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These comments read like a bunch of low-income retail shoppers defending Walmart because they provide something they otherwise couldn't get. I think these type

These comments read like a bunch of low-income retail shoppers defending Walmart because they provide something they otherwise couldn't get. I think these types of debates are bellwether for programmer/IT professional unionization. These are the exact types of lawsuits brought against organized labor as it was trying to get organized to prevent exploitative behavior. It's disturbing to see these same anti-organization arguments rehashed simply for a new industry.

mbostleman 8y ago
If one holds strongly a principle that opposes monopolies and supports strong anti-trust protections in the market, it would explain why the same argument is made regardless of industry. Also, the issue focusing on using the company email system sounds to me like a bit of a strawman. Why in the world would you want to use a communication medium owned and controlled by your opponent for such a thing? And even if you wanted to, being not allowed to doesn't in anyway limit your ability to organize in any practical way. I mean seriously, these are presumably some of the smartest tech people on the planet. They can't figure out a way to commmunicate independently?
- neilk 8y ago
  Congratulations! You figured out that this isn’t about “theft of services” or anything like that. It’s about 1) Legalizing retaliation in case you mention the union meeting to a coworker over a Slack private message. 2) Drastically reducing the visibility of union organization in the workplace. That makes it much harder to reach critical mass.
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    To me the primary issue has nothing to do with unions. It has to do with private property. The company pays for and owns the property. No one should have any "rights" to using it.
    - jtms 8y ago
      Right??! What kind of upside down world of entitlement are we sliding into? With google on your resume just go work somewhere else that fits your ideology better if you aren’t happy with the present’s behavior.
typon 8y ago
Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why
- malvosenior 8y ago
  You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer. Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. From that perspective, organized labor seems like an unnecessary dependency. Programming is a form of extreme independence many will be hard fought to give away. Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    I don't know if this is true. My career is also a result of the excellent mentors I have and continue to have, the wonderful peers I cooperate with, the selfless professors who taught me fundamentals, the excellent technology already built by those who came before me, etc. I really can't say that my career is a result of my own hard work and passion as if my own hard work and passion is the primary thing that allowed my career to succeed. It doesn't matter how passionate and hard working I am if my environment wasn't condusive to computer science as a profession.
    - malvosenior 8y ago
      Tech makes an alternative path available to others though. You can be a self taught programmer and become very successful. It's one of the only fields where you can achieve an upper middle class lifestyle without accreditation. You'll definitely be working hard to make that happen though.
      - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
        I couldn't be self taught without learning materials that others have produced, the programming languages that others wrote, or the technology that others built. I'm also not speaking mentors and peers just in school. I mean literally I do not believe I could be self-taught with 0 outside mentorship or learning materials or community and be considered a highly successful developer. I needed learning materials and mentors to teach me best practices in software development. I needed programming languages that I didn't write myself. I needed a computer, whether paid for by myself, family, or the public taxes via libraries. Not stopping to recognize that I program on the shoulders of giants would make me arrogant and foolish, I think.
fgheorghe 8y ago
From what you are saying, programmers are now just a set of workers in a factory, shouting “power to the people”.
anticensor 8y ago
If the employee side is numerous enough to unionise, the employer side should also be numerous enough to establish an employer organisation.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  The whole point of unionization is the employer side has the advantage of being way less numerous.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    Employer organisations also consist of multiple employers. In a fully unionised bargaining, both employer and employee unions attend bargaining process. There are sufficient number of software and database companies to establish an employer organisation for software.
    - Ericson2314 8y ago
      Fairness depends on the ratio of employee employer monopoly power. There may be enough tech companies to form a union, but that just means employees need to be more consolidated to match. Your "fully unionized bargaining" case is just one point in the blanced subspace. A many-to-many relationship where the employers per employee matched the employees per employer (along with other hierarchical symmetries) would be an (outlandish) other such point.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 8y ago
  > the employer side should also be numerous enough to establish an employer organisation. They are and they have; see US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al. From the wiki article: "DOJ alleged in their Complaint that the companies had reached "facially anticompetitive" agreements that "eliminated a significant form of competition...to the detriment of the affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Unions organize in public, employers collude in secret. The fact that the companies proposed a settlement the day the suit was filed indicates they simply priced that into their cost-benefit analysis when they were colluding.
Aunche 8y ago
The difference is that software engineers, especially those at Google, have high social mobility and are well educated. I think that unions are inefficient, but I'm sympathetic towards or even support most of them because those workers don't have a better option. Googlers just come off as entitled. They should be intelligent enough to acknowledge when they're making clickbaity populist arguments that misrepresent complex issues, but they turn a blind eye to it. Calling out these arguments doesn't mean I support large corporations trampling over the weak.
- gcb0 8y ago
  let me try to help you fill the data you assumed with concrete examples. search H1b applications for google and other companies. you will see google hires with 60-100k salaries. being stuck for 10yrs on the lowest end of our category pay is very far from "high social mobility"
  - ben_jones 8y ago
    Only one data point but this [1] suggests otherwise. It invalidates the idea that the median is in the < 100k range however it does not speak to mobility, i.e. that you may be stuck with an entry level salary for a longtime because you are indentured to the company that facilitated your H1b. [1]: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=&year=ALL+YEARS https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+EN...
