7 ms·

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 wor

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.
  - rmdashrfstar 8y ago
    Please keep talking about issues like this. There’s too many preaching a cure from an armchair and not enough recounting actual experience.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    These are great comments because they underline pain points that 21st century labor unions can work to solve and iterate upon
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance. People are talking about the benefits of unionization in a specific industry in response to the near-automatic narrative that unions are bad. You gave an example of an absurd regulation in a completely different industry. How does that tie into what collective bargaining in software dev would look like?
    - freedomben 8y ago
      Great question. Of course unions in software aren't really a widespread thing, so speculating at what they would look like is fraught with all the problems of speculation, but this is what I think of: Currently at work, I'm more of a "devops" guy but I get into things all over the stack sometimes too. In previous places I've been a "backend" guy that occasionally got into the frontend, etc. I view this as the optimal arrangement: blurry lines of responsibility (so people aren't pigeon-holed), but you can still develop depth and expertise in an area of specialty. In a world of unions, if it were analogous to my past experience, there could be a "front end" union, a "back end" union, a "dev ops/operations" union, etc. These unions would then draw up lines, much like the "driver" and "mechanic" unions did in my past. Need to change a line of javascript? Talk to a "front end" guy. Tweak a deploy script? Not if the union agreement forbids it. Those seem like ludicrous thoughts based on where we are now. But I'm sure at one time the idea that a driver can't effect any repairs to the truck, no matter how small, probably seemed ludicrous as well. Yet here we are. I know I probably sound very anti-union, but to clarify my position, I'm only anti-forced unions. So long as I can opt out of the union if and when I please, I have no qualms. Sadly that is not the case in many places in the United States. P.S. If I could edit and re-word this line, I would. I think the language is unclear and unnecessarily harsh: > Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance. I would change that to: "Thinking of unions as all upside with no downside (or vice versa) is an argument from ideology, not one from experience."
rconti 8y ago
This. And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof). Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  It's more "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" imho. Many HN denizens are angling to either work at google or launch a startup that is acquired by google or grow to the scale of google. Why offend the future employer / acquirer now over proletarian issues? In case you aren't familiar with the Steinbeck quote: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    "Embarrassed" -> "disenfranchised" has a nice ring to it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - novembermike 8y ago
    This is misquoted quite a bit. Here's the actual quote. "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
simion314 8y ago
What is different then the acting though? Actors have unions that protect their rights but don't affect their salaries AFAIK (maybe they were abused so much that the history if fresh for them still?)
- smacktoward 8y ago
  Actors' unions do impact salary. Union contracts set and enforce minimum amounts that all working actors have to be paid, for example. An actor earning these amounts is said to be "working for scale." For illustration, SAG-AFTRA's current rate sheet for TV productions can be found here: https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010%2025%2018.pdf https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010...
  - simion314 8y ago
    So isn't ok of setting some minimal salary? I do not see why the developers would be against this, only the companies would like to abuse the developers and work them extra hours and not pay.(so probably companies are spreading the FUD against unions? )
- idontpost 8y ago
  The difference is that actors were treated like shit first. Even the stars. Just look at what they did to Judy Garland, not to mention everyone else on Wizard of Oz. That hasn't happened yet to developers.
  - Dangeranger 8y ago
    You may want to think back just 25 years to the early to mid-nineties when developers where considered “code monkeys” who couldn’t think past their current module and needed “business analysts” to write requirements for them. It wasn’t slavery by any stretch, but working in programming was akin to working in “IT” and thought of as a department full of weird nerds who cost the company money.
    - 8y ago
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
I can think of a mountain of things that programmers could collectively bargain for that would benefit everyone. I'd like for bargaining to happen about parental leave, what "unlimited vacation" actually means, what "on-call" duties really entail, compensation for overtime, and whether or not engineers can be reasonably forced to perform illegal or unethical behavior (data collection, dark pattern designs).
- vips7L 8y ago
  You are not forced to do any of those things. You are able to find a new employer whenever you want.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    I might not able to find a new employer whenever I want. I might not have time to job search because I have children. I might have dependents or I myself need critical medical care that cannot be interrupted by job hopping. I might have a family emergency that has destroyed my savings to look for a new job. I might be in the point of my career in which leaving for a new job so soon would be a red flag to employers. I might have just made a large purchase (a home, for example) that means I cannot afford to find a new employer at the exact moment my current asks me to be on-call for the next 72 hours nonstop. And if it's not me, it might be my co worker, who I know is a new parent and cannot afford to stop working to care for their child. It might by my mentor, who is dealing with ageism making it difficult to find work. It might be my mentee, who is being discriminated against because of their H1B status. It might be my new hire, who accepted a lowball offer because they have no knowledge of price transparency. It might be a software developer I just met at a data science meetup, who is being worked to the bone at a startup but doesn't have enough experience to be hired anywhere else. Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.
    - techntoke 8y ago
      Agreed.. thank you for being aware of these issues. I find the tech industry to be pretty toxic & corrupt overall, usually rewarding the employees that are the least ethical.

