Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why
I do notice some agitation in the direction of unionisation from some parts of the industry – particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse.
The other side of the coin is that collective bargaining itself makes switching to a different employer or working as a consultant a lot more difficult than if the sector wasn't unionized. Sure, some people will have trouble doing these things anyway, especially at the low-end of the income distribution. But that's why we should support policies like Basic Income, or at the very least expanding things such as the EITC and getting rid of e.g. payroll taxes for low earned incomes. And I think that many people here on HN would agree, whether or not they self-identify as libertarians.
> ...particularly in game development, where conditions can often be worse.
Game development is the sort of industry that everyone thinks they'll want to work in, only to change their minds very quickly once they see how the sausage is made. Even just raising awareness about the work conditions in the industry - and making it clear that they're not representative of "tech" more generally - would help a lot.
That's before we even talk about collective bargaining. Getting a pay raise was completely out of the question, as raises were almost entirely based on seniority and how long your ass had been in the chair. It was highly punitive to younger people like myself. We also got crap shifts because shift preference was also awarded by seniority in the union. The non-unionized shop paid a shift differential, so people willing to work 2nd and 3rd shift got more money for their time. That was a great solution, as it increased the supply for shift work to approximately the levels of demand (basic economics).
So tl;dr: unions have and had a place, but the cure can sometimes be worse than the disease. Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
People are talking about the benefits of unionization in a specific industry in response to the near-automatic narrative that unions are bad.
You gave an example of an absurd regulation in a completely different industry. How does that tie into what collective bargaining in software dev would look like?
Currently at work, I'm more of a "devops" guy but I get into things all over the stack sometimes too. In previous places I've been a "backend" guy that occasionally got into the frontend, etc. I view this as the optimal arrangement: blurry lines of responsibility (so people aren't pigeon-holed), but you can still develop depth and expertise in an area of specialty.
In a world of unions, if it were analogous to my past experience, there could be a "front end" union, a "back end" union, a "dev ops/operations" union, etc. These unions would then draw up lines, much like the "driver" and "mechanic" unions did in my past. Need to change a line of javascript? Talk to a "front end" guy. Tweak a deploy script? Not if the union agreement forbids it.
Those seem like ludicrous thoughts based on where we are now. But I'm sure at one time the idea that a driver can't effect any repairs to the truck, no matter how small, probably seemed ludicrous as well. Yet here we are.
I know I probably sound very anti-union, but to clarify my position, I'm only anti-forced unions. So long as I can opt out of the union if and when I please, I have no qualms. Sadly that is not the case in many places in the United States.
P.S. If I could edit and re-word this line, I would. I think the language is unclear and unnecessarily harsh:
> Acting like unions are this amazing shining solution with no downsides is pure ignorance.
I would change that to: "Thinking of unions as all upside with no downside (or vice versa) is an argument from ideology, not one from experience."
Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
In case you aren't familiar with the Steinbeck quote:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
I'm not sure the pro-union crowd are doing themselves any favor by constantly telling people they don't know what they want, insisting things could only be better, inventing straw-man arguments, and so on.
So even with a history of Silicon Valley playing tricks to suppress what developers get paid[1], the typical HN reader is humdrum about salary because it's "better than average?" I have a hard time believing that.
> Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.
I get that.
But doesn't this seem weird:
1. Devs apparently don't care for the bureaucracy of the taxi medallion service. So two companies build a nationwide service that does an end run around it.
2. Devs apparently don't care for the lack of salary transparency. So they create a cryptographic system that... oh wait, nope, there's no app for that.
?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11843237/Apple-G...
Yes, because the "pay suppression's" effect was to knock people making six-figure salaries down to six-figure salaries, on average. It actually had very little observable negative effect.
(Note that if you go back to the original lawsuits, they were regarding gentlemen's agreements around headhunting. Given that SV's default attitude is "individuals are responsible for themselves," an agreement against headhunting isn't interesting---if an employee is dissatisfied, they know where the competition is and who to talk to about changing companies. If anything, there's a weak positive to an anti-headhunting agreement for employees at the companies in question: it was one fewer recruiter squads pumping spam into an employee's inbox).
