9 ms·

I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. A past job, I automated away jobs at $0.10 on the dollar and made a healthy salary

I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. A past job, I automated away jobs at $0.10 on the dollar and made a healthy salary, but it obviously was 1/10th of what I was worth. I left that company and all those jobs are still automated away and the more the company grows, the more they save. Also a tech union could push for perks like developer offices, remote work, better work equipment, etc. If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to do, but don't know how to do. Now is the time to do it too, US businesses are pulling back on offshore labor and bringing work back to the US.

zjaffee 9y ago
It 100% would raise the wages of tech workers, but it could also hurt the stock price of many tech companies from which many senior employees make such kinds of wages anyways. Additionally, there is complexity around where goods are produced and where they are sold in regards to taxes, so some of these numbers I will list aren't exactly simple. But anyways, Apple makes 600k in profit a year per employee, meaning they can increase the salary of every employee in the company by 400k (ignoring tax issues) and still turn a crazy large profit. Companies such as Google and Facebook have a revenue per employee that is well over 1 billion dollars, and in turn could theoretically return that money to their employees rather than putting it towards some of the other expenses that they do. However, due to stock compensation, it is for the benefit of existing employees that these companies do focus on continuing to monopolize.
- scarmig 9y ago
  > a revenue per employee that is well over 1 billion dollars ...
  - sologoub 9y ago
    These figures are from 2015 numbers, so a bit old. No billions per employee, but still not too terrible: http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple-facebook-google-others-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple... Apple is listed at $2.1 mil/employee, Google at $1.2 mil, FB at $1 .4 mil.
stale2002 9y ago
This isn't really a good thing. Unions do things like engage in age discrimination by favoring senior members over all else. They do things like throw up oppressive barriers to entry, and limited licenses, in order to F over everyone who is not already in the club. Unions are only a good idea for exceptional 1 size fits all situations. For example, there are only a couple major airlines in the industry, and if you get fired or leave, your career is permanently messed up, even though you spent a decade training to be a pilot and getting the necessary flight hours. In this kind of situation, where an airline has excessive bargaining power, and workers have no other option, a pilots union makes sense. Even though a pilot job is a high skilled position. But for tech? No way. Engaging in collective bargaining to get the small amount of negotiation power just isn't worth the drawbacks of a 1 size fits all solution.
- Clubber 9y ago
  >Unions do things like engage in age discrimination by favoring senior members over all else. I think you mean unions negotiate for relatively higher pay for people who have been with the company longer, or with more experience, but it would also negotiate higher pay for new hires relative to a non-union shop. You're also thinking of manufacturing unions. I suspect a tech union would be a little different. Things like The Writer's Guild are also unions. I'd certainly be willing to try it. I suspect pay would at least double. I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. Unions would help that problem. Unions would also prevent offshoring which drives down wages.
  - morgante 9y ago
    > I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. By what metric? Software developers can make $250k+ in SV. I have a hard time imagining pay doubling broadly. Only a small cohort of employers could sustain paying engineers $500k+, though I suppose it is possible.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      Software developers wages have stagnated for at least the last 10 years. http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread/81424.html http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread/81424.html So I'll ask again, since developers are in such high demand, why do you think wages haven't increased?
morgante 9y ago
> I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. By what mechanism? Either they engage in collective bargaining, which is filled with problems, or artificially constrict the supply of labor by requiring additional licensing. Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. From where I'm standing, the current system works very well and is about as free as a labor market can be. I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there involved talking to about two dozen companies, narrowing those down to 6 or 7 offers and having each company submit a bid (initial offer). I pruned off the bottom half and had the top 2-3 companies submit revised bids based on competitor info and ultimately chose a company which offered a great mix of compensation and role/culture. At no point in the process do I think having someone else do negotiation for me would have increased my pay. In fact, I'm convinced that any collective bargaining arrangement would mean a significant reduction in my compensation—for one thing, every "open salary" calculator I've seen proposes a salary about half of what I make. Formulaic salaries help low performers and hurt high performers. > If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to do, but don't know how to do. I don't need a union to do that. I certainly don't need a union with collective bargaining to do that. Tech "unions" might make sense to enshrine certain ethical principles, but I would not expect a union to increase my pay—and would vote against any one which promised that.
