5 ms·

There's a lot of words, in the article and the comments, about being compensated for on-call time. The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I

by ken 8y ago

There's a lot of words, in the article and the comments, about being compensated for on-call time. The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. Protecting your time is one feature that unions offer. Want to be paid for every hour you're on call? Get the union to put it in their rules for employers. The alternative we have now is that each developer is responsible for negotiating this into their contract on their own -- even though they probably have little or no experience with legal contracts. (Dammit, Jim, I'm a programmer, not a contract lawyer!) I'm surprised that software professionals have opted for a solution that necessitates each person solving the same problem each time it comes up. It's like manual memory allocation but for employment contracts. We just assume everyone is always perfectly competent at this skill, and if they aren't, it's all on them!

msla 8y ago
> The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. A few ideas, not in any specific order: It would kill start-ups, wouldn't it? If you have to obey union rules, you can't have one person who's the DBA and the project lead and the primary programmer and and and because those are all different jobs and require different union employees. Great if you're Microsoft and can afford it, but otherwise... What would it do to Open Source and Free Software? Can it be Union-Certified if it's made by people who aren't all being paid? If a company has to Look For The Union Label, as the song goes, is it going to be allowed to use software which comes from outside the corporate sphere? Related to the above, what would happen to hobbyist programming? Would it be regulated out of existence entirely, or merely relegated to people writing software nobody's allowed to use because it was made off-the-clock?
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Only union members, and employers with significant numbers of union employees, are bound to obey union rules. The union negotiates their contracts. If the union so desires, it could state that no union member may do all the aforementioned jobs at once unless they have at minimum an indelible 5% ownership stake in the company; bear the title of Chief Technical Officer; report only to the CEO, COO, or directly to the board; and have no employee subordinates. It sets the expectations for any company wanting to do that. Any company wishing to ignore it can still hire non-union employees, but the union employees are instructed to embargo any company that does not meet the standards for employment. Hobby projects are irrelevant. There is no employer. Unions are a cartel for paid labor by employees, where there may be a power imbalance between owners, managers, and laborers. In a hobby project, the worker is always the owner. FOSS is likely unaffected. Any employer that has FOSS projects is already reined in by the threat of forks. In the extreme case, the union could manage their own forks of FOSS projects, and refuse to merge changes that don't meet union criteria. It isn't about whether anyone is paid, but about whether everyone is following the cartel rules.
- ken 8y ago
  I suggested one benefit of a union: pay for on-call hours. You've extrapolated from this at least 3 or 4 other rules that I never mentioned, and which I've never heard of, and which make no sense to me. Where is all this coming from? Why would the union rules require separate people for two positions? Why would this be relevant to open source and free software? Why would it be relevant to hobbyists? And so on. I just don't see these problems in other fields. There's unions for actors, and stagehands, and janitors, but I still have a local amateur theatre in my neighborhood, and the lighting director sweeps the floors when that needs doing. Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men. That makes me believe that it's the right track.
  - msla 8y ago
    > Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men. You refused to understand my post and downvoted to disagree. Your position is, therefore, refuted by your own dishonesty.
onemoresoop 8y ago
But being on call and suddenly having to fix an urgent issue takes the more energy: warm-up energy, context switching from dining with the family or playing with the kids, or being woken up from sleep. How can that be calculated so that nobody gets taken advantage of? And there's a downside, if being on call becomes profitable, say pays 2X or something like that, I bet new urgent issues would be engineered so that they're taken care of while on call time.
thanatropism 8y ago
If Silly Valley was run like Hollywood, you'd have Version Control Engineers as a class and no one with their Version Control's Guild cards would have any say in that field. (With how Hollywood is run, you might as well have While Loop Engineers.)
- notJim 8y ago
  I think you're exaggerating a bit. Making movies is multi-disciplinary, where sound vs visuals vs set design are largely different skillsets at the higher levels. Sounds similar to engineering vs design vs product management to me.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Sure. But at least at my startup 3 of 5 founders are able programmers, two of five are able mathematicians (important to our R&D process), two of five have extensive strategy and financial consulting experience and one was a manager for a long time. So... we switch hats a lot. In the last six months I've been (a) deep into research, producing basically Beamer slidesets; (b) implementing that research in Python; (c) spearheaded the basic product design process, albeit based on the whole team's insight (my lemma was "I'm basically an anthropologist trying to make sense of what everyone's been saying", although I made significant calls (d) pitching in with front-end programming in Angular when our third party provider pooped out and it got to crunch time and (e) spent deep time writing finance spreadsheets and valuation models. It's a tight ship and I'm not even the most multi-talented person in the crew.
- ken 8y ago
  Hollywood isn't the only union in the world, and from what I can tell, it's unique in its manner of operation. Is there any other trade union which has "cards" like that?
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Occupations aren't usually that narrowly defined. Hollywood is something of a strawman in debates about unions, but then - Hollywood is closer to Silly Valley geographically than most typical cases of heavy unionization.
_ah 8y ago
A union is a mechanism by which a class of people with less power (typically workers) pool together to enforce rules on people with more power (typically employers). Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. Companies are constantly courting devs, offering very high salaries, and including incredible perks that simply aren't available in most other industries. Yes, some engineers are exploited, but on average the power lies with the employees. When you think of all the "union overhead": voting on contracts, complying to work rules, occasionally going on strike, there just isn't enough pain to make that worth it. Yes, I might work too much overtime and go on call at bad hours, but I can also leave and get a new job relatively quickly, and get paid a lot to work in a climate-controlled environment with free drinks and food. A real software union will arise if and only if it becomes necessary. If somehow everyone is automated out of a job and the few engineers left feel that their very existence is at risk, and the few employers remaining ruthlessly exploit those engineers for minimal pay and benefits, THEN people will fight back (and a union is one possible strategy for this fight). Until then it's a waste of effort.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- notJim 8y ago
  > Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. This is actually not true in my experience. Having a high salary and perks isn't the same as having power. On-call is a perfect example where, AFAIK, it's not the norm to get paid for it (as a developer at least), and if you don't like it, you're free to get a new job. Except the new job will likely have the same policy. There are other work-life examples: for example, I've tried to find a part-time job, and to get jobs to offer me more vacation time in lieu of higher pay. Both of these are more common in countries with strong unions, but I've never been able to get them here.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    Except the new job will likely have the same policy. Nonsense. There are a bazillion software companies out there and most look nothing alike. If on-call is a dealbreaker for you, just ask the right questions and be clear up front. And if you want to work part time, consider contracting.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
Ugh, please no. This interacts poorly with paid leave, and gives management an extra tool of coercion. This has happened with police work and overtime - if you piss off your boss as a cop, you stop getting overtime allocated to you, and wind up getting a pretty significant pay reduction. Or if you get put on paid administrative leave, well, that doesn't include overtime, so that's also a significant pay reduction for police officers. IMHO the real selling point for a software union would be a union-sponsored tax advantaged retirement plan that is ruthlessly optimized to being employee favored. Lots of startups don't have retirement plans or have shitty ones. Furthermore, lots of companies run into issues with non-discrimination testing for "highly compensated" line engineers. If you get things set up with a multi-employer plan with a pretty lightweight collective bargaining agreement for employers to sign, you can get significant tax advantages.

