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The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/databa

The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers. You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up with some other annoying workplace condition, it's said the person should negotiate this all up front with the employer, and that the person's lawyer should get involved in the negotiation. As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc. (or the equivalent forms coming from some venture backed firm whose VC's lawyer's help with the HR legal forms). Especially when the heads of tech companies are united ( http://www.fwd.us http://www.fwd.us ) to trying to flood the Valley with low-paid workers chained to the H1-B visa, driving down wages and shortening the careers of programmers ( http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ). Now on top of that, we see that the companies are united in trying to drive down wages. It's not just one Fortune 500 company doing this, it's the management of all of them doing it together. Yet the idea of programmers and admins organizing to defend their interests? Well only complainers do that. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt organize for their collective interests, but any tech who did that must have something wrong with him - he's a complainer, lazy, whatever. We shouldn't be organized to have our interests defended. It's a zero-sum issue with two potential beneficiary sides. There are those of us who work, and create wealth being screwed by this. There are those on this board who benefit from this exploitation and thus will pick at points in this article, in this post and so on. Why wouldn't they, they're the ones who parasitically benefit from this expropriation and exploitation.

joyeuse6701 13y ago
Everyone held the anti union position because of the now proven illusion of meritocracy. You may well get your wish, all aspects of unions included.
a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to even occur to most software people.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Doctors/lawyers interact with clients/patients a lot, so they dress to impress; whereas programmers only interact with other programmers or managers, who don't really care. If you're a programmer, the code you write matters much more than the human interaction around it (arguably the same can be said about doctors and lawyers, but a lot of people wouldn't hire a lawyer dressed in jeans and a t-shirt). Also, there are external dress requirements. For example, a lawyer might get thrown out of court if he/she shows up in casual clothes.
  - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
    > programmers only interact with other programmers or managers This is the problem half the time. Nerds in childish t-shirts want to sit around pecking out code in isolation instead of taking full responsibility for their work by putting on a jacket and working the organization. This is why IT projects are consistently such disasters and why executives have the idea to get cheap grunts to do this stuff under a layer of middle managers.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit: The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A programmer is paid for the software she creates; the user of that software has no idea what the programmer who wrote it looks like, and they judge the quality of it by what it does. So programmers have developed other metrics that they use to form a status hierarchy, notably the quality and difficulty of programs that you've written, but also things that are somewhat fuzzier like the technologies and tools you use. Contrast this with a lawyer or salesman, where your buying decisions are directly influenced by how they present themselves and you often cannot directly determine the quality of their product. People in these professions have a strong incentive to present themselves well because customers have no other information to base their purchasing decisions on. Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search [1]. [1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm
sounds 13y ago
1. This is not a zero-sum game. The incremental value gained by a large company defrauding their employees may be the same dollar amount, but to the employees it makes a much larger subjective difference. Also the company that gets caught colluding once will have a much harder time regaining its good name. A tech employee gets offered $300k/year + options? He jumps. Google's "double irish" has $3 billion more in revenue? Ho hum, just another day. 2. Since it is not a zero-sum game, it makes sense to avoid the corrupt, lazy actions that Jobs, Schmidt, et al. have embraced. Hackers don't need to "band together" – all that means is appointing some PHB and blindly following him. Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. Each of us will make our own decisions. Each of us will weigh the costs, benefits, and ethics. Feel free to start a union or just go straight to a political party. We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.
- acdha 13y ago
  > Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. … We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government. Well, I'm certainly convinced that pure optimism will trump powerful interests with huge financial reserves and far more influence with lawmakers and the media. How could this not succeed?
  - sounds 13y ago
    What exactly are you proposing? An alternative credo for hackers to ascribe to? Please specifically mention whether you are pro- or anti-union and whether you live and work in the US or not. Edit: I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?
    - Stratoscope 13y ago
      > I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience? WTF? Please explain your comment. If I take it literally it sounds like sheer unadulterated bigotry. I am hoping that I completely misunderstood you. If that's the case, I very sincerely apologize and owe you a beer or two.
spiderPig 13y ago
As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agree with the reforms he suggests that there should be laws against exploiting them (ex: don't imprison them with the whole green card ruse which could take 6-8 yrs for some countries). However, I disagree with his generalization that H1-Bs are talentless compared to Americans (Just look at Goog). And that somehow they're paid lower wages. All big companies (MSFT, FB, GOOG) pay H1-B candidates the same salaries as their American counterparts. And they all go through the same interview process. Personally, I went to a top 20 uni here and paid $100k in tuition alone. It is true that bringing more talented H1-Bs will drive down wages, but isn't that a competitive advantage ?(None of the European companies have this advantage really and I think it's one of the main reasons for the valley's growth.) What we need to rectify is fraud of H1-Bs. Come up with a white list of companies that can use H1-Bs and make sure there's no cheap, talent less labor. Don't let body-shopping, consulting and outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro be issued H1-Bs. Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. The pie that outsourcing companies are eating into is really a gold mine that should be used to expand the American middle class. But the outsourcing companies themselves seem to have powerful lobbying in place (NASSCOM). So it is a hard problem.
- daemin 13y ago
  It's not that H1-B's get paid less than other workers, it is that by having more people available to do the same job it decreases the pay for all people doing said job. That's how the logic would appear to work, supply and demand, etc.
  - lotu 13y ago
    The thing with and H1-B is if they lose their job they have to leave the country the same day. That is a big incentive to work very hard and accept low compensation.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eru 13y ago
> As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc. Of course, you do. Just vote with your feet.
- DamnYuppie 13y ago
  The point that I think your comment is missing is that if the vast majority of employers are colluding to drive down prices your feet will invariably lead you to a less profitable place overall. Also this response seems to indicate that an individual's actions will hold any meaning against the concerted and united effort of employers. Unless a multitude of others act in concert we, the developers, will be at a disadvantage.
  - eru 13y ago
    The world is bigger than a few companies in Silicon Valley. Go work for a bank, in the worst case.
    - DamnYuppie 13y ago
      You believe that this ends at Silicon Valley. This most likely is common practice across a multitude of companies and industries.
      - mindcrime 13y ago
        There's just no way that every (or even most) companies in, say, the US, are all collectively colluding to do much of anything, much less fix wages. There's a reason that cartels don't really work, and that's because somebody always has an incentive to cheat. Same deal here... even IF you got every single company to agree to fix programmer salaries, it would never hold up, because some member of the group would either find a way to pay more and disguise it somehow, or they'd flat out openly rebel and take their chances. Does this happen on a small scale among handfuls of companies? Almost certainly, as we've seen. But how much impact it has at a more macro level is certainly questionable.
crassus 13y ago
Maybe if there were a tech workers union, we could finally organize politically for some pro-tech policy. Is there a better paid group of people who can't get anything done politically?
spinlock 13y ago
The thing that turns me off to unions are the work rules. Could you imagine if you couldn't use git because that work was reserved for source-code engineers? Work rules are the reason that you've never heard of an intellectually stimulating union job.

