7 ms·

Athletes are known for being extremely successful in collective bargaining and labor actions, both of which tend to be anathema to the software engineering comm

Athletes are known for being extremely successful in collective bargaining and labor actions, both of which tend to be anathema to the software engineering community.

minikites 12y ago
It tends to be anathema to most "white collar" workers which is a shame, the concept of organized labor is beneficial to all workers.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  Organized labor is great when you've got a local labor monopsony (one-buyer) which is exploiting your work. This was clearly the case in many company towns back in the organized-labor movement's heyday, and still has relevance to groups like public school teachers, but the last figures I've seen say that economists estimate that the average rate of exploitation in the US at large is somewhere roughly between 1%-3% (because switching firms is an expensive proposition). There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low, and yet here we are with the labor movement trying to double down on a 19th-century solution to our 21st-century problems. The concept of organized labor is more beneficial today to robots than it is to Americans -- robots, and imports from developing nations. We won't even get into all of favors the labor movement hasn't done itself on various topics, either, like union leaders paid executive-like compensation or the Teamsters' ties to organized crime.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > and still has relevance to groups like public school teachers I can't believe that we're on opposite sides of the teachers' union issue.
    - fennecfoxen 12y ago
      Well, I think it's important to start with an ounce of sympathy, as it builds understanding. Public schools are run by legislatures and school boards and the like, typically being reviewed by annual-at-best election (with crap turnout, for races that few will actually follow, and many of the advantages of incumbency available. The decision-makers are not incentivized to care very much about the quality of their decisions. Moreover, they're probably the only employers in the county (maybe the whole state) and the entire business has ultra-long highly-scheduled hiring cycles -- none of this "can you start tomorrow?" business like you get in tech. That is a recipe whereby good performance is not linked to good pay at all and has very high potential for abuse. Would you trust someone employed by that sort of a bureaucracy to evaluate your performance at your job? I'd prefer not to, myself. So there are a few ways to approach this. Teachers could just sit there and take it -- you can understand why they don't care to do so, surely. We could structure the system to have a lot of objective evaluations to curb abuses -- an approach still fraught with many issues (standardized tests and certificates which fail to capture many of the most important aspects of pedagogy). As a final set of options, we could either try to ameliorate some of the worst of all this by restructuring the system to have more options and employers for teachers (charter schools, private schools, etc), or we could double down on the status quo while avoiding any evaluations on teaching whatsoever, leaving failing schools in place to ruin the lives of entire generations of students (blaming either Funding or Parents). It is mostly in the choice of the last option over the penultimate option that there is a major problem -- teachers' unions paying dues to spend on the election cycle to elect union-friendly politicians. This means that the right sort of incumbent essentially gets to spend tax money on his own campaign, and it goes downhill from there into an orgy of corruption, power games, and detachment from responsibility -- aka "politics".
  - harryh 12y ago
    Support a $15 minimum wage! Support the FUTURE! https://www.facebook.com/Robots4MinimumWage https://www.facebook.com/Robots4MinimumWage
    - eru 12y ago
      Why settle for less than a million dollars an hour minimum wage?
      - minikites 12y ago
        Picking an absurd number doesn't invalidate the original argument.
  - fragmede 12y ago
    > economists estimate that the average rate of exploitation in the US at large is somewhere roughly between 1%-3% (because switching firms is an expensive proposition). Average, possibly, but that's definitely low for certain sectors, eg workers on an H1-B visa. It also doesn't help when firms collude to make switching firms even harder, eg: when Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay agreed not to recruit each other's employees.* To think organized labor is antiquated because the economy has moved on from single-company mining towns is naive. The simple fact is that corporations don't have your best interest in mind any more than you can claim you always have your employer's best interests at heart. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Li...
    - fennecfoxen 12y ago
      > The simple fact is that corporations don't have your best interest in mind any more than you can claim you always have your employer's best interests at heart. This is true. It also applies to the labor union, and to the government.
  - s73v3r 12y ago
    "There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low" That reason is solely because those with the money and power started a huge smear campaign against organized labor, and tried to get people to see them as "moochers".
    - eru 12y ago
      How does that compare to other countries and times?
- wyager 12y ago
  > the concept of organized labor is beneficial to all workers. Yeah, it sure is great when I'm not allowed to adjust my own monitor due to union rules. Only facilities is allowed to do that!
  - minikites 12y ago
    Show me where that is a real rule.
pjc50 12y ago
Hmm. https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Divide $14Bn net income by 53,600 employees gives about $260k. So GOOG could roughly double their salaries and remain profitable. Is that enough to overcome anathema? Edit: the real thing is that athletes' past performance is very rankable - Moneyball etc passim. Winners are paid on an exponential curve. Programmer performance is not only not rankable, it's barely measureable and interviewers have to resort to silly tests. So it becomes worthwhile to poach people that have already been through someone else's FizzBuzz filter. The nearest thing to the transfer market is the acquihire/acquishutdown.
- jasode 12y ago
  >Divide $14Bn net income by 53,600 employees gives about $260k. So GOOG could roughly double their salaries and remain profitable. That doesn't make any sense. If Google disburses that $14B Net Income as salary/bonus to the employees, the Net Income would be $0. One can't have it both ways, unless you illogically count that money twice. Besides the issue of recategorizing "net income" as "employee expense", Google wouldn't have new money to invest in the business as an ongoing concern. That $14B can be used in future years to invest in driverless cars, satellites, global internet hot air balloons, acquisitions of other companies, or whatever ambitious plans they have. Disbursing the Net Income to their employees means Google would cease to exist as a viable ongoing business. One can also look backward and see why and how companies get formed in the first place. If angel investors and venture capitalists knew from the beginning that Google was going to disburse all Net Income to employees, they would have never invested $$$ in 1998 to let them grow. Angels and VC's are not charities and they want ROI -- because things like pension funds that utilize VC's want an ROI. From that birth of the company, the chain of events continued: a big reason why Google has $14B of net income in 2014 is that they did not disburse the net incomes to employees in previous years 2013, 2012, 2011...2000. They were able to spend previous profits to build new datacenters, offer 1 gigabyte GMail accounts, acquire Keyhole maps, etc.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    So why are Google disbursing $124m in executive compensation that could be used to build the business? http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-paid-1-salary-4-other-executives-get-124-mn/387731-11.html http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-paid-1-sala... Rhetorical question, of course. Yes, there should have been an "up to" in my previous comment. Obviously there is a tradeoff between investing retained profits, returning money to investors, and increasing staff compensation; that's what Ford v Dodge was all about.
kcole16 12y ago
They also hire lawyers and agents to handle the negotiations that result in favorable working conditions and compensation. Maybe tech professionals should do the same?
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  We absolutely should. We also have to look forward. Tech companies generate $500k per engineer even while those engineers are managed by idiots-- people who don't understand technology, don't value the wrong term, think "Scrum" is a good idea, and likely failed out of the mainstream business culture ("MBA culture") and are using the Valley as a second act. Imagine what value the top software engineers could produce if they were managed well. And then imagine that software engineers would be even better at their job if major decisions were made by the right people. This industry is running at 5% of its max potential, if that. Not only can we capture significantly more of the value that we create, but we can add substantially more value if we man up and learn how to take charge.
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    ^ s/wrong/long/
eru 12y ago
> Athletes are known for being extremely successful in collective bargaining and labor actions, [...] Really? Is that an American thing?