by ken 8y ago

msla 8y ago

> The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. A few ideas, not in any specific order: It would kill start-ups, wouldn't it? If you have to obey union rules, you can't have one person who's the DBA and the project lead and the primary programmer and and and because those are all different jobs and require different union employees. Great if you're Microsoft and can afford it, but otherwise... What would it do to Open Source and Free Software? Can it be Union-Certified if it's made by people who aren't all being paid? If a company has to Look For The Union Label, as the song goes, is it going to be allowed to use software which comes from outside the corporate sphere? Related to the above, what would happen to hobbyist programming? Would it be regulated out of existence entirely, or merely relegated to people writing software nobody's allowed to use because it was made off-the-clock?

logfromblammo 8y ago
Only union members, and employers with significant numbers of union employees, are bound to obey union rules. The union negotiates their contracts. If the union so desires, it could state that no union member may do all the aforementioned jobs at once unless they have at minimum an indelible 5% ownership stake in the company; bear the title of Chief Technical Officer; report only to the CEO, COO, or directly to the board; and have no employee subordinates. It sets the expectations for any company wanting to do that. Any company wishing to ignore it can still hire non-union employees, but the union employees are instructed to embargo any company that does not meet the standards for employment. Hobby projects are irrelevant. There is no employer. Unions are a cartel for paid labor by employees, where there may be a power imbalance between owners, managers, and laborers. In a hobby project, the worker is always the owner. FOSS is likely unaffected. Any employer that has FOSS projects is already reined in by the threat of forks. In the extreme case, the union could manage their own forks of FOSS projects, and refuse to merge changes that don't meet union criteria. It isn't about whether anyone is paid, but about whether everyone is following the cartel rules.
ken 8y ago
I suggested one benefit of a union: pay for on-call hours. You've extrapolated from this at least 3 or 4 other rules that I never mentioned, and which I've never heard of, and which make no sense to me. Where is all this coming from? Why would the union rules require separate people for two positions? Why would this be relevant to open source and free software? Why would it be relevant to hobbyists? And so on. I just don't see these problems in other fields. There's unions for actors, and stagehands, and janitors, but I still have a local amateur theatre in my neighborhood, and the lighting director sweeps the floors when that needs doing. Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men. That makes me believe that it's the right track.
- msla 8y ago
  > Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men. You refused to understand my post and downvoted to disagree. Your position is, therefore, refuted by your own dishonesty.

