8 ms·

Labor Board Backs Startup Engineers Fired for Unionizing

132 points by gingernaut 8y ago

zdragnar 8y ago
There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones. > The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, ... On the one hand, this sounds to me like they're probably struggling financially, and the unionization efforts would have put them in a worse spot. This is pure speculation, however, because the article kept focusing on the gender of the employees. Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mirimir 8y ago
  The following quote makes it clear: > “It became increasingly clear that their strategy was divide and conquer—flatter a handful of us in the hopes that we would go along with their plans, and not put up a fight when they fired half of our co-workers,” Westergard adds. But seriously, what were they thinking? How could they have been so blatant? > In mid-January, after most of the unit signed authorization cards to be represented by the union, Lanetix was informed and the union filed papers with the NLRB. Ten days later, the engineers were fired.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    That the firing of the whole staff was stupid and illegal was not in doubt, which is why I didn't really bother addressing it. Rather, I wish the article had bothered to answer your question. I can hypothesize all day that they were in financial trouble and making rash decisions as a result, but the author didn't bother trying to find the truth, only present a narrative.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      OK, maybe they were desperate. But couldn't they have admitted that, and tried to negotiate deals with their engineers? Although I guess it's arguable that they were trying, with the offers to senior staff. But still, it was poorly done.
- 2bitmachine 8y ago
  >There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones. This seemed pretty clear in the article? They tried to buy off senior male employees with extra stock options last minute. >Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism. It felt like there was a fair amount of detail to me. If anything, it exposed how much sexism in tech is something management sees as a useful wedge to divide and conquer workers.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    My point was that, without knowing the management's perspective, it's entirely possible that gender was merely a coincidence of having senior males available, and hiring junior females either because they were the best available or the company wanted to look diverse. Perhaps they were flagging and needed to cut the junior developers so the senior developers could focus on getting back on track. Either way, it's impossible to know, because without more details all we are left with is the agenda of an author who isn't interested in presenting the truth (or providing sufficient evidence to support it). Edit: consider the following scenario: you have a team of male developerd; maybe they were friends when they pitched the idea for a product to you. After a few months, there's a big backlog, and they want to hire junior developers to train and take off some of the pressure. To embrace diversity, you hire a bunch of women who recently graduated from a boot camp to round out your all white male staff. Fast forward a year. Everyone has become a tight knit team, but the pressure to deliver mounts. Instead of getting faster, they're all bogged down with refactors and endless pull request revisions of things that aren't working out. You are running out of money, so you decide to cut the junior developers, and try to bribe the senior devs with some of the cost savings to make up for all the extra hours they'll now be working. Uh oh! You're only firing the women! They all band together, oblivious to the fact that you literally won't be able to keep them all on. I'm not saying this is what happened. What happened could have been pure sexism and anti-labor mentality. BUT pushing such an agenda without KNOWING that is the case here doesn't do anyone any favors.
    - 8y ago
- adrr 8y ago
  Seems like very poor management and people skills. Also it's probably not a good idea to backstop a pre-product startup with bootcamp engineers regardless of gender. The foundation is set early on which is very costly to change. No wants to be changing data models and relationships when there are mission critical features that need to be done.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Is the implication that bootcamp engineers will come up with the wrong data models and relationships? I bet Hackbright teaches you more about SQL than my entire CS degree from MIT did. (I took a graduate-level database class for a few weeks before dropping it; apart from that, I can't remember anything else about databases in theory, let alone SQL and ORMs in practice.)
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      The origin of the education doesn't matter so much as the implied lack of real-world experience. I'd hazard a guess that a third of the engineers I've worked with had a CS degree, and in the world of web and mobile there aren't many places that matters. On the other hand, bootcamps in particular teach you a basic grasp of the "in" technologies that will look good on a resume. Having a few on your team is often a good thing. Having too many, or having too pressing of a deadline to properly mentor them is a terrible thing for everyone involved.
shagie 8y ago