Athletes are known for being extremely successful in collective bargaining and labor actions, both of which tend to be anathema to the software engineering community.

minikites 12y ago

It tends to be anathema to most "white collar" workers which is a shame, the concept of organized labor is beneficial to all workers.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
Organized labor is great when you've got a local labor monopsony (one-buyer) which is exploiting your work. This was clearly the case in many company towns back in the organized-labor movement's heyday, and still has relevance to groups like public school teachers, but the last figures I've seen say that economists estimate that the average rate of exploitation in the US at large is somewhere roughly between 1%-3% (because switching firms is an expensive proposition). There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low, and yet here we are with the labor movement trying to double down on a 19th-century solution to our 21st-century problems. The concept of organized labor is more beneficial today to robots than it is to Americans -- robots, and imports from developing nations. We won't even get into all of favors the labor movement hasn't done itself on various topics, either, like union leaders paid executive-like compensation or the Teamsters' ties to organized crime.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > and still has relevance to groups like public school teachers I can't believe that we're on opposite sides of the teachers' union issue.
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    Well, I think it's important to start with an ounce of sympathy, as it builds understanding. Public schools are run by legislatures and school boards and the like, typically being reviewed by annual-at-best election (with crap turnout, for races that few will actually follow, and many of the advantages of incumbency available. The decision-makers are not incentivized to care very much about the quality of their decisions. Moreover, they're probably the only employers in the county (maybe the whole state) and the entire business has ultra-long highly-scheduled hiring cycles -- none of this "can you start tomorrow?" business like you get in tech. That is a recipe whereby good performance is not linked to good pay at all and has very high potential for abuse. Would you trust someone employed by that sort of a bureaucracy to evaluate your performance at your job? I'd prefer not to, myself. So there are a few ways to approach this. Teachers could just sit there and take it -- you can understand why they don't care to do so, surely. We could structure the system to have a lot of objective evaluations to curb abuses -- an approach still fraught with many issues (standardized tests and certificates which fail to capture many of the most important aspects of pedagogy). As a final set of options, we could either try to ameliorate some of the worst of all this by restructuring the system to have more options and employers for teachers (charter schools, private schools, etc), or we could double down on the status quo while avoiding any evaluations on teaching whatsoever, leaving failing schools in place to ruin the lives of entire generations of students (blaming either Funding or Parents). It is mostly in the choice of the last option over the penultimate option that there is a major problem -- teachers' unions paying dues to spend on the election cycle to elect union-friendly politicians. This means that the right sort of incumbent essentially gets to spend tax money on his own campaign, and it goes downhill from there into an orgy of corruption, power games, and detachment from responsibility -- aka "politics".
- harryh 12y ago
  Support a $15 minimum wage! Support the FUTURE! https://www.facebook.com/Robots4MinimumWage https://www.facebook.com/Robots4MinimumWage
  - eru 12y ago
    Why settle for less than a million dollars an hour minimum wage?
    - minikites 12y ago
      Picking an absurd number doesn't invalidate the original argument.
- fragmede 12y ago
  > economists estimate that the average rate of exploitation in the US at large is somewhere roughly between 1%-3% (because switching firms is an expensive proposition). Average, possibly, but that's definitely low for certain sectors, eg workers on an H1-B visa. It also doesn't help when firms collude to make switching firms even harder, eg: when Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay agreed not to recruit each other's employees.* To think organized labor is antiquated because the economy has moved on from single-company mining towns is naive. The simple fact is that corporations don't have your best interest in mind any more than you can claim you always have your employer's best interests at heart. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Li...
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    > The simple fact is that corporations don't have your best interest in mind any more than you can claim you always have your employer's best interests at heart. This is true. It also applies to the labor union, and to the government.
- s73v3r 12y ago
  "There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low" That reason is solely because those with the money and power started a huge smear campaign against organized labor, and tried to get people to see them as "moochers".
  - eru 12y ago
    How does that compare to other countries and times?
wyager 12y ago
> the concept of organized labor is beneficial to all workers. Yeah, it sure is great when I'm not allowed to adjust my own monitor due to union rules. Only facilities is allowed to do that!
- minikites 12y ago
  Show me where that is a real rule.

