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Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performer

Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers :) Even Amazon FC workers, and SV employees who had their wages suppressed by illegal collusion, it seems.

pjmlp 5y ago
In Europe they do.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  In Europe tech workers also make ~40% less than American tech workers after taxes, retirement/pension, and healthcare. I’m sure that’s not entirely attributable to unions, (and I would genuinely be interested in understanding the full cause of the disparity) but I imagine it plays a role.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I am quite happy with my 40h week, extra pay for overtime and weekends work, 30 day vacation, health care and retirement, no need for extra 40%.
    - username90 5y ago
      You don't need to be in a union to get that though, you don't even need to be in a profession that has a union in any company to get that.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        If you are lucky, here mostly everyone gets it.
        throwaway894345 5y ago
        Again, the benefit is standard among tech workers here as well. We can still appreciate Europe without the pretense that it is better than America for every category of citizen. No need for the defensiveness.
    - kcorbitt 5y ago
      Those are all standard benefits for tech workers in America (at least if you're willing to move to a tech hub, which is where the interesting work is anyway). Plus 50-200% more pay. I do agree that Europe does a good job of guaranteeing decent working conditions for the bottom half of the labor market, and it's totally reasonable to prefer a society where those benefits are widely available to everyone. But from an individual comp/benefits perspective for a skilled engineer there really isn't a comparison -- the US wins hands down.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        A big if, and then waste those 50-200% into getting what is standard here, possibly alongside a double mortage and better never get any serious sickness, no thanks.
        kcorbitt 5y ago
        No, the extra 50-200% is in addition to the employer-provided healthcare benefits and retirement match. If you get seriously sick, you're much more likely to get effective and timely treatment with the gold-plated health insurance plans provided by US tech employers than the options I'm familiar with in Europe.* I'll 100% grant that the US healthcare system is really messed up, and if you're not in a highly-compensated field you're probably better off in most European systems. I'm socially liberal and would much rather the US system were more equitable, even if that means my own personal experience gets a bit worse. But that doesn't change the fact that if you're an in-demand engineer your personal interactions with the US system will be great. * To be fair, I've only lived in London and Barcelona, so there may be other parts of Europe with better healthcare systems. But at least compared to those two cities, I've had much better experiences with my employer-provided health coverage in the US than in the public UK or private Spanish healthcare systems I've used.
        iso1631 5y ago
        Why didn't you choose to have private healthcare in the UK? It costs peanuts and I'm surprised big tech companies don't offer it as standard
  - throwaway09192 5y ago
    Believe me or not, I worked for FAANGs and received offers to relocate to the US, as most of my peers. The large majority refused and preferred to stay in EU. Admittedly, my sample size is around 15, but still meaningful.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I don't disbelieve you, but this doesn't rebut my claim at all. To be clear, I didn't claim that Europeans prefer to move to the US, only that the US compensation packages are better for software professionals.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      No surprise. Generally speaking nobody uproots their life by moving countries unless the upside is massive. If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        A lot of throwaways in this thread. :)
      - throwaway09192 5y ago
        > No surprise Apparently people are not liking my comment and it's getting a lot of downvotes. > If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large. The increase in salary can be massive, often 2x or above. Even including the increased cost of housing in large cities and health insurance. Still, the increase in wealth hits a point of diminishing returns. Most people I know claim they have a better quality of life in EU overall.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
esyir 5y ago
Would you like your us tech salary replaced by the European one? My take, as someone outside both regions is that even after medical and rental and other such fixed costs, us tech workers continue to make tons more than European tech workers. The top paying tech companies in Europe are, from what I understand, American.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  With European welfare state and everything else? Yes, in a heartbeat.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    Then do it. They are desperate for tech employees. As it stands, taking the European offer is not rational even after taking into account the value of the welfare from the state. The only people it makes sense for are those with other reasons to go (culture, family, etc).
throwaway894345 5y ago
I don’t buy this. I see myself as a top performer and I’m very well paid, but I know I’m not getting nearly the same amount as the investor class. I’m not greedy either—I make much more than I need, but I don’t think our society benefits when the lion’s share of compensation goes to the super wealthy. I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality. Agreed. The significance of the capital risk loss on most investors actual livelihoods and future investments is very often over dramatized. The risk is purely capital and at a certain point, capital accumulates capital. Once you reach a certain level of capital accumulation that your needs and even wants are met, the rest by stable low risk and nearly fully secure investments, anything beyond that can be easily risked in incredibly high risk investments (or higher risk investments) in hopes for big payoffs. Rinse, repeat, and you might become stupidly successful or might just dither around being fully financially independent. When people talk about investor risk, they often think about Bob or Pam down the street pulling out their life savings to take a risk and put their all in the business they're going to start up. This isn't how most investors look, most investors aren't taking much of any personal risk other than the risk of not improving their standard of living beyond an already very good standard of living. This type of risk to me is overly rewarded in our financial system. If Bob or Pam fail, they're screwed. If a typical investor fails, they wait until they snowball some more capital and try again.
- kortilla 5y ago
  If you are very well paid you likely are the investor class. Nearly every tech company that pays well does so via equity.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If you are very well paid you likely are the investor class. Nearly every tech company that pays well does so via equity. Getting paid in equity doesn't make you “the investor class”, aka the capitalist class, aka the haut bourgeoisie. Having the overwhelming share of your support coming from capital returns rather than pay for labor does that, but equity as a component of labor compensation doesn’t, alone, do that, or even move you out of the working (primarily dependent on labor income) class into the middle (split dependency on labor and capital with neither dominating) class.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
And it's really too bad because in a decade or two, the tech industry will really need one. I used to be against unionizing too, but then heard this scenario: there will come a time in the near-future when the average software job starts being outsourced en masse (and I'm not talking about rote IT support). When that day comes, how will we be able to fight that?
- petra 5y ago
  Why will software jobs be outsourced? What will change?
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Big tech companies, especially Google, are spending massive amounts of money to get everyone in the world to code. Don't be fooled by their faux-magnanimous PR bullshit, this is an effort to drive down their largest expense: software developer salaries.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  How would unions fight outsourcing? Wouldn't that expedite it if anything?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    A lot of outsourcing practically relies these days on very codified process maintained by software... And that software is usually developed domestically. It wouldn't take a lot for the domestic software developers to passively sabotage such software via collective action of failure to maintain it and letting the first unexpected heavy dependency crashing bring the whole system down. Even if a lot of company ops are outsourced, having all your site reliability engineers walk off the job sets the company up for any small fire to quickly become a large one.
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      I don't see how that answers either of my questions, or continues the thread of discussion I was attempting to pull on. Are you saying that unions would enable sabotage to prevent outsourcing? If so, I disagree. Software used by businesses often has many external vendors (notable ones in software: GitHub, Slack, Teams...). The idea that an internal dev team could sabotage these sufficiently to prevent outsourcing sounds far-fetched to me.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I believe this used to be the case (and completely agree on the illegal collusion acceptance). But as software continues to eat the world, the average software engineer reflects more the average employee.
CPLX 5y ago
> Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers Lebron James and Tom Brady are union members.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  If they can be, so can you.

