Kickstarter employees vote to unionize | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

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910 pointsdanso1,092 comments

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

If you want to improve your workplace, you have additional leverage to fight for changes if you're in a union. There's often very little you can do alone. This might be things like pay, or it might be something else entirely.

2. But aren't tech workers elite coddled rich kids who are lucky to make what they receive?

I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union. Folks who run these companies are even more elite than the person who codes. Why not negotiate for a better workplace? Why be a weak negotiator? Isn't that especially important to do when you have flexibility to go somewhere else?

3. Why don't they just leave their job?

Some issues are systemic across an industry. Additionally, some people like to improve their jobs rather than just leave. People are wired differently. Creating lasting change at a company can be rewarding. Some also care about the mission of the company they work for.

A comment on #2 would also be that you should organize and enshrine your rights when you have the power, not when you're weak. Developers are powerful now, can possibly become weak later.

> 1. Why do tech workers need a union?

I don't know if a union is the answer, but tech workers aren't immune to management hi-jinks:

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

It’s not just wage-fixing, tech companies wield an absurd amount of power in other aspects of people’s lives.

I was once let go due for “performance” reasons that involved major company politics behind the scenes. I’d just gotten my annual review from my boss emailed to my work email about a week before my termination, which showed stellar performance across the board.

When I looked into filing for unemployment, I discovered that I needed to dispute the reason for my dismissal since I was let go for cause, which required me to submit evidence. Who doesn’t have access to work emails? Fired people don’t.

My employment agreement stipulated that the employer maintained all rights to my emails, so I was completely SOL.

Leave money negotiations off the table, and you could have a union establish a single consistent process for firing practices that'd protect someone like James Damore from being arbitrarily fired.

I don't agree with what Damore had to say, but that shouldn't matter! I would absolutely support a union-backed fair process for evaluating his or anyone's continued employment, whatever controversial things they write about.

"Union stops arbitrary firing of controversial high-performer Damore" would bring a tear to my eye, no matter who it is.

James Damore was fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes, which he agreed he wouldn't do in the Google code of conduct. Even Damore confirmed this with the press. How would being unionized change that?

You should be able to subpoena those e-mails and other documents. Depending on your municipality, there is usually a court/tribunal process just for unemployment claims, or you could get an employment lawyer. It is going to eat up some of that unemployment, but it's worth it to not let a company get away with that kind of shit.

> but it’s worth it

Is it, though? I chose to focus on finding the next gig and luckily got one in a couple weeks. The emotional toll of subjecting yourself to the legal system against an entity with a team of lawyers sounds absolutely horrible.

In most states unemployment hearings are heavily biased towards the employee, and many times they are just phone conferences. It's very easy to fight.

It's worth it. If there is an actual violation, the company didn't just steal money from you. They defrauded the state labor board and the taxpayers of the state. And that's the sort of thing that government lawyers are very interested pursuing.

It probably isn't worth it.

But it might be satisfying enough for you to decide to do it anyway.

For future reference, being fired because of performance or incompetency is unlikely to be a valid "for cause" firing that disqualifies one from unemployment benefits. If a person is fired because the employer claims they suck at the job (whether its true or not), they still get unemployment.

Your mileage may vary depending on local laws or recent changes to employment law.

Yeah, I was going to say. "For cause" is usually things like theft or not showing up for work.

Failing to perform to a certain standard might be applicable if you just started, but if you've been there for years, it becomes a bit more shaky.

Being let go for "performance" reasons is not "for cause" in CA. For cause means something serious that violates the employment agreement, like criminal behavior or sexual harassment.

Companies generally don't fire people "for cause" absent cause because that's the best way to guarantee a lawsuit (because as you've pointed out, it has financial repercussions like cutting off the availability of unemployment, and reputational damage to the former employee).

If this was in California, you absolutely could have filed for unemployment, even if you were unemployed for performance reasons. Worst that could've happened is that the unemployment office could've rejected the application. In this case, they likely would've called to interview you and get a statement on why you were terminated, in which case a verbal description would do the trick (mentioning that you had received an excellent performance review just the week before would've been enough for the interviewer).

Source: I've been fired (for "performance") once and laid off twice, for all of which I've applied for unemployment benefits (approved the first two times; rejected the third because I was a contractor and not eligible to be treated as employee-equivalent). I didn't have any written evidence for the "performance" one; I just told the interviewer that after I was terminated my former supervisor had to hire multiple people in my place (which was true).

Long story short: always file for unemployment, even if the chances of approval are slim. The worst they can do is say no.

This is an excellent example, because the key thing is: the companies involved weren't even thinking of it as wage-fixing. They were thinking of it as avoiding disruption to launch schedules by not churning people with low bus-factor.

Employees and management have different perspectives on the work agreement and management's is over-represented because they set most of the company policy. An amplified employee voice can lead to better workplace design in general.

The companies can call it whatever they want, but it reflects the power imbalance between worker and employer that unions exist solely to re-balance.

Some managers in a board room somewhere made a decision that depressed the wages for how many thousands of workers, and what can those workers do about it? Jump ship to...the other companies that colluded to depress their wages?

This whole "you're paid enough so don't unionize" thing is so weak, when obviously people could be paid a lot more, but aren't, because, surprise, the companies still hold all the cards.

> This whole "you're paid enough so don't unionize" thing is so weak

Exactly, even Hollywood actors have a union! Although I would wager most of them aren't the high paying variety.

I dunno... I was a victim of this wage-fixing scheme, as were all of my coworkers at the time. And I don't know of a single one who would have preferred to have a union collectively negotiating wages.

The whole scheme was that the companies stopped their recruiters from cold-calling each others' employees. That kept wages down by reducing the opportunities for people to get a better salary by moving between companies (or threatening to). If wages were collectively negotiated, those opportunities would not exist in the first place.

Collective bargaining does not necessarily include collective negotiation of wages.

Can you point to an example of a large US union that doesn't collectively bargain wage scales?

The Screen Actors Guild, and the players unions for most professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc). They recognize that their members have different levels of talent, and allow the stars to make more, while still ensuring basic rights for every member.

And how's that working out for them? The median SAG/AFTRA member makes less than $1,000 per year from acting. And the pro sports players associations are tiny -- they exclude the much larger group of athletes who try to make a living playing sports but don't make the big leagues.

Lesser leagues also have unions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359888

And those that don't, want them:

https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/6/5/17251534/mlb-draft-min...

https://www.theringer.com/2019/1/23/18193121/ufc-unionizatio...

SAG/AFTRA is a large union that represents actors in TV/film, as well as actors in theater, who generally make diddly squat because not many people watch theater performances in the US.

By way of comparison, the rate for a single background-role (i.e., as an extra) in a commercial at SAG rates is more than 3x the non-SAG rate for the same time. ($630 vs $200). If you live in a city like LA or NY, you could make a living wage working (as a background actor) just 45 days a year.

SAG's hourly rates are great on paper - well above market, in fact. The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them, which is why their actual income is so low. The way SAG maintains its power despite this is by requiring productions that want to hire more in-demand actors to only employ SAG actors, forcing everyone to sign up to SAG and commit to waiting tables rather than acting most of the time.

If you cast your mind back to the video game voice actor strike a few years ago, for example, you may recall that one of the justifications for that was that they needed more money because many of them were only getting something like one day's work a month on average. Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors. Back in the day, a lot of video game and anime voice acting was apparently done by union members under pseudonyms so the union didn't find out; that's probably harder to get away with these days.

The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them,

This is false. Pretty much every theatrical film, broadcast or cable TV show, and nationally aired commercial in the US is subject to union/guild scales (and even Netflix has begun negotiating with the unions and guilds.)

If you have a "reputation" in Hollywood then you are making above scale because your agent has the leverage to demand above scale. And if you don't, that generally means you are a background player and you're making minimum scale. And at that level, you have trouble finding work because there are hundreds of thousands of other actors competing for the same roles, not because the productions can't afford you.

Yes, because there isn't that much voice over work in video games, and AAA studios were paying minimum scale for games that ultimately grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors.

This is false. The union scale for video game voiceover work was $825/session, no residuals no benefits. It usually takes less than 3 sessions to record all of an actor's lines, so you're looking at a total net outlay of less than $2500 for an actor's voiceover work in a video game. If your studio can't afford that for a game in which voiceover work is important enough to justify 3 sessions of recording, then you're not a studio, you're a hobby. (But on that note, a different, lower scale applies to low-budget games, just like it does to low-budget film and TV productions.)

> the players unions for most professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc)

This is wrong. The major sports unions all collectively bargain minimum salaries, and in some cases maximum salaries as well.

SAG and all the professional sports unions do set minimum pay scale. In the case of the NBA, the maximum pay is set well below open-market levels.

Presumably a maximum pay is set with the intention of allowing that money to go elsewhere in the sport? The NBA knows stars will get paid very well, but they want to ensure not all the money is spent on them so that lesser known players are fairly compensated as well. It seems a smart idea especially because an instituted max is still allowing stars to be paid 8 figures a year.

IMO, the maximum pay/salary caps are set to promote competition across the league. As an entertainment product provided by a monopoly supplier, that's exactly the right thing to do. As a (clearly hypothetical if you'd ever met me) top talented employee under such a scheme, it's terribly counter-productive to my individual situation.

You can't get a job in a SAG affiliated production until enough SAG members are hired, but you can't become a SAG member until you've been in a SAG affiliated production.

I'm not an actor, but on the outside that Catch 22 stinks of Old Boy Network tactics.

Why do you think that strong unions will fight for collective negotiation of wages?

Sweden has one of the strongest union system in the world and at the same time is one of the most entrepreneurial nations with high wages and lots of billionaires, salaries are lower than the US but they are still negotiated and not fixed by the union. The minimum wage for a specific job might be but apart from that I'm free to negotiate my salary. At the same time I have more days of vacation than the minimum 25 because of collective bargaining. I have requirements for minimum amount of natural light by my desk while at the same time can negotiate bonuses, shares, stock options or whatever because those aren't regulated by a collective agreement.

Kollektivavtal[0] are one of the backbone of how Swedish entrepreneurship works, to help society as whole and to give power to the weak link of the chain, it's an interesting model and one of the reasons why I chose to live here.

One of the ways it work is that by covering so many people the few companies that aren't covered by a collective agreement are naturally forced by the labour market to match the minimum, be it wages or benefits. Because unemployment is low people can shop around if there are better places to work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement

It's very difficult to actually grow a company in a country like Sweden because of the regulations and taxes you are required to pay after a certain amount of employees.

Perhaps that's a good thing.

So goes the Sweden's GDP and tax base.

BTW Ikea is no more operating primarily from Sweden, partly because of these reasons.

No, it is because tax evasion using international ports to hoard wealth is a thing, because other countries don't have any will to disallow that when they can earn free tax money from companies trying to evade their duties.

It is a race to the bottom with tax schemes, not the fault of Sweden to try to uphold its values and ways of living. So far it has worked pretty well, tell me more how it can be improved because as a country of 10m people I'd say it is pretty impressive.

Even more if your whining about taxes is so real, then you should come teach the Swedish government how to do it right and better because we are losing a lot of money it seems...

Do you have some data to share to back that statement?

I would rather pay employees a living wage as part of a sustainable business than deal with the hypergrowth VC bullshit that destroys entire market segments with nothing to show for it except ruined lives after the startups finally implode.

There will be no sustainable business. Regulations and taxes strangle your business before it gets to that point.

If you look at the business landscape of Sweden, it mostly consists of large multinational corporations with bases outside of Sweden (IKEA is a good example of this) and government jobs.

It doesn't leave much room for individuals wanting to start a business and actually having an chance at success.

How was Spotify invented, in your mind?

You made my point again. If you look at the wikipedia page, it's not incorporated in Sweden. It's a multinational corporation with an office in Sweden.

So are many multinationals, for tax reasons (not labor law reasons) related to something called IP migration that let corporations evade taxes on local income.

Labor laws affect a company if they have employees in that jurisdiction. It doesn't matter if your HQ is somewhere else.

It's literally headquartered in Stockholm. That's like saying a Silicon Valley startup isn't actually in California or subject to California's laws solely because it incorporated in Delaware.

HQ is still here in Stockholm, it grew from Sweden up to the point it was incorporated outside of Sweden to go public, because shareholders will be moaning about it. It is still a very Swedish company, paying taxes in Sweden.

Incorporated outside of Sweden is the key here. It seems people are downvoting me because they dont want to hear the truth...but other commenters keep making my point quite nicely.

Incorporating outside of Sweden allows big companies to enjoy tax benefits and then hire Engineers from Sweden at an average of 50,000USD to 68,0000USD (these numbers can easily be found on Google).

They get lower taxes, a cheap labor pool, and the company isn't limited through draconian taxes and regulations, it only has to deal with it at a satellite office. It's a win-win.

Now show me a company that's large, started in Sweden, and is still in Sweden many years later.

But it's the same exact thing that any larger Western corporation do when they become multinational, be it an American, British, Australian, they go out and create multiple tax schemes to avoid their duties, it's not a matter of Sweden specifically having high taxes or not, it's a matter of a systemic issue for tax evasion that large corporations can afford to abuse.

Electrolux, Ericsson and Volvo are still incorporated and have their HQs in Sweden.

Now, by moving the goalposts, you lost your initial argument. Sure it might be the case that Swedish companies, at some stage of their growth, tend to incorporate in another country.

Still the benefits Swedish employees experience don't seem to be in the way of getting a startup successfully up and running in Sweden.

This was my point all along. You might be able to start a company in Sweden, but you won't be able to grow it there because of taxes and regulations.

It's funny how it took so long for someone to finally admit that I'm correct instead of being willfully ignorant about the realities of a socialist country like Sweden.

Sweden is not socialist, for fucks sake, don't push this agenda here. Sweden has one of the freest markets in the world...

If social policies is socialism for you then I'm at a loss here because that point of view is utterly stupid.

Just because you're incorporating in a different country doesn't mean you're not continuing to grow and develop your business in the original country.

Spotify still pays taxes in Sweden. Incorporating doesn't let you avoid income taxes in your HQ country or avoid labor laws, it just lets you play around with the taxes you pay on your foreign income.

It's a country of 10 millions that builds jet fighters (Gripen), 5G technology with Ericsson, Minecraft, etc. The current NASDAQ trading platform was also developed in Sweden.

I would say they're doing very well when it comes to business and technology.

All government funded operations except Minecraft..which is now owned by Microsoft.

Funny..the Original owner of Minecraft never stayed in Sweden with his billion dollars.

My point still stands: you can start a company in Sweden, but will never be able to grow it to sustainable levels unless you incorporate elsewhere (or get purchased).

All examples I've seen so far have only helped prove my point.

Spotify is homegrown in Sweden. King.com is homegrown in Sweden. Klarna is homegrown in Sweden and so on and on.

I don't think you have any data to back your claims, reading through your comments it gives me "I feel it is this way" vibes and I don't think

King.com is incorporated in Malta. Presumably to get around taxes in Sweden and Spotify is incorporated in Luxomburg. Stop changing the topic.

My point is that you can't grow a company in Sweden and every single example you have just given me are companies that left Sweden after growing to a certain stage.

I think I'm done arguing my point because facts and data dont seem to matter here and it's funny how such a seemingly intelligent community can be utterly blinded by politics.

The reality is that I would never incorporate a company in Sweden and incorporating pretty much anywhere else on earth would give me an advantage.

Again: as ANY big company looking to evade taxes, this is not a fault of Sweden.

Why are most SV tech companies in the US incorporated in Delaware? Is it because California sucks and should lower their tax rates or employer obligations to the bottom of the pit that Delaware created?

You never replied my other comment about companies that are still incorporated in Sweden such as Volvo, Electrolux, etc., so you can be done as much as you want peddling your point of view, it doesn't make it right.

Edit: checking your comment history tells me that you call what Bernie Sanders is pushing for as "socialism" and you use that as an excuse to vote for Trump 2020, come on.

I'm not familiar with union laws, but couldn't those workers form a union that did exactly what they wanted and none of what they didn't want?

Why can't we have any other organization to which we delegate our power, but which then does exactly what we want it to do?

Because with the power comes an opinion on how to best wield it — maybe entirely for the good of the community, but often not limited by that. People why strive to be in control most often have their own axe to grind, too.

But a larger problem is the "they want". "They" are many people, and their opinions on a particular topic are "mostly aligned" at best. This is not a single opinion or want. This is why any collective action of this sort can be "mostly satisfactory" for the participants at best, and often quite disliked by some minor fraction of them.

Because it results in a parasite effect. The union uses its power to negotiate a pay rise for its members. The business then gives the pay rise to all the employees. Each employee thinks “Well I would have got the benefit if I was a union member or not, so I’ll stop paying my union fees”

> did exactly what they wanted and none of what they didn't want?

Unfortunately, many workers want to do horrible things, such as to make it illegal for someone to work in engineering of they don't have a CS degree, or if they came out of a bootcamp, or the like.

Workers voting to put up barriers to entry, and keep out the competition, is both rational, democratic, common in unions, and also a completely horrible thing to do.

That’s already illegal and was punished accordingly, so no need for a union. Labor laws are a better tool.

This is a pretty specious argument. Murder is illegal and punished severely, yet we still try and avoid getting killed.

I would posit that it is the same here; wage fixing is bad and punished, but wouldn't it be better if we had a faster mechanism for guaranteeing equity in treatment by corporations?

No. That’s more like saying we should join a union so we can put rules in place that say employers aren’t allowed to murder us.

It’s already illegal, and people who don’t care about the law won’t care about a union agreement either.

The same court battle and settlement process would result. Or worse, everyone would be forced to strike, and all employees are legally barred from working.

> No. That’s more like saying we should join a union so we can put rules in place that say employers aren’t allowed to murder us.

I love that people are so ignorant of the history of labor struggle in the US that they don’t know that people actually did form unions to prevent their employers from murdering them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...

Before you call anybody ignorant, maybe stop and think about the last time a tech employer murdered people. That historical factoid is completely irrelevant when discussing solutions for today. Guess what, we don’t need to wear chain mail while riding a horse to work anymore either. Progress!

> Before you call anybody ignorant, maybe stop and think about the last time a tech employer murdered people.

Does the YouTube shooting count? Google only sent real time security updates to full time employees, leaving contractors to fend for themselves, even though they’re now a majority contractor workforce:

https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/invisible-no-longer-google...

And this event certainly has pushed labor organizing at the company.

See also worker deaths at Amazon:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...

It doesn’t seem at all irrelevant to me that companies have a long history of compromising workers safety, unto their deaths, and especially when workers don’t organize to defend themselves.

The progress you celebrate is because people before you did this en masse, so perhaps it is a good idea to be a little more respectful and cognizant of that history.

> A final approval hearing was held on July 9, 2015.[22] On Wednesday September 2, 2015, Judge Lucy H. Koh signed an order granting Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement. The settlement website stated that Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel has reached a settlement of $415 million and other companies settled for $20 million.

> In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the [previous] settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.

> Labor laws are a better tool.

Historically, unions have largely been responsible for advancing the state of labor laws. Individuals can't afford the legal representation to win precedent-setting cases against large corporations. By pooling their resources, collectives can bring a gun to the gunfight. Strong unions can similarly match lobbying efforts when corporations attempt to weaken labor laws through legislation.

The number 1 reason to form a union in the tech world is so a company can't pull a Disney. Replace all your full time workers with imported 'contractors' and force you to train them.

Getting rid of the 'contractor' loop hole in tech will be better for everyone.

I'm interested in someone setting minimum quality requirements for code, and I've no faith in my government to do that well. No, I said that wrong. I have every faith in my government screwing that up spectacularly.

From what I understand from other industries, the safety guidelines are often, at least initially, heavily informed by the professional bodies of those industries. Later on watchdog groups start to propose more stringent rules.

We haven't really discussed any of this stuff very concretely and we'd have to start somewhere (other than legislation please).

You really aren’t aware of all the union factories that picked up and moved their entire operations to another country to avoid unions?

As far as the contract “loophole”. Every time I’ve worked as a contractor, my net income including taking into account the loss of benefits was hire than I made as an FTE.

> The number 1 reason to form a union in the tech world is so a company can't pull a Disney. Replace all your full time workers with imported 'contractors' and force you to train them.

How do they force you to train your replacement? There are plenty of jobs in tech right now, you could (and should) just walk out the door if something like that occurs.

Some people have bills to pay and mouths to feed, and don't want their kids going without health insurance for potentially months between jobs. The individual market for health insurance is terrible and COBRA is another expensive liability for someone without a job.

IIRC, they literally included a clause in their contract that they wouldn't receive their severance pay / layoff benefits if they didn't train contractors.

This is also something a union can help with, you can't negotiate that clause out of your contract, but collectively you can.

"Athletes unionize" is one of the better arguments I've heard for why devs should.

I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.

Wish I knew more about it.

Here's what the NFLPA has on their website: https://www.nflpa.com/about/history

One of the reasons I like it as an example is it shows how much more a union can do than simply negotiate raises, and that they don't even have to do that part at all! You can collectively bargain over anything, and also a union can theoretically serve as a type of association that has other benefits. There's room for a ton of innovation and creativity here.

You don't see people argue that their union means mediocre football players can't get fired. The values of the workers can absolutely be shared by the union (the players are the union) -- and if you want to negotiate for even higher pay rather than making it harder to fire folks, you can do that.

Athletics is not as luxurious you might think: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/07/olympic-games-...

Right but when someone says "athletes unionize" in this context they're almost certainly talking about the NFL and NBA. Not semi-amateur olympians.

Speaking of which, it just blows my mind that US olympians routinely win a ton of gold against government-supported olympians from e.g. Russia or China. There wouldn't even _be_ any olympians from there if the government didn't fund it.

Part of the reason athletes unionize, though, is because they play for monopoly leagues; there are no competitors for the top leagues in most American sports, so it isn't like you can just leave and play in the other NBA if you don't like their practices.

Well, not a monopoly, but Apple, Google, and several other major Silicon Valley corporations did collude to keep developer salaries low.

That was discovered and busted by the government. It appears unions aren't necessary to end wage fixing cartels.

And especially, note that unions are wage fixing cartels!

I have near 0 trust in the major tech companies (Facebook/Google/Apple/etc.) but amazingly I trust the US government even less. I have absolutely no faith that the US government discovered and solved the salary issues in those companies in any meaningful way

You should see how small my check was for restitution payments. I really don't think that the government fixed the problem effectively.

Well with a union, not only do you get wage fixing, but also union dues!

That's begging the question. You haven't explained why unions would be incapable of preventing wage fixing.

This is survivor bias. That example is only known because it was caught and fixed - there are a myriad of other issues that are unseen by the public that a union could address.

such as ?

The league monopoly power is probably the primary reason that it happened - before free agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_agent#Major_League_Baseba... ) became a thing, a team would own you for life (or until you were traded), so you had no recourse - you couldn't even leave for another team in the same league after your contract was up! White collar employees generally don't work on a contract like that - as at will employees, we can generally leave our work environment with only a couple days notice and have employment elsewhere. The impact of someone like Charles Comiskey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Comiskey ) is limited in the white collar world.

Besides that though there are a few other things that don't come up in white collar environments. One is career tenure. I think NFL is the shortest average career length for North American sports at something like 2-3 years. In MLB non-elite players who are 30+ are now becoming less likely to get picked up by teams after hitting free agency, meaning the median career for a successful career is something more like 6-7. Athletes in such a situation don't have any leverage to sit out a whole year, which can represent 14%-50% of their lifetime earnings in the primary thing they spent their youth training on. Athletes also have to worry about physical injury that don't exist in white collar environments, which has led, for example, to changing touchback rules in football and adding a 26th man to the roster in baseball this season.

> I think NFL is the shortest average career length for North American sports at something like 2-3 years...Athletes also have to worry about physical injury that don't exist in white collar environments, which has led, for example, to changing touchback rules in football and adding a 26th man to the roster in baseball this season.

You're burying the lede there: the careers, particularly in sports like football, are short because sports actively break people. Athletes can tear their ACLs and alter their ability to walk or run for years, or end up with traumatic brain injuries that permanently alter their personality. After 5 years they're used up and cast aside -- and who in the public remembers a 2nd string Linebacker?

Given the immense amount of training, suffering, and injury... I'd come to the same conclusion re: bargaining.

The monopoly issue is also why most remaining unions are public employees working for some government monopoly.

Movie stars belong to SAG-AFTRA.

There is more to athletics and sports than American sports.

Most European countries have a professional football players union, and their contracts are owned by the club, and not within a monopoly like with American sports. The same goes for referees, coaches, managers, etc.

Again, the amount of money these people are paid can be very high, and while many players don't use the union for things like negotiating pay, they rely on the union for other types of representation.

Baseball players unionized in the 60s for the same reasons any other group did - poor wages, poor working conditions, and owners who operated as feudal lords due to the reserve clause.

