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My guess is that the “unionization effort” will spread to other companies but it won’t get anything more than a few percentage of the workforce to join. Most w

My guess is that the “unionization effort” will spread to other companies but it won’t get anything more than a few percentage of the workforce to join. Most workers at the big tech companies are fairly happy and comfortable and not nearly as politically vocal as the organizers of the union. I suspect that it will be limited to a small vocal minority.

greatgirl 6y ago
Not on a long term scale. Tech's revenue is eventually going to dry up, regulations will become tighter and the low hanging fruit will be picked. They'll be less willing to pay engineers a senator's salary and there will be more engineers to go around too. With this comes discomfort if you're a software engineer. Your job begins to become less thinking and more maintenance. Your salary isn't what it was, or you get outsourced, or you simply get fired because the company doesn't need more than one smart engineer. With this comes politicization. Why does one person get to decide my fate? Why isn't the workplace a democracy? Then you will see unions in the tech industry.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  People have been predicting tech is soon going to dry up for basically the entire industry's history. I'm not gonna say this is an impossible future, but I don't see much reason to expect it.
  - greatgirl 6y ago
    People wrongly predicted the end of the tech industry (and by tech industry i mostly mean ad-tech like google, since that is the subject of the thread) because they don't understand it, and there was even more reason to misunderstand it when it was in its infancy. Now, we can see the amount of anti-trust cases against them, the amount of regulation popping up, the overabundance of young compsci students. There are reasons to expect it to burst one day, but I never said that day was soon.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Big companies are already almost entirely maintenance.

greatgirl 6y ago

Not on a long term scale. Tech's revenue is eventually going to dry up, regulations will become tighter and the low hanging fruit will be picked. They'll be less willing to pay engineers a senator's salary and there will be more engineers to go around too. With this comes discomfort if you're a software engineer. Your job begins to become less thinking and more maintenance. Your salary isn't what it was, or you get outsourced, or you simply get fired because the company doesn't need more than one smart engineer. With this comes politicization. Why does one person get to decide my fate? Why isn't the workplace a democracy? Then you will see unions in the tech industry.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
People have been predicting tech is soon going to dry up for basically the entire industry's history. I'm not gonna say this is an impossible future, but I don't see much reason to expect it.
- greatgirl 6y ago
  People wrongly predicted the end of the tech industry (and by tech industry i mostly mean ad-tech like google, since that is the subject of the thread) because they don't understand it, and there was even more reason to misunderstand it when it was in its infancy. Now, we can see the amount of anti-trust cases against them, the amount of regulation popping up, the overabundance of young compsci students. There are reasons to expect it to burst one day, but I never said that day was soon.
alisonkisk 6y ago
Big companies are already almost entirely maintenance.