pjmlp 5y ago

In Europe they do.

throwaway894345 5y ago
In Europe tech workers also make ~40% less than American tech workers after taxes, retirement/pension, and healthcare. I’m sure that’s not entirely attributable to unions, (and I would genuinely be interested in understanding the full cause of the disparity) but I imagine it plays a role.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I am quite happy with my 40h week, extra pay for overtime and weekends work, 30 day vacation, health care and retirement, no need for extra 40%.
  - username90 5y ago
    You don't need to be in a union to get that though, you don't even need to be in a profession that has a union in any company to get that.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      If you are lucky, here mostly everyone gets it.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        Again, the benefit is standard among tech workers here as well. We can still appreciate Europe without the pretense that it is better than America for every category of citizen. No need for the defensiveness.
  - kcorbitt 5y ago
    Those are all standard benefits for tech workers in America (at least if you're willing to move to a tech hub, which is where the interesting work is anyway). Plus 50-200% more pay. I do agree that Europe does a good job of guaranteeing decent working conditions for the bottom half of the labor market, and it's totally reasonable to prefer a society where those benefits are widely available to everyone. But from an individual comp/benefits perspective for a skilled engineer there really isn't a comparison -- the US wins hands down.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      A big if, and then waste those 50-200% into getting what is standard here, possibly alongside a double mortage and better never get any serious sickness, no thanks.
      - kcorbitt 5y ago
        No, the extra 50-200% is in addition to the employer-provided healthcare benefits and retirement match. If you get seriously sick, you're much more likely to get effective and timely treatment with the gold-plated health insurance plans provided by US tech employers than the options I'm familiar with in Europe.* I'll 100% grant that the US healthcare system is really messed up, and if you're not in a highly-compensated field you're probably better off in most European systems. I'm socially liberal and would much rather the US system were more equitable, even if that means my own personal experience gets a bit worse. But that doesn't change the fact that if you're an in-demand engineer your personal interactions with the US system will be great. * To be fair, I've only lived in London and Barcelona, so there may be other parts of Europe with better healthcare systems. But at least compared to those two cities, I've had much better experiences with my employer-provided health coverage in the US than in the public UK or private Spanish healthcare systems I've used.
        iso1631 5y ago
        Why didn't you choose to have private healthcare in the UK? It costs peanuts and I'm surprised big tech companies don't offer it as standard
- throwaway09192 5y ago
  Believe me or not, I worked for FAANGs and received offers to relocate to the US, as most of my peers. The large majority refused and preferred to stay in EU. Admittedly, my sample size is around 15, but still meaningful.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I don't disbelieve you, but this doesn't rebut my claim at all. To be clear, I didn't claim that Europeans prefer to move to the US, only that the US compensation packages are better for software professionals.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    No surprise. Generally speaking nobody uproots their life by moving countries unless the upside is massive. If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      A lot of throwaways in this thread. :)
    - throwaway09192 5y ago
      > No surprise Apparently people are not liking my comment and it's getting a lot of downvotes. > If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large. The increase in salary can be massive, often 2x or above. Even including the increased cost of housing in large cities and health insurance. Still, the increase in wealth hits a point of diminishing returns. Most people I know claim they have a better quality of life in EU overall.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

