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How would unions fight outsourcing? Wouldn't that expedite it if anything?
by BobbyJo 5y ago
How would unions fight outsourcing? Wouldn't that expedite it if anything?
- shadowgovt 5y agoA 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 agoI 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 agoI shouldn't have used "sabotage;" it has the wrong connotation. A union can organize through collective action a walkout of software maintainers. Few organizations (big or small) run automatically indefinitely without the hundreds to thousands of changes per day such teams make. The three examples you've provided (GitHub, Slack, Teams) often grow per-enterprise integrations to make them work the right way for a given company, and when those integrations crash, who will be available to restore or correct them? Through simple inaction, a site reliability team can "cause" a company's infrastructure to spin itself apart by simply refraining from stopping it from spinning itself apart.