Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Just because you are salaried and "professional" does not mean you collectively do not have extreme clout.
Whatever the hot issues are - say hours worked in a 7 day period - and the desire is to place limits (say 4 twelve hour days amd 1 eight hour day) having a union attitude means your bargained (agreed upon) rules are enforceable. And you carry a right to not work outside your agreed upon scope.
The attitide comes in when you stop work after the last day. It's your right.
People in unions (i am one) are the beneficiaries of years of compromise and abuse But it's fragile.
All the union is is a sturdy frame which everyone stands on. Its sure footed. Otherwise workers - even professionals- have no true security, no true predictable work conditions.
Iz is very unfortunate that union has become such a negative word. If a handful of people got together and simply stopped the management "abuse" i guarantee (!!!!) you you would be surprised how much power even engineer types can have
All a union did for me in my younger years was have me work my ass off so older union members could sit around doing literally nothing. In fact as far as I could tell their jobs were effectively finding ways to do nothing, and then when they got too good at that finding ways to keep others from doing anything.
I would not be paid nearly what I am today had I been stuck in my first union job. Even if I had stayed in the same field.
Until unions can stop being basically safe havens for either the lazy, incompetent, or corrupt (what they've effectively become in the US) I want zero part of them. The two I were in in my teens and early 20's were enough for me. They were so bad I did not want to be morally associated with them in any way whatsoever. All I ever saw from them was protection for the worst kind of people, and the high performers were ran out of the company as soon as possible by all the other members.
It sucks there isn't something else that can champion the rights and pay of the workers without simply serving the lowest common denominator. I'd actively join and support a "trade guild" where membership was predicated on competence and work ethic - and members actively policed to ensure they meet the standard. I'd also seek out employing such guilds when possible.
Unfortunately that doesn't exist, and I tend to actively avoid union shops with a few notable exceptions. Typically when you say the word "union labor" to me that means it's going to be 4x the price, take 5x as long, and be done halfassed so we'll have to re-do half the work anyways.
In the first, it was 100% seniority-based with zero regards to effort or skill. The second I left for basically the same reason. Ability played very little part in pay or benefits. It was simply a time served deal.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine was named shop steward at an automobile manufacturer. The next day he showed up at the airport, in the middle of a workday, in a brand new truck that he just took off the lot as a perk. When we asked why he was hanging out with us at the airport rather than at work, he smiled and said that all complaints went over his desk first, and he wasn't likely to let a complaint against him go past him.
I know that unions played a massively important role in the past, but like all bureaucracies, as it aged and evolved, they became something far different.
One way of looking at his role could have been that while you were running around, his health and safety was being preserved. If he (or any other vital employee) was injured in an accident that didn’t involve his explicit job requirements, that could have resulted in a bottleneck much more costly than his clocked time spent reading books.
The more important thing is the freedom to leave a job that doesn't work for you. That's how I went from the shitty non-union jobs to (eventually) a lucky couple decent ones.
Too much political commentary about unions these days is from pundits looking in from the outside, and there is too much paid anti-unionism to get an accurate description of unions’ actual shortcomings without it being washed out by vague exaggerations.
The fact that almost every billion dollar company with decamillionaore CEOs is dead set against unions (not even willing to form a partnership agreement with a union), should prove how good they are for everyone who isn't a multimillionaire.
One of the big misconceptions is that unions are just for workers. In my experience unions benefit the employers just as much as the workers by providing a formal process for raising and resolving grievances. This helps corporations by keeping things smooth and puts a check on low level management that benefits the organization over all.
Unions also bring a lot of BS. They are another hierarchy with their own bosses, and rules, etc. But you will not find any more generous group of people then in a union. When there is a collection for someone who has a sick kid or some other tragic life event the amount of money that gets collected in a single meeting is surprising. I have never seen that kind of generosity in any professional setting.
I have also seen unions vote repeatedly to take cuts in their own pay to help out their fellow members on the pension issue, even knowing that those people f--ked themselves up with their own stupid decisions, but the point of a union is that you take care of your own, and members are willing to take a very real and significant personal hit to do that.
One of the best things about unions is fixed contracts and pay scales. Haggling over money used to be considered disgraceful and beneath the dignity of respectable people. Unions are old school so they still stick to that code and younger people would do well to learn from them on that.
I don't really think that software engineers could benefit much from unionization. Seizing the means of production doesn't have much meaning when you are the means of production. People who already have all the power don't need a union. But understanding how unions work and the benefits that they provide for organizing labor, corporations, and society is definitely a good thing.
Software engineers already have a lot of leverage. If you have a boss telling you you have to work crazy hours just say no. If you aren't using the bargaining power you already have a union is probably not going to help you.
In unions bosses break the rules continually and you only get them enforced by persistently filing grievances in the face of a lot of blowback, sometimes from the upper echelons of the union itself because they don't like people rocking the boat too much.
In the grievance game management and union sit down every month or so and take the list of proposed disciplinary actions against employees (firings, suspensions, etc) and the list of grievances filed against management and swap them out to prevent the people with the most seniority from getting fired. A lot of valid grievances will get ignored because they were traded out so some old timer could keep their job - not exactly the epitome of justice.
