9 ms·

Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered i

• monocasa 3y ago
  Unions have a lot of different forms. SAG-AFTRA is in a field with extreme striation for instance. There's still plenty of individual negotiation.
• itsoktocry 3y ago
  >The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. The economics of labour suggest unions are most valuable where there's a monopsony buyer of labour. Big Tech might fit that bill, especially when we know they colluded to depress salaries.
  • flerchin 3y ago
    The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.
    • tartuffe78 3y ago
      With a few notable outliers...
    • digitalsushi 3y ago
      99.999% of the time I agree with you.
    • rmbyrro 3y ago
      Sure, just the integrity of the plane after landing vary sometimes.
    • lnxg33k1 3y ago
      Yeah the best developer uses the same compiler of the worst, guess the difference is not what you do at the end, but how you manage the trip, and how you write code before
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?
      • flerchin 3y ago
        Plenty more, but the economic impact to the airline is the same from any individual pilot.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • chii 3y ago
      Not really. The worst pilot only lands once, and never again.
      • Ekaros 3y ago
        Now what qualifies as landing?
        • II2II 3y ago
          Collect a large number of pilots, divide them into two pools based upon their performance (low and high). Which pool do you think will incur more expenses to the airline? Keep in mind that some of those costs range from reducing consumer confidence (poor landings or damaged cargo), to planes requiring more maintenance (increased costs of maintenance, planes taken out of service more often), to planes being put out of commission (regardless of whether everyone walks away or not). A lot of people seem to be measuring value in landings per day, widgets per minute, lines of code per week without acknowledging that the quality of work does have an impact.
          • flerchin 3y ago
            There's only acceptable piloting and not. There's no pilot that makes the airline 10x more per flight.
    • wil421 3y ago
      The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. At the other end you have cargo pilots and regional flights that carry a brand of major airline but are operated by a different company. Look at salary differences. https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary
      • AptExtrapolatio 3y ago
        >The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. Curious about this. I'd have thought going the civilian route of flight school should put one on equal footing on this regard? Or are you saying that just statistically more long-tenured pilots are retired military?
      • flerchin 3y ago
        In general, these are due to union rules. The union decides what the compensation is, and it's largely by seniority. The airline makes no more money from retired military pilots than they do from any other pilot.
  • frant-hartm 3y ago
    If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value. Have you worked on an assembly line? I have. You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.
      • bigtechennui 3y ago
        So there’s a cap on the maximum value (always doing it on time), and a cap on the minimum value (never doing it). The above poster takes the position that the ratio between the maximum value, and minimum employable value is less than 10.
      • mycologos 3y ago
        I think the distinction is the relationship between the median performer and the 90th percentile performer. The two are very different employees for software development but not on an assembly line. As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer and the 10th percentile performer on an assembly line, but that's not the comparison the parent comment introduced.
        • itsoktocry 3y ago
          >As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer But I didn't say that, and I don't agree. I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle. There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.
          • 3y ago
  • pydry 3y ago
    This idea crops up so frequently that Ive started calling it the "Apparently Tom Cruise Works in a Factory" fallacy.
    • runako 3y ago
      Is Tom Cruise represented by a union?
      • germinalphrase 3y ago
        The film industry is highly unionized. At some point in his career, he absolutely was - possibly multiple.
      • onion2k 3y ago
        Yes. He's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He stopped shooting MI:8 in solidarity with the union.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • TimPC 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are plenty of fields where the output of your best and worst employees don't differ dramatically. Worst is generally some passable minimum not someone who refuses to do the job entirely. For plenty of assembly line jobs, your worst employee has similar productivity to your best employee because there is no ability to make the assembly line faster for the more productive person. In code on the other hand, your best employee can straight up do things your worst employee can't. The differences are much larger. There is a reason people hire Principal Software Engineers, but most IC roles in other fields don't have the same range of seniorities.
    • eaton 3y ago
      I've been doing software professionally for about thirty years now, and what's interesting to me is that the conversations I had with my grandfather about factory work involved all of the same dynamics. Prototyping new solutions versus consistent reproduction of known solutions? People who only understand their own tasks versus those who have a holistic understanding of the components, the process, and the final product? Troubleshooting unexpected failure states in complex systems and fixing mission-critical problems that can make or break the business, versus checking out when The System Breaks? Conflicts between book-smart college grads and grizzled vets who know how things "really work" under the hood? Those are the stories he told me about working in a factory, and frankly the lessons I learned from him were just as valuable as any "fifteen lessons for software architects" books our industry has produced. Sure — software is unique! So is food, so is metal, so is film, so is concrete… People don't deserve unions because they're 10x workers. People deserve unions because they're workers.