    - Roboprog 8y ago
      Median $127K on that search, FWIW Well over $100K, but that won’t go as far in San Jose as it would in Sacramento :-)
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Google sponsors its H1B employees for green cards. If the goal was to lock in the workforce to pay them less, they wouldn't be doing that. Most actual H1B abuse happens in companies like Tata and Infosys, that are structured around it.
mmsimanga 8y ago
I am not against unions but having spent a career trying to get business to tell me what exactly they want I tend not to put too much faith in large organisations. I feel the administrative overhead of getting all us programmers to agree on specific principles as part of a union is literally going to be impossible. Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar.
- neilk 8y ago
  You seem to be arguing that the employee actions described in the article didn’t already happen. Trivialities like favorite technologies can be put aside when it comes to questions of values and fairness.
  - mmsimanga 8y ago
    I was responding to parent on why programmers are reluctant about the idea of unions. I used a rather silly example on programming languages. To bring it back to the issues discussed in the story. I would certainly agree with holding management to task in the manner they handled the sexual abuse. I am not so sure I agree with all the diversity talk (I speak as a black man, I have to put that in) and as someone who lives in a city where gangs literally own parts of the town, I don't see anything wrong in empowering law enforcement/army with high tech weapons. They are bad motherfuckers out in the world and we need some good badass motherfuckers otherwise we as the world would be in trouble. In a roundabout way, I guess I am trying to say where do you draw the line on which positions the union should take. It would become another system where whoever is elected gets to decide what position we as the workers should take.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  > Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar. Try asking them how much they think programmers should be paid and I think you'll find they come to agreement pretty quickly.
dominotw 8y ago
I guarantee 100% that if there is a ever a union for IT workers. First ask would be, Ban H1B
- what_ever 8y ago
  Why? Would the union only consist of American workers?
  - aquadrop 8y ago
    Because that's what unions do. They protect current members at the expense of everyone else, including unionized colleagues.
- hoaw 8y ago
  No one could really say what the absolute position of a union would be in that question. Unions are membership organizations that work in the interest of current, and to some extent future, members. The rest is politics. A union would have incentive for foreigners to e.g. come to the US, so the US get a larger slice of the market. On the other hand they don't have an interest in those workers e.g. having lesser rights or lower compensation. Because then foreigner workers become more attractive than their existing members, thereby preventing those members from having long term success. So it depends on how you view e.g. H1B. It really isn't that complicated if you think about it.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    Do you have an example of such pro immigration labor union?
    - hoaw 8y ago
      You are unlikely to find a western labor union that is specifically pro immigration these days. Since labor has been in decline in the west for the last few decades. Before that I am sure you could find those who were pro labor immigration. The Nordic countries have for example had relatively large labor immigration under social democratic governments (which are usually associated with the labor unions). Also it depends what you mean by pro immigration. No union is going to be pro liberal immigration rules, since they don't want to undermine their own members. For it make sense for a union it has to be employees who are lacking, either in numbers or skill, in the country and can therefor expand the country's share of the market.
hippich 8y ago
Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. Many computer professionals still remember how nice it was to be able to get an edge by giving up something (undercut competitors to get the first crucial project in the portfolio, not being judged by your credentials, etc) My prediction - time will pass and the idea of a labor organization will become the norm in IT world as well. Perhaps even a requirement to be certified by some kind of professional organization to be hired at all. But this will hurt newcomers.
- jackpirate 8y ago
  Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. I don't understand your point at all. Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. The standard argument against unions (esp. in the tech sector) is that they harm high-skilled overperforming workers by capping the maximum benefits they can receive.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    > Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. Unions fight to support newcomers? Common union tactics such as closed shops and seniority-based pay agreements are deliberately and severely hostile to newcomers. > overperforming workers Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!
    - Zeklandia 8y ago
      Overperformance is when a worker overexerts themselves, by working themselves harder or for longer. Overperformance is a problem because it exerts pressure on the other workers to do the same, leading to a runaway effect of increasing expectation for results while workers are left exhausting their bodies and their time, and often their own personal resources, trying to meet that expectation in order to not be fired or miss out on bonuses or promotions. They are not "making everyone else look bad" they are raising the bar higher than most could even reach.
ggggtez 8y ago
A tech union seems inevitable at this point. It seems like there has been some false starts, but there is a "market need" that is being unmet. Silicon Valley has shown it's very good at meeting unfulfilled market needs.
- thegayngler 8y ago
  While true, how do you do that and still maintain the flexibility of moving from lets say Javascript to Golang or Swift development? A Union would stifle or add friction for people wanting to quit your current job work with different technologies they want to work on professionally.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Why? A tech union need not operate in the same way previous unions have.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    From what I’ve seen the unions forming in tech right now are way more fluid than the corporations they’re working inside. These are very decentralized federations of employees. It’s not some old Italian family who has been controlling the FORTRAN labor market in San Jose for 30 years.
RickJWagner 8y ago
I don't like your Walmart analogy. You are right, there are lots of low-income shoppers who buy things at Walmart they couldn't otherwise afford. To these shoppers, Walmart provides a better way of life. I don't think they'd rather be low-income shoppers buying from more expensive stores that offer fewer choices. Walmart is beneficial for the shopper. If it wasn't so, Walmart wouldn't be successful.