Having a written contract does provide leverage but not as much leverage as being able to tell your boss that their project will fail and they will lose money if they don't give you what you want. Not every software engineer is going to have that kind of leverage but if you want it you are probably more likely to get it by using your existing skills than by trying to organize a union.
It takes months to find a good developer of any type on the open market (in Chicago at least).
Domain knowledge in the vertical markets in which we operate takes months after hire as well.
1) When a co-op student, a female friend (also a co-op student) was assaulted (punched in the face) when she crossed a picket line to go to work - she wasn't in a union job so she _had_ to go to work.
2) At my first job, another friend related an experience where they beat their daily quota by 3-4x. They were taken aside and told it was amazing how much property damage happened in the parking lot, and perhaps they should slow down a bit.
3) An immediate relative was bullied at work. The union represented her until a point it became contentious. Then they ignored the issue hoping it would go away.
4) Another immediate member of my family had someone protected from repercussions after endangering 100+ people in a safety critical role because they were part of a union drive.
Those experiences all happened in rapid succession in the 90s, it formed an opinion in my head of what a union is, and I didn't want anything to do with them.
Additionally, unions force costs to go up on many projects and revert any productivity gains that technology has provided. This prevents projects from getting done reducing the GDP impact of the larger industry even though certain people would likely get paid less.
Yes, for labor jobs, unions are absolutely necessary, but from my perspective collective bargaining presents many failures when it comes to coordinating large projects across multiple union groups, in addition to demoralizing high performers as unions as of right now have not adopted well to any sort of up or out promotion structure.
Honestly, I think this is worth some honest discussion about the big picture. Many of the critiques against neoliberalism[1] is that all of the benefits of opening international trade and automation have gone to the rich. In 1930 John Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek for his grandchildren[2]. The average workweek in the U.S. is 47-49 hours[3]. This is in a world where dual incomes is common.
I'm not advocating paying people to sit around all day, but I think it would be good to look at what we're trading work/life balance, job security, income, life expectancy, age of retirement, and the other things we give up for it. Personally, I still like the current world of iPhones and Amazon delivery, so it's not a clear argument in one direction, but it's not something I hear people talk about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Focus_on_economi...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/john-keynes-predicted-15-hour...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/09...
Now, if i downloaded the Amazon app and became a delivery dude i would still deliver Amazon. No insurance No savings. Use of my own car. I could do this for amazon for 5 years and i would have nothing.
The union already blazed the way for my salary and benefit package.. So i simply benefited from it.
Amazon and uber workers and drivers have so untapped clout..
Perhaps at individual companies, but the overall trend is pay has not kept pace with productivity gains, so the overall trend across society is the reverse of what you're worrying about.
Both American political parties are (from a socio-economic perspective) more right-wing than all mainstream parties in my country. Even the most right-wing party we have is pro (partly) subsidized health care, pro minimum wage, pro decent unemployment and disability benefits, etc etc. You could say my country is way more left wing than the US.
But the unions! Wow USA unions appear to be little communist islands. I've never seen unions so extremely, maybe obscenely left wing than those in the USA. Again, this is just from stories so maybe I have it all wrong, but the unions appear to me like the last remaining instance of "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" in the Western world.
If I'm not mistaken (and I might be), then I wonder whether maybe this is because US politics is so bizarrely (from a European perspective) right-wing. If you can actually die from hunger in your trailer home after a bad day at work, then extremely protective unions make a lot more sense than if you know you'll stay alive even if you lose an arm or your boss screws you over.
Not sure whether there's a point I'm trying to make but I wonder what HN thinks about all this :-)
It's interesting that you mention Communism. Historically, U.S. unions have been vehemently anti-communist after widespread suspicion of the U.S. Communist Party spread, due to developments (mass murder) in the Soviet Union and also due to its overt link with the Soviet international organization (Comintern).
While public sector unions, ---particularly teachers unions and police--- can engage in what could be called leftist tactics and attitudes, your description doesn't fit private sector unions.
Some private sector unions in the U.S. have a long history with corruption, particularly Mafia involvement with meat packers and longshoremen in New York, but that is an entirely different matter.
If your union isn't a bit socialist, won't it easily end up becoming a protectionist nightmare?
(disagreements noted in my other comment)
I've experienced union and non-union workplaces - I'd have no problem working in either - in the end, if the company rewards loyalty, and longevity - you're going to have a good time all around - union or not.
How do you shore this up the the fact that many of us engineers have pretty freaking awesome, high paying jobs?
Things have seemed to work out great for those of us who are willing and able to negotiate well for ourselves.
Thats the problem I have with unions. I do not for a single second want someone else to be negotiating for me. I can do that on my own, and I have done well for myself using my own negotiation power.
As a younger man, I've been a member of unions that were good, and unions that were bad, and while I don't remotely proclaim myself to be an expert on them, but I am experienced enough to have observed what I believe are patterns.
Ideally, unions aim to solve power imbalance between workers and employers, which it does by giving power to a presumably disadvantaged party. Where the employees are already in demand, or are highly skilled, what have you, employers already have to work hard to maintain the employee base it has because replacement employees are difficult to find.