- Clubber 9y ago
  >Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. Since there is a short supply of software engineers, why do you think wages haven't risen? >every "open salary" calculator I've seen proposes a salary about half of what I make. Formulaic salaries help low performers and hurt high performers. I suspect that's because businesses manipulate that so they can hire offshore workers cheaper. H1B mandates that they pay at least industry wages (or something like that). If the business declares the industry wages artificially low, they can hire cheap tech workers. Unions would prevent that. >At no point in the process do I think having someone else do negotiation for me would have increased my pay. Maybe, maybe not. It sure works well for NFL players. I seriously doubt you are getting a tenth of what you make for the company. There's only so far you can go by yourself. >I don't need a union to do that. I certainly don't need a union with collective bargaining to do that. You can ask until your are blue in the face, but you will probably be ignored at most places. Also, you wouldn't have to fight for 6 months to get a decent monitor, it will just be there. >but I would not expect a union to increase my pay—and would vote against any one which promised that. That's not very good business sense. You should at least ask them to prove it before you flatly deny it. Let me ask you this, say you owned your own company and you partnered with another company on a joint venture. Do you think it would be a good negotiation if your company only got 1/100th of the profits of the joint venture? That's probably what you are getting now. Sounds like you've sold yourself short and you either don't realize it, or you want to believe you are a good negotiator. You may be a good negotiator as an individual, but you just don't have the power of a group. Why do you think political parties exist? Group power always trumps individual power.
tomohawk 9y ago
Eastman Kodak was a technology innovator. Where are they now? Unions were/are a huge drag on them. In order to 'protect' workers, unions define job functions. This prevents an engineer from being moved over to bathroom cleaner. However, it also locks people into job descriptions that may have made sense at one time, but no longer do. It also makes the business unable to respond flexibly to new conditions. A friend of mine worked at Kodak. It took months to get a photocopier installed because the movers were unionized, and they wouldn't move the old one because it was plugged in. Only the unionized electricians were allowed to unplug it.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Non-unionized workplaces can also have ridiculous, bureaucratic rules.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Ya, I've heard stories about people getting in trouble for moving a printer because it's a union job. Like I said before, not all unions are the same, just like not all developers are the same. BTW, unions didn't kill Kodak. Executives love to blame unions for their own ineptitude. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/what-killed-kodak/250925/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/what-ki...
- Daishiman 9y ago
  IBM is not unionized and has fought unionization since forever. They didn't need unions to have ridiculous rules pegging people into hyper-specific roles at the cost of productivity. If the company cared about that being a huge drag on productivity, it would bring it up with the unions. Pathological management is around everywhere.
sushid 9y ago
Value add is not always how people get paid. For instance, say a GOOG/FB/APPL driver drives 100+ engineers and saves them 100 hours/ride on commuting time. That doesn't mean that the driver reasonably deserves the cost of 100 hours of engineering time per ride even though he does provide that service. But yes, I do agree that it would significantly raise the wages if we were able to collectively bargain.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > Value add is not always how people get paid. It's never how people get paid, at least not on the open market. You get paid based on what the market will bear for your skills, based on supply and demand. If you have the unique skill to create exceptional Renaissance Italian stained glass then you may be paid a mint if there is demand, or you may he waiting tables if not. Same thing if you are an expert in Vax machines.
ryandrake 9y ago
As someone who's lived through two awful tech downturns so far, now is also the time because the going is relatively good. People will be wishing they did the next time tech downturns and the layoffs begin...
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Do you want the layoffs to be based solely on your union seniority number rather your individual value to the on-going company?
  - Clubber 9y ago
    You give companies too much credit. When it comes to layoff time, most companies don't know or don't care what your individual value is. They need to make a number and will cut whatever they think they can to make that number. Most of the time, if they actually try to "rightsize," which isn't that often, it's the new guys who don't have the domain knowledge or the expensive guys who are assholes and redundant. This goes back to my favorite adage: 1. Be good at your job 2. Don't be an asshole
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      Those two points are undeniably sound advice, simple to state, and hard for some people to apply.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        Indeed.