You may be interested to learn that one of the corrupt agreements was that in the event that an employee does talk to the competition about changing companies and one of the other colluding companies makes an offer to the employee, that company will not counter-offer beyond the first offer.
So, "little observable negative effect" is not quite as dispositive (or even as visible) as you portray it would be.
(Hm... There's either an economics or sociology paper in the making there about the consequences in employment practices when the wealth inequality in a nation skews large).
Did the companies shrink or grow their workforce?
If they grew, wouldn't that suggest to you that the workers themselves aren't seeing the hostility you are?
If you don't want to offer counterpoints you are not obligated to, but it's rude to simply attach insulting adjectives to the message without trying to argue it.
And for 2 - there's app for that, but I don't think the statement is generally true.
For illustration, SAG-AFTRA's current rate sheet for TV productions can be found here: https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2017%202020%20wages%20TV%2010...
That hasn't happened yet to developers.
It wasn’t slavery by any stretch, but working in programming was akin to working in “IT” and thought of as a department full of weird nerds who cost the company money.
The reason they exist is because the organization values (or is subject to mandates for) documented requirements, and doesn't want programmers to have to bother with the tedious work of developing and maintaining them, focussing on actually developing the software.
Was this always the case though? Perhaps my position is colored by my experience working for a former IBM manager who thought of programmers as those who “just write the code” based on the requirements written by the “more senior” business analysts.
That particular experience reeked of superiority of managers, project managers, and the business analysts who worked directly for them. I admit that my experience could have been anecdotal, however I’ve asked several senior programmers who were active in the nineties who have confirmed the relationships were by and large toxic at the time.
The second generation of dot-coms that succeeded centered developers as domain experts and essential to company survival (broadly-speaking; there is certainly variance).
I assume it's because there's always another batch of fresh-out-of-college young people willing to throw their bodies onto that grindstone that we haven't yet seen successful unionization in that space?
I worked 16 hours a day for a week, it was horrible, I don't think I can do 2 times more in 16 hours then in 8 and I gave up the money and just worked the 8 hours(now I am doing 4 hours a day , screw the money)
I know a fair number of developers who aren't doing that great, or at least not as well as they should. Life quality issues are very common. It is for instance very common to get screwed on salary, pension or vacation at some point of your career, be let go because a project was mismanaged, having a dysfunctional work environment or any number of issues were developers draw the last straw.
Edit: To add to this. I think people don't understand the "failure mode" of being unorganized. It isn't that it is going to be bad all the time. It is that since you don't have a voice other people don't have to consider you. Which means that the likelihood that you will be negatively affected by both small and large decisions of other people increases over time. And that isn't necessarily something you can correct after the fact. Getting unduly interrupted in your career, working in a bad environment or not getting credit is something seemingly small can really affect your life long term. And at least many people I know have these types of stories.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16648000
Here's a choice quote:
"But, the new documents added, employees had to waive the right to take their age cases to court. Instead, they had to pursue them through private arbitration. What’s more, they had to keep them confidential and pursue them alone. They couldn’t join with other workers to make a case."
I am aware only of actors getting protection from dangerous activities, exploitation, bad work condition.
And if it's not me, it might be my co worker, who I know is a new parent and cannot afford to stop working to care for their child. It might by my mentor, who is dealing with ageism making it difficult to find work. It might be my mentee, who is being discriminated against because of their H1B status. It might be my new hire, who accepted a lowball offer because they have no knowledge of price transparency. It might be a software developer I just met at a data science meetup, who is being worked to the bone at a startup but doesn't have enough experience to be hired anywhere else.
Life is not so easy. We're all struggling. We should be working to back each other up so that individual people are not being exploited and then have to fight by themselves against an entire corporation.
Exactly this.
This is why I work the requested 40ish* hours per week that my employer purchases in bulk from me, and rarely more. It's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated. I work very hard while I am working and I do more than the baseline my employer requests of me. My management thinks highly of me and I am well-compensated for my efforts, so clearly my employer values the contributions I make.
