11 ms·

It could make it hard to recruit new Sr people and leaders in their fields. I would never consider working at Amazon.

by lokar 6y ago

nerdponx 6y ago
Maybe some will balk, but not all. There is probably enough overlap between "talented devs and designers" and "people who think unions are bad and/or don't care" that it won't affect their hiring pipeline. That said, I think highly-paid tech contributors do have the most leverage out of any other labor market participant right now. The more of us that don't want to work for anti-union companies, the better.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  The more leverage you have as an individual, the less relevant a union is for you.
  - tekromancr 6y ago
    If you do have leverage, and you don't use said leverage to help those that don't; then you are a bastard. And having policies ensures that your company, at high levels is ONLY staffed with bastards because people who are not bastards won't want to work there. Granted, that might be exactly what Amazon et al are selecting for; but at some point, a company being anti-union will be a signal to prospective high-level employees that many of your potential co-workers will be entirely self-interested assholes and you will have to decide if such a work environment is for you.
    - peytn 6y ago
      I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. Besides, if you’re in a working environment where people throw around terms like “total comp” and have mortgages denominated in millions of dollars, the self-interest ship has kinda sailed.
      - tekromancr 6y ago
        > I like to keep business and charity separated. I don't know if that really tracks, tho. You still have ethical obligations in your day-to-day business. As an extreme example; if your business is "I sell fentinyl laced heroin to elementary school children" isn't really something you can make up with any amount charitable giving. But aside from that, I was making the self-interested argument that even complete sociopaths wouldn't necessarily want to work in an environment where "My coworkers can and will try to fuck me at the first opportunity" is a true statement.
        nerdponx 6y ago
        I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.
        spamizbad 6y ago
        This perhaps explains the rationale you sometimes hear that more rules/regs will cause people to not even bother trying to start a business. If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.
        LordDragonfang 6y ago
        I'm having a hard time seeing the justification here. It's not that the cheaters refused to play if they couldn't cheat, it's that when given influence, they prefered to have things be worse for everyone so that they could cheat more freely. >If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules. The converse, that rules which allow profitable unethical behavior (and therefore prefer such unethical behavior, since profit is the measure of success) are going to alienate people who want to play fair, is exactly as well supported by that observation. And all other things being equal, it seems better to alienate the cheaters than the fair players, which in turn argues for stronger regulation. It just highlights that the people who want to cheat and make such arguments aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to cheat more easily.
    - robocat 6y ago
      Rubbish. Your assumption is that unions are always a benefit to their members. I have seen enough actions by unions where the outcomes were detrimental to their members for me to believe that some unions are a net negative for their members. Someone can choose to not belong to a union because they are a good person that just believes that a union is bad for everyone. Edit: Disclaimer: I am not stating that I think unions are bad. However the few direct experiences I personally have had with unions have not been a clear positive for the members (as an employee or student, never as an employer). Edit 2: Or you could just believe unions are net neutral, so be against joining. Because who wants to voluntarily submit themselves to an organisation or people they don’t believe in?
      - mjlawson 6y ago
        Using leverage isn't the same thing as belonging to a corrupt union. If anything, your leverage should be used to improve said union, if you have it. The same energy and fervor that goes into establishing a union presence and and should also be used to maintain it through positions of leadership and involvement within the union. I agree that not all unions are fantastic, but staying on the sidelines when you could use your position to influence for the betterment of everyone is a very privileged, selfish act.
      - lmm 6y ago
        Much like democratic government, people get the unions they deserve. Empowering your colleagues is an ethical act, and if they use that power to do things that you paternalistically think are against their own interests, then that's proof that the power is genuinely theirs.
        robocat 6y ago
        I think that is a misunderstanding of where the power of “democracy” comes from. I think voting mostly works in democracies by being able to vote a party out after the government has abused us against our wishes and their promises. In a first-past-the-post system, you often get to chose between two evils... Imagine you were forced to pick a partner for 3 years, one which you suspect will rape you and the other you think will beat you, and you must pick one or the other... And that is ignoring the fact that usually nearly 50% of the people that voted, voted against the party they got. It is ridiculous to think that the ~50% that voted against a party deserve what they get. That said, I like this version by H.L. Mencken better: "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard."
    - oort-cloud9 6y ago
      You know that business is nothing designed to be your babysitter, right? And it's designed to pay you more than your work deserves,right?
    - modularform123 6y ago
      I will give up my life before I lick the boot of a union thug.
  - frenchy 6y ago
    And that's how you end up with a company full of assholes.
  - duckfang 6y ago
    So, what individual thinks they have more leverage than Amazon? Amazon has a 1.6 trillion $ market cap.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Amazon needs a lot of software engineers and needs them more than any individual SWE needs Amazon, no matter what their market cap is.
      - patrickthebold 6y ago