I disagree. Professional sports leagues are both monopolies and monopsonies (meaning they’re the only ones hiring those specialized athletes). So the market dynamics are very different from that of tech. If you’re a NFL linebacker, you don’t really have an option to switch leagues if you’re unhappy with how it’s run. If you’re a software engineer, you can switch companies very easily.

what if apple, google, intel, adobe, pixar, lucasfilms all conspire to suppress your wages? great you can switch to another company that doesn't pay you your worth.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...

It’s already illegal for them to do that. The solution to collusion by firms is not collusion by workers.

what's the worst thing that happens to a big business by breaking the law? paying a small fine?

I brought up professional sports unions in the context of having a highly competitive group of workers who make large salaries, and that a union can still be useful in that environment as far as negotiations.

That professional sports are monopolies and monopsonies isn't particularly relevant to this point.

The fact that tech workers can find a job elsewhere is even more motiviation to unionize because you have even more bargaining power and there are smaller risks.

> That professional sports are monopolies and monopsonies isn't particularly relevant to this point.

What are you talking about. That’s entirely relevant. What’s not relevant is that the workers are rich. Market dynamics are the entirety of what determines your compensation and working conditions. Being able to leave for a competitor is pretty all the leverage you’re ever going to have.

If that was true, Kickstarter wouldn't have fought it as hard as they did. The workers just gained additional leverage. What's the evidence that these workers have zero additional leverage?

There’s no evidence that they do have additional leverage either. I could argue that they acted against their own self interest in many ways, but still don’t know for sure how things will work out in one way or another.

There's absolutely evidence that unions increase wages. 100%.

I suppose you could argue that's happening out of employer generosity? And that they're more generous when there's a union?

> There's absolutely evidence that unions increase wages. 100%.

Does that hold for unprofitable VC-subsidized companies? They might go bankrupt if VCs are turned off by a unionized workforce in the next round.

Yes there is evidence that unions increase wages. But none for this specific case.

There can't be evidence of unions increasing wages in the tech industry because, as this article points out, prior to today there were no unions in the tech industry. Ever.

However, there is significant evidence in blue-collar and white-collar industries, and in artistic and athletic fields, that unions increased members' earnings.

Tech vs non-tech. Blue-collar vs white-collar. That’s not what matters. What matters is market dynamics. That’s all I’m saying here.

It's really not a fair comparison: we think of athletes as making large salaries, but beyond the stars, many who make the highest level professional league will make a league minimum salary over a relatively short career, as opposed to white collar workers who typically make 6 figure salaries over multiple decades.

That sports leagues are actually very relevant. See for example from https://theundefeated.com/features/all-22-why-decertificatio... :

>Counterintuitively, the owners benefit from the existence of a union as well. The existence of unions allows leagues to operate under rules that are in violation of federal antitrust law, which is why decertifying has been the most impactful threat to leagues.

That same article goes on to explain how unions actually in some ways have acted against the interest of athletes in some way, since the collective bargaining agreements that they entered in to have locked in conditions for years that would not make sense in a more free floating market.

Anyone who thinks that players' unions are suppressing athlete salaries doesn't remember how little athletes made before the unions negotiated higher scales.

Even the best NFL athletes used to have day jobs. The 2014 minimum base salary for MLS players was just $48,500 (which increased to $7x,xxx in 2019 as a result of the union renegotiating pay scales). On average (median or mode), a professional soccer player will make less than an entry-level programmer in the valley, despite a significantly smaller potential workforce.

I agree that unions have done a lot; the point is that the evidence shows it to be a double edged sword. Following the link I posted, it explains how one effect of current collective bargaining agreements enables owners of sports teams to cap the percentage of the overall revenue going to players. For example, collective bargaining has given us free agency in baseball, which has been great; it's also given us a system in which players don't hit free agency until they've been playing for 5 or 6 years, at which point they're usually in their late 20's or early 30's, and have missed prime earning years on the free market (having to settle for whatever comes out of the arbitration process).

Some of the increase in pay is due to the union, and they should be applauded for that, but part of the increase in pay in all these leagues also is due in part to the increase in revenues from media deals

Another thing worth pointing out from this link: when the NFL players were last trying to get serious about negotiating with the NFL owners, they decertified the union. Their ultimate threat wasn't "you can't do this to us, we're part of a union," it was "if you don't give us concessions, we'll get rid of our union so you're on the wrong side of regulations." This is a completely different scenario from what software engineers would face. The analog with sports is just really not very good (whether one is in favor of unions for white collar workers or not).

It actually wasn't until baseball unions that players actually started getting paid well.

If this was the only reason to have a union, you would only expect unions to exist in sports leagues that have a monopoly. Yet that isn't what we see in practice. The WNBA and the MLS both have unions. The NBA G League is moving to form a union as we speak. These are all leagues that face stiff competition from abroad and it is common for American athletes to go play in those foreign leagues. However that competition between employers isn't enough to give the athletes the negotiating power that they can command with a union.

Then look at movie stars instead of athletes if you feel the analogy isn't apt. They're all card carrying members of SAG-AFTRA.

But even athletes have a clear distinction between management and "employee". The line is very blurry in engineering, esp. for senior devs which might go in and out of management frequently.

Marvin Miller is the man who created these. There are some good accounts of his life.

When he started, MLB players hated hearing him out because they thought he was a communist. Talk about a situation where people cut off their nose to spite their faces!

A quick google search will explain that history and will also tell you why it makes no sense to compare athletes with developers.

Hollywood actors and screenwriters are also unionized.

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy? I mean we’d like to think that the good ideas win and impact and outcome matters. We hold up the 10x engineers and those that make an outsized contribution to the industry / company / product right? Shouldn’t they get higher compensation compared to the rest of the work force? How do we square that with collective bargaining that has set salaries and annual increases?

The two ideas are not incompatible. You can set a company-wide curve for promotions.

What about outside of promotions? I’m not going to get promoted every year and I certainly don’t want to only be able to get a sizable increase tied with promotions.

Although I do agree they are not fundamentally incompatible. You can have a large number of hands within a job level and have the ability to jump bands for example. But then this somewhat goes against the typical union (at least in the US) thinking where there is typically a step progression “up”.

Fundamentally, at least in terms of compensation, this seems to be about how we view money in general rather than specifics of unions. Ie should everyone be paid more or less the same for the same job or should there be wildly different compensation. For unions I typically see salaries clustered, that every senior engineer for example does more or less the same job. Currently in tech the view isn’t that. It’s more the one senior engineer can dramatically out perform another and should be compensated accordingly.

If a senior engineer can outperform another dramatically, he will get promoted to principal sooner than the other and is probably getting higher bonuses, even if their base wage is currently the same.

If a "10x" senior engineer moves to another company he will probably seek a job as principal engineer and get a higher base wage than older employees that have less technical aptitude than him.

Negotiated salary bands do not go against meritocracy.

Actors are unionized (or “guildized”, which is basically the same thing), but their pay varies wildly and seems to be more or less relative to their objective value.

That’s a good example. I don’t know much about it, what benefits does the union in this case provide that isn’t achievable without one?

Before the actors union stars were made by a studio and forced to work for that studio for long hours and little pay. If you spoke up you were out. Lucy Ball was smart enough to start her own studio only to see it get sold a few years later.

If they didn't have a union movies would look different. Maybe better for the customer because you get to see your favorite star in 10x more movies.

Two examples of actor union rules that come to mind are employers paying for journey to location of its more than a couple of miles, and the (very strict) rules about filming nude scenes (only essential people on set, people standing by with bathrobes etc)

Actors don't die on set any more, so that's nice. From the SAG-AFTRA site:

"SAG-AFTRA members are entitled to a variety of benefits, including contracts/collective bargaining, eligibility for the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan, SAG-Producers Pension Plan, the AFTRA Retirement Fund, the iActor online casting database, and much more."

https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/member-benefits

I actually think Healthcare. https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-and-aftra-health-plans-merge

> That’s a good example. I don’t know much about it, what benefits does the union in this case provide that isn’t achievable without one?

This seems like an important benefit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_indust...:

> Residuals are royalties that are paid to the actors, film or television directors, and others involved in making TV shows and movies in cases of reruns, syndication, DVD release, or online streaming release. Residuals are calculated and administered by industry trade unions like SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild of America, and the Writers Guild of America.

Per the wiki page, these rights were won and have been maintained by striking and union-lead contract negotiations.

Here's a brief list:

1. Non-competes. If you're an actor, the studio that you did your first film with doesn't own you for the rest of your life.

2. Getting paid for your time if you're called out for a shoot, and the shoot doesn't happen, because the director's dog ate the script, or some other non-sense that you have no control over.

3. Getting paid for your time if you're called out for a shoot, and told to hang around for 8 hours, so that you can do your 5-minute scene.

4. Getting paid if you're a theatrical understudy, have learned your part, and are sitting on-call, ready to step in if the main actor is sick/vacationing/etc.

5. Getting paid more for understudying more roles. Someone who understudies two principal roles has to be paid more than someone who understudies one other chorus role.

Prior to unionization, violations of these were incredibly prevalent across the industry. Studios who took advantage of actors were rewarded by the market, and anyone who tried to push back on these practices was black-balled from the industry.

Despite having to pay actors for their work, and not treating actors like chattel, the entertainment industry has not yet fallen apart.

Keeping in mind that an actor's objective value to the movie studio is proportional to their subjective value to the audience.

That's because the actors' guild has a clause in the union constitution requiring a big supermajority (something like 2/3 of the vote) to impose a pay cap or to remove the supermajority vote requirement. The people who created the SAG understood very well that unions oppose meritocracy and specially crafted the SAG to resist this effect. I have no idea whether Kickstarter's organizers did the same, but I expect that they did not.

It always depends how the union works and what they negotiate for. Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron and Tom Hanks are all members of a union (SAG-AFTRA) and it doesn't seem to have prevented them for making 10x the money of an unknown actor.

That said, there's a risk - even a high one - that Union Executives, over time, become rent seekers instead of advocates for their members. It's like government, every Union gets the executive it deserves.

> the engineering ethos of meritocracy

You know what's pretty inarguably a real "meritocracy"? Professional sports players. And they're all unionized.

Tech does not meaningfully or significantly adhere to any ethos of meritocracy; it is exactly as political as anything else. The part that really melts your brain is when you realize that the "meritocracy" myth is peddled so the people who don't realize they're bad at politics are losing.

So do all tech companies have legal monopoly where they share revenues and where you have to enter a draft to get a job?

Sports leagues have nothing to do with how most companies operate.

Of course there's no monopoly. But tech companies are pretty happy to collude, both at an executive level (we've had court cases about this) and at the memetic "this is what we think about management" one, in order to work against workers' interests. We, too, are allowed to work together to combat this.

Wage suppression, limiting our ability to grow and expand into different areas, and controlling the ability to exert control over what the work we do is used for--these are reasons to unionize.

There are only 20-35 “companies” that a professional athlete can work at. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of places employing “tech workers”.

If companies are colluding, that’s the issue where the government needs to intervene.

The tech collusion case involved most of the industry leaders, and thus presumably the highest payers.

And instead of correcting the actual issue - fining the companies for collusion and enforcing consent decrees - unions are the answer?

There can be multiple tools used to solve a single problem. Both a root cause can be addressed, and additional fixes added for the sake of future-proofing.

Because unions have never been corrupt in the history of America.....

Non sequitur. The corruptibility of unions does not prevent them from being viable tools, it simply means they are a tool that must be handled carefully.

Sports is about the farthest thing from a meritocracy you can get. Only 25 NBA players in the history of the league have been below 5 foot 9 (175cm) [1]

Professional athletes are genetic freaks first and foremost - look at the dropoff from college football players to professional players. It's not talent that determines who makes it, it's genetic ability. The absolute worst NFL team in history would decimate the best college team in history just because of the difference in size, speed, and strength of the people on the professional team.

The NFL uses the standing vertical jump as a test of athletic ability because it's one of the only tests that can't be trained. No matter how much stronger or more explosive you get, your standing vertical jump pretty much stays the same. And guess what, people who make it in the NFL are the ones with the highest standing vertical jump.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shortest_players_in_Na...

The way I'm reading it, your argument assumes the mental aptitude we train into the ability to write code is not genetic.

Is that your position or did I read too far into it?

> It's not talent that determines who makes it, it's genetic ability.

Sorry, I meant "meritocracy" in the way that the tech crowd does, not a, y'know, actual one. Because they rarely if ever exist in practice.

It's funny, because I would hold that a good bit of what we consider "technical aptitude" is innate, if not strictly "genetic". I don't mean stuff like that old Dartmouth CS study, though. Speaking for myself, I have a level of general memory recall that, while not what you might call "eidetic memory", is very, very good. "Remember the behavior of an API I used cursorily five years ago" good. And from a pure value perspective, that I can dredge weird stuff like that up, that I can make connections between disparate stuff based almost entirely on having too much junk in the drawers of my brain, are why I deliver value in tech roles. If anything, my ability to quickly and with self-discomfiting detail remember the failures of code I've written are more valuable than the code I write today. ;)

And I have had that kind of weird memory recall since I was a kid. I don't know if it's "genetic", but I didn't do anything to make it happen. Which leads me to think that if "being tall" rules one out of a meritocracy, stuff like that, or the weird permutation of brainscape that makes one better able to latch onto stuff like algebra or able to better visualize systems--all of that stuff functionally should, too.

Which, to me, is yet another ding in this idea of "meritocracy". It's all a dart board.

I don't think you understand what a meritocracy is.

In what way are those fitness-for-purpose measures not a meritocracy?

"Meritocracy" is being judged on ability. How that ability originated is unimportant. Why does it matter that athletes' merit has a strong basis in genetics? Top-level athletes make it to the top level by being better than their peers.

You can train to improve vertical jump, there are specific work outs developed for NBA players for this purpose. https://www.amazon.com/Vertical-Jump-Development-Bible/dp/14...

I agree that meritocracy is more a talking point than reality on the ground. I just mean, right now there is a disparity in income. Think of it as the income inequality that's common in many countries. In principle the tech world seems to agree this that setup; that some engineers should be paid significantly more than others.

In my previous experience with unions in North America, incomes tends to be compressed towards the middle. You get rid of the very low and very high income earners. Maybe this is just an implementation problem and isn't inherent to unions, but in practice here, it does seem to be common.

Pay is more of a function of where you work than skill. There are mediocre engineers being paid $300K at FAANG and great engineers being paid $100K at Random Small Company. FAANG pays more because it's better able to monetize what its engineers are building.

That’s true but the engineering pay at the same company varies a lot too. Probably not 3x for the same level and role but I’ve seen difference of 2x in total compensation for the same title.

>Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

Only if one assumes that management pays based on the same ethos of meritocracy. They generally do not, which is why a force to oppose the management 'union' can result in a return to meritocracy. As with any balancing force, it is possible for the reaction to be far too strong and swing in the opposite direction, but that isn't reason to avoid any attempt to balance.

How does one go about measuring productivity in software? Because you can't have a meritocracy without an objective measure of performance. I think we all know by now that number of features shipped / commits / lines of code are not good measures, just the most visible. Also, I have come to learn that "10x developer", just means "OK developer with a greenfield project". Maybe I am just salty because my productivity is being impacted greatly right now because the software developed by our 10xer of 10 years past breaks every week and I have to fix it to get my job done.

Unions can negotiate things other than salary, like health benefits, paid leave, policy issues, etc.

(Though in practice you're correct: unions rarely exist for jobs with more individualized pay.)

It is worth mentioning that if the Senate bill version of Medicare for All becomes the law of the land, then previously employer-funded healthcare becomes one less thing for union leaders to have to negotiate with employers.

Partially. It will take basic medical care off the table, allowing unions to focus their negotiations on better wages and working conditions. M4A entitles everyone to a common set of benefits, but doesn't preclude extended benefits (medical or otherwise) outside that set.

Why? It just raises the bar for the unions: negociating co-pay, dental plan... Plenty of healthcare things will not be covered by Medicare. Unions will negociate about this.

Would nationalized healthcare cover orthodontics? I could see an awful lot of union members being interested in supplemental family dental from employers.

Yes.

"All Americans would have coverage for comprehensive health care services, including hospital stays; emergency room visits; doctor visits; substance use disorder treatment; dental, vision, and mental health services; long-term care; and reproductive health care. Depending upon income, prescription drug cost sharing would be capped at $200 annually." -- https://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/news/20191120/medicar...

I don't see any mention of orthodontia in there.

Medicare for All covers pretty much everything.

Obviously, there might be some edge cases. This is where private insurers could still fill a role. I can't imagine that extra/supplemental private insurance could be too expensive, if it had to compete against a unified 350 million+ person insurance pool.

Edit: It is worth noting that the US is pretty unique when it comes to the separated dental insurance coverage plans and main health insurance plans.

That's actually great! But what will the actual terms and conditions be? Some existing examples: a maximum number of psych visits, (medical) dental work up to xxx$ per year (if you had a checkup last year), limited coverage for experimental treatments for like cancer.

The US is not (wont be) the only one which seperates dental (as in infections, teeth removal) from orthodontic like braces and fake teeth.

Maybe important, I'm not American.

Not immediately. Universal health coverage means employers lose the ability to use health plans as a benefit and/or part of an employee’s total compensation. So unions will likely then be negotiating to see that turned into cash.

Although, universal health plans also mean employees, unionized or not, win the freedom to change jobs because they’re no longer tied to jobs they hate just to remain insured. I don’t think many people are considering or discussing this at large in the conversation about MfA. This will be a huge social and employment benefit for people with families/children, as well as those with existing—especially serious and costly—conditions. It could be something unions will temporarily grapple with in defending their importance.

I have no doubt, however, that something will replace healthcare at the negotiating table. Capital and labor are forever locked in conflict.

> Although, universal health plans also mean employees, unionized or not, win the freedom to change jobs because they’re no longer tied to jobs they hate just to remain insured. I don’t think many people are considering or discussing this at large in the conversation about MfA.

Really? From where I sit it's been a central point in discussions about universal coverage as a goal, regardless of mechanism being debated, at least since it was an issue in the Clinton campaign in 1992.

I absolutely recognize it has been a goal for those who support universal coverage. I have yet to hear anyone against or unsure about MfA even bring it up. I probably could have worded that much better.

I’m referring to what media coverage I’ve seen—and perhaps it’s heavily related to the area I live (US South) and the media coverage that dominates here—but whenever I mention it and try to discuss that point with others, people often stare blankly. It takes time to even get the concept to click. And there’s a lot of, “I never even thought about that!”

Single payer specifically does this, not universal healthcare in general. You can have a universal healthcare system in which private healthcare is a thing, including employer-provided healthcare. Many countries do just that.

> Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

I've seen that other commenters have already pointed out that the two are not incompatible.

However, with the risk of getting some downvotes, I would like to challenge the primacy of meritocracy itself.

I don't mean to say that people shouldn't do a good job at work or that they shouldn't try to continuously improve. But I think that an environment and a mentality of continuous competition between individuals is not necessarily beneficial. For one it can cause tensions, frustration, anger, alienation at an individual level, but I think in the long run it can actually harm the company itself.

I'm curious what you guys think about this point of view.

> I don't mean to say that people shouldn't do a good job at work or that they shouldn't try to continuously improve. But I think that an environment and a mentality of continuous competition between individuals is not necessarily beneficial. For one it can cause tensions, frustration, anger, alienation at an individual level, but I think in the long run it can actually harm the company itself.

IIRC, the authors of Peopleware [1] (fantastic book, btw) agree with you. They identified some pay for performance ideas for knowledge workers as "teamkillers" (e.g. tempting management ideas that end up destroying the social fabric that makes an effective team stronger than the sum of its parts).

https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out.

> Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy? I mean we’d like to think that the good ideas win and impact and outcome matters. We hold up the 10x engineers and those that make an outsized contribution to the industry / company / product right?

Not necessarily. I'd imagine that a union could negotiate its pay-scales any way it likes, which could take into account "meritocracy" in many different ways. That could include ideas that are totally foreign to existing for-profit company practices, such as a peer-controlled meritocratic bonus implemented via the union itself.

> Shouldn’t they get higher compensation compared to the rest of the work force? How do we square that with collective bargaining that has set salaries and annual increases?

Here's a hypothetical: In a non-union shop, regular engineers get paid $100k, while 10x engineers get paid 120k. In a union shop all engineers get paid $150k. Should the engineers reject a union so the 10x engineers can get paid more than regular engineers, even though that means everyone makes less?

Also: Are the 10x engineers the people management chooses to pay more? Is management good at recognizing merit? When they recognize it, do they choose to compensate it accordingly? Or do they make the good business decision, and pay the meritorious employees the minimum amount of money they'll be happy with. For some 10x engineers, that could be 2x salary. For other 10x engineers, that could be 1.05x salary. For some 10x engineers, that could be 0.75x salary.

While I agree if the 10x is making 120 and it moves to 150 that is good for everyone. But what if there is a 10x who actually makes 200. Would you ask them to take a pay cut so everyone is on that same 150? I think people will have a hard time with that. I feel people will always want more money for performing better, or get incentivised to perform at the exact right level of that compensation and not more. I am curious what other people think on this. Is there some desire that most people have to be that stellar performer and get that extra compensation, which might make them not want to Unionize so they can try? Would also be curious as to how the breakdown in these votes go. Are the people already better off (well above mean compensation) less likely to vote for Unionization?

Actor’s guilds don’t specify a ceiling to wages, only floors. We could do the same here.

True, is that how people are attempting to form these sorts of unions as well? I honestly don't know what one would look like here. Are there documents from existing Software Engineer unions out there that can be used as a good model? Does the Kickstarter Union already have some form of docs in place, or is that what starts now?

> While I agree if the 10x is making 120 and it moves to 150 that is good for everyone. But what if there is a 10x who actually makes 200. Would you ask them to take a pay cut so everyone is on that same 150?

I think that one key aspect of your comment is that you're taking about a 10x. Which can be generalized into a question: should a solution be rejected if it leaves a well-off minority less well-off than they are now, regardless of how much good it may do otherwise?

I, personally, think the answer to that general question is no. That answer may be hard to swallow if you're part of that well-off minority, but I don't think that changes the truth of the matter.

However, that doesn't mean that a union would or should force that guy to take a pay cut.

> I feel people will always want more money for performing better, or get incentivised to perform at the exact right level of that compensation and not more. I am curious what other people think on this.

I feel that people will always want more money regardless. I also feel that compensation is actually a poor motivator for performance. I think the real motivators for performance are internal factors (such as a desire to improve oneself, to avoid annoyance with badly made things, or to be challenged rather than bored).

Personally, I think once you make enough money, the extra compensation is more a form of recognition than anything else. Recognition doesn't have to be in the form of money, it's just that a souless corporation only cares about money, so money is the only way you can extract recognition from it.

Generally I think I agree. The well-off minority should not hold back changes for the betterment of the majority. I just wonder how that gets executed cleanly.

And you are right, compensation is definitely a form of recognition, and perhaps there are better ways to do it. Just not sure how you bestow that recognition in some reasonable way. So what other form of recognition conveys your actual value to a company? What else can be done here?

It is good to incentivise stellar performances with higher pay, but for me personally, it isn't the reason I aspire to be good. I think I would do exactly the same thing in a "Star Trek-like" economy where everyone basically has the same standard of living. (Probably because I was born wealthy and am not pressured by fear of subsistence)

One thing people would probably stop doing is chasing wealth and career to the detriment of their private life, and that might be a net negative to corporate spreadsheets and economic growth, but probably a net-positive for society.

I say to both my leftist and rightist friends to please spend some time analyzing Scandinavian societies. They are much more advanced than us on a lot of social issues, and a lot of their successes are directly applicable to our societies, too.

Why should a person take a pay cut to help someone else who is less skilled or chose different priorities above their jobs? I expect a person who is willing to devote 60 hours a week to get paid more than me when I go home after 8 hours.

That person devoting 60 hours a week is almost certainly committing trash that someone else will have to refactor or discard entirely at a later date.

Real 10x programmers spend most of their time levitating, anyway.

> I expect a person who is willing to devote 60 hours a week to get paid more than me when I go home after 8 hours.

Apart from the fact you get diminishing returns on work quality for those sort of hours...

That person is neglecting their family and/or partner, or at the very least their own health if they're working those sort of hours. Where do they find time to work on personal relationships or do exercise?

It also skews job expectations by creating an atmosphere where other employees are pressured into working those sort of hours, with the same resulting problems.

If someone has no attachments, no outside interests, no interest in maintaining their health, and genuinely has that sort of energy and desire for work, let them pick up a part-time gig separate to their main job.

Why? If I had a choice to make more money working one job and make the same amount of money doing two jobs. Of course I’m going to choose one job. I wouldn’t do that now, but people have a right to prioritize their work life balance as they choose.

How many startup founders have worked 60+ hours a week to get their business off the ground?

Law is famous for getting ahead by having more billable hours.

Of course if everyone gets higher pay (if we just look at pay) then that's a good thing. In your hypothetical of course I'd want 150k for everyone. Do we have data to show that this is the effect of unions in white collar jobs?

It's amusing in some ways.

