay all power structures, naturally evolve to serve the interests of the _current_ members. Because of this, seniority-based benefits and insulating bad apples from termination are traits that almost always show up in every union through convergent evolution.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Your comment creates the impression that without unions, developers wouldn't have to deal with "power structures". But to a pretty good first approximation every technology firm in the industry is a "power structure" --- a rigid and overt one, at that --- run by financiers and owners. So it's hard to see what rank-and-file professionals would have to lose from exercising their own market power, at least in your analysis.
      - danielvf 9y ago
        And add a union to the current situation, and now you have two power structures over you, not one.
        tptacek 9y ago
        Yes, and you'll be a constituent of one of them, which is the argument for organizing.
        apsec112 9y ago
        Being a constituent doesn't necessarily mean anything. Eg., Eric Garner was a constituent of New York City. NYC is democratically governed, and he had an equal right to vote. It didn't help him very much.
        detcader 9y ago
        Being a constituent of X (in this context) means means X is expected to advocate for you. Thus Eric Garner wasn't a constituent of NYC, he was a constituent of his representatives, who may or may not have done a good job advocating for the safety of those interviewed or detained by the police. I don't see how constituency doesn't help here, because now we can hold reps responsible for advocating for better protection, whereas if no representative power structures existed in the US, what happened to Garner would happen all the time and we would still belong to Great Britain
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Just because traditional unions operate a certain way does not mean a union for tech workers has to operate the same way. Unions have all converged on operating the same way because the NLRA is very rigid, and over the decades, they've found a stable way of operating. Other operating structures have been tried over the last century, and all have failed except the current one. If anybody believes that a tech union under the NLRA would break this trend, especially while presumably still being affiliated with other traditional unions, then the burden would be on them to explain why the forces that drive other unions would somehow not apply to tech.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      The Screen Actor's Guild doesn't work that way.
      - chimeracoder 9y ago
        > The Screen Actor's Guild doesn't work that way. SAG-AFTRA has been specially exempted from key provisions in labor law.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        You're gonna need to provide evidence.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  No. But I can imagine a union without seniority rules.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  A lot of places already have these, but informally. Also, why on earth do you think we'd have to? If no one wants them, why would we have them?
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I honestly think programmers are just demonstrating that they skew politically inept by not unionizing. Well, not a union as such, but if you look at other professional degrees, almost all of them have powerful trade groups that represent the workers -- doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. I think it speaks more to political ineptitude and the newness of the field that programming doesn't even have the same support structures in place that engineers do.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  The downvotes speak volumes of the cognitive dissonance. Everone is fully in control of their destiny through their rugged individualism and bootstraps until they're laid off and packing up to head back home from SFBA because they have no worker protections. I suppose everyone has to learn the hard way (again) during the next downturn.
  - psyc 9y ago
    The comment you're replying to conflated gatekeeping associations, which aim to keep people out of the field to bolster demand, with worker protections.
    - jejones3141 9y ago
      Ignoring the ethics of the matter, I suspect that those already in the field would consider that a form of protection and hence a union would take on gatekeeping functions.
  - brightball 9y ago
    Have you ever thought that programmer pay is as high as it is because of the lack of those protections? It's pretty well established that programmer interviewing is hard for businesses and when they get it wrong everybody needs to be able to part ways. The speed at which this field moved is almost entirely due to the lack of encumbrances. That includes having to pay a state licensing group to say you are professionally certified in Java, risking losing your job if you fail to renew on time, having the state lock out anybody from the profession who does not meet these requirements, having unions require these certifications and pressure companies to only hire based on them. It's a long, inefficient and useless money grab who's costs far outweigh the benefits.