Where the employees are less skilled, or more easily replaceable, unions can be super effective at raising workplace standards and wage negotiations.
That said, I'm wary of anyone who speaks in absolutes to either end. Some unions arrive at too much power, and can be self-defeating or exploitative. Some unions are corrupt. Some unions don't work very hard for their members. Some unions are horrible, and then turn it around, and vice versa. Unions can be effective at raising wage floors, but can also lower ceilings for workers who might be best off without them.
The assertion that any given union is de facto good or bad seems flawed to me, as I've seen both sides of that particular coin, and like all eco-systems, work very well when a particular set of conditions are met and a particular balance is struck.
The presence of a union can also make the difference in management resorting to close/offshore the operation altogether.
Yeah, but companies are also really good at making people think they are getting a great deal when they aren't.
There was a thread a few years ago where someone posted a police agency's salary database disclosure and the comments were along the lines of "zomg some random guy I knew in high school makes way more than me".
Not to contradict the poster who claims that unions can become parasitical--both on employers/taxpayers and on newer members--but in the end which benny is more valuable: free meals, or a fully COLA'ed pension that's still paying out when you're 80?
Less / No crunch time. Ethical support so you can refuse to do something shady. Support for union members getting equal pay and equal treatment, despite marginalized status. Job security for people over 50.
Those are just off the top of my head. And yes, I get that not all of those things are delivered by all unions. But ultimately, there is a lot to be gained from banding together and cooperating, which cannot be negotiated singly.
It's easy to see when designing reactors, or building bridges that your work and decisions can directly impact human welfare and correspondingly I have seen a very high standard of attention to detail, standards compliance and ethics in those fields. When designing software systems and applications it's harder for some to see, but the potential impact is still present.
It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
Also, organizing is not just about protecting one's job. It's about collectively negotiating for stuff like pay, benefits, working conditions, etc. that are extremely difficult to negotiate as a single employee due to the vast power imbalance in the employee/employer relationship. I don't know about you, but my last few jobs offered almost zero room to negotiate anything--like most jobs, when you work in tech you work entirely on your employer's terms.
That’s about the sum of it, yeah. At least for myself, every job I’ve had in the past 6 years has been through my network, and the interviews have been short and sweet formalities.
This is a really important point to understand. Any time I hear people talk like the market will never get worse I'm reminded of San Diego in the early 90s. There had been a ton of great jobs there with all of the defense contracting jobs — whole suburbs full of highly-trained engineers who making great incomes because multiple companies were bidding for their skills.
Then the Cold War ended and the entire sector halted. None of those companies were hiring, anyone looking to move was selling a house in a neighborhood where many of their neighbors were doing the same thing, and if they tried to switch fields there was a lot of competition. My first employer had a $15/hour software QA job getting applications from people with engineering MS and PhD degrees who'd been out of work for a long time and were willing to take a huge pay cut just to have a job, only now that education and experience was seen as a negative because it was assumed that they'd leave as soon as the job market improved.
And, yes, the job market did recover but everyone affected still had to eat the cost of significant periods of unemployment or being forced to sell a house because they couldn't make the mortgage payments. IT has some differences in that the skills are more generally in demand but there are also some interesting risks like an entire profession becoming commoditized as e.g. a SaaS offering becomes a viable alternative to hiring staff — especially because the last couple decades have left a lot of tech workers are used to thinking of themselves as having more in common with senior management than we actually do and not everyone understands how quickly most companies would cut them lose if it fit the budget better.
I believe that we are well paid because of the demand and the amount of money a good developer can make a company. If that equation changes, then why shouldn't developers get laid off or lose their jobs?
Currently, supply and demand is working very well for most of us, especially in SV. I would never trade my freedom for a union that, in all instances, become friction and the bureaucracy of the union benefits from my hard work.
And will the teamsters union be able to save all those truck driving jobs? I doubt it, unless they do it through politics...
The one example I always give is of my mom starting out working in the 70's. Her employer was not unionized but had several unionized competitors in the city. Because her employer didn't want to bother with union negotiations all the time they paid a quarter more an hour than their competitors and so no union ever started up. My mom was benefitting from a union she wasn't even a member of. You could be in that same position if a programmer union ever started up.
If I ever was forced to join a union, I'd quit on the spot and go find somewhere else to work. I worked for Comair (small airline owned by Delta) during a stewardess strike, which ultimately caused the company to sell planes and eventually go out of business. Big unions like the teamsters don't give a crap about their members, only their power and greed.
It was said a year or so later that the teamsters were talking to other airlines saying, "Don't give us what we want and we'll pull a Comair on you". All of the Stewardess union members, airplane mechanics union members, and pilots union members were furloughed aka given indefinite non-paid leave due to the profit imbalance that the highest paid stewardesses in the industry caused on a sub-par airline.
No thanks unions. There is enough free market for what we do that they aren't necessary.
EDIT: Hey everyone, I can't comment in this thread for several more hours now, because HN considers questioning the wisdom of deploying conventional databases on Kubernetes beyond the pale. They throttled my account because my posts that did that were too "boring" and "tedious". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 for details.
