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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 ou

• 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.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • JulianMorrison 8y ago
    Except that being powerless before a boss is hardly a form of independence.
  • AWildC182 8y ago
    That said, such independence can be taken away just as quickly by the megacorps through all manner of illegal dealings and anti-competitive practices. We worked hard to earn the money we do, it's our right to defend ourselves against another "no poaching" agreement or, god forbid, another attempt to use our hard-learned skills to support the oppression of others.
  • zimpenfish 8y ago
    > Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion. If your code isn't using your own libraries compiled by your own compiler hosted on your own OS running on your self-built machine using a CPU you designed, no, it isn't. Sure, your own hard work and passion goes a long way but you rely heavily on the works of others and the privilege of being able to use them.
    • malvosenior 8y ago
      I'm developing in 2019. If I was developing in 1976 I would have been working on something much farther down the stack. Either way requires an immense amount of time in front of a computer to be a top performer and in either time period putting that time in would lead to success.
    • rmdashrfstar 8y ago
      This is an unproductive reductionist gatekeeping response to a genuine description of the effort and toiling many have gone through to reach their position.
    • sandov 8y ago
      But people who developed those libraries allow anyone to use them, so you have the same chance as yor neighbor to develop the next Google, and there are a lot of smart people trying to do it, and not all of them will succeed. So, your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.
      • zimpenfish 8y ago
        > you have the same chance as yor neighbor That assumes you're starting from the same place and head in the same direction. You have to know a library exists before you can use it. It has to be compatible with what you're using. There are many things out of your immediate control that can influence these things (imagine my next door neighbour only has an i3 and the fancy functions of the library which make it 100x faster require extensions of an i7. I immediately have an advantage. There are many subtler advantages that can come into play.)
  • pjc50 8y ago
    > You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a computer ... which requires access to time and computers to train on. Not everyone is quite in that state. And not everyone is an autodidact either, it's not the only valid route to programming. > Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion Not completely - it's a result of getting accepted by hiring managers, and then retained by internal performance processes, both of which are incredibly subjective and vulnerable to prejudice. Moreover, some people care about things beyond themselves. A key component of unions is solidarity: caring about how your colleagues are treated. This may also extend to how your employer is treating the wider society.
• village-idiot 8y ago
  Because a lot of programmers on HN are at the upper edge of their field’s income distribution for a variety of reasons, location definitely being one of them. When a field unionized, the people near the top typically stand to lose the most, even if everyone as a whole are more enriched. I would bet money that the most elite members of car manufacturing were also not particularly enthused about unionization, although I have no clue what specific job would qualify as elite.
  • mcv 8y ago
    > When a field unionized, the people near the top typically stand to lose the most, > even if everyone as a whole are more enriched. Not necessarily. From what I understand, some pilot unions do the exact opposite.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • rmdashrfstar 8y ago
      Care to explain?
      • mcv 8y ago
        From what I've read, older, experienced pilots get the safest, convenient, day-time routes and the best pay, while inexperienced pilots get the harder routes with little sleep and less pay. (Some of?) their unions represent mostly the interests of the older, experienced pilots and not so much the younger ones.
• giancarlostoro 8y ago
  I don't know how much correlation between the 'secret' history and the rest of SV's history but if you're interested Steve Blank covers the secret history nicely: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
• mcv 8y ago
  I don't see how programmers are super conservative. In my experience, especially on HN, they tend to be fairly progressive on average. However, they also tend to be somewhat libertarian. And so far, software development hasn't been an industry that really needed unionisation. But that could always change in the future, of course. Personally, I generally support unions, though I don't see the need for them in software development. Though as a self-employed freelancer, I do see the use for an organisation that argues on behalf of freelancers on the national level, and I'm member of an organisation that does that. It's not really the same thing as an actual union, but it fills one of the roles of a union.
  • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    I've found that programmers tend to be socially liberal (pro-gay rights, abortion rights, etc.) but financially conservative (don't like their money being spent on public goods). Which somewhat overlaps with libertarianism, yes.