I do the work hours I do and how I do them, pushing back on unreasonable on-calls and repeatedly staying late, because I am senior so I have the voice to be able to discourage management not staffing our group appropriately and not setting unreasonable deadlines. I make sure my juniors know, too, that the way to your personal success is a healthy work-life balance that works both for you and for the group of people in which we are ensconced. I also make sure I mentor my juniors and I do what I can to help others be more efficient and effective.
No one should have to burn the candle at both ends just to be able to be seen as doing a good job.
* There are exceptions, of course. I am not inflexible, because that's unreasonable, but my employer pays for approximately 40 hours per week of my valuable single life in this universe and 40 hours, roughly, is what it shall receive.
Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together.
The destruction of the middle class shows that the balance of power is too extreme on the side of the employer, and something has to be done.
You're aware that several major US tech companies were colluding to keep employee wages lower than they otherwise would be[1], right? Once a company's size exceeds Dunbar's number[2] (and often long before then), it's de-facto us vs. them from the executives' point of view.
[1] http://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsui...
Look up prior posts here about salary negotiation for developers. You'll find that most of the advice and the resulting comments are in the "fuck you, pay me" vein.
When doing day to day work, you and your employer are on the same team. When it comes to negotiating the conditions and compensation for that work, you are 100% on different teams.
1) For a long time, there was no "institutional" left in the United States; so in the US - liberalism was seen as the "left". This is slowly changing now...
2) The tech crowd wants really to believe to be progressive (because they work on "progressive" technologies); but in fact, I never saw so many real life liberals like among tech workers.
It's an interesting combination that doesn't fit super-well into America's dominant left-right political axis.
Liberals are often right wing parties in other countries. Basically you have a scale from socialism where everything in your life is dictated by social contracts to liberalism where almost nothing in your life is dictated by social contracts. The left in the US calling themselves liberals is kinda like the north korea calling themselves "democratic people's republicc". Their only liberal agenda is freedom from the Christian social contract.
Eg. Support gay rights and environmental causes, but don't really give a shit about poor people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Greenberg_a...
My wife has worked the same job in and out of unions. She didn't want a union, it was a drawback for her. Her union job seems okay. Some things are better, some are worse. They've got some absolutely asinine policies that everyone hates that don't change and haven't changed for a decade or more despite the union "power".
Also, her job requires a masters, soon to be a Ph.D, and still pays less than most of tech (though it pays very well).
And of course because PART of the industry is unionized, it is impossible to say to what extent non-union jobs are free-riding on the "benefits" of a union.
That's an interesting assertion that you seem to be accepting as universally axiomatic.
(... or perhaps, a self-referential definition. Maybe a company isn't "massive" until one observes behaviors that suggest the company is purposefully acting counter to employee quality-of-life wishes?)
No one WANTS unions. We would like to be dealt with individually in a fair manner. But when tithe business you want to employ you has an entire department intended to get you to sign on for the smallest cost possible... Well... Some union starts to look like a pretty good idea. Even if it does end up causing a lot of grinding since common sense goes out the window once lawyers and contracts come into the picture.
Those groups of people from a non-indigenous, non-minority, never-enslaved, non-female background have always been conservative, consisting largely of 1) white men, and 2) immigrant professionals (generally drawn from more privileged groups in their country of origin and statistically more conservative than the average for their country of origin.)
These same demographics, no matter what profession they're in, are conservative. Their world has generally treated them well, and changes in their world are dangerous for them. If the world were to change for the better (for them), they imagine themselves, or somebody who looks like them, making those changes.
I think spots on a left-right political spectrum is a sloppy way to represent people. There have got to be over 100 valid 'axes' to position a person on, 'projecting' everybody onto a single line forces people to 'sit next to' positions they do not appreciate.
That's the point.
If someone has an opinion you don't like but is hard to dismiss or prove "wrong" then you can dismiss it by association with a group of "wrong" opinions. An easy way to make this association is by attributing it to a group whose opinions are known to be "wrong" by whatever the local in-group is. Once you have associated the inconvenient opinion with a bunch of "wrong" opinions it is easy to dismiss.