      • TimPC 3y ago
        I think a working model of a technology union would have to work closely to professional sports unions or acting unions that support wide disparities in pay. I think historical tech opposition to unions is people not wanting the idea of a standardized wage and extremely high job security (which acts as a downward force on wages). Many people look for something like the Netflix model where you're expected to move on if you're not producing lots of value, but you get compensated more for it. The thing about having 10x engineers being possible is that everyone thinks they are above 1x and deserve above average pay.
  • nordsieck 3y ago
    > Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. I've worked at FedEx as a package handler before. That is absolutely not the case there. The absolutely best employees might be 3x more productive than someone who's mediocre with 2 weeks of experience. When the job is picking up boxes off of a conveyor belt and putting them in trucks, your walking speed is one of the key limiters. And no one can walk 10x faster than someone else. Not for a 6-8 hr shift. Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees. Obviously we're all just throwing around numbers to make a point, this isn't hard data. But I assure you there are zero jobs where there is no difference between the best and worst employees. Zero.
    • Kye 3y ago
      3x seems like a lot in a business that lives or dies on thin margins.
  • dartos 3y ago
    Specifically in the software development field, a good engineer increases the productivity of all other engineers in a way that allows engineers to increase the productivity of each other in a compounding way. A “10x” engineer is worth a compounding amount more than their peers. I don’t think that holds for every field.
    • adrianovaroli 3y ago
      Jorge Luis Borges colleagues at the National Library forced him to go slower because he could catalogue books in a fraction of the time they needed. So yeah, if you're an absolute genius, you don't need a union. Everybody else does. Your common people colleagues do.
      • dartos 3y ago
        Yeah, that’s the trade off with many collectivist ideas. They optimize for equality, which necessarily hurts the highest performers (in one way or another) and benefits the lower ones (in many ways) Like anything, it’s a trade off
  • jhgfjhgfjhfgjhg 3y ago
    You would depress the wages of 10x engineers with unions. Look at teacher unions for an example.
    • atmavatar 3y ago
      Actors and athletes don't seem to have that problem despite having unions.
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    > Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. Or presumably anything else (because you said "any field"). But why? It seems like the less skill or expertise something takes the less ability there is to deviate from the average. In which case unions, if most useful for low-skilled labor like OP described, are most useful for industries that tend to outsource their labor to other countries. And thus reduces the need for unions. Seems consistent with the decline of unions in the US.
    • shortrounddev2 3y ago
      Jobs aren't all technical skills. You can be the best coder in the world but if you're a colossal asshole you're not going to get put in charge of other people. If you show up to work drunk or high, you're definitely not going to advance.
      • nonethewiser 3y ago
        Never said it was. We're talking about productivity. Being such an asshole that your performance is crippled is baked into that.
  • shortrounddev2 3y ago
    Big tech might, but unlike steelworking or auto manufacturing, the barrier for entry for tech is very low, and so big tech aren't the only employers out there. They're not even the only employers paying high wages (you can get good salaries at startups as well)
  • neotrope 3y ago
    > Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. This is a big misconception. The difference is whether 10x talent is more valuable than 1x talent. You could be the worlds best fish gutter, but if you can't gut 10x more fish than the next guy, then your salary is capped and you're wasting your talent. In software, you can be 10x more productive than the next guy.
• ownagefool 3y ago
  It's a decent take. But taking a view on markets outside of the US and SV/bigtech in particular, those 10x devs aren't usually getting the 2-3x as much, and taking a view of industry in total, profits are runaway but wages are flat and falling, especially when considering inflation. Capital is winning. Perhaps unions are required. But I'm not a union member and likely never will be.
  • marcinzm 3y ago
    >Capital is winning. When hasn't it won in the western world?
    • throw0101c 3y ago
      > When hasn't it won in the western world? In the US, post-WW2 until Reagan got elected.
      • marcinzm 3y ago
        They still won just not as much as now.
        • the-smug-one 3y ago
          I agree, us non-capitalists took more of the cake back then.
