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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't Googlers make a union? I think Microsoft had one back in days, but it was microscopic.

At least in the US, unions tend to cover jobs where there is a lot of manual labor and etc. They tend to heavily emphasize seniority over most anything, and in doing so straight up discourage merit based pay. Many have strict rules about what position is offered to who and when (seniority wins again).

They're not very effective / desirable for higher skill jobs IMO where merit and skills change rapidly.

Granted that's all very general and I'm sure there are exceptions but unions (I hear they're different elsewhere) in the US are kinda wonky, not very agile, and can become an negative entity in many ways as they serve their own interests.

This isn't strictly true. Professional athletes in major leagues are unionized, and their jobs are highly specialized and well paid. The Writers Guild of America is another union that represents a non-manual labor profession. You could also consider the American Medical Association as a pseudounion guild that restricts entry into the medical field and keeps wages high.

Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at their skill level. That's a pretty distant comparison. Same goes for doctors where they're not readily replaceable considering training / licensing requirements.

Pro Athletes are like 1% of the 1%. Even the 12th guy on the roster was like the best player on his college team. I am not sure if everyone in google was the best coder in their college.

>Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at their skill level.

Er, what? That was the point.

You: Unions are mainly effective for low-skill, manual jobs.

ForHackernews: But they have them for professional athletes and actors too.

You: Irrelevant, they're a whole different animal.

Yes, the point all along was that the union model applies to different animals/worker-types.

Also, they failed to address screenwriters, who have a creative specialist occupation that is vaguely more similar to software engineers.

Interesting, never thought about that one. And it's also similar in terms of tons of unqualified people trying to get in, and a low barrier to entry (in terms of producing recognizable work)...

As well as the Screen Actor's Guild.

"SAG-AFTRA represents approximately 160,000 actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals."

https://www.sagaftra.org/home

As well as the American Federation of Musicians.

When I was a freelance orchestral musician I loved the union. There was a huge difference in how you were treated during union vs non-union gigs.

My wife was a part of a union that covered theater workers.

Their group medical benefits were "you pay for it and submit each bill individually". It was pretty brutal, they showed no interest in changing it at the time.

Progress is a function of effort, not time. Default to action, push whenever feasible to fix what is broken.

I find many union's efforts to be lacking generally.

And federal government employees have a union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the vast majority of which are office workers. Something like 670,000 members.

AMA is great for doctors. You need a license to practice you don't need a license to code. I don't think it wouldn't really apply to programmers.

The AMA is everything that is wrong with American Healthcare.

They have enforced the Physician monopoly to the point where its cronyism.

There is a reason Physicians make 300k/yr.

But it’s good for the members of the profession, which is the point of its existence. No doubt a similarly structured “programmers’ guild” would be equally good—for programmers.

It would only be good for the programmers who kiss the ring and the already priviledged. It will screw over everyone else.

I will never ever support an organization that puts up artificial barriers to what is currently a very open work industry.

I would join the group just to sabotage it if they tried to keep out bootcampers or people without a CS degree. Anyone should be allowed to program.

On the other hand, they are the reason a doctor or lawyer trained in India can not come to the US and directly start practicing, aside from the Indian lawyer not knowing US law, which they could potentially learn just as they learn java.

No negative sentiment implied here. I am an immigrant myself.

IMO, there should professional licensing gated by an exam, similar to the accounting or actuarial professions. Anyone who can pass the exams gets in. But the flip side of being a real profession is you're liable if you store passwords in plaintext.

Specifically, the RUC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_Society_Relative_Val...

It's too bad nobody ever thought to create an Independent alternative.../s

As much as both parties gave lip service to healthcare reform, they both supported cutting the independent advisory board on pricing before it even got a chance to get started.

There are plenty of truths in your point, but there are TONS of unions that aren't "manual labor" related. The top 3 US unions by membership are Teachers and Public Servant. There's also entertainment unions (All pro sports, SAG, etc). These represent millions of US workers.

