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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to 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.

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> 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.

I used to think that as well. The problem is that if you don't have an arbitrary employment security clause (seniority, aka LIFO), employers can find ways to fire you/lay you off arbitrarily for union activity under the cover of other reasons (e.g. unrealistic performance goals). I don't know how to resolve this problem. But without LIFO, you can be guaranteed that most people who use the union for its intended purpose doesn't have much of a future at the company.

The people with political influence in the union might not be those whose views align with the more technically proficient members of the group. I anticipate a developer union being another vector for leeches to grasp onto productive developers and (indirectly) siphon off their well earned money.

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.

> 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.

So, like today's retarded interviewing environment for most SV companies?

I think that's an interesting discussion worth having -- supposing a tech union existed, what would we want it to negotiate for?

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.

Gamedev is the only sub-industry that comes to mind that could see a large benefit from a union. That said burnout is so high and there's so many people beating down the door for a job that its never really materialized.

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