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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 Hollyw

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
    > There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. But the argument today is literally that we should be homogenising the practices of the market which pays employees well with the practices of the market that is famous for forcing women to sleep with people for opportunities. I refuse to back down on this point - that is a terrible strategy and we should not do that. We should be doing the opposite of what Hollywood does in this instance. The evidence is overwhelming. I would not choose to work in Hollywood if I wanted to make money and be paid well. None of us would, I suspect, since this is a tech forum. I would rather be working for Red Hat, even with this round of layoffs.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      [flagged]
- clipsy 4y ago
  > 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. Funny, the superstars themselves certainly do not agree with that sentiment in general; and indeed, the industry was infamous for exploiting superstars prior to unionization.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Software superstars far outperform Hollywood superstars. That isn't close either. Some of the richest people in the world are people who succeeded in software. The wealthiest people in the world for the last 5 years have been ex-computer technicians. The difference is instead of wasting their time with union politics to try and make their lifestyle work they were busy trying to figure out how to make money. The answer was a resounding "not unions".
    - majormajor 4y ago
      That's not the difference. You're being willfully obtuse. Less imagined "time-wasting union politics" [whatever you think that means for SAG] doesn't change the TAM for an Oprah or a Brad Pitt to let them be a Jeff Bezos. You latched onto the stupidest of all possible ways to interpret my post and compare the two fields because you don't want to engage with the actual things Hollywood unions do or how they actually work.
      - roenxi 4y ago
        The people in a wealthier industry have more money than people in a poor industry. You just picked an answer that shows that. Unions will make the software industry less wealthy. Eventually that will flow down to wages. I'm not being obtuse, I'm being effective at getting wealthy. An approach I encourage for everyone else in the software industry I might add. You're holding up an example that is worse at making money than I am and saying people should copy it. No! People should copy the industry that is effective at minting millionaires. People should be copying the freedom of software rather than software copying the industries that unionised and stayed poor.

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
  > There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. But the argument today is literally that we should be homogenising the practices of the market which pays employees well with the practices of the market that is famous for forcing women to sleep with people for opportunities. I refuse to back down on this point - that is a terrible strategy and we should not do that. We should be doing the opposite of what Hollywood does in this instance. The evidence is overwhelming. I would not choose to work in Hollywood if I wanted to make money and be paid well. None of us would, I suspect, since this is a tech forum. I would rather be working for Red Hat, even with this round of layoffs.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    [flagged]
clipsy 4y ago
> 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. Funny, the superstars themselves certainly do not agree with that sentiment in general; and indeed, the industry was infamous for exploiting superstars prior to unionization.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Software superstars far outperform Hollywood superstars. That isn't close either. Some of the richest people in the world are people who succeeded in software. The wealthiest people in the world for the last 5 years have been ex-computer technicians. The difference is instead of wasting their time with union politics to try and make their lifestyle work they were busy trying to figure out how to make money. The answer was a resounding "not unions".
  - majormajor 4y ago
    That's not the difference. You're being willfully obtuse. Less imagined "time-wasting union politics" [whatever you think that means for SAG] doesn't change the TAM for an Oprah or a Brad Pitt to let them be a Jeff Bezos. You latched onto the stupidest of all possible ways to interpret my post and compare the two fields because you don't want to engage with the actual things Hollywood unions do or how they actually work.
    - roenxi 4y ago
      The people in a wealthier industry have more money than people in a poor industry. You just picked an answer that shows that. Unions will make the software industry less wealthy. Eventually that will flow down to wages. I'm not being obtuse, I'm being effective at getting wealthy. An approach I encourage for everyone else in the software industry I might add. You're holding up an example that is worse at making money than I am and saying people should copy it. No! People should copy the industry that is effective at minting millionaires. People should be copying the freedom of software rather than software copying the industries that unionised and stayed poor.