zjaffee 9y ago

It 100% would raise the wages of tech workers, but it could also hurt the stock price of many tech companies from which many senior employees make such kinds of wages anyways. Additionally, there is complexity around where goods are produced and where they are sold in regards to taxes, so some of these numbers I will list aren't exactly simple. But anyways, Apple makes 600k in profit a year per employee, meaning they can increase the salary of every employee in the company by 400k (ignoring tax issues) and still turn a crazy large profit. Companies such as Google and Facebook have a revenue per employee that is well over 1 billion dollars, and in turn could theoretically return that money to their employees rather than putting it towards some of the other expenses that they do. However, due to stock compensation, it is for the benefit of existing employees that these companies do focus on continuing to monopolize.

scarmig 9y ago
> a revenue per employee that is well over 1 billion dollars ...
- sologoub 9y ago
  These figures are from 2015 numbers, so a bit old. No billions per employee, but still not too terrible: http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple-facebook-google-others-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple... Apple is listed at $2.1 mil/employee, Google at $1.2 mil, FB at $1 .4 mil.

stale2002 9y ago

This isn't really a good thing. Unions do things like engage in age discrimination by favoring senior members over all else. They do things like throw up oppressive barriers to entry, and limited licenses, in order to F over everyone who is not already in the club. Unions are only a good idea for exceptional 1 size fits all situations. For example, there are only a couple major airlines in the industry, and if you get fired or leave, your career is permanently messed up, even though you spent a decade training to be a pilot and getting the necessary flight hours. In this kind of situation, where an airline has excessive bargaining power, and workers have no other option, a pilots union makes sense. Even though a pilot job is a high skilled position. But for tech? No way. Engaging in collective bargaining to get the small amount of negotiation power just isn't worth the drawbacks of a 1 size fits all solution.

Clubber 9y ago
>Unions do things like engage in age discrimination by favoring senior members over all else. I think you mean unions negotiate for relatively higher pay for people who have been with the company longer, or with more experience, but it would also negotiate higher pay for new hires relative to a non-union shop. You're also thinking of manufacturing unions. I suspect a tech union would be a little different. Things like The Writer's Guild are also unions. I'd certainly be willing to try it. I suspect pay would at least double. I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. Unions would help that problem. Unions would also prevent offshoring which drives down wages.
- morgante 9y ago
  > I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. By what metric? Software developers can make $250k+ in SV. I have a hard time imagining pay doubling broadly. Only a small cohort of employers could sustain paying engineers $500k+, though I suppose it is possible.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    Software developers wages have stagnated for at least the last 10 years. http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread/81424.html http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread/81424.html So I'll ask again, since developers are in such high demand, why do you think wages haven't increased?

morgante 9y ago

> I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. By what mechanism? Either they engage in collective bargaining, which is filled with problems, or artificially constrict the supply of labor by requiring additional licensing. Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. From where I'm standing, the current system works very well and is about as free as a labor market can be. I just accepted a new job and the process of getting there involved talking to about two dozen companies, narrowing those down to 6 or 7 offers and having each company submit a bid (initial offer). I pruned off the bottom half and had the top 2-3 companies submit revised bids based on competitor info and ultimately chose a company which offered a great mix of compensation and role/culture. At no point in the process do I think having someone else do negotiation for me would have increased my pay. In fact, I'm convinced that any collective bargaining arrangement would mean a significant reduction in my compensation—for one thing, every "open salary" calculator I've seen proposes a salary about half of what I make. Formulaic salaries help low performers and hurt high performers. > If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to do, but don't know how to do. I don't need a union to do that. I certainly don't need a union with collective bargaining to do that. Tech "unions" might make sense to enshrine certain ethical principles, but I would not expect a union to increase my pay—and would vote against any one which promised that.