    • acct1771 8y ago
      Wouldn't say "somewhat"...promoting personal sovereignty (all of the stuff you mentioned and more) is one of the main tenants.
    • x220 8y ago
      I would call it libertarianism if most of the people I've written to seem to actually believe in minarchist government and having rights limited only as much as absolutely necessary. I don't think that's what most people on here believe. I think most people here hold a few political-social ideas they strongly believe in (such as LGBT issues or clean energy), a smattering of other fashionable social opinions, and then finally an entirely selfish collection of fiscal ideas which objectively seem to benefit themselves the most.
    • wutbrodo 8y ago
      I dunno if that's true either. Things like UBI were wacky ideas popular in SV culture long before their recent mainstreaming. I think the libertarian streak is better described as a mistrust/realism (depending in your views) of the _competency_ of any given government program. The government's advantage is that it lets us directly align objectives in a way that markets often don't, but it's disadvantage is that it'll generally optimize much less efficiently for the objective it's targeting. This means that government action and markets are appropriate in different situations; I'm not crazy about the fact that we're the least competent at transit construction in the developed world, but I'm still a supporter of transit investment despite the eye-popping levels of waste. Live in San Francisco long enough, and you get a really strong sense of how detached a government can get from reality, and how much its actions can reflect the selfishness and idiocy of part of its constituency instead of any pretense of benefiting society or achieving its goals. It's unsurprising that you'd see a portion of the population, especially one used to more well- functioning institutions, start to drift towards support of government policy that doesn't rely on individuals within govt making complex decisions. UBI and other such hands-off policies fit directly into this. They're not anti-govt spending, they're anti-centralized decision-making
• matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I think you can just look at the surface and see it as a natural consequence of a relatively easy, high-income, unregulated profession, with high demand for workers. Many of the benefits of collective bargaining aren't applicable to people who are relatively easily able to switch jobs or work as a consultant. That then tends to lead to… complacency, I guess? I would expect that relatively few people in that field have recently been in a situation where collective bargaining would have been a benefit to them, and that allows them to see only the downsides. I do notice some agitation in the direction of unionisation from some parts of the industry – particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse.
  • zozbot123 8y ago
    > Many of the benefits of collective bargaining aren't applicable to people who are relatively easily able to switch jobs or work as a consultant. The other side of the coin is that collective bargaining itself makes switching to a different employer or working as a consultant a lot more difficult than if the sector wasn't unionized. Sure, some people will have trouble doing these things anyway, especially at the low-end of the income distribution. But that's why we should support policies like Basic Income, or at the very least expanding things such as the EITC and getting rid of e.g. payroll taxes for low earned incomes. And I think that many people here on HN would agree, whether or not they self-identify as libertarians. > ...particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse. Game development is the sort of industry that everyone thinks they'll want to work in, only to change their minds very quickly once they see how the sausage is made. Even just raising awareness about the work conditions in the industry - and making it clear that they're not representative of "tech" more generally - would help a lot.
    • freedomben 8y ago
      Thank you. As someone who worked in a union before switching jobs, it is not all rainbows and unicorns like so many people try to present it. In one shop I worked in, I was a truck driver delivering fuel to airplanes. If my truck broke down in any way, even something as stupid as the key got jammed, if I pulled out my leatherman and pulled it free, I could be fired for violating union agreements. Even most of the mechanics agreed how dumb it was. I was the sucker sitting out in 100 degree summer sun in the airport with zero shade, waiting 30 to 60 minutes for somebody to come do a job that would take me 10 seconds. That's before we even talk about collective bargaining. Getting a pay raise was completely out of the question, as raises were almost entirely based on seniority and how long your ass had been in the chair. It was highly punitive to younger people like myself. We also got crap shifts because shift preference was also awarded by seniority in the union. The non-unionized shop paid a shift differential, so people willing to work 2nd and 3rd shift got more money for their time. That was a great solution, as it increased the supply for shift work to approximately the levels of demand (basic economics). So tl;dr: unions have and had a place, but the cure can sometimes be worse than the disease. Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
• pc86 8y ago
  Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.
