4 ms·

A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceab

A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable. Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries. As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.

topkai22 12y ago
"The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well. The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.
- chronid 12y ago
  If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced. Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored? I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)
- makeitsuckless 12y ago
  Except the reality is that we are not getting paid "so well". Given the scarcity and value of our skills, we're getting screwed. We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    I agree with you, but I don't for a second think unions will change that. Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there. This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity. Unions commoditize workers. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html
    - pdonis 12y ago
      > Unions commoditize workers. Can't upvote this enough.
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        And corporations try to commoditise labour even more aggressively. Your point is...?
        pdonis 12y ago
        My point is that if you're a worker who doesn't want to be commoditized, you have to fend for yourself. The company won't protect you from it, but neither will unions. Basically, if you see yourself as part of any group, whether it's "all the employees of company X" or "all the members of union Y", you're asking to be commoditized.
        vidarh 12y ago
        The reality is that the vast majority of software developers does not stand out enough to get any benefit from fending for themselves. It's funny to see this idea repeated throughout this thread that we're all special snowflakes that can negotiate better deals on our own. Even more funny if you look back at the many threads about negotiating salary and see the huge number of people on HN that never even negotiate initial offers but just accepts what they're handed. My own experience is that some of us can negotiate outstanding deals, but from managing teams for the last 20 years and being part of salary negotiations and ranking developers for most of that, in almost every company I've worked, I've seen seen software staff get lumped together in big buckets of (from the company's perception) entirely interchangeable developers and set raises across whole blocks, with the only salary differences generally being banded by narrowly by position other than for a tiny (5%-10%) portion of top performances. Odds are you are a commodity to your employer in terms of salary and performance.
- task_queue 12y ago
  If you are the only guy who knows X business process, congratulations! You've got yourself a comfortable trap and not much leverage for a higher pay raise or transfer because you're needed at X forever. Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out. But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole. Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  > The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs This is an extremely dangerous myth. Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple. Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - clusterfoo 12y ago
    But that could never happen to us, right? > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And apparently every programmer sees himself as a cunning negotiator, and irreplaceable genius 1000x-er. We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - vidarh 12y ago
      Exactly. Which becomes downright comical when you read any of the HN threads on negotiating salary, and see the stream of people who take what they are offered or are pleased with negotiating 5% more. I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off. But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I can weigh in on this bit about high-skill workers holding the cards, because they can supposedly just create a bidding war every time they want to make more money. It's not really true. After 30, jobs under 2 years start to look bad on your CV, and you start getting into senior positions that are rarer. You can't always overcome those issues just because you're a great programmer. If you're 40 and have had 4 jobs in the past 6 years, many companies won't even look at you. We seem to think that, if it will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to leave, we're in charge. Not really. Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces. No one is indispensable.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    "Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces." Yeah this happens all the time. It is always weird to me when you have people who are staunchly libertarian/free-market who seem to assume companies and consumers are perfectly rational actors (which is the only way a lot of the theory they are so fond has a chance of working without outside regulation). I just want to shake them and ask them if they are even paying attention to... anything.
    - pnathan 12y ago
      One of the key things to recognize when considering rationality and reasonable behavior is that not everyone is reasonable.
      - georgemcbay 12y ago
        Not only are some people often unreasonable, but nobody is always reasonable. Every single one of us has flaws that can be exploited (on purpose or just by coincidence) to cause us to act unreasonably in some situations... even when we're fully aware of this fact and actively trying to correct for it. Being reasonable even just most of the time is difficult work given all of the essentially hardwired flaws we are working against.
- Tsagadai 12y ago
  Highly skilled workers lose out too. If you bring in several million dollars in value and you are working for a large company is your pay proportional to the amount of value you bring in? This is a common reason people leave in the tech sector, you have a major breakthrough or a wildly successful project and you get a pat on the back for it while the shareholders take the lion's share. Ever tried to negotiate a raise and find you are getting less than 10% of what you bring in in revenue?
- Spooky23 12y ago
  Thats a myth. IT employees get paid in bands just like any other worker. The difference is that you hit the ceiling sooner than a similar gigs. If you're in the Bay Area or Wall St tribal units, the numbers are higher, but they are higher for a reason... Your expenses or costs are way higher. Everyone is replaceable. If you are the keeper of the keys of some magical system, you'll be replaced with the system when you become a liability, unless your employer is a moron.
  - jqm 12y ago
    "unless your employer is a moron..." I'd like to point out that having a moron for an employer, and in fact, a passle of morons in management is not a far fetched scenario.... I'd go so far as to say it's somewhat regular. Don't believe me? Just ask the average employee:)
    - Spooky23 12y ago
      Oh no doubt. But as an employee, proceed with caution. Being the keeper of the keys for the magical complicated system can work out for years... until it doesn't. Then you'll find yourself as the guy with 10 years of managing a OpenVMS legacy system in 2015!