If HN's mods ran the union, would they limit your professional advancement for asking questions that may imperil their friends' VC investments, on the subjective basis of the question's technical implications being too "boring" and "tedious"? Because they limit HN accounts for it. Now imagine they could control your salary instead of your imaginary internet points.
Also, no matter how you look at it. The result of the failed negotiations was them selling 90 planes to pay for the stewardesses. This resulted in the furloughing of 90 planes worth of employees, and ultimately in the company not being competitive enough to survive.
I saw this front and center as someone with no real view for or against unions sans the union dues were forcibly deducted from my salary whether I wanted to be in one or not. I came out seeing the teamsters for what they truly are. The teamsters unions are the thugs they were formed to prevent. They need to be broken up.
It's not that surprising; Hacker News comments tend not to sympathize with victims of harassment, sexism, or racism when stories about those topics come up. So it's not surprising that it doesn't become the focus of the thread here, since it's not the lede in the story.
> f you read the article it goes on to note that was because of sexual harrassment and his attitude toward gay men. These are bread and butter union issues.
In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on the workplace. If the workplace is mostly men who don't really have a problem with harassment of women, the union won't either, and women aren't going to have a great time there. That's sadly pretty common in blue-collar unions[0].
[0] eg: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chica...
Oh, I never said that it did. I'm referring to blue-collar jobs like Rust Belt manufacturing specifically because that's a historically heavily unionized industry where the workforce is disproportionately male and white.
Is it as much as we think? It seems that big companies in Silicon Valley had no qualms about talking among one another about not "poaching" developers (what a lame term poaching is).
I'm not terribly keen on the idea of unions either (or immigration restrictions for that matter), but we should damn well be sure that companies are not colluding.
(I wish the fact that corporations are people was a satire...)
Take a look at big tech earnings http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-revenue-employ... . It may look like you're getting a lot, but there's a lot of room left for even greater salaries and (still) insane profits. Maybe even double them.
If programmers need a union, its not for pay. It's to get management and executive expectations back in line with reality. I'm tired of 60 hour work weeks, and poorly managed pet projects. And I damn well don't want to risk a career change.
I think this is going to change soon (~10 years).
I have seen people with computer science masters degrees working in support positions. I’m not talking about maintenance development, I’m talking about tech support.
When I graduated there were maybe 5 people in my class, but now the market is starting to get flooded with CS people.
Everyone is hopping on the CS train like there is no tomorrow.
The market being flooded with CS degrees doesn't scare me, I'll start getting scared when it takes less than 6 months to hire for an entry-level role.
I left my last job due to harassment thinking screw this I dont need it and can get a job wherever. Ooops there goes my $110k job/lifestyle!
You can get your resume evaluated and you can ask questions about your performance, maybe there's something you can do to make yourself more attractive to employers.
You should not conclude from your experience that tech is a bad career choice.
For as much as people like to gripe about LinkedIn and their variously deceptive practices, marketing heads and executives don't write code. There are engineers in there making that stuff happen.
It's still supply and demand. When you have a monopoly on the demand side, you can significantly put downward pressure on the price.
Supply and demand doesn't cease to exist even when the market is screwed up. It just puts constraints on the curves. Google "supply and demand graph in a monopoly" to see more.
Unions create a legal framework around repetitive work.
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building?
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers have stories about working late at night and on weekends to ship features on bogus accelerated schedules they had little hand in setting?
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers accept payment in the form of equity that has to be executed at great expense immediately after leaving the company, and offers no actual guarantee of return after making that investment?
If it's a "seller's market", why are developers forced to move to the most expensive real estate markets in the country to work every day from a particular office when their work can be done more productively from their own home offices?
If it's a "seller's market", why are so many developers compensated with equity whose terms they're not even allowed to fully understand? And why is it that their common shares are last in line after liquidation preferences and VCs take their rake?
I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working conditions. Not simply how much they're paid --- and make no mistake, plenty of developers have those complaints, and feel victimized by the way compensation is negotiated for in this market --- but also simply for how inefficiently and inhumanely their jobs are structured compared to what they so obviously could be.
Tech workers should organize. United they bargain, divided they write anonymous complaints on HN.
I get paid 60% of what I made at my last job because there were certain things I wanted to be different in my work environment. Too many people optimize only for pay and then complain that nothing else works the way they want it to. Cut some salary off of your top line and you'll find that the leverage that gives you in other areas is pretty huge, particularly at companies that aren't bogged down in bureaucracy. If your salary is too low to comfortably trade off against, then you're obviously not one of the examples of people with market power.
Now don't get me wrong: most of these things are positive-sum, and ideally they wouldn't trade off against pay because they might increase productivity. But that doesn't have much to do with being a seller's market.
I've never had a problem negotiating any of those points with any of my employers in the tech industry. Perhaps work for smaller companies if these sorts of things are important to you?
If you want to max out salary in silicon valley, I guess your list applies. For almost everywhere else in the country it's simply not the case - if you are truly talented you can almost write your own job description.
> I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working conditions.
I suppose that's one reaction. My reaction is generally amusement at the ridiculous complaints. Once in a while a legitimate one comes through, but most of them are truly "first world problems" to the absolute utter extreme.