bahman2000 9y ago
may be one way to fight age-ism in the industry
dkhenry 9y ago
I would hope not. I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers. I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process. Some times we call software development engineering, and if thats the case I would press anyone to show me an engineering discipline that parallels software engineering in terms of working conditions and relations.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Do you see Directors and Screenwriters as professionals? They belong to a union (the Director's Guild and the Writer's Guild, respectively).
- tptacek 9y ago
  Most professionals also belong to labor unions. They're just not called that; they're called professional associations.
  - gok 9y ago
    There are pretty huge differences between (say) the IEEE and the UAW. Collective bargaining, for example.
    - _jal 9y ago
      I think the GP was thinking more of the state Bars, the Federation of State Medical Boards, National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, etc. Those are not in the same category as the IEEE.
      - gok 9y ago
        Sure, boards which look after professional certifications do have more power, especially in jurisdictions that give those certifications legal power. But those boards still don’t typically negotiate wages or organize strikes.
wfo 9y ago
If they are smart, they should: right now they have a lot of power in the workplace because there is demand for them. This is a problem tech business owners have identified: programmers have too much power on the job relative to their bosses. They require good wages, they require too many benefits, they complain and sue when they are sexually harassed, they demand equity and to be treated well and refuse to accept the company asserting total ownership of their person in their contract, like non competes, binding arbitration, corporate ownership of every thought they have on the job or off. Could you imagine a company tracking every movement of every programmer at all times and automatically firing those who fail to "perform" according to certain metric? Does your eye linger too long on a comment relative to your peers? Fired. Did it take you too long to write this method this one time? Fired. This is the reality for Amazon warehouse workers and it could be for you, easily. But there is a solution (from the prospective of employers) for this "problem": every time you hear someone talk about "teaching everyone to code" or "the STEM shortage" (which absolutely does not exist -- there is a shortage of qualified programmers willing to work for $12/hr, a shortage of hard science PhDs willing to do menial lab work for 10$/hr) this is coded language for "let's make millions more programmers so that they become so commonplace they become a commodity and may be treated as such". As it turns out, programming is not that hard, anyone could do it if they learned. And they are learning. Programmers would be smart to unionize before this strategy succeeds, not after, it will be much easier while they still have power. But this requires social and political intelligence, and for programmers (who lean Libertarian up until the moment they get laid off or abused by their boss) to put their egos aside and disabuse themselves of the notion that they succeeded only because they are so much more brilliant than everyone else.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dkhenry 9y ago
  Your comment shows the real divide on unionization and its not about someone's political ideology, its fundamentally about how they view the profession. If like you said programmers should unionize before the army of $12/hour programmers arrives then what you are claiming is that software development could be done by someone who was trained and willing to accept $12 per hour. Essentially you are making the claim they are a common laborer much like a construction worker or delivery driver ( both of whom make more then $12/ hour ). If however you view software development as a profession requiring intelligence and a deep understanding of the subject matter then you don't care about the $12/hour laborers because they will never be able to replicate the work of a qualified professional. The people who don't want a union aren't resisting it because they want to live in some libertarian wet dream, they are resisting it because they see their profession as something that can't be reduced to common labor and they don't see a labor union as able to provide any benefits, as indeed they don't when you are dealing with a profession. The push to get people to unionize is not about workers rights its about putting technology professionals in the place business owners want them in. No one likes the idea that software is eating the world and there is a limited group of people , who are not the traditional power brokers, who are very well positioned to capitalize on that. They would much rather that software development become a commodity so they can continue their model of capital vs labor.
