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> This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. [...] I think there's another purpo

> This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. [...] I think there's another purpose of the film industry unions that doesn't get mentioned much in these (tech industry) discussions. Specifically, that the film unions raise wages by limiting the number of people who enter the industry. It's simple supply and demand. This works via the following mechanisms: First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union. Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production. Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member). So far so good. But how does one join the union? That's the catch-22: You must work for at least n days on a union production (n=1 for speaking roles, n=3 for extra roles) to be eligible to join SAG/AFTRA. But most union productions won't hire you unless you're a union member (see above). I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees).

throwaway894345 6y ago
> I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees). I doubt it, if only because actors are hired in large part due to their celebrity. There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public).
- minimuffins 6y ago
  Most people in film and TV unions aren't actors.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically: > First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union. Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production. Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member). Note that by observing important differences between the film and software industries, I'm not arguing that unions couldn't work for the software industry. I suspect this is why I've been downvoted.
    - labcomputer 6y ago
      > I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically: I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent). I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I guess I'm saying that the celebrity nature of actors is a confounding factor. It's not that these actors are merely celebrities among the film industry, but your mom and dad and friends actually have heard of them and their presence in a film is going to influence whether or not people turn out to see the film. You can get the most famous programmers together to build a product, and no one is going to buy that product on the basis of those programmers' celebrity unless some segment of the software industry is the target audience for that product. To be quite clear (and likely this was your point, in which case I agree), if the film/tv unions excluded actors, the effect would be pretty comparable. My friends and family aren't going to see a film because Joe The Sound Guy worked on it just like they aren't going to buy an app just because Collin The SRE worked on it (no matter how famous Joe and Collin are in their respective industries).
- sitkack 6y ago
  > There are no celebrity SRE Twitter is full of them.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    >> There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public). > Twitter is full of them. Name one.
    - ar_lan 6y ago
      Kelsey Hightower comes to mind. In general, I try to avoid Twitter though because the software community there is very self-congratulatory and a bit toxic elitist. Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        Hightower's celebrity does not extend to the general public. I don't think he even has a wikipedia page, which is certainly the low water mark for celebrity.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        > Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer. Is this a typo? I was under the impression that frontend devs were near the bottom of the dev pecking order. At least that's been my experience wherever I've worked and in things I've read.
        throwaway894345 6y ago
        I think you're reading it wrong; the phrasing as I read it is consistent with your "frontend devs at the bottom of the pecking order" perception. The original quote says "good luck being treated like a real engineer" implying that frontend devs are treated so poorly they aren't even considered to be real engineers. FWIW, frontend is a suite of hard problems which are distinct from the problems we face on the backend but no less challenging. Frontend development today certainly seems a lot less rigorous than backend development in the sense that there seem to be fewer best-practices and more of an embrace of a certain "cowboy/ninja/move-fast-and-break-things" chaotic ethic (engineers from other disciplines would balk at the characterization of backend engineering as 'rigorous', but I think it's fair to say that we devote more rigor to it than frontend development). I think this is largely due to our industry deciding that frontend was a low-skill position and thus putting most of our most junior engineers there to sort it out, and then we on the backend mock them for churning out new frameworks and tools in a desperate effort to bring some order to the chaos.
taurath 6y ago
I would add - finally, the nature of the film industry is to work on a contract project basis, with individual funding rounds rather than being a "regular" employee. Thats why the union benefits in terms of health insurance is so important. So imagine a union of software contractors - that union would have no power because anyone wanting to use a contractor could sidestep them immediately by hiring a non-union contractor of which there are many. How it could work is this - imagine you took the top 20 researchers in machine learning and they unionized, and refused to work except under a contract negotiated by the union. If Google wants "that guy" then they have to use that union contract. "That guy" has power, because people want to hire them. That can form an umbrella under which other ML researchers can sign up. Suddenly you can't effectively do ML without working with the union. Companies with people like that keep those people under extremely lucrative contracts so its unlikely they would be financially motivated to form such a union. There's also the factor that "what even is the top-20 researchers". In movies you know if you have Brad Pitt or not. But you 100% need as many top people as possible to somehow become union-minded. I'd hope that this group of Google workers grows quickly. Its great that they've voted to form. Note of course I'm just spitballing here and am not at all an expert in labor relations or how unions really form or work. Maybe it didn't go like that. Here's an interesting article thats paywalled, but it at least describes an early unionization and then a big back and forth struggle. It would behoove us all to understand how the labor movement of the 1890s to 1960s came about, because it would appear we are just about to enter such a period. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815030?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815030?seq=1
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbrave 6y ago
  Perhaps in your ML union example they would be motivated by things other than financial compensation, perhaps ethical concerns.
kayfox 6y ago
In the theatre industry the union's work to limit supply and demand is usually along the lines of assigning work by seniority and seniority based on how much work someone has done, so when you first get into IATSE, you have to be really flexible and available for whatever work comes along so that you can accumulate the time to get more work. This somewhat limits entrants. Some IATSE locals use different variations on that work assignment strategy and some entrants get work outside the union, so it varies by location, specialty, sector, etc.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees). I doubt it, if only because actors are hired in large part due to their celebrity. There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public).

