Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

My fear for a tech union is whether it will deny someone like me the kind of opportunity I was very fortunate to enjoy roughly 10-20 years ago. At lot of us here got our starts under scrappy circumstances and with lots of hustling. I am very cautious not to support any move that will amount to pulling up the ladder behind me.

You mentioned AMA in another comment; will our tech union require eight years of university and one year of residency at IniTech to "practice programming"? Will it require a minimum hourly wage? At what rate? My first programming job at 17 wasn't super well paid, but better than working at the gas station. Will there be an ethics committee that might get high-jacked by activists and "disbar" programmers working for sites with objectionable content? Or the NSA or ICE? And if it can't do any of those things, what teeth will it actually have?

View on HN

I have effectively no college, and went to work right after high school. Whatever labor organization tech workers come up with doesn't have to be the AFL-CIO and it doesn't have to be the AMA. It can just take the best attributes from all those organizations. Or it can start more modestly! Maybe tech workers will just come up with two or three things --- say, late exercise on options and better IP clauses --- and just start by organizing around those.

So that's a nice optimistic vision, and if I had any faith we could keep it to that, I'd be for it. My vision includes scope creep and lots of greedy ambitious good-at-politics less-good-at-actually-doing-work types grabbing the show once it's successful.

Most organisations meaningfully described as unions has a non-trivial element of excluding people from the trade in one way or another. I will never be a part of any organisation that will prevent any person from (trying to) make a living as a programmer in whatever way.

I wouldn't either. Luckily, since organization hasn't really happened yet, if we get involved now we can make that a principle for the field. Tech is unique among professions in how open it is to people that aren't the product of an academic feeder assembly. That's something I think is worth preserving about the industry, and something a labor organization should help preserve.

Don't assume that a disorganized workforce will keep that from happening. Look at pretty much all cybersecurity regulation from the last 10 years to see what could happen if labor rolls over and lets it: professional certification, run by commercial firms that specialize in selling themselves as efficient authorities.

> Most organisations meaningfully described as unions has a non-trivial element of excluding people from the trade in one way or another. I will never be a part of any organisation that will prevent any person from (trying to) make a living as a programmer in whatever way.

The problem is that, once an industry unionizes, you don't really have a choice.

The process of decertification is basically a catch-22: unions are actually allowed to terminate membership of employees who advocate decertification, which makes it impossible to organize enough support for decertification from current members without risking losing your membership.

And that's all assuming that you actually hold the majority view. It's quite possible that the majority of your coworkers want to (for example) ban Asian workers from obtaining work visas. If that's the case, you can't really do anything to stop your union from supporting it either.

That example isn't hypothetical, by the way. Banning immigration from Asia was one of the first major victories of the American Federation of Labor.

"The problem is that, once an industry unionizes, you don't really have a choice."

That's entirely false, and intellectually dishonest.

> That's entirely false

Technically, by the letter of the law? Okay. But in practice? No, it's completely true. Your only "choice" is to find a non-unionized job (if one even exists in your field). Decertifying a union is borderline impossible in practice. And if you're in the minority opinion among your coworkers, you're completely out-of-luck, because there's nothing you can do, legally or practically.

> and intellectually dishonest.

You keep saying this phrase a lot, but there's nothing "intellectually dishonest" about explaining the practical problems associated with OP's statement ("I will never be a part of any organisation..."). You can't just use that phrase to dismiss fact-based critiques that you don't like. If you disagree, actually engage with the argument.

Well yes, a union is organized democratically so you can vote on what you support if you're part of one. The problems you identify are central to all of democracy: what if you lose the vote? Then positions you don't support will be supported! Decisions made by the majority don't obey the will of the minority! So your solution is to eliminate the vote altogether and give away any voice you have, since you might not get everything you want -- not have unions at all; to reject any democracy altogether, and instead let a tiny few wealthy oligarchs make all the decisions. The alternative is your work goes to support whatever the executives of the company want, which is usually explicitly the opposite of what is good for you since your salary and everything that is good for you costs the company money. The profits from your labor will go to efforts to automate your job out of existence, they will go to efforts to lobby to take away all of your rights and protections, benefits and bonuses. This is currently exactly what happens in every non-unionized workplace.

I could not have said this better myself.

If a tech association just wants to get vesting schedules fixed, great, I ha e no problem with that.