_jal 9y ago
I think this would be exactly the right time for tech-workers to unionize. Which means it won't happen. US tech workers currently have it great - I think they're somewhere close to a peak of negotiating power. That's when you want to negotiate. That's also when workers think there's no point in it. I think one thing that keeps tech engineers from unionizing is the "professional" label. Unions are iron workers, not professionals like me. I have two responses: (1) look at other professionals. Lawyers, doctors and accountants have unions, they just aren't call that. Think about it. (2) If you think your "professional" status is sticky without doing anything, take a look at programmer work conditions at overseas outsourcers. That is the future of the job if you don't do anything.
arjie 9y ago
I hope not. I've seen enough HNers talk about how they want immigrants out of the industry, and about how we should restrict the supply of programmers to keep pay high. No thanks. I don't want to baseline myself to a bunch of guys who can't get a good job when the market is as hot as it's been.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > I hope not. I've seen enough HNers talk about how they want immigrants out of the industry, and about how we should restrict the supply of programmers to keep pay high Incidentally, this is exactly what labor unions have spent their time doing for much of their history as incorporated organizations. Labor unions fought (successfully) to exclude immigrants from certain regions from immigrating, and even fought to retroactively strip them of citizenship, so that members could seize their property after they were deported. Labor unions fought to relocate Japanese-Americans during World War II, to create jobs for members, and then fought to prevent them from returning home. The current quota system for visas and immigration that tech people frequently complain about? That was the result of legislation that the AFL lobbied for decades ago. People don't like to talk about this, because it's an ugly chapter of labor history, but especially in this day and age, it's important to remember.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    They don't like to talk about it because it's entirely off the subject, here. It is extremely intellectually dishonest for you to say that, implying that a tech union would do such a thing.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > They don't like to talk about it because it's entirely off the subject, here. It is extremely intellectually dishonest for you to say that, implying that a tech union would do such a thing. Every time the topic of immigration and visas come up, the comments are flooded with racist comments and talk about how we need to make it harder for companies to hire people on H1Bs from Asia. The more overtly racist comments get flagged and removed, but the rest still stay. If anything, it's intellectually dishonest of you to suggest that these same people wouldn't actually fight to do that, given that's literally what they say they want to do.
curun1r 9y ago
My guess would be no. Unions work when labor is fungible. And while a business might view many tech employees that way, we've largely resisted seeing ourselves that way. We mythologize the 10x programmer and openly acknowledge that there is a large but hard-to-measure productivity difference between high performers and low performers. So why would a group that believes that put organizations in place that force businesses to treat and pay employees equally? Why would that group start to accept that years of service is a proxy for useful experience and ability? Fear of lawsuits mean that it's already too difficult to get rid of disruptive elements in an engineering team...are we really willing to make that process harder? Will the actual 10x programmers--the ones that have the data and recommendations on their CV to prove it--be willing to cede their individual negotiating power?
jasode 9y ago
>they've got such a nice position in the economy there's probably a bit of an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Is that correct? I'd say your intuition is basically correct. If we use average programmer's salary of $84k[1], that places the income in the top 30%. If we extend the statistics further to include Silicon Valley salaries of $200k+, that places them in the top 5%. I can't think of any unionization in labor history that originated with members in the top 5% of salaries. That includes unions in manufacturing, arts (film/tv), sports, transportation, etc. Yes, NFL & MLB players make a lot today but their unions happened before the advent of TV and playing pro sports was not a highly paid endeavor. (Early MLB players had to have 2nd jobs and share hotel rooms on the road.) As a thought experiment... one might argue that if the NFL were to restart today after the invention of TV, there would not be a players union. Instead the roster of 53 football players would be 53 independent contractors. Indeed, modern players in "sports" teams like eSports are mostly independent contractors. The