        Amazon needs a lot of software engineers, but they don't need any single engineer. Which is the whole point of unionizing.
        DickingAround 6y ago
        The software engineers have plenty of leverage over every company without unions. A proof of that is high wages across the industry. And for Amazon in particular, where is that extra money coming from? It's not like they have a dividend to shareholders they could stop paying out. They're not some law firm where the partners are profit sharing. It's a publicly traded company that just constantly reinvests in growth. They're practically famous for that. So really to pay more, they must either get more efficient (probably already trying at that) or raise prices or stop reinvesting. I guess they could pay the higher paid workers less, but isn't that already the software engineers we're talking about? Those are the higher paid workers. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if they could literally have qualified as a not for profit whose sole goal is to grow into new market segments and employ more people. Because if you take a wide angle view of it, that's pretty much all they ever do.
        kelnos 6y ago
        > A proof of that is high wages across the industry. That's true if you only consider a few carefully-chosen tech corridors like SV and sorta-Seattle. Software developer wages in much of the US, Europe, and most of the rest of the world, are not that great. Usually enough to live off of, yes, but no where near what we in the bay area and a few other select locations are used to.
  - objclxt 6y ago
    > The more leverage you have as an individual, the less relevant a union is for you. If this was true, why are the highest paid and in-demand stars and directors in Hollywood all still dues paying members of their unions?
    - fmajid 6y ago
      The union helped them on their way up, and they are grateful, even though strictly speaking they no longer need the union.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Not to mention that SAG’s dues are quite regressive, only being applied to the first $500K in earnings, so being highly-paid doesn’t cost them anything additional.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        Unions still help movie stars negotiate deals.
    - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
      Isn't that slightly different and more because the film industry is unusual in that it has adapted around the unionised environment? Stars would have joined the union early in their career for the protection, but late on its minimal expense for sake of keeping the cogs of production turning. I'm no expert, but I imagine there are various on-set insurances which require actors to be a member of union, etc. It's not quite the same as a VP of a tech company joining a union.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        Seems pretty much the same to me. Junior devs have to work their way up, senior devs already make big bucks and don't really "need" the union anymore.
        tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Sure. And the aristocracy is good for aristocrats. I suspect that engineers, in general, vastly overestimate the amount of leverage they actually have as an individual when considering the merits of joining a union.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      Yup, agreed. My experience is that even the "rockstars" get fired or managed out when they become "difficult". The only places where these types of people are tolerated -- but still, not forever -- is very small shops where bus factors are low and firing a key software developer would wipe out a company-killing amount of institutional knowledge. Even then, those people are still replaced, eventually. It's the height of hubris to believe that an individual software engineer has the power to effect much in the way of change when it comes to wages and working conditions. Sure, we have orders of magnitude more power than someone working for pennies in a sweatshop, but we're nowhere near the point of calling the shots, or even bringing a significant amount of leverage to the negotiating table.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > Maybe some will balk, but not all Sure, that's fair. I guess it really depends on the proportions. I personally used to work at Amazon a number of years ago. I enjoyed my time there, and if my current work circumstances ever changed would have considered going back there. Based on what I've seen lately from them, though, I would never go back. In fact, as a customer I've discontinued Amazon prime and won't order from their retail site again. AWS has me a little more boxed in, but I'm going to slowly look for more ways to separate from them there, too, over time.
- plandis 6y ago
  The two unions I’ve worked for before getting a job in tech were terrible. At one I was physically threatened with violence for being too productive and the other allocated work times/roles by seniority instead of ability. If you happened to not be friends with the union president, then you better really enjoy cleaning the bathrooms. You seem to be under the impression that unions are always good and that certainly isn’t the case. I’ve had zero good experiences and I’m not keen to have another bad experience, thanks.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
singlow 6y ago
Then they have probably succeeded. I don't think they want people whom this would deter.
amznthrwaway 6y ago
I interviewed at Amazon largely to see what happened when I challenged them to talk about some negative practices. Their answers impressed me sufficiently that I work here now. I believe (hopefully correctly) that Amazon is a very flawed company which is becoming _less_ flawed over time, and that I can help support those improvements.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zarkov99 6y ago
In contrast, I would be very happy too consider a company that is honestly focused on its commercial mission rather than appease the small number of people who believe their employers should give them a platform for their activism.
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  Expect no one to stand up for you when you, too, are inevitably mistreated.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    You mean I will not be protected from oppression by the self-sacrificing activist heroes in tech? The same heroes that so righteously punish the thinkers of bad thoughts and so gallantly protect everybody else from the violence of wrong ideas? I guess I'll have to fight my fights alone then.

