4 ms·

> I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades. Every 2 decades?! I'd say it's more

> I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades. Every 2 decades?! I'd say it's more like every 2-3 years. Also I'm not sure the salaries are "outrageous" except for a select few devs working at FAANGs, and those only make up a small fraction of all developers out there. The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.

roenxi 3y ago
If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong. > The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working. I've talked to a lot of old people, seen plumbers and tradespeople at work and visited Asia a couple of times. Read a bit of history in my spare time. The majority may believe that but they are working from instinct rather than evidence. The evidence is they have one of the most comfortable, low risk existences in the history of humanity. Both in an absolute and relative sense, also when compared to currently living humans. But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.
- jselysianeagle 3y ago
  > If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong. Sacked?! If you think the only time people switch jobs in the tech industry is when they get sacked, with all due respect, you know nothing about the tech industry, and your views and understanding about most corporate jobs today is most likely very, very outdated.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    If you're already voluntarily switching jobs every 2-3 years, then nobody should care that Red Hat is forcing its employees to switch jobs every ... when was the last time they had a layoff, I dunno... years. It is barely an inconvenience.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      when you switch jobs voluntarily, then you can do the job hunting on the side and you can reject offers that are not obviously better than your current job. when you get laid off then you may have to take the first offer that comes along, even if it pays worse because (at least in the US) many can't afford to be out of a job for long. in germany you have to take any offer that pays at least 80% of your current salary if you don't want to loose unemployment benefits. getting laid off is a massive difference compared to switching jobs voluntarily.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people. Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry. How would you "drive the wealth out" without eliminating demand for software, which has been on a long upward trend because it underpins so much and because increased productivity leads to demand for further productivity increases + maintenance of the existing increases? If it's just some "unionized employees are lazy and don't actually do stuff" trope, I don't buy it. The Hollywood model has always seemed like it could work quite well for software companies, especially startups or "release-oriented" things like games. * wildly different success rates for different project, resulting in wildly different compensation depend on what project you're on * generally short "try to make a big hit in just a few years" time frames * sometimes things turn into long-lived recurring series * incentives to push crunch time and other crazy work practices if not checked by something Obviously it's not a perfect 1:1 match everywhere, but a lot of similarities and it's an example of creative, flexible work happening with collective bargaining and better-than-government-mandated minimum standards. The union/non-union split could even end up looking like a split between top-tier VCs and studios and everyone else hustling trying to break in...
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry. The stereotype is starving actors and artists. I don't want to copy their strategies. I want to be a capitalist in a free market; we have wine and big comfortable leather bound chairs. People who like joining unions seem to get angry with me because my approach leads to me having huge amounts of stuff. I happen to fund my capitalist ways with a software engineers salary, which is quite high. If I get sacked once a decade or so I'm still going to crush most of Hollywood in terms of economic outcomes. I'm serious here, as far as I can tell unionising is a bad idea. I wouldn't do that if I was trying to live a wealthy and comfortable life.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      I question if you're making a good faith argument there. Your "starving artist" stereotype applies much more to non-union Hollywood than it does to union Hollywood. You can be a starving artist without needing any union. Get rid of Hollywood unions and there is 0% chance you stop having starving artists. There's only so many people and so many hours in the day, compared to how many people desperately want to create stuff to try to make it big (or just to create at all), so that attribute will never go away. Again, software has a unique attribute of how good software creates demand for even more good software that Hollywood can never match. There's two ways to get people to take chances: * desperation * a good safety net VCs help with the latter already for founders. I think a good union could help a lot with it for would-be startup employees.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  Or maybe the entire structure has been upturned. My story: laid off 3/20 because of the pandemic. Had a nice gig with a nonprofit that saw their revenue crater because of lockdowns. Followed by a year of contract work, followed by a year working for an established firm owned by private equity. PE went slash and burn in 2/22, went to a startup in March only to have their Series C fail to close, another startup in June with funding, who did a 30% layoff in December because they needed to conserve capital-their funding plans for 2023 fell apart. I had more jobs in the last 3 years than I’ve had in the previous 25. So with all due respect- f** off.
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't break the site guidelines, no matter how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. Your comment would be just fine without that last bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

roenxi 3y ago

If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong. > The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working. I've talked to a lot of old people, seen plumbers and tradespeople at work and visited Asia a couple of times. Read a bit of history in my spare time. The majority may believe that but they are working from instinct rather than evidence. The evidence is they have one of the most comfortable, low risk existences in the history of humanity. Both in an absolute and relative sense, also when compared to currently living humans. But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.

jselysianeagle 3y ago
> If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong. Sacked?! If you think the only time people switch jobs in the tech industry is when they get sacked, with all due respect, you know nothing about the tech industry, and your views and understanding about most corporate jobs today is most likely very, very outdated.
- roenxi 3y ago
  If you're already voluntarily switching jobs every 2-3 years, then nobody should care that Red Hat is forcing its employees to switch jobs every ... when was the last time they had a layoff, I dunno... years. It is barely an inconvenience.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    when you switch jobs voluntarily, then you can do the job hunting on the side and you can reject offers that are not obviously better than your current job. when you get laid off then you may have to take the first offer that comes along, even if it pays worse because (at least in the US) many can't afford to be out of a job for long. in germany you have to take any offer that pays at least 80% of your current salary if you don't want to loose unemployment benefits. getting laid off is a massive difference compared to switching jobs voluntarily.
majormajor 3y ago
> But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people. Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry. How would you "drive the wealth out" without eliminating demand for software, which has been on a long upward trend because it underpins so much and because increased productivity leads to demand for further productivity increases + maintenance of the existing increases? If it's just some "unionized employees are lazy and don't actually do stuff" trope, I don't buy it. The Hollywood model has always seemed like it could work quite well for software companies, especially startups or "release-oriented" things like games. * wildly different success rates for different project, resulting in wildly different compensation depend on what project you're on * generally short "try to make a big hit in just a few years" time frames * sometimes things turn into long-lived recurring series * incentives to push crunch time and other crazy work practices if not checked by something Obviously it's not a perfect 1:1 match everywhere, but a lot of similarities and it's an example of creative, flexible work happening with collective bargaining and better-than-government-mandated minimum standards. The union/non-union split could even end up looking like a split between top-tier VCs and studios and everyone else hustling trying to break in...
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry. The stereotype is starving actors and artists. I don't want to copy their strategies. I want to be a capitalist in a free market; we have wine and big comfortable leather bound chairs. People who like joining unions seem to get angry with me because my approach leads to me having huge amounts of stuff. I happen to fund my capitalist ways with a software engineers salary, which is quite high. If I get sacked once a decade or so I'm still going to crush most of Hollywood in terms of economic outcomes. I'm serious here, as far as I can tell unionising is a bad idea. I wouldn't do that if I was trying to live a wealthy and comfortable life.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    I question if you're making a good faith argument there. Your "starving artist" stereotype applies much more to non-union Hollywood than it does to union Hollywood. You can be a starving artist without needing any union. Get rid of Hollywood unions and there is 0% chance you stop having starving artists. There's only so many people and so many hours in the day, compared to how many people desperately want to create stuff to try to make it big (or just to create at all), so that attribute will never go away. Again, software has a unique attribute of how good software creates demand for even more good software that Hollywood can never match. There's two ways to get people to take chances: * desperation * a good safety net VCs help with the latter already for founders. I think a good union could help a lot with it for would-be startup employees.
wombatpm 3y ago
Or maybe the entire structure has been upturned. My story: laid off 3/20 because of the pandemic. Had a nice gig with a nonprofit that saw their revenue crater because of lockdowns. Followed by a year of contract work, followed by a year working for an established firm owned by private equity. PE went slash and burn in 2/22, went to a startup in March only to have their Series C fail to close, another startup in June with funding, who did a 30% layoff in December because they needed to conserve capital-their funding plans for 2023 fell apart. I had more jobs in the last 3 years than I’ve had in the previous 25. So with all due respect- f** off.
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines, no matter how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. Your comment would be just fine without that last bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html