technology of tv magnifies individuality (Tom Brady's face also sells cars & watches for endorsement deals). Today's marketability of the individual instead of the team would make it harder to convince 50%+ of players to elect union representation. (NASCAR drivers and UFC MMA fighters had/have grumblings about union representation that have gone nowhere so far. Also, they first have to switch to from independent contractors to employees -- which is another set of hurdles.) Some airline pilots (with seniority) are 5% salary but in the 1930s they weren't when the union formed. So, when would 50%+[2] programmers willing want to pay union dues -- say 1.5% (SAG) or 1.4% (UAW) of their salary?!? When the economic conditions of programmers match the poor conditions of the previous successful unionization efforts. We're obviously nowhere near that situation with software devs (even ones without college degrees) earning good salaries. Some other commenters recommend that now is the best time to unionize because the current times are good for programmers. My question to that is... has that ever happened in history? Basically, the main driver for unionization is economic conditions instead of ideological stance. If one believes more in the the ideology rather than economics, then yes it seems realistic to think that top-5% salary earners will vote themselves into a union. Since I emphasize economic conditions, I predict they won't -- at least not within the next 10 years. If a breakthrough AI happens to make programmers a commodity equal to burger flippers, the economics stresses on the profession changes which makes unionization more realistic. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+salary https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+salary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
If they do it will be like welders where union membership ties mostly to workplace and there's several professional associations that have certification systems and whether a particular cert is required is dependent on state regulations that pertain to the nature of the job.
gwbas1c 9y ago
We need professional organizations and licensing processes. Unions are for common laborers. The difference is that professionals bargain individually, because the jobs we do are specialized. Common laborers need unions for collective bargaining; because their work isn't specialized. So think of it more like: A tech company would only hire a licensed software engineer. The licensing process is mostly the tedium part of determining competency, so that the job interview is about mutual interest and personality fit. It then opens up more room for individual negotiation, because there is less of a competency risk when hiring. Unions and collective bargaining is for when there is very little competency risk when hiring.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I would hope they'd start. And there's no reason it has to be anything like a auto worker's union or anything like that. The Screen Actors Guild, the Director's Guild, and the Writer's Guild are all unions, and no one is complaining that SAG is hurting the ability of a "rockstar ninja actor/actress" from making huge amounts of money, which is the main complaint I hear about unions here.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > no one is complaining that SAG is hurting the ability of a "rockstar ninja actor/actress" from making huge amounts of money, which is the main complaint I hear about unions here. They absolutely do prevent lots of people from being hired the theater and film industry in the first place, which is a widespread complaint against them. Obviously the lucky few who do gain membership (which is intentionally difficult) make more money as a result of the constricted supply.
mlindner 9y ago
I laugh when people propose this. I moved to Silicon Valley from across the country because there are good opportunities to learn from companies here. If I'm forced into a union my company will shortly be going under so I'll just find a new job. Silicon Valley workers are already the most overpaid workers in the entire country. A similar job elsewhere pays 50%-75% what I make here. If you try to unionize to force wages higher, all this does is causes the exodus of companies from Silicon Valley even faster.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "Silicon Valley workers are already the most overpaid workers in the entire country." You're gonna have to provide evidence of that. And don't just quote a dollar amount, because that needs to be taken in context. That context being the amount of money the company makes, the value that the employee brings, the cost of living in the area, and other factors. "A similar job elsewhere pays 50%-75% what I make here." So what? It costs less in those areas. But that, to me, sounds like a bunch of people who haven't asked for what they're worth. "If you try to unionize to force wages higher, all this does is causes the exodus of companies from Silicon Valley even faster." Given the cost of living there, doubtful. And there are far more things to organize around besides wages.