It could make it hard to recruit new Sr people and leaders in their fields. I would never consider working at Amazon.

by lokar 6y ago

It could make it hard to recruit new Sr people and leaders in their fields. I would never consider working at Amazon.

Maybe some will balk, but not all. There is probably enough overlap between "talented devs and designers" and "people who think unions are bad and/or don't care" that it won't affect their hiring pipeline. That said, I think highly-paid tech contributors do have the most leverage out of any other labor market participant right now. The more of us that don't want to work for anti-union companies, the better.

sokoloff 6y ago
The more leverage you have as an individual, the less relevant a union is for you.
- tekromancr 6y ago
  If you do have leverage, and you don't use said leverage to help those that don't; then you are a bastard. And having policies ensures that your company, at high levels is ONLY staffed with bastards because people who are not bastards won't want to work there. Granted, that might be exactly what Amazon et al are selecting for; but at some point, a company being anti-union will be a signal to prospective high-level employees that many of your potential co-workers will be entirely self-interested assholes and you will have to decide if such a work environment is for you.
  - peytn 6y ago
    I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. Besides, if you’re in a working environment where people throw around terms like “total comp” and have mortgages denominated in millions of dollars, the self-interest ship has kinda sailed.
    - tekromancr 6y ago
      > I like to keep business and charity separated. I don't know if that really tracks, tho. You still have ethical obligations in your day-to-day business. As an extreme example; if your business is "I sell fentinyl laced heroin to elementary school children" isn't really something you can make up with any amount charitable giving. But aside from that, I was making the self-interested argument that even complete sociopaths wouldn't necessarily want to work in an environment where "My coworkers can and will try to fuck me at the first opportunity" is a true statement.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.
        spamizbad 6y ago
        This perhaps explains the rationale you sometimes hear that more rules/regs will cause people to not even bother trying to start a business. If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.
        LordDragonfang 6y ago
        I'm having a hard time seeing the justification here. It's not that the cheaters refused to play if they couldn't cheat, it's that when given influence, they prefered to have things be worse for everyone so that they could cheat more freely. >If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules. The converse, that rules which allow profitable unethical behavior (and therefore prefer such unethical behavior, since profit is the measure of success) are going to alienate people who want to play fair, is exactly as well supported by that observation. And all other things being equal, it seems better to alienate the cheaters than the fair players, which in turn argues for stronger regulation. It just highlights that the people who want to cheat and make such arguments aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to cheat more easily.
  - robocat 6y ago
    Rubbish. Your assumption is that unions are always a benefit to their members. I have seen enough actions by unions where the outcomes were detrimental to their members for me to believe that some unions are a net negative for their members. Someone can choose to not belong to a union because they are a good person that just believes that a union is bad for everyone. Edit: Disclaimer: I am not stating that I think unions are bad. However the few direct experiences I personally have had with unions have not been a clear positive for the members (as an employee or student, never as an employer). Edit 2: Or you could just believe unions are net neutral, so be against joining. Because who wants to voluntarily submit themselves to an organisation or people they don’t believe in?
    - mjlawson 6y ago
      Using leverage isn't the same thing as belonging to a corrupt union. If anything, your leverage should be used to improve said union, if you have it. The same energy and fervor that goes into establishing a union presence and and should also be used to maintain it through positions of leadership and involvement within the union. I agree that not all unions are fantastic, but staying on the sidelines when you could use your position to influence for the betterment of everyone is a very privileged, selfish act.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Much like democratic government, people get the unions they deserve. Empowering your colleagues is an ethical act, and if they use that power to do things that you paternalistically think are against their own interests, then that's proof that the power is genuinely theirs.
      - robocat 6y ago
        I think that is a misunderstanding of where the power of “democracy” comes from. I think voting mostly works in democracies by being able to vote a party out after the government has abused us against our wishes and their promises. In a first-past-the-post system, you often get to chose between two evils... Imagine you were forced to pick a partner for 3 years, one which you suspect will rape you and the other you think will beat you, and you must pick one or the other... And that is ignoring the fact that usually nearly 50% of the people that voted, voted against the party they got. It is ridiculous to think that the ~50% that voted against a party deserve what they get. That said, I like this version by H.L. Mencken better: "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard."
  - oort-cloud9 6y ago
    You know that business is nothing designed to be your babysitter, right? And it's designed to pay you more than your work deserves,right?
  - modularform123 6y ago
    I will give up my life before I lick the boot of a union thug.
- frenchy 6y ago
  And that's how you end up with a company full of assholes.
- duckfang 6y ago
  So, what individual thinks they have more leverage than Amazon? Amazon has a 1.6 trillion $ market cap.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Amazon needs a lot of software engineers and needs them more than any individual SWE needs Amazon, no matter what their market cap is.
