27 ms·

The Burnout Machine

• kelseyfrog 2y ago
  We joined the burnout machine under our own free will. What else did we expect? Moloch's not getting any less hungry.
  • tejtm 2y ago
    It was not the burnout machine when all of us joined.
    • whstl 2y ago
      Yep. It definitely wasn't the case 10 years ago. It became significantly worse, with way more micromanagement, less productivity and lower quality products.
    • shadowgovt 2y ago
      Oh, it definitely was. We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
  • convolvatron 2y ago
    I joined a hungry machine that was desperate for my labor. I would love to be properly exploited like I used to be. Instead I'm expected to spend all my time faffing about talking about how i might actually do some work in some theoretical world. and that makes me miserable.
  • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    "We aren't like the other big companies," was a line I heard associated with some big tech companies circa 2006. Implication was that they saw the dysfunction at larger firms and chose to build something different. Fast-forward twenty years, and they're just like them.
    • whstl 2y ago
      I'd argue tech companies today are worse. Large firms back then were dysfunctional and unproductive, but the amount of stress was minimal compared to tech today.
• terminalbraid 2y ago
  Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that. I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed. Software is also a broad industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred. Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster? The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach. [1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union-uvw-cwa-has-already-welcomed-over-100-new-members https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union...
  • whstl 2y ago
    I have been part of quite successful unions in Germany and Latin America. Even participated on a strike once.
  • stygiansonic 2y ago
    The article mentions this union, not sure if it meets your definition of success: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins
    • shagie 2y ago
      Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract. Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
• linksnapzz 2y ago
  What happens when your employer replaces union workers w/ more pliant immigrants on visas? Or just outsources their work entirely? Are you going to picket an AWS DC in Ashburn?
  • drpossum 2y ago
    This was actually very popular with offshoring and the results spoke for themselves. I made a lot of money cleaning up those dumpster fires and it's hard for me to not encourage more of it.
    • Muromec 2y ago
      My favorite is sitting downstream from those ascended souls. There isn't ever a deadline they don't miss, so business people never bark on my tree.
    • aaronbaugher 2y ago
      I've picked up work that way too. There are two problems with it, though. A) After a company has sunk a bundle into offshoring with nothing to show for it, it has less in its budget for me. They may be desperate at that point, but that doesn't mean their checkbook is bottomless. B) The dream of cheap/subservient/good skilled labor dies hard in management sometimes, and it can take years before management realizes its mistake. Meanwhile, the company may go out of business before it has a chance to come home and pay me the big bucks to clean up its mess.
  • Muromec 2y ago
    You get a nice piece of metal, come close and personal with coppers and live happily in exile in Europe ever after. Either that or you become a homeless drug addict. There are always exciting choices for these exciting times.
• rglover 2y ago
  The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business. The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
  • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    Correct. Devs need to stop believing that business acumen is some special skill they can't develop. It's not magic. Your CEO isn't a better human than you despite what LinkedIn tells you.
  • debacle 2y ago
    I never worked harder in my life than when I worked for myself.
    • rglover 2y ago
      Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill. You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you. Building your own thing is a rough go (13 years deep myself), but hell if I don't wake up most days with a shit eating grin on my face.
      • BeetleB 2y ago
        > Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill. Depends on your goals and your personality. When I list the things I want to achieve in my life, working for myself drastically reduces the likelihood of achieving those things - unless my own business makes enough money for me to retire in a few years (extremely unlikely). > You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you. Amusingly enough, I feel it's even more acute when you work for yourself: "You can spend your entire life working hard for yourself, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a (tiny) bank account that you wouldn't want to take with you." At least when you work for someone else (at about 40 hours a week), there's room for hobbies. I recall a friend of mine - a local inventor (he had a PhD and kept building things, trying to make products out of them, etc). In his mid 50's, he had invented a lot, but his only success was that the business didn't go under. He qualified for food stamps, and hadn't taken a vacation in over a decade. He never had time for a meaningful relationship. He cut his losses and took a regular job. He misses doing deep technical work, but he's much happier. Smart guy. I knew younger people who worked for him - did more fun technical stuff than I've ever done for a job. They took the lesson to heart and got regular jobs eventually, as well.
• film42 2y ago
  I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems." What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company. I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits? Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
  • sfpotter 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • fullshark 2y ago
      Why don't you fill in the gaps for all of us that lack imagination, instead of insult us?
    • jrussino 2y ago
      > If you don't see how this can be useful, that's a failure of imagination on your part. I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration. But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
• limusrazor 2y ago
  How do you then compete with companies from other geographies willing to overwork US companies? Sounds great on the surface, but if you slow down the treadmill too much, you risk falling off completely.
