Not really related to the article, but yeah, I can't imagine that level of union-driven bureaucracy is good for productivity.
Sometimes because of unions. Others times for "security reasons" or "3rd party contract" reasons, etc.
I'm no hardcore anti-unionist, but this particular situation seems like a very plausible late-stage union failure mode.
Also, culturally the aerospace industry is very rule and procedure heavy, for good reason.
Sometimes you can't change a light bulb at a small company, sometimes at a big one you're first job is to assembly you're own desk.
It was a POS system the finance director brought and caused no end of problems at one point we were unable to cut a BACS tape for over 6 months
union driven bureaucracy is known to have extreme consequences in the name of job security
One day my job was to clean out some office trailers out in the back lot so they could haul them to a new site in a few days. To do this I needed a vacuum cleaner (which they had) and a generator to run it (which they also had). No problem, I said.
Until I found out that the generator was so low on oil that it wouldn't start due to the low oil cutoff switch. The oil was black and needed to be changed.
No problem again, I knew where the oil was, and I knew how to change it so I started to do just that. Until a union mechanic yelled at me and asked me what the H I was doing and that only a mechanic could do that job. I said "Ok, I'll just top it off so I can start it" ,and he said "Nope, you can't do that". I thought he was joking and kind of laughed until he called my boss over to explain it to me.
The mechanics, of course, were busy, so wouldn't get a chance to change my oil until next week, so I told my boss that I wouldn't be able to do my job. He said he'd take care of it.
And take care of it he did -- he said to go to the trailers and wait, and sure enough, a union driver showed up with a tractor trailer towed generator -- it must have been a 500KW generator, maybe larger. The union generator operator showed up soon after and started it up for me, and said he'd be back at quitting time to shut it down.
So all day long a 500KW generator sucked down 10 (?) gallons of fuel per hour (not to mention the wear and tear on that huge generator and the cost of the driver and generator operator)... just so I could run a shop-vac.
All because I wasn't allowed to put a few dollars of oil into a 5kw generator due to union rules.
That is when I lost all respect for unions.
I've not witnessed such an incident first hand, but as soon as I do I'll likely think "wow, they weren't kidding" and lose all respect for union activities from one incident.
By anonymous posters, most likely who have never actually worked a union job and are just repeating something they've read in threads like these.
Yes, unions have dumb rules. Do you think those rules were developed before or after corporations dictated onerous policy? So who are the good guys?
I don't think "losing respect for all Chinese because one wasn't acting rationally" is a fair analogy, more like "losing respect for all Chinese because they not only follow arbitrary and counter-productive rules, but they actively support them and will fight to keep them"
We usually call that "ideological blinkers".
Meanwhile there is a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract and the Department of Labor says you are exempt from overtime pay because ???
But not to worry, all switchboard operators working for a company with less than 750 stations also don't get paid for all hours worked. There is no fairness and reason to the Fair Labor act, it just means someone who is probably long gone lobbied to royally fuck computer specialists over. And here we are today.
Can you imagine police unions agreeing to arbitration?
Corporations want as few people doing as much work as possible. And they will have no qualms about laying people off to achieve that (TFA). Putting absolute restrictions on tasks puts a floor on employment. It's not ideal, but somewhat effective.
Whenever people talk about unionizing or professionalizing software development, I think things of this. Even if it ridiculous for both sides, it is indicative of a group of workers, and an employer, who have decided exactly what their job is (and is not), and what the rules and training pertaining to that job are.
Contrast with software development, which is a free-for-all - mainly for good, but the complete absence of standards or authorities doesn't always seem like a good thing. Just occasionally I find myself thinking that some baseline standards for, say, source control or testing would do everyone a world of good.
There's a reason you see more older (and expensive) aircraft mechanics working on the latest greatest tech, as opposed to older developers.
What do you suspect those reasons may be? Also, what would you describe as latest greatest tech in the context of aerospace industry?
Not gp, but in the context of this thread, the answer is obvious: Unions.
Until we come to a mature understanding of the place that unions have in our working economy, I hope we never see this kind of bureaucracy form in our profession.
When I worked at MSFT as a developer in the early 2000s, we had dedicated test developers who wrote tests. You wrote your code and checked it in after a code review and as long as it passed the integration tests, the test developers wrote their (what would now be called) unit tests and checked them in to make sure someone else didn't break your code.
I think writing your own tests gained favor in the early/mid-2000s with the "extreme programming" and TDD movements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development)
What are "union rules"? Each union is free to bargain their demands collectively with the employer. If your members think such a rule is stupid, they won't demand it. But your lack of knowledge and disdain of unions is noted.
It's horrendously redundant and wouldn't be applicable to most software, but it does work well; when bugs are picked up by the third or fourth layer of testers, which happens from time to time.
Is this based on seniority, as in the new guys have to write the tests? That way you would at least have some experience with how to code in an easily testable fashion.
Yes, this is exactly how we QA in fields where software errors can cost lives.
From a personal perspective, I find that trying to design tests as the developer of the code to be tested is fundamentally difficult -- I have embedded assumptions around the functionality of the code that make it cognitively difficult to fully envision complex failure scenarios. Some of the best test producers I've worked with have had no development background at all.
There would never be a union so long as fully-qualified software engineers are in-demand - even the deluge of web-designers from the dot-com boom (and today's coding-camp graduates) haven't seen a rise in poor working conditions or unemployment because of the over-supply of labor.
I do advocate some kind of professional certification or charter status for software-engineers involved in safety-critical systems - like how a certified civil engineer needs to sign-off on bridge and building designs - but that's largely for the public's benefit, not solely their own.
I feel like union bashing has just become part of our culture, just like complaining about state road crews (always 1 guy working and 5 guys standing around!) but the joke may be on us when we allow our infrastructure to be privatized and our unions to be killed and we realize that we work for the market, not the other way around.