Clubber 9y ago
>Considering there is already a shortage of software engineers, constricting it further is unlikely to be net positive. Since there is a short supply of software engineers, why do you think wages haven't risen? >every "open salary" calculator I've seen proposes a salary about half of what I make. Formulaic salaries help low performers and hurt high performers. I suspect that's because businesses manipulate that so they can hire offshore workers cheaper. H1B mandates that they pay at least industry wages (or something like that). If the business declares the industry wages artificially low, they can hire cheap tech workers. Unions would prevent that. >At no point in the process do I think having someone else do negotiation for me would have increased my pay. Maybe, maybe not. It sure works well for NFL players. I seriously doubt you are getting a tenth of what you make for the company. There's only so far you can go by yourself. >I don't need a union to do that. I certainly don't need a union with collective bargaining to do that. You can ask until your are blue in the face, but you will probably be ignored at most places. Also, you wouldn't have to fight for 6 months to get a decent monitor, it will just be there. >but I would not expect a union to increase my pay—and would vote against any one which promised that. That's not very good business sense. You should at least ask them to prove it before you flatly deny it. Let me ask you this, say you owned your own company and you partnered with another company on a joint venture. Do you think it would be a good negotiation if your company only got 1/100th of the profits of the joint venture? That's probably what you are getting now. Sounds like you've sold yourself short and you either don't realize it, or you want to believe you are a good negotiator. You may be a good negotiator as an individual, but you just don't have the power of a group. Why do you think political parties exist? Group power always trumps individual power.

tomohawk 9y ago

Eastman Kodak was a technology innovator. Where are they now? Unions were/are a huge drag on them. In order to 'protect' workers, unions define job functions. This prevents an engineer from being moved over to bathroom cleaner. However, it also locks people into job descriptions that may have made sense at one time, but no longer do. It also makes the business unable to respond flexibly to new conditions. A friend of mine worked at Kodak. It took months to get a photocopier installed because the movers were unionized, and they wouldn't move the old one because it was plugged in. Only the unionized electricians were allowed to unplug it.

emodendroket 9y ago
Non-unionized workplaces can also have ridiculous, bureaucratic rules.
Clubber 9y ago
Ya, I've heard stories about people getting in trouble for moving a printer because it's a union job. Like I said before, not all unions are the same, just like not all developers are the same. BTW, unions didn't kill Kodak. Executives love to blame unions for their own ineptitude. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/what-killed-kodak/250925/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/what-ki...
Daishiman 9y ago
IBM is not unionized and has fought unionization since forever. They didn't need unions to have ridiculous rules pegging people into hyper-specific roles at the cost of productivity. If the company cared about that being a huge drag on productivity, it would bring it up with the unions. Pathological management is around everywhere.

sushid 9y ago

Value add is not always how people get paid. For instance, say a GOOG/FB/APPL driver drives 100+ engineers and saves them 100 hours/ride on commuting time. That doesn't mean that the driver reasonably deserves the cost of 100 hours of engineering time per ride even though he does provide that service. But yes, I do agree that it would significantly raise the wages if we were able to collectively bargain.

forapurpose 9y ago
> Value add is not always how people get paid. It's never how people get paid, at least not on the open market. You get paid based on what the market will bear for your skills, based on supply and demand. If you have the unique skill to create exceptional Renaissance Italian stained glass then you may be paid a mint if there is demand, or you may he waiting tables if not. Same thing if you are an expert in Vax machines.

ryandrake 9y ago

As someone who's lived through two awful tech downturns so far, now is also the time because the going is relatively good. People will be wishing they did the next time tech downturns and the layoffs begin...

sokoloff 9y ago
Do you want the layoffs to be based solely on your union seniority number rather your individual value to the on-going company?
- Clubber 9y ago
  You give companies too much credit. When it comes to layoff time, most companies don't know or don't care what your individual value is. They need to make a number and will cut whatever they think they can to make that number. Most of the time, if they actually try to "rightsize," which isn't that often, it's the new guys who don't have the domain knowledge or the expensive guys who are assholes and redundant. This goes back to my favorite adage: 1. Be good at your job 2. Don't be an asshole
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    Those two points are undeniably sound advice, simple to state, and hard for some people to apply.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      Indeed.