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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong, I find the pledge to be a noble gesture, and it's good to see individual tech employees finally publicly take a stance on ethical issues. But have ethical issues ever hurt a company's candidate flow? I can't think of a single company so tainted by some ethical thing that they can't find engineers willing to hold their nose and work for them.

Have you ever been asked on an interview how you handled being assigned to write code that you had serious ethical concerns about, or whether there was any kind of projects you'd object to being assigned to? I haven't. Maybe those questions come AFTER the whiteboard hazing if there's time...

I've in the past objected to an ethically questionable assignment, and the company dealt with by moving me to a different part of the code base and hiring a contractor who had no problem with doing the deed. Had I quit over it they would likely have shrugged and hired someone else.

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How many people do you think would need to sign this for it to have a material impact on recruiting and retention for big companies? Let's not be fuzzy about it. Let's see what the goal needs to be, and then talk about how reachable it is.

That would require a high degree of speculation, since I can't think of any example in history in any industry where "employees not willing to work for a company" managed to have a material impact on that company. I think this is uncharted territory.

This is a joke about HN, right?

Hey. I'm getting some mileage out of this on Twitter and you're getting a little jumped on, but: if you're not joking, this is good news. It's kind of great news.

It means all you have to do is learn a bit about the labor movement to see a whole new dimension of possibilities for intervening against a system we're widely concerned about.

Fair enough, labor unions. Brain no longer working, thanks for leading me by the nose to it. So we need to get software engineers, who as a group tend to be openly hostile to the idea of unions, to embrace collective bargaining.

Not all unions are about salary and shop rules. Look at the history of Polish Solidarity!

And not all organization is union organization. 5-10% of employees speaking up can have an effect.

In the 1980s, Irish workers in a large supermarket refused to handle South African goods because of apartheid

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...

I don't think software engineers were so much hostile as indifferent. And now we're wandering into an area where people want to take a stand against their own management, but are worried about doing it alone for fear of retribution.

This is exactly what labor law is designed to help do, and I can assure you people are interested.

I think it also depends hugely on the country.

I can only talk about Germany, and in general I'd say unions here have limited to moderate power, depending on the field they operate in. (e.g. you always hear news about strikes from the metal-related union (IG Metall) or the train drivers, or pilots/air personnel.)

Now, the thing is that there's also one very broadly defined one for "services" (ver.di) which used to have mostly shop assistants, hairdressers, people with desk jobs, etc.pp. But recently (let's say since the 90s) also more and more IT people and especially software developers. And I can't give you specific details, but I've heard and read so many stories about what they want is quite contrary to what people in these jobs want. Maybe (probably?) because we're better off anyway? Maybe because hardly any people in software here are paid via the regulated union tariffs (is that the correct word I'm using? The rate of pay that the union agreed to with the bigger companies. Often involves politicians, but sometimes only for mediation when there's no progress on talks) but via direct negotiations with your company.

TLDR: can only speak for Germany, but the union seems to be not representative of the people for this field of work

I think we're all reasonably clear that software developers wouldn't collectively bargain for better salaries. But it's silly to suggest that there aren't issues that would motivate even coddled SFBA developers. For instance:

* Work-for-hire and IP assignment rules and how they relate to side projects

* Non-solicitation clauses and pacts between big companies not to hire

* Transparency about equity valuations in job offers

* Exercise periods for options (in fact: an area of current open conflict between VCs and employees!)

* Overtime, on-call requirements, and death-march schedules

There are probably a dozen more things like this, and that's before we get to the true purpose of organizing, which is to make sure that software talent as a bloc can use market pressure to prevent itself from being subverted by unethical government requests.

This is not a crazy weird idea. There are white collar unions, and there are professional organizations (like the AMA) that do many of the things a union does on behalf of their members, without calling themselves that.

No, I absolutely agree. But I do think developers in Germany have it a lot better (from a safety standpoint, work regulations, IP law, etc.pp.) than people in the US - it's just that we get paid less (comparing 60-70k EUR vs 120-140k USD as very rough estimate) and there's no hire & fire. My point is that I think that's why we'd be able to peruse the advantages of a union a lot less. As long as the market is so that we can find a new job near instantly. Maybe I'm also blind to our disadvantages (because I live here, but I think many EU countries are comparable) - but that's why I think the 'typical union advantages' are even less prevalent in the US.

Addendum: I think the job safety thing is bigger, who can predict if this will be a safe job when most of us readers here (assuming age 20-40) are closer to retirement. Then again I'm not sure unions really help against companies not wanting to hire 50+ people for normal (I.e. non-manager) jobs.

The opposite is true. The stronger the employment market, the more market power labor has.

We can easily get new jobs. But we cannot easily find jobs that satisfy all the points I laid out above. Short exercise periods, for instance, are almost universal among tech startups. Companies can get away with doing that because right now, the interest in fixing that is diffuse, and the interest in maintaining the status quo is concentrated.

Straightforward fix: form a professional association, and collectively shun companies that screw over early startup employees with post-vesting clawbacks. We'll see how much longer khaki-clad sweater-bevested VC partners mouth off to the press about disloyal employees when the cost of employing developers for their portfolio companies (and theirs alone) goes up by 40%.

The more I think about unionization, the more I think 2016-2017 is an immense opportunity. A Chicagoan I'm not entirely fond of once memorably said: never let a crisis go to waste.

I'd love to see any numbers on how many "startup employees with stock options" there even are compared to normal salaried employees without any vesting periods.

And then compare that to other countries. Maybe that's my point. I don't see myself disagreeing with anything you wrote, yet you seem to take it that way :)

We don't need to unionize every software developer in the world. If the targets we want to apply pressure to are startups, all we have to unionize are the startups.

Sorry if I sound snippy. That happens a lot. The problem is with message boards: they're weighted heavily towards comments that highlight distinctions in point of view. That doesn't mean, in my case at least, that I'm trying to be dismissive.

Labour unions are backed by force of law, and campaigned primarily to get their members more money or benefits, not stop "unethical" behaviour (they invariably claim they're motivated by safety or conditions or whatever, but in practice it almost never is).

You could regard underpaying employees as unethical behaviour in itself. Not entirely unrelated

Counter-example: In the 1980s, Irish workers in a large supermarket refused to handle South African goods because of apartheid

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...

You mean besides Polish Solidarity?

Solidarity was by no means a normal trade union comparable to those in the west. It was directly supported by the US Government, not confined to any particular industry, was illegal rather than supported by pro-union laws (as is often the case in the west) and existed in an oppressive dictatorship not a democracy.

Yes: things were much harder for Solidarity, and it not only prevailed but helped break the Iron Curtain.

Are you serious? Do they even teach history in High School now?

Ahem.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action

Has anybody managed to move your company up the Joel Test[0] by threatening to leave, or management learning they missed a hire? Serious question.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

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