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.