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.
- rmdashrfstar 8y ago
  Please keep talking about issues like this. There’s too many preaching a cure from an armchair and not enough recounting actual experience.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  These are great comments because they underline pain points that 21st century labor unions can work to solve and iterate upon
- rchaud 8y ago
  > Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance. People are talking about the benefits of unionization in a specific industry in response to the near-automatic narrative that unions are bad. You gave an example of an absurd regulation in a completely different industry. How does that tie into what collective bargaining in software dev would look like?
  - freedomben 8y ago
    Great question. Of course unions in software aren't really a widespread thing, so speculating at what they would look like is fraught with all the problems of speculation, but this is what I think of: Currently at work, I'm more of a "devops" guy but I get into things all over the stack sometimes too. In previous places I've been a "backend" guy that occasionally got into the frontend, etc. I view this as the optimal arrangement: blurry lines of responsibility (so people aren't pigeon-holed), but you can still develop depth and expertise in an area of specialty. In a world of unions, if it were analogous to my past experience, there could be a "front end" union, a "back end" union, a "dev ops/operations" union, etc. These unions would then draw up lines, much like the "driver" and "mechanic" unions did in my past. Need to change a line of javascript? Talk to a "front end" guy. Tweak a deploy script? Not if the union agreement forbids it. Those seem like ludicrous thoughts based on where we are now. But I'm sure at one time the idea that a driver can't effect any repairs to the truck, no matter how small, probably seemed ludicrous as well. Yet here we are. I know I probably sound very anti-union, but to clarify my position, I'm only anti-forced unions. So long as I can opt out of the union if and when I please, I have no qualms. Sadly that is not the case in many places in the United States. P.S. If I could edit and re-word this line, I would. I think the language is unclear and unnecessarily harsh: > Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance. I would change that to: "Thinking of unions as all upside with no downside (or vice versa) is an argument from ideology, not one from experience."

rconti 8y ago

This. And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof). Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
It's more "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" imho. Many HN denizens are angling to either work at google or launch a startup that is acquired by google or grow to the scale of google. Why offend the future employer / acquirer now over proletarian issues? In case you aren't familiar with the Steinbeck quote: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
- acct1771 8y ago
  "Embarrassed" -> "disenfranchised" has a nice ring to it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- novembermike 8y ago
  This is misquoted quite a bit. Here's the actual quote. "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

simion314 8y ago

What is different then the acting though? Actors have unions that protect their rights but don't affect their salaries AFAIK (maybe they were abused so much that the history if fresh for them still?)

smacktoward 8y ago
Actors' unions do impact salary. Union contracts set and enforce minimum amounts that all working actors have to be paid, for example. An actor earning these amounts is said to be "working for scale." For illustration, SAG-AFTRA's current rate sheet for TV productions can be found here: https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010%2025%2018.pdf https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010...
- simion314 8y ago
  So isn't ok of setting some minimal salary? I do not see why the developers would be against this, only the companies would like to abuse the developers and work them extra hours and not pay.(so probably companies are spreading the FUD against unions? )
idontpost 8y ago
The difference is that actors were treated like shit first. Even the stars. Just look at what they did to Judy Garland, not to mention everyone else on Wizard of Oz. That hasn't happened yet to developers.
- Dangeranger 8y ago
  You may want to think back just 25 years to the early to mid-nineties when developers where considered “code monkeys” who couldn’t think past their current module and needed “business analysts” to write requirements for them. It wasn’t slavery by any stretch, but working in programming was akin to working in “IT” and thought of as a department full of weird nerds who cost the company money.
  - 8y ago

SolaceQuantum 8y ago

I can think of a mountain of things that programmers could collectively bargain for that would benefit everyone. I'd like for bargaining to happen about parental leave, what "unlimited vacation" actually means, what "on-call" duties really entail, compensation for overtime, and whether or not engineers can be reasonably forced to perform illegal or unethical behavior (data collection, dark pattern designs).

vips7L 8y ago
You are not forced to do any of those things. You are able to find a new employer whenever you want.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  I might not able to find a new employer whenever I want. I might not have time to job search because I have children. I might have dependents or I myself need critical medical care that cannot be interrupted by job hopping. I might have a family emergency that has destroyed my savings to look for a new job. I might be in the point of my career in which leaving for a new job so soon would be a red flag to employers. I might have just made a large purchase (a home, for example) that means I cannot afford to find a new employer at the exact moment my current asks me to be on-call for the next 72 hours nonstop. And if it's not me, it might be my co worker, who I know is a new parent and cannot afford to stop working to care for their child. It might by my mentor, who is dealing with ageism making it difficult to find work. It might be my mentee, who is being discriminated against because of their H1B status. It might be my new hire, who accepted a lowball offer because they have no knowledge of price transparency. It might be a software developer I just met at a data science meetup, who is being worked to the bone at a startup but doesn't have enough experience to be hired anywhere else. Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.
  - techntoke 8y ago
    Agreed.. thank you for being aware of these issues. I find the tech industry to be pretty toxic & corrupt overall, usually rewarding the employees that are the least ethical.