mbostleman 8y ago

If one holds strongly a principle that opposes monopolies and supports strong anti-trust protections in the market, it would explain why the same argument is made regardless of industry. Also, the issue focusing on using the company email system sounds to me like a bit of a strawman. Why in the world would you want to use a communication medium owned and controlled by your opponent for such a thing? And even if you wanted to, being not allowed to doesn't in anyway limit your ability to organize in any practical way. I mean seriously, these are presumably some of the smartest tech people on the planet. They can't figure out a way to commmunicate independently?

neilk 8y ago
Congratulations! You figured out that this isn’t about “theft of services” or anything like that. It’s about 1) Legalizing retaliation in case you mention the union meeting to a coworker over a Slack private message. 2) Drastically reducing the visibility of union organization in the workplace. That makes it much harder to reach critical mass.
- mbostleman 8y ago
  To me the primary issue has nothing to do with unions. It has to do with private property. The company pays for and owns the property. No one should have any "rights" to using it.
  - jtms 8y ago
    Right??! What kind of upside down world of entitlement are we sliding into? With google on your resume just go work somewhere else that fits your ideology better if you aren’t happy with the present’s behavior.

typon 8y ago

Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why

malvosenior 8y ago
You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer. Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. From that perspective, organized labor seems like an unnecessary dependency. Programming is a form of extreme independence many will be hard fought to give away. Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  I don't know if this is true. My career is also a result of the excellent mentors I have and continue to have, the wonderful peers I cooperate with, the selfless professors who taught me fundamentals, the excellent technology already built by those who came before me, etc. I really can't say that my career is a result of my own hard work and passion as if my own hard work and passion is the primary thing that allowed my career to succeed. It doesn't matter how passionate and hard working I am if my environment wasn't condusive to computer science as a profession.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Tech makes an alternative path available to others though. You can be a self taught programmer and become very successful. It's one of the only fields where you can achieve an upper middle class lifestyle without accreditation. You'll definitely be working hard to make that happen though.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      I couldn't be self taught without learning materials that others have produced, the programming languages that others wrote, or the technology that others built. I'm also not speaking mentors and peers just in school. I mean literally I do not believe I could be self-taught with 0 outside mentorship or learning materials or community and be considered a highly successful developer. I needed learning materials and mentors to teach me best practices in software development. I needed programming languages that I didn't write myself. I needed a computer, whether paid for by myself, family, or the public taxes via libraries. Not stopping to recognize that I program on the shoulders of giants would make me arrogant and foolish, I think.