  • sfpotter 2y ago
    Not burning your employees out is good. Totally unclear that working "80 hour weeks" is any more productive than a standard 40 hour week. Keeping employees around by slowing things down and making things more humane means you can retain employees for longer, build institutional knowledge, build a good culture at the company, etc. You can have a company full of atomized, dehumanized, and miserable workers... or not? Not seems better.
  • Muromec 2y ago
    Oh, you miss the point. Nobody wants to overwork. The sweet spot is billing US company for enough hours for them to think you work more than their engineers, undercutting them in the absolute terms and getting more due to purchase power you have in your locale.
• zer0zzz 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/DwbzxemJZIc https://youtu.be/DwbzxemJZIc
• mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance. There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.
    • brian-armstrong 2y ago
      Conversely, software engineers are generating considerably more profit for their employers than they receive in compensation on average. I know it's not the only metric of exploitation, but it's a hard one to ignore.
    • guy234 2y ago
      how is the proletariat oppressed by an ordinary non-management software developer?
      • xboxnolifes 2y ago
        It doesnt matter. What matters is what side you are perceived to be on.
      • tekla 2y ago
        Drives rents up for ordinary people.
    • lblume 2y ago
      Disagree. Class consciousness is about realizing that societal classes correspond to their relation to the means of production, not the concrete wage being earned. The majority of developers is part of the proletariat, at least according to Marx.
• jegp 2y ago
  As an outsider, I'm astounded why workers aren't unionizing to a much higher degree. It's been proven to work [1] against the misinformation, discord, and wealth inequality that companies will, inevitably, cause. Despite the small union fee, the individual clearly stands to benefit[1]. Is it because people are cheap? Or not familiar with history? You'd think that tech workers were quite informed. [1]: https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic-region/ https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic...
  • umvi 2y ago
    America != Norway. American labor unions have (had?) a reputation for corruption, dragging companies down with inefficient and parasitic practices and in some cases being controlled by organized crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_Teamsters#Influence_of_organized_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_T...).
    • jegp 2y ago
      Isn't the question then about the lesser evil? It's wrong to deny unions on the basis that some people are corrupt. Some people in companies are corrupt too and the US lies squarely in the middle of the corruption index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w... I don't see why America!=Norway is a relevant argument.
  • geodel 2y ago
    Maybe you will be less astounded if you read more about how large countries in terms of areas, population, ethnicities, immigrants have people with different and sometimes conflicting motivations about work conditions.
    • jegp 2y ago
      Conflicting motivations sounds like a very reasonable thing in large populations, in fact. But I have a hard time believing why workers wouldn't unanimously want better pay, better conditions, and more power. I would be curious to see any counter examples!
• protonbob 2y ago
  The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
  • abuani 2y ago
    Yeah that was my take away. I don't doubt there are many company cultures like that, and you see many highly influential tech bros advocate for it. But in my ~15 year career, most of my burnout was due to lack of progress and politics, not 80+ hour work weeks. Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
    • robocat 2y ago
      > I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it. In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird. Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life. In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can. I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it. Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.
  • swatcoder 2y ago
    The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them. You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so. Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them. Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.
• deedubaya 2y ago
  Burnout? Yes. Overwork? Maybe. Unionize? Eh… The post reeks of privilege. Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    "As long as other jobs suck more, be grateful and don't investigate legal avenues to improve your life"
  • mrbombastic 2y ago
    I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.
    • deedubaya 2y ago
      I might agree from the tech worker’s perspective, except to someone working in fast food flipping burgers, a tech worker making $200k/$400k/$1M+ might as well be in the 1%.
      • hackable_sand 2y ago
        I have both perspectives! I went from developer to "burger flipper". There is some mythologizing going on, but that is a lack of perspective. The people I work with don't have the time or money to graduate their skills. Paramount, most of them could easily, easily train into tech roles given the opportunity.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • nimih 2y ago
    On the other hand, your post "rinks" of a general ignorance of labor history in the US, where unions have (at least, historically) been able to support each other across industries and facilitate class solidarity amongst workers. Perhaps if you showed up to some picket lines in your city and worked to build connections with your fellow workers by providing support in their struggles, you'd find that they're supportive of yours in return.
• thom__ 2y ago
  Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse. I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
  • paulcole 2y ago
    > They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible. > I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. Did everyone feel that way?
    • itsgrimetime 2y ago
      > It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible. Or maybe pay that’s proportional to the value we provide
      • paulcole 2y ago
        It’s always proportional to the value you provide. You just don’t like the proportion lol. What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
• legitster 2y ago
  This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies. If you only want to work at the flashy unicorns in downtown San Francisco, you are signing yourself up for exploitation. Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production! I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
  • sophacles 2y ago
    A union doesn't have to be "workers for company X employees". It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples). Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier. They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient. Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
    • whoisthemachine 2y ago
      I quite like the idea of a trade union or accreditation board for SWE. The idea that we all work by a shared set of standards and terminology is appealing.
