4 ms·
Replying to clarify my point for all the replies: Think of all the job descriptions that have become irrelevant, for most startups, in the last decade: "DBA",
by el_nahual 8y ago
Replying to clarify my point for all the replies:
Think of all the job descriptions that have become irrelevant, for most startups, in the last decade: "DBA", "sysadmin", "IT". Even in the past year or two, thanks to docker, there's less need for "devops".
Unions exist to protect the interests of today's--not tomorrow's--workforce.
So yes, I certainly believe that a union would say "companies that use docker hire 90% fewer sysadmins than those that do not. We have 70,000 members with that job description. The next collective bargaining agreement will forbid it.
Labor unions have historically been anti automation. If you think software unions are somehow different then the burden of proof is on you.
Imagine that 10 years from now someone invents an AI that can magically take a set of plain english specifications and output a working, high-quality CRUD web app, making a single engineer as efficient as 10. Do you think the software engineers union at BigEnterpriseCo would let them use it?
- scarmig 8y agoI mean, anyone can make up stories in their heads. You're the one making a very strong claim about unions universally being anti-automation. Support it before trying to shift the burden of argument simply because you're lazy. Thirty seconds of Googling got me this on the USW blog, from a week ago, celebrating automation: https://m.usw.org/blog/2018/automation-augmentation-enhances-workers-roles-in-factories https://m.usw.org/blog/2018/automation-augmentation-enhances...
- dang 8y agoGetting personally nasty will get you banned here, so please don't do that, even when someone else is wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- CydeWeys 8y agoFortunately we don't need to rely on your hypothesis here; we can simply look at what's actually happening in the many countries where unions for software engineers are common. Do you have actual examples of irrelevant jobs in software engineering that have been kept on because of unions? How about unions advocating for proprietary software in order to keep out open source software? Given that many software unions already exist, the burden of proof is on you to prove that such things are actually happening. It's unreasonable to expect someone to prove the negative here.
- lovich 8y agoLabor unions have historically been against automation _that gets rid of it's members_ which it should be if they are protecting them. Likewise, corporations have been all for automation that let's them lay off wide swaths of workers. If union members benefited from automation, they'd be all for it. Why should someone be for a change that makes them jobless? Corporations certainly don't lobby for changes that decrease their profits. This is like when the Luddites were labeled anti progress, when in reality they we're anti being replaced and left to starve in the streets, with the industrial automation being the linchpin in a set of events that caused said starvation. Share the wealth or don't be surprised when people will fight you over it.