But to the rest: this is a forum where people constantly complain about the shoddy standards of shipping software. Shit security. Shit privacy. Shit performance. Shit dependency hell. Right now people get paid a lot of money to make as-bad-as-possible-to-still-make-money products. It's interesting.
Maybe a group that could negotiate on a larger scale with companies to say "we're not making that shit" could have some use. Or maybe the jobs would all go overseas, but from my experience... good luck with that!
BRAVO.
We are the beating heart of this world. We have way more leverage than industrial workers ever did - yet they won the weekend, the eight hour day and workplace safety.
What could we win once we set aside the moronic idea that we are each embryonic billionaires whose assholes spray gold coins every time we update a git repo?
Civilized health care, for starters. That alone would make the disruption worth it.
Working in product or in project management is literally 10% of the stress with the same pay. How does that make any sense?
There are plenty of good developer jobs in silicon valley and the broader tech market. Why work somewhere that treats you poorly?
I'm curious, how does your office look like?
It's open, but we got it because we loved the building, and we have two conference rooms with doors for calls.
(My "desk" is a big couch with a monitor arm mounted to the wall.)
(I worked from a couch at WeWork for a year prior to this and it didn't seem to ruin me).
It probably makes the difference that you have a swing arm, and aren't looking at a machine on your knees.
Needless to say my current job is heavy remote with flexible time in the office that I took over a higher paying position.
But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts or extended options execution windows.
Are you a professional developer? Which of these issues do you think are non-issues?
It's not that people disagree about them, it's that many developers don't suffer from them.
I'm a professional developer and, for me personally, everything in your list is a non-issue. I left BigCo where they were an issue. But I sure can think of a host of issues that I would be concerned about were I part of an organization, one of which being someone else saying what are and aren't issues to me.
If a time comes where a good dev cannot choose where they work and basically negotiate their own terms (e.g. I'm not putting up with any of that stuff in your list and I don't have to in our current market), then unionization may be warranted. But as it stands now, I think many of the issues you listed are avoidable and good devs call their shots.
The HN complaints you hear are an echo chamber and shouldn't be a basis for your opinions on the industry as a whole.
When that time comes it will very likely be too late to effectively organize. It might already be.
But I mean, it's obvious, right, that not all these issues have to be universal for them to be nucleation points for organizing? As has been photographically established downthread, I don't much care about open offices right now. But I would not be shocked to see a team of developers organizing around getting quiet offices for their startup.
My just-so-story understanding of this stuff - if you are a full-time employee in some brainy job, your employer does have some sort of non-zero claim to some kinds of your intellectual output, even when you're not on the clock. To disambiguate this, a standard approach is to let the employer own everything while making it easy for the employee to explicitly exempt personal projects. The onerous-sounding AoI comes with an escape clause and the understanding the employer isn't going to be a butthead about letting the employee use it and that's pretty much exactly how it works out. That way, as your career takes you from a kitten subscription service to a dev tools vendor to Unicron, your npm packages for Pokemon eugenics optimization stay yours.
I can totally see how this might not work that well if you're a specialist in a specialized and funky field like security or how such agreements might seem like utterly evil overreach if you're reading about them on HN from your digital nomad space van parked in Auerbach in der Oberpfalz. But as a general [US/software/SFBA/etc] thing, they don't feel like a top-of-the-list issue.
Probably a bit of debate here, there are for sure some absurd ones I've read about here. I understand why companies feel the need to protect themselves though, even if its wrong.
> extended options execution windows
This is just stupid and I'm not sure anyone thinks the current system is good, not employees, not employers and not even the IRS.
Options do suck, but I guess these are considered less pressing issues because anyone intelligent ignores options more or less completely. If you end up with a windfall from them, that's great, but no one should expect it. Working for equity is for chumps -- demand a decent salary. It's plenty attainable.
I also don't apply to large fortune 500 companies either, since I know the drawbacks are not worth the pay increase.
I know plenty of developers who worked part-time on their startup at well-known SV companies. Two different sets of coworkers subsequently quit, and each sold their company for ~500M. Another one has gotten several rounds of funding. Another one sold their company to an enterprise company for over $1B, and after the earnout period was over, they formed a new company.
There was nothing "onerous" about any of the contracts these people signed. Meanwhile I haven't heard the opposite at all.
Frankly, I don't care even a little bit about this.
I am not building any startups that are going to be worth anything. I do stuff for fun, sure, but none of it is going to be worth any amount of money ever.
Thats why I work for a big company who pays me a high salary, because I don't have any world changing, valuable startup ideas. If the big 5 tech company that I currently work for wants to have the IP rights to my worthless side projects, they can go ahead and have them. (They are certainly paying me enough for the privilege)
Or in other words, if I had the choice between "keeping my IP rights", and "getting paid 5k more in salary", I'd take the 5k every time. Or the 1k. Or merely to avoid an awkward conversation with a lawyer.
And I expect that the vast majority of other developers are in the same boat as me. They `might` have side projects, but they aren't kidding themselves about how much they are worth, and are correctly valuing those IP rights at near 0$.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work under onerous IP contracts that grant their employers rights to what they build in their spare time?
Most developers don't have any IP to lose. If you have IP to lose then you can find a company that won't ask you to sign onerous contracts.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building?