onemoresoop 8y ago

But being on call and suddenly having to fix an urgent issue takes the more energy: warm-up energy, context switching from dining with the family or playing with the kids, or being woken up from sleep. How can that be calculated so that nobody gets taken advantage of? And there's a downside, if being on call becomes profitable, say pays 2X or something like that, I bet new urgent issues would be engineered so that they're taken care of while on call time.

thanatropism 8y ago

If Silly Valley was run like Hollywood, you'd have Version Control Engineers as a class and no one with their Version Control's Guild cards would have any say in that field. (With how Hollywood is run, you might as well have While Loop Engineers.)

notJim 8y ago
I think you're exaggerating a bit. Making movies is multi-disciplinary, where sound vs visuals vs set design are largely different skillsets at the higher levels. Sounds similar to engineering vs design vs product management to me.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Sure. But at least at my startup 3 of 5 founders are able programmers, two of five are able mathematicians (important to our R&D process), two of five have extensive strategy and financial consulting experience and one was a manager for a long time. So... we switch hats a lot. In the last six months I've been (a) deep into research, producing basically Beamer slidesets; (b) implementing that research in Python; (c) spearheaded the basic product design process, albeit based on the whole team's insight (my lemma was "I'm basically an anthropologist trying to make sense of what everyone's been saying", although I made significant calls (d) pitching in with front-end programming in Angular when our third party provider pooped out and it got to crunch time and (e) spent deep time writing finance spreadsheets and valuation models. It's a tight ship and I'm not even the most multi-talented person in the crew.
ken 8y ago
Hollywood isn't the only union in the world, and from what I can tell, it's unique in its manner of operation. Is there any other trade union which has "cards" like that?
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Occupations aren't usually that narrowly defined. Hollywood is something of a strawman in debates about unions, but then - Hollywood is closer to Silly Valley geographically than most typical cases of heavy unionization.

_ah 8y ago

A union is a mechanism by which a class of people with less power (typically workers) pool together to enforce rules on people with more power (typically employers). Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. Companies are constantly courting devs, offering very high salaries, and including incredible perks that simply aren't available in most other industries. Yes, some engineers are exploited, but on average the power lies with the employees. When you think of all the "union overhead": voting on contracts, complying to work rules, occasionally going on strike, there just isn't enough pain to make that worth it. Yes, I might work too much overtime and go on call at bad hours, but I can also leave and get a new job relatively quickly, and get paid a lot to work in a climate-controlled environment with free drinks and food. A real software union will arise if and only if it becomes necessary. If somehow everyone is automated out of a job and the few engineers left feel that their very existence is at risk, and the few employers remaining ruthlessly exploit those engineers for minimal pay and benefits, THEN people will fight back (and a union is one possible strategy for this fight). Until then it's a waste of effort.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
notJim 8y ago
> Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. This is actually not true in my experience. Having a high salary and perks isn't the same as having power. On-call is a perfect example where, AFAIK, it's not the norm to get paid for it (as a developer at least), and if you don't like it, you're free to get a new job. Except the new job will likely have the same policy. There are other work-life examples: for example, I've tried to find a part-time job, and to get jobs to offer me more vacation time in lieu of higher pay. Both of these are more common in countries with strong unions, but I've never been able to get them here.
- stickfigure 8y ago
  Except the new job will likely have the same policy. Nonsense. There are a bazillion software companies out there and most look nothing alike. If on-call is a dealbreaker for you, just ask the right questions and be clear up front. And if you want to work part time, consider contracting.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago

Ugh, please no. This interacts poorly with paid leave, and gives management an extra tool of coercion. This has happened with police work and overtime - if you piss off your boss as a cop, you stop getting overtime allocated to you, and wind up getting a pretty significant pay reduction. Or if you get put on paid administrative leave, well, that doesn't include overtime, so that's also a significant pay reduction for police officers. IMHO the real selling point for a software union would be a union-sponsored tax advantaged retirement plan that is ruthlessly optimized to being employee favored. Lots of startups don't have retirement plans or have shitty ones. Furthermore, lots of companies run into issues with non-discrimination testing for "highly compensated" line engineers. If you get things set up with a multi-employer plan with a pretty lightweight collective bargaining agreement for employers to sign, you can get significant tax advantages.