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Comment by mmsimanga | Hacker News Reader

I am not against unions but having spent a career trying to get business to tell me what exactly they want I tend not to put too much faith in large organisations. I feel the administrative overhead of getting all us programmers to agree on specific principles as part of a union is literally going to be impossible. Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar.

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You seem to be arguing that the employee actions described in the article didn’t already happen.

Trivialities like favorite technologies can be put aside when it comes to questions of values and fairness.

I was responding to parent on why programmers are reluctant about the idea of unions. I used a rather silly example on programming languages. To bring it back to the issues discussed in the story. I would certainly agree with holding management to task in the manner they handled the sexual abuse. I am not so sure I agree with all the diversity talk (I speak as a black man, I have to put that in) and as someone who lives in a city where gangs literally own parts of the town, I don't see anything wrong in empowering law enforcement/army with high tech weapons. They are bad motherfuckers out in the world and we need some good badass motherfuckers otherwise we as the world would be in trouble. In a roundabout way, I guess I am trying to say where do you draw the line on which positions the union should take. It would become another system where whoever is elected gets to decide what position we as the workers should take.

> Try putting some developers using electron, PHP, Java and Postgresql in a room and see if you can get past the introductions without a flamewar.

Try asking them how much they think programmers should be paid and I think you'll find they come to agreement pretty quickly.

Maybe some famous people will pen something like the 'Agile Manifesto' for unionized knowledge work, and it will slowly catch on. It could happen (though it would be risky for anyone who isn't self-employed to be an authors)

As I’ve mentioned before, software engineers will embrace unions once they accidentally reinvent the concept from first principles under a different name.

I am not sure if you deliberately chose Agile as an example of something we all agree on or you are taking my example to the next level. Either way you get an upvote from me :-).

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