      • rockemsockem 2y ago
• dadrian 2y ago
  What Big Tech companies are demanding 80 hours a week?
  • philjohn 2y ago
    Not demanding per se, but when you're stack ranked against people who ARE ...
    • wyager 2y ago
      A lot of these pro-labor-reg people argue (and I agree with them!) that the ROI on additional hours worked past 40 is pretty bad. If this is the case, then someone working an extra N hours a week won't actually move the needle that much when it comes to performance ranking. My experience has been that the people who choose to work super long hours do not actually perform much better, if at all, than those who don't. Caveat is that this could, of course, be selection effects a la Berkson's paradox. Maybe those who work very long hours do so because they must to reach the expected output level for the firm they work at.
      • trinix912 2y ago
        I agree with this, but I think we need to keep in mind that oftentimes managers and executives aren't aware of how this works in our domain. When it's time to cut someone short, they have to decide between you and me doing 40 hour weeks vs. some other employees putting in overtime. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
      • VirusNewbie 2y ago
        right, but a lot of people at Big Tech are looking for the sweet spot of productivity, and it very well may be 45 hours a week or 48 or something, and to others that is unacceptable. I don't see very many senior level folks in FAANG who are "5:01" engineers. There is pressure, but you're compensated quite generously for it.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• umvi 2y ago
  How many tech jobs are 80 hours a week? My work life balance is pretty good at a smaller tech company, so is it the FAANG jobs expecting 80 hour weeks?
  • rockemsockem 2y ago
    I've never heard of hours like that outside of early high-growth startups. Have worked at FAANG and know many people who've worked at many of the FAANG companies. Seems made up tbh
    • buildbot 2y ago
      I’ve worked 80 hours in a week at Microsoft; before a paper deadline. After though, I was able to work less and regain balance. It’s certainly not unheard of before any kind of deadline at many companies.
      • rhubarbtree 2y ago
        I think we should normalise talking about average (median) working hours, not the extremes. I probably worked 100+ hours on paper deadlines, but working 60 hours in startups is about my sustainable limit, and when coding it’s more like 45. People lie about their average working hours so much. If you listen carefully, it usually becomes apparent that their claims are physically impossible, eg they mention that they went to the gym each evening when the hours imply they should have been working. Generally, anyone who states above 55 hours should be treated sceptically.
• didgetmaster 2y ago
  I worked for 8 different companies over my 35 year career. Not once did I feel exploited and wanted a union to come to my rescue. But that is just my experience.
• FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  I don't want a union... I want state licenses like doctors, nurse, lawyers, engineers, etc.
  • shagie 2y ago
    Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?" The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
  • finnthehuman 2y ago
    Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action. A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
  • skywalqer 2y ago
    Yeah, great, give programming a high entry barrier for new people. One of the worst ideas I've heard today.
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      Why should I as an individual software engineer not support this? We’re already in this profession and pulling the ladder up could help us maintain our salaries and working conditions
  • samatman 2y ago
    When would it kick in, do you think? Would you need a JSON loisence? A bash loisence? Is Javascript ok but only in the browser, and only under 500 lines? At what point does the bobby say Oi! ?
• delichon 2y ago
  When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway, and the difference was that they didn't let you vote. I felt that about 90% of the dues were used against me and the students. That was the other big reason I quit, besides the low pay, which the union didn't fix. So I moved on to become a much higher paid developer who has zero pressure to join a union. My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business. If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
  • ForTheKidz 2y ago
    > I'm happier making my own deal with the boss. And i bet your boss is even happier!
    • try_the_bass 2y ago
      You say this like it's some kind of zinger, but software engineers that actually negotiate their salaries generally earn more than those who don't.
  • csomar 2y ago
    > When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.
  • maerF0x0 2y ago
    It's almost like humans universally will use systems of power to further their own aims, rather than altruistic ends. And those who do have an advantage in the accumulation of that power.
• footlose_3815 2y ago
  There's a bit of strawman going on where for example when author says "Not taking 12am slacks makes you not a team player". Never in my life have I heard that one. Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
• wyager 2y ago
  > demanding 80 hour weeks IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    Please can you give us a typical daily schedule of these 80 hour week folks? Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days? Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working? I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable. Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days. Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours. Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc. It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• calvinmorrison 2y ago
  Why do you need sustainability when you're making 400K a year at $EvilCorp? Just work for 5 years and retire.
  • Apocryphon 2y ago
    This line of argument would've sounded more plausible several fiscal quarters ago.
    • calvinmorrison 2y ago
      My company doesn't speculate in stock market gambling so we have literally zero problems
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  No time like the present, and I know that the tech labor movement has been going on for a while, but it's a real shame that this idea didn't get more traction a few years ago at the peak of worker power. LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin... My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now. If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298
• jas39 2y ago
  There is nothing wrong with unions, but they are a response to an imbalance in bargaining power. In places with lots of smaller employers, there is much less benefit.