  • kome 8y ago
    Liberalism is a right-wing ideology...
    • typon 8y ago
      You are technically right yet still downvoted. These days these words have so many different definitions for different people that they've become nearly meaningless.
      • kome 8y ago
        To be fair, I was expecting the downvotes. For two reasons: 1) For a long time, there was no "institutional" left in the United States; so in the US - liberalism was seen as the "left". This is slowly changing now... 2) The tech crowd wants really to believe to be progressive (because they work on "progressive" technologies); but in fact, I never saw so many real life liberals like among tech workers.
        • fixermark 8y ago
          Tech workers seem to tend towards social liberalism, but economic conservatism bordering on libertarianism (if not actual, avowed libertarianism). It's an interesting combination that doesn't fit super-well into America's dominant left-right political axis.
    • wasdfff 8y ago
      In every context besides economic journals it refers to social liberalism: the progressive left. No one is calling reagan or bush liberals even if they are by the economics definition of the word.
• tivert 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 That's not quite right, HN is full of anti-labor libertarians. And I think it has something to do with startup culture, which is a lot about working to get a golden ticket to join the capitalist class. That causes a lot of people to identify with that class and its interests, despite actually being laborers themselves.
  • 0x262d 8y ago
    yes. and in addition, programmers in general while technically workers have a pretty cushy middle class existence.
    • Apocryphon 8y ago
      So did doctors and lawyers, at one point.
• 0x262d 8y ago
  HN especially attracts people who think like "I'm a super smart 10x hacker and deserve the fact that I earn 5x median salary and poor and dumb people can starve". it's sad. reverse class consciousness.
  • simion314 8y ago
    I mentioned this in other comments, actors have unions but they still have different salary(superstarts will earn much more then a new unknown actor) and they seem very eager to join the union(or guild or how it is named I am not from US). So it seems that programmers were scared by some bad stories that everyone will have same salary.
    • stale2002 8y ago
      Unions also often times throw up massive barriers to entry in order to keep out new comers. I absolutely do not want everyone to be forced to get a degree, and a certification just to be allow to make a freaking web app. Right now there is nothing preventing companies from hiring someone who just went to an 8 week bootcampers, and this is a good thing. I know many people who have done this route.
      • rchaud 8y ago
        Nobody is talking about unionizing at a sub-10 person shop, aka the type of place where bootcamp grads learn the ropes. The companies unionization would affect are behemoths (FAANG but also HP, IBM, Oracle etc) that hire enormous numbers of people, few to none of whom would be a fresh bootcamp grad.
        • JoshTriplett 8y ago
          > The companies unionization would affect are behemoths (FAANG but also HP, IBM, Oracle etc) that hire enormous numbers of people, few to none of whom would be a fresh bootcamp grad. Even large companies are willing to hire people who have taken non-traditional paths, if you can get past the initial HR screening (typically by finding the right engineer or manager to talk to directly). Let's not break that.
• markstos 8y ago
  Maybe not every anonymous account on HN corresponds to a real individual?
  • uncletaco 8y ago
    Da. I'm just uploaded brain scans of the California Spiny-Tailed lobster. I honestly struggling with the idea of being an individual myself.
    • acct1771 8y ago
      Believe your GP is trying to say someone could be astroturfing anti-labor sentiment.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• getpost 8y ago
  I started out anti-labor due to my own experience in a minimum wage job. I was forced to join the union and pay union dues, yet I still received only the minimum wage, so being a union member resulted in a sub-minimum wage! Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together. The destruction of the middle class shows that the balance of power is too extreme on the side of the employer, and something has to be done.
  • idontpost 8y ago
    > Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together. That might be the stupidest thing I've ever read on this subject. Management ALWAYS has an "us vs them" mentality. Only dupes and fools would think they should be "working together" with the sociopaths that run US companies.