          • marcinzm 3y ago
            Unions in tech won't recreate the 1950s. The reason capital always wins is because it can be moved around more easily than specialized workers can change their skill set. If you extract more of the pie in one area then capital (and thus growth) will just move to a different areas. Could be different industries or companies in different countries. They still win while your occupation and growth in earnings stagnates.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
• runako 3y ago
  > low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years Routinely on this site, there are job postings for "senior" engineering roles for that do not require even 5 years of experience. (By contrast, the recent headlines about UPS drivers making $170k are for drivers with 5+ years of tenure.) There are frequent discussions in this space about whether engineers need college or other pre-employment education. And many/most "tech" workers are not programmers; they contribute to tech companies in other ways. By and large, our industry as a whole does not place a huge value on long experience. I'm not sure how different tech really is. > When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power. How much power did the individual employees at Meta, Google, etc. have when they were being laid off en masse recently?
  • _aavaa_ 3y ago
    > By contrast, the recent headlines about UPS drivers making $170k are for drivers with 5+ years of tenure. They do not make 170k, that was a puff piece from UPS. That number was total compensation + monetary value of all benefits. Which not the way most people/postings talk about compensation.
    • runako 3y ago
      > Which not the way most people/postings talk about compensation. This is a tech site. People in tech routinely include the value of e.g. RSUs in compensation numbers. Point taken, but a) it's not too far afield from how tech comp is discussed and b) even if you back out the non-cash components, the drivers still make a lot of money. (Possibly more even than the median US software developer.)
      • _aavaa_ 3y ago
        I agree that things like RSUs are generally included, but the 50k of benefits does not include RSUs. The closest this they talk about is the pension plan, which they quote as 23k. Looks like UPS quotes above 95k avg, and 42$/hr avg after 4 years. I have no idea how that compares to average tech salary, but I agree that it is good money. That last thing worth mentioning, also from UPS' site is that almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years. That's a long time. [0]: https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer/real-employee-benefits.html https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer/real-...
• LtWorf 3y ago
  A union would protect everyone. And nobody is saying that a senior engineer should get paid the same as a junior. You live under the impression that better workers will earn more. In practice the skill that earns higher salary is to pretend to be very competent by using jargon and parroting stuff.
  • nxm 3y ago
    Even the terrible developers that are a drain on the company and hence compensation? No thanks
    • pyreticRitual 3y ago
      Do terrible NBA players get to keep their jobs? The pithy response is to point at like, James Harden, but on the whole professional basketball is very meritocratic and yet they have a union. Pro sports in general. Netflix said they run their company like a pro sports team, why not include that players have a union?
      • bjornsing 3y ago
        > Do terrible NBA players get to keep their jobs? Sports is different because there’s only a certain number of spots on the field. This changes the dynamics and keeps the crab mentality at bay. The same is not true for most workplaces.
        • pyreticRitual 3y ago
          How so? The limited number of spots seems like it would enhance negative behavior, not curb it.
    • LtWorf 3y ago
      > Even the terrible developers that are a drain on the company and hence compensation? No thanks Nobody forced them to hire them?
  • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
• pydry 3y ago
  Were you unaware that there is a writers strike on right now?
• throw0101c 3y ago
  > Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? Actors in the US are in SAG (currently on strike). AFAICT, there is a 'base contract' that most people get ("John Smith as Taxi Driver", "Jane Doe as Waitress #2"), but folks can negotiate above and beyond that ("Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt"). So there's a floor, but no ceiling.
• RandomLensman 3y ago
  Why would a 10x engineer object to improved working conditions for all? Some general hatred for coworkers?
  • pjc50 3y ago
    Yes. Thinking of yourself as a 10x engineer, you run the risk of seeing everyone else as 0.1x engineers, mere inconvenient ants that you're forced to tolerate. You can see a bit of that in this thread.
  • alphazard 3y ago
    I didn't say they would object, just that they aren't incentivized to care about it. It doesn't help the 10xer's bottom line, and the conditions at the "bottom" of tech are some of the best of any profession.
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      They actually are, unless the 10x engineer thinks good customer service agents, customer deployment engineers, assistants, etc. somehow are not worth having. Usually, the product is way more than just some software engineering piece.
  • xeromal 3y ago
    Because Union agreements can bind pay to non meritocratic ways such as time spent in the role or when a higher position opens up. Those top players will rise to the top easier in an open market. It's the same with waitstaff in a tip-based system. The bottom half wants fair wages while the top 20% will leave because they know they can earn without those rules in place.
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      First, that means there is an open, two-sided market and, second, citation needed that that is really the case. Btw., employers can and do also pay based on non-meritocratic KPIs (but depends on your definition of that term).