• rco8786 2y ago
  > You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone. > demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally. > If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." Not reality. > If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." Not reality. > This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. By what measure? > this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs. And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
  • Foreignborn 2y ago
    it’s because they used an LLM to edit the prose. It has all the signature marks. There might be good content there, but it’s full of AI slop.
    • thorum 2y ago
      More than just editing, I’d say. Large sections are clearly 100% AI.
• tengbretson 2y ago
  A lot of this simply reads to me as not accepting the agency (and the discomfort that comes with exercising it) to say simply say no.
• taylorbuley 2y ago
  This seems overly-catastrophizing to me. I don't deny it rings true for many, but I think some of the statements here really depend on your team and company.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  The VC funded startup unicorn game is not helping the world. The paragraph on not being able to say no to questionable products is interesting. It's similar in structure at nations under a ruler. That said, we're not starving, so we might as well redirect our resources toward more useful for humans, society (and even the planet).
• stared 2y ago
  Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation. > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." Yet, it is up to us. In some software jobs (AAA game dev and a certain type of startup), you are expected to crunch beyond limits. In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job. Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage. Or work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself. Not many career choices support this freedom. In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional—you won't finish university, you won't get established, and that's the end of the story. In many other jobs, if you were freelancing a dozen hours a week, you would literally not be able to afford food. In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn. Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
  • goodpoint 2y ago
    > Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" ...if you are born in US, maybe, but "somebody else has it worse" is pure whataboutism.
  • legitster 2y ago
    > This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations. On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons. My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software. I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.
• woah 2y ago
  For some reason this sounds AI-written, especially this paragraph: > Companies love to brag about their innovation, but the real innovation is finding new ways to make us disposable. Permanent employment? That’s for suckers. Why pay benefits and offer job security when they can churn through contractors and freelancers like cheap code? And don’t get me started on those non-compete clauses - designed to keep you locked down and terrified to make a move that might actually be good for your career.
  • getnormality 2y ago
    I was scrolling the comments waiting for someone to say this. And it was this same paragraph where the GPT smell got overwhelming. LLMs love punchy but meaningless metaphors (how are contractors and freelancers like cheap code? what is cheap code?) and punchy but generic turns of phrase ("that's for suckers", "let's get real for a minute", "don't get me started"). It reminds me of when Elon Musk used to show off how unfettered Grok was, how free to be edgy. Everything it said sounded like this.
    • rhubarbtree 2y ago
      100% had the same reaction and Grok came straight to mind. Either it’s an AI or the writer can’t write. Terrible article. Interesting topic though - hopefully people responded without reading it. We don’t want more AI trash on HN. A lot of the comments are already clearly AI written / edited.
  • spopejoy 2y ago
    As LLMs get better and better at imitating bad writing it will become impossible to tell the difference
• ketzo 2y ago
  > It’s a meat grinder that chews up developers, sysadmins, and infosec pros …and designers, and PMs, and sales and marketing and support and… I know that, charitably, the point is that engineers often have higher leverage than other individual contributors at a tech company. But the whole point of a union is to join together employees (as opposed to employers) for greater leverage. Don’t make your tent smaller for no reason!
• oldjim69 2y ago
  Union now. Union tomorrow. Union Forever.
• foxyv 2y ago
  My company firewall blocked this for reason () Uh, huh...
• JimTheMan 2y ago
  These articles about work conditions in tech feel profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. It's like reading a gazette from Mary Antoinette talking about how tough her life was (pre-revolution..) The rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers with quite cushy perks... Like sure, it would be great to unionise... But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them.
  • parpfish 2y ago
    in the grand scheme of things, it's true that tech workers have very cushy nice jobs. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make our jobs better. tech workers should be at the vanguard and come up with imaginative ways to "disrupt employment" the same way we always talk about disrupting everything else. four day work weeks (or less), full remote, codetermination, equity/profit-sharing, etc. we should use our privilege to raise the bar and set a precedent for better working conditions that apply upward pressure to make things better for all the less privelged jobs.
  • acuozzo 2y ago
    > rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers They most certainly do, but it says A LOT more about them that they see developers as overpaid rather than themselves as underpaid. Propaganda from the owners of capital has worked well by ensuring that anyone relying on an income is more likely to look left, right, and strike down than to ever consider looking up.
    • daedrdev 2y ago
      Most businesses are not very profitable at all. Like 5-10% margin. If you took all their profits and made them wages (ignoring the consequences), thats not a crazy amount of pay increase especially compared to what tech workers make.
