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I'm certainly not an expert on unions, so thank you for the detailed reply! > There are a number of well known counterexamples, sports and acting unions/guilds

by akarma 5y ago

I'm certainly not an expert on unions, so thank you for the detailed reply! > There are a number of well known counterexamples, sports and acting unions/guilds for example. I can't imagine how promotions would apply to areas like sports and acting the same as it applies to typical careers that have ladders, so I wouldn't cite it as a well-known counter-example. > I've yet to see any tech union advocate for this position, and they generally advocate against it. Tech Workers Coalition and the Alphabet Workers Union are the two I know of in this case. With regards to the Tech Workers Coalition, they want "explicit criteria to achieve (promotions)" [1] which would necessarily involve more red tape and likely a seniority-basis, as not every employee can be promoted. > Despite that the most sought-after biglaw companies use a mostly-tenure based compensation process. This is a reason why I elected not to go to law school, and a contributing factor for several people I know who moved from law to tech. The lack of this is what makes tech unique and adopting the homogeny of another un-meritocratic industry should certainly be avoided. [1] https://techworkerscoalition.org/bill-of-rights/ https://techworkerscoalition.org/bill-of-rights/

joshuamorton 5y ago
> With regards to the Tech Workers Coalition, they want "explicit criteria to achieve (promotions)" [1] which would necessarily involve more red tape and likely a seniority-basis, as not every employee can be promoted. I don't see how this follows. Much the same way that you can have transparent pay even though people are paid differently, you can have transparent promotion criteria that aren't simply "John has worked here longer". I am absolutely able to recognize that the more senior ICs I work with have larger scopes of work and often more challenging projects. My reading of this is that there should be clear job ladders that are used and checked against during promotions (and for example you're given feedback stating that XYZ is why you aren't performing at th e next level yet). Google, for example, is aspirationally already doing this. There's a job ladder and you're rated agains the ladder. In my case, this has meant that I've gotten promoted almost 2x as fast as some of my coworkers on my team. The aspirational part is that sometimes the feedback isn't in line with the rubric, and criteria can be different across the company (this is sort of a necessary evil of having a big company, a 1-size-fits-all rubric is difficult.) I'm honestly, really not sure how it follows that since not everyone can be promoted you must use tenure as the metric. As long as you can define some set of criteria that defines "Senior" vs "Junior", you should promote all of the people who meet the criteria. If that's all of your employees, perhaps you need to rethink the criteria, or perhaps you have a bunch of "Senior" employees. At that point, deciding which ones to not promote is going to be crappy no matter what: tenure is an option, but the alternatives are usually "who the boss likes the most" which isn't really any better. But again, this comes down to at this point the company has failed to provide explicit criteria to achieve promo, because people who achieve them aren't being promoted anyway.

by akarma 5y ago

joshuamorton 5y ago

> With regards to the Tech Workers Coalition, they want "explicit criteria to achieve (promotions)" [1] which would necessarily involve more red tape and likely a seniority-basis, as not every employee can be promoted. I don't see how this follows. Much the same way that you can have transparent pay even though people are paid differently, you can have transparent promotion criteria that aren't simply "John has worked here longer". I am absolutely able to recognize that the more senior ICs I work with have larger scopes of work and often more challenging projects. My reading of this is that there should be clear job ladders that are used and checked against during promotions (and for example you're given feedback stating that XYZ is why you aren't performing at th e next level yet). Google, for example, is aspirationally already doing this. There's a job ladder and you're rated agains the ladder. In my case, this has meant that I've gotten promoted almost 2x as fast as some of my coworkers on my team. The aspirational part is that sometimes the feedback isn't in line with the rubric, and criteria can be different across the company (this is sort of a necessary evil of having a big company, a 1-size-fits-all rubric is difficult.) I'm honestly, really not sure how it follows that since not everyone can be promoted you must use tenure as the metric. As long as you can define some set of criteria that defines "Senior" vs "Junior", you should promote all of the people who meet the criteria. If that's all of your employees, perhaps you need to rethink the criteria, or perhaps you have a bunch of "Senior" employees. At that point, deciding which ones to not promote is going to be crappy no matter what: tenure is an option, but the alternatives are usually "who the boss likes the most" which isn't really any better. But again, this comes down to at this point the company has failed to provide explicit criteria to achieve promo, because people who achieve them aren't being promoted anyway.