I know I saw some stuff on this in the past... so past articles (oldest to newest) for contexts Joint Statement of Solidarity with Unjustly Fired Lanetix Workers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293823 (3 comments) https://medium.com/@techworkersco/joint-statement-of-solidarity-with-unjustly-fired-lanetix-workers-354daaa4b306 https://medium.com/@techworkersco/joint-statement-of-solidar... ---- Lanetix engineers bring case to NLRB claiming firings were illegal retaliation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469573 (1 comment) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/coders-want-to-unionize-with-help-from-trump https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/coders-wa... ---- Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16504247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16504247 (91 comments) https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company-fired-software-engineers-seeking-12541301.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company... ---- Software Engineers Fired for Attempt to Unionize https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815822 (10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16817501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16817501 (10 comments) https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unionization-campaign-firing/ https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unioniza... ---- Labor Board Backs Startup Engineers (at Lanetix) Who Were Fired for Unionizing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875865 (no comments) https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engineers-fired-unionizing/ https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engine...
fogetti 8y ago
> Despite their futuristic sheen, tech companies “actually operate like traditional industrialists and will go through old fashioned methods of suppressing workers,” he says. Spot on.
- briandear 8y ago
  And workers can quit. There are jobs everywhere.
  - Centigonal 8y ago
    and workers can also form unions if they want to. Why do you want to limit their freedoms?
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Exactly. I would consider myself pretty conservative and a little bit libertarian and I fully support the rights of workers to unionize. I dislike when governments get involved and starts forcing employees to join unions. But if you want to unionize, you have that right. If the companies don't want to play ball, they can fire you and waste time and money trying to hire an all new workforce.
      - repsilat 8y ago
        Union activities are essentially price-fixing. We let employees in unions "collude" and "exert anti-competitive influence" because we want to give them more market power relative to companies. When you talk about giving unions as free associations, it's fair to ask whether companies should share the same rights -- if tech workers can get together and agree not to work without a pay rise, shouldn't tech companies be allowed to get together and agree not to increase pay? I think if we're going to distinguish between those cases it should be on pragmatic grounds, because I don't think talking about principles (or any "natural right" divorced from the simple letter of the law) here is terribly useful.
        8y ago
scarejunba 8y ago
You've got to be stupid to retaliate against workers unionizing. They're going to get screwed. I don't think unionizing was going to save their jobs though. Looks like the business wasn't doing too well, and they were trying to jettison their juniormost engineers. The whole thing was probably going to go under.
- dan0- 8y ago
  Wal-Mart and ilk have been union busting for decades, this company likely thought they could get away with union busting just fine.
geofft 8y ago
A little bit of a tangent, but, > Earlier this month, after five years of organizing, security officers for companies including Facebook, Google, and Genentech, many of whom were making between $12 and $14 an hour, ratified their first union contract. They won wage increases of up to $1.20 per hour, better health care, and, for the first time, paid holidays. How is this rational? Do Facebook and Google believe they are facing no advanced persistent threats capable of bribing someone who lives in the Bay Area on $12/hour?
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Why would they care? Companies never seem to be held accountable for being hacked.
- mc32 8y ago
  Those folks do physical security. Aside from access to buildings and stuff they have access to little else, plus they have supervisors and people at the company who supervise them, plus doing weird things will trigger alerts and stuff, so I don't think they can do a lot beside ignore alarms for an intruder who would not have access to digital assets. Plus, NDAs are pretty powerful tools. I mean, if a guard lets you in, what are you gonna do, steal a laptop which is encrypted and requires 2FA? The only places which might have richer targets are research and prototyping facilities which I imagine have additional safeguards.
  - 2bitmachine 8y ago
    If they can’t do basic, physical security correctly, it kind of calls into question their broader approach? For example, I imagine it’s much easier to socially engineer yourself into other access once your inside the campus than from without.
  - eigenvector 8y ago
    What about getting into a data center and causing a service disruption by physically destroying equipment?
    - 8y ago
hyperpallium 8y ago
When the means of production is concentrated, some kind of worker combination is a logical response. But we're richer now, well-fed and well-entertained, so although the concentration is greater than ever (cf agrarian or industrial times), it's not as motivating.
ma2rten 8y ago
Tech companies used the same strategy in the 1970s, offering employees high salaries and sweet perks to make collective action less appetizing. That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp I am generally skeptical about bootcamps. In my experience they typically only teach very specific skills, but don't teach fundamental concepts. That makes it hard to pick up new skills, which is required from software engineers. Is it possible that this is the reason Lanetix was planning on firing them? EDIT: I took a look at the website of Hackbright. I'm very skeptical about this bootcamp. The bootcamps is 16k for 12 weeks. They seem to teach full-stack programming in 8 weeks (python, flask, postgres, html, css, javascript, jquery, git). That gives students about a half a week per technology. The last four weeks seem to be reserved only for interview prep and computer science fundamentals that are needed for interviews. Their website implies that the skills they teach will empower students to work at famous tech companies, e.g. "Companies that use Python include Google, Yelp and Dropbox to name a few. Mastering Python here will help you start thinking like an engineer. You can feel confident that you’ll walk out of the door ready to tackle any engineering role.".