      • acuozzo 2y ago
        No one has the responsibility to prop-up marginal businesses by toiling for them or purchasing their goods/services. Absolutely requiring the American "minimum" standard of living is propaganda set nearly in stone by The New Deal. I'm a child of the working class. I don't think it does my parents a disservice in stating that their sacrifice(s) and toil were not compulsory. I appreciate them, but my father would not have required extensive surgery to walk again if we had settled for less years prior.
• mproud 2y ago
  Maybe this isn’t an article designed for “me”, but there is a sizable workforce of people who aren’t getting paid super high salaries for super high responsibilities. I’m talking about the hourly tech employee. The customer support call center agent. The HVAC technician. The on-the-go consultant. Yes, it’s not glamorous, but it’s reliable, it not stressful, and it still has good benefits.
  • wincy 2y ago
    I’m salary software engineer lead and I work past five maybe two or three times a year. If I need my boss I have to call him after hours. There’s plenty of dev jobs that aren’t stressful.
• bravoetch 2y ago
  That came across as a largely angry rant instead of a reasoned appeal. With decades in the tech industry I never experienced the kind of problems described. Mostly it's been a lot of fun.
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  This will take a change of attitude. I entered the industry right around the dotcom bust, when people were still making the jump from their 9-to-5 for whatever big or small company to seeking angel investment and starting their own business. My observation early in my career regarding unions and software engineers was "The first step would be for software engineers to stop thinking their biggest impediment to greatness isn't management; it's the underperforming slacker in the next cube over holding all the 10x engineers back." But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
  • aaronbaugher 2y ago
    I dunno. I've been waiting for that to happen since the 90s, when the D and R halves of the uniparty fully teamed up to make Wall Street and corporate profits their #1 priority and encouraged the exporting or outsourcing of every job possible. We've had 30+ years to do something about it, but we were always too independent and anti-social for that.
• m0llusk 2y ago
  > billionaires at the top Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
• haburka 2y ago
  It’s weird that they reference alphabet workers union when specifically that union has done nothing for full time software engineers in its entire time. Check out their wins: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins Lots of references to contractors wins which I think are more important but the facts make the opposite point then the article is making. The reason why software engineers won’t unionize in the US is because the US has weakened the power of unions so much. There are already unions in Europe for Alphabet that have done things - the French union just outright rejected alphabets attempt to do layoffs.
• CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  Unionizing is always a good idea, but unions can be a complicit joke. A "no strike" clause is a big red flag that its not gonna do anything . And organizing is a good way to get fired. Employers don't care - they won't get caught or prosecuted and if fined it will be after the critical organizers are long gone. It takes some next level leadership to make it work that is mostly missing
• namuol 2y ago
  Perhaps another reason to unionize is to claim more of the political power being wielded by our industry. Unions can play a role in shifting where lobbying money goes, how industry advises politicians, etc. At least I think that’s how things used to work. Not sure how anything works anymore…
• Scubabear68 2y ago
  Because you can code, gold should flow copiously into your coffers and the masses should genuflect to our awesomeness. Or, it can be like everything other job, and not so much. Ad tech has given developers the illusion they are extremely valuable. They are, but not that much. Not by a long shot. Google et al massively distorted the software development market by at least 4x, if not more. What we are seeing now is a massive correction back to some level of sanity for tech worker comp.
• maxrmk 2y ago
  I feel very fortunate to have worked other jobs before my first in tech. My last was hanging drywall and I will never forget how awful it was. I haven’t loved every part of every tech job I’ve worked, but I’ve always chosen to be there. I think the author is missing perspective on what the alternatives are like, and seems to have a lack of agency when they say things like: > How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no? There’s incredible mobility within tech - more so than almost any other industry. Vote with your feet! I’ve taken major pay cuts to have more choice over my work, and have never regretted it.
  • sureglymop 2y ago
    I think it makes sense when you look at it specifically with the "burnout" context in mind. The truth is, burnout can happen to anyone and it is often unclear whether there even is any real recovery. And it can even happen not just necessarily due to overwork but due to lack of a clear goal, death by a thousand papercuts, complete riddance of passion and interest for certain reasons. Sure it's nicer to work from your desk than to hang drywall but if you do end up burning out that will affect your brain and possibly permanently alter it. After that, who knows if you could even work in the industry at all anymore? Personally I believe we way way underestimate it. Longevity is more important than exploiting the passion and overmotivation of potential burnout candidates for short term gains.
    • maxrmk 2y ago
      I can only speak for myself, but I would absolutely rather work burned out in tech than work in the trades again. Drywalling was absolutely destroying my body, mind, and will to live. Mobility is also a factor - I’ve had high stress tech jobs, but always had the option to quit and do something else if I felt close to burnout. That mobility doesn’t exist in many other jobs.