• pjc50 3y ago
  I think we're still in such a good position relative to everyone else in society that it's difficult to see the need for collective bargaining. The skills are in demand and not easily replicated. There are enough tech jobs that the solution to almost any workplace issue is to quit and work somewhere else - often for more pay. > The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers Lots of people will claim to be 10x engineers, few people will claim to be average engineers, even though statistically there are more of the latter. I suspect 80% of engineers think they're in the top 20%. This is bad for solidarity. (Many of the people likely to face discrimination issues are also at risk of being discriminated against by their union, sadly; it's not an entirely simple solution. Again, poor solidarity.) > pay proportional to value-add As we're seeing in the Unity debacle, who gets to capture value is about power rather than simply distributing the total value-add among all those that add value. And power in this case is determined by the "BATNA" for both sides. So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power.
  • Clubber 3y ago
    >I think we're still in such a good position relative to everyone else in society that it's difficult to see the need for collective bargaining. Corps have been pushing down wages for decades. Here's some methods: - Offshoring - Automation - Skeleton teams - Long hours - Removal of bonuses for anyone but managers - Removal of signing bonuses (this was a thing in the late 90s) - Recruiters posing mid level people as seniors. - No or inadequate inflation raises - Coordinated layoffs (flood the market, hire back what you need at deflated prices) - Little or no on site skill training (this was also big in the late 90s) - A few large, entrenched tech companies. The math is: total developer hours needed - total developer hours available = surplus and higher wages. When you automate your daily grind, you get more done. When you get more done, the total developer hours needed is less. Multiply this by around 2 million developers and and pushes down wages. They're boiling frogs here. >So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power. You may think that, but the phrase, "no one is irreplaceable," and "the graveyard is full of irreplaceable people," is still true. Go piss off your CEO, call him incompetent or something, and see how replaceable you really are. He will ditch you and make everyone else pick up the load.
• mplanchard 3y ago
  In addition to the writers’ and actors’ unions, many professional athletes are also unionized, where there is also a great deal of variance in pay and skill between the best and the worst athletes.
  • bjornsing 3y ago
    Both actors and athletes face a different dynamic, due to the fact that there’s a limited number of spots on the field / the set. This keeps crab mentality at bay to some extent. The same is not true for most workplaces.
• lapcat 3y ago
  > Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power. No, this is a common misunderstanding. Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes. The point of labor unions is that no matter how much power you may think an individual worker has, it's always relatively small and vastly surpassed by the power and money of the business ownership.
  • throw0101c 3y ago
    > Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes. Except tennis, where players are basically independent contractors—and not coïncidentally they have the lowest average earnings of any major sport: * https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/9/12/23870760/tennis-wages-sports-performance-pay https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/9/12/23870760/tennis-wages-s...
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I would not expect a union for tennis players. Why would they even have an employer? They play by themselves, for themselves. I have never heard of a tennis player “owner”, other than obviously the tennis player themself. And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players.
      • throw0101c 3y ago
        > They play by themselves, for themselves. The same can be said of actors, and yet they have a union/guild. > And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players. Few can name most of the benchwarmers in the NBA/NFL/etc, and yet they have a minimum salary: NHL is $775K, NFL is $800K. Carlos Alcaraz is the top player and made US$ 10M (gross, not net) in 2022: he would be the 147th top-paid athlete in the NBA, 202nd in the NFL, 126th in the MLB.
• jampekka 3y ago
  Companies do commoditize software development by for example pushing technologies that cater to the least experienced common denominator. Bondage and discipline languages are a good example of this. It's typically the main rationale for their advocation, although stated perhaps a bit differently. It follows quite obviously from the profit motive that companies want to minimize salaries, labour bargaining power and dependence on individuals. These, especially the latter, apply to the "10x" as well.
• woooooo 3y ago
  Skilled trades have unions.
• dijit 3y ago
  > Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I will do my best to take this as the result of decades of anti-union sentiment across the USA; in places like Sweden this is not "common knowledge" as it seems to be stated here. The best counter-examples I can think of, within the US even is: the screen actors guild (which is a union) and the writers guild. Both of which cannot (and definitely do not) represent uniform quality and lack of talent or special skill.
• UncleMeat 3y ago
  Even if it were true that there are fields where quality is uniform and it were true that unions worked better for these fields, that doesn't mean that unions are bad for other fields.