minimuffins 6y ago
Most people in film and TV unions aren't actors.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically: > First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union. Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production. Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member). Note that by observing important differences between the film and software industries, I'm not arguing that unions couldn't work for the software industry. I suspect this is why I've been downvoted.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    > I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically: I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent). I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I guess I'm saying that the celebrity nature of actors is a confounding factor. It's not that these actors are merely celebrities among the film industry, but your mom and dad and friends actually have heard of them and their presence in a film is going to influence whether or not people turn out to see the film. You can get the most famous programmers together to build a product, and no one is going to buy that product on the basis of those programmers' celebrity unless some segment of the software industry is the target audience for that product. To be quite clear (and likely this was your point, in which case I agree), if the film/tv unions excluded actors, the effect would be pretty comparable. My friends and family aren't going to see a film because Joe The Sound Guy worked on it just like they aren't going to buy an app just because Collin The SRE worked on it (no matter how famous Joe and Collin are in their respective industries).
sitkack 6y ago
> There are no celebrity SRE Twitter is full of them.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  >> There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public). > Twitter is full of them. Name one.
  - ar_lan 6y ago
    Kelsey Hightower comes to mind. In general, I try to avoid Twitter though because the software community there is very self-congratulatory and a bit toxic elitist. Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Hightower's celebrity does not extend to the general public. I don't think he even has a wikipedia page, which is certainly the low water mark for celebrity.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer. Is this a typo? I was under the impression that frontend devs were near the bottom of the dev pecking order. At least that's been my experience wherever I've worked and in things I've read.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I think you're reading it wrong; the phrasing as I read it is consistent with your "frontend devs at the bottom of the pecking order" perception. The original quote says "good luck being treated like a real engineer" implying that frontend devs are treated so poorly they aren't even considered to be real engineers. FWIW, frontend is a suite of hard problems which are distinct from the problems we face on the backend but no less challenging. Frontend development today certainly seems a lot less rigorous than backend development in the sense that there seem to be fewer best-practices and more of an embrace of a certain "cowboy/ninja/move-fast-and-break-things" chaotic ethic (engineers from other disciplines would balk at the characterization of backend engineering as 'rigorous', but I think it's fair to say that we devote more rigor to it than frontend development). I think this is largely due to our industry deciding that frontend was a low-skill position and thus putting most of our most junior engineers there to sort it out, and then we on the backend mock them for churning out new frameworks and tools in a desperate effort to bring some order to the chaos.

taurath 6y ago

I would add - finally, the nature of the film industry is to work on a contract project basis, with individual funding rounds rather than being a "regular" employee. Thats why the union benefits in terms of health insurance is so important. So imagine a union of software contractors - that union would have no power because anyone wanting to use a contractor could sidestep them immediately by hiring a non-union contractor of which there are many. How it could work is this - imagine you took the top 20 researchers in machine learning and they unionized, and refused to work except under a contract negotiated by the union. If Google wants "that guy" then they have to use that union contract. "That guy" has power, because people want to hire them. That can form an umbrella under which other ML researchers can sign up. Suddenly you can't effectively do ML without working with the union. Companies with people like that keep those people under extremely lucrative contracts so its unlikely they would be financially motivated to form such a union. There's also the factor that "what even is the top-20 researchers". In movies you know if you have Brad Pitt or not. But you 100% need as many top people as possible to somehow become union-minded. I'd hope that this group of Google workers grows quickly. Its great that they've voted to form. Note of course I'm just spitballing here and am not at all an expert in labor relations or how unions really form or work. Maybe it didn't go like that. Here's an interesting article thats paywalled, but it at least describes an early unionization and then a big back and forth struggle. It would behoove us all to understand how the labor movement of the 1890s to 1960s came about, because it would appear we are just about to enter such a period. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815030?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815030?seq=1

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
michaelbrave 6y ago
Perhaps in your ML union example they would be motivated by things other than financial compensation, perhaps ethical concerns.

kayfox 6y ago

In the theatre industry the union's work to limit supply and demand is usually along the lines of assigning work by seniority and seniority based on how much work someone has done, so when you first get into IATSE, you have to be really flexible and available for whatever work comes along so that you can accumulate the time to get more work. This somewhat limits entrants. Some IATSE locals use different variations on that work assignment strategy and some entrants get work outside the union, so it varies by location, specialty, sector, etc.