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It will be interesting to see what this does for developer salaries at Kickstarter. If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously

It will be interesting to see what this does for developer salaries at Kickstarter. If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. For unions in our industry to work they are going to have to be very explicit about how they are going to raise developer salaries.

untog 8y ago
Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.
- soheil 8y ago
  Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
  - ahelwer 8y ago
    As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down. Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
    - soheil 8y ago
      > Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
      - ahelwer 8y ago
        Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
        soheil 8y ago
        I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument. If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
        ahelwer 8y ago
        It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
        8y ago
  - geofft 8y ago
    Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position. It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
    - soheil 8y ago
      > "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
      - geofft 8y ago
        Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches: 1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that. 2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
  - untog 8y ago
    > And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia. Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request. But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
    - soheil 8y ago
      > Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes. > But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Are employees really going to strike to get out of an open plan office, though? I hate my open plan office but I would never give up even a week's salary to protest it.
rb808 8y ago
Yeah but presumably with a union you can also take it easy, not worry about getting laid off and spend time on personal projects.
- naravara 8y ago
  What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping and administration from the management.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Just a quick question... But do you have any personal experience with the UAW (United Auto Workers Union)? Because while on it's face, I'd agree with your comment... but in experience I've seen things closer to what the other guy was implying.
    - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
      You think United Auto Workers work on side projects?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - solidasparagus 8y ago
    It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.
- moduspol 8y ago
  Top performers already have that choice.
praptak 8y ago
Companies in general are crappy at recognizing top contributors anyway. Tech companies are no exception.
- StevePerkins 8y ago
  Contributors in general are pretty crappy at recognizing top contributors. How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.
  - atwebb 8y ago
    Please stop contributing to my impostor syndrome. You're absolutely right though, it can be very difficult to have enough self knowledge and awareness to even place one's self sometimes.
  - goldcd 8y ago
    raises hand I see my job to be a human-shield whose sole purpose is to try to ensure something worthwhile gets done by the collective. No shortage of smart-people. Tricky bit is keeping them pointing vaguely in the right direction and ensuring nobody upsets/interrupts them. I'll fight my/their corner, but accept I may be wrong/out-of-my-depth if you can tell me why. Until then, I just soak up the grief. Biggest turn-off - people who think personal excellence in one area is infinitely transferable.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    I wouldn't consider myself a top performer. Though I'd expect I'd become one at a place that had a union ensuring low performers got accumulated at the company.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).
geofft 8y ago
As a top performer: 1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves. 2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  You do best when your colleagues do the best, for sure. Do you think the union is going to help or hurt when you have underperforming or disruptive colleagues?
  - munk-a 8y ago
    I think these two questions can be separated Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites) Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive. Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
  - pavlov 8y ago
    Will the union help or hurt when you have colleagues being treated unfairly by management?
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    Union will help. Unions usually have probationary times before they start representing a new employee. For a year of probationary time, it's plenty to know if the employee is a good fit. If not, the employee can be let go and doesn't get the help of the union. And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.
navigatesol 8y ago
>If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.
rarecoil 8y ago
> If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you. Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hellllllllooo 8y ago
Salary isn't the only point of negotiation. Unions can protect people against safety concerns, long hours or lack of vacation etc. or whatever issues are a problem at a company. A union is a group of people organizing to define how they want to work and salary structure doesn't have to part of the contract if it's not an issue to the workers. The union members get to define what is important to them.
- hellllllllooo 8y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted beyond just not liking unions? It's literally a fact. Members decide what their collective goals are. In cases like nursing in California under staffing and long hours are the issues they are most concerned about above salary.
danShumway 8y ago
Agreed. I think Kickstarter employees jumping out and trying this is a good thing for the overall industry. The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay). This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees. I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.

untog 8y ago

Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.

soheil 8y ago
Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
- ahelwer 8y ago
  As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down. Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
    - ahelwer 8y ago
      Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
      - soheil 8y ago
        I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument. If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
        ahelwer 8y ago
        It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
        8y ago
- geofft 8y ago
  Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position. It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
    - geofft 8y ago
      Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches: 1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that. 2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
- untog 8y ago
  > And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia. Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request. But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes. > But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
Are employees really going to strike to get out of an open plan office, though? I hate my open plan office but I would never give up even a week's salary to protest it.

rb808 8y ago

Yeah but presumably with a union you can also take it easy, not worry about getting laid off and spend time on personal projects.

naravara 8y ago
What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping and administration from the management.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Just a quick question... But do you have any personal experience with the UAW (United Auto Workers Union)? Because while on it's face, I'd agree with your comment... but in experience I've seen things closer to what the other guy was implying.
  - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
    You think United Auto Workers work on side projects?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- solidasparagus 8y ago
  It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.
moduspol 8y ago
Top performers already have that choice.

praptak 8y ago

Companies in general are crappy at recognizing top contributors anyway. Tech companies are no exception.

StevePerkins 8y ago
Contributors in general are pretty crappy at recognizing top contributors. How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.
- atwebb 8y ago
  Please stop contributing to my impostor syndrome. You're absolutely right though, it can be very difficult to have enough self knowledge and awareness to even place one's self sometimes.
- goldcd 8y ago
  raises hand I see my job to be a human-shield whose sole purpose is to try to ensure something worthwhile gets done by the collective. No shortage of smart-people. Tricky bit is keeping them pointing vaguely in the right direction and ensuring nobody upsets/interrupts them. I'll fight my/their corner, but accept I may be wrong/out-of-my-depth if you can tell me why. Until then, I just soak up the grief. Biggest turn-off - people who think personal excellence in one area is infinitely transferable.
- ummonk 8y ago
  I wouldn't consider myself a top performer. Though I'd expect I'd become one at a place that had a union ensuring low performers got accumulated at the company.
WillPostForFood 8y ago
This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).

geofft 8y ago

As a top performer: 1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves. 2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
You do best when your colleagues do the best, for sure. Do you think the union is going to help or hurt when you have underperforming or disruptive colleagues?
- munk-a 8y ago
  I think these two questions can be separated Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites) Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive. Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
- pavlov 8y ago
  Will the union help or hurt when you have colleagues being treated unfairly by management?
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  Union will help. Unions usually have probationary times before they start representing a new employee. For a year of probationary time, it's plenty to know if the employee is a good fit. If not, the employee can be let go and doesn't get the help of the union. And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.

navigatesol 8y ago

>If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.

rarecoil 8y ago

> If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you. Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

hellllllllooo 8y ago

Salary isn't the only point of negotiation. Unions can protect people against safety concerns, long hours or lack of vacation etc. or whatever issues are a problem at a company. A union is a group of people organizing to define how they want to work and salary structure doesn't have to part of the contract if it's not an issue to the workers. The union members get to define what is important to them.

hellllllllooo 8y ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted beyond just not liking unions? It's literally a fact. Members decide what their collective goals are. In cases like nursing in California under staffing and long hours are the issues they are most concerned about above salary.

danShumway 8y ago

Agreed. I think Kickstarter employees jumping out and trying this is a good thing for the overall industry. The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay). This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees. I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.