• the-smug-one 3y ago
  With a union backing them up individuals can more easily: - Get better at salary negotiation and interviews through having union training - Share how much they earn with other workers, even distributing statistics, reinforcing salary negotiation power and the ability for workers to ensure that businesses doesn't engage in illegal wage fixing - Have union back up when HR are being a pest to protect the company - Ensure that fair severance is distributed when an individual is let go - Negotiate on-call scheduling as a group - Negotiate all other parts of their contract, for example removing pesky no competes - Engage in lobbying Individuals, even ones with great competence within their field of expertise, have a lot less information regarding the game they're playing with other companies. Unions can help with that. Note: You can still be in a union without having your workplace be 'unionized' or having a collective agreement with the union. You can still engage in salary negotiations individually, and you may still skip out on being in the workplace's union.
• Aurornis 3y ago
  This nuance is missing from most discussions about unions in tech; People have a high-level idea that unions have increased wages and improved working conditions in other industries and they’ve made a crude extrapolation that a tech union would therefore give them them more money and fewer working hours. All with no downsides or strings attached! A more accurate mental model is to understand a union as trading some (or most) of your individual negotiating leverage and advancement opportunity out for a collective negotiating structure through the union. You have less opportunity to negotiate and advance on your own, but you would, in theory, get various protections in return. This does not mean wages go up! In fact, companies are now incentivized to withhold as much compensation as they can get away with so they have room to negotiate in the next round of union talks. You also have to be prepared to strike to force those negotiations, which means giving up your compensation for that period. Job hopping is huge in the software industry. It’s well known that job hopping is an easy way to get a pay increase when you’re in bad conditions. I would be surprised if software engineers as a whole would accept long strikes and strict compensation structures when they realize they can actually earn more by jumping out of a hypothetical union job where they’re not getting paid due to strikes and the recruiters come calling with job offers that are conveniently for 5-10% more than their union’s demands anyway.
  • AmericanChopper 3y ago
    Many tech workers already effectively have made the salary compromises required by collective bargaining. That’s what salary bands are. Those who think they’re worth more than that become contractors, while the FTEs mistakenly think they’re getting paid the same as everybody else and sleep well at night imagining they have more job security than the contractors do. Creating actual unions won’t change much. The suckers will still self-select into getting paid less, and will be very happy to do so.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    At least here in (highly unionized) Finland unions set only the floor on the wages and other working conditions, and especially in white collar jobs practically everyone is paid above the floor. Some, mostly public sector, contracts have union negotiated "wage tables" suggesting pay based on position and individual performance, but similar exist in almost all large organizations. And the unions don't care if someone is paid more than this, and at the moment they wouldn't even know, because individual pay isn't public information.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  And those 20% won't even be compensated 2-3x higher under a union: likely just in lockstep with their years of service. A union might figure out a couple of tiers within the payscale for specialized or managerial work, but I expect those to be gamed as well by shrewd but mediocre people. Following up on what you say, the main reason for unions is to help labor extract more of the wealth they create. While I'm sure there are lots of people here who think devs should make more of it, they live pretty comfortably. It'd be like saying doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work. There might be some marginal benefits to it, no doubt, but they don't as a class seem any more interested in it than devs do.
  • pjc50 3y ago
    > doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work .. have you actually checked how much power the AMA has, even though they're not technically a "union"? This year UK doctors went on strike against their monopsony employer because they were getting below-inflation pay rises: https://www.bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/junior-doctor-campaigns/pay/junior-doctors-strike-doctors-guide-to-industrial-action-2023 https://www.bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/junior-doctor-campaigns...
• onion2k 3y ago
  Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? Actors are unionized.
• bjornsing 3y ago
  > The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much. If you want to see what happens in a collective bargaining system you can come to Sweden. Here the best engineers make about 1.25x what the worst make. Also, everybody makes a lot less than in the US. > 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power… In a free market those 20% have 80% of the negotiating power, true. But in a union they only have 20% of the votes. So what will happen? See above.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  It makes sense to negotiate as a block when management has more power than you. Now more than ever, tech companies have more cash, more lobbying and more power. They use this to play games with employees, like attrition through a return to office program so that they can skirt around the WARN Act wrt layoff requirements.
• M2Ys4U 3y ago
  >Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? Absolutely not. I'm a software engineer in a research & development department (with a headcount of ~200 in an organisation of about 20k). Roles here are very varied, from people with multi-decade experience and very deep specialist technical knowledge to recent graduates, in domains that range from RF engineering to ethnography to project management. Our union is indispensable, both within our department and across the whole organisation.