- bitshepherd 8y ago
  > That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization. The inverse is exactly that, though. Higher wages give certain skilled individuals enough personal comfort to the point that they don't feel they need to stick their neck out for some group of randos. Sure, that $125k job with a small sack of RSUs looks pretty on paper, but break it down with all of the extra-curricular obligations, the occasional long week that happens a little too often, housing costs, commuting, and it doesn't look too appealing. Once you have enough 'highly' paid individuals in a group -- we'll cut the number at $100k, even though that's the poverty level in the Bay Area -- then a backbuilding narrative begins to create itself, that because 'everyone' is at a a certain level, it's kind of just okay. The trope of high demand, low supply of qualified individuals is pervasive in tech recruiting, to the point where some of the same individuals being oppressed question if there's an actual problem. It could also be explained away as that we're all just that unique and special, but that's stitching together another reality entirely. Instead of agreeing that fellow humans are being oppressed, we tech workers muse and question the merit of sticking together, for one another. We question the quality of one's skills or ability to comprehend with not another thought. We even sometimes question if we're overly compensated, when overt actions or results would prove otherwise.
Apocryphon 8y ago
I'm firmly convinced that tech workers will come around to unionizing once they accidentally reinvent it under a different name
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  What tangible benefits would the average tech worker get? What benefits would a FAANGer get? Not surprisingly I work in tech. I'm not morally opposed to unions - I just don't see how they would make my life any better.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Here's some issues that a collective advocacy organization could help with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221 Also: "Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them."
    - Fins 8y ago
      As a single data point, I worked at a union shop once. It wasn't very good.
  - jkaplowitz 8y ago
    I used to work at Google. Without going into specifics in this public of a forum, yes I've personally witnessed examples of unjustified pay disparities, due to arbitrary factors uncorrelated with job qualifications or performance. At the very least, collective assistance could be very useful at Google in negotiating fair compensation for new hires and in sustaining that fairness over time based on performance data. After all, Google has huge quantities of data to let them decide on compensation, the employees have extremely little and unevenly distributed access to similar data, and it doesn't feel like there is much opportunity to recover lost wages if you realize you've been underpaid compared to peers (aside from discrimination on illegal grounds). I presume the same would help at other tech companies. None of this requires the stereotypical fossilized rigidity that give unions a bad name, and I wouldn't want that either. Even in the US NLRA system that's not at all required.
phront 8y ago
Not sure about it but why do they want to establish a union? History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures. The cure that is much worse than the desease.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  It's interesting. When I think of unions, I think of corruption. But when I think of "Gewerkschaft" (simply the German word for union) I think of worker protection.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ajross 8y ago
  > History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures. Not the history that I learned. That's the kind of quip you get off of libertarian blogs. The real world labor movement was just a wee bit more nuanced and important. We're literally about to celebrate Labor Day for a reason that doesn't have much to do with "mafia-like structures".
dunpeal 8y ago
> The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp, as did the female engineer fired in November. What's the full story here? Layoffs typically happen when a company has cashflow issues preventing it from meeting payroll. "Low level" (read: low paid) employees of any kind are _not_ the first on the chopping block, but on the contrary, the higher paid employees who each cost x3-4 times or more. Moreover, why would they get rid of most/all female engineers like that? Among other problems, that would expose them to an open-and-shut discrimination case, since sex is a protected class. This, in conjunction with the fact they decided to pay the senior engineers even more, tells me there's something more to this story.
- gaius 8y ago
  there's something more to this story. Maybe I’m just hopelessly jejune but I find it hard to believe in 2018 moustache-twiddling top-hat wearing Capitalist fatcats were like bwahahaha let’s sack all the women. Of course they absolutely deserve to be sued into oblivion, I just don’t see the gender angle, correlation is not causation. Edit: oh I see, they were hired from a gender-segregated bootcamp. So sexism is baked into the company’s DNA.
adiusmus 8y ago
If you as a company have a HR department then complaining about unions is very hypocritical.