    - patrickthebold 6y ago
      Amazon needs a lot of software engineers, but they don't need any single engineer. Which is the whole point of unionizing.
      - DickingAround 6y ago
        The software engineers have plenty of leverage over every company without unions. A proof of that is high wages across the industry. And for Amazon in particular, where is that extra money coming from? It's not like they have a dividend to shareholders they could stop paying out. They're not some law firm where the partners are profit sharing. It's a publicly traded company that just constantly reinvests in growth. They're practically famous for that. So really to pay more, they must either get more efficient (probably already trying at that) or raise prices or stop reinvesting. I guess they could pay the higher paid workers less, but isn't that already the software engineers we're talking about? Those are the higher paid workers. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if they could literally have qualified as a not for profit whose sole goal is to grow into new market segments and employ more people. Because if you take a wide angle view of it, that's pretty much all they ever do.
        kelnos 6y ago
        > A proof of that is high wages across the industry. That's true if you only consider a few carefully-chosen tech corridors like SV and sorta-Seattle. Software developer wages in much of the US, Europe, and most of the rest of the world, are not that great. Usually enough to live off of, yes, but no where near what we in the bay area and a few other select locations are used to.
- objclxt 6y ago
  > The more leverage you have as an individual, the less relevant a union is for you. If this was true, why are the highest paid and in-demand stars and directors in Hollywood all still dues paying members of their unions?
  - fmajid 6y ago
    The union helped them on their way up, and they are grateful, even though strictly speaking they no longer need the union.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Not to mention that SAG’s dues are quite regressive, only being applied to the first $500K in earnings, so being highly-paid doesn’t cost them anything additional.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Unions still help movie stars negotiate deals.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    Isn't that slightly different and more because the film industry is unusual in that it has adapted around the unionised environment? Stars would have joined the union early in their career for the protection, but late on its minimal expense for sake of keeping the cogs of production turning. I'm no expert, but I imagine there are various on-set insurances which require actors to be a member of union, etc. It's not quite the same as a VP of a tech company joining a union.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      Seems pretty much the same to me. Junior devs have to work their way up, senior devs already make big bucks and don't really "need" the union anymore.
      - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Sure. And the aristocracy is good for aristocrats. I suspect that engineers, in general, vastly overestimate the amount of leverage they actually have as an individual when considering the merits of joining a union.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Yup, agreed. My experience is that even the "rockstars" get fired or managed out when they become "difficult". The only places where these types of people are tolerated -- but still, not forever -- is very small shops where bus factors are low and firing a key software developer would wipe out a company-killing amount of institutional knowledge. Even then, those people are still replaced, eventually. It's the height of hubris to believe that an individual software engineer has the power to effect much in the way of change when it comes to wages and working conditions. Sure, we have orders of magnitude more power than someone working for pennies in a sweatshop, but we're nowhere near the point of calling the shots, or even bringing a significant amount of leverage to the negotiating table.
ncallaway 6y ago
> Maybe some will balk, but not all Sure, that's fair. I guess it really depends on the proportions. I personally used to work at Amazon a number of years ago. I enjoyed my time there, and if my current work circumstances ever changed would have considered going back there. Based on what I've seen lately from them, though, I would never go back. In fact, as a customer I've discontinued Amazon prime and won't order from their retail site again. AWS has me a little more boxed in, but I'm going to slowly look for more ways to separate from them there, too, over time.
plandis 6y ago
The two unions I’ve worked for before getting a job in tech were terrible. At one I was physically threatened with violence for being too productive and the other allocated work times/roles by seniority instead of ability. If you happened to not be friends with the union president, then you better really enjoy cleaning the bathrooms. You seem to be under the impression that unions are always good and that certainly isn’t the case. I’ve had zero good experiences and I’m not keen to have another bad experience, thanks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

singlow 6y ago

Then they have probably succeeded. I don't think they want people whom this would deter.

amznthrwaway 6y ago

I interviewed at Amazon largely to see what happened when I challenged them to talk about some negative practices. Their answers impressed me sufficiently that I work here now. I believe (hopefully correctly) that Amazon is a very flawed company which is becoming _less_ flawed over time, and that I can help support those improvements.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zarkov99 6y ago

In contrast, I would be very happy too consider a company that is honestly focused on its commercial mission rather than appease the small number of people who believe their employers should give them a platform for their activism.

wildrhythms 6y ago
Expect no one to stand up for you when you, too, are inevitably mistreated.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  You mean I will not be protected from oppression by the self-sacrificing activist heroes in tech? The same heroes that so righteously punish the thinkers of bad thoughts and so gallantly protect everybody else from the violence of wrong ideas? I guess I'll have to fight my fights alone then.