• bluGill 3y ago
  Unions work best when you have 3 qualities of the job: a feeling that you cannot be better than someone else (that is quality/expertise don't count past a short training period); a uniform wage scale (that is no way to say one person is better than another); and enough skill that you can't be easily replaced. Note that the above is how they work best. Unions do work in situations lacking some of the above, but because of that lack there is incentive for someone to leave the union and so they have troubles they must address somehow. The above mostly lifted from https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit-unions/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit...
• Pxtl 3y ago
  Uh, did you miss that Hollywood is on strike? That Marvel's 3D artists are unionizing? I wouldn't call those "low skilled" jobs, or one where "quality is uniform". edit: Artistic endeavors where people are passionate about the work to the point where they can be exploited are an excellent place for unions. Within computing the obvious comparative is the gaming industry. The "EA Spouse" scandal in the '00s demonstrated how much people were willing to destroy themselves to get into the gaming industry, and how an employer could abuse that passion.
• pramsey 3y ago
  The NBA Players Association would like a word.
• eaton 3y ago
  Unions don’t exist so that people you consider unskilled will get raises. Unions exist so that people who sell their labor can cooperate to influence the conditions they work in. If you consider nothing more important than your own individual compensation, and have absolute faith in your own irreplaceable genius, it’s easy to make a case against unions — sort of like “there is no prisoner’s dilemma, why would I ever cooperate?”
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• calinet6 3y ago
  This thread is full of idiots who think they're geniuses.
• scoofy 3y ago
  We seem to have based our ideas of on the excesses of the 1970's. The idea of a tech union could simply be establishing the very basics. The expectations of the folks I know in the industry include more than 40 hour weeks, significant unpaid overtime during "crunch" periods. Managers promising the world to clients without even consulting the devs. Illegitimate H1-B hiring, and unspoken threats to H1-B workers when they are voluntold to do extra, unpaid work. Again, I understand the hesitancy, but a tech union could be much more akin to the Screen Actors Guild, where the vast majority of the negotiation is about how the lowest-ranking get a fair shake, while the superstars barely notice the union. The benefits to the superstars, however, are obvious. When you have major players on record of egregious crimes of illegal non-competes a decade ago, which probably cost the superstars literally millions of dollars each over their careers, I would hope they would want to be on board too. Unions can suck. They don't have to suck. I would think a bunch of habitually online, highly-skeptical, analytic, and systemic-focused folks like us could actively make them not suck.
• OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  > Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? SAG-AFTRA (the big acting union) blows that argument out of the water. The disparity in compensation between the SAG extras and the big name stars can be several orders of magnitude. Their union works great, as it's mostly about dictating labor-favorable working conditions and contract terms. There are all sorts of things that the vast majority of software developers could get behind that we often don't see eye-to-eye with management about. Flexible working hours, having blocks of interruption-free time, on-call sucks, etc.
• stonogo 3y ago
  Unions protect against the power imbalance between the capitalist class (in the classical definition -- those who control the capital) and the labor class (again, in the classical definition -- those who sell work for wage). The skill disparities you describe exist in literally every field; software is not special in this regard.
• wheresmycraisin 3y ago
  Could you possibly be more elitist?
• jhp123 3y ago
  The old-fashioned way to level this accusation is to say that the union is "Procrustean", named after the mythical Greek King who would chop people's limbs off or stretch them on a rack so as to fit the exact dimensions of his bed. For THERSITES & Co., for the weakly and small, Who in free competition must go to the wall, The plan of PROCRUSTES has obvious charms: "Cut 'em down to our standard, chop legs, shorten arms! Bring us all to one level in power and pay, By the rule of a legalised Eight Hours Day!"
• adrianovaroli 3y ago
  Volkswagen workers are unionized. Their expertise counts for a lot.
• sershe 3y ago
  Unions work best in industries that have captive audience, that's why public sector, and public-sector-adjacent (e.g. infrastructure construction) unions are the ones that stick around more; no matter how bad they are, the taxpayers can't choose to shop around. Stuff either becomes more expensive (infrastructure), or worse with consumers holding the bag (public schools; consumers do shop around, but it doesn't matter much to the unions because taxpayers still pay). Or ports are a good non-public example, it's hard to "disrupt" a port. To the extent that industry is competitive, unions would basically destroy their companies... Big 3 automakers are a great example.