• OutOfHere 2y ago
  Just stop working more than 35-40 hours a week. If you get no bonus because of this action, that's not so bad. If you get let go because of it, the next one could be more tolerant. You are not a slave, so don't act like one.
• blueyes 2y ago
  personal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a futile or harmful mission is a great way to get burned out. wrote about some of this here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presence https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...
• nimish 2y ago
  You can just do things, like quitting and starting your own company instead of trying to convince a hostile company to unionize which is not a cure to any of these malaise style issues
• CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  Apparently the #1 issue that could motivate unionizing is WFH. I suggest a one issue union: the WFH union. I think it would be a massive success.
  • Apocryphon 2y ago
    And even if you want to work onsite- ever notice that the near-universal distaste for open offices? Yet that's a trend in tech that refuses to die? There's an anti-open office layout story on HN every month, or used to be. For all of the power that software engineers think they have as an occupation, why can't they overcome being stuck in a bullpen, sometimes even in a floating desk setup? Maybe all of the cushy perks are just what management is willing to bestow, and something as simple as getting cubicles or team cubes is beyond the reach for most staff engineers. Would a labor union be overkill for getting such a concession? Perhaps. But in the absence of any sort of professional representation to push back or push for things, all you can do is blog stories that get upvoted on HN, and not much else.
    • CaffeineLD50 2y ago
      WFH is a super powerful incentive that collective bargaining could well, bargain for. I say unionize for WFH. Watch it work
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Elon will do everything to stop this. It’s a threat to his very existence How do I help
• astrange 2y ago
  > You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient. Does this still happen? This sounds kind of 2010. What I find interesting about this page is how poorly written it is. It looks like a chimera of AI writing (bullet points) and someone on too much Adderall (…because that's happened to me). It's too long yet too short at once. I think the author should try reading it out loud to someone else.
• pooingcode 2y ago
  Ran this through few AI checkers and they all flagged this as highly likely written by AI. Surprised to see it passed the sniff test for users on HN enough so to make it to the front page. Sure AI gen can be hard to detect but for the most common models it’s easy to detect. I would hope HN has a way in the future to filter out clear AI generated blogs. HN has been an oasis to get away from bot spam and AI slop.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    +1 for rejecting anything that doesn’t pass a set of AI tests. I’ll take false positives to keep HN alive.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• zmibes 2y ago
  i've enjoyed the fluidity of startup software work. have a job for a bit, it's exciting, the thing blows up or goes bust. get a new job. hire some other devs. have to fire them because out of cash (sorry, no hard feelings i hope). burning out? quit! maybe i'm just in a fortunate enough position to be able to take risks, but i have no interest at all in unions, strikes, secret conversations that the article suggests. would be a mild red flag for hiring for me (expressing overt interest in unionizing). it has a hint of difficult to work with, politicising the workplace, power games. i will say this though: talk about salaries with your colleagues (if you want)! employers have the deck stacked in their favour with this taboo and there is no good reason to uphold it afaiks as an employee. the more you all know the better position you are in. don't need a special club with dues and leaders for that
• ivanovm 2y ago
  The tech industry unfortunately screwed up a basic social contract It is well-understood in every other industry - if you want to be at a prestigious firm, make top compensation, sit in a nice office, work with top-tier coworkers and enjoy excellent perks, you must hustle hard and be unreasonably competitive every day to continue reaping those benefits. I'm not even talking about back-breaking work - this is true for law, medicine, financial services, entertainment, sports, academia, and everything else I can think of. After a decade+ run of cheap money and strong demand for talent, returning to broader reality may feel very unfair for many. But that doesn't make it so
  • maerF0x0 2y ago
    I think what you're saying is coming for tech. It's just that we've been short 100s of thousands of engineers for so many decades. But both the training (education, hack schools etc) side is closing the gap, plus tooling is amplifying existing engineers such that the gap between supply and demand is closing. There will be a reckoning when supply exceeds demand, and then talent and competition will reign supreme. That being said there already is about a 10x spread between talent pay in tech (roughly $100k to $1M)
• ledzep2 2y ago
  The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock. Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition. Endless grind.
• thorum 2y ago
  Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    400 AI upvotes?
• capitanazo77 2y ago
  [flagged]
• paulddraper 2y ago
  > The tech industry loves to hype itself as a meritocracy, where the best and the brightest rise to the top. But in reality, it’s a meat market. As soon as you’re not "on the cutting edge," you’re out. I’m not really understanding the distinction.
• 7e 2y ago
  There should be a union for YC startups, to prevent them from being exploited so badly. By the time the startup meat grinder eventually peters out, the founders own almost nothing of a fairly worthless company and the employees even less. Meanwhile YC pimps the myth of the startup and cashes the winning lottery tickets.
