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This also describes an environment where the union doesn't seem to be offering any significant benefits to developers. If unionizing doesn't improve your workin
by Kalium 5y ago
This also describes an environment where the union doesn't seem to be offering any significant benefits to developers. If unionizing doesn't improve your working conditions, what's the point of the union?
- pavel_lishin 5y agoIf you're driving safely at sixty miles an hour, what's the point of a seatbelt?
- eru 5y agoCollisions without a seatbelt are dangerous at much lower speeds. And you might be driving safely, but you can't control what other people are doing. In any case, what does this have to do with unions?
- axutio 5y agoI think the idea is that you form the union when you have leverage and don't need it so that if you ever lose leverage as an individual in the future (e.g. if the developer labor market becomes oversaturated or demand for developers tanks), you will still have some leverage as a member of the collective. Seems kind of like insurance - you pay for it when you don't need it so that you have it when you do.
- Kalium 5y agoOh, I get the idea. We're just talking about a situation described by the commenter above where the union is already formed. It is apparently unable to provide any substantial benefit except the hope that it might be useful at a future date. This leads me to wonder if it's really doing anything of value for the workers it's supposed to be defending, supporting, and empowering. Like the insurance policy that you suspect will be cancelled the first time you try to make a claim.
- judge2020 5y agoThis is generally why Insurance is more regulated in certain industries, eg. Motor vehicle insurance can’t drop you because the get a claim about how you totaled someone else’s Lamborghini. Are there similar protections that regulate unions themselves?
- woodruffw 5y agoYes. Unions are tightly regulated under the NLRA and by the NLRB, both of which constrain their collective bargaining powers, right to form, etc.
- scarface74 5y agoCar insurance companies can very much drop you if they deem you to high of a risk.
- judge2020 5y agoBut they can’t drop you to avoid paying a claim if you have insurance.
- scarface74 5y agoIf demands for developers sink - aren’t you screwed anyway? How often in the history of labor have unions ever kept companies from just outsourcing? Did it help employees in the car market? My solution for 25 years as always been to change jobs.
- ceejayoz 5y agoForming the union when you have leverage helps later when you don't.
- Kalium 5y agoIf a union formed when you have leverage doesn't deliver when you do, why would you expect it to deliver when you don't?
- lmm 5y agoA union is like an insurance policy, or a lawyer on retainer, or a contract in writing. It doesn't do anything when times are good, that's not what it's for.
- eru 5y agoAnd like an insurance policy, it costs you. Not all insurance policies are good.
- lmm 5y agoOh absolutely. But the remedy for that is to be actively involved and hold them to account, not dismiss the whole thing as a scam.
- eru 5y agoYou want me to be actively involved in all insurance contracts that are offered to me, and try to lobby them to be better? Seems like just saying No to them would be the saner option. (Similar also for unions you don't want to participate in. Or political parties, or companies etc. Joining and getting involved is fine, if that's what you want. But avoiding is just as valid a response.)
- lmm 5y agoYou have to judge how much involvement to have. Just signing up and forgetting about it is a pretty bad idea. But not getting insurance at all because you've heard some insurance sucks and doesn't pay out is an even worse one. Most kinds of disaster preparedness are thankless, seemingly pointless work until the disaster in question happens.
- mkr-hn 5y agoUnions are insurance against capitalist hubris.
- eru 5y agoCompetition is insurance against that, too. Alas, unions can have their own principal-agent problems and bureaucracy and hubris.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoalas, competition can have its own problems too. In complicated situations it may be that you want more than one insurance against bad things happening.
- eru 5y agoI'm happy for people to join unions, if they want to. I'd just be against being forced to join unions, or against giving unions any special legal privileges. (Eg one such privilege would be not enforcing contract clauses about employees giving up their right to strike in exchange for some pre-agreed compensation.)
- bigbillheck 5y agoCompetition usually turns into collusion and consolidation.
- pydry 5y agoI find it weird that nobody is seeing this in tech. The automovotive market used to have garage based startups a long time ago. It used to have fierce competition and workers could get pay raises without unions. Then gradually everything fell under 3 big companies, workers fought the concentration of market power by unionizing (and lost) and for decades there was just the big 3. It's not even a question of if or even who tech will consolidate under any more - it will be someone who is currwently a household name. It is when. It's coming.
- aaomidi 5y agoI'm pretty sure going from "we can terminate your employment without cause" to "okay these are the reasons we will terminate your employment" is a HUGE stress relief for people. Unions, even when they're not doing much, bring in stability.
- wyager 5y agoTurning the decision to fire someone into a hyper-formalized procedure mostly seems to result in environments where terrible people never get fired, like the DMV.
- aaomidi 5y ago1. The DMV is actually an amazing quality of service. Ive lived in a couple of states. California was just on another whole level of bad. Anyway, DMV is actually really efficiently done. 2. What part of firing people do you think is going to fix the bureaucracy?
- google234123 5y agoOne bad person can ruin a team and cause good people to leave. See California where it can take 5 years to fire a bad teacher and 100000s of dollars.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoSame for me in New Mexico two weeks ago. I had an appointment and had a new license and license plates within 25 minutes. It was an excellent experience. There was a guy next to me who hadn’t read about the required paperwork and tried to argue. His experience probably wasn’t great but that was his own fault.
- veganhouseDJ 5y agoThe DMV is an outdated example. I remember decades ago standing in line literally for 3 hours to finally get to talk to the person at the desk only to be told I had the wrong form. Then back to the end of the line. I honestly can't think of anything that has improved as much in my lifetime as the DMV.
- woodruffw 5y agoAt the bare minimum: unions increase job security and provide a formal disinterested (or even positively interested) recourse mechanism against your employer. They also decrease your employer's ability to leverage the collective pressure of other employees against you.
- colechristensen 5y agoWhen the recourse is that you can easily pick up a new job, usually with a raise, the union doesn’t have a lot to offer. I’m also happy to be able to negotiate myself.
- acdha 5y agoThink about what happens when you get older and those job offers are harder to get, or you have a family you’d like to spend time with, or your health is a limiting factor, or the new owners look at the payroll and decide your job could be done better by their buddy’s company in Romania. The time to invest in a union is before you need it.
- eru 5y agoTo be honest, I don't actually want to work at a place that has better job security. Obviously, I wouldn't mind better job security for just myself; but if the downside is that my employer can't get rid of the dead wood, I'd rather work elsewhere.
- Retric 5y agoUnions don’t prevent getting rid of dead wood, people get fired from union jobs regularly. The point is they need an actual pretext to fire someone, and layoffs are more difficult. It’s mostly protection vs the Amazon style fire people regularly so we can avoid paying unemployment insurance when we do seasonal layoffs etc.
- gernb 5y agoThe Police Union and the Teacher's Union have certainly been reported to be responsible for making it hard to fire people.
- NoThisIsMe 5y agoTo advance organized labor for all.
- eru 5y agoYou say it like that's a good thing in itself?
- mschuster91 5y agoIt is. Labor providers are organized and connected in all sort of structures, ranging from golf club memberships and industry associations over questionably-legal wage fixing deals to ~~outright bribing~~ donating to politicians. In contrast, just about 10% of US workers are unionized [1]. This disparity is the reason behind a large part of wage stagnation and other areas where employment conditions are far behind of what has been achieved and fought for in Europe. [1]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
- eru 5y agoAbsolute wages are higher in the US than in Europe. Wages have not stagnated in the US, either. What measures of inflation do you use to come to that conclusion? The labour share of GDP has been roughly stable over the last few decades.
- mschuster91 5y ago> Absolute wages are higher in the US than in Europe. They are, but do not forget that in Europe, our take-home wages already have healthcare, social security and pension contributions taken care of, and our housing and general cost of living (e.g. groceries) are also vastly lower than in the US. > Wages have not stagnated in the US, either. They have, at least for the wide masses [1]. [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/
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- qbasic_forever 5y agoKeeping the good working conditions. Without it you're a new management team away from everything going to shit.
- eru 5y agoNot even a new management team: an existing management team can change things, too. But, so what? You can just work elsewhere instead.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoAs a manager it should be terrifying and strike fear into your heart at the thought that your entire team's last recourse is to just up and leave with no notice. With a union you can bargain, understand the problems, and resolve them.
- eru 5y ago> With a union you can bargain, understand the problems, and resolve them. What keeps you from talking to your team?
- jcims 5y agoI was a member of the Teamsters for about a year. That organization seems to thrive on creating a hostile relationship between management and staff. I’m a manager now, there’s absolutely no way I would want to invite that type of operating model into a current workplace. If the organization that I work for creates an environment that is not conducive to retaining employees then I’m just as likely to leave as my team.
- rmbyrro 5y agoGiven how easier - relatively to manufacturing - it is to challenge established players in tech, this shows tech unions are pretty much doomed. Companies adopting this model will collapse very quickly with the lck of good talent. Good people will work elsewhere and their employers will thrive.
- heavyset_go 5y agoWhite collar union workers have higher compensation, better benefits and more time off[1]. They also report higher rates of life satisfaction[2]. Unions offer engineers more opportunities for democratic decision making at work, a place most workers spend 8 hours a day or more at. They also offer strong bargaining positions that can help developers own more of the value they create. I'm sure there are things about the industry and employers that developers could improve. For example, there are quite a few engineers out there that have on call duty expected of them, sometimes unpaid or inadequately compensated. On call duty, often in places with higher rates of unionization or good labor laws, is compensated by 1.5x to 2x+ rate multipliers, includes additional bonuses, and on call duty isn't an expectation, it is voluntary [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0160449X16643321 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0160449X16643321
- UncleMeat 5y agoDevelopers are constantly complaining about things. Unions could fight for * Access to remote work * Pay that isn't adjusted by location * Transparency in performance review and promotion processes * Better leave policies * Better equity access policies * Opportunities to fire shit managers * Elimination of forced attrition policies Software engineers are paid very very well. We have better working conditions than most. But there are still big things that bother people.
- dls2016 5y ago* Manage on-call rotations.
- UncleMeat 5y agoYep that's a great one. 24h on-call is garbage and unions could absolutely pressure businesses to have more reasonable policies.
- ceras 5y agoWhat's the alternative to 24hr on-call?
- UncleMeat 5y agoServices that don't have strict SLAs. Or follow-the-sun support teams.
- ceras 5y agoNo strict SLA is unrealistic for many businesses (imagine NYT going down for an entire weekend), but follow-the-sun could work if employees really want it.
- dls2016 5y agoAgreed, the internet is core infrastructure and cloud services will increasingly handle more and more essential services. A union would put the on-call rules/schedules/compensation in the hands of the workers, not left to the whims of an unaccountable manager.