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Tech workers could have effectively used the leverage associated with unionization since at least 1984 during the semiconductor recession. Considering that the

Tech workers could have effectively used the leverage associated with unionization since at least 1984 during the semiconductor recession. Considering that the revenue per employee number is at an all time high, and the amount of money the company spends on the employee's working environment[1] is at record lows pretty much explains why this is going to be effective now when it wasn't before. There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees. So giving a voice to that choice could be interesting as well. [1] Most people I've had the discussion with will argue that "free food" and "bus service" is way more than employees in the 90's got. However on a per-employee basis, the typical professional employee (engineer) had 150 square feet of office space that was unshared, in an open plan office that is typically less than 18 square feet and can be a small as 9 square feet. 100 square feet in a class A office building is $1000/month for $10/sq ft. Food and bus service per employee totals to much less than that. The key is that with a union, the employee has a voice in whether they get compensated in office space or in free snacks.

jacquesm 7y ago
Food and bus service are also simply ways to control the amount of time an employee spends on premises.
kerkeslager 7y ago
Also, frankly, fsk free snacks. Pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks, and I'll choose whether to spend it on snacks or not. And since the money spent on free snacks was probably about $20/week, it won't be a significant consideration in any of my decisions. Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.
- TylerE 7y ago
  They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
  - breischl 7y ago
    Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.
      - breischl 7y ago
        As you said, that stuff is lunch/dinner, rather than snacks. Certainly that's a more valuable perk that some pretzels and sodas (or whatever). It's also less common.
  - gaustin 7y ago
    I can have them delivered for very little premium. If my co-workers and I pool our orders we can reduce the impact of those deliveries (or rotating pickup), and have more choice about what snacks we get. Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make. Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that. And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  Tax free when a company buys them. I prefer the free snacks even at an even money exchange, but realistically, you'd see about $12/week on a $20/week rerouting.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    If $8/week is something that affects your decisions, you might benefit from unionizing for higher pay. ;) If you want to play the tax game, let's talk about reimbursing large purchases like a vehicle, personal laptop that you aren't monitoring, education costs, or housing. There isn't a situation where I'm going to care about snacks.
- gpm 7y ago
  Free snacks has to be one of tech companies most profitable endeavors. They've got a bunch of workers who cost them on the order of 1 to 4 dollars per minute. If they can spend a dollar on a snack to get 2 minutes more work out of them, they are making a killing. Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc. The same goes for meals by the way, I can't believe the number of places that have expensive employees go buy food for themselves blocks away... they're literally throwing away money by not having cheap employees fetch it in a single batch.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Meals Are supposed to be taxed but the irs doesn’t enforce it.
  - Negitivefrags 7y ago
    You act like there is some shadowy cabal running cost benefit analysis of every decision for some evil purpose. Maybe the free snacks are there because it’s nice to have free snacks and the boss enjoys them? Does there really need to be a more sinister reason? I mean, I know at our company that I wanted to have drink fridges with a huge amount of interesting beverages because I enjoy drinking a different drink every day. It wasn’t me trying to improve employee performance.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      There is at least a little bit of a dark side to seemingly frivolous perks like snacks, foosball tables, and beer on tap- by spending relative pennies for "luxuries", management is able to paper over diminished investment elsewhere, that employees could otherwise benefit from. Or to hide work cultures that aren't as great as they look upon their first visit. Shiny distractions.
      - blahbhthrow3748 7y ago
- wyager 7y ago
  Office perks are tax efficient. They aren’t subject to payroll taxes and are a deductible business expense. Not having any perks at all would be wasteful.
  - mst 7y ago
    Also notable - there are companies that provide 'free' perks for your staff where a few of them are concrete and the rest are discounts on things from their marketing partners. Honestly, I'd be tempted to sign up and then tell incoming employees the truth thereof.
  - zaccus 7y ago
    That's great for investors, but the benefit to employees is minimal. No, free snacks don't count as a benefit lol.
- tiew9Vii 7y ago