• thedevilslawyer 2y ago
  Have been on both sides, running a company, and being an employee. Neither side is happy with current status-quo, but we're at some equilibrium. How does this sound as new equilibrium: companies pay across board become around ~40%-50% less than it is today. Avg tenure and stability goes up ~2x what is today. Would we as an industry take this up?
• ants_everywhere 2y ago
  I'm generally in favor of unions, but I don't understand the game theory under which an L3 up to L8 (for example) have enough in common that they would be a single bargaining block. Compensation and authority scale up pretty quickly in large tech companies. Also, much of that compensation is in stock, which makes the tech workers capitalists. I'm skeptical that you're going to encourage unionization by telling people they're evil for owning capital. So if the goal is collective bargaining power you first have to figure out what mechanisms need to be in place if L3 and L<N> have diverging interests. Then you need to figure out if waging a 19th century holy war against capital is important, in which case you have to make a case for why tech workers should give up the ability to be compensated by shares. Also if you want people to come together, maybe stop trying to bully them? Some of the comments on this thread are really beyond the pale.
• hardlyfun 2y ago
  I would still rather be doing tech right now than anything else. Job market is not as good as it used to be, but it is still better than other work. Honestly, I kind of only just scanned the article because it was clearly written by GPT.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    Others also noted this is AI slop.
• habosa 2y ago
  I’ve only been in tech for 10 years but I’ve worked at companies of various sizes (FAANG, a 50-person startup, and now a mid-sized “unicorn”) and I’ve never had to work crazy hours. Maybe leading up to a launch I’d work past dinner occasionally but mostly my work weeks have been 40-45 hours consistently. Am I just lucky? I mean obviously I’m lucky relative to the world (tech has been lucrative and interesting during this decade) but are others in tech really working crazy hours all the time? I have worked with some people who seem to turn any job into a 24/7 thing but they were either workaholics or under-qualified people trying to substitute quantity for quality. And it did not seem to pay off for them. I’ve always thought that San Francisco was a pretty laid back city. Working until 7 is “late”. My friends in NYC think that’s early. I will say that I’ve always thought oncall as a concept is odd and somewhat exploitative. Only software engineers and doctors seem to carry pagers. And software engineers (mostly) don’t save lives.
  • bradlys 2y ago
    Tech is a big industry. It employs millions in the US. I’ve met people who only work 20-25 hours/week while pulling down $500k/yr+ at a known company that has a very toxic work culture. I’ve met people making under $150k who are working 60-70hr/week regularly at a supposed easy company. All within Silicon Valley. The reality is that experiences vary widely in the industry even within each company - sometimes even within a team.
• xlinux 2y ago
  America need more unions period.
• kimi 2y ago
  > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." And what do we get in return? Burnout, anxiety, and the constant threat of layoffs. ..apart from 6- or 7-figure pay, a chance to hit it real big, and to built things that everybody uses? and this for job positions that 40-years ago commanded an average salary, because the latest React is not rocket science. Reminds me of "apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
• marenkay 2y ago
  If history shows anything than it is that companies will abuse workers if there is no organization and legislation stopping them. The fact that some get a good salary but way more get a bad one plus a lot of abuse should be a concern to all of us. You may be lucky and sitting at a big company with nice stock options, a six figure salary. But: for every one of those there are many barely scraping by just making minimum wage, with no hope in sight I wish the common consensus would be: yes, we should band together and fight for each other.
• wiseowise 2y ago
  As a European I can only read that and say “What? You don’t get that in the US?”
• kolanski 2y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• carra 2y ago
  > the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job." Well, my dreams usually don't involve having a job at all...
• frithsun 2y ago
  Let's make us American workers even less attractive in the most globalized and exportable industry of all by playing Wagner Act games.
• frozencell 2y ago
  This was written by a LLM. Probably ChatGPT 4.5.
  • arandomhuman 2y ago
    It’s actually upsetting how lazy this is and it still made front page.
  • lblume 2y ago
    Agree. It seems that despite model improvements our brains can still distinguish many kinds of AI generated text from human writing.
• breakyerself 2y ago
  Most every profession should be unionized including software devs. Not including cops.
• LIzzyytujghf 2y ago
  [dead]
• nekochanwork 2y ago
  I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks). I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year. We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor. I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
  • coolThingsFirst 2y ago
    And how will you leverage that as a developer? Only making a startup seems to work.
  • nickpinkston 2y ago
    Though you'll need to deduct a lot of SG&A, etc. overheads from that as well, and it often looks far worse. Big Tech companies (ie ones close to monopolies) still extract a ton of net cash flow that ends up going to investors and top management, though you could then ask why those monopolies extract cash from their customers as well, etc. My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. I get why bus drivers, etc. in stable systems should organize and could do so without adversely affecting system performance, but in tech/startups, I don't think those companies would exist in unionized form for very long before being put out of business. Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
    • nielsbot 2y ago
      > My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. Do you have examples? > Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis. Who?