This is entitlement. Open office saves money. The only option that saves you from wearing headphones is a private office per programmer, which is rare (I think Microsoft still does this). The next common options is cubicles but you still need to wear headphones.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers have stories about working late at night and on weekends to ship features on bogus accelerated schedules they had little hand in setting?
We are well paid to get our work done. Doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, accountants all work as much or even longer hours. Also bad managers create bad schedules and bad cultures, this is across fields.
> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers accept payment in the form of equity that has to be executed at great expense immediately after leaving the company, and offers no actual guarantee of return after making that investment?
"Great expense" is an exaggeration. Other career paths don't have equity. 80% of the companies I've worked at gave me worthless equity. It's the game that we play. The other 20% made me ~$500k.
> If it's a "seller's market", why are developers forced to move to the most expensive real estate markets in the country to work every day from a particular office when their work can be done more productively from their own home offices?
No one is forced to move anywhere. People want to move here, still.
> If it's a "seller's market", why are so many developers compensated with equity whose terms they're not even allowed to fully understand? And why is it that their common shares are last in line after liquidation preferences and VCs take their rake?
"Not even allowed to understand"? That's a lie. If you work for a shitty company that isn't transparent, you can leave and work for another company that is. That's a seller's market.
Tech workers are generally much happier than other professions. Until that changes, you will never get unions. I hope it never happens, and I will never join a union, and I personally don't know a single programmer that wants to as well. Those that want unions are in the vast minority, and are much louder on forums like Hacker News, but it won't get much traction unless there's another dotcom bust.
It'd be interesting to see if, having pointed this out, the voting spread changes. I'd like a truer accounting, if there's one to be had!
Why not try to publicize this ideaand see how much real traction you get? (spoiler alert: zero because most developers don’t want it)
2. Starfighter is one of 3 companies I've been involved in publicly on HN. The first one did pretty good. We're doing pretty good with this one. Thanks for asking! :)
3. There's an obvious difference between the question of whether something's a viable business (CTFs as contingency recruiters: probably not!) vs. whether an argument represents any kind of popular sentiment.
4. Do upvotes validate my argument? No. But they would seem to me to rebut your claim to speak for "most developers".
What kind of publication were you thinking of?
A converse example is Uber. Uber is despised on HN and every anti-Uber comment is upvoted. But HN sentiment has had no consequence on Uber’s success and growth.
“Most developers” don’t comment on HN. Most developers also don’t want unions otherwise we would have had one in the 50 years of industry, despite all your precious HN upvotes.
Also, your misrepresentation of “publicize” into “publication” is strange.
It felt icky writing that comment upthread, but, I figured, what the hell, let's see what happens.
Not everyone can do what you can do and those people in particular benefit from a union. Others have also listed why you may benefit but I wanted to make clear that you assuming everyone is like you is silly.
Because you will one day be 45 years old ...
For software developers seller's market is long gone.
that's a silly question, isn't it? "for when it becomes a buyer's market", seems like an obvious answer. and when that happens, it'll probably be harder to unionize.
I suspect it's just that when the going is good, people don't really think they need a union. If the prophecies come true and AI starts writing code for us, you can bet people will suddenly be interested in unionisation.
The more I think about it, software engineering is almost completely antithetical to the idea of unions. Traditional engineers have so much structure around their fields because the laws of physics govern a large part of their craft. Not so with SE.
Professional classical musicians require a great deal more training (and talent) than programmers to get to the level where they can make a living doing it.
Mostly because our working conditions are not bad, we are more or less paid fairly, there are a lot of options to move around.
Also it'd be bad if we had other people negotiating on our behalf, for what we probably feel is less pay than we are worth, and the concept of seniority would ruffle and stop a lot of newer grads from getting higher paying jobs over people that have been working already for 25 years in the industry.
That's not a required part of a union. I think one of the misconceptions people have is that if you have a union it looks and operates exactly like one on a Ford factory floor. If you formed a union it could do exactly what you want it to do, and not do the things you don't want it to do. If you wanted a union to do nothing other than negotiate payment for overtime and a new Macbook every year you could just do that.
Some possibilities I can think of are: better pay, less work hours or paid overtime, better benefits, more vacation time, minimum office size / screen size / cubicle wall height, a cap on the ratio of employee pay to CEO pay, a right to say no to work that violates a professional code of conduct without risk of reprisal, access to training material, pay transparency, prohibitions against overly-broad intellectual property assignments and a right to work on non-competing projects in one's free time, prohibitions against anti-compete clauses, and mandatory prior notification of layoffs.
I imagine most people who work in tech would have a different list, but there would be some overlap.
I've seen the types of developers that thrive in political climates. They manage to get paid way too much money to make poor decisions about subjects they read the wikipedia article on just before the meeting. I honestly believe these are the types that will rise through the union ranks and will use their power for harm and personal enrichment.
Union interviews will be all be standardized and will consist of: drawing UML diagrams, naming 24 design patterns in 30 seconds, and white-boarding a blockchain Rubik's CryptoCube solver implementation.
Points will be deducted if the solution is not an abstract OOP design that can extend to n-dimensional Rubik's CryptoCubes.