  I worked for a company that IPO'd at the time for around $4.4 billion. Shortly after IPO they wanted everyone to go on call. The terms sucked bad, the requirements significantly affecting personal time and the compensation for time on call and loss of personal time less than minimum wage for the pleassue. I'd of been better off working minimum wage out of hours given I'd have to loose personal time anyway. The conditions where non negotiable and I was told they didn't need to re-issue contracts etc, I'd have to go on call with no say in it. In real terms going on call was a pay cut with more accountability. On refusing to go on call, my manager and his manager used the line "What about the free food and perks, take one for the team". It's about the worst thing they could of said. Free food being a small salad counter / deli bar and free soft drinks non which I utilized as didn't fit my fitness diet and as you said likely only a few dollars per week extra per member of staff for them to provide a few snacks. After previously being labelled a high performer etc not long after (days) late on a Friday afternoon HR called me in to sign my resignation papers and go on gardening leave.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  I'd welcome free snacks. I work on IND airport property, we have 30 minute lunches, the 2 refrigerators will store maybe food for 20 people yet we have 100ish on day shift, McDonald's is the closest anything and in traffic during a typical lunch period will take you 20-25 minutes on a good day to get to and get back and we can NOT eat at our desks (that we share with another shift). Then of course there are 3 microwaves to reheat your food, for 100ish people. Some free fruit or something would be awesome for when you're not feeling what you brought or need something in addition other than bloomed chocolate and stale chips from a vending machine that the vendor refills once every 1 week to 6 weeks with no rhyme or reason. The soda machine sells out in 3-4 days and the vendor comes once every 2 weeks if we're lucky. The tap water comes out milky white at first and even if you let it run if you fill a mug and let it sit for a half hour, dump it out, the next day there will be white build up. Do that for a week and then heat the mug and it'll flake off printer paper thick pieces. I'd totally take free snacks, but yeah I'd be happier with more money. When I was at OpenAI for a meeting a couple of June's ago I was absolutely floored when they were like "we cater 2 meals a day, you're welcome to stay for lunch" and the guard/receptionist immediately offered me a chilled drink as I was checking in. I was like "wait, did I die and go to heaven?!"
throwaway894345 7y ago
Politics aside, I wonder if a tech union would have a strong incentive to make their individual workers irreplaceable--encourage them to hoard knowledge or make the code deliberately difficult for others to understand--such that the company would have a lot more to lose from a strike. As an outsider, most unions that I'm familiar with have employees that are more or less replaceable (one certified welder can fill in for another in a relatively short amount of time), but I don't think this is (as) true for tech. Thoughts?
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  It's not as if most companies- or at least most startups- are particularly good about preventing individuals or individual teams from becoming vital cogs, leading to tribal knowledge. Unions won't lead to less documentation that the existing poor organizational cultures already foster.
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    My question was about whether unionization constitutes an increased incentive (and I would think that it would for the same reasons that unionization gives a collection of individuals more power than they would have as individuals); I don't think that depends on whether or not existing institutions are good or bad at preventing vital cogs, etc. I might be wrong, but I don't think it's because of the efficacy of existing institutions.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  There's nobody purposely making that kind of effort right now and it STILL takes something like a month for a new body to get up to speed.
- OJFord 7y ago
  It wouldn't occur to anyone, it would just be a problem afterwards with them gone. If anything 'obscure code' would just be a reason to get rid; have less of it and what there is is new guy's problem.
- ptx 7y ago
wmil 7y ago
There's a great tweet about offices... "Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies? Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today." https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936 https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936 Read the whole thread. It's disturbing how close the over the top dystopian joke offices from the film Brazil are to reality.
mprovost 7y ago
And the amount spent on actual hardware must be at an all time low. The first lab I interned at in high school in the early 90s, every programmer had both a Symbolics workstation and a NeXTcube on their desk. (In a private office, of course). That represented a pretty significant investment. At my first "real" job, I got a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. These days you get the same Macbook Pro that everyone else can pick up at the Apple Store. Often tech folk will have faster personal computers at home.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Right, it was not uncommon in the 80s and 90s for your workstation to cost significantly more than your car did. The Ultra-5 was the cheap Sun work-station at $4k base price, as by 1999 Intel based workstations were starting to put pressure on Sun from below.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    I could seriously do with more RAM, but I don't need a $4k computer. In fact, since I have a MacBook but would be more than happy with a (Linux) ThinkPad, it might not even cost more. My point is, we don't need 'hardware investment' for the sake of it. If places started doing that I'd rather BYO device, and pocket the difference between what I need and what they budget for.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      On the last point, Apple seems to be betting otherwise with its exorbitant prices for top spec Mac Pro configurations.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        From what I understand their market is basically companies that have already bought into a Mac based workflow and for whom the switching costs (retraining on new software, rebuilding tools etc) would be so high that Apple can practically charge whatever they want. This doesn't seem like a good long term strategy though.
WalterBright 7y ago
> There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees. Big tech companies already do that in the form of stock options, grants, and employee stock purchase plans.
yspeak 7y ago
No free snacks just union dues. And a new bureaucracy that will live off it. Have a problem ? See your union boss. They will take care of everything.