We already have an informal FAANG guild: 1) their salaries are higher 2) FAANG on the resume = already vetted 3) mastered the interview rigmarole

So it seems that efforts by employers to collude in the job market led to something that resembles a professional guild.

Don't most jobs have a range set by the company? Something like between 80/120k based on experience. A union wouldn't change that. I've never seen someone go in with 10x skills at 150k and make it past the recruitor filter.

The number of places that will pay you more than they decided beforehand is very small not matter if you are 10x better or not. You will get top of pay range.

Startups wouldn't fall under this because usually you need 20+ people. This would apply to get giants who have systems in place. If you are truly worldclass they invent a position. But for regular developers where there are more than one person sharing the same title this is who the union is for.

> I've never seen someone go in with 10x skills at 150k and make it past the recruitor filter.

The real crime is that employers have convinced you that only rockstars should be making $150k.

> Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

Not to sound dismissive, but if you actually believe that working in tech is akin to a meritocracy, you're either fairly young or you haven't spent a lot of time in a corporation. Both of which being ok.

The engineering ethos of meritocracy is a flawed model for management / employee interaction because it assumes a level playing field.

If anything, employees who believe their workplace should be a meritocracy can protect and provide force to that belief via a union.

Tech work isn't a meritocracy, though. Even putting aside the issue of diversity and bias, there's a large gradient of working conditions and pay across the industry. There are plenty of really smart engineers online who have a popular following, and people are often shocked when it comes out that those people are severely underpaid relative to some college new grad churning out boilerplate for an ad company.

Also, do companies really value 10x engineers? Sure, the people who are truly at the top, well known, and know their worth have great negotiating power to work on interesting things and get paid a lot for it. What about everyone else? I'd say that most "10x" engineers aren't getting 10x the compensation. Most people who perform well will get a promotion or something, and that's it. The way tech companies manage workers and handle performance reviews isn't all that different from everyone else. Tech workers are capturing a fraction of the value they generate, and there's no reason for management to admit that.

No, your salary depends on how well you negotiate, not how good a worker you are. Whenever I’ve shared salary information with coworkers (at non-union tech jobs) it never correlated with value or quality or productivity.

If you really want to go the “meritocracy“ route, drop salaries altogether. Make employees bid on features and maintenance, and pay them for accomplishing these specific tasks. Paying salaries at all (the same amount every month regardless of productivity) is anti-meritocratic.

Open source is a fantastic counterexample to this. Lots of people produce huge collective value to the industry for $0 incremental salary.

Movie stars with multi-million dollar contracts exist in the same union as B-list actors you've only ever seen in the backgrounds of infomercials.

You need to define meritocracy.

There's plenty of excellent software engineers paid pennies to work on difficult problems because they live in countries with very low wages.

And plenty of people in silicon valley being wildly overpaid to copy paste javascript from stack overflow.

I think the tech people/artists working on gaming industry , Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize".

So far , the medium.com has been the "systematic problems reporting tool" for tech and that just generates the views and small changes..

In the past decade, i hate to see that the word "unionizing" in itself has become a bad word to hear for anyone from Management.

I doubt the word "unionizing" was ever something management wanted to hear

>Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize"

Why wouldn't the same employees that are setting Uber's culture set the union culture? The union is a collective bargaining unit that acts on behalf of the workers, not the most moral and upstanding workers, or the most progressive workers, or the workers that represent you personally.

From the public version of the story, a vast majority of the issues seemed to stem from management, not necessarily the workforce. A union would help all workers have a voice (and a union lawyer can be used to identify and validate early on that there is a problem to be solved).

Sexist/racist people don’t show up to union meetings and volunteer for union committees to push sexist/racist policies.

It’s not like national politics where it’s a prestigious and high paying job, and corporations are throwing a ton of money behind candidates.

Also, unions are usually not employer-specific. No matter how many jerks you have at one company, they can’t overpower all the voting members at all the other companies.

Respectfully, plenty of misandrists and anti-White racists do show up to those meetings and join panels to push their discriminatory agenda.

Why do you think we talk about the lack of women in STEM, but not the lack of men in HR, education, social work, psychology, etc?

Because bigots set the agenda.

Having sports programs for one sex has been ruled illegal under Title IX — but how many universities have special tutoring just for women?

That is, programs to help women in majors where they trail but offering no similar programs for men in majors where they trail.

Again, the reason we don’t talk about that illegal discrimination is because bigots set the agenda.

There are plenty of men in HR, education, and social work.

Men simply don't go into those fields as much as women do because they pay less than comparable positions in other fields.

Case in point: the number of men in nursing has been increasing every year without having any gender-based outreach efforts, because nurses make good money, get longer weekends, and you don't need 10 years of degrees to become a nurse.

Similarly, the % of men employed as educators increases with salary. Or in other words, very few male teachers at the K-3 levels, more at the middle-school level, and the largest % of male teachers at the high-school level.

Not in my experience (2 unions). Do you have any examples of unions where this has occurred? (Recently, not some event from the 1950's or 1960's -- racists and sexists were much more powerful in all forums back then.)

Your example is universities, and I've never heard of any university faculty being unionized. In fact, that's another great example of a system where policymakers have immense prestige and very high paying jobs. Tenure allows senior faculty to set crazy agendas of all sorts, good and bad. That's the main criticism of the tenure system! Having worked a few years in academia and a few years under a trade union, I can tell you the two could not be more different, in structure or operation. I'm not sure how a criticism of academia is relevant in a discussion of unions.

You ask "How many universities have special tutoring just for women?". I don't know. How many? I searched the 3 colleges I've attended in my life, and none of them do (or at least it's not easy to find online -- compared to all the "free tutoring for all" that I found). Are you suggesting that many do?

If you want to talk about illegal discrimination, give me facts, not vague innuendo and rhetorical leading questions. And let's not get distracted by unrelated systems.

I’ve worked in Australian Universities and both the support staff and teaching/research staff where unionised. And sure there are professional with tenure but there are also quite a large number of adjunct professors who are basically being exploited.

What is discriminatory about taking active measures to ensure that the tech monoculture does not perpetuate itself? If there are programs for women in STEM majors who need extra support, it is because women in STEM majors may have to surmount an obstacle that men do not: namely, that women are not fit for engineering.

This webcomic sums up why so many organizations take active measures to support women in STEM in one panel: https://xkcd.com/385/

It’s illegal discrimination to provide programs only for the majority sex — see rulings on only having sports programs for men. (Women have been the majority of college students since the 1980s.)

There’s nothing wrong with women in STEM programs, but not having matching men-in-social-sciences programs is a Title IX violation... precisely in the way only having sports for men would be.

You can have programs for no one; you can have programs for everyone; you cant have programs only for one sex.

That’s literally the point of civil rights laws.

That's an oversimplification of Title IX. Nowhere does it state that a university must offer the same sports programs or even the same number of sports programs for each gender. It only states that women who desire to play sports be accommodated, which is to say, a school can't only have sports programs for men.

From the US Department of Education website:

A college or university is not required to offer particular sports or the same sports for each sex. Also, an institution is not required to offer an equal number of sports for each sex. However, an institution must accommodate to the same degree the athletic interests and abilities of each sex in the selection of sports [1]

[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/interath.htm...

> anti-White racists

Please spare the alt-right dog whistle.

Sadly, that sort of thing gets boosted on HN & calling it out for what it is like you did gets your comment turned grey & flagged.

If you make sexism/racism the focus of your union, it will be very short lived.

> Why wouldn't the same employees that are setting Uber's culture set the union culture?

Company culture comes from the top.

In a union or a cooperative, the members actually have an opportunity to decide who gets to be at the top.

In a co-op, yes. In a union, no. You only elect your union leaders, not the company's leaders. The board decides who is in charge of the company, and the board is controlled by shareholders.

Powerful unions sometimes have a board seat, but one seat does not let you unilaterally impose who runs the company.

Ultimately, company culture is a product of what the owners and their appointees allow and incentivize. In Uber's case, its culture is directly tied to Kalanick's management.

I agree in that unions give employees leverage in management and decision making, and that a union might have provided incentives for Uber to behave differently towards its employees. But a union isn't going to change who owns the company, unless they negotiate a buyout.

There are some airlines that will not take accept delivery of a Charleston-assembled Boeing 787. The fact that you can speak up with less repercussions in unionized Everett when too many corners are cut obviously has influence on product quality and company culture, even though the union doesn't get a seat at the board.

I don't think management has the ability to shape culture to that degree. Maybe it is different in the US, but I doubt this to be generally true.

Unions are indeed in danger of creating their own ambitions, especially without input from workers.

That said, I think the US could really use some form of employee interest group. Because the business orientation has reached perverse levels.

There's always the danger that a faction takes over an organization. (Bipartisan consensus is especially bad, don't run for the hills when you encounter it, instead raise the alarm and protest vociferously.)

Luckily there is institutional experience how to prevent a descent into oligarchic bureaucracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Democracy

Unions have a terrible reputation when it comes to helping people in the minority. They have elections and tyranny of the majority is the natural outcome. Unions and Labor parties have a nasty history of racism. About 15 years ago I was present when a UAW rep called a gay salaried coworker the f-word at 150 decibels and the company could do nothing. He is now the plant union chairman.

I am sure this union will start off nice, but eventually the Bros will run it.

Basically every institution in the U.S. has racism in its history.

But the reason the civil rights movement has been so aligned with the labor movement historically is because racial and economic progress are linked. That's one reason why there's more pay equity in union jobs.

Worth noting that Dr. King was assassinated, he was in the city because he was striking with sanitation workers.

https://www.theroot.com/dr-king-understood-the-power-of-unio...

I am clearly biased based on my experience, and agree with MLK that you can’t make progress if you don’t have a voice. Maybe if the union is setup with parliamentary style representation it would avoid some of the nasty problems I have seen first hand.

Yeah, I think you make a fair point. Unions need to be representative of all parts of the workforce. The first things unions do when they start organizing is try to create a committee that includes all departments, people across race, etc.

But I just don't think you dismiss, say, the concept of banks because of problems that banks have had. Or sports. Or the entertainment industry. Or anything else.

I honestly don't know about unions in the anglophone world, but here in continental Europe they did a rather splendid job. I think it might be a mix of propaganda by corporate media and lack of transparency that led to the downfall of unions in NA and Britain, but it really doesn't need to stay that way. Build up the system again, and this time better.

I also don't see why there shouldn't be an international union of IT workers. We are an extremely flexible workforce, generally sharing similar concerns, and usually with a strong urge to cooperate on a number of issues. We could even band together to crowdfund certain open source projects we really want but never get around to.

What's to stop the bros from running management where they have all the power?

Athletic unions are generally there because the top leagues are monolithic, there aren't other places to go with similar compensation. It's sort of a different playing field.

Okay, so you have 2 options to make dollar money as an engineer: Google & Facebook.

Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon pay well, but 10-20% less for the same level. There's a handful of others that will pay about 20-40% less. The average startup is paying 40-70% less.

And, sure, you'll always run into some startup that's paying one or two engineers a million dollars.

Stephon Marbury made more money when he left the NBA to play in China. Doesn't mean the average player can or does.

Anyone making league average in the NBA could play in Europe or China for 40-70% less.

Not sure what the difference is...

I don't think those options are the only ones and I think your numbers are dramatically far off for everything.

Those aren't the only options anymore, Netflix is for instance famous for compensating very well, and large startups can be competitive too. https://www.levels.fyi/

In tech the monolithic nature arises differently.

The Top Companies pay X, and that sets the ceiling for most people's wages. The difficulty of getting into Top Companies means that most other companies know they can pay somewhat less than that.

Although it's claimed there's a talent shortage and in theory that would cause engineers to be able to negotiate for large salaries, most businesses just don't think that deeply about it. You can't negotiate with someone who just doesn't care that the math works out in their favor. Many managers in my experience have anchor points on salaries that they just will not go beyond regardless of the quality of the candidate. The salary spread for junior to super-super-senior developer is only about 50% (100k-150k or 120k-200k), whereas the productivity difference may commonly be much greater.

Lastly, there is de facto price fixing. Human Resources Departments do "salary surveys" of what all the other companies are paying and then try to pay their employees around the same amount. Even though this isn't official "collusion", the effect is the same. And if 1 or 2 small companies buck the trend, it doesn't change the overall market.

Athletes need unions because sports organizations are a legal monopoly. All of the employees - the owners - set rules in concert.

When you graduate from college, you decide what company you want to apply for. You don’t have to participate in a draft where different employers have already decided the order they are going to make you an offer.

Also all sports team share some of their revenue streams.

> But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union.

Most of athletes aren't high paid. You don't hear about them and the high-paid athletes via players unions do everything possible to prevent newcomers from joining their ranks -- that's why there are deadlines when the teams must bring the number of people on a team down to a certain number.

Most of SAG/AFTRA members only dream of a principal role again after using the exceptions while collecting tips slinging drinks in bars or carrying plates in restaurants.

If you are making over 100-250k while working in tech unions will push your compensation down. The companies won't be negotiating with you about your special deal when the union shows up in your shop.

> Most of SAG/AFTRA members only dream of a principal role again after using the exceptions while collecting tips slinging drinks in bars or carrying plates in restaurants.

And yet, they get healthcare through the union. Minimum rates for when they do find work. Residuals to get them through lean years.

> And yet, they get healthcare through the union.

If they meet eligibility requirements. Most don't.

> Minimum rates for when they do find work.

Those rates are terrible. One cannot support oneself on it. SAG day rate is ~$335. SAG week rate is ~$1166. That's 2020.

> Residuals to get them through lean years.

You are thinking of people who "made it" -- managed to land a long term gig on one of syndicated TV shows. Those are equivalents of $550k/year Staff Engineers.

Source: Dated two. Used exceptions to do SAG/AFTRA show arriving at the must join status.

> If they meet eligibility requirements. Most don't.

You have to earn $15k/year to qualify for the lowest tier health plan. At the minimum rate you quoted, that's about 12 weeks of work. That doesn't seem unreasonable - hard to call yourself a professional actor yet if you can't book 12 weeks of work. Dues are only $220/year, so it's not like you're giving a ton of money to the union while you wait for a break.

> Sag week rate is ~$1166. That's 2020

That's still better money than waiting tables. About 2x California minimum wage.

> You are thinking of people who "made it" -- managed to land a long term gig on one of syndicated TV shows

Maybe I'm understanding this wrong, but it seems like anyone who is a "principal performer" is eligible for residuals. Even guest stars that speak one or 2 lines in a single episode of a long-running show will get something. I don't know the sums involved - maybe it's grocery money, for someone with that small of a part. But do you think a one-line performer would have gotten that negotiating by themselves? They'd be told to take a hike.

> You have to earn $15k/year to qualify for the lowest tier health plan. At the minimum rate you quoted, that's about 12 weeks of work.

That's work on a set. 12 weeks/year on a set is a huge number. To get to that point, one probably spent 2x the time on non-paid activities such as pounding pavement going on castings and auditions.

> That's still better money than waiting tables. About 2x California minimum wage.

Exactly! So the great achievement of the union is non-full time at 2x minimum wage with benefits tied to ~ 3 months of days on set.

That would be a massive downgrade for tech workers who are full time, at 4x - 10x the minimum wage. Options and RSUs would definitely go bye-bye.

> Even guest stars that speak one or 2 lines in a single episode of a long-running show will get something. I don't know the sums involved - maybe it's grocery money, for someone with that small of a part.

The best thing to be is an extra who said something on camera, because that automatically upgrades one to a principal by burning an exmeption.

Yes, everyone gets paid residuals but it is all based on the total units and total pay and who gets more units.

> To get to that point, one probably spent 2x the time on non-paid activities such as pounding pavement going on castings and auditions.

You make a fair point, have an upvote.

> That would be a massive downgrade for tech workers who are full time. Options and RSUs would definitely go bye-bye.

Why are you assuming that a hypothetical tech union would negotiate the same rates as SAG-AFTRA? There's no shortage of people wanting to become rich and famous as actors, singers, or other on-screen performers - and they've still managed to negotiate 2x minimum wage. Whereas there's a shortage of people wanting to be programmers.

> Whereas there's a shortage of people wanting to be programmers.

There is definitely no shortage of people who want to become programmers. There may be a shortage of people who are capable of becoming competent programmers, but I don't think so. There is definitely a shortage of people who meet the arbitrarily high bars set by many non-famous companies.

There's no shortage in people who want to work in tech even in the conditions that people of Kickstarter that voted for the union consider to be unacceptable. ( Pay scale, offices, perks )

The reason why general do X for me is so low on freelancing sites is because there in enormous supply which is currently restricted by the arbitrary rules of the employers who pay for those capricious restrictions though the nose. Tech unions are going to democratize this which is going to greatly negatively affect the current tech workers.

Tech workers could have effectively used the leverage associated with unionization since at least 1984 during the semiconductor recession.

Considering that the revenue per employee number is at an all time high, and the amount of money the company spends on the employee's working environment[1] is at record lows pretty much explains why this is going to be effective now when it wasn't before.

There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees. So giving a voice to that choice could be interesting as well.

[1] Most people I've had the discussion with will argue that "free food" and "bus service" is way more than employees in the 90's got. However on a per-employee basis, the typical professional employee (engineer) had 150 square feet of office space that was unshared, in an open plan office that is typically less than 18 square feet and can be a small as 9 square feet. 100 square feet in a class A office building is $1000/month for $10/sq ft. Food and bus service per employee totals to much less than that. The key is that with a union, the employee has a voice in whether they get compensated in office space or in free snacks.

Also, frankly, fsk free snacks. Pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks, and I'll choose whether to spend it on snacks or not. And since the money spent on free snacks was probably about $20/week, it won't be a significant consideration in any of my decisions.

Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.

They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.

Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.

I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.

As you said, that stuff is lunch/dinner, rather than snacks. Certainly that's a more valuable perk that some pretzels and sodas (or whatever). It's also less common.

I can have them delivered for very little premium. If my co-workers and I pool our orders we can reduce the impact of those deliveries (or rotating pickup), and have more choice about what snacks we get.

Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.

Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make.

Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that.

And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.

> Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk.

Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.

You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.

Well I'm certainly not ordering from GrubHub either.

> Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.

What's the economy of scale on me getting up and going to get a fresh salad even when snacks are provided for free, because I value my health and sanity?

If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.

Really, you think buying my own snacks doesn't work? I gotta tell you, I've been accused of many things, but being unable to buy snacks is not one of them.

Sure, maybe it costs me some minuscule amount of money: if that's your point you can have it. Congrats! You win that argument.

My argument is: pretending that snacks are a meaningful benefit in negotiating employment is a huge loss to employees. But if you want to choose your job based on the snack benefit, have fun working for reduced wages so you can sit at your desk more.

I think you replied to the wrong person? I didn’t make any such accusation...

You said:

> If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.

And before that, you said:

> You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.

Buying my own snacks works just fine, because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant. The greatest relevance they have is as a contract negotiation chip where employers try to sell them as a benefit which gets weighed against things that actually matter, like salary.

If you view snacks as an inherently important thing, I guess I can't argue with you on that, but I think most people wouldn't agree with you if they realized how much money they might be leaving behind by considering things like snacks when choosing a job.

None of that supports your 'accusation' claim.

> because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant.

That's not what 'economy of scale' means.

> If you view snacks as an inherently important thing

I don't, and it's unrelated to my argument.

Also, even if they were to give you your fraction of that back, that would count as taxable income - unless they categorize it as a "stipend" -- which requires a lot more up-front accounting/legal work on their end.

You may prefer getting $6/wk (or $5.04/wk after taxes) more instead of snacks at work, but the simple fact is that your employer provides snacks because it's in their best interest to do so. Whether it's in your interest is not the decisive factor, though they may take your opinion into consideration.

I've never seen an office manager order from anything but GrubHub and instacart on a fairly regular basis with plenty of employee input.

You seem to be referring to large faceless corporations that are ordering in bulk that way.

I'm not referring to large, faceless corporations, I'm referring to >100 person orgs. My experience can't be an outlier as there are plenty of vendors that specialize in this space, so someone out there is buying from a vendor. Here's what I found on the first page of search results:

- http://dockspace.co/

- https://snacknation.com/

- https://naturebox.com/office

- https://www.eatclub.com/

- https://www.workperks.co/

- https://fruitguys.com/office-fruit-delivery

- https://www.bevi.co

I feel like this conversation got massively side-tracked. Are you arguing in good faith that the amount of value some snacks provide to an employee is meaningful when compared to the other things the GP mentioned?

No, I was responding to the specific argument made by the OP which I quoted above.

What you quoted was more of a statement of what I want than an argument for why I want it. You didn't quote my argument.

This entire thread is the reason unions are such a pain in the a$$.

You have a bunch of employees who have never run a company confidently telling with their handwaving math how things should work. You have a dozen people patting themselves and others on the back for the idea of getting a sliver of their snack budget back in salary with no concept of economies of scale.

While unionizing for backbreaking work like the manufacturing industry makes sense, in tech it is a nightmare. Let's see where Kickstarter finds itself in the next recession and see how things work out when executives can no longer make quick decisions but are forced to do everything by committee.

This seems to be hard for some folks to understand. Allow me to simplify.

Fuck snacks. I do not care about snacks. Take them away. I won't complain.

Who are you to decide if that's worth it or not? Obviously if someone has decided to take that pay cut and switch companies it was worthwhile for them.

You might not care much for those perks yourself but it's self-evident that some people do.

People are free to make whatever irrational decisions they wish. Again, we're talking anecdotal evidence, but those people don't stay long at those companies.

I certainly won't hold it against an employer if they provide snacks.

It’s not irrational to value things differently. I place a huge premium on having a variety of drinks, snacks, and meals at my workplace. Far, far beyond the mere cost to purchase them. I make plenty of money, why would I add a huge time sink, hassle, and mental overhead for a bit of extra cash that I don’t really need?

Do you know how much of a time sink, hassle, and mental overhead it is to work for $5000 you didn't make because you accepted $500 in snacks instead?

If not, I can point you to a few devs who can tell you from their experiences. ;)

However, this problem isn't solved by unions, it's solved by teaching your dev friends how to negotiate better. If they are on their 3rd job and are still getting under negotiated with snacks then I don't know what to tell you (or them).

I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.

> I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.

Well, I'll just quote that so you can't change it, and people can decide for themselves whether they think paying thousands of dollars for snacks is a rational decision.

Irrational decisions you've been making for a long time are still irrational decisions. Irrational decisions you make with 1% of your income are still irrational decisions.

If you're saying that leaving behind massive amounts of money in exchange for cheap snacks is something you just inherently like, I guess that's not irrational, but that's a pretty unusual thing to like. But follow your heart!

It's kind of nice to know that you can walk 5 meters from your desk to get food, however it doesn't take long to realise that you'd rather 10 min to the nearest place and eat there instead. It gives you a bit of time outside the office,you move more and ultimately make your own decision on what you eat instead it being done by your lovely Big Corp.

Judging by the throngs of people filling office cafeterias, this is not a universal truth. Making my point again.

People rarely do what's more benefitial to them.The best example is when a heavily overweight person with developing heart conditions is prescribed medication left and right instead of being told( and helped with) to better manage diet and levels of physical activities.

So in response to my point that people may value things differently than how someone rando on the Internet thinks they should, your response is that they clearly just don’t know what’s good for them :)

Of course people value different things- that's normal.I remember I worked for a company,where most of my team had this bad habbit of having lunch at their desk. Constantly skipping 1 hour lunch they were entitled to. Our manager used to go crazy about it and eventually had to ban it all together. Interestingly enough, while it was a busy place,there was no need not to take lunch. I always took full lunch break and enjoyed walks alongside Thames,while some others had to seek medical help because of overwork.

Unless you left all shopping on partner or parents, it is like 5 seconds to grab stuff for office too while in store.

And even if your partner does it all, "honey would you buy also some crackers" is quick.

So close, but not quite right.

You get free snacks at the office for the same reason people sitting at slot machines get free drinks - because someone wants you to stay there.

And get diabetes

Plenty of companies provide fruit. Apples are not strong causes of diabetes last time I looked.

Plenty of companies provide mostly unhealthy snacks.

Also, encouraging workers not to spend time out of the building is not so healthy, physically and mentally.

And it's not meant to be a perk. It's mean to keep people glued to the chair.

Go outside. Don't eat the donut. You are not a NPC in some game. Do your thing.

And yet, on average, nudges work.

Eat apples on daily basis and you'll soon see the affected on your teeth and heart. They are good source of fiber, vitamins bit also have a lot of sugar. Despite all this,they are still miles better than your average Snickers bar.

Actually, speaking as a diabetic, fruits are something you have to be careful of.

There is a _lot_ of sugar in fruit. A medium sized apple has as much sugar as 8oz of Coca Cola.

The sugars in fruit are very simple, which is good and bad. They tend to spike blood sugar very quickly, but also drop back to baseline fairly quickly.

Now, there is lots of good nutritional stuff in fruit also, of course, but you could absolutely develop diabetes from eating fruit.