readams 9y ago

Working in a union would be terrible. Can you imagine having to deal with seniority rules?

ryanworl 9y ago
A union is whatever the members want it to be. Just because traditional unions operate a certain way does not mean a union for tech workers has to operate the same way.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  How would a union help me at all?
  - eli 9y ago
    Is there anything you want from your employer that they don't already give you? If a lot of your fellow employees agree, it would be more powerful for you all to ask as a collective group rather than you to ask as a single employee.
  - AndrewDucker 9y ago
    Legal support if your company does something unpleasant to you. Pushing for better conditions/pay for you as part of improving them for everyone where you work.
  - ryanworl 9y ago
    I don't know if a union would help you specifically because I don't know who you are or who you work for. But in general, a union could negotiate the development practices you and your co-workers want. As an example, if you and your co-workers wanted one week per quarter devoted solely to paying back technical debt, your union could demand it. There is no reason why a union has to do anything in particular at all if you don't want it to. I'm not trying to tell you to join a union or not, just saying that a union as a legal structure does not require any of the tactics or goals as 20th century manufacturing or public sector unions.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      "There is no reason why a union has to do anything in particular at all if you don't want it to." Yes there it. If a union takes over the workforce of your company, now you have to follow the union rules. If unions were just opt in, them yes you'd be right. But unions are NOT opt in for many states. One you are a union shop, you are screwed if you disagree with the union.
      - Frondo 9y ago
        A union is also a democratically-run organization, so if you disagree with it, you have some recourse. A workplace is not democratically run, so if you disagree with it, you are also screwed, only this time you have no recourse.
        stale2002 9y ago
        I'd rather only get screwed by 1 group than have the possibility of being screwed by 2 groups. Voting and democracy doesn't help anything. I am just 1 vote. I'd rather have things negotiated between me, and only me and the other party.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        So between you, and the entirety of the company.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    One way to look at Hacker News is as a part-time ranked inventory of labor grievances for tech workers. Open offices. Draconian IP clauses. Opportunities for developers to become founders. Work-life balance. Remote work. People get hung up on this because most developers feel like their profession is well-compensated. And, they are. But so are doctors and lawyers, who also belong to professional associations. There's much more to bargain for than just wages.
    - TheCowboy 9y ago
      Adding another couple that are popular: better hiring and interviewing practices that don't over-burden applicants. Eliminating the number of rounds, better transparency about the overall hiring process, avoiding tests that are completely irrelevant to job performance. Better transparency regarding salary offerings, and a framework for individual negotiation that doesn't disadvantage certain groups. There are plenty of things a professional organization could excel at that don't require full-blown unionization.
    - euroclydon 9y ago
      Doctors are miserable from the micromanagement and metrics these days.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Legal backing if, say, you worked for Equifax, and refused to certify that their systems were secure, and they wanted to terminate you to shut you up.
- ryandvm 9y ago
  All unions, nay all power structures, naturally evolve to serve the interests of the _current_ members. Because of this, seniority-based benefits and insulating bad apples from termination are traits that almost always show up in every union through convergent evolution.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Your comment creates the impression that without unions, developers wouldn't have to deal with "power structures". But to a pretty good first approximation every technology firm in the industry is a "power structure" --- a rigid and overt one, at that --- run by financiers and owners. So it's hard to see what rank-and-file professionals would have to lose from exercising their own market power, at least in your analysis.
    - danielvf 9y ago
      And add a union to the current situation, and now you have two power structures over you, not one.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Yes, and you'll be a constituent of one of them, which is the argument for organizing.
        apsec112 9y ago
        Being a constituent doesn't necessarily mean anything. Eg., Eric Garner was a constituent of New York City. NYC is democratically governed, and he had an equal right to vote. It didn't help him very much.
        detcader 9y ago
        Being a constituent of X (in this context) means means X is expected to advocate for you. Thus Eric Garner wasn't a constituent of NYC, he was a constituent of his representatives, who may or may not have done a good job advocating for the safety of those interviewed or detained by the police. I don't see how constituency doesn't help here, because now we can hold reps responsible for advocating for better protection, whereas if no representative power structures existed in the US, what happened to Garner would happen all the time and we would still belong to Great Britain
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Just because traditional unions operate a certain way does not mean a union for tech workers has to operate the same way. Unions have all converged on operating the same way because the NLRA is very rigid, and over the decades, they've found a stable way of operating. Other operating structures have been tried over the last century, and all have failed except the current one. If anybody believes that a tech union under the NLRA would break this trend, especially while presumably still being affiliated with other traditional unions, then the burden would be on them to explain why the forces that drive other unions would somehow not apply to tech.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    The Screen Actor's Guild doesn't work that way.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > The Screen Actor's Guild doesn't work that way. SAG-AFTRA has been specially exempted from key provisions in labor law.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        You're gonna need to provide evidence.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 9y ago
No. But I can imagine a union without seniority rules.
s73ver_ 9y ago
A lot of places already have these, but informally. Also, why on earth do you think we'd have to? If no one wants them, why would we have them?