topkai22 12y ago

"The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well. The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.

chronid 12y ago
If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced. Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored? I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)
makeitsuckless 12y ago
Except the reality is that we are not getting paid "so well". Given the scarcity and value of our skills, we're getting screwed. We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.
- MCRed 12y ago
  I agree with you, but I don't for a second think unions will change that. Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there. This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity. Unions commoditize workers. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html
  - pdonis 12y ago
    > Unions commoditize workers. Can't upvote this enough.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      And corporations try to commoditise labour even more aggressively. Your point is...?
      - pdonis 12y ago
        My point is that if you're a worker who doesn't want to be commoditized, you have to fend for yourself. The company won't protect you from it, but neither will unions. Basically, if you see yourself as part of any group, whether it's "all the employees of company X" or "all the members of union Y", you're asking to be commoditized.
        vidarh 12y ago
        The reality is that the vast majority of software developers does not stand out enough to get any benefit from fending for themselves. It's funny to see this idea repeated throughout this thread that we're all special snowflakes that can negotiate better deals on our own. Even more funny if you look back at the many threads about negotiating salary and see the huge number of people on HN that never even negotiate initial offers but just accepts what they're handed. My own experience is that some of us can negotiate outstanding deals, but from managing teams for the last 20 years and being part of salary negotiations and ranking developers for most of that, in almost every company I've worked, I've seen seen software staff get lumped together in big buckets of (from the company's perception) entirely interchangeable developers and set raises across whole blocks, with the only salary differences generally being banded by narrowly by position other than for a tiny (5%-10%) portion of top performances. Odds are you are a commodity to your employer in terms of salary and performance.
task_queue 12y ago
If you are the only guy who knows X business process, congratulations! You've got yourself a comfortable trap and not much leverage for a higher pay raise or transfer because you're needed at X forever. Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out. But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole. Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.
jjoonathan 12y ago
> The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs This is an extremely dangerous myth. Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple. Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- clusterfoo 12y ago
  But that could never happen to us, right? > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And apparently every programmer sees himself as a cunning negotiator, and irreplaceable genius 1000x-er. We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Exactly. Which becomes downright comical when you read any of the HN threads on negotiating salary, and see the stream of people who take what they are offered or are pleased with negotiating 5% more. I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off. But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.
michaelochurch 12y ago
I can weigh in on this bit about high-skill workers holding the cards, because they can supposedly just create a bidding war every time they want to make more money. It's not really true. After 30, jobs under 2 years start to look bad on your CV, and you start getting into senior positions that are rarer. You can't always overcome those issues just because you're a great programmer. If you're 40 and have had 4 jobs in the past 6 years, many companies won't even look at you. We seem to think that, if it will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to leave, we're in charge. Not really. Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces. No one is indispensable.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  "Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces." Yeah this happens all the time. It is always weird to me when you have people who are staunchly libertarian/free-market who seem to assume companies and consumers are perfectly rational actors (which is the only way a lot of the theory they are so fond has a chance of working without outside regulation). I just want to shake them and ask them if they are even paying attention to... anything.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    One of the key things to recognize when considering rationality and reasonable behavior is that not everyone is reasonable.
    - georgemcbay 12y ago
      Not only are some people often unreasonable, but nobody is always reasonable. Every single one of us has flaws that can be exploited (on purpose or just by coincidence) to cause us to act unreasonably in some situations... even when we're fully aware of this fact and actively trying to correct for it. Being reasonable even just most of the time is difficult work given all of the essentially hardwired flaws we are working against.
Tsagadai 12y ago
Highly skilled workers lose out too. If you bring in several million dollars in value and you are working for a large company is your pay proportional to the amount of value you bring in? This is a common reason people leave in the tech sector, you have a major breakthrough or a wildly successful project and you get a pat on the back for it while the shareholders take the lion's share. Ever tried to negotiate a raise and find you are getting less than 10% of what you bring in in revenue?
Spooky23 12y ago
Thats a myth. IT employees get paid in bands just like any other worker. The difference is that you hit the ceiling sooner than a similar gigs. If you're in the Bay Area or Wall St tribal units, the numbers are higher, but they are higher for a reason... Your expenses or costs are way higher. Everyone is replaceable. If you are the keeper of the keys of some magical system, you'll be replaced with the system when you become a liability, unless your employer is a moron.
- jqm 12y ago
  "unless your employer is a moron..." I'd like to point out that having a moron for an employer, and in fact, a passle of morons in management is not a far fetched scenario.... I'd go so far as to say it's somewhat regular. Don't believe me? Just ask the average employee:)
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    Oh no doubt. But as an employee, proceed with caution. Being the keeper of the keys for the magical complicated system can work out for years... until it doesn't. Then you'll find yourself as the guy with 10 years of managing a OpenVMS legacy system in 2015!