pjc50 12y ago

Hmm. https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Divide $14Bn net income by 53,600 employees gives about $260k. So GOOG could roughly double their salaries and remain profitable. Is that enough to overcome anathema? Edit: the real thing is that athletes' past performance is very rankable - Moneyball etc passim. Winners are paid on an exponential curve. Programmer performance is not only not rankable, it's barely measureable and interviewers have to resort to silly tests. So it becomes worthwhile to poach people that have already been through someone else's FizzBuzz filter. The nearest thing to the transfer market is the acquihire/acquishutdown.

jasode 12y ago
>Divide $14Bn net income by 53,600 employees gives about $260k. So GOOG could roughly double their salaries and remain profitable. That doesn't make any sense. If Google disburses that $14B Net Income as salary/bonus to the employees, the Net Income would be $0. One can't have it both ways, unless you illogically count that money twice. Besides the issue of recategorizing "net income" as "employee expense", Google wouldn't have new money to invest in the business as an ongoing concern. That $14B can be used in future years to invest in driverless cars, satellites, global internet hot air balloons, acquisitions of other companies, or whatever ambitious plans they have. Disbursing the Net Income to their employees means Google would cease to exist as a viable ongoing business. One can also look backward and see why and how companies get formed in the first place. If angel investors and venture capitalists knew from the beginning that Google was going to disburse all Net Income to employees, they would have never invested $$$ in 1998 to let them grow. Angels and VC's are not charities and they want ROI -- because things like pension funds that utilize VC's want an ROI. From that birth of the company, the chain of events continued: a big reason why Google has $14B of net income in 2014 is that they did not disburse the net incomes to employees in previous years 2013, 2012, 2011...2000. They were able to spend previous profits to build new datacenters, offer 1 gigabyte GMail accounts, acquire Keyhole maps, etc.
- pjc50 12y ago
  So why are Google disbursing $124m in executive compensation that could be used to build the business? http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-paid-1-salary-4-other-executives-get-124-mn/387731-11.html http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-paid-1-sala... Rhetorical question, of course. Yes, there should have been an "up to" in my previous comment. Obviously there is a tradeoff between investing retained profits, returning money to investors, and increasing staff compensation; that's what Ford v Dodge was all about.

kcole16 12y ago

They also hire lawyers and agents to handle the negotiations that result in favorable working conditions and compensation. Maybe tech professionals should do the same?

michaelochurch 12y ago
We absolutely should. We also have to look forward. Tech companies generate $500k per engineer even while those engineers are managed by idiots-- people who don't understand technology, don't value the wrong term, think "Scrum" is a good idea, and likely failed out of the mainstream business culture ("MBA culture") and are using the Valley as a second act. Imagine what value the top software engineers could produce if they were managed well. And then imagine that software engineers would be even better at their job if major decisions were made by the right people. This industry is running at 5% of its max potential, if that. Not only can we capture significantly more of the value that we create, but we can add substantially more value if we man up and learn how to take charge.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  ^ s/wrong/long/

eru 12y ago

> Athletes are known for being extremely successful in collective bargaining and labor actions, [...] Really? Is that an American thing?