132 points by gingernaut 8y ago

There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones. > The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, ... On the one hand, this sounds to me like they're probably struggling financially, and the unionization efforts would have put them in a worse spot. This is pure speculation, however, because the article kept focusing on the gender of the employees. Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mirimir 8y ago
The following quote makes it clear: > “It became increasingly clear that their strategy was divide and conquer—flatter a handful of us in the hopes that we would go along with their plans, and not put up a fight when they fired half of our co-workers,” Westergard adds. But seriously, what were they thinking? How could they have been so blatant? > In mid-January, after most of the unit signed authorization cards to be represented by the union, Lanetix was informed and the union filed papers with the NLRB. Ten days later, the engineers were fired.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  That the firing of the whole staff was stupid and illegal was not in doubt, which is why I didn't really bother addressing it. Rather, I wish the article had bothered to answer your question. I can hypothesize all day that they were in financial trouble and making rash decisions as a result, but the author didn't bother trying to find the truth, only present a narrative.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    OK, maybe they were desperate. But couldn't they have admitted that, and tried to negotiate deals with their engineers? Although I guess it's arguable that they were trying, with the offers to senior staff. But still, it was poorly done.
2bitmachine 8y ago
>There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones. This seemed pretty clear in the article? They tried to buy off senior male employees with extra stock options last minute. >Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism. It felt like there was a fair amount of detail to me. If anything, it exposed how much sexism in tech is something management sees as a useful wedge to divide and conquer workers.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  My point was that, without knowing the management's perspective, it's entirely possible that gender was merely a coincidence of having senior males available, and hiring junior females either because they were the best available or the company wanted to look diverse. Perhaps they were flagging and needed to cut the junior developers so the senior developers could focus on getting back on track. Either way, it's impossible to know, because without more details all we are left with is the agenda of an author who isn't interested in presenting the truth (or providing sufficient evidence to support it). Edit: consider the following scenario: you have a team of male developerd; maybe they were friends when they pitched the idea for a product to you. After a few months, there's a big backlog, and they want to hire junior developers to train and take off some of the pressure. To embrace diversity, you hire a bunch of women who recently graduated from a boot camp to round out your all white male staff. Fast forward a year. Everyone has become a tight knit team, but the pressure to deliver mounts. Instead of getting faster, they're all bogged down with refactors and endless pull request revisions of things that aren't working out. You are running out of money, so you decide to cut the junior developers, and try to bribe the senior devs with some of the cost savings to make up for all the extra hours they'll now be working. Uh oh! You're only firing the women! They all band together, oblivious to the fact that you literally won't be able to keep them all on. I'm not saying this is what happened. What happened could have been pure sexism and anti-labor mentality. BUT pushing such an agenda without KNOWING that is the case here doesn't do anyone any favors.
  - 8y ago
adrr 8y ago
Seems like very poor management and people skills. Also it's probably not a good idea to backstop a pre-product startup with bootcamp engineers regardless of gender. The foundation is set early on which is very costly to change. No wants to be changing data models and relationships when there are mission critical features that need to be done.
- geofft 8y ago
  Is the implication that bootcamp engineers will come up with the wrong data models and relationships? I bet Hackbright teaches you more about SQL than my entire CS degree from MIT did. (I took a graduate-level database class for a few weeks before dropping it; apart from that, I can't remember anything else about databases in theory, let alone SQL and ORMs in practice.)
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    The origin of the education doesn't matter so much as the implied lack of real-world experience. I'd hazard a guess that a third of the engineers I've worked with had a CS degree, and in the world of web and mobile there aren't many places that matters. On the other hand, bootcamps in particular teach you a basic grasp of the "in" technologies that will look good on a resume. Having a few on your team is often a good thing. Having too many, or having too pressing of a deadline to properly mentor them is a terrible thing for everyone involved.

