Comment by brandonmenc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandonmenc | Hacker News Reader

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My mother was in IBEW for ~40 years, and went on strike a couple of times. Grandfather was a union organizer. I was in IBEW very briefly as a teenager working for GTE.

My father went from being a union steward to having grievances filed against him as a member of management during his ~40 years at GE.

I've seen both sides.

imo, unions are best suited for workers who have no leverage: at jobs where the worker is an interchangeable part, or is unspecialized, or where the labor market is flooded, or when they want to minimize changing employers - software development is none of the above.

Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

How to achieve that? Maybe a professional organization is needed - similar to doctors - but a union and all its trappings? Meh.

I find it so weird that so many software developers think they're being paid fairly in the face of Google having massive reserves of cash just lying around.

Additionally there is lots of software written 5-10 years ago making tons of money today where the original authors get none of it.

There’s probably an order of magnitude more software that was written 5-10 years ago that lost money but the software devs were still paid for.

Yes but the loss is linear while the gains are often exponents. I bet the integral of each would make the 'lost money' nearly insignificant.

Well, yeah. Otherwise there’d be little incentive to risk that money. And you wouldn’t call those losses insignificant if it was your money :)

not to mention all the anti-poaching stuff that was revealed.

Why would they need to have those agreements if people were being paid a fair price?

When you realize you can retire early, it's quite easy to forgive them. Not realizing you're very fortunate would make you kind of a jerk, no?

So if you can retire early, complaining about your employer makes you a jerk?

No, just complaining about being underpaid when anyone looking at things objectively would say you're well off and have been treated well.

Why do you feel like you can correctly discern what the objective view is?

Well, maybe "objective" was the wrong word. But you can try to see things from other people's point of view. This is something humans can do.

Well, perhaps you can see that saying people who are "fortunate" are "jerks" for complaining when something isn't fair is quite baffling, then? And perhaps you can see that using the phrase "this is something humans can do" can come across as quite condescending? And perhaps you could see that the same argument could be used against any company with cash reserves, whether they employ engineers or minimum-wage line cooks, then?

I'm an ex-Googler. I'm speaking primarily for myself. The idea that I couldn't possibly have been "paid fairly" (which the comment I was originally replying to) is nonsense.

Note that I'm not saying that every software engineer (let alone line cooks) at Google has been paid fairly. But some of us have been fortunate, and I don't think I'm all that atypical.

Your claim that people working at a company with enormous cash reserves cannot possibly have been paid fairly is wrong, and it's condescending to tell people that they are "weird" for understanding their own situation.

I didn't call anyone weird, I said I found it weird.

I didn't say that it wasn't possible for someone working for a company with huge cash reserves to have been paid fairly.

>Google having massive reserves of cash just lying around.

What does that have to do with anything?

Clearly, employees generated that money and don't have it.

In the face of all of the companies that illegally colluded to suppress developer wages sitting on massive reserves of cash...

It’s the same thing as poor whites clinging to racism because they think it elevates their class position. False consciousness abounds.

Doctors in the US are unionized, for the economical sense of the word, and it is one of the reasons of high cost of health care and under-supply.

Software and the internet, thankfully, is generally libertarian because thats how the internet generally behaves. Otherwise, the U.S. would bar foreigners from practicing software engineering, and limit the amount of people that can have a software license.

> Doctors in the US are unionized, for the economical sense of the word,

No they are not, for any sense of the word.

> and it is one of the reasons of high cost of health care and under-supply.

No, they are not. Aside from the fact that doctors collectively have about zero control over the total supply, physician earnings account for about 7% of healthcare expenditures. That's a drop in the bucket, even if you reduced that to zero.

> Otherwise, the U.S. would bar foreigners from practicing software engineering, and limit the amount of people that can have a software license.

This much is completely true, and you can look to the incredibly long and xenophobic history of labor unions for evidence of that.

> Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

It’s an issue with the tool startups use to run their businesses: either C or S corps.

What if a startup used a DAO instead of a corporation? I’d suspect you’d see the rate paid out by the smart contract would be proportional to an engineer’s contribution.

Measuring the engineer’s contribution is non-obvious though; it’s not a simple metric like LoC, bug reports closed, feature requests completed, etc.

Guilds

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