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

I honestly think programmers are just demonstrating that they skew politically inept by not unionizing. Well, not a union as such, but if you look at other professional degrees, almost all of them have powerful trade groups that represent the workers -- doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. I think it speaks more to political ineptitude and the newness of the field that programming doesn't even have the same support structures in place that engineers do.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
The downvotes speak volumes of the cognitive dissonance. Everone is fully in control of their destiny through their rugged individualism and bootstraps until they're laid off and packing up to head back home from SFBA because they have no worker protections. I suppose everyone has to learn the hard way (again) during the next downturn.
- psyc 9y ago
  The comment you're replying to conflated gatekeeping associations, which aim to keep people out of the field to bolster demand, with worker protections.
  - jejones3141 9y ago
    Ignoring the ethics of the matter, I suspect that those already in the field would consider that a form of protection and hence a union would take on gatekeeping functions.
- brightball 9y ago
  Have you ever thought that programmer pay is as high as it is because of the lack of those protections? It's pretty well established that programmer interviewing is hard for businesses and when they get it wrong everybody needs to be able to part ways. The speed at which this field moved is almost entirely due to the lack of encumbrances. That includes having to pay a state licensing group to say you are professionally certified in Java, risking losing your job if you fail to renew on time, having the state lock out anybody from the profession who does not meet these requirements, having unions require these certifications and pressure companies to only hire based on them. It's a long, inefficient and useless money grab who's costs far outweigh the benefits.

bahman2000 9y ago

may be one way to fight age-ism in the industry

dkhenry 9y ago

I would hope not. I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers. I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process. Some times we call software development engineering, and if thats the case I would press anyone to show me an engineering discipline that parallels software engineering in terms of working conditions and relations.

s73ver_ 9y ago
Do you see Directors and Screenwriters as professionals? They belong to a union (the Director's Guild and the Writer's Guild, respectively).
tptacek 9y ago
Most professionals also belong to labor unions. They're just not called that; they're called professional associations.
- gok 9y ago
  There are pretty huge differences between (say) the IEEE and the UAW. Collective bargaining, for example.
  - _jal 9y ago
    I think the GP was thinking more of the state Bars, the Federation of State Medical Boards, National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, etc. Those are not in the same category as the IEEE.
    - gok 9y ago
      Sure, boards which look after professional certifications do have more power, especially in jurisdictions that give those certifications legal power. But those boards still don’t typically negotiate wages or organize strikes.

wfo 9y ago

If they are smart, they should: right now they have a lot of power in the workplace because there is demand for them. This is a problem tech business owners have identified: programmers have too much power on the job relative to their bosses. They require good wages, they require too many benefits, they complain and sue when they are sexually harassed, they demand equity and to be treated well and refuse to accept the company asserting total ownership of their person in their contract, like non competes, binding arbitration, corporate ownership of every thought they have on the job or off. Could you imagine a company tracking every movement of every programmer at all times and automatically firing those who fail to "perform" according to certain metric? Does your eye linger too long on a comment relative to your peers? Fired. Did it take you too long to write this method this one time? Fired. This is the reality for Amazon warehouse workers and it could be for you, easily. But there is a solution (from the prospective of employers) for this "problem": every time you hear someone talk about "teaching everyone to code" or "the STEM shortage" (which absolutely does not exist -- there is a shortage of qualified programmers willing to work for $12/hr, a shortage of hard science PhDs willing to do menial lab work for 10$/hr) this is coded language for "let's make millions more programmers so that they become so commonplace they become a commodity and may be treated as such". As it turns out, programming is not that hard, anyone could do it if they learned. And they are learning. Programmers would be smart to unionize before this strategy succeeds, not after, it will be much easier while they still have power. But this requires social and political intelligence, and for programmers (who lean Libertarian up until the moment they get laid off or abused by their boss) to put their egos aside and disabuse themselves of the notion that they succeeded only because they are so much more brilliant than everyone else.

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dkhenry 9y ago
Your comment shows the real divide on unionization and its not about someone's political ideology, its fundamentally about how they view the profession. If like you said programmers should unionize before the army of $12/hour programmers arrives then what you are claiming is that software development could be done by someone who was trained and willing to accept $12 per hour. Essentially you are making the claim they are a common laborer much like a construction worker or delivery driver ( both of whom make more then $12/ hour ). If however you view software development as a profession requiring intelligence and a deep understanding of the subject matter then you don't care about the $12/hour laborers because they will never be able to replicate the work of a qualified professional. The people who don't want a union aren't resisting it because they want to live in some libertarian wet dream, they are resisting it because they see their profession as something that can't be reduced to common labor and they don't see a labor union as able to provide any benefits, as indeed they don't when you are dealing with a profession. The push to get people to unionize is not about workers rights its about putting technology professionals in the place business owners want them in. No one likes the idea that software is eating the world and there is a limited group of people , who are not the traditional power brokers, who are very well positioned to capitalize on that. They would much rather that software development become a commodity so they can continue their model of capital vs labor.