fgheorghe 8y ago

From what you are saying, programmers are now just a set of workers in a factory, shouting “power to the people”.

anticensor 8y ago

If the employee side is numerous enough to unionise, the employer side should also be numerous enough to establish an employer organisation.

Ericson2314 8y ago
The whole point of unionization is the employer side has the advantage of being way less numerous.
- anticensor 8y ago
  Employer organisations also consist of multiple employers. In a fully unionised bargaining, both employer and employee unions attend bargaining process. There are sufficient number of software and database companies to establish an employer organisation for software.
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    Fairness depends on the ratio of employee employer monopoly power. There may be enough tech companies to form a union, but that just means employees need to be more consolidated to match. Your "fully unionized bargaining" case is just one point in the blanced subspace. A many-to-many relationship where the employers per employee matched the employees per employer (along with other hierarchical symmetries) would be an (outlandish) other such point.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 8y ago
> the employer side should also be numerous enough to establish an employer organisation. They are and they have; see US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al. From the wiki article: "DOJ alleged in their Complaint that the companies had reached "facially anticompetitive" agreements that "eliminated a significant form of competition...to the detriment of the affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Unions organize in public, employers collude in secret. The fact that the companies proposed a settlement the day the suit was filed indicates they simply priced that into their cost-benefit analysis when they were colluding.

Aunche 8y ago

The difference is that software engineers, especially those at Google, have high social mobility and are well educated. I think that unions are inefficient, but I'm sympathetic towards or even support most of them because those workers don't have a better option. Googlers just come off as entitled. They should be intelligent enough to acknowledge when they're making clickbaity populist arguments that misrepresent complex issues, but they turn a blind eye to it. Calling out these arguments doesn't mean I support large corporations trampling over the weak.

gcb0 8y ago
let me try to help you fill the data you assumed with concrete examples. search H1b applications for google and other companies. you will see google hires with 60-100k salaries. being stuck for 10yrs on the lowest end of our category pay is very far from "high social mobility"
- ben_jones 8y ago
  Only one data point but this [1] suggests otherwise. It invalidates the idea that the median is in the < 100k range however it does not speak to mobility, i.e. that you may be stuck with an entry level salary for a longtime because you are indentured to the company that facilitated your H1b. [1]: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=&year=ALL+YEARS https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+EN...
  - Roboprog 8y ago
    Median $127K on that search, FWIW Well over $100K, but that won’t go as far in San Jose as it would in Sacramento :-)
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Google sponsors its H1B employees for green cards. If the goal was to lock in the workforce to pay them less, they wouldn't be doing that. Most actual H1B abuse happens in companies like Tata and Infosys, that are structured around it.

mmsimanga 8y ago

I am not against unions but having spent a career trying to get business to tell me what exactly they want I tend not to put too much faith in large organisations. I feel the administrative overhead of getting all us programmers to agree on specific principles as part of a union is literally going to be impossible. Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar.

neilk 8y ago
You seem to be arguing that the employee actions described in the article didn’t already happen. Trivialities like favorite technologies can be put aside when it comes to questions of values and fairness.
- mmsimanga 8y ago
  I was responding to parent on why programmers are reluctant about the idea of unions. I used a rather silly example on programming languages. To bring it back to the issues discussed in the story. I would certainly agree with holding management to task in the manner they handled the sexual abuse. I am not so sure I agree with all the diversity talk (I speak as a black man, I have to put that in) and as someone who lives in a city where gangs literally own parts of the town, I don't see anything wrong in empowering law enforcement/army with high tech weapons. They are bad motherfuckers out in the world and we need some good badass motherfuckers otherwise we as the world would be in trouble. In a roundabout way, I guess I am trying to say where do you draw the line on which positions the union should take. It would become another system where whoever is elected gets to decide what position we as the workers should take.
smacktoward 8y ago
> Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar. Try asking them how much they think programmers should be paid and I think you'll find they come to agreement pretty quickly.