So, like today's retarded interviewing environment for most SV companies?
Software developers and people in IT are probably two orders of magnitude more likely to be libertarian / anarcho-capitalist and conservative in economic views than your average union worker in another field. That's definitely a large impact as well.
I'm not trying to argue that unions are wholly bad either, but there's a trade-off to be had here. It's not as simple as "people dislike unions because they're too dumb to realize that they want one".
I sometimes point out that every movie star they've ever heard of is a member of a union.
I think part of the problem comes from the decline in unions in the US over the last few decades. New industries aren't unionizing, and older unions are being undermined where possible.
Getting into a movie industry union is very difficult and rather expensive to boot. You don't just get into these unions by showing up at the door.
The correlation to software would be having a list of progressively difficult things you have to do, so that, ultimately, only 10% of people make it in. The rest pay their dues by working minimum wage jobs and unpaid internships.
Unions, professional societies, licensing bodies, etc., all function primarily to shore up the in group. These groups then live off of annual license fees, dues, and other types of lechery. This group grows more and more detached, sitting in an office worrying about the meta-scale instead of actually doing any real work. Eventually the union and licensing bosses consume massive quantities of the otherwise-productive value just for sitting there in the middle. By this point, their approval has been codified into major corporate contracts if not literally made legally prerequisite. Good luck extracting them at that point. Right-to-work at least keeps that apparatus somewhat in check.
I knew a young woman aspiring to become a professional actor. She had spent years trying to earn her way into SAG, and had years left to go before she realistically had a shot of actually getting in. Unions are not charities. They exist to serve themselves and the people they decide to like, and no one else.
The fact is that all unions start with some exclusions. This would have to be a critical piece of any unionization as employers would have no incentive to agree to the terms laid out.
You're not really going to get rich from any acting roles.
Even at the 99th percentile, most actors don't make a ton of money, and the employment is both sporadic and punitively taxed. So those who are rich are generally those who were independently wealthy to begin with.
For every actor you read about who's making multimillion dollar contracts year after year for franchise movies, there are literally thousands who are making a modest living at best, or barely scraping by at worst.
I also believe that forced collective bargaining is unconstitutional, because it requires people to associate with a group that they don't want to associate with.
If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, that's wonderful. But, they can leave me out of it, and I can do without whatever pay schedule and benefits they manage to extract from the employer.
IMO the real issue with current law is that collective bargaining agreements must apply to all employees in a bargaining unit.
But that is the market, is it not? If your employer chooses to require all employees to negotiate as a unit, and is not required to do so by law, aren't they just doing that because they're a rational actor in the market?
The law is a different question, yes, but the fundamental motivation is to prevent 80% of the company from negotiating, say, "We all get 1-hour lunch breaks" and the remaining 20% from benefiting from the negotiation because that's the rational thing for the company to do in that situation, thereby providing an incentive for people to remove themselves from the "agreement" and coast on it nonetheless. What would you do to solve this problem in other ways?
But, unionization is not something an employer really has a choice in currently. If people vote to form a union, the employer must deal with the union representation (to my understanding).
What I'm saying is that an employer should be free to fire any employee (including for the explicit reason that they are a union member) and a group of employees should be able to strike and bargain as a unit if they like. But the union members shouldn't be able to force a non-member to strike or bargain with them.
Edit: and the non-member employee shouldn't get any of the pay rates, benefits, or work rules that the union negotiates for it's members.
How does this work, though? Take the lunch-break example - it is economically irrational for a company that is giving a 1-hour lunch break to the vast majority of its employees to require a couple of employees to work through lunch, when you have no guarantee that you'll have a complete set of workers. It's easier to just put a "Closed for lunch" sign out front.
Or take health insurance, which is purchased in bulk. You can't give the vast majority of employees a better plan and keep the rest on the old plan. The old plan no longer is available to you with those enrollment numbers. You can either put them on a more expensive plan that resembles their old plan, or on the new plan, or on no plan at all.
And that's leaving aside the fact that the negotiating parameters change. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and none of my coworkers have it, that negotiation is hard. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and all of my coworkers have it, that's an entirely different conversation. If I want a better health plan than any of the ones my company offers, that's a huge uphill battle. If I want a better health plan than I'm on that all my coworkers are already on, I can probably just have that for the asking.
There is just no way that you can require that the non-members are not allowed to benefit from the union negotiations. It doesn't work like that.
For health care, there exists individual plans. So, the employer can choose to offer that to non-members if they think it's worth it. The employer could also have a standard non-union benefit package if the company had enough non-union employees. Or, it could choose not to offer health insurance (or any other benefit it offered to the union).
I don't agree that seeing your union colleagues get a benefit means that an individual negotiator be more likely to get a benefit. This knowledge does reveal that the employer is willing to give that benefit to the union. But, the union has the weight of it's members to extract that benefit. The non-member has only their individual contribution. So it depends on the individual's value to the business versus the union members' value.
I suspect that there would still be a strong incentive to bargain collectively in jobs where an employee is easily replaced. These workers would see that they can get better compensation by banding together than going it alone.
Meanwhile, it would basically not be feasible to unionize in areas where there is a significant difference in the productivity of individual employees. Most programming falls into this category in my opinion.