esyir 5y ago

Would you like your us tech salary replaced by the European one? My take, as someone outside both regions is that even after medical and rental and other such fixed costs, us tech workers continue to make tons more than European tech workers. The top paying tech companies in Europe are, from what I understand, American.

Ericson2314 5y ago
With European welfare state and everything else? Yes, in a heartbeat.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Then do it. They are desperate for tech employees. As it stands, taking the European offer is not rational even after taking into account the value of the welfare from the state. The only people it makes sense for are those with other reasons to go (culture, family, etc).

throwaway894345 5y ago

I don’t buy this. I see myself as a top performer and I’m very well paid, but I know I’m not getting nearly the same amount as the investor class. I’m not greedy either—I make much more than I need, but I don’t think our society benefits when the lion’s share of compensation goes to the super wealthy. I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality.

Frost1x 5y ago
>I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality. Agreed. The significance of the capital risk loss on most investors actual livelihoods and future investments is very often over dramatized. The risk is purely capital and at a certain point, capital accumulates capital. Once you reach a certain level of capital accumulation that your needs and even wants are met, the rest by stable low risk and nearly fully secure investments, anything beyond that can be easily risked in incredibly high risk investments (or higher risk investments) in hopes for big payoffs. Rinse, repeat, and you might become stupidly successful or might just dither around being fully financially independent. When people talk about investor risk, they often think about Bob or Pam down the street pulling out their life savings to take a risk and put their all in the business they're going to start up. This isn't how most investors look, most investors aren't taking much of any personal risk other than the risk of not improving their standard of living beyond an already very good standard of living. This type of risk to me is overly rewarded in our financial system. If Bob or Pam fail, they're screwed. If a typical investor fails, they wait until they snowball some more capital and try again.
kortilla 5y ago
If you are very well paid you likely are the investor class. Nearly every tech company that pays well does so via equity.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > If you are very well paid you likely are the investor class. Nearly every tech company that pays well does so via equity. Getting paid in equity doesn't make you “the investor class”, aka the capitalist class, aka the haut bourgeoisie. Having the overwhelming share of your support coming from capital returns rather than pay for labor does that, but equity as a component of labor compensation doesn’t, alone, do that, or even move you out of the working (primarily dependent on labor income) class into the middle (split dependency on labor and capital with neither dominating) class.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

And it's really too bad because in a decade or two, the tech industry will really need one. I used to be against unionizing too, but then heard this scenario: there will come a time in the near-future when the average software job starts being outsourced en masse (and I'm not talking about rote IT support). When that day comes, how will we be able to fight that?

petra 5y ago
Why will software jobs be outsourced? What will change?
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Big tech companies, especially Google, are spending massive amounts of money to get everyone in the world to code. Don't be fooled by their faux-magnanimous PR bullshit, this is an effort to drive down their largest expense: software developer salaries.
BobbyJo 5y ago
How would unions fight outsourcing? Wouldn't that expedite it if anything?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  A lot of outsourcing practically relies these days on very codified process maintained by software... And that software is usually developed domestically. It wouldn't take a lot for the domestic software developers to passively sabotage such software via collective action of failure to maintain it and letting the first unexpected heavy dependency crashing bring the whole system down. Even if a lot of company ops are outsourced, having all your site reliability engineers walk off the job sets the company up for any small fire to quickly become a large one.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    I don't see how that answers either of my questions, or continues the thread of discussion I was attempting to pull on. Are you saying that unions would enable sabotage to prevent outsourcing? If so, I disagree. Software used by businesses often has many external vendors (notable ones in software: GitHub, Slack, Teams...). The idea that an internal dev team could sabotage these sufficiently to prevent outsourcing sounds far-fetched to me.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I believe this used to be the case (and completely agree on the illegal collusion acceptance). But as software continues to eat the world, the average software engineer reflects more the average employee.

CPLX 5y ago

> Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers Lebron James and Tom Brady are union members.

Ericson2314 5y ago
If they can be, so can you.