dominotw 8y ago

I guarantee 100% that if there is a ever a union for IT workers. First ask would be, Ban H1B

what_ever 8y ago
Why? Would the union only consist of American workers?
- aquadrop 8y ago
  Because that's what unions do. They protect current members at the expense of everyone else, including unionized colleagues.
hoaw 8y ago
No one could really say what the absolute position of a union would be in that question. Unions are membership organizations that work in the interest of current, and to some extent future, members. The rest is politics. A union would have incentive for foreigners to e.g. come to the US, so the US get a larger slice of the market. On the other hand they don't have an interest in those workers e.g. having lesser rights or lower compensation. Because then foreigner workers become more attractive than their existing members, thereby preventing those members from having long term success. So it depends on how you view e.g. H1B. It really isn't that complicated if you think about it.
- dominotw 8y ago
  Do you have an example of such pro immigration labor union?
  - hoaw 8y ago
    You are unlikely to find a western labor union that is specifically pro immigration these days. Since labor has been in decline in the west for the last few decades. Before that I am sure you could find those who were pro labor immigration. The Nordic countries have for example had relatively large labor immigration under social democratic governments (which are usually associated with the labor unions). Also it depends what you mean by pro immigration. No union is going to be pro liberal immigration rules, since they don't want to undermine their own members. For it make sense for a union it has to be employees who are lacking, either in numbers or skill, in the country and can therefor expand the country's share of the market.

hippich 8y ago

Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. Many computer professionals still remember how nice it was to be able to get an edge by giving up something (undercut competitors to get the first crucial project in the portfolio, not being judged by your credentials, etc) My prediction - time will pass and the idea of a labor organization will become the norm in IT world as well. Perhaps even a requirement to be certified by some kind of professional organization to be hired at all. But this will hurt newcomers.

jackpirate 8y ago
Because all these ideas (regulation, minimum wage, laborisation, etc) protect existing workers and harms lower skilled or newcomers, foreigners, minorities, etc. I don't understand your point at all. Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. The standard argument against unions (esp. in the tech sector) is that they harm high-skilled overperforming workers by capping the maximum benefits they can receive.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. Unions fight to support newcomers? Common union tactics such as closed shops and seniority-based pay agreements are deliberately and severely hostile to newcomers. > overperforming workers Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!
  - Zeklandia 8y ago
    Overperformance is when a worker overexerts themselves, by working themselves harder or for longer. Overperformance is a problem because it exerts pressure on the other workers to do the same, leading to a runaway effect of increasing expectation for results while workers are left exhausting their bodies and their time, and often their own personal resources, trying to meet that expectation in order to not be fired or miss out on bonuses or promotions. They are not "making everyone else look bad" they are raising the bar higher than most could even reach.

ggggtez 8y ago

A tech union seems inevitable at this point. It seems like there has been some false starts, but there is a "market need" that is being unmet. Silicon Valley has shown it's very good at meeting unfulfilled market needs.

thegayngler 8y ago
While true, how do you do that and still maintain the flexibility of moving from lets say Javascript to Golang or Swift development? A Union would stifle or add friction for people wanting to quit your current job work with different technologies they want to work on professionally.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Why? A tech union need not operate in the same way previous unions have.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  From what I’ve seen the unions forming in tech right now are way more fluid than the corporations they’re working inside. These are very decentralized federations of employees. It’s not some old Italian family who has been controlling the FORTRAN labor market in San Jose for 30 years.

RickJWagner 8y ago

I don't like your Walmart analogy. You are right, there are lots of low-income shoppers who buy things at Walmart they couldn't otherwise afford. To these shoppers, Walmart provides a better way of life. I don't think they'd rather be low-income shoppers buying from more expensive stores that offer fewer choices. Walmart is beneficial for the shopper. If it wasn't so, Walmart wouldn't be successful.