• dkarl 2y ago
  I have a hard time with this pitch because I've watched people burn out working alongside me, on the same team, for the same boss, on the same problems, for entirely personal reasons. I've also been in shitty situations with shitty bosses that caused me a lot of stress, and it's hard to point to any clear lines that were crossed. I haven't heard any proposed union rule that would protect me in those situations, just promises that if a union existed, things would be better. It needs to be more specific. We see what unions do for working class people, but our level of compensation, education, and cultural capital gives us everything that a traditional union gives to blue collar workers. Literacy, internet access, and money go a long way. We don't need a union to tell us what our legal rights are or help pay for a lawyer for us. We don't need a union to tell us what workplace conditions are legal or illegal. We don't need a union to tell us when and how it's safe or unsafe, effective or ineffective to report corporate malfeasance. Again, we have literacy, internet access, and money for legal representation. Maybe a union could benefit me somehow, but I'm going to need much more concrete examples than just hey, your job is unpleasant sometimes, join a union!
  • bgilroy26 2y ago
    If factory workers could delete the processes and equipment they work on with the press of a button, they would be bought off too Paying tech workers high wages reflects the need for them to side with capital when it comes to protecting assets I had an Ask HN last weekend that did not get any responses but I would still love to learn what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups because I can't believe boards of directors are not responsible to guarantee product continuity to shareholders
    • iteria 2y ago
      What prevents them is sane compartmentalization. Even in accounting it's understood that you cannot defend again things like embezzlement if multiple employees cross different functions conspire, but you can defend against individuals by compartmentalizing their functions making every step further from their function more difficult to execute. Same with tech. In a mature agency, if random dev has the ability to delete the repo and the back ups, you're doing it wrong. That said, your entire department is a threat you can't avoid. That is what a union brings to the table.
• matrix87 2y ago
  I feel like these calls to unionize aren't trying to improve working conditions for tech workers, they're just trying to find ways to politically capture tech companies That's why, you know, most of the people who call to unionize are left wing progressives who don't work in tech (and a large number in the bay area resent the shit out of tech) Frankly given their attitudes towards meritocracy, "social justice", etc, I don't really trust these groups to actually negotiate a better deal for me. I'd expect them to just use the leverage I give them to screw me over. Go on Alphabet Workers Union's website and this is the exact shit you'll see They probably target tech specifically because they think we aren't "class conscious" enough to understand our own situation. That's why they don't go and bother the finance industry, those guys know where they're sitting economically
• theflyinghorse 2y ago
  " the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job." You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient." Never seen that. I'll also bet vast majority of tech workers have never seen that either.
• maerF0x0 2y ago
  I absolutely support everyone's right and freedom to join a union, so long as it's not mandatory. (The couple of unions I was part of in my life, I didn't have a choice if I joined or not afaik) That freedom of choice is a fundamental good that must be respected. Without agreeing that unions are the solution, I think I agree that there's certainly some big opportunities to close unfair gaps or disparities between W2 workers and other classes of self employment / businesses (in a very Tech + American centric perspective) 1. Insurances tied to employer, not just health, but also disability and life. IMO this is a major barrier to folks not working for the biggest company they can, it's a subtle form of bias towards direct employment, and by the biggest companies. 2. Retirement and other pretax benefits only (easily) available through w2 employment. IMO the tax benefits and vehicles for accumulating assets should be front loaded and universal... A bit like Canada's TFSA program which gives ~5K a year of tax sheltered investment. It's also a bit weird that certain classes of workers can claim a home office, but a WFH cannot, or can expense their tools, transportation, marketing etc, but W2s cannot... (Try and expense your Linkedin account when you're looking for a new job, that's marketing cost). IMO every employee should be ran as a small corporation that has revenue and expenses, and the IRS has very little say over what was or wasn't necessary for the purpose of maximizing revenue.
• joquarky 2y ago
  From the article: > Push for Ethics: Let’s make sure that any union platform we build isn’t just about wages and hours, but about ethics too. We need to have a say in what we’re building and how it’s used. This was the most important part of the article for me. I just passed the CISSP; and while studying for it, I was very impressed with how much emphasis ISC2 put on human safety/welfare, which is something that I feel like our industry is lacking more than ever lately. From https://www.isc2.org/ethics https://www.isc2.org/ethics : > Code of Ethics Preamble: > The safety and welfare of society and the common good, duty to our principals, and duty to each other, require that we adhere, and be seen to adhere, to the highest ethical standards of behavior.
• jb-wells 2y ago
  A bit late to talk about organizing a union. Offshoring and now AI are here.
• hackburg 2y ago
  [dead]
• albertogimeno 2y ago
  "I want to make 4-6x the average american salary without taking on any risk, but don't tell me to work hard"