But the moment someone even SUGGESTS putting up barriers to entry is the moment I oppose that organization with all of my might.

It is just too risky to allow an organization to get entrenched and ruin the tech industry for newbies.

Guess what: you (almost certainly) already are. You think your business (on orders from the management, not based on a vote of the workers) doesn't arbitrarily exclude people? You don't have HR officers who filter out great programmers because they don't have credentials? Your company doesn't post job listings that require 5 years of experience and a college degree to write basic CRUD apps? You just have no control over these decisions at all, so it is easier to divorce yourself from them. If you had some ownership over the decision making process, like in a union, you'd have to own it -- this is good, even if it means you don't get your way. It is a transition from having zero say (nonunion) to making an argument, being heard out, and losing. And who knows, convince enough people, argue well enough, and you'll win the vote next time. But you have to fight to get a vote in the first place before that happens.

It's always going to be in the self-interest of union members to put up the strongest possible barriers to entry, to protect what makes the union members valuable: their scarcity.

It's farcical to expect a majority of union members to put ideology above self-interest and vote to depress their own wages by permitting new entrants to follow in their footsteps (except in proportion to existing members leaving the field, maybe).

People who are inside an advantageous position (employed in a desirable field, living in a desirable city) very reliably kick the ladder down once they've climbed.

Society at large is nearly always better off when these people are disenfranchised and disempowered. You don't even need a tyrant to do this either; simply expand the voter pool to include would-be entrants as well as current members.

Hey irrelevant but can I ask how did you enter the tech industry without college? If self taught can I ask how did you teach yourself and what (why), and with what resources?

For me, I started out with BASIC and a library book and a supportive dad, then HTML and Javascript, most likely based on random online guides (this was late 90's), online communities (likely newsgroups and IRC, and I spent a lot of time on Slashdot), then PHP, based on the same. Along the way I taught myself Linux, too.

Why? It was what was there and what was accessible. There wasn't a particular plan or direction, just the excitement of getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do.

I felt that same excitement when I was a kid. Like 10 years ago maybe? The excitement of making a computer do what you want it to do. I used to mod Halo Combat Evolved games for fun and just put random code together and make shit work, picked up HTML and CSS even trying to make myself and some friends clan websites! My father didnt foster it as much, and somewhere along the line I stopped messing around and tinkering with all that stuff. Now I'm in my early 20's and really want to and need to get a job in the tech field. I feel really bad saying I want it for the money mainly, but it seems to be frowned upon when I ask around what can and should I learn to fast track my way to employability. Any advice?

Web dev, possibly mobile app dev. Not the shining cutting edge, you'll struggle to compete, but the "boring" bread and butter stuff (think "utility company app for meter reading" and "replacing that brittle/broken Sharepoint/Excel based workflow with a simple Ruby on Rails CRUD app" more than "instagram" and "cloud AI internet-of-things"). Focus on adding (and articulating) real business value, not on getting to play with the latest shiny thing.

Alternatively, find a niche that needs fixing with a CRUD web app, then build and sell it.

A couple of years of doing that, always making sure you're educating yourself (educating doesn't have to equal scrambling to keep up to date with every fad or sitting in a classroom, it means making sure that you're adding skills and increasing your proficiency in ways that adds value to your work. Read a few CS textbooks, it's good to know the jargon, and understanding the theory behind what I knew to work was very helpful for me), a lot of good firms will take a good hard look at you. Just always keep in mind that you're "invisible" to recruiters, so you'll probably have to hustle a bit/network a lot.

Anyway, that was roughly my path, combined with moving to London somewhere between paragraphs one and three (employers here care much less about my missing degree than they do in Denmark). YMMV.

Well I'm in NY if that helps.

> Alternatively, find a niche that needs fixing with a CRUD web app, then build and sell it.

Would you care to expand on that a bit please? Thanks!

The business world is silly with workflows that involves emailing wonky spreadsheets full of opaque formulas around or convoluted filing of documents in deep directory trees on a network drive or actual honest to god paper forms. Spend half a day in any sizable office environment as a capable developer, and you'll identify potential for hundreds of hours of savings by switching workflows to simple applications that are little more than said CRUD web apps.

I can recommend reading the early stuff on kalzumeus.com, about the bingo card creator. Same guy is also a prolific contributor here, as patio11.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com