4 ms·

Well, for one thing, the good times won't last forever. Now's the time to prepare for the bad—it's much harder to organize when you're weak. For another, despi

Well, for one thing, the good times won't last forever. Now's the time to prepare for the bad—it's much harder to organize when you're weak. For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money. And then, software development and related jobs are not all at FAANG, or even close to that. Many of those working in software aren't negotiating, individually, from a position even a little better than a "normal" office worker. Probably most, in fact. There's a whole world of software developers out there beyond SV, Seattle, and New York—the average state of a worker in our industry, even just in the US, is probably much closer to the norm outside those places than in them. It's also a proven avenue for putting a stop to all sorts of abuses that exist due to the uneven power of workers and employers, not just direct compensation. Lots of non-California workers in tech are under badly disadvantageous employment agreements, but without working collectively, either through unions or government, against them, they're so common that resisting them carries high individual risk and a low chance of benefiting anyone else who's in an even worse position to resist them. That flexibility to work or create our own businesses you bring up? Yeah, that could be assured for non-California, non-public-figure-rockstar developers, too, through union negotiations.

majormajor 7y ago
> For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money. At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO. HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers. Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  My point is just that, despite high comp at some companies, rejecting a candidate is still considered a very "cheap" move from employers' perspective (so: their labor negotiating position is still strong, despite high comp)—I explicitly wasn't trying to get into the correctness of that sort of policy or the environment that creates it, beyond its probably not being viable if tech companies' negotiating positions were meaningfully weaker than a normal employer.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity. It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar. If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.) Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.

majormajor 7y ago

> For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money. At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO. HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers. Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.

karatestomp 7y ago
My point is just that, despite high comp at some companies, rejecting a candidate is still considered a very "cheap" move from employers' perspective (so: their labor negotiating position is still strong, despite high comp)—I explicitly wasn't trying to get into the correctness of that sort of policy or the environment that creates it, beyond its probably not being viable if tech companies' negotiating positions were meaningfully weaker than a normal employer.
- majormajor 7y ago
  From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity. It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar. If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.) Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.