There are trade offs to collective bargaining, especially if you feel you're at the top of the skill curve among workers (If you're in the 1% of workers, why would your value be helped by bargaining with the other 99%) but the idea is always that in any negotiation of you vs. "the company" the advantage is typically in favor of the company because of the deferred costs across the entire organization. The larger the company gets, the greater this advantage becomes. Yes, there are other companies competing for top talent, and coding is an exceptionally in demand skill (which BTW, many hiring managers still prioritize seniority/experience over true meritocracy) which helps in the short term but since everyone is pushing coding education initiatives, I can't imagine this will be the state of things in the future. Right now, since there's more Senior Dev job openings than people with Senior Dev skills, there may be a slightly more neutral negotiation table. We'll see how that plays out in 10 years.

Any time you have a large group of people, there's going to be disagreements about organizational choices or decisions as to how best to allocate resources. If you're unwilling to buy into the group, it's always going to feel like an albatross instead of a benefit.

A coders union could be a good thing in the long term. Right now, the sector is still too chaotic, and lots of people are making stupid amount of money. If that starts changing...

Yeah, exactly. In a lot of unions in the states, if you have 5 years experience, you make x amount of money regardless of skill. The benefits are usually VERY nice though.

Depends on the union benefits wise.

Teaching ... not so much.

Unions are for situations where individual workers can not negotiate well. That's why the term "collective bargaining" is often interchangeable.

IT workers are typically considered professionals why can negotiate for themselves.

The general rule of thumb is how "replaceable" a worker is. Someone like a doctor or a hard to find engineer is considered professional, and thus a union is not needed.

Someone who has a lot of handholding on their job, and can easily be replaced by someone else who will train quickly, is what a union is for.

Thus, a union might work for the cleaning crew, foodservice crew, and maybe even Waymo testers. It won't work for software engineers, because engineers should be able to negotiate for themselves.

I'm not sure I quite grasp this argument. Google is a popular, high-demand employer, and lots of people want to work there. But Google still found it useful to conspire with other tech companies[1] in order to hold down wages. The reverse should also be true: The sorts of engineers who can get a job at Google are in high demand. But, if they bargained as a group, they could probably get even more money.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-google-ruling/u-s-judg...

> It won't work for software engineers, because engineers should be able to negotiate for themselves.

Why? Is there something about software that inherently makes its practitioners shrewd negotiators?

Part of what keeps software salaries down is the uncapped supply of talent competing for a small number of jobs. Tough to expect much negotiating power.

Not to mention it flies in the face of many popular “engineers suck at negotiating, let me teach you how to” blog posts on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=negotiation&sort=byPopularity&...

Uhhh, no thanks.

I have no desire to increase the amount of people who have control over my working environment and getting in between my employment contracts that I negotiate with potential employers.

Having only one entity that can screw up my working conditions (the employer) is much better than having 2 entities that can screw it up (both the employer and the union.)

When dealing with a single entity, the relationship is clear. I negotiate with them, and offer my work in exchange for a contract that we both agree on.

It would screw up incentives to have a third party who has significant control over my mutually agreed contracts.

It's not a good idea while CS salaries are so exaggerated next to other engineering salaries: the top 10% of earners complaining about working conditions will come off as a bit entitled to the other 90%. Wait for salaries to normalize or maybe concentrate on creating a trade association instead and steering the industry through that

Isn't Unions against the idea of contractors? That takes work away from the union workers?

Unions, in general, aren't monolithic. How the average trade union member may feel about contractors within their field would likely depend on the industry they work in.

Further, these groups aren't mutually exclusive in some cases. Many contract electricians are unionized, for example.

Make sure you understand the difference between a contractor and an employee.

Often people who should be employees are classified as contractors.

In this case, a union would advocate that contractors are really misclassified employees.

No, contractor and freelancer unions exist.

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