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Comment by samirillian | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is great. See the top comment on Google firing apparent labor organizers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21520129

On the one hand, programmers are called impossibly naive for trying to organize.

Then when others do organize, rather than revising the claim that it's naive to even think about organizing, they simply resent those who do.

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Programmers will never organize.

Organizing means losing the right to individual bargaining when signing a new contract.

Edit: I'm not against this, but American Individualism makes people think they can get a better deal by negotiating alone.

Here in Sweden where collective bargaining is widespread I haven't found that it's somehow in conflict with individual bargaining. Collective bargaining results in minimums, like this is the worst deal we can give you based on collective agreement. You can still bargain individually to get a better deal than that.

It can perhaps be an issue if you feel that you can be more attractive on the market by undercutting the competition, but I'd guess that the majority of game developers are not in that position.

In the US, in particular at least one NYC government agency, unionized "system analyst" jobs are common. They get a defined salary based on experience and level, an assigned eight hour shift with half-hour lunch break, and a clock that must be punched into on time. Another has kind and caring help desk people who nevertheless carefully watch the clock.

The government does defined salaries based on experience and level regardless of unionization.

And programmers in particular are taken with the notion that they are exceptional. They are, or aim to be, "10x programmers" who deserve multiples of their coworkers. They're already paid multiples of workers with comparable skills and comparable working hours -- though they do like to reinforce the myth of their superiority by working long hours.

They're not the usual temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They're temporarily comfortable billionaires.

>Organizing means losing the right to individual bargaining when signing a new contract.

That's not accurate - Actors, for example, conduct individual bargaining all the time. They just get a guild minimum that protects them from being taken advantage of. It's not a cap on earnings.

> Edit: I'm not against this, but American Individualism makes people think they can get a better deal by negotiating alone.

One would think individualism should encourage a healthy level of skepticism towards corporate FUD, rather than unreflecting acceptance of trivial falsehoods as true.

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