For example I were to say "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" (probably not a welcome opinion around here because most here like gun control) then people would use that to assume that I am anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and all the other things that the HN user-base generally agrees is bad about the modern American republican party and dismiss my opinion.
I could say the same exact sentence in a context where the dominant group is ardently racist and classiest but not pro gun control they would use the bits about race and class to assume that I am some crazy leftist who wants the proletariat to seize the means of production and use the association to dismiss my opinion.
It's quite hard to dismiss a statement like "every implementation of gun control is inherently racist and classiest" when you have to fight it head on. By associating a statement like that with people who also have a bunch of views that are "known to be wrong" by the local majority or in-group the playing field is tilted and it's easier to dismiss.
And so far, software development hasn't been an industry that really needed unionisation. But that could always change in the future, of course.
Personally, I generally support unions, though I don't see the need for them in software development. Though as a self-employed freelancer, I do see the use for an organisation that argues on behalf of freelancers on the national level, and I'm member of an organisation that does that. It's not really the same thing as an actual union, but it fills one of the roles of a union.
The government's advantage is that it lets us directly align objectives in a way that markets often don't, but it's disadvantage is that it'll generally optimize much less efficiently for the objective it's targeting. This means that government action and markets are appropriate in different situations; I'm not crazy about the fact that we're the least competent at transit construction in the developed world, but I'm still a supporter of transit investment despite the eye-popping levels of waste.
Live in San Francisco long enough, and you get a really strong sense of how detached a government can get from reality, and how much its actions can reflect the selfishness and idiocy of part of its constituency instead of any pretense of benefiting society or achieving its goals. It's unsurprising that you'd see a portion of the population, especially one used to more well- functioning institutions, start to drift towards support of government policy that doesn't rely on individuals within govt making complex decisions. UBI and other such hands-off policies fit directly into this. They're not anti-govt spending, they're anti-centralized decision-making
That said, I do think American-style right-wing/capitalist libertarians are overrepresented among programmers compared to the average public, as are left-wing libertarian socialists/anarchist.
I would bet money that the most elite members of car manufacturing were also not particularly enthused about unionization, although I have no clue what specific job would qualify as elite.
> When a field unionized, the people near the top typically stand to lose the most,
> even if everyone as a whole are more enriched.
Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.
I really can't say that my career is a result of my own hard work and passion as if my own hard work and passion is the primary thing that allowed my career to succeed. It doesn't matter how passionate and hard working I am if my environment wasn't condusive to computer science as a profession.
I'm also not speaking mentors and peers just in school. I mean literally I do not believe I could be self-taught with 0 outside mentorship or learning materials or community and be considered a highly successful developer. I needed learning materials and mentors to teach me best practices in software development. I needed programming languages that I didn't write myself. I needed a computer, whether paid for by myself, family, or the public taxes via libraries.
Not stopping to recognize that I program on the shoulders of giants would make me arrogant and foolish, I think.
If your code isn't using your own libraries compiled by your own compiler hosted on your own OS running on your self-built machine using a CPU you designed, no, it isn't. Sure, your own hard work and passion goes a long way but you rely heavily on the works of others and the privilege of being able to use them.
So, your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.
That assumes you're starting from the same place and head in the same direction. You have to know a library exists before you can use it. It has to be compatible with what you're using. There are many things out of your immediate control that can influence these things (imagine my next door neighbour only has an i3 and the fancy functions of the library which make it 100x faster require extensions of an i7. I immediately have an advantage. There are many subtler advantages that can come into play.)
... which requires access to time and computers to train on. Not everyone is quite in that state. And not everyone is an autodidact either, it's not the only valid route to programming.
> Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion
Not completely - it's a result of getting accepted by hiring managers, and then retained by internal performance processes, both of which are incredibly subjective and vulnerable to prejudice.
Moreover, some people care about things beyond themselves. A key component of unions is solidarity: caring about how your colleagues are treated. This may also extend to how your employer is treating the wider society.
That's not quite right, HN is full of anti-labor libertarians. And I think it has something to do with startup culture, which is a lot about working to get a golden ticket to join the capitalist class. That causes a lot of people to identify with that class and its interests, despite actually being laborers themselves.