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> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from th

> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. > wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line. > overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO) Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO. I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.

marcinzm 6y ago
You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either. >In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally. >And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
parliament32 6y ago
And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise. >unlimited PTO This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
- duckfang 6y ago
  > This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management. Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine. Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited". But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)? The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-deceptive-ploy-in-todays-workplace https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO" is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO. But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*
slibhb 6y ago
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure Are you a poet? In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".
- duckfang 6y ago
  https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... And research in logs and events can either be quick or very slow, depending on what you're looking for. And it's also easy to slop out slow bad code, and make it someone else's problem (dev side of things).
  - musingsole 6y ago
    That's a story about overzealous productivity metrics coupled with a non-thinking management class. It's hardly an argument for or against being able to identify bad performers. I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.
    - rootsofallevil 6y ago
      but does your manager? or does s/he actually only see the pizza guy delivering the pizza?
      - slibhb 6y ago
        "My manager doesn't recognize my hard work" is a totally different statement than "performance is subjective".
        Viliam1234 6y ago
        Good point. But the managers make most of the decisions, and they usually can't recognize performance. So if you have a 10x developer who is admired by all coworkers but disrespected by management, they probably won't get raise (unless they change the job).
busterarm 6y ago
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. This is only for people who just apply to "jobs" and accept whatever money is given. You're entirely in control of negotiating terms and it's easily possible to negotiate wildly different employment terms than your coworkers at medium to large companies. Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination. I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that. You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.
hintymad 6y ago
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.
- rootsofallevil 6y ago
  >There will be false positives, but the rate is low What do you base this on? My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
  - hwbehrens 6y ago
    Wouldn't that be a false negative? A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity. I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
    - hintymad 6y ago
      You're right. Edited the comment accordingly. Both false positives and false negatives exist.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions. I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is: a. incompetent administration b. failure to desegregate our schools.
vlozko 6y ago
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.
- jacksnipe 6y ago
  On the flip side, I've been a student in a school with a teacher's union (NYS public middle school) and a school without (South Carolina public high school) and there was an absolute world of difference between the two. My NYS teachers were almost universally better, whereas in South Carolina good teachers seemed to be the exception. My good SC teachers made 20k/year less than my worst NYS teachers, iirc
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    If by NYS, you mean Westchester (as is not unlikely given HN), I don't think this is a fair comparison.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    There are a lot of confounding factors here. New York state has higher median income, lower violent crime, etc than South Carolina. It is more than possible that the unionization of NYS education is a result of its better education system rather than its cause.
- hintymad 6y ago
  And even worse, schools can't be shut down. It's okay for companies to have unions. In the worse case, the company closes doors, so ultimately the union needs to work with the company one way or another. In government entities, unions are tumors as they don't need to worry about their employers going down.
yibg 6y ago
You make it sound like everything is subjective and there are no bad or good workers. And since we can't accurately, objectively measure performance, let's just pick metric we can measure even though it has no correlation with performance. Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
This kind of obtuse comment is part of why pro-union people have such a hard time convincing any anti-union people. People have had bad experiences with unions protecting shitty employees far beyond what companies usually do, and the response amounts to, "NUH UHHH". If that's what people have actually experienced, telling them "actually what you saw with your eyes isn't reality" is not effective messaging.
- nnvvhh 6y ago
  The comment you responded to gave a response to multiple points, it's far from "nuh uh." Your characterization is inaccurate.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    I'm specifically talking about dismissing concerns about how bad employees are protected or how promotions are handled. > They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed. "No, you didn't actually see that."
peferron 6y ago
> not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment? Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.
FredPret 6y ago
> wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable We can use seniority, but why not get creative and rank employees by height, moustache density, or digits of pi memorized?
jjk166 6y ago
> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.
Nimitz14 6y ago
> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. Then either you and all your coworkers so far have been amazing, or you're the bad one. Either way consider yourself lucky!

marcinzm 6y ago

You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either. >In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally. >And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.

parliament32 6y ago

And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise. >unlimited PTO This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.

duckfang 6y ago
> This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management. Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine. Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited". But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)? The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-deceptive-ploy-in-todays-workplace https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO" is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO. But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*

slibhb 6y ago

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure Are you a poet? In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".

duckfang 6y ago
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... And research in logs and events can either be quick or very slow, depending on what you're looking for. And it's also easy to slop out slow bad code, and make it someone else's problem (dev side of things).
- musingsole 6y ago
  That's a story about overzealous productivity metrics coupled with a non-thinking management class. It's hardly an argument for or against being able to identify bad performers. I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.
  - rootsofallevil 6y ago
    but does your manager? or does s/he actually only see the pizza guy delivering the pizza?
    - slibhb 6y ago
      "My manager doesn't recognize my hard work" is a totally different statement than "performance is subjective".
      - Viliam1234 6y ago
        Good point. But the managers make most of the decisions, and they usually can't recognize performance. So if you have a 10x developer who is admired by all coworkers but disrespected by management, they probably won't get raise (unless they change the job).

busterarm 6y ago

They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. This is only for people who just apply to "jobs" and accept whatever money is given. You're entirely in control of negotiating terms and it's easily possible to negotiate wildly different employment terms than your coworkers at medium to large companies. Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination. I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that. You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.

hintymad 6y ago

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.

rootsofallevil 6y ago
>There will be false positives, but the rate is low What do you base this on? My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
- hwbehrens 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be a false negative? A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity. I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    You're right. Edited the comment accordingly. Both false positives and false negatives exist.
whimsicalism 6y ago
I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions. I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is: a. incompetent administration b. failure to desegregate our schools.

vlozko 6y ago

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.

jacksnipe 6y ago
On the flip side, I've been a student in a school with a teacher's union (NYS public middle school) and a school without (South Carolina public high school) and there was an absolute world of difference between the two. My NYS teachers were almost universally better, whereas in South Carolina good teachers seemed to be the exception. My good SC teachers made 20k/year less than my worst NYS teachers, iirc
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  If by NYS, you mean Westchester (as is not unlikely given HN), I don't think this is a fair comparison.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  There are a lot of confounding factors here. New York state has higher median income, lower violent crime, etc than South Carolina. It is more than possible that the unionization of NYS education is a result of its better education system rather than its cause.
hintymad 6y ago
And even worse, schools can't be shut down. It's okay for companies to have unions. In the worse case, the company closes doors, so ultimately the union needs to work with the company one way or another. In government entities, unions are tumors as they don't need to worry about their employers going down.

yibg 6y ago

You make it sound like everything is subjective and there are no bad or good workers. And since we can't accurately, objectively measure performance, let's just pick metric we can measure even though it has no correlation with performance. Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

This kind of obtuse comment is part of why pro-union people have such a hard time convincing any anti-union people. People have had bad experiences with unions protecting shitty employees far beyond what companies usually do, and the response amounts to, "NUH UHHH". If that's what people have actually experienced, telling them "actually what you saw with your eyes isn't reality" is not effective messaging.

nnvvhh 6y ago
The comment you responded to gave a response to multiple points, it's far from "nuh uh." Your characterization is inaccurate.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  I'm specifically talking about dismissing concerns about how bad employees are protected or how promotions are handled. > They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed. "No, you didn't actually see that."

peferron 6y ago

> not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment? Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.

FredPret 6y ago

> wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable We can use seniority, but why not get creative and rank employees by height, moustache density, or digits of pi memorized?

jjk166 6y ago

> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.

Nimitz14 6y ago

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. Then either you and all your coworkers so far have been amazing, or you're the bad one. Either way consider yourself lucky!