- Protection for under performers alongside high performers. Difficult or darn near impossible to terminate employment. Ability to enforce performance evaluation and plans could be killed by the union. Common in teacher unions.
- Without being able to measure performance, pay may be solely based on tenure, not skill.
In fact, the three times I have seen companies terminate employment after somebody was put on a PIP it was directly related to other mental health issues the employee was going through at the time. Anecdotal m, obviously, but this complaint about unions smells bogus to me, since a common complaint about the tech industry is about blood sucking low performers that stick around long past they’re due.
As for measuring performance I again fail to see any company that does an adequate job of this with heuristics that aren’t at least partially, and usually fully, based on tenure.
In short, what makes you think we’re good at these things now, such that unionizing would make them worse.
Though generally what happens is employees get basically cost-of-living raises indefinitely. Over a decade or two, the company ends up with a half-price employee, compared to market rates.
Also we don't have to be good at evaluating employees to get worse at it. Giving raises on certification and seniority will make engineers chase promotions and titles instead of solving problems and finding managers that appreciate the work.
As far as I can tell everything you're describing is the primary way that people are currently promoted and how compensation is decided. The real unicorns aren't companies with billion dollar valuations, but companies where you can just focus on solving problems and have your manager recognize that with compensation and promotion.
Just like unicorns... they don't exist.
I still feel like my question stands. Are we actually so good at these things now that unionizing would actually harm us? Or is this claim that unions will make it harder actually just hand-waving and ignoring the fact that we're already terrible at this kind of evaluation only we (workers) have no recourse against a feelingless corporate structure that exists to min-max productivity and compensation for the benefit of shareholder value?
Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.
If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to adapt, and not the other way around.
How do you prove that an employee took two weeks to find a bug that should have taken one day to find?
How do you prove that writing a domain-specific language was a bad decision compared to defining a complex XML schema?
How do you prove that an engineer is bad at explaining technical concepts?
I do think employees need organization and culture to negotiate better in the short term and manage health and career in the long term. But I don't see evidence that either the employer or the union leadership have the right incentives to meet those needs.
Email archives of PIP goals and the like. But that doesn't even matter. All you really have to do is prove you didn't fire them because they asked for OT pay they were owed.
Yes a Union cant stop some one being fired if they are guilty of Gross misconduct but they can make sure people don't get fired for say accusing a manger for unwanted touching or to make wahy for the CEO's nephew.
For example I bet James Danmore had no advice before his internal hearings that lead to his firing.
EDIT: I'll also add, although obvious to some but worth mentioning, that an effective game-dev union needs to help both those people equally.
There are very few individual roles in games. Even leadership roles are highly dependant on their teams (just look at what happened to Visceral if you want an example). And there is a lot of interdisciplinary interaction too, so even if there were separate game programming, game design and game art houses, there is no guarantee their could work with each other in a productive manner. At best you can separate QA and some art teams, which already happens all the time.
"Could be killed by a union".. yes, or they could be killed by corporate policy or management that lets rules slide for employees they like.
Your example of teachers unions is a bad one, as they often get villified. Yet, we know there are multiple reasons for a so-called "underperforming" teacher, multiple solutions that help, and the fact that one has to be able to replace the teacher if you let them go, all complicating the issue.
"Pay may be solely based on tenture, not skill" Note your use of "may be". Tenure-only pay is often used for jobs that you can't measure the skill of one person against another: Factory jobs, for example. These often still have a pay range, giving more for folks with education than those without, for example. What changes is generally transparency: Skill measures and the evaluation of those skills needs to be communicated to employees in ways they can meet and/or improve them. In addition, these same issues happen outside of unions as well.
There is always version lock in at some point, and NO workers like change if it's going to cause them to lose their livelihood. This has nothing to do with unions.
Why do you care more about protecting artificial constructs like companies at the expense of power given to people building the products?
The argument is much more nuanced than you’ve proposed.
For example, when the ACA passed, unions were more concerned with their constituency and their carve outs than with decoupling employment from healthcare. Same story for all the business interests.
However, the whole firing topic is really only filling up a fraction of unions' time. Unions' main tasks are overwatching safety regulations, crunch times, etc... so that the actual time spent at/for the company is better quality whise. This leads to happier, healthier programmers which should be in their employer's interest as well, see e.g. negative press and lack of battle proven personel at telltale.
A union would go nuts in that scenario. Which then supports the theory that unions would oppose technology that improved efficiency since they would care more about the protecting the production input than they care about optimizing the production output.
This article is one of many discussing the dawn of truck automation in very much detail: https://teamster.org/news/2018/01/teamsters-union-perspectiv...
As you can see unions are in fact discussing this very broadly without jumping to easy conclusions.
Automation by ML is a complex topic on all levels. We are just at the beginning of what will be very interesting times regarding policing automation, ML, and AI.
Union bonus is, that when your a-hole boss has a grudge and fires you for a bogus reason, you can dispute it, and possibly get your job back too.
Our contracts also spell out specific job titles and positions, and pay rates accordingly - a guy who only sweeps gets $x, where as a special effects technician gets nearly 3 times that amount.