_jal 9y ago

I think this would be exactly the right time for tech-workers to unionize. Which means it won't happen. US tech workers currently have it great - I think they're somewhere close to a peak of negotiating power. That's when you want to negotiate. That's also when workers think there's no point in it. I think one thing that keeps tech engineers from unionizing is the "professional" label. Unions are iron workers, not professionals like me. I have two responses: (1) look at other professionals. Lawyers, doctors and accountants have unions, they just aren't call that. Think about it. (2) If you think your "professional" status is sticky without doing anything, take a look at programmer work conditions at overseas outsourcers. That is the future of the job if you don't do anything.

arjie 9y ago

I hope not. I've seen enough HNers talk about how they want immigrants out of the industry, and about how we should restrict the supply of programmers to keep pay high. No thanks. I don't want to baseline myself to a bunch of guys who can't get a good job when the market is as hot as it's been.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> I hope not. I've seen enough HNers talk about how they want immigrants out of the industry, and about how we should restrict the supply of programmers to keep pay high Incidentally, this is exactly what labor unions have spent their time doing for much of their history as incorporated organizations. Labor unions fought (successfully) to exclude immigrants from certain regions from immigrating, and even fought to retroactively strip them of citizenship, so that members could seize their property after they were deported. Labor unions fought to relocate Japanese-Americans during World War II, to create jobs for members, and then fought to prevent them from returning home. The current quota system for visas and immigration that tech people frequently complain about? That was the result of legislation that the AFL lobbied for decades ago. People don't like to talk about this, because it's an ugly chapter of labor history, but especially in this day and age, it's important to remember.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  They don't like to talk about it because it's entirely off the subject, here. It is extremely intellectually dishonest for you to say that, implying that a tech union would do such a thing.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > They don't like to talk about it because it's entirely off the subject, here. It is extremely intellectually dishonest for you to say that, implying that a tech union would do such a thing. Every time the topic of immigration and visas come up, the comments are flooded with racist comments and talk about how we need to make it harder for companies to hire people on H1Bs from Asia. The more overtly racist comments get flagged and removed, but the rest still stay. If anything, it's intellectually dishonest of you to suggest that these same people wouldn't actually fight to do that, given that's literally what they say they want to do.

curun1r 9y ago

My guess would be no. Unions work when labor is fungible. And while a business might view many tech employees that way, we've largely resisted seeing ourselves that way. We mythologize the 10x programmer and openly acknowledge that there is a large but hard-to-measure productivity difference between high performers and low performers. So why would a group that believes that put organizations in place that force businesses to treat and pay employees equally? Why would that group start to accept that years of service is a proxy for useful experience and ability? Fear of lawsuits mean that it's already too difficult to get rid of disruptive elements in an engineering team...are we really willing to make that process harder? Will the actual 10x programmers--the ones that have the data and recommendations on their CV to prove it--be willing to cede their individual negotiating power?