More broadly, I think you've kinda missed my position a bit. I'm thinking about freedom of association as a negative right (as in "government can't force you to {x}"). So, if that right was interpreted the way I would like it to be, it doesn't really matter what the actual outcome is. It shouldn't be legal to force a non-member to associate with a union (unless the employer chooses to contract exclusively with that union).
Obviously, you're arguing that my interpretation is not desirable b/c it would cause a free-rider problem (which I don't think is as strong of a possibility as you do).
If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, that's wonderful. But, they can leave me out of it, and I can do without whatever pay schedule and benefits they manage to extract from the employer.
Well you can't really 'opt out' of the benefits of their negotiation in that way, and for the same reason you can't opt out of the union. You're not talking about a future with some unions where people can also choose to go it alone, you're talking about a future with no unions at all. At least be honest about that.
People should be free to voluntarily associate with groups that represent them and their interests.
Except collective bargaining won't exist without that law.
You realise that unions are something imposed on employers, right? They don't like them.
> You realise that unions are something imposed on employers, right? They don't like them.
and a common first thing for the union to do is to force the employer to only hire union workers.
No, closed shops are illegal, but union shops aren't. An employer can no longer agree only to hire people who are already members of a union (that's a closed shop, which used to be legal), but they can force you to join a union after you are hired. If that's the case, if the union terminates your membership, the employer is forced to terminate your employment as well.
(Ironically, the union can force you to pay dues even if you're not a member, but that's a separate matter.)
If an employer chooses to require it's employees be members of a union, I think that's their right. But, I dislike (and think should not be legal) a group voting to unionize and then forcing their agreement onto other employees that don't want to be represented.
To my current understanding, there are 2 stumbling blocks to that way of doing things. 1) Employees can force an employer to deal with a union and 2) the union must cover everyone in the bargaining unit.
In my opinion, ideally both of those things would stop. A union can operate and negotiate on behalf of it's members. The union contract wouldn't cover non-members. And an employer can choose not to hire union workers.
So you're cool with unions enforced by dictators but not unions enforced by democracy?
First: Profit seeking organizations don't care about skill they care: about wait for it... profit which is the money you add vs the money you cost, which may be completely divorced from skill.
Second: Literally nobody can accurately measure a specific individuals contribution, through skill or otherwise.
It's not based on that now.
If there were a well-run union for tech workers that is responsive and accountable to its members and has a mission to negotiate in favor of goals that I share then I'd be interested in joining.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...
LOPSA is innefective and does nothing and doesn't count in my book.
Of course unions in general have become what they were formed to prevent in many ways, and need massive amounts of reform internally themselves.
Because unions have no standing across international borders.
ask about the overtime thing, too
Why not quit and find a non-union job?
Why don't they start their own media company then rather than resort to short-term value extraction tactics which will likely drive said "cathedral of journalism" into the ground?
Also, can't the LA Times easily just buy up more freelance material from non-employees (not only journalism, graphics, web work, etc)?
Not if the union's any good.
Any future growth that may have previously resulted in hiring full time workers could easily now be redirected to freelance, temp work, and p/t workers regardless of the union.
I remember watching a Tronc video when it was trendy to make fun of them and they were already talking heavily about digitizing much of the work that was done manually. It's a much more dynamic industry than an old-school factory that needed a set of bodies with predictable roles to show up.
Some (many? most?) union contracts with companies specify that X type of work must be done by members of the union. For example, in TV stations, among the graphics equipment like character generators, the union rules at least used to be that engineers could use the keyboard, but only (union) artists could use the mouse. At the time, I worked for a character generator company; we deliberately made our character generator so that you could do everything from the keyboard, even though it had a mouse.
Not if the union is willing to go on strike. This is one of the main things a union can achieve.
In some ways, this looks like a reflection of what happened at Uber. Ousting bad leadership can be a difficult and complex process sometimes.
https://www.ft.com/content/42daca9e-facc-11e7-9bfc-052cbba03...
In this article, he suggests Silicon Valley engineers should be worked to the bone like their Chinese counterparts. Some of the things he suggests in the articles:
1) End vacation days (he refers to taking a vacation day as "stealing")
2) Workers should get used to not seeing their kids
3) End the weekend (employees should work 14 hour days, 6-7 days a week)
4) Buildings should turn off the heat. Instead, employees can wear coats and scarves at their desks.
5) Physical fitness should be discouraged.
We also have the ability to fire untalented or unpleasant people, and promote especially talented individuals regardless of age or tenure.
You don't need to work at any company that looks like the above. And I don't know of any company that looks like the above.
Moritz is one of the most esteemed partners at the most prestigious VC firm in the world. He's a multi-billionaire with immense power. He's not "some guy."
"has an opinion"
He wrote an op-ed in the most widely read international business journal. This isn't an opinion, it's a rallying cry.
What troubles me if this is the logic for our newspapers (especially local which cover tangible issues that we could actually change in comparison to a CNN/Fox News/MSNBC) what does that say about our trust in the fourth estate? When they disappear, who will watch our officials? Cause we collectively have been on the ball for the last 30 odd years...