shagie 8y ago

I know I saw some stuff on this in the past... so past articles (oldest to newest) for contexts Joint Statement of Solidarity with Unjustly Fired Lanetix Workers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293823 (3 comments) https://medium.com/@techworkersco/joint-statement-of-solidarity-with-unjustly-fired-lanetix-workers-354daaa4b306 https://medium.com/@techworkersco/joint-statement-of-solidar... ---- Lanetix engineers bring case to NLRB claiming firings were illegal retaliation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469573 (1 comment) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/coders-want-to-unionize-with-help-from-trump https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/coders-wa... ---- Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16504247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16504247 (91 comments) https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company-fired-software-engineers-seeking-12541301.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company... ---- Software Engineers Fired for Attempt to Unionize https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815822 (10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16817501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16817501 (10 comments) https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unionization-campaign-firing/ https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unioniza... ---- Labor Board Backs Startup Engineers (at Lanetix) Who Were Fired for Unionizing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875865 (no comments) https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engineers-fired-unionizing/ https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engine...

fogetti 8y ago

> Despite their futuristic sheen, tech companies “actually operate like traditional industrialists and will go through old fashioned methods of suppressing workers,” he says. Spot on.

briandear 8y ago
And workers can quit. There are jobs everywhere.
- Centigonal 8y ago
  and workers can also form unions if they want to. Why do you want to limit their freedoms?
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Exactly. I would consider myself pretty conservative and a little bit libertarian and I fully support the rights of workers to unionize. I dislike when governments get involved and starts forcing employees to join unions. But if you want to unionize, you have that right. If the companies don't want to play ball, they can fire you and waste time and money trying to hire an all new workforce.
    - repsilat 8y ago
      Union activities are essentially price-fixing. We let employees in unions "collude" and "exert anti-competitive influence" because we want to give them more market power relative to companies. When you talk about giving unions as free associations, it's fair to ask whether companies should share the same rights -- if tech workers can get together and agree not to work without a pay rise, shouldn't tech companies be allowed to get together and agree not to increase pay? I think if we're going to distinguish between those cases it should be on pragmatic grounds, because I don't think talking about principles (or any "natural right" divorced from the simple letter of the law) here is terribly useful.
      - 8y ago

scarejunba 8y ago

You've got to be stupid to retaliate against workers unionizing. They're going to get screwed. I don't think unionizing was going to save their jobs though. Looks like the business wasn't doing too well, and they were trying to jettison their juniormost engineers. The whole thing was probably going to go under.

dan0- 8y ago
Wal-Mart and ilk have been union busting for decades, this company likely thought they could get away with union busting just fine.

geofft 8y ago

A little bit of a tangent, but, > Earlier this month, after five years of organizing, security officers for companies including Facebook, Google, and Genentech, many of whom were making between $12 and $14 an hour, ratified their first union contract. They won wage increases of up to $1.20 per hour, better health care, and, for the first time, paid holidays. How is this rational? Do Facebook and Google believe they are facing no advanced persistent threats capable of bribing someone who lives in the Bay Area on $12/hour?

jjoonathan 8y ago
Why would they care? Companies never seem to be held accountable for being hacked.
mc32 8y ago
Those folks do physical security. Aside from access to buildings and stuff they have access to little else, plus they have supervisors and people at the company who supervise them, plus doing weird things will trigger alerts and stuff, so I don't think they can do a lot beside ignore alarms for an intruder who would not have access to digital assets. Plus, NDAs are pretty powerful tools. I mean, if a guard lets you in, what are you gonna do, steal a laptop which is encrypted and requires 2FA? The only places which might have richer targets are research and prototyping facilities which I imagine have additional safeguards.
- 2bitmachine 8y ago
  If they can’t do basic, physical security correctly, it kind of calls into question their broader approach? For example, I imagine it’s much easier to socially engineer yourself into other access once your inside the campus than from without.
- eigenvector 8y ago
  What about getting into a data center and causing a service disruption by physically destroying equipment?
  - 8y ago

hyperpallium 8y ago

When the means of production is concentrated, some kind of worker combination is a logical response. But we're richer now, well-fed and well-entertained, so although the concentration is greater than ever (cf agrarian or industrial times), it's not as motivating.

ma2rten 8y ago

Tech companies used the same strategy in the 1970s, offering employees high salaries and sweet perks to make collective action less appetizing. That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp I am generally skeptical about bootcamps. In my experience they typically only teach very specific skills, but don't teach fundamental concepts. That makes it hard to pick up new skills, which is required from software engineers. Is it possible that this is the reason Lanetix was planning on firing them? EDIT: I took a look at the website of Hackbright. I'm very skeptical about this bootcamp. The bootcamps is 16k for 12 weeks. They seem to teach full-stack programming in 8 weeks (python, flask, postgres, html, css, javascript, jquery, git). That gives students about a half a week per technology. The last four weeks seem to be reserved only for interview prep and computer science fundamentals that are needed for interviews. Their website implies that the skills they teach will empower students to work at famous tech companies, e.g. "Companies that use Python include Google, Yelp and Dropbox to name a few. Mastering Python here will help you start thinking like an engineer. You can feel confident that you’ll walk out of the door ready to tackle any engineering role.".