jasode 9y ago

>they've got such a nice position in the economy there's probably a bit of an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Is that correct? I'd say your intuition is basically correct. If we use average programmer's salary of $84k[1], that places the income in the top 30%. If we extend the statistics further to include Silicon Valley salaries of $200k+, that places them in the top 5%. I can't think of any unionization in labor history that originated with members in the top 5% of salaries. That includes unions in manufacturing, arts (film/tv), sports, transportation, etc. Yes, NFL & MLB players make a lot today but their unions happened before the advent of TV and playing pro sports was not a highly paid endeavor. (Early MLB players had to have 2nd jobs and share hotel rooms on the road.) As a thought experiment... one might argue that if the NFL were to restart today after the invention of TV, there would not be a players union. Instead the roster of 53 football players would be 53 independent contractors. Indeed, modern players in "sports" teams like eSports are mostly independent contractors. The technology of tv magnifies individuality (Tom Brady's face also sells cars & watches for endorsement deals). Today's marketability of the individual instead of the team would make it harder to convince 50%+ of players to elect union representation. (NASCAR drivers and UFC MMA fighters had/have grumblings about union representation that have gone nowhere so far. Also, they first have to switch to from independent contractors to employees -- which is another set of hurdles.) Some airline pilots (with seniority) are 5% salary but in the 1930s they weren't when the union formed. So, when would 50%+[2] programmers willing want to pay union dues -- say 1.5% (SAG) or 1.4% (UAW) of their salary?!? When the economic conditions of programmers match the poor conditions of the previous successful unionization efforts. We're obviously nowhere near that situation with software devs (even ones without college degrees) earning good salaries. Some other commenters recommend that now is the best time to unionize because the current times are good for programmers. My question to that is... has that ever happened in history? Basically, the main driver for unionization is economic conditions instead of ideological stance. If one believes more in the the ideology rather than economics, then yes it seems realistic to think that top-5% salary earners will vote themselves into a union. Since I emphasize economic conditions, I predict they won't -- at least not within the next 10 years. If a breakthrough AI happens to make programmers a commodity equal to burger flippers, the economics stresses on the profession changes which makes unionization more realistic. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+salary https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+salary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

If they do it will be like welders where union membership ties mostly to workplace and there's several professional associations that have certification systems and whether a particular cert is required is dependent on state regulations that pertain to the nature of the job.

gwbas1c 9y ago

We need professional organizations and licensing processes. Unions are for common laborers. The difference is that professionals bargain individually, because the jobs we do are specialized. Common laborers need unions for collective bargaining; because their work isn't specialized. So think of it more like: A tech company would only hire a licensed software engineer. The licensing process is mostly the tedium part of determining competency, so that the job interview is about mutual interest and personality fit. It then opens up more room for individual negotiation, because there is less of a competency risk when hiring. Unions and collective bargaining is for when there is very little competency risk when hiring.

s73ver_ 9y ago

I would hope they'd start. And there's no reason it has to be anything like a auto worker's union or anything like that. The Screen Actors Guild, the Director's Guild, and the Writer's Guild are all unions, and no one is complaining that SAG is hurting the ability of a "rockstar ninja actor/actress" from making huge amounts of money, which is the main complaint I hear about unions here.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> no one is complaining that SAG is hurting the ability of a "rockstar ninja actor/actress" from making huge amounts of money, which is the main complaint I hear about unions here. They absolutely do prevent lots of people from being hired the theater and film industry in the first place, which is a widespread complaint against them. Obviously the lucky few who do gain membership (which is intentionally difficult) make more money as a result of the constricted supply.

mlindner 9y ago

I laugh when people propose this. I moved to Silicon Valley from across the country because there are good opportunities to learn from companies here. If I'm forced into a union my company will shortly be going under so I'll just find a new job. Silicon Valley workers are already the most overpaid workers in the entire country. A similar job elsewhere pays 50%-75% what I make here. If you try to unionize to force wages higher, all this does is causes the exodus of companies from Silicon Valley even faster.

s73ver_ 9y ago
"Silicon Valley workers are already the most overpaid workers in the entire country." You're gonna have to provide evidence of that. And don't just quote a dollar amount, because that needs to be taken in context. That context being the amount of money the company makes, the value that the employee brings, the cost of living in the area, and other factors. "A similar job elsewhere pays 50%-75% what I make here." So what? It costs less in those areas. But that, to me, sounds like a bunch of people who haven't asked for what they're worth. "If you try to unionize to force wages higher, all this does is causes the exodus of companies from Silicon Valley even faster." Given the cost of living there, doubtful. And there are far more things to organize around besides wages.