Given a choice between the apple and the soft drink, I'd choose the raw apple every time. Human digestion can far more efficiently work with the apple than suga-cola. The "sugar" might be the same in terms of basic numbers, but the composition is very different.

I genuinely would like to see how strong the evidence actually is for someone getting diabetes from raw fruit[1]. Especially when compared to other sources such as sugary drinks etc. My uneducated guess is that we should be able to look at primates with high fruit consumption and we'd instantly see massive diabetes populations. I doubt this is true. It would be a stretch at best.

[1] I should at this stage assert the non-inclusion of anything processed either. I'm not counting fruit juice for example. Juicing is not the same as eating the actual fruit. Less effort so the digestion process changes. Commercial juices are even worse.

> They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.

Wrong. This is the complete opposite of what's happening. They aren't eliminating a chore you'd need to do. You're going to work 9-5 whether they provide free snacks or not, and you're going to snack. If they don't provide them, you're going to leave and go get them somewhere else. They're providing snacks to keep you from leaving the office. They get you at your desk longer. It's not a perk. It's a cheap way to extract more labor.

If your job is more fulfilling than walking to a store and standing in line (and most programming jobs are IME), then it's win-win. Company gets something they want, I get something I want, we're both happy.

No, they’re trying to make sure you never leave the office. A walk down the street to the nearest grocery store is a nice break, but not one the company wants you taking.

I'm under the impression that the practice started in the bay area where the nearest grocery store is a nice 10 minute drive away.

You know, with the advent of Amazon and other Task Rabbitty to-your-door delivery services, did they really save me any chore here? I can get just about anything delivered to my door stop within 48 hours, why is it trouble for me to get my preferred snacks at all?

Tax free when a company buys them. I prefer the free snacks even at an even money exchange, but realistically, you'd see about $12/week on a $20/week rerouting.

If $8/week is something that affects your decisions, you might benefit from unionizing for higher pay. ;)

If you want to play the tax game, let's talk about reimbursing large purchases like a vehicle, personal laptop that you aren't monitoring, education costs, or housing. There isn't a situation where I'm going to care about snacks.

Free snacks has to be one of tech companies most profitable endeavors.

They've got a bunch of workers who cost them on the order of 1 to 4 dollars per minute. If they can spend a dollar on a snack to get 2 minutes more work out of them, they are making a killing.

Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc.

The same goes for meals by the way, I can't believe the number of places that have expensive employees go buy food for themselves blocks away... they're literally throwing away money by not having cheap employees fetch it in a single batch.

Meals Are supposed to be taxed but the irs doesn’t enforce it.

You act like there is some shadowy cabal running cost benefit analysis of every decision for some evil purpose.

Maybe the free snacks are there because it’s nice to have free snacks and the boss enjoys them? Does there really need to be a more sinister reason?

I mean, I know at our company that I wanted to have drink fridges with a huge amount of interesting beverages because I enjoy drinking a different drink every day. It wasn’t me trying to improve employee performance.

There is at least a little bit of a dark side to seemingly frivolous perks like snacks, foosball tables, and beer on tap- by spending relative pennies for "luxuries", management is able to paper over diminished investment elsewhere, that employees could otherwise benefit from. Or to hide work cultures that aren't as great as they look upon their first visit. Shiny distractions.

This. I work at a place that had no retirement plan, subpar health insurance, generally clueless HR and no support for career development besides "fake it til you make it".

Of course they have ping pong tables and video games and free snacks and drink fridges. The cost and logistics of putting in a couple ping-pong tables is way cheaper than giving everyone vision coverage, or matching retirement contributions.

Why do you need vision coverage?

"Lisa needs braces"

"Dental Plan!"

"Lisa needs braces"

"Dental Plan!"

Man that episode had a lot of great lines.

"[in a flashback when Mr. Burns was young]

Boy: You can't treat the working man this way. One day we'll form a union and get the fair and equittable treatment we deserve. Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt and shiftless and the Japanese will eat us alive!

Mr. Burns' Grandfather: The Japanese!? Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders? Bosh! Flimshaw!

[Years Later]

Mr. Burns: If only we'd listened to that boy, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven."

/s or...?

I don't know if they were being sarcastic, but I'm willing to argue for the position.

There are life altering medical conditions that can make you go blind, for that "vision coverage" as part of medical coverage makes sense. I'm excluding that from the below because by "vision coverage" most people mean "insurance for routine checkups and purchasing glasses".

For routine eye appointments and glasses - their is no high unexpected costs that need to be spread out over a large population. The costs are low and predictable. The majority of the population needs them. So the typical benefit of insurance doesn't exist - i.e. you aren't spreading large unexpected costs over a large number of people so they average out to a small consistent cost.

Meanwhile insuring these things just means that the people purchasing the product no longer have an incentive to keep the price down, and adds bureaucracy, both of which increase the cost without providing a better service.

So - why do you need vision coverage?

I'll acknowledge some counter arguments exist. Encouraging people to get frequent enough eye appointments, spreading the cost of bad eyesight to the minority of people who don't need eyeware, if government supported - subsidizing the basic need of eyeware for poor people, etc. You can make an argument in the other direction to, but I don't think either argument is obviously better, and in the end which side you agree with basically comes down to what your politics are like.

Software engineering and white collar work in general are very visual-heavy professions. It is absurd not to include health coverage as part of compensation when the job involves 40+ hours a week of staring at computer screens. It is also ridiculous that vision and dental insurance are bundled separately from "medical" coverage, but that is a different issue.

Why is it absurd?

I'm assuming your total compensation is the same either way. So it's not that you're not being compensated for staring at computer screens all days, it's just a question of whether your being compensated by being given dollars or being compensated by your eye doctor and glasses manufacturer being given dollars.

Upon rereading your post, your point makes more sense. But don't you at least get discounts on the exams and eyewear? I would assume there's some justification for why vision insurance exists beyond the serious conditions you mention, and thus be an additional benefit from employers of workers who experience ocular wear and tear all day.

You get fake discounts off egregiously inflated eye exam/eyewear prices

You can easily buy prescription glasses online for less than $20 a pair, and you can get an eye exam done for $50-$100

If you use your vision insurance to buy glasses in person, though, good luck getting them for less than $150. The price of the glasses magically inflates to whatever your insurance will cover.

If my vision insurance weren't bundled with my employment as a "free" benefit I'd definitely just use $80 out of my HSA to pay for an eye exam and then buy a sack of glasses online

> Shiny distractions.

Or, as I put it in a similar situation, very expensive snacks and foosball games

Once I worked in a department that had a crappy coffee maker. We got a new boss. First thing he did was get a really good coffee maker installed.

That boss left, new boss showed up, coffee maker left and an even worse one than the original was installed. No espresso! In SF!

In my experience having at least a VP who actually cares about the perk will vastly improve it. But most won’t care and will do whatever the default is.

I make my own coffee at home and bring it in a thermos. Office coffee sucks almost by definition.

Throw out that crappy "perk" and pay me more money.

Throwing out the "perk" of providing free performance enhancing drugs to their employees means their average employee will become less effective, either because they won't be on performance enhancing drugs or because they will be spending time walking around to get performance enhancing drugs instead of working. So the average employee is making less money for the company, so they are payed less, not more.

In numbers it goes something like they can pay you and extra buck a day for not having the coffee machine, but they simultaneously have to cut your pay 10 bucks a day for the loss in productive work being done. Your 9 bucks a day and free coffee down in the exchange.

There is a secret cabal running cost-benefit analyses of every decision for some evil purpose: They're called MBA's and they're everywhere. Especially in larger companies.

This. For anyone who doesn't see it, please check out the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013).

> The same goes for meals by the way

I don't think meals work in quite the same way. If I'm looking for a snack that is a short-term immediate need. I have a stash in my desk drawer, there are often free ones in the kitchen & break-out area, and I'm happy to use those usually rather than going further afield. It doesn't save actual time because ten minutes nipping to the shop is ten minutes time I'll serve elsewhere but it can impact productive time as a 10-minute break is a more significant mental context switch than a 30-second one.

But at lunch though, is a different beast. I'm going to be away from my desk and/or meetings for at least half an hour, except on those occasions when there is an emergency so I stuff something down myself at my desk from the collection of protein bars and such in that desk draw & work through. Providing a meal doesn't give the company the same productive time benefit there at all, in fact some studies suggest it could be a detriment - taking a proper break for lunch has been shown to have a beneficial effect on concentration in the afternoon. I usually make a point of taking most of an hour to get out away from my desk, even in iffy weather, though I do currently have the luxury of working close to home so I can actually get there, eat, fuss the cat, and get back, in that time so that may not be as appealing to others.

> Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc.

Free food is also tax-deductible in a way that simply giving you the extra money is not.

Office perks are tax efficient. They aren’t subject to payroll taxes and are a deductible business expense. Not having any perks at all would be wasteful.

Also notable - there are companies that provide 'free' perks for your staff where a few of them are concrete and the rest are discounts on things from their marketing partners.

Honestly, I'd be tempted to sign up and then tell incoming employees the truth thereof.

That's great for investors, but the benefit to employees is minimal. No, free snacks don't count as a benefit lol.

I worked for a company that IPO'd at the time for around $4.4 billion.

Shortly after IPO they wanted everyone to go on call. The terms sucked bad, the requirements significantly affecting personal time and the compensation for time on call and loss of personal time less than minimum wage for the pleassue. I'd of been better off working minimum wage out of hours given I'd have to loose personal time anyway. The conditions where non negotiable and I was told they didn't need to re-issue contracts etc, I'd have to go on call with no say in it. In real terms going on call was a pay cut with more accountability.

On refusing to go on call, my manager and his manager used the line "What about the free food and perks, take one for the team". It's about the worst thing they could of said.

Free food being a small salad counter / deli bar and free soft drinks non which I utilized as didn't fit my fitness diet and as you said likely only a few dollars per week extra per member of staff for them to provide a few snacks.

After previously being labelled a high performer etc not long after (days) late on a Friday afternoon HR called me in to sign my resignation papers and go on gardening leave.

I'd welcome free snacks. I work on IND airport property, we have 30 minute lunches, the 2 refrigerators will store maybe food for 20 people yet we have 100ish on day shift, McDonald's is the closest anything and in traffic during a typical lunch period will take you 20-25 minutes on a good day to get to and get back and we can NOT eat at our desks (that we share with another shift). Then of course there are 3 microwaves to reheat your food, for 100ish people.

Some free fruit or something would be awesome for when you're not feeling what you brought or need something in addition other than bloomed chocolate and stale chips from a vending machine that the vendor refills once every 1 week to 6 weeks with no rhyme or reason. The soda machine sells out in 3-4 days and the vendor comes once every 2 weeks if we're lucky. The tap water comes out milky white at first and even if you let it run if you fill a mug and let it sit for a half hour, dump it out, the next day there will be white build up. Do that for a week and then heat the mug and it'll flake off printer paper thick pieces.

I'd totally take free snacks, but yeah I'd be happier with more money.

When I was at OpenAI for a meeting a couple of June's ago I was absolutely floored when they were like "we cater 2 meals a day, you're welcome to stay for lunch" and the guard/receptionist immediately offered me a chilled drink as I was checking in. I was like "wait, did I die and go to heaven?!"

Politics aside, I wonder if a tech union would have a strong incentive to make their individual workers irreplaceable--encourage them to hoard knowledge or make the code deliberately difficult for others to understand--such that the company would have a lot more to lose from a strike. As an outsider, most unions that I'm familiar with have employees that are more or less replaceable (one certified welder can fill in for another in a relatively short amount of time), but I don't think this is (as) true for tech. Thoughts?

It's not as if most companies- or at least most startups- are particularly good about preventing individuals or individual teams from becoming vital cogs, leading to tribal knowledge. Unions won't lead to less documentation that the existing poor organizational cultures already foster.

My question was about whether unionization constitutes an increased incentive (and I would think that it would for the same reasons that unionization gives a collection of individuals more power than they would have as individuals); I don't think that depends on whether or not existing institutions are good or bad at preventing vital cogs, etc.

I might be wrong, but I don't think it's because of the efficacy of existing institutions.

There's nobody purposely making that kind of effort right now and it STILL takes something like a month for a new body to get up to speed.

It wouldn't occur to anyone, it would just be a problem afterwards with them gone.

If anything 'obscure code' would just be a reason to get rid; have less of it and what there is is new guy's problem.

In which professions, then, would you say the employees are not easily interchangeable? Surely not exclusively programmers? But actors, writers, teachers, doctors and many other non-welding professionals all have unions.

If the potential workers in favor of such a scheme wanted to do that, they could just as well do it now individually.

Food and bus service are also simply ways to control the amount of time an employee spends on premises.

There's a great tweet about offices...

"Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies?

Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today."

https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936

Read the whole thread. It's disturbing how close the over the top dystopian joke offices from the film Brazil are to reality.

And the amount spent on actual hardware must be at an all time low. The first lab I interned at in high school in the early 90s, every programmer had both a Symbolics workstation and a NeXTcube on their desk. (In a private office, of course). That represented a pretty significant investment. At my first "real" job, I got a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. These days you get the same Macbook Pro that everyone else can pick up at the Apple Store. Often tech folk will have faster personal computers at home.

Right, it was not uncommon in the 80s and 90s for your workstation to cost significantly more than your car did. The Ultra-5 was the cheap Sun work-station at $4k base price, as by 1999 Intel based workstations were starting to put pressure on Sun from below.

I could seriously do with more RAM, but I don't need a $4k computer.

In fact, since I have a MacBook but would be more than happy with a (Linux) ThinkPad, it might not even cost more.

My point is, we don't need 'hardware investment' for the sake of it. If places started doing that I'd rather BYO device, and pocket the difference between what I need and what they budget for.

On the last point, Apple seems to be betting otherwise with its exorbitant prices for top spec Mac Pro configurations.

From what I understand their market is basically companies that have already bought into a Mac based workflow and for whom the switching costs (retraining on new software, rebuilding tools etc) would be so high that Apple can practically charge whatever they want. This doesn't seem like a good long term strategy though.

I’m at a two person company and we work fine on both Linux and Mac. There’s no need for a top end mac to do dev work, and frankly no one does a MacBook quality PC in terms of battery optimization (auto graphics switching, battery optimized web browser), ease of use (still top of the line trackpad), whole-disk-encryption, seamless sleep and wake while preserving whole disk encryption.

They designed a laptop for a laptop user whereas most PC makers have no idea what they designed their laptop for. Even if you get good PC hardware the Windows side becomes lacking because Windows has to be optimized for many use cases. Many people who don't get it are using their macbooks as desktop replacement, at which point you should probably just get a mac mini and backpack that around.

> we work fine on both Linux and Mac. There’s no need for a top end mac to do dev work

Absolutely agreed.

> frankly no one does a MacBook quality PC in terms of battery optimization (auto graphics switching, battery optimized web browser), ease of use (still top of the line trackpad), whole-disk-encryption, seamless sleep and wake while preserving whole disk encryption

I haven't had anything else for a while, but I agree. My ideal would be smooth-sailing Linux on macbook hardware. Unfortunately while it used to work, it's only gotten worse, and the pretty much deal breaker is WiFi:

https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

> Many people who don't get it are using their macbooks as desktop replacement, at which point you should probably just get a mac mini and backpack that around.

What? No! If I was going to do that it'd be a similar SFF device, running Linux. (And more powerful for the same budget, probably.)

I don't think the bet is that software engineers need those, unless they have a lot of some kind of macOS-specific rendering to do or something.

I think it's the disconnect between "You can't have 50 square feet of office space" compared to in the 90s where you had potentially 5 figures worth of hardware under your desk.

I suppose, but then the reason's boring isn't it? They're different budgets.

That Macbook Pro is probably also much more powerful than your Sun Ultra 5 workstation though. Technology has improved. The important question is whether the stuff they give you enables you to effectively do your job or not.

Yeah but that's because that Sun Workstation probably provided significant value over regular consumer PCs at the time. Do you actually need more than a MacBook Pro and a couple extra monitors to do your job comfortably? I doubt it.

> There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees.

Big tech companies already do that in the form of stock options, grants, and employee stock purchase plans.

> 1. Why do tech workers need a union?

In my experience the normal dynamics of employer-employee relationships are broken in the tech sector.

In most cases where employees have a grief with an employer it's usually due to a lack of something, be it wages, safety, job security etc.

In the tech sector that doesn't apply. Wages are good, normal health and safety issues are non-existent and you have no problem finding a job if you need one - if you have the skills.

The problem is that the environment can be very, very toxic. My experience has been of employers offering me a big salary, but then expecting me to work very long hours. Couple this with an obsession with being the first to market and rushing to get the product out of the door and you end up with an unpleasant and stressful work environment.

There are health and safety issues, but they don't manifest in broken bones or bruises, but in stress, anxiety and nervous breakdowns.

And you can't opt-out. I've asked to have my contract changed so that the overtime clause has limits applied to it in exchange for a salary reduction - in three attempts every employer has said no. It's like overtime is expected as a normal thing and that you can't complain because your salary is so good.

But of course if you are putting in just an extra hour each day and you are contracted for a 37.5 hour week, you are actually reducing your salary by around 13%.

And if you are perceived as a troublemaker by your employer for standing up for yourself you;ll find that news gets around other employers faster than you'd expect.

Its that broken dynamic, combined with a lack of ethics that means tech employees need to unionize in order to reign in bad employers.

Reduced salary of 13% —- that 8 week vacation, 37.5 hr hard cutoff gov job is looking not too shabby (to run a bunch of fun side projects alongside )

Well. You can have all the free market leverage on the world, but without a union you cannot participate in regulatory capture and these days it is all that matters :)

> Some issues are systemic across an industry.

The biggest problems I have with this industry most developers don't want fixed. So unless a union offers something like a certification, licensing, or credentialing program for its members, like the security industry does, I don't see a union solving the software industry problems most frustrating to me. A license or certification is valuable because it provides a common platform of competencies that raises the value of the union members in the workforce, requires documented continuing education, and ensures a common criteria of best practices that reinforces the business value of the union to business entities.

Developers don't want this because 1) at least in the US, our educational system is prohibitively costly, and your solution proposes putting the cost of that on developers, including not having time off for education, and 2) that's mostly a problem for employers, not developers--I'm quite capable of working with poorly-qualified and poorly-skilled developers and my work looks better by comparison.

You're proposing that developers pay to solve their employers' problem.

I don't think you'd find many developers who object to their employers paying for education and giving them time off to pursue that education.

> You're proposing that developers pay to solve their employers' problem.

Education is completely orthogonal to licensing or certification. If education is your primary basis of qualification then you are at best a beginner.

I am proposing that developers pay to justify higher wages and cut through subjective hiring bullshit as part of their union dues they would pay for anyways to be a member of said union. When have you ever seen software candidate selection be at least partially objective?

The rest of your points don't make any sense. You don't need any education to be a developer. For example, I am completely self taught. I have also worked with some incredibly talented developers who have no college at all. How do you, objectively speaking, determine if that makes somebody less or more qualified? You don't, because there isn't any objective measure by which to rate qualification.

Without some value added quality like licensing why would I ever pay union wages when I could simply jump ship and go work somewhere else? Every time I have changed employers my wages have gone up by 10% or more.

I also suspect the developers who are most strongly opposed to licensing or certification are those who have never completed a certification in any field.

> I am proposing that developers pay to justify higher wages and cut through subjective hiring bullshit

Why is that a problem developers need to solve? A bad hiring process hurts the company much more than developers.

> The rest of your points don't make any sense. You don't need any education to be a developer. For example, I am completely self taught. I have also worked with some incredibly talented developers who have no college at all.

That's good for you and them, but if you have certifications, there are going to be tests for those certifications, and people are going to want an effective way to learn the material necessary to pass those tests. I've taught myself things, and I've learned things from teachers, and the latter is much faster for me and most people. So if you want me to get a certification, I'm going to want you to pay for me to take a class geared toward that certification. Certification classes = education.

I'll also point out that a bachelor's degree in CS is a certification, which you seem to think isn't much of a value added. So which is it: are certifications a value added or not?

> Without some value added quality like licensing

How is licensing an added value for developers?

> I also suspect the developers who are most strongly opposed to licensing or certification are those who have never completed a certification in any field.

I'm not opposed to certification. I'm opposed to requiring certifications in order to work in development, and then forcing would-be developers to pay for it. I learned a lot in my J2EE certification class when my employer paid for it, and while I don't think I've ever even put that on my resumé, the knowledge gained does show up sometimes in these non-objective interviews you're complaining about. :)

> Why is that a problem developers need to solve? A bad hiring process hurts the company much more than developers.

Its not well thought out company policies that interview and hire people. Generally its other developers insecurely biasing their decisions on subjective considerations for their personal preferences. That hurts the company and potential candidates, but this is still how software hiring works in most cases.

> I'll also point out that a bachelor's degree in CS is a certification

No it isn't. A medical degree is not a medical license and a law degree isn't a law license. No education is a real estate or truck driver license, though both of those licenses demand some form of education. Hopefully the education has prepared you for both the real world and for the licensing, but clearly this is often not the case in practice, at least in software.

> > Why is that a problem developers need to solve? A bad hiring process hurts the company much more than developers.

> Its not well thought out company policies that interview and hire people. Generally its other developers insecurely biasing their decisions on subjective considerations for their personal preferences. That hurts the company and potential candidates, but this is still how software hiring works in most cases.

You're not answering my question: Why is this developers' problem? Sounds like a problem for companies, not developers. If you think this solves a problem companies have, then companies should pay for it, not developers.

> > I'll also point out that a bachelor's degree in CS is a certification

> No it isn't. A medical degree is not a medical license and a law degree isn't a law license. No education is a real estate or truck driver license, though both of those licenses demand some form of education. Hopefully the education has prepared you for both the real world and for the licensing, but clearly this is often not the case in practice, at least in software.

Okay, if your definition of a certification is that it's required for employment, then why not just require a CS bachelors for employment as a software developer? If you answer that, you have the answer for why people are against certifications.

Yes, interviews are subjective and ineffective in identifying suitable candidates, but a) I'm not sure why you think that this is a problem developers should solve rather than employers, and b) I'm not sure why you think a standardized certification would be less subjective. If anything, a standard certification is going to be much poorer at identifying candidates suitable for companies, since specific companies have specific needs.

if you want to unionize go ahead, i'm not though. I believe a lot of tech works would prefer not to be union and have to deal with all the BS plus dues. I can negotiate on my own pretty well so knock yourself out but i won't be signing up.

> I can negotiate on my own pretty well

No, you can't. A union can collectively say "no programming will be done on behalf of the company if you don't give us what we want". You can't do that.

Well the union has no incentive to do that individually on your behalf.

> 1. Why do tech workers need a union?

1. Fight ageism (every 20 year old today will grow up someday)

2. Fight open office layout (my opinion, may not be shared by everyone)

3. Fight for equal pay, discriminations of various sorts

4. Fight for reasonable share in success and against the massive differential between CxO and others' pay

5. Resist outsourcing where it makes sense

....... the list goes on ....

Many of the most talented or hardest working engineers might rationally be opposed to equal pay measures.

Lobbying for equal pay protections isn’t independent of evaluations of merit. It’s about correcting demonstrable systemic bias against a protected class, e.g. if all women were being paid less then men in the same roles, with same experience, merit evaluations etc.

Equal pay referred to between equally qualified men, women and other genders.

Not clear why a talented and hard working person of one gender would be opposed that a similar person of another gender get same pay?

It did not refer to people making unequal contributions.

> Equal pay referred to between equally qualified men, women and other genders. Not clear why a talented and hard working person of one gender would be opposed that a similar person of another gender get same pay?

Because there might not be an even distribution of people with certain skills. For instance, some point to the disproportionately large number of Asians in higher paying roles, and demand a form of equalization.

The issue is not that people don't believe in equality, it's that people don't have the same view of what is equal. In particular, some view equality in terms of equality of outcomes while others view it in terms of equality of opportunity.

*engineers who are the best negotiators, rather than most talented or hard working

Being talented and/or hard working can provide leverage in negotiations.

You wish

Not at all.

“equal pay” does not mean that all employees are paid the same amount...

> 2. Fight open office layout (my opinion, may not be shared by everyone)

This is, I believe, the biggest strike against unions. If the unions decide you don't get open offices, then that decision binds everyone, whether they wanted an open office or not.

You just have to hope that the many tradeoffs you make are worth the things you get in return.

Unions need not ban all open offices from existence, but they can at least provide a more powerful voice than angry blog posts in an industry dominated by open plans.

The difference is that, if you have a union, you get to vote on whether you want an open office or not. Without one, you have to do whatever the boss says.

This is, I believe, the biggest strike against management. If the management decide you get open offices, then that decision binds everyone, whether they wanted an open office or not.

That's actually not (necessarily) the case (source: I'm management)

Having management make adaptations specific to an individual's preferences is a feature available in a management-employee negotiated arrangement that might be precluded or more difficult in a union shop.