bitshepherd 8y ago
> That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization. The inverse is exactly that, though. Higher wages give certain skilled individuals enough personal comfort to the point that they don't feel they need to stick their neck out for some group of randos. Sure, that $125k job with a small sack of RSUs looks pretty on paper, but break it down with all of the extra-curricular obligations, the occasional long week that happens a little too often, housing costs, commuting, and it doesn't look too appealing. Once you have enough 'highly' paid individuals in a group -- we'll cut the number at $100k, even though that's the poverty level in the Bay Area -- then a backbuilding narrative begins to create itself, that because 'everyone' is at a a certain level, it's kind of just okay. The trope of high demand, low supply of qualified individuals is pervasive in tech recruiting, to the point where some of the same individuals being oppressed question if there's an actual problem. It could also be explained away as that we're all just that unique and special, but that's stitching together another reality entirely. Instead of agreeing that fellow humans are being oppressed, we tech workers muse and question the merit of sticking together, for one another. We question the quality of one's skills or ability to comprehend with not another thought. We even sometimes question if we're overly compensated, when overt actions or results would prove otherwise.

Apocryphon 8y ago

I'm firmly convinced that tech workers will come around to unionizing once they accidentally reinvent it under a different name

oh_sigh 8y ago
What tangible benefits would the average tech worker get? What benefits would a FAANGer get? Not surprisingly I work in tech. I'm not morally opposed to unions - I just don't see how they would make my life any better.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Here's some issues that a collective advocacy organization could help with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221 Also: "Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them."
  - Fins 8y ago
    As a single data point, I worked at a union shop once. It wasn't very good.
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  I used to work at Google. Without going into specifics in this public of a forum, yes I've personally witnessed examples of unjustified pay disparities, due to arbitrary factors uncorrelated with job qualifications or performance. At the very least, collective assistance could be very useful at Google in negotiating fair compensation for new hires and in sustaining that fairness over time based on performance data. After all, Google has huge quantities of data to let them decide on compensation, the employees have extremely little and unevenly distributed access to similar data, and it doesn't feel like there is much opportunity to recover lost wages if you realize you've been underpaid compared to peers (aside from discrimination on illegal grounds). I presume the same would help at other tech companies. None of this requires the stereotypical fossilized rigidity that give unions a bad name, and I wouldn't want that either. Even in the US NLRA system that's not at all required.

phront 8y ago

Not sure about it but why do they want to establish a union? History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures. The cure that is much worse than the desease.

Semaphor 8y ago
It's interesting. When I think of unions, I think of corruption. But when I think of "Gewerkschaft" (simply the German word for union) I think of worker protection.
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ajross 8y ago
> History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures. Not the history that I learned. That's the kind of quip you get off of libertarian blogs. The real world labor movement was just a wee bit more nuanced and important. We're literally about to celebrate Labor Day for a reason that doesn't have much to do with "mafia-like structures".

dunpeal 8y ago

> The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp, as did the female engineer fired in November. What's the full story here? Layoffs typically happen when a company has cashflow issues preventing it from meeting payroll. "Low level" (read: low paid) employees of any kind are _not_ the first on the chopping block, but on the contrary, the higher paid employees who each cost x3-4 times or more. Moreover, why would they get rid of most/all female engineers like that? Among other problems, that would expose them to an open-and-shut discrimination case, since sex is a protected class. This, in conjunction with the fact they decided to pay the senior engineers even more, tells me there's something more to this story.

gaius 8y ago
there's something more to this story. Maybe I’m just hopelessly jejune but I find it hard to believe in 2018 moustache-twiddling top-hat wearing Capitalist fatcats were like bwahahaha let’s sack all the women. Of course they absolutely deserve to be sued into oblivion, I just don’t see the gender angle, correlation is not causation. Edit: oh I see, they were hired from a gender-segregated bootcamp. So sexism is baked into the company’s DNA.

adiusmus 8y ago

If you as a company have a HR department then complaining about unions is very hypocritical.