  • AlexandrB 8y ago
    > Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together. You're aware that several major US tech companies were colluding to keep employee wages lower than they otherwise would be[1], right? Once a company's size exceeds Dunbar's number[2] (and often long before then), it's de-facto us vs. them from the executives' point of view. [1] http://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit/ http://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsui... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
    • jammygit 8y ago
      It was as though it was the employers who unionized against the employees in that case...
  • rchaud 8y ago
    > Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together. Look up prior posts here about salary negotiation for developers. You'll find that most of the advice and the resulting comments are in the "fuck you, pay me" vein. When doing day to day work, you and your employer are on the same team. When it comes to negotiating the conditions and compensation for that work, you are 100% on different teams.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• calibas 8y ago
  I think it's simply because many people here dream of some day becoming the next Gates, Bezos, or Elon and they don't really empathize with the thousands and thousands of people whose hard work actually creates that ridiculous amount of wealth.
  • wutbrodo 8y ago
    I'm not sure that's true; the 1%/10% dichotomy gets abused a lot, but there are some salient differences; most of my professional circles in their 20s are making up to half a million dollars in their 20s at a large tech co. Whether you consider it myopic or not, it's easy to see why they (and those aspiring to be them) would consider a labor movement to be against their interests. And it certainly represents a much larger (and more reasonable) group than those asusming that they're going to make billions from founding a startup.
• wutbrodo 8y ago
  Calling SV programmers, or even just HN, "super conservative" betrays a hugely simple-minded view of the political spectrum with no relation to reality. Politics is a lot more complex than a single 1D liberal/conservative metric, and even if you were to force it into this model, calling SV "super conservative" is an utter joke.
• jammygit 8y ago
  "Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative" I think spots on a left-right political spectrum is a sloppy way to represent people. There have got to be over 100 valid 'axes' to position a person on, 'projecting' everybody onto a single line forces people to 'sit next to' positions they do not appreciate.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >'projecting' everybody onto a single line forces people to 'sit next to' positions they do not appreciate. That's the point. If someone has an opinion you don't like but is hard to dismiss or prove "wrong" then you can dismiss it by association with a group of "wrong" opinions. An easy way to make this association is by attributing it to a group whose opinions are known to be "wrong" by whatever the local in-group is. Once you have associated the inconvenient opinion with a bunch of "wrong" opinions it is easy to dismiss. For example I were to say "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" (probably not a welcome opinion around here because most here like gun control) then people would use that to assume that I am anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and all the other things that the HN user-base generally agrees is bad about the modern American republican party and dismiss my opinion. I could say the same exact sentence in a context where the dominant group is ardently racist and classiest but not pro gun control they would use the bits about race and class to assume that I am some crazy leftist who wants the proletariat to seize the means of production and use the association to dismiss my opinion. It's quite hard to dismiss a statement like "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" when you have to fight it head on. By associating a statement like that with people who also have a bunch of views that are "known to be wrong" by the local majority or in-group the playing field is tilted and it's easier to dismiss.
• pessimizer 8y ago
  Programming historically involved access to expensive equipment and intellectual property, and involved pretty heavy math education. Once the industry professionalized (meaning here that the professional was expected to provide his own qualifications rather than being trained), the previous workforce of largely women was replaced by people drawn from privileged classes. Those people ultimately became management, established a culture, and replicated that culture by hiring people who came from the same backgrounds; so the effect lasted long after programming became far more accessible (although still requiring large amounts of leisure time.) Those groups of people from a non-indigenous, non-minority, never-enslaved, non-female background have always been conservative, consisting largely of 1) white men, and 2) immigrant professionals (generally drawn from more privileged groups in their country of origin and statistically more conservative than the average for their country of origin.) These same demographics, no matter what profession they're in, are conservative. Their world has generally treated them well, and changes in their world are dangerous for them. If the world were to change for the better (for them), they imagine themselves, or somebody who looks like them, making those changes.
• kough 8y ago
  "The Californian Ideology" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• anth_anm 8y ago
  It's neo-liberalism coupled with the idea that you can still get rich at your startup. Makes sense considering this site is part of ycombinator.