joyeuse6701 13y ago

Everyone held the anti union position because of the now proven illusion of meritocracy. You may well get your wish, all aspects of unions included.

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago

Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to even occur to most software people.

ahomescu1 13y ago
> Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Doctors/lawyers interact with clients/patients a lot, so they dress to impress; whereas programmers only interact with other programmers or managers, who don't really care. If you're a programmer, the code you write matters much more than the human interaction around it (arguably the same can be said about doctors and lawyers, but a lot of people wouldn't hire a lawyer dressed in jeans and a t-shirt). Also, there are external dress requirements. For example, a lawyer might get thrown out of court if he/she shows up in casual clothes.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  > programmers only interact with other programmers or managers This is the problem half the time. Nerds in childish t-shirts want to sit around pecking out code in isolation instead of taking full responsibility for their work by putting on a jacket and working the organization. This is why IT projects are consistently such disasters and why executives have the idea to get cheap grunts to do this stuff under a layer of middle managers.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit: The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A programmer is paid for the software she creates; the user of that software has no idea what the programmer who wrote it looks like, and they judge the quality of it by what it does. So programmers have developed other metrics that they use to form a status hierarchy, notably the quality and difficulty of programs that you've written, but also things that are somewhat fuzzier like the technologies and tools you use. Contrast this with a lawyer or salesman, where your buying decisions are directly influenced by how they present themselves and you often cannot directly determine the quality of their product. People in these professions have a strong incentive to present themselves well because customers have no other information to base their purchasing decisions on. Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search [1]. [1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm

sounds 13y ago

1. This is not a zero-sum game. The incremental value gained by a large company defrauding their employees may be the same dollar amount, but to the employees it makes a much larger subjective difference. Also the company that gets caught colluding once will have a much harder time regaining its good name. A tech employee gets offered $300k/year + options? He jumps. Google's "double irish" has $3 billion more in revenue? Ho hum, just another day. 2. Since it is not a zero-sum game, it makes sense to avoid the corrupt, lazy actions that Jobs, Schmidt, et al. have embraced. Hackers don't need to "band together" – all that means is appointing some PHB and blindly following him. Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. Each of us will make our own decisions. Each of us will weigh the costs, benefits, and ethics. Feel free to start a union or just go straight to a political party. We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.

acdha 13y ago
> Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. … We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government. Well, I'm certainly convinced that pure optimism will trump powerful interests with huge financial reserves and far more influence with lawmakers and the media. How could this not succeed?
- sounds 13y ago
  What exactly are you proposing? An alternative credo for hackers to ascribe to? Please specifically mention whether you are pro- or anti-union and whether you live and work in the US or not. Edit: I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?
  - Stratoscope 13y ago
    > I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience? WTF? Please explain your comment. If I take it literally it sounds like sheer unadulterated bigotry. I am hoping that I completely misunderstood you. If that's the case, I very sincerely apologize and owe you a beer or two.

spiderPig 13y ago

As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agree with the reforms he suggests that there should be laws against exploiting them (ex: don't imprison them with the whole green card ruse which could take 6-8 yrs for some countries). However, I disagree with his generalization that H1-Bs are talentless compared to Americans (Just look at Goog). And that somehow they're paid lower wages. All big companies (MSFT, FB, GOOG) pay H1-B candidates the same salaries as their American counterparts. And they all go through the same interview process. Personally, I went to a top 20 uni here and paid $100k in tuition alone. It is true that bringing more talented H1-Bs will drive down wages, but isn't that a competitive advantage ?(None of the European companies have this advantage really and I think it's one of the main reasons for the valley's growth.) What we need to rectify is fraud of H1-Bs. Come up with a white list of companies that can use H1-Bs and make sure there's no cheap, talent less labor. Don't let body-shopping, consulting and outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro be issued H1-Bs. Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. The pie that outsourcing companies are eating into is really a gold mine that should be used to expand the American middle class. But the outsourcing companies themselves seem to have powerful lobbying in place (NASSCOM). So it is a hard problem.

daemin 13y ago
It's not that H1-B's get paid less than other workers, it is that by having more people available to do the same job it decreases the pay for all people doing said job. That's how the logic would appear to work, supply and demand, etc.
- lotu 13y ago
  The thing with and H1-B is if they lose their job they have to leave the country the same day. That is a big incentive to work very hard and accept low compensation.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

eru 13y ago

> As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc. Of course, you do. Just vote with your feet.

DamnYuppie 13y ago
The point that I think your comment is missing is that if the vast majority of employers are colluding to drive down prices your feet will invariably lead you to a less profitable place overall. Also this response seems to indicate that an individual's actions will hold any meaning against the concerted and united effort of employers. Unless a multitude of others act in concert we, the developers, will be at a disadvantage.
- eru 13y ago
  The world is bigger than a few companies in Silicon Valley. Go work for a bank, in the worst case.
  - DamnYuppie 13y ago
    You believe that this ends at Silicon Valley. This most likely is common practice across a multitude of companies and industries.
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      There's just no way that every (or even most) companies in, say, the US, are all collectively colluding to do much of anything, much less fix wages. There's a reason that cartels don't really work, and that's because somebody always has an incentive to cheat. Same deal here... even IF you got every single company to agree to fix programmer salaries, it would never hold up, because some member of the group would either find a way to pay more and disguise it somehow, or they'd flat out openly rebel and take their chances. Does this happen on a small scale among handfuls of companies? Almost certainly, as we've seen. But how much impact it has at a more macro level is certainly questionable.

crassus 13y ago

Maybe if there were a tech workers union, we could finally organize politically for some pro-tech policy. Is there a better paid group of people who can't get anything done politically?

spinlock 13y ago

The thing that turns me off to unions are the work rules. Could you imagine if you couldn't use git because that work was reserved for source-code engineers? Work rules are the reason that you've never heard of an intellectually stimulating union job.