jacquesm 7y ago

Food and bus service are also simply ways to control the amount of time an employee spends on premises.

kerkeslager 7y ago

Also, frankly, fsk free snacks. Pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks, and I'll choose whether to spend it on snacks or not. And since the money spent on free snacks was probably about $20/week, it won't be a significant consideration in any of my decisions. Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.

TylerE 7y ago
They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
- breischl 7y ago
  Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.
    - breischl 7y ago
      As you said, that stuff is lunch/dinner, rather than snacks. Certainly that's a more valuable perk that some pretzels and sodas (or whatever). It's also less common.
- gaustin 7y ago
  I can have them delivered for very little premium. If my co-workers and I pool our orders we can reduce the impact of those deliveries (or rotating pickup), and have more choice about what snacks we get. Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make. Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that. And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.
edmundsauto 7y ago
Tax free when a company buys them. I prefer the free snacks even at an even money exchange, but realistically, you'd see about $12/week on a $20/week rerouting.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  If $8/week is something that affects your decisions, you might benefit from unionizing for higher pay. ;) If you want to play the tax game, let's talk about reimbursing large purchases like a vehicle, personal laptop that you aren't monitoring, education costs, or housing. There isn't a situation where I'm going to care about snacks.
gpm 7y ago
Free snacks has to be one of tech companies most profitable endeavors. They've got a bunch of workers who cost them on the order of 1 to 4 dollars per minute. If they can spend a dollar on a snack to get 2 minutes more work out of them, they are making a killing. Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc. The same goes for meals by the way, I can't believe the number of places that have expensive employees go buy food for themselves blocks away... they're literally throwing away money by not having cheap employees fetch it in a single batch.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Meals Are supposed to be taxed but the irs doesn’t enforce it.
- Negitivefrags 7y ago
  You act like there is some shadowy cabal running cost benefit analysis of every decision for some evil purpose. Maybe the free snacks are there because it’s nice to have free snacks and the boss enjoys them? Does there really need to be a more sinister reason? I mean, I know at our company that I wanted to have drink fridges with a huge amount of interesting beverages because I enjoy drinking a different drink every day. It wasn’t me trying to improve employee performance.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    There is at least a little bit of a dark side to seemingly frivolous perks like snacks, foosball tables, and beer on tap- by spending relative pennies for "luxuries", management is able to paper over diminished investment elsewhere, that employees could otherwise benefit from. Or to hide work cultures that aren't as great as they look upon their first visit. Shiny distractions.
    - blahbhthrow3748 7y ago
wyager 7y ago
Office perks are tax efficient. They aren’t subject to payroll taxes and are a deductible business expense. Not having any perks at all would be wasteful.
- mst 7y ago
  Also notable - there are companies that provide 'free' perks for your staff where a few of them are concrete and the rest are discounts on things from their marketing partners. Honestly, I'd be tempted to sign up and then tell incoming employees the truth thereof.
- zaccus 7y ago
  That's great for investors, but the benefit to employees is minimal. No, free snacks don't count as a benefit lol.
tiew9Vii 7y ago
I worked for a company that IPO'd at the time for around $4.4 billion. Shortly after IPO they wanted everyone to go on call. The terms sucked bad, the requirements significantly affecting personal time and the compensation for time on call and loss of personal time less than minimum wage for the pleassue. I'd of been better off working minimum wage out of hours given I'd have to loose personal time anyway. The conditions where non negotiable and I was told they didn't need to re-issue contracts etc, I'd have to go on call with no say in it. In real terms going on call was a pay cut with more accountability. On refusing to go on call, my manager and his manager used the line "What about the free food and perks, take one for the team". It's about the worst thing they could of said. Free food being a small salad counter / deli bar and free soft drinks non which I utilized as didn't fit my fitness diet and as you said likely only a few dollars per week extra per member of staff for them to provide a few snacks. After previously being labelled a high performer etc not long after (days) late on a Friday afternoon HR called me in to sign my resignation papers and go on gardening leave.
ryanmercer 7y ago
I'd welcome free snacks. I work on IND airport property, we have 30 minute lunches, the 2 refrigerators will store maybe food for 20 people yet we have 100ish on day shift, McDonald's is the closest anything and in traffic during a typical lunch period will take you 20-25 minutes on a good day to get to and get back and we can NOT eat at our desks (that we share with another shift). Then of course there are 3 microwaves to reheat your food, for 100ish people. Some free fruit or something would be awesome for when you're not feeling what you brought or need something in addition other than bloomed chocolate and stale chips from a vending machine that the vendor refills once every 1 week to 6 weeks with no rhyme or reason. The soda machine sells out in 3-4 days and the vendor comes once every 2 weeks if we're lucky. The tap water comes out milky white at first and even if you let it run if you fill a mug and let it sit for a half hour, dump it out, the next day there will be white build up. Do that for a week and then heat the mug and it'll flake off printer paper thick pieces. I'd totally take free snacks, but yeah I'd be happier with more money. When I was at OpenAI for a meeting a couple of June's ago I was absolutely floored when they were like "we cater 2 meals a day, you're welcome to stay for lunch" and the guard/receptionist immediately offered me a chilled drink as I was checking in. I was like "wait, did I die and go to heaven?!"

throwaway894345 7y ago

Politics aside, I wonder if a tech union would have a strong incentive to make their individual workers irreplaceable--encourage them to hoard knowledge or make the code deliberately difficult for others to understand--such that the company would have a lot more to lose from a strike. As an outsider, most unions that I'm familiar with have employees that are more or less replaceable (one certified welder can fill in for another in a relatively short amount of time), but I don't think this is (as) true for tech. Thoughts?

Apocryphon 7y ago
It's not as if most companies- or at least most startups- are particularly good about preventing individuals or individual teams from becoming vital cogs, leading to tribal knowledge. Unions won't lead to less documentation that the existing poor organizational cultures already foster.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  My question was about whether unionization constitutes an increased incentive (and I would think that it would for the same reasons that unionization gives a collection of individuals more power than they would have as individuals); I don't think that depends on whether or not existing institutions are good or bad at preventing vital cogs, etc. I might be wrong, but I don't think it's because of the efficacy of existing institutions.
mrguyorama 7y ago
There's nobody purposely making that kind of effort right now and it STILL takes something like a month for a new body to get up to speed.
OJFord 7y ago
It wouldn't occur to anyone, it would just be a problem afterwards with them gone. If anything 'obscure code' would just be a reason to get rid; have less of it and what there is is new guy's problem.
ptx 7y ago

wmil 7y ago

There's a great tweet about offices... "Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies? Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today." https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936 https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936 Read the whole thread. It's disturbing how close the over the top dystopian joke offices from the film Brazil are to reality.

mprovost 7y ago

And the amount spent on actual hardware must be at an all time low. The first lab I interned at in high school in the early 90s, every programmer had both a Symbolics workstation and a NeXTcube on their desk. (In a private office, of course). That represented a pretty significant investment. At my first "real" job, I got a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. These days you get the same Macbook Pro that everyone else can pick up at the Apple Store. Often tech folk will have faster personal computers at home.

aidenn0 7y ago
Right, it was not uncommon in the 80s and 90s for your workstation to cost significantly more than your car did. The Ultra-5 was the cheap Sun work-station at $4k base price, as by 1999 Intel based workstations were starting to put pressure on Sun from below.
- OJFord 7y ago
  I could seriously do with more RAM, but I don't need a $4k computer. In fact, since I have a MacBook but would be more than happy with a (Linux) ThinkPad, it might not even cost more. My point is, we don't need 'hardware investment' for the sake of it. If places started doing that I'd rather BYO device, and pocket the difference between what I need and what they budget for.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    On the last point, Apple seems to be betting otherwise with its exorbitant prices for top spec Mac Pro configurations.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      From what I understand their market is basically companies that have already bought into a Mac based workflow and for whom the switching costs (retraining on new software, rebuilding tools etc) would be so high that Apple can practically charge whatever they want. This doesn't seem like a good long term strategy though.

WalterBright 7y ago

> There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees. Big tech companies already do that in the form of stock options, grants, and employee stock purchase plans.

yspeak 7y ago

No free snacks just union dues. And a new bureaucracy that will live off it. Have a problem ? See your union boss. They will take care of everything.