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Comment by chairmanwow | Hacker News Reader

It would force the organization to its knees in my opinion. Unions for work in showbiz are ridiculous in that they restrict people to members of a specific union; e.g. All adjustments to an actor'a appearance must be done by the appropriate member of the cast, insofar as a sound guy couldn't brush a hair off of the shoulder of an actor.

Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.

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Imagine ... is not an argument. It is fabricating a non-existent scenario. I can imagine a whole lot of things non of which factor into whether labor should collectively bargain for better conditions.

This whole thread is made from 93.4% paper tigers and straw men.

It is an argument and it is not a straw man, because that argument is based on historical precedent. It's simply observing what has happened repeatedly in the past and pointing out it'd likely happen again. There are no logical fallacies there - if you believe the future would be different to the past, despite implementing the same policies, it's on you to argue why.

I am not going to argue on the merits of unions based another union and industries separation of duties taken out of context. It is an argument killing trope, "look at the ridiculous separation of job responsibilities in the film unions!" OMG, What would happen if we took this to the extreme in tech? Imagine, in a world where one person types statements and another enters semicolons. If you can't solve this problem, unions are bad.

It has no bearing on the validity of labor collectively bargaining for better conditions.

I am curious what your ideal software engineering union would look like.

I'm personally quite opposed to unions since they all seem to abuse their power in the long run, but I am curious what you would want a union to do for you.

To be fair, companies are well capable of adding extremely crippling bureaucracy to development processes without union help.

There are actually unions in technology (particularly, but not exclusively, in the public sector) so while that might be a valid argument as to why adapting a particular element of showbusiness union policies in a particular way would be a bad idea for a tech union, it's not actually an argument against unions in tech.

Public sector unions are public sector unions, not technology unions. AFSCME does not represent the interests of technical workers. And since when are public sector tech workers (truthfully the bottom of the barrel in terms of technical skill) something to aspire to?

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