As examples, I have colleagues working from remote locations, colleagues working in co-working spaces, colleagues working non-traditional schedules (by their choice, not mine). I can't see how having a union policy on work schedules and rules would have helped any of those employees and can easily see how they'd be harmed by having standardized work rules.

Once your firm gets a set office space, what layout plan will it have?

How about automation?

In Poland, worker unions at various companies strongly block any attempts at automation, because it makes less people are required to do the job so it leads to layoffs. But without adopting automation, in the long run the company can't keep up with automation-heavy competitors, so they go out of business, making everyone lose their jobs.

A union also tends to mean that you get paid for the # of years you worked your job, not how good you are.

This is a good thing for the bottom 50% of workers, and a bad thing for the top 50% of workers.

Does this union do anything to address that? Is pay still fully merit based?

Why do unions have to have seniority rules? Certainly next-gen unions can pursue a different model.

Unions do not like members being graded. I do not run a union, so I am not sure why that is. May be worth asking some of them.

This is completely false.

Union wage agreements are based on what union members want.

For blue-collar unions, this usually means seniority-based scales.

For white-collar unions, this usually means experience-based scales (which differs from seniority because it's not job-specific; any job in the field counts).

For talent-based unions like SAG or NFLPA, this means minimum scales with no cap on maximum potential earnings.

Do you know people in a union like SAG or the other entertainment type unions? It seems super not awesome for a lot of people. I know people working their way through the lower tiers. You often get a choice of <work on non-union production for $15 an hour, or work on union production for minimum union pay (which is < $15 an hour), and earn your hours needed to eventually become part of the union>. If you make it all the way through that dance INTO the union, it can help you coast and get a steady paycheck. And yes, it is a fact that lower tiers of people are abused in the US. But I would rather deal with that with universal healthcare, vs promoting unions to argue for better health benefits.

You are technically correct in that unions can be any agreement that the founders. Sure. However I see a union for programmers looking a lot more like a union for autoworkers than a union for actors.

What country has a successful union for computer programmers? Are the top 10% of performers better compensated than the top 10% of developers in the US? As far as I can tell, developers in the US have the best compensation of anywhere on earth. I can't imagine why I would ever want to join a programmer union.

> However I see a union for programmers looking a lot more like a union for autoworkers than a union for actors.

Why? That's your opinion, we're talking about a hypothetical organization that hasn't been attempted in the U.S. until the OP. It's all up in the air and speculative right now, there are many ways in which a tech union might shake out.

> What country has a successful union for computer programmers?

You might as well have asked a decade ago what country has built a successful mainstream electric car, or a program that could replace taxis or hotels, or a reusable space rocket. Like these things before they were invented, a tech union would be a new innovation, a new type of entity, that will need to be evaluated on its own real-world merits in the future. Right now critics prematurely shooting down the idea are constrained by imperfect comparisons to different types of unions created in different industries in different times.

> As far as I can tell, developers in the US have the best compensation of anywhere on earth.

For the time being. Economic tumult and technological change can easily alter this reality. What goes up must come down. So one should seek to future-proof and at least consider long-term safeguards, instead of assuming the good times will always be present.

> I can't imagine why I would ever want to join a programmer union.

Have you read this discussion at all? There's been many, many motivations for why a tech union- or a guild or some other professional association that works on behalf of tech workers- should exist, and compensation is only one of them.

Those may be the stated reasons for a union, but for some reason, in tech, workers just want a union because they want to inject their political views into their company:

> But in 2018, a heated disagreement broke out between employees and management about whether to leave a project called “Always Punch Nazis” on the platform, according to reporting in Slate. When Breitbart said the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by inciting violence, management initially planned to remove the project, but then reversed its decision after protest from employees.

> Following the controversy, employees announced their intentions to unionize

The Kickstarter campaign was worse than I thought: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/282505033/always-punch-...

The back cover (near the bottom of the page) clarifies that "Nazi" includes everyone who is alt-right. It describes itself as "satirical," but you can say that about anything blatantly offensive.

And? the workers are the ones producing the platform, not the CEO or board members. It's well within their purview to inject politics if they communally agree upon it.

My point it has nothing to do with traditional motivations for unionizing that everyone is discussing. Also, workers definitely have nothing to do with deciding whether whether some content is appropriate. It has nothing to do with workplace conditions or collective bargaining. They aren't the ones who lose money when Republicans drop Kickstarter.

I ask again, and? Unionization is collective action by a group of workers. It will provide them the ability to negotiate future issues (i.e. not wanting to host Nazi kickstarters). Of course they have everything to lose if kickstarter loses money, the first people laid off aren't CEOs.

No workers = No Kickstarter. That's it.

No they don't lose anything. Kickstarter can't claw back their wages. Unlike, a factory worker, they can easily find another job.

They get paid a salary to do a job, not to protest business decisions. If they want to protest something, they can, but they shouldn't expect any protection from being fired because they're literally refusing to do the job they were paid to do. Do you think a book store employees should receive protection for moving all the books on evolution to the fiction section?

What's wrong with workers protesting business decisions? Ignore the culture war angle for a second; what if they were protesting apolitical business decisions from management that they believe would be calamitous to the financial fortunes of the firm? What if there is mismanagement at play? Then what's the recourse besides organizing for collective action- Speaking up at all hands, just to get rebuffed? Leaking bad news to the press? Breaking the chain of command and reporting to the board directly?

Long have engineers and other workers complained of clueless MBAs. Why go to bat for the pointy-haired bosses? Haven't you ever worked at an org where product leadership screwed up, leading to layoffs anyway? Or management overruled the technical concerns of the engineers? Or pushed them towards something that was simply unsound for the product and the business as a whole? Pursued strategy by fiat, where the only check against their power is the board?

People imagine tech unions will just be a rehash of Industrial Era blue collar unions, but they have the potential to be something more- a way for the rank and file to finally have the clout to push back against bad engineering decisions from poor leadership.

There is at least one example that comes to mind where a union forces corporate leadership to make business decisions that could potentially help the company stay competitive- and thus protect all of their jobs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889

Finally, as shareholders themselves, why shouldn't employees protest against questionable business decisions? What stake do they have in a company if they are expected to unthinkingly carry out orders?

> Why not negotiate for a better workplace?

Well, that depends on what the union is negotiating for.

I can think of many things that a union might democraticly negotiate for that I would strong oppose.

Things such as putting of barriers to entry, like requiring a degree, or keeping our bootcampers, might be "beneficial" to the union members, but would be an absolute deal breaker to me.

The moment a union tried to pull up the ladder, and do something like that, is the moment that I attempt to sabotage everything that they do, regardless of the union democratically negotiating to screw over new developers.

> some issues are systemic

I would unionize just to get rid of open offices, for example

It's not clear that these are really tech workers who voted for it. Half of Kickstarter's employees are designers/coders and the other half work with the community [1]. Since one of the unionization organizers worked on Trust and Safety, I wonder if that's also how the vote was split.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/team

In my opinion, unions are just a way to destroy property. If you want really improve your life, gather people and leave the company, start a business, the same business, why not and put all the improvements there. But unionize is plainly silly.

>I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union.

I think athletes are more in unions because when the NFLPA was formed most of them had to go get real jobs to support themselves combined with the fact that sports like American Football have a history of causing life-changing injuries including pretty severe TBIs.

The wiki entry for the NFLPA even points this out

>The new association's initial agenda also included a league-wide minimum salary, plus a per diem when teams were on the road, a requirement that uniforms and equipment be paid for and maintained at the clubs' expense, and continued payment of salaries when players were injured

Even then they didn't get that great of a deal

>Rather than face another lawsuit, the owners agreed to a league minimum salary of $5,000, $50 for each exhibition game played, and medical and hospital coverage

Inflation adjusted from 1956 that's a minimum salary of $47,421.14.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Pl ayers_Association

So there was a very real reason for that specific union to form and once a union forms, it's pretty unlikely to go away.

Trying to compare that to office workers needing a union doesn't really translate.

I'm not saying office workers need, or don't need, a union. I'm simply saying I don't think this is a fair comparison. I've never been part of a union and can't really speak to the benefits and downsides of them.

You may think you can do without a union if business is good and management OK. When shit hits the fan, that is when you'll learn that you need them.

I work in a German unionized company and I think unions can be quite well-aligned with workers and business interest.

IIRC certain aspects of US law make unions be the way they are in the US on purpose to lower their acceptance among employees. For example work councils which are commonly established in unionized companies aren't allowed in the US iirc, they can be a nice alternative from going all in into unionizing, a democratic representation of all employees.

Coming from a public accounting background, I’ve seen a variety of businesses. Somewhat obviously, I’ve seen some be successful with unions and others be successful without, which makes sense, as unions are neither inherently good nor bad. They are a tool which can change the power dynamic and incentive structure of workers and employers throughout an organization, but there is nothing inherent about having a union that guarantees ineffective operations, just as the absence of a union does not indicate that employees are getting shafted.

Generally speaking for well run, ethical companies, whose management actively try to do the right thing, unions add unnecessary redundancy and bureaucracy. When there is a sense of trust between employer and employee, communication flows between employees and managers, employee working conditions are safe and healthy, and compensation is reasonably fair. For companies that are shady and treat employees poorly, unions help enforce structured communication and transparency between managers and employees.

Usually I look for symptoms of bad management when hearing about employees who want to unionize. In tech, we can generally assume reasonable working conditions and pay, so Kickstarter unionizing screams “toxic management” for me, personally. I haven’t heard management’s defense, but ultimately the burden is on management to convince a majority of its employees that they don’t need a union. Clearly they haven’t, and given how easy it is to appease developers, this is particularly damning.

The (original) article only mentioned one grievance, that Kickstarter removed a "punch nazis" project and the employees revolted. Honestly it sounds like they had it pretty good.

"play stupid games win stupid prizes"

I'm with you on the theory, up until your last statements - the vote to unionize was 46 to 37; 55% in favor with no breakdown in the roles means we can't be sure the dissenting voice wasn't the development staff.

It could be the support and community management roles (or any other 'soft skill' role which is less scalable and no less valuable but perceived as more easily replaced) carried the vote.

"...support and community management roles..." are less scalable? Does this mean companies are finding it more difficult to fill community management roles than developer roles? Also, what do you mean by "no less valuable"? I don't think you can have a company who's product is software without developers. You do not, however need community managers. You make an interesting point: I do wonder if those in "soft skill" roles perceive their roles as equally valuable as software developers. I personally do not.

Kickstarters product is not software though, it's a platform, so support and community management probably does play a fairly substantial role.

Hmm... If I worked as customer support at Tesla, I would not expect to be compensated, or frankly valued the same as say an electrical engineer at Tesla. And really, isn't community management just another word for customer support?

I never said they should be compensated the same but saying they are not needed or should not be valued seems plain wrong to me.

Support and community management are less scalable in the sense that the relationship between user interactions and time needed from staff is fairly linear. Each one is therefore less valuable, but collectively (no pun intended) essential when there are other, hungrier alternatives.

At it's current stage of maturity, the Kickstarter platform needs maintainers (SREs, Security, etc.) and staff to interact with creators and backers. I don't know to what degree new features or efficiencies will help Kickstarter become more profitable on 5% than it has been since 2010 - the product is essentially the same.

It is also worth noting that NY is not a right to work state. This means that the 37 people who voted against the union have no right to not-pay-dues to the union.

If the workers change their mind then, in theory, they will have the opportunity to vote to decertify the union, later in their employment (a minimum of 3 years). Approximately 0 unions a year are decertified this way in the US.

It's not really that big of a problem. In an ideal situation, sure, the union could represent union members and the non-union member would be banned from receiving any benefits bargained for by the union. Unfortunately, if the union has to represent everyone then everyone should pay, which isn't much different than if the <1% in leadership positions at a company makes a dumb decision costing the company money and people their jobs, the entire company is forced to follow the decision and totally uninvolved workers pay the consequences for it. At least in a union, the workers have say in how it operates and what its goals are.

Do unions have to represent everyone? Seems like its collective bargaining either way?

They aren't required to, but they have the legal right to insist on it and most unions do. The concern is that, if you choose not to represent everyone, the non-union employees can negotiate better deals than you and they'll still benefit from many kinds of working condition improvements you might want.

There are 3 options. Non members can free ride, they can pay an agency fee, or they can pay full union dues. The Beck decision (not always well enforced) says that union members have a right not to pay for union costs outside of the agency fee.

It's also possible that some organizations have a high concentration of folks who have a particular viewpoint on unions, regardless of whether they're being treated poorly or not. For example, Vox's newsroom unionized, even though I would suppose that they are likely treated better than most journalists -- at least to the extent the business' economics allow. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case with Kickstarter, just that this strikes me as possible. I'm also not trying to imply any judgment for or against the move.

I get the impression a lot of tech companies aren't doing it out of particular absolute need for such a strong a hammer, but because they can and it suits their ideology for legitimately bad stuff they see happening in other industries.

It always made 100x more sense to me on some factory floor in the early 20th century than it does in a tech startup like environment in 2020, plus some labour jobs in between.

I can just imagine the thousands of additional mandatory meetings across the entire company, the needless costs, and hoop jumping that will be added for very little ROI. But because they see gig delivery workers facing shitty conditions under weak contractor and unemployment law designed for a past century, so they think it's justified and want to start it somewhere.

The laws that get passed that make non-union members pay dues even though they volunteer not to be part of the union is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. Or how they make it impossible to fire egregiously bad workers. Or how in the small town I grew up in these union jobs were coveted and hiring was super nepotism driven, you had to know the right people to get the job - which to me is the opposite of "diversity and inclusion", which is (unsurprisingly) the 2nd bullet point on their political union website, right after "equal pay for equal work" which is a statement riddled with mythology over data.

>It always made 100x more sense to me on some factory floor in the early 20th century than it does in a tech startup like environment in 2020.

Why does that make more sense? The point of unionization is collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is effective whether you have 30 rockstar ninja developers or blue collar workers on a factory floor.

In either case the collective action helps amplifying the workforce's ability to negotitiate. It's the developers who create the company's value. It's time they see that they actually have the power to determine how their companies are run.

Google's employees frequently protest when their management decides to engage in unethical practise like say, developing censoring software for the Chinese market. Instead of throwing a tantrum and leaving the building and holding a protest they could imply unionize and leverage their position.

Early 20th century predates OSHA and most federal labor regulations in general. Its not that collective bargaining in the abstract is worth less, but there are far more federal guarantees.

Are you exactly equal to the worker next to you? If so collective bargaining makes sense because a good deal for everybody is the best deal you can get. If not, then collective bargaining is keeping some great people down.

The fact that you said rockstar developer says you believe that there are some non-rockstar developers who are presumably worth less.

Note that athletic unions do not bargain for wages in general (they will put in minimum and sometimes maximum, but not individual wages)

I used the term rockstar developer sarcastically. No I don't believe that the differences between individual developers outweigh the benefits of bargaining collectively. What I do believe is that there's a great reality distortion among developers that makes them think they're more unique than they actually are, which is a culture the tech sector has deliberately cultivated. Just like say, the image of the "nice CEO" who comes to work in a hoodie and pretends to save the world rather than doing what shareholders ask him or her to do. It's all just a stunt to obfuscate hierarchies.

And I'd stress again that I think the biggest thing to bargain for isn't necessarily wages, it's control over how these firms conduct themselves. Tech workers, almost more than anyone else, seem to have forgotten that they can be stakeholders in their firms.

Collective bargaining doesn’t need to bargain for equal wages. There’s all sorts of things that would be easier to collectively bargain, such as: - Allowing monetary gain from side projects - Eliminating non-competes - Establishing routes to stop unethical projects

Among other things. Pay can certainly be part of the conversation, but collective bargaining in general, as you pointed out in the case of athletic unions, doesn’t mean each individual is getting the same wage.

Why do you equate collective bargaining with collective negotiation of wages?

It is the second comment [0] on this thread that I reply conflating those aspects into one as if that is how every union and collective bargaining work, why?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22360416

“Are you exactly equal to the worker next to you?”

From the point of view of management one or two levels up from you, you are viewed as exactly the same. Most companies have narrow salary ranges for each level and you get more money mainly by being promoted. In a union shop this is no different.

This suggests that you are unfamiliar with modern compensation structures at tech companies. Stock awards are the major differentiator. In a union shop, this is very different.

In a union shop, you can vote on how payscales will vote and campaign for a system that you believe is fair. Without a union, you have to take whatever the bosses offer.

No, you have to take whatever the market offers, and the market forces are more powerful than an individual boss, for better or for worse. In a tech hub, it’s overwhelmingly “for better” as far as workers are concerned. Otherwise, their company doesn’t survive.

You are still within a structure with different levels set by management. Not much different from a union.

Management gives different people different raises. They do regular reviews to decide how much those raises will be, and not every person gets the same raise. Therefore management two levels above me does in fact believe there are differences. They show up over the years both in how fast you move to the top of your level, and in how fast you move up to the next level.

In a factory union shop you get a raise based on years of service, and promotions are tied to new skills. (If you currently put tires on and become a certified welder you will get a raise even though you don't weld anything). Again, not all unions force pay scales like this, but unions that don't lose one of their reasons for existing.

”In a factory union shop you get a raise based on years of service, and promotions are tied to new skills. ”

That’s not how it works for example in Germany. I worked in a union company We had several pay levels and I negotiated with management to skip a few. No difference to the non union company in the US I am working now. The only difference is that the employees aren’t involved in setting pay levels and working conditions.

Did you work in a factory job? That is putting bolts in, or making the same cut on an assembly line, or other such repetitive manual labor job? A position where the limit how fast you can go is the speed the line is set at/the slowest person on your line? A position where you are setup for success for the quality standards?

Unions do exist in Germany for non-factory workers and they can measure performance and pay accordingly. This weakens the union a bit because employees do not stand for each other as much as you can get a head even if the next guy is bad.

Reminds me of arguments against social benefits like welfare, Medicare for all, etc in the US. Sure it's effective in a lot of places but it's different in this particular case, people, so we don't need to do it.

> Vox's newsroom unionized, even though I would suppose that they are likely treated better than most journalists -- at least to the extent the business' economics allow.

Better treatment also involves better pay. Being nice to your employee is not enough. Vox may treat employees nicely, but you'd be surprised how low they pay to their occasional writers who are scattered in a bunch of niche vehicles.

Do you have personal familiarity with their payment practices? Are the occasional (presumably non-employee) writers also part of the union? Do they get votes like full employees?

I mean the other thing is does vox really have much money to be folding into higher comp? I have always assumed that it's a break-even venture like most news media these days but I'd be interested to learn otherwise.

If it helps, I'll say it for you.

From the article:

But in 2018, a heated disagreement broke out between employees and management about whether to leave a project called “Always Punch Nazis” on the platform, according to reporting in Slate. When Breitbart said the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by inciting violence, management initially planned to remove the project, but then reversed its decision after protest from employees.

Following the controversy, employees announced their intentions to unionize with OPEIU Local 153 in March 2019.

If this story is accurate Kickstarter employees aren't unionising because of bad treatment by management but because management wanted to stop them badly treating other people. If this story isn't accurate then Kickstarter and this new union need to loudly sue Vox right now because this story makes them look like hateful extremists.

This is especially true because Kickstarter management gave in to their employees demands. Now they're unionising anyway. For what? To protect the right for the hard left to encourage violent extremism against their political opponents? What kind of union is this?

In case anyone is in any doubt what "punching Nazis" means the project is here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/282505033/always-punch-...

It says very explicitly their definition of "Nazi" includes anyone with "anti-immigrant ideologies" or really anyone who isn't woke.

Kickstarter's management look like utter fools. How did they not crush this right at the start? They have every right to fire every single one of their employees who objected to the original decision.

Took a while to find it all the way down in that image of the inside cover, but I can't see how that isn't promoting violence against anyone considered to be alt-right or far-right. Do they have to accept "Always Punch Antifa" projects now?

>Somewhat obviously, I’ve seen some be successful with unions and others be successful without

From the company perspective maybe, but I've not seen a union in the US that successfully rewards high performing employees over mediocre lifers. Overachievers end up leaving and you're left with no innovation. Do you have any examples of unions that have solved this problem?

Aren't a lot of professional sports leagues unionized? I know that NBA players have a union, and top players definitely get rewarded well.

When most sports unions started professional players were not well paid. In the 1950s many of the best baseball players didn't play for professional teams because a local hardware store in some small town offered them better wages if they would work during the day and play on the town team on weekends!

>> I know that NBA players have a union, and top players definitely get rewarded well.

relative to what? the top players have always gotten big paydays, and the economics suggest without a union they would get paid even more. They are effectively subsidizing mid and lower tier players.

NBA players association, actors guild, writers guild etc are famous examples of "rewarding high performing employees"

> NBA player association

I disagree. The NBA players association looks out for the mid level role players (who make up a vast majority of the league) over the highest performing players. The top tier of NBA players are essentially "underpaid" compared to their worth due to maximum salaries. This makes room for mid level guys to make 10-15 million per year. If there was no maximum salary there would be a massive bidding war for the top tier players, and the remaining small slice of pie would have to be split among everyone else.

Judging from this post, I’m not sure you fully grasp how basketball works nor the underlying concept of “team sports.” Even MJ needed 4 other guys on his side to win.

While it may be true that team sports need multiple players, several players have currently signed "supermax contracts." Since they signed a maximum contract, their team would be willing to pay them more, so they are underpaid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_salary_cap#Supermax_contra...

If you call US$ 201 million underpaid, sure. Or maybe US$ 229 million.

This is a ridiculous amount to play ball, if that cap means that mid level players get a decent life I think it's more than fair enough. I don't think a salary cap of a couple hundred millions of dollars would stop any human being innovating to get to such a job, I'm sorry.

Every one of those also famously enforces a closed shop for the positions most people have in mind when they think of "high performers".

I'd argue those are more like cartels than unions.

It's interesting that those are all effectively monopolies on the talent. I wonder if that just counters the brain-drain the parent comment was referring to since high performers can't leave the union for a non-union role.

> Overachievers end up leaving and you're left with no innovation.

Do you have any examples of this problem occurring?

I would think that in well run ethical companies the relationship with unions would also be harmonious. That’s at least how it works in Germany with unions like IG Metall. Seems to me that problems mostly arise when management becomes unreasonable.

Or when the union leadership becomes unreasonable.

From what I have seen it’s mostly management that gets greedy first.

Who was first doesn't change the fact that unions are sometimes unreasonable.

Though I have to say most companies I've seen with evil unions have management that deserves the worst a union can do. I've seen cases of good management with bad unions harming everybody (except the union leaders), but they are generally rare.

Mentioned this before, but I would posit that US law essentially requires a minimally effective union to have an adversarial relationship with the company. Every member has to get equal protection, and unfortunately, not every member deserves it. (Not a knock on unions — every large organization has its share of lackwits)

Unions can become corrupt too. After all, it's an additional organization and when money gets involved...

> Generally speaking for well run, ethical companies, whose management actively try to do the right thing, unions add unnecessary redundancy and bureaucracy.

The only type of "well run, ethical companies" where unions are redundant are worker-owned cooperatives. Otherwise, an employer, regardless of how ethical they are, can never replicate the most critical aspect of unions: collective bargaining rights. Sure, an employer can essentially just implement the kind of benefits that would be negotiated by a union, but it does not replace the fact that until a union exists employees have essentially no means to collectively demand changes to compensation and working conditions unless they unionize.

That's becoming my take as well.

I think the tech industry was, at least for a while, an exception here. Developers were so hard to get and retain that the power of individual workers did a lot to keep things sane. But I think that power is, for a variety of reasons, waning. If we want to keep our unusually good working conditions, and especially if we want to make sure our colleagues enjoy them as well, then I think collective action is going to become more and more necessary.

(For those wondering why, a key part is the intrinsic size difference. It's much easier to lose one employee than to lose your full-time job. This inherent power imbalance is easily exploited.)

For the next thing I start, I've been looking into worker- and member-owned co-op structures. It turns out some of my favorite businesses are run that way, from my local bakery (Arizmendi) to my favorite outdoor goods company, REI. My explorations are early yet, but I'm seeing a lot to be optimistic about. I think it's possible to combine the discipline of a value-for-money business with the mission orientation of a not-for-profit. For example, imagine if WhatsApp had been a worker- or member-owned co-op. If instead of selling to Facebook, they'd just kept making the thing they thought the world needed.

If this resonates with people, feel free to contact me on email or Twitter. Maybe we can get a mailing list together for further discussion.

Here's an interesting (IMO) one:

https://www.windings.com/about-us/

> For more than 50 years, Windings has provided engineered electromagnetic solutions for critical applications in Aerospace, Defense, Automotive, Medical, Oil & Gas and general Factory Automation. As a full-service provider, Windings is a leader in the design, test, manufacture and support of custom electric motors, generators and related components including rotors, stators, lamination stacks and insulation systems.

> Windings business structure was converted to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 1998 and we have been 100% employee owned since 2008. Being 100% employee owned means that every one of our 100+ employees, and only our employees, is either an owner or is on the path to becoming an owner.

Thanks! Do you have a connection to it? I'd be very curious to hear an inside take.

I don't. I was looking for someone to design a motor and just happened to notice.

"For example, imagine if WhatsApp had been a worker- or member-owned co-op."

Given the price-per-employee WhatsApp got, they might have agreed to a buyout sooner as a co-op.

If it were possible to sell out, of course. But that depends a lot on the bylaws. And selling out also depends on the people who join.

I'll also note that there's nothing incompatible between being a worker-owned co-op and making a lot of money. Whatsapp had plenty of potential to generate revenue. Forbes estimates that it's making $4 billion/year. They could have paid their small staff incredibly well without having to sell out.

And one thing that people can't easily buy is interesting work. Even at my modest-for-a-tech-worker income, I'm choosing work by who I'm with and how interesting it is. If people already have more money than they can plausibly spend, would they take even more money to stop doing something they love, something that lets them influence the world at enormous scale? Some would, I'm sure. Some wouldn't.

You should contact Human Agenda and join their Mondragon Trip (http://www.humanagenda.net/tour-the-mondragon-cooperatives/). Mondragon, as you probably know, is the home of the world's largest worker-coop federation's HQ and its namesake. Through Human Agenda you can get a tour of their HQ and potentially a chance to meet worker owners and see their facilities (a number of which are in the town.) You can also check out their university and quality of life. I've been there myself and it's highly recommended if you want to go this direction.

Also, the Arizmendi cooperative is named after the founder of Mondragon, Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta.

Mondragon is an ethnocentric, nationalist organization with strong political orientations. It's not a general example of what anyone would think of as a regular cooperative.

If a small part of Vermont where 'its own country' and constantly under threat of economic annexation from the US or Canada, well, people might organize differently than they do in California.

That's an extreme perspective.

Mondragon is about as "nationalist" and "ethnocentric" as Ford, Samsung, or Sony. I'm not sure what "strong political orientations" is supposed to mean; I can easily point to just about any international corporation and find evidence of strong political "orientations" expressed by the board or its corporate executives and evidence of the corporation pursuing their political interests as well.

Also, Mondragon cooperative is regarded as a world leader in worker coops, so unless you're talking about people who know absolutely nothing about cooperatives, I think Mondragon remains a pretty "general" example of what's possible for cooperative business. In any case, it's certainly not clear what you think is a "regular cooperative."

> If a small part of Vermont where 'its own country' and constantly under threat of economic annexation from the US or Canada, well, people might organize differently than they do in California.

Well, Basque is not under threat of economic annexation from Spain; it's already annexed. People in Basque do often oppose the Spanish government for nationalist reasons, but it's just one of many reasons considering that the internal struggle in Spain is a country-wide issue and not reserved to Basque. And nationalism in the region is hardly evidence that Mondragon itself is a nationalistic entity. Lastly, it's very unlikely that a region "under threat of annexation" would choose to develop cooperatives to maintain economic autonomy. The reason Mondragon succeeded was primarily because of the influence of Arizmendiarrieta, and he spent around 10 years trying to convince people to start a cooperative in Basque (in other words, people in Basque did not automatically acclimate to the idea of a worker owned cooperative.) Arizmendiarrieta himself was not from Basque and did not speak Euskera natively, and did not entreat his followers to see cooperatives as a uniquely Basque enterprise, hence why it is now an international organization rather than secluded to the northern Spanish region.

Additionally, worker owned cooperatives aren't unique to Basque, Spain, or even Europe. And it's not like everyone in Basque worships Mondragon either. I am no expert on this, but I've been to Basque, visited Mondragon, and interviewed a number of people on the subject of cooperatives in Spain. From what I can tell, your perspective here is quite warped from reality.

Mondragon employs almost 100K people in a 'nation' of 3.5M people. It's inexorably tied to the national struggle of 'Basque People' in their attempts to achieve some degree of economic autonomy while ostensibly 'controlled' by another group with whom they have had historical antagonisms.

If there were no 'Basque People' I submit there would be no Mondragon.

In Quebec, where I live, there's a similar dynamic, and a host of national entities: telecoms, energy, finance etc. were taken over in an ethnocentric fashion, quite literally stated by the managers of the organizations. As a non-Quebecer, when I opened my bank account at 'Desjardins' (French/Quebecois almost cooperative style bank), they referred to themselves as 'nous' (meaning 'us') and to myself as 'vous' (meaning you, plural), as though there was a clear distinction in their minds. Their employment at Desjardins bank is accepted at least some extent as a 'cause', tied to the nationalist movement. I'm not offended by it as I'm not really ethnically 'Quebecois' but the boundary lines were crystal clear.

This type of thing is common and normal in the world, something that 'New Worlders' often struggle with because we view things through a different lens. I think this causes us to misinterpret important dynamics, and not grasp what's actually happening with causes such as Mondragon, and certain kinds of socialized services in other European countries.

Bargaining rights don't come for free. At the end of the day, unless you are the owner of the company or union leaders, you are basically serving two masters.

That's a pretty pessimistic way to look at it. Without a union or being a high-skilled worker, you are 100% serving your corporate overlord. In well-run unions the leadership serves the membership, not the other way around. With a good union you are serving yourself in a far more significant way than without the union.

> In well-run unions the leadership serves the membership, not the other way around.

Isn't that a bit much like "in a well-run republic, the government serves the people" etc? That's certainly true in theory...

I have no experience with US unions, but I am, thanks to a previous job, very well acquainted with most of the major unions in Germany on multiple levels. The further up you go, the more corruption you will find. They are run as cross-overs between political party and corporation, with large salaries for the executives, networks deciding over promotions and mostly based on political & personal affiliation, not on merit. They tend to say "we have to see eye-to-eye with management to negotiate", which roughly translates to "we have to be paid as well as upper management".

Don't get me wrong, I'd probably still recommend joining a union if you're starting out today, but I wouldn't give you any of that ideological crap. It'll get you more pay, and you'll have a lawyer for any issues with your job. Do it, don't tell anyone about it (illegal or not, if you apply for a job, they will look you up and if you're known for being active in a union, they will not hire you), and keep your head down, because they can also make your life hell if you get on their bad side or insult some local boss.

> Isn't that a bit much like "in a well-run republic, the government serves the people" etc? That's certainly true in theory...

Surely one has to prefer theoretical upside over the certainty of servitude.

> I have no experience with US unions, but I am, thanks to a previous job, very well acquainted with most of the major unions in Germany on multiple levels. The further up you go, the more corruption you will find. They are run as cross-overs between political party and corporation, with large salaries for the executives, networks deciding over promotions and mostly based on political & personal affiliation, not on merit. They tend to say "we have to see eye-to-eye with management to negotiate", which roughly translates to "we have to be paid as well as upper management".

I have no first-hand experience with German unions, so I won't comment beyond observing that in either case, the issue comes down to a lack of a meritocratic reward structure. Unions are neutral on that front, it all comes down to the laws and culture. American unions were born out of capitalist greed run amok, so they tend to be pretty antagonistic and confrontational. I get the impressions that German unions are more of a cooperative with capital to ensure work stoppages are minimized.

> Don't get me wrong, I'd probably still recommend joining a union if you're starting out today, but I wouldn't give you any of that ideological crap. It'll get you more pay, and you'll have a lawyer for any issues with your job. Do it, don't tell anyone about it (illegal or not, if you apply for a job, they will look you up and if you're known for being active in a union, they will not hire you), and keep your head down, because they can also make your life hell if you get on their bad side or insult some local boss.

I didn't think my statement was particularly ideological, and I don't personally feel an ideological bent toward unions. I wouldn't personally join one because I don't need it, but a union would benefit most of the developers I know from a practical standpoint. Getting on the bad side of the union is no different than getting on the bad side of an executive - at least with a union you have 2 centers of gravity to pull on instead of one.

"certainty of servitude" -> "I didn't think my statement was particularly ideological"

Have the self-awareness to concede that describing 'a job' particularly in high tech which can pay quite well and has great conditions, is tantamount to servitude is effectively ideological.

Why do the salary and conditions matter? Either you are ownership or you serve their interests in exchange for money. There is nothing ideological about calling a thing what it is.

> Surely one has to prefer theoretical upside over the certainty of servitude.

I don't think there is servitude in high tech jobs, so there's no certainty either in my view. The issue I have with the theoretical approach is that it often falls short in the real world and you end up with a mess where everybody involved is surprised.

I'd like to see those well-run unions (or republics, or corporations etc etc) before believing in them. So far, my impression is that they only exist on paper or on very small scales, but as soon as they grow to significant size, the usual processes set in and you end up with a problematic organization. Sure, one can say those aren't well-run, but that sounds too much like No-True-Scotsman to me.

"pessimistic way to look at it. Without a union or being a high-skilled worker, you are 100% serving your corporate overlord."

And 'serving a corporate overlord' is not 'pessimistic'?

You have skills, you work with others to make something hopefully productive, you get paid, and that's the deal. The company usually takes on most of the risk and the bigger chunk of the upside. That's the deal, it works well in most cases.

I can see unions being useful in some situations, however in my opinion the worse part of a typical job, is the fact that you work for someone else. No matter how nice your boss, you still have to follow orders. Joining a union is just duplicating this dynamic, because now you have to also follow union rules. I can see in many cases that this is worth it because the type of job has extremely low mobility. However for any position that has market options, joining a union seems pointless as your bargaining rights are simply leaving and joining another company because you can (and any successful company would recognize successful employees, thereby giving you bargaining rights via the market).

>>you are basically serving two masters.

Though technically the truth, the inherent understanding is that at-least at the union side , you can have your voice heard, a.k.a a minimal guarantee that you will be heard by one of those masters.

Agreed, completely. I support unions, but I see the best way forward to both increase equality and reduce corporate corruption is the Mondragon model of worker-owned cooperative federations. Unions are not an advance in this direction at all, merely a check on corporate ownership. It's better than nothing, but it's not the end-all to worker protections.

If I am paying the union and the union leaders are elected by me. Then the union is serving me, not the other way around.

An employee can at any time choose to work somewhere else.

Indeed. They can also choose to unionize.

Sure, it's just not the only way like you implied.

What I "implied" was:

1. union benefits are redundant in worker owned-cooperative, not in typical corporations

2. and that's because corporate employers cannot emulate collective bargaining rights (but co-ops can)

Please, I'd really like you to explain to me how how "an employee can at any time choose to work somewhere else" emulates collective bargaining rights.

Collective bargaining is one way to do better for yourself but the other is to change jobs and negotiate for better pay and conditions as part of the hiring process.

This has other advantages too, like meeting new people and learning new things.

However, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

> In tech, we can generally assume reasonable working conditions and pay, so Kickstarter unionizing screams “toxic management” for me, personally.

I can confirm that "toxic management" is the only way to describe the situation when this union drive began.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

Is the article's description of why the union was created accurate?

Yes it's accurate, though the "Always Punch Nazis" controversy was just the tip of the iceberg. Employees were being treated like enemies by some in upper management.

Edit: I've been rate limited by HN mods (thanks!), so not replying on this account anymore. All the best!

The article is ambiguous, but I guess those organising the union were taking the side of leaving the project up? Or is the union demanding total freedom of speech in the terms of service? I'm guessing not.

Doesn't that bother you, at least a little bit? How can whether or not to leave up "always punch nazis" be the union's signature issue? Unions are meant to fight for the common man against the elites.

alwayspunchnazis.com has a cartoon of the US President being punched in the face at the top of it, and every article on that website calls the Republicans Nazis. Given how many ordinary working class Americans voted for Trump, painting them all as Nazis and then insisting that such a fundraise remains live would seem to be the opposite of what unions historically stood for.

> Given how many ordinary working class Americans voted for Trump, painting them all as Nazis and then insisting that such a fundraise remains live would seem to be the opposite of what unions historically stood for.

The Nazis won a plurality of the popular vote, so it’s not exactly a great distinguishing factor for Trump.

>The Nazis won a plurality of the popular vote, so it’s not exactly a great distinguishing factor for Trump.

The distinguishing factor is that Trump's admin doesn't actually resemble a Nazi regime.

I was only responding to a particular point in the parent comment.

The irony here is that most union members in the US are Trump supporters.

>Yes it's accurate, though the "Always Punch Nazis" controversy was just the tip of the iceberg

Wow pretty crazy that a company would expect employees to consistently enforce a reasonable part of the company's T.O.S.

Many tech workers have no idea how unbelievably spoiled they are.

New accounts are rate limited by software. I've marked your account to exempt it from this now.

You have it backwards. The employees treated management like enemies, and still are. Now everyone else is legally required to as well. What a disaster.

Honestly, I really want tech workers to unionize and push for companies to install ethics committees.

Particularly at Facebook and Google -- tech workers should unionize there not because they need better work conditions but because otherwise all business decisions are in the hands of executives for whom unethical or sociopathic behaviour is often an advantage.

They're unionizing because they're politically likeminded. There's absolutely no other logical reason why they would do it.

> Clearly they haven’t, and given how easy it is to appease developers, this is particularly damning.

In my experience, developers are probably among the hardest to appease. It's probably a tie between developers and sales. Both groups are primarily money driven and keen to negotiate, but developers also feel entitled to influence or control other aspects of the business based on their personal idea of morality (e.g. developers are not inclusive of the opinions of other groups of employees).

I don’t think there is much that management can do in this case. What you say is true where unions have historically shown up. But these times are different. Like most people pushing an agenda and participating in twitter outrage mobs, I think this is ideologically driven, and the employees have a very limited understanding of how unions work and when they are needed. It’s essentially a meme.

You may think you can do without a union if business is good and management OK. When shit hits the fan, that is when you'll learn that you need them.

I work in a German unionized company and I think unions can be quite well-aligned with workers and business interest.

Congrats to the Kickstarter folks. Here's hoping this is the turn towards increased workers rights in the tech sector.

Yes, this sector tends to pay fairly well, but that doesn't mean there aren't other areas to improve. From IP restrictions to overtime, oncall to transparency in promotions, there are countless workplace conditions I hear about needing to improve constantly.

transparency in promotions?

In a lot of companies there's a sense that the promotion process is secret, unfair, or doesn't evaluate everyone equally. Especially at big tech companies (at Amazon, for instance, I often heard a sense that it was 'impossible' to get to L6. Additional transparency can help people understand why they are/are not moving to the next level.)

Speaking as an IAM union member, congratulations! now comes the hard part.

You're probably (still) going to hear a lot of FUD from your employer but dont worry, things really do only get better from here. Once you get a union youll get more quarterly insight into your companies profits, losses, and a MUCH better picture of what the company intends to do in the next six to twelve months. Youll also get a direct say in almost anything you think will help the business. Im not just talking about a suggestion box for the snack-o-matic, but real input to people with actual power.

the hard part is the election period. Kickstarter is going to pull out ALL the stops to change your mind. youll get harassing phone calls at night, weird letters in email, meetings intended for one thing but that end up as an anti-union rant (EX: Safety meetings that turn into anti-union propaganda immediately) and of course lots, and lots, of direct mail from people and organizations no ones heard of outside a union busters office. Youll also get invited to a ton of after-work "pow wow" or "support" groups that sound like they are union related, but arent. Keep your eyes on the prize, ignore the fliers on your windshield, and vote.

I just formed a company back in December. Super easy to set up an LLC, C or S Corp. But I wanted it to be a worker co-op like Mondragon. And there's no real guidance or help.

Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.

As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?

Sure, it's hard/unfeasible for a startup to unionize in its formative years. But Kickstarter was founded in 2009 and is a relatively mature company in the tech sector.

I think they parent is asking more about how few resources exist helping people establish and manage worker co-op forms of businesses rather than LLCs or S-Corps.

> Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm.

Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.

However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality you would want for a project or company, especially if you (the founder) have a vision.

IMO, part of the reason Linux and Python were so successful was that they had a "benevolent dictator" with a strong vision. Imagine the gridlock that would occur with Linux development if we had a 2-party system that polarized on controversial issues and got mired at every vote.

Democracy is also a system that produces BETTER decisions. Sure tyranny can make decisions "efficiently" but that's not that great when those decisions are terrible.

Democracy: Fewer macro, more micro, better decisions

Command-Control: More macro, fewer micro, terrible decisions.

EDIT: Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making" vs command-control which is "centralized decision making". When I talk about democracy, I mean distributed decision making.

It also makes the orgs much slower moving, much less able to adapt quickly. Market conditions change while these companies are still debating decisions from months ago.

TL;DR: It works for some (and we should have more of them imo!) but not all or even most.

Non action is a decision. In general, I don't think there is even a possibility to ever make less decisions. A situation happens, and a decision needs to be made to resolved it, non-action is also just one of the possible decision.

I don't think I have ever heard, study or read about the claim of democracy making better decision (at the least, the common refrain about tyranny of the majority comes to mind), so I will have to ask for justifications of that statement.

First, most people misunderstand democracy. Democracy is that people have a say over in proportion to how much a decision affects them. Command-control hierarchies don't have this property. I like to call democracy 'distributed' decision making vs centralized like command-control.

Have you read studies that command-control hierarchies make better decisions?

"Wisdom of the crowd" was also a common refrain for a time. Somewhat trendy in the years before Twitter and Facebook blew up. I think it's widely regarded as naive nowadays, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems

I expect you're being downvoted because your statement is so obviously wrong. Democracies have consistently made horrifying decisions. Take a read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

As have monarchies and dictatorships. So where does that leave us? The conclusions that all forms of government make horrifying decisions?

Democracy is the worst form of government ...

Except for all others.

I like to think that a democracy and good decision making are not particularly correlated. But democracy is technology for preventing violent revolution because power change is built into the system.

It's not obviously wrong. What has Democracy to do with "majority based decision making". Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making".

So why would "distributed decision making" be obviously worse than "command and control" like the way a corporation or tyrannical government is run?

Not necessarily. Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated. Which is not the case, specially in under developed countries; Most of the time, the ignorance and lack of a more developed consciousness in a country citizens benefits those that are in power, as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate so that it stays that way;

> Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated.

Certainly if you're looking at tech jobs, the "population" is reasonably well educated.

I'm talking about education in a much bigger scope. Not referring to the Kickstarter situation at all; Tech education is not enough. I'm talking about political, social, emotional, economical etc, education; This level of education is a life long pursue. Schools are not enough. Internet is not enough;

For business decisions, no. You'd be surprised at how many employees at Google don't really understand the process of how Google makes money. They offer little internal seminars so they can learn how.

The last thing you want is a bunch of smart engineers voting on business decisions they don't have the background to fully grok.

So I guess we should take the overwhelming majority in this threat rejecting the idea of democratizing private companies, and the at least skeptical attitude towards unions as indication that both are likely to be good ideas.

> Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated ... as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate

I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.

Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.

The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.

So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.

Another way to look at "fitting in" is "wanting the right things." Get the elites to want what you want and the broader population will tend to follow. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desir...

The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.

Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.

The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)

The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.

Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bottom, is prone to envy.

Some have experienced egregious tyranny and abuse of power in the workplace, and might think it is worth deterring there too.

IMO with companies, the stakes are not so high that democracies (i.e. unions) need to be implemented right from inception. If a company demonstrates repeated abuse of employees, then sure, retrofit it with a union to keep future abuses in check.

But unions have several significant downsides too, and for companies with a clean record, strong leaders with a vision, good pay and benefits, high morale, etc. I don't see any benefit to encumbering such with a union.

If you haven't been in a position where workplace tyranny and abuse of power don't seem so high stakes, you are fortunate, but your experience is not universal or necessarily typical.

Not high stakes as in you won't be killed, your family won't be shipped off to a labor camp, etc. if the company president turns out to be a malevolent dictator.

You really think it's worth it to encumber all companies with unions because of a few bad eggs?

In the U.S., healthcare is tied to employer. That, coupled with low amount of savings most Americans have, does make it into a life and death situation.

No, at worst you might just might end up living on the street, without healthcare. Or just humiliated and broken down daily.

Sure I do. What's the downside, someone might tell you not to plug in your own computer?

You think it's worth it to have people spending the majority of their life in an environment of tyranny, abuse of power, humilation and degradation, no democracy in the environment you spend most of your waking hours in -- because some unions might tell you not to plug in your own computer?

Linus and Guido a) do not control anyone's paycheck b) cannot control who decides they're interested in working on Linux and Python.

The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they continually decide whether to endorse the dictator's vision. A dictatorship of a company is much more like an actual dictatorship of a country, where you control people's lives and decide who gets to join and leave. It's more efficient, yes - but it is both less just and less incentivized to point that ruthless efficiency in the right direction.

By all means, run technical projects at work like Linux and Python are run - but give people the freedom to vote no confidence in these projects without endangering their housing and their health insurance.

You don't get to decide who leaves. If people don't like a companies dictator then they are free to go join another company. It's this competition in the free market for labor that helps prevent the abuses of tyranny.

That is a terribly naive perspective on the "free market for labor"

Not in software.

If by "software" you mean the tiny bubble that is silicon valley (and aspirants).

The majority of developers out there hold down "real" jobs like everyone else at giant faceless corporations where they have no say and no power.

There are some H-1B holders and green card applicants I'd like you to meet.

Also some pregnant people, people who look like they could get pregnant, people with significant medical expenditures, .... Yes, obviously, the control that an employer has over these people is much less than the control a governmental dictator would have - but it's much, much more than the control Guido or Linus have over anyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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

Maybe what would improve these companies is not pure democracy, but rather a bill of rights for workers. This can include a mutual contract over pay and benefits, depending on how well the company is doing, with a legitimate appeals process for both sides.

[In]efficient at what?

You've got to think carefully about your metrics when it comes to government.

Look it's widely understood that, if the dictator or tyrant is good at his (or, very occasionally, her) job then things usually go well.

The old women of Bhutan cried when the King decreed democracy.

It's getting rid of the bad ones that's the big problem, and so: democracy. "The worst form of government except for all the others."

Edit to add: the ultimate government is "full consensus", but it's incredibly expensive in terms of the time it takes to get everybody's input and consensus. However, once full consensus is reached it's the most efficient at execution: everyone works together in harmony to achieve the ends of the group in the mutually-agreed fashion.

Needless to say, this form of government is very very rare on Earth, but hardly unknown.

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

Democracy is efficient at getting shit done. As uncareful as this metric is defined.

But I would say even more importantly, democracy is very efficient at limiting internal bloodshed. It provides a well-defined, peaceful process for people to grab power. The power is limited, but you don't have to kill people to gain it, and in turn you don't risk getting killed yourself by the next upstart.

I agree. One of the most important and successful aspects is the relatively peaceful transfer of power.

Personally I'm more concerned that the government remains responsive and, for lack of a better word, humble.

(That's part of why the Kingdom of Bhutan is so amazing: the don't measure GNP, they have a measure called Gross National Happiness that they take pretty seriously. Heh. They really seem to have their kit together. It's a Third-World country you can't emigrate to.)

>Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.

Look here and with their sister orgs

https://www.usworker.coop/home/

They hold conferences and workshops.

Edit: And if you're looking for a higher level approach:

https://democracycollaborative.org/

I’ve been wondering recently to what extent the political structures of the most successful corporations may influence those of politics at large...

It’s funny that we value democracy in name, but still enforce a rigid, top-down, and winner-takes-all hierarchy in most of our businesses.

Nice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure.

Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.

> election period

didn't they just complete the election?

Yes, and successfully.

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern.

Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.

One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.

About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back...

You Do know that there's more than 1 way to set up a union, right?

There are such things as professional unions (think old European guilds) that also enforce competency and much more.

somehow I seriously doubt the people from that article will add any competency laws or requirements to the workers to their union at all.

That's a cool anecdote. Meanwhile, unions across Europe won massive increases in standards of living for all workers, from better leave, healthcare, safety protections, to even blocking the wealthy from having control over their democracies through militant, labor-backed political parties.

I'm not sure that last part is really a recommendation. What if I don't agree with the political positions of my union's leadership?

Then you vote to change the positions, and if necessary the leadership.

When you work for a contractor working for a corporation, you work for the contractor. When you work for a union working for a corporation, you work for the union. The difference is that the contractor isn't even notionally on your side, and the union is, at least in theory.

I wouldn't work for a corporation that organized "militant, corporate-backed political parties" either.

Then your probably going to have to work for yourself, if you’re in the US anyway. Even small companies do this through the US Chamber of Commerce.

A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.

Personally I had to wait a week to move desks until an electrician carried my desktop two desks over. He didn't move my monitor ... that wasn't included in the rules.

I ran into this sometimes when I worked conferences. We weren’t allowed to plug in our equipment, though we had paid for a power drop and it was sitting there. Of course, nobody was there to do it, so I would just plug it in. If they want to come by later and unplug it and plug it back in, they can feel free.

I had same issue at a large investment bank. I don’t blame the union so much as the negotiated rules. De minimis items shouldn’t need union unless there’s a safety or liability issue.

I've personally seen this exact same thing. I was raised pro-union. I'm still very pro-union. Stuff like this is just batty, though.

Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".

That's still "union rules". If the union chose to be pedantic and insisted upon these rules in negotiation, then it's really the union's fault.

No, it's "union and company rules". The nature of a negotiation is that both sides have agreed on the result. Getting people to accept calling this sort of bullshit "union rules" is propaganda.

This is really a problem of unintended consequences. And it's not "union rules", it's a collective agreement that both the union and management sign off on. Union shop or not, we can all point at absurdities in work life - just as many come from management in my experience (which doesn't include much work with unions).

It's a bit like the tax code or some complicated piece of bureaucracy. Some of the stuff in there sure seems stupid but you can bet it was put in for a reason that, at the time at least, looked sensible. In the case of things like "only an electrician is allowed to do that", it's a pretty safe bet that at some point in the past management tried to do an end run around the agreement and have cheaper labor do something they weren't trained or compensated for. In the US at least the system is so adversarial you end up with hard lines being drawn on both sides.

The alternative to enforcing rules pedantically is enforcing them arbitrarily, which is what happens in non-union environments. One set of rules for Billy, another set of rules for Sally.

Why is the result of a negotiation only the fault of one party if both sides had equivalent bargaining power?

Think about where the company's interest lies. Without the union, of course they would want their employee to just plug the thing in. They wouldn't agree to such a silly stricture if it wasn't forced upon them by the union.

But if as a low-level manager I can gain sympathy and build relationships with my superiors by blaming my inefficiency on the union-devils, why not cause a petty delay with passive aggressive rules.

The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.

Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.

The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.

This is a very simplistic assumption that there’s one company interest which everyone understands and supports. I’ve seen many places where it would be as simple as department A owns that function and they care about making their lives easier, not your productivity. That’s basically the norm for large company IT departments, with nary a union in sight.

Remember, there’s been a well-funded campaign pushing back against the New Deal for longer than most of us have been alive. Unions are not perfect but there are a lot of misrepresentation and urban legends circulating and most of the stories you hear are likely either wrong or leaving out key details (e.g. the union got adamant about certain tasks after management tried to avoid honoring their contract). Unless you have first-hand experience or lots of documentation, be skeptical.

Expecting that companies want their employees to be able to do their jobs without being blocked by picayune rules is simple, but it's not simplistic.

Again, you could be surprised by some IT departments.

There's this perspective that the best way to keep a system working is to make it unusable, so that nobody uses it, and thus nobody breaks it, and so you don't have to keep fixing it. It's something I've seen parts of organizations navigate into without any union-related involvement.

Again, “company” is not the same as “each distinct political group within the company”. Anyone with experience at a large company will probably have examples of groups behaving against the perceive global because that was better within their group’s incentive structure.

As a simple example, how often is purchasing inordinately expensive because something was abused in the past and that group was told to make sure it never happens again? Or a sales group setting engineering up for failure because they personally had a huge financial incentive to do so?

And without a union, employees might tell people who report sexual harassment to get bent.

Yes, unions can make things less efficient. Yes, unions can cause unnecessarily stupid systems that harm people. But so do employers! I'd rather have one I can at least vote in.

That exact same scenario happened to me but it wasn't at a union shop. Seems weird to blame this on unions in general. Dumb rules are dumb rules...

Since we're all trotting out anecdotes...

I knew a guy who came to work at Google and didn't get a laptop for two weeks. No unions were involved.

That is not the norm though, typically everyone gets their laptop together in a big room the first hours of orientation. You can even request a new laptop and get it within a couple of hours, so if the person didn't get a laptop their first day something must have gone very wrong somewhere...

Yeah, you're right. It was unusual.

Thinking about it, this anecdote isn't a great counter-example to systemic foolishness after all, d'oh!

> had to wait two days for a union electrician

Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.

> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.

It's something inherent in human nature, unfortunately.

There are ALL SORTS of inefficiencies and insanity and laziness and treating people like garbage most of us have experienced at non-union workplaces, of course.

That union shops may seem to be subject to extra risks of of certain types of nonsense doesn't mean they aren't a win overall.

But yeah, to be honest, some people with unions find they need to struggle with union leadership over some things. It's generally a lot better overall than struggling with your boss.

A union is simply an agreement between workers and management. Agreements can be modified to prevent such faults when both parties enter in good faith.

I had a uncle that was a bricklayer and moved somewhere that bricklayers were in demand so that he could get paid more. He was not a union member. When the union found out he was doing the same work for slightly less, they sent some people over to threaten his life if he didn't join union or leave. He left.

What's with the anecdotes on this thread? The OP was trying to make substantive statements about unions in general and why anecdotes are ineffective in describing them, and your counter was to provide yet another anecdote?

I had a father that worked as a fisherman for a small company which was not union. He ended up dying because the owners didn't properly inspect the boat and it capsized because of a fatal flaw in the design, killing everyone on board.

Using your same argument, we should abolish all corporations, correct? Since a poorly ran corporation can quite literally kill people due to negligence.

I find it honestly absurd that people attribute all of these negative qualities to unions and yet are not willing to do the exact same thing to the same corporate behavior which has zero checks or balances.

Because your issue is better solved by regulations.

Corporations don't pretend to be on the workers' side; unions do.

Corporations absolutely do pretend to be on the workers' side.

I had a relative that many suspected was murdered way back in the day when my city was having one of its bridges built. Basically there was a strike going on and he was a scab.

I guess I should have mentioned the entire process in my previous comment instead of pointing out the conclusion.

Businesses use lobbyist to get laws to entrench themselves in their own monopolies. If I attempt to disrupt this business by avoiding their regulatory capture, police are sent to punish me. Depending upon which laws I violate, I can be sent to jail and end up with years in prison. Prison, where you are kept in stylized cages and your ever waking moment is controlled by others. That is a treatment that I do not see any significant difference from treatment that would be labeled as slavery.

I know people this has happened to, and I don't see why people treat it as being somehow justified just because the business went through the process of lobbying (and political donations which only seem different than bribery in name only).

And this is ignoring the history of business outright murdering people for protesting for workers' rights.

There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are. But maybe there is something inherent that makes them violent after all? It's simply not obvious at a glance that they're going to be violent.

I'm not sure that there's nothing inherent in unions that makes them promote mediocrity. There could be - the fact that unions add more layers to the bureaucracy and slow things down could very well have the effect of promoting mediocrity.

Generally, if you want people to do the best work, then the people need to be motivated and they need to have as little friction as possible. Unions add friction. In a company where things work, unions would probably add friction and cause more mediocrity.

Note that I'm not saying that unions necessarily cause this, but I am saying that they might be a cause for it. Claiming otherwise with no supporting arguments isn't convincing.

> There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are.

They are violent in the same way Democracies are violent. If you break some arbitrary rule, we put you in a cage. If you resist, you die.

Violence is inherent in statehood, it’s not specific to dictatorships.

Unions operate financially like churches. They depend on the dues (tithes) paid by their membership. The more members you have, the more influence and power you have.

This incentivizes unions to never voluntarily reduce their numbers. The more mediocre the employees, the more protection they need from the union, and thus the more power the union has over the employee population.

The ideal union employee to a union boss, based on how unions are funded and run in the US, is a minimally competent drone that regularly pays dues.

Unions also consistently advocate credentialism over performance. If an employer wants to improve performance the union will fight any outcome based benchmarks, and will instead push for everyone to be educated and certified. In truth it would be best for the business to do both, educate and measure outcomes. What is more important, that every teacher in the US have a masters degree, or that every teacher be good at teaching. The union will always advocate for the former.

I like unions, particularly in the private sector. I wish they operated differently and were more pro-active in cultivating skill (like old school guilds) and less about body count.

We should advocate union reform rather than ditching them entirely then.

Millions of people across the U.S. benefit from collective bargaining, such as increased wages, health benefits and retirement security, yet one anecdotal off-topic post gets upvoted.

Probably because it resonates as a real problem despite the upsides.

An easily solved problem.

Please solve it then. Start with AT&T's union. I await your results.

The employees can request it be fixed in the next contract. Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things.

> Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things.

So its not easily solved...

Or perhaps it reinforces preconceived notions?

It matches my own experience and anecdotes that others have told me from their experiences. I don’t think it’ll be hard to find similar stories out there...

It's good to have those stories, because then it will provide case studies for future unions to learn from and to avoid.

That’s not the correct comparison. Unions are a hedge against abusive employers when employees lack other options. They are a blunt instrument with many downsides. They make sense when the downsides are not worse than the abusive employer. This does not describe the situation with kickstarter employees, and any real union job would find this entitlement laughable.

Tech industry is full of entitled prima donnas living in an alternative reality valid only in their heads. US median wage according to data for 2016 was about $32k [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...]. According to Payscale Kickstarter pays its employees an average of $96,897 a year. Salaries at Kickstarter range from an average of $62,662 to $142,634 a year.

Deciding to treat tech management in an adversarial fashion or being more woke than the management while making 3x is going towards the mean, not away from it.

"Software engineers aren't a privileged set. They're just less fucked than the rest of the U.S. Former Middle Class."

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...

Not recognizing that making over 100k/year sitting in $800 chairs, eating company provided organic snacks, having subsidized meals ( or fully free ) in lovely offices and complaining that the management is not woke enough that it dared to pull the "It is always a good time to punch a nazi" project before reinstating it not to offend the woke employees is the definition of privileged set.

In lovely open offices?

> In lovely open offices?

Yes. Compare it with an average office in Manhattan:

Windows 10 on computers with 4Gb RAM slinging Acrobat Pro, where you are in NYC and your files are on a network drive in France, company does not do Dropbox or Google drive, there's one printer on the other side of the 25k sq feet office full of cubicles, you pay for your own coffee, there are no snacks, the chairs are $50 ones you typically see in the office supply stores and you are paid cool $49k/year.

As discussed recently, cubicles would probably be preferred by most engineers to open offices. However, they are virtually an industry standard at this point and it's not exactly something that a tech worker can escape by changing companies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256872

As far as snacks and coffee go, this subthread goes into a good discussion about how most of the perks are relatively cheap for management to shell out for, and elides that the money could instead go into providing individual offices as was the case in the industry in the '90s- or just paying employee salaries:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359927

Tech workers are relatively compensated well, no doubt- but as mentioned in the Quora link, they are not exactly paid commensurate to the value they bring. Perks such as snacks or fancy furniture are simply window dressing, not to mention provided meals are also seen as a way for the company to maximize time spent in the office. The tech industry is very good at providing double-edged benefits- unlimited PTO is another example, as it nearly always comes with some strings attached and often leads to less vacation time taken than if allotted vacation time is given. It's an industry that's very good at selling products that are only free at first glance- is it any wonder that many employee perks/benefits are no different in principle?

This is a very strangely specific comment.

I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance.

Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone.

Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.

This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+...

The search results I'm seeing for that don't seem relevant to the discussion. Did you actually have any evidence to the "This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US." or were you just taking a shot in the dark here to support your own bias?

No evidence that you would (or should) be satisfied with, just direct personal experience as a member of the Teamsters (Local 284), years of indirect personal experience working in HVAC and building two homes (IBEW and Carpenters union) and many personal anecdotes from my brother (CWA) and wife (NEA).

My point is this. There are some common pathologies in the way unions tend to operate (or at least old unions that have ossified over time) in the US that have nothing to do with the underlying objectives of collective bargaining. This step for Kickstarter is a huge victory for organized labor in the USA and they are likely to receive aggressive input from other American labor unions as to how they should operate. In my opinion the employees at Kickstarter accept this input at their own peril. This shouldn't just be a new union, this should be a new type of union and one indicator of success would be strong objection to their charter from one or more existing unions in the US.

For the record I have no philosophical objection to unions or collective bargaining at all. I do have material concerns around how they tend to operate in the US.

"Unions don't make rules like what you experienced,"

They negotiate them with the employer. What comes out of those negotiations like all compromises sometimes gets really wonky.

Any union in the tech industry is going to resemble professional unions such as Hollywood unions or sports unions much more than the punch-clock unions seen in manufacturing and government.

This goes against the anti-union propaganda, though. I'm sure if we unionize, some mafioso from "corporate" will come down to my home office 8 US states away to plug in my monitor before I'm allowed to work.

/sarcasm

What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.

No, it will look nothing like those. The industries have virtually nothing in common.

My experience with US unions was similar.

They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change.

I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare.

Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do.

I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.

The experience I have had with UK unions is very different from this, and the other descriptions of unions in the US.

I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch".

I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.

It's certainly a more antagonistic relationship from what I've heard from folks in Europe. The worst part is IMO that least with my experience Union leadership is often pretty poor and despite being people who actually work those jobs, they're not very knowledgeable or capable about even the job.

It's unfortunate.

>Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.

It likely stems from the fact that the birth of the unions in the US was a super violent affair (grotesque murders of both union organizers and union busters). All of the old unions born around that time were founded in an environment where the company was a hostile enemy you negotiated every minute thing with.

This 100%. I'm generally against unions in tech, but the right to have a union was earned in blood here in the US. I hope it stays around at least as a remembrance to those that died for it. We all benefited in some ways.

Not just those. One of the more powerful unions famously bombed the Los Angeles Times building and killed a bunch of journalists because it was opposed to unionization.

That sounds like a much better relationship. But in that case isn’t the role of the Union almost redundant? I mean what’s stopping the workers and management from just having a dialog without a union?

Another thing is I don’t want the same X% increase as everyone else. What if I’m better or worse employee? Why should I get the same output for variable input?

Same reason that when you and your friends reserve dinner at Hakkasan you don't all go and call Hakkasan - it's better for everyone if the group manifests as one. Your rep is your designated guy in charge of following up on your requests.

I'm not pro-union but the use case is meaningful.

Just to take Sweden as an example. For public companies with more than 25 employees the workers have the right to two members and two substitutes on the companies board. Usually these come from the union working with the company.

The goal of this is to create a dialog of how the company is run and similar on every level of the company.

Regarding your question about the salaries, that is mostly blue-collar work here. For white-collar workers the unions mostly exist to enforce regulations and allow the workers to have the legal clout and information necessary when disputes arise, creating more of a do it right the first time rather than try to bend the rules to see how far you can go environment. Salaries are individually negotiated.

Maybe the differences between how unions are implemented. I've worked at a white collar union shop (electrical engineering) where salaries are collectively negotiated. i.e. x% increase per year. The net result at this particular place has been that outside of promotions, salary increases are tied to tenure.

I mean in theory nothing. But then that dialogue would have to be called something, and it would basically be the union at that point.

I mean that's all the union is, a group of employees having a unified relationship with the company.

I was working in a factory at the time, and the nature of that work didn't lend itself to individual bargaining, like say software engineering. That said I don't see why you couldn't ask for more if you're a better employee, I never got told I couldn't ask. It might be down a different path, like a promotion. And not every union would necessarily do any salary negotiation.

It’s all pros and cons. This is very much one of the big negatives of unions. That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. In an era of massive income inequality, it’s a loss. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds.

—-

I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.

> That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time.

Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.

It’s a relatively nascent industry, and this wealth is not equally distributed. We don’t know what it’ll look like in ten, twenty years. You cannot assume the world will continue to be as is.

River boat pilots once could say the same thing.

As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".

Conditions change.

Yeah, and look what happened to the auto unions. They made a deal to protect the income of the senior members and hung the junior members/new hires out to dry.

> River boat pilots once could say the same thing.

> As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".

and to the extent that unions protected those jobs any longer than they were necessary, society as a whole was harmed.

Tech companies in NYC (the likes any one would recognize) who have DCs in NYC area are affected.

If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.

This is absolutely bog-standard anti-union propaganda. This could have been written in the 1960s.

If you don't think there is waste and ridiculous rules without unions, you need to work for any medium to large company.

Large/medium sized companies are run with tiny fiefdoms where the more people working under you means more power.

You don't need unions to have people do bullshit and useless wasteful work.

Agreed. All people protect their realm regardless of unions.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this reads like poorly disguised anti-union propaganda, but it does. In my experience with startups--which is a bit more extensive than yours is with union workplaces--"ambition and taking on responsibility" are rewarded only when it's convenient, and those rewards are often removed or withheld for arbitrary or personal reasons that have nothing to do with your quality of work. The fact that your bosses can (and do) fire startup employees at a moment's notice without any real consequences to themselves would probably concern you more than whether the employees... worked regular eight hour days (wait, why is this being spun as a negative?), were you in an industry where jobs were tighter.

The only thing missing is the comment starting with "I'm not anti-union, but..."

Sounds like a crummy union.

Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.

> One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served"

I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options.

I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed.

What's wrong with "mediocre" employees staying employed?

Everything is a trade-off between priorities. You can optimize for anything, but not everything.

There's nothing "wrong" with stable employment for unproductive people, but when you optimize for that as a goal, then you're paying for it with things like decreased productivity and immense frustration for the creative people who actually want to solve problems. Detaching employment from productivity reduces it to ritual, which is incredibly demotivating for the good workers who see through the farce. They can't even go off on their own to volunteer their skills for the common good, because they still rely on employment--but their hands are tied within that sphere due to a fundamental distortion of its meaning.

The current system was designed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for factory labor. Instead of pretending that we can force it to be relevant into the future, we need to accept that productivity is moving into the realm of cognitive work. Part of this means educating people from the ground up to use information tools and reason abstractly, but we also have to admit that not everybody is going to have the innate ability to contribute in the future, and handle that in a way that doesn't hamstring the people who can.

Because now other employees have no motivation to put in anything more than mediocre work. The reality is people are motivated primarily by self interest. If advancement and retention is based on seniority rather than merit, people have no incentive to put in more than the minimum work.

This is assuming they were already based on merit and not on nepotism and favoritism. In comparison to those, seniority might be a reasonable alternative.

Competition will bring success to the company that fosters an engaged and motivated workforce. Even in national unions, they are still subject to foreign competition.

Sure, the free market isn't immune to nepotism or favoritism. But unions more often than not institute practices that give the same rewards to mediocrity as excellence - to the effect that the latter either put in less work or change jobs.

In either case the company risks losing to a more focused company valuing meritocracy and contribution over either nepotism or seniority. And we see this happen when starts rise up to the top. But our current system gives a lot of protection to existing players, be it through regulatory capture or be it through more natural phenomena like brand recognition taking time to decay even in the face of numerous bad products (in the world of games, look at how many people are still looking forwards to TES6 despite the issues with FO76).

There is also some cases where valuing meritocracy is only the best option when employees are willing to leave, but many employees are very stuck to their existing jobs. This is why pay raises do not keep up with the price of new hires. Consider the case where the cost to hire a new employee goes up 6% year over year while the company raises go up 1% year over year, potentially losing out to even inflation. The reasoning is that the extra costs to hire the few people who leave to another company to capture the 5% difference is smaller than the 5% savings for each person who does not leave.

To some extent, unions help to balance out the issue where most people are not perfectly rational actors.

It takes time, but you'll find that most of the ambitious and motivated people you'll meet are also mediocre. The successful ones tend to also have had luck on their side.

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on. Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films. It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate....

If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.

I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.

I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.

If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c....

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

> Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.

Also, several of these companies like Apple, Netflix, and Amazon already deal with those unions as content producers.

This seems like a cartoonishly simple respresentation of what a union can do.

Why would one have no incentive to excel? Our union creates entire promotion matrixes for excelling employees.

Comparing it to a prison... Are you a worker or a shill for corporate?

Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't insinuate shillage or astroturfing on HN. I know you probably didn't mean it literally, but it's still against the guidelines.

Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was:

- hours go out by seniority

- raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work

- that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken

- 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union.

- I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart.

Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.

Yep. I had this same experience when I was working at a grocery store.

I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine.

Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours.

So I joined just to get hours, and lost a few hundred bucks that summer so the old women who had been cashiers for 30 years could get their raises.

Remarkably similar experience. I worked as a bag boy at a grocery store many years ago. The guy who hired me told me he strongly encourages everyone to join the union and I didn't realize at the time it was an implicit threat. After four months I kept wondering why there were five bag boys on duty and I was the only one working and where they went. One of the store managers came over to me during one of my shifts to thank me for my hard work. I was literally just doing my job while the other kids weren't. Less than two weeks later I had no hours on the schedule. Assuming it was a mistake I asked the guy who scheduled the hours (Mr. "Strongly Encourage") and he said he'd look into it. It was the end of my week so I needed to know what time to show up on Monday and so I persisted and said I needed to know when my next shift was so I wouldn't be late. He kept feigning ignorance. After my third inquiry he turned and said "Look, someone else transferred in so they got the hours, okay?"

I might still be on the payroll with no hours scheduled at that company for all I know.

This was definitely a case where a union wasn't good for workers -- it was good for the lazy bums who didn't want to work.

Okay so my comment was a bit rude, but it from reading this thread it seems many US citizens are so entrenched in an anti Union stance they can't even think of what could be.

In my country the unions negotiate a framework for pay rise based on performance management. They make sure people working (night) shifts have enough time off, can't be rotated at will by management and get compensation.

People who are forced to leave due to downsizing get a proper retraining budget first and are transitioned to other jobs in or outside the company.

It just seems every time Unions are brought up here on HN someone says "my train was late once so all trains are bad form of transportation". But this is too simple, and it doesn't account for the fact that highly skilled IT people can easily negotiate good wages but that low skilled people can't, and they need unions the most.

I've worked once in a non-union shop, where I wasn't allowed to move my computer from my old desk to another. I was expected to unplug all my stuff, label it, put all my personal effects and peripherals into a crate, label it, and sign out. Then, I was supposed to come back the next day, and set everything up.

In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.)

What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?

> About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through:

It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen.

Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.

> Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it.

If I make a small mess, I can:

1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or

2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working

In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.

I think you missed the point of adding additional responsibilities.

In my example the electricians did not make the mess, but they, however, walk around the facility a lot so why not give them a broom so they can clean up messes on their way.

Unchecked is how you lead to companies squeezing 3 jobs out of one person.

Sounds more like the union added contract terms preventing the business from hiring somebody for position X and "asking" or even "allowing" them to do the tadks if position Y (which might pay more than X).

A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.

Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.

Don't forget HR covering up harassment and discrimination until stories are leaked to the media!

A union is run rather democratically. It will tend to reflect the attitudes of its membership, i. e. your coworkers. In some old industry on a downward slope, employees will tend to be older and risk-averse, and so will the union. Tech Unions will tend to be rather different.

Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management.

It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...

But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie.

Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters.

Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc.

But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).

> But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own.

I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.

That is the reasoning, and it's exactly why it concerns me. I'm imagining a world where the national SRE union comes by, and tells me I should never write any monitoring code or change any configuration flags because that's an SRE's job I'm taking.

Congratulations to everyone at Kickstarter!

All workers deserve a voice in their workplace and that's exactly what the solidarity of a union provides.

> That dynamic doesn’t reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has.

What a shameful statement.

Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor, and a sub-50% CEO approval rating. A lot of reviews talk about a secretive, insulated management group.

You don’t see companies with 4.5+ stars on Glassdoor unionizing.

So I’d have to ask their leadership: who made this an “us versus them” situation? Perhaps your local superstore sells handheld mirrors.

You don’t want your employees to unionize? Offer highly competitive salaries, benefits, and opportunities to grow. Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.

Or even better: your employees are unionizing? Great! It means you have an organized structure to discuss employee satisfaction with!

or it could be even worse, the “us versus them” has gone to the next level.. its all up-to the mentality of management , if everyone flexes their muscle nothing good can come out of it.

Better "us vs them" than "me vs them"

> Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor

Glassdoor's ratings are not terribly reliable. Here's something I wrote previously about my own experience with using it:

-----

I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.

Our HR department spammed with "go to glassdoor and rate us" mails and hinted at giving good ratings because this way we'd be able to get people.

At some point people really started to rate them. Ended up with a 3.2 rating.

One of my past employers did something like this. We had some negative reviews from job candidates that weren't hired. At an all hands our CEO encouraged everyone to leave honest feedback on Glassdoor. A lot of employees did, bumping our score up. It wasn't dishonest or misleading, all of the reviews were real.

Reviews are supposed to be from people who worked at the company, so if they were from rejected candidates they are fake reviews. If the company wouldn't remove the fake reviews, that further proves my point that the Glassdoor ratings are not reliable.

> Offer highly competitive salaries

Every time I see this statement, I can't help it but wonder why people don't put some estimate what constitutes "highly competitive".

FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).

From the workers' perspective, why should we care exactly? That sounds like a you problem.

If you aren't able to pay your workers, I'm not sure why you think you shouldn't just go out of business. People aren't obligated to work for substandard wages so you can get rich.

I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners. But taking it out on workers isn't the answer.

I think businesses are able to pay their workers, just not absurd amount of money that FAANG pays their respective workers.

We're talking about 85k vs 200k for junior engineers here and probably 150k vs 500k for senior engineers.

Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?

> I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

The NBA tried to level small market vs big market. UEFA tried with FFP. So far the result has been... _meh_

Perhaps unionization can come hand-in-hand with breaking up tech monopolies to encourage competitive behavior to allow smaller startups to survive.

Somehow my view on this would be:

The BIGS will be too big to accept union and the less BIGS will have to accept their fate to live with unionized workers.

Employees will choose between: get paid tons of money but sacrifice your life vs unionized and accept market average pay (or a little bit above).

Just like life: high-risk high-gain, low-risk low-gain.

> I think businesses are able to pay their workers, just not absurd amount of money that FAANG pays their respective workers.

If the lower amount is reasonable and people are willing to work for it, then there isn't a problem. But you said, "FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions)." So it sounds like you think people aren't willing to work for the lower wage.

Given the numbers you're proposing, I think you may have a wrong impression about what engineers are being paid, both inside and outside of FAANG.

The salaries you're quoting might be true for the bay area, but that's because of the absurd cost of living there. Those numbers are certainly not accurate for the entire US or for the world. FAANG workers are paid that in the bay area, because that's what their skillsets are worth when you adjust for the bay area's cost of living. And if you make the decision to put your startup in the bay area, it's completely unreasonable of you to expect your highly-skilled workers to live in slums because you couldn't locate your business in a place where you can pay to support the cost of living. Maybe that means your startup fails, but that's on you: you're the one who came up with that crappy business plan, and it's not up to workers to prop up your crappy business plan by working for substandard wages.

> Are you suggesting that small businesses should just die?

Ugh. Don't ignore half of what I said. If a business can't pay their workers the business should die, yes. But there are a lot of small businesses that seem capable of paying their workers, so I'm not sure why you think this is an undue burden, and I'm certainly not saying that those small businesses should die.

Again, why do you think that workers should prop up your insolvent business by accepting substandard pay? Pay fair wages or GTFO.

Whatever unfairness you think exists in competition between small and large businesses, exists tenfold between employees and employers. If small businesses are underprivileged, crapping on workers who are even more underprivileged is not the solution to that problem.

Austin, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, (and maybe London UK) branches of FAANG pays 2-3x from the top-10% market average in that area.

SDE1 @ Amazon Vancouver get at least 160-180k (CAD).

SDE3 @ Tableau Vancouver can hit $300k-$350k (CAD).

SDE3 @ Amazon Seattle can get paid 400-500k (USD).

I don't know how much Google Singapore, Zurich, and China pay compare to the market. I heard Alibaba pays $200k USD (if you're OK with 996) for Soft Eng (not in management).

All I said was that "competitive salary" is loosely defined because once FAANG landed in a specific location, they will absolutely "crushed" your notion of competitive salary.

This is the reason why I find the notion of "competitive salary" is interesting (and a bit funny). Employees will demand "competitive salary" and when we asked them, they will point out to the maximum TC that they can find in their area. That's not "competitive" salary. That's "I want to get paid the max".

Of course... it wouldn't be sexy to say "pay us fairly" since that equates to "market average".

If they can't afford the price of labor why should the business continue to exist? If the going rate for a plumber is $100 an hour, why should I be surprised if I get no responses when I'm only willing to pay $40?

That is a very overly simplified perspective.

Let me rephrase the situation: Majority CAN pay plumbers vs Majority CANNOT pay FAANG level.

And? My point remains: why should software developers willingly work for less pay? People aren't entitled to have software developers work on their projects. If companies not willing to pay the going rate for software development, then why are they surprised when they can't find workers?

They shouldn't and what I'd like to hear is developers say how much they're willing to be paid than "make the pay competitive".

So let me ask you back: what is the going rate for developers? Is it what everybody else is paying you or FAANG level?

> what is the going rate for developers?

Whatever people are willing to pay.

> Is it what everybody else is paying you or FAANG level?

It depends on a variety of factors like domain and location. But if you're not finding developers, then its higher than whatever you're offering. And if it's in major tech metros (SV, Seattle + Eastside) it's close to FAANG levels.

> But if you're not finding developers, then its higher than whatever you're offering. And if it's in major tech metros (SV, Seattle + Eastside) it's close to FAANG levels.

This is not entirely true. People aren't finding developers because most of them failed the interview (unless you are digital agencies).

In major tech metros, nobody pay close to FAANG levels. Either you pay at FAANG levels (and they compete at that level) or you go down one-tier (Pinterest, Airbnb, etc) or you're the rest.

> In major tech metros, nobody pay close to FAANG levels. Either you pay at FAANG levels (and they compete at that level) or you go down one-tier (Pinterest, Airbnb, etc) or you're the rest.

Contrast this with your original comment in this chain:

> FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).

If what you say is true, that most companies don't pay close to FAANG levels, then why are non-FAANG companies having a hard time to compete?

Unemployment in software is near zero. You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels, yet at the same time say that non-FAANG companies are having trouble attracting talent. If a company is having a hard time attracting talent at their current compensation levels, then this indicates that their current compensation levels are not competitive (assuming other factors are the same).

Ultimately, the price of labor is whatever people are willing to pay. If workers can get better pay for the same work elsewhere, then the company is going to have trouble staffing - and that's natural.

> that most companies don't pay close to FAANG levels, then why are non-FAANG companies having a hard time to compete?

Hard time to hire engineers according to their bar. Their bar is high (FAANG level) but they don't pay FAANG level so this is interesting => They don't want to lower the bar (rightfully so) and nobody wants to be perceived as "FAANG" reject.

> You insist that few companies are paying close to FAANG levels

Few? I'd say they're "exceptions" (like Uber... for a while before they laid people off) and the rest aren't even close.

Isn't forming a union creating a "us versus them" situation?

Sometimes I wonder if in some instances a low approval rating is endogenous to the company's employee makeup. I work in the HE sector and I can tell you that the lowest levels of student satisfaction comes from departments or disciplines comprising of mostly people complaining about society, yadayadyada

> Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.

This was the main driver for unionization. Outrageous incompetence from upper management.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

As a contractor, I'm happy for them. One day we will have one big union.

> One day we will have one big union.

The strength of labor unions in Europe is drawn in large part due to the fact that there are a multiplicity of unions representing workers for the same companies, and workers can choose who they want to represent them.

That's not the case for labor unions in the US.

That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them. Anti-union propaganda is rampant.

It could be the case in the US. Having a single union is a good place to start.

> That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them. Anti-union propaganda is rampant.

Well, no, the fact that almost all unions in the US use exclusive representation contracts (compared to Europe, where such contracts are range from "unheard-of in most industries" to "illegal") is not due to anti-union propaganda.

You're right. It's because Taft-Hartley was put in place to prevent unions from gaining the same workplace and political power as they have in Europe.

Unions being weak in the US is due to anti-union propaganda though, which as you likely know was the point I was making. Very few industries have even a single union let alone competition.

Complaining about the lack of competition when union representation has been decimated, seems like pointless bikeshedding. I'll happily talk about the lack of union representation, but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.

> Complaining about the lack of competition when union representation has been decimated, seems like pointless bikeshedding

On the contrary, history shows us clearly that the fact that union membership has declined in the US and the fact that union membership in the US is typically on an exclusive representation basis are deeply linked.

In fact, you can still draw your same argument ("the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them") from this fact - it just has little to do with propaganda, as you claimed.

> but "unions bad because of [trivial complaint]" is a distraction.

If you want to have that argument, please find someone who said that and argue with them, instead of responding to my post, which is saying something different altogether.

As I said above I have no interest in diving into these trivial and frankly baseless arguments. Talking about inter-union competition when there are no unions is a huge waste of time and energy. Let's actually have unions first before we worry too much about unions being too powerful.

Using it as an argument against creating a single union seems like a distraction.

> Talking about inter-union competition when there are no unions is a huge waste of time and energy.

The same factors which led to the rise of exclusive representation are the ones which led to the drop in union representation across the board.

If you want to ignore that, fine, but don't be surprised or disappointed when you don't end up with the result you seem to want (more union representation).

Unions in Europe are usually optional and are thriving. Unions in USA are usually forced and are not thriving. Don't you think that USA should learn a bit from Europe about this since they are typically far ahead of USA on worker rights issues?

This is a fine comment except for the end. You unfortunately have a habit of taking swipes at people you're talking to here. Could you please up your game a bit and omit those? Your comments tend to be quite good otherwise, but it's not ok to break the site guidelines like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> This is a fine comment except for the end. You unfortunately have a habit of taking swipes at people you're talking to here. Could you please up your game a bit and omit those? Your comments tend to be quite good otherwise, but it's not ok to break the site guidelines like this.

I'll admit that that sentence is a bit dismissive, but it's a deflection in response to a comment which is itself dismissive and aggressive towards me and which is trying to bait an unnecessary argument over an uncharitable reading of my original (innocuous) statement. Hopefully that's evident in context.

I'll be honest: there are usernames I recognize by name. There are users who have made a habit of posting aggressive, dismissive, snarky replies to even my blandest comments, often trying to bait an argument and drawing the conversation towards a specific tangent. There are some users who post comments that are "civil" in tone but express racist or homophobic sentiments towards me. (In some cases, it's plainly obvious that they're trying to continue personal grudges from other threads; they've linked directly to the previous thread or copied sections of text verbatim!) In my view, either one goes against the spirit of the guidelines for this website - fostering productive conversation - as well as the letter.

Yes, it's true that trying to deflect or cut off an argument like this is a defensive response. But it's a defensive response that's been learned over years of participating on this site, and from seeing moderators take no visible action against people "civilly" directing bigoted comments at individuals, while publicly taking issue with the people defending themselves (albeit impolitely) from those exact comments in the same thread. While that might not be the intention, and while there may be reasons for this (e.g. engaging visibly with the people likely to be receptive feedback as opposed to those who won't), it's the pattern that I (and others) have noticed.

I very much appreciate the time and effort that you (and others) put in to running this site, which is exactly why I'm taking the time to write this comment and explain the broader context.

Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.

Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem with your comments that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information. It's much harder to see these patterns in oneself than it is in others, especially the people we most disagree with. The only way to fix that is to take on a higher standard for yourself—not because a higher standard applies to you, but as a compensation for the strong bias to always see the other person as the greater problem. We all have that bias, so we all need to apply that fix. It's a community-level effort.

That said, if there are other accounts repeatedly breaking HN's rules, we'd certainly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.

It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. We do that a lot. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, so we rely on users to help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

You can help by flagging such comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them. I took a look at the history of comments you've flagged, and in most cases there ended up being visible evidence of moderation. In egregious cases, it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com, because usually that will lead to swifter action.

> Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem in the past that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information.

Yes, I had seen that, which is why I mentioned that in my comment.

> Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.

I understand, and I'm not saying that it makes it okay. I'm explaining that, when people see patterns in which violations of rules get called out publicly and which don't, it sends a message. The reason I'm letting you know because I believe that's not the message that your team intends to send (if it were, I wouldn't be bothering).

> It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. I've personally done that hundreds if not thousands of times. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

The last time you and I interacted on here (Jan 2019) was in a thread where you took issue with a snarky comment I wrote, and I responded by pointing out the same thing - that I was responding to a person who was even more aggressive, clearly acting in bad faith, and accusing me of "racism" for explaining why a post was offensive to people of certain ethnic backgrounds (including my own). My comment apparently warranted a public moderator response; the parent that I responded to apparently did not. The other was eventually flagged, but only much later - long after the post had fallen off the front page.

Perhaps moderators don't necessarily read the parent post when responding to a comment, but because most readers assume that mods do, a situation like that makes it look like moderators are condoning one type of behavior over the other.

It doesn't help that, in any system that relies on user flags for reporting behavior, users from minority backgrounds ultimately are flagged at a higher rate, even if they adhere to the rules the same proportion of the time. There's peer-reviewed research that's explained this phenomenon, but most of it boils down to the obvious dynamic: people are less likely to report objectionable behavior if they agree with the content, and people are more likely to disagree with content that openly expresses viewpoints from minority groups.

> You can help by flagging those comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them, and in egregious cases it's helpful to email hn@ycombinator.com.

I have typically avoided flagging these comments because I've (perhaps incorrectly) been under the impression that they're not actioned - in all the years I've been on this site, I don't think I've ever seen moderators publicly calling out this sort of "civil bigotry" that I'm describing.

However, if that's not the case, I'll make note of that and will flag those from now on instead of responding myself.

>That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them.

No, it's actually because the government gave them more power and allowed agreements to be structured where all of the electricians in one company must come from the same union.

Unions in the US are able to prevent competition from other unions. You can not freely choose different unions if you don't like the one in your company. See every state that doesn't allow "right to work". Unions become mandatory.

That's not the case in Germany as well, there's practically only the DGB (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, German Trade Union Federation) that has member unions that have very little overlap. Yes, there are some small, competing unions (e.g. there is another union representing police officers and another federation for people working in government organisations) and some non-members (e.g. a union representing airplane pilots or medical personel), but there's not a lot of competition, the DGB represents about 85% of all union members and is very closely connected to the SPD, one of the major parties.

DGB is a choice though, you aren't forced to join it. Every worker at Kickstarter will be forced to join this union, so the situation is very different.

I didn't mean to imply one way or the other, just wanted to point out that "competition between unions" isn't really a thing in Germany, so "that's why it works that well in Europe" is questionable. I don't know how it works in France or the UK, so Germany might be the total outlier, but it would be an outlier of 80m people.

As a contractor, I am happy to have absolutely nothing to do with unions.

Agreed. I'm also happy to live in a right to work state, and that I'll never be beholden, without choice, to a union regardless of where I work.

You can be a contractor with your own S-corp and still get the same benefits as union members if you are in an industry that has union workers like SAG.

https://www.wrapbook.com/how-to-set-up-a-loan-out-company/

> same benefits as union members if you are in an industry that has union workers like SAG

I have an LLC operating for tax purposes as an s-corp. I can't think of any benefits a union would give me that I couldn't otherwise get for myself.

> "inherently adversarial"

Given that the employer-employee relationship--or indeed any vendor-customer relationship--is already inherently adversarial, and its power balance is skewed in favor of the employer for everyone but the most highly-skilled of laborers, one might naturally expect that laborers might cartelize to improve their bargaining position.

The "us versus them" binary arises as a consequence of typical corporation management structure. One of the best ways to avoid it is by giving the employees an actual stake in the success of the company as a whole. Pay them in stock, or give bonuses based on meeting the company goals. Employees with zero stake are more likely to find any lever they can use to pry more of the value that they provide to the company out of its owners.

I would love to understand the dynamic better, so please correct me here or chime in.

Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).

The interview process does require intensive preparation to land a top spot. However, your compensation package increases proportionately to the preparatory time. From the mind of a top performer, wouldn't you want to seek out the best of the best, rather than settling for median wage? It seems like unionizing will encourage the top workers to leave while the below-average to stay, dragging down the overall talent pool.

Just to add to this comment; It's one thing for software developers in the government or a large "essential" corporation like a bank or telecom company to unionize. Those places get toxic because the work has to be done and gets very political because of the sheer number of people's lives they affect. I understand the labour issues around working for those organizations.

But kickstarter? You mean the funding apparatus for indie games and gimmicky consumer products? That's where you want to unionize?

Workers' unions represent workers, not consumers or society as a whole, so why should they care about whether the workers they represent work at "essential" corporations?

Because some stress is more justified than others. If somebody was stressed out as a travel blogger, would you favour their unionization over a stressed out retail worker?

That's essentially what I'm getting at, the stress at kickstarter isn't worth their mission. But at other companies, the stress is worth it, so therefore the unionization is worth it.

It's not like unionization is a zero sum game, why would a travel blogger's choices affect the retail worker's?

Unionization takes public support, it's not something done in isolation (hence why there's all sorts of articles about Kickstarter's attempt and unionizing - they need support). Public support is a zero-sum game, therefore unionization is a zero-sum game.

If I give my limited attention to this unionization effort, then I may not give it to someone else. And maybe there is a workforce who doesn't have the eye of the internet who are trying to unionize, but now kickstarter has taken all the space for that news category.

> Unionization takes public support [...] Public support is a zero-sum game, therefore unionization is a zero-sum game.

Chocolate cookies take sugar. Sugar is white, therefore chocolate cookies are white.

If they feel that unionization can improve the conditions of their employment, regardless of stress, I don't see the difference. Their employer is optimizing towards less expenses per unit of work, and it's only fair that an equally resourceful organization can counter balance that goal with the workers in mind.

I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm. Pitting 'top performers' against the rest, scaremongering about 'lazy workers' etc. just divides the workforce and allows management/owners to exploit/underpay workers as a whole. The company would not be able to function/make as good a profit as it does without ALL workers contributing. If a worker truly is lazy/not pulling their weight, they get fired. A union doesn't stop that. A union is a unified voice for workers that can demand rightfully, better working conditions, better pay, better benefits.

This fiction that somehow tech workers should avoid unions because their pay is so well is utter corporate propaganda. The money won't always be this good people, especially as more and more are told to enter the industry. I know HackerNews is an entrepreneurial haven but it's funny to me how people here, with all their technical wisdom, are so blind to any benefits to workers and aversion to anything seen as 'socialist'.

>I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm.

I don't know why you assume that unions = organized and unified workforce. It's like claiming that HOAs = organized and unified neighborhood.

>I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm.

Because historically it hasn't in the US. Unions end up implementing a seniority-based compensation/benefits scheme and there is nothing given to employees who outperform everyone else. This even fosters an environment where top performers are discouraged by their peers for "making everyone else look bad".

> This even fosters an environment where top performers are discouraged by their peers for "making everyone else look bad".

You don't need a union for this. Most large companies that do software (not the FAANGs, but the non-tech-first ones) generally don't know what to do with top performers, because consistency and predictability is more valuable to them. Especially a top performer who's bad at politics so they come off as attacking whole other departments or teams.

A union won't fix it, but probably won't make it worse, in those places.

Someone who comes off as attacking other departments or teams is probably a toxic individual to work with. Even if they crank out good code quickly, at some point senior engineers are expected to influence others, and attacking others is not conducive to that.

As for rewarding top performers, most places have annual or biannual reviews where people are given bonuses based on individual and company performance. The difference between underperforming and overperforming can be a lot of cash.

> From the mind of a top performer

Unfortunately, we also know that tech has a big age discrimination problem, for example. Unions are one of the tools to combat that.

Perhaps to look at it the other way, those with the tools/mindset to haggle and negotiate and prepare for a top career will end up at a place that offers top benefits and top salaries.

Which means the places that don't offer top benefits, top salaries, or places that otherwise mistreat their workers, will, almost by definition, retain mostly a workforce of employees who are either not top talent or are bad at negotiation (or some variation of this - e.g. the video game industry has some great programmers who work with awful treatment & pay for one reason or another).

If you're in this poorly treated group, unionization looks great. If most of your workforce is in this group, then most of your workforce will be eyeballing unionization.

So, first of all, most people aren't "top performers", so it would make sense for 75% of developers to want a Union under your reasoning.

Secondly, in my experience it isn't the "top performers" who end up with the highest pay, it's the people best at spouting bullshit and sounding convincing.

> who end up with the highest pay, it's the people best at spouting bullshit and sounding convincing.

Putting it more objectively--it's the people who often are able to provide their first line manager with opportunities for better pay.

seems "lucrative + meritocratic" if you aren't in a marginalized group. Age/gender/pay discrimination is a serious problem in tech that unionization can help solve (it's not a magic bullet, but it's a step in the right direction)

You don’t even have to be in a marginalized group (although that does entreat all kinds of bias).

In my experience tech companies largely make decisions based on clique behavior, not “merit”. Management identifies individuals they like personally, those people are given juicy projects and veto power in meetings.

The game is not “who is driving business metrics?” it’s “how can I package my ideas in a way that makes management feel comfortable?”

Maybe you can argue that’s a form of meritocracy (“excel at making management feel comfortable!”), but I don’t think that’s what most people think of when they think of merit.

I have sort of come around to it. Part of my job is to be kind and helpful to the people around me, including the bosses. So that’s how I judge myself. Hitting business goals is good in the long term, but on every timescale I am expected to engage on, nurturing relationships seems to matter more.

> Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).

You mean ENGINEERING, not tech. The people who need these unions are not the engineers, they're the "disposable" soft skills jobs like community and customer support. These are the tech jobs that pay poorly and are mistreated while engineers are fought for with absurd compensation packages (see: Away).

I'm excited by this. I hope they utilize this as an opportunity to improve employee well-being and force the employer to treat issues like climate change as an actual hard requirement and not a "nice to have."

I think the only concern I have, which I've seen with a lot of unions, is that they can evolve to become an us vs. them mentality, which enables absolutely mediocre people to keep their jobs at the cost of everyone.

I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.

The only downside I can think of is ageism, but then again, I have colleagues in their 50s and 60s where I work. But I suppose this isn't universal. (I'm in Atlanta and we have a lot of older workers. Age doesn't seem to be a thing here.)

Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people. We have the flexibility to find new work or create our own businesses.

Why introduce a new level of politics and collective bargaining? I don't want to pay union dues. If I don't like where I'm working, I'll go somewhere else.

Can someone explain why I should want this? (Or why I should empathize with those who do?) I don't understand it at all.

Just look at their employee reviews. The management there seems toxic.

I implore you to also think twice about the way in which you are demonizing unions. Sure, some unions aren’t the best, but what you’re saying is 100% discounting the benefits that a union can bring to employees. Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation. They can restrict overwork, unpaid overtime (see the special salaried overtime exemptions that IT employees and teachers get enshrined into US law), and unsafe working conditions.

Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.

The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”

Sure, life is nice for many tech employees right now, but what happens when the supply/demand situation inverts?

Tech employees often also have a very bad habit of pretending that more poorly compensated areas of their own company are enjoying the success in the same way. Ask someone in support or a junior graphic designer about what they think about the prospects of “working somewhere else.”

>junior graphic designer

I don't think anyone says tech employee and is referring to graphic designers/anyone in that area.

99% sure anyone who hears tech employee is thinking software development.

EDIT: How on Earth can anyone downvote this statement? If you ask 10 people to name 10 tech companies, not one of them is going to pick a game studio.

Graphic designers work at most tech companies I've worked at, and I've never worked at a game studio. They definitely can be classified quite reasonably as tech employees.

Also, here in Montreal, most people's list of well-known local tech employers would absolutely include at least one or two of the many game studios here.

Be honest here.

What percentage of employees at Google/Apple/Microsoft do you think are "graphic designers", and what percentage are "software developers"?

Your argument to create a union is that the 1% of employees need protection. Honestly I agree video game industries could use a union. But the presence of a graphics designer at Google does not mean every employee needs to unionize.

Google has more software developers, no doubt, but still far more graphic designers than you seem to expect.

No, every employee at Google does not need to unionize. CEO Sundar Pichai certainly doesn't. But lots of Googlers have long wanted a union for good reason, including software developers. I would have happily voted yes in a union election when I was there, despite being a software developer myself.

I know of plenty of examples of misbehaviour and other harmful actions by Google toward software development employees, a number of which have been publicly reported. And the situation seems to have gotten worse since I left.

To be clear, Google is far from unique in this regard, and it's still probably a better employer than many of its peer companies. That just underscores how severe and widespread the problem is.

> The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”

Bingo. I've worked at enough places to know that the greener grass myth is indeed a myth in the industry. That doesn't mean you can't get a better job, but there's always a very real risk that things will be worse at your new job.

This, plus in the USA you can't quit your current job without another one lined up, because your access to healthcare is dependent on employer-sponsored health insurance. Especially if you already made enough money for the year that you don't qualify for a program like Medicaid or state-sponsored subsidies.

> Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation.

Those negotiations can also drag down your salary potential as well. You get paid what everyone else gets paid. If you warm the chair longer, you get paid more, regardless of any innovation or extra value you bring to the business.

You have incentivized mediocrity because what’s the point of doing anything beyond the minimum requirements? It isn’t like you’re going to get a raise for being especially clever.

> Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.

No, they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase the influence and power of the union leadership. You are directly paying the union to represent the union's interest, which may or may not align with your own.

E.g. a motivated, capable teacher has a portion of their salary deducted and spent on defending seniority based pay even if said teacher is in favor of performance based pay. The union directly acts against the desired of the employee.

The bigger issue is going from Salaried to Hourly employees. I assume (but don't know) that you need to be hourly in order to unionize.

I have been at a bunch of companies that reclassified employees from salaried to hourly. This always came after a single employee filed a lawsuit. It almost never impacted developers, sometimes impacted QA and often impacted other development support employees. I have never seen an impacted employee like it because they could not participate in stock options. I was only at companies with lucrative stock options.

If a company had poor stock options then I could see that somebody might like the change.

You don't need to be hourly to unionize. Salaried employees can do that. The exclusion is based on meeting the definition of supervisor, not by the payroll category.

Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs? It’s not true.

I live in the SF Bay Area, have worked as a SWE for 10+ years including at top companies like Google, and changing jobs is NOT easy and I’m sick of the implication it is.

There are also a LOT of younger kids on HN who have never worked through a recession.

Finally, just because you make an ok salary doesn’t mean a political voice is worthless. Why do doctors have the AMA?

Engineers desperately need to stop boxing themselves out of the discussions, we absolutely need to organize, badly.

Having family who worked with