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> 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

> 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 4y 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 4y 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.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    1) I work in software because it offers the most money for the least work. 2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union. I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer. 3) > There's two ways to get people to take chances That seems to discount the reality that Silicon Valley startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world right now. No safety nets. Not much desperation. A relatively high number of workers becoming millionaires. Making it harder to run a business by empowering employees to just shut things down when times get tough is unlikely to help get businesspeople to take more risk.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      > I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer. There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. I never asserted that everyone in Hollywood is better off than the average engineer at any particular company, or whatever dumb strawman you want to come up with. You dismiss the role of unions for the highly-compensated in Hollywood but ... do you have no curiosity about why they exist? Why the superstars aren't constantly trying to tear down the union? Can you imagine no world where the superstars were worse off if they had been the victim of more predatory behavior early in their career before they were superstars? --- I'm not fully sure I even agree that SV startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world. SV startup culture in particular is VERY well-capitalized companies, greatly lowering the risk for founders. You will see a lot of people in that world complain about it being hard to hire - they don't want to compete with bigtech salaries. The salary/equity difference between founders and employees means the latter group is often shouldering as much or more risk, without as many chances to take money off the table. So, typically, you get inexperienced kids who don't need great health plans or benefits and will work for less money. Easy to see ways a union could be mutually beneficial there - no need for every startup to have to worry about company-provided health and benefits, for instance. Management being worried about a strike seems perfectly fine - employees are in exactly that position regarding being laid off constantly in most of the US (at-will employment). So employees know not to fuck around, generally. Maybe it could be a better thing if managers similarly had to respect their employees a bit more - maybe it would prevent a lot of the "let's hire a bunch of new people during a pandemic just in case this weird blip turns out to be a permanent change, however unlikely that seems otherwise!" idiocy that started a bunch of this at FAANG companies, if "we can just lay them off easily if needed" isn't as easy as all that.

roenxi 4y 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 4y 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.
- roenxi 4y ago
  1) I work in software because it offers the most money for the least work. 2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union. I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer. 3) > There's two ways to get people to take chances That seems to discount the reality that Silicon Valley startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world right now. No safety nets. Not much desperation. A relatively high number of workers becoming millionaires. Making it harder to run a business by empowering employees to just shut things down when times get tough is unlikely to help get businesspeople to take more risk.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    > I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer. There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. I never asserted that everyone in Hollywood is better off than the average engineer at any particular company, or whatever dumb strawman you want to come up with. You dismiss the role of unions for the highly-compensated in Hollywood but ... do you have no curiosity about why they exist? Why the superstars aren't constantly trying to tear down the union? Can you imagine no world where the superstars were worse off if they had been the victim of more predatory behavior early in their career before they were superstars? --- I'm not fully sure I even agree that SV startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world. SV startup culture in particular is VERY well-capitalized companies, greatly lowering the risk for founders. You will see a lot of people in that world complain about it being hard to hire - they don't want to compete with bigtech salaries. The salary/equity difference between founders and employees means the latter group is often shouldering as much or more risk, without as many chances to take money off the table. So, typically, you get inexperienced kids who don't need great health plans or benefits and will work for less money. Easy to see ways a union could be mutually beneficial there - no need for every startup to have to worry about company-provided health and benefits, for instance. Management being worried about a strike seems perfectly fine - employees are in exactly that position regarding being laid off constantly in most of the US (at-will employment). So employees know not to fuck around, generally. Maybe it could be a better thing if managers similarly had to respect their employees a bit more - maybe it would prevent a lot of the "let's hire a bunch of new people during a pandemic just in case this weird blip turns out to be a permanent change, however unlikely that seems otherwise!" idiocy that started a bunch of this at FAANG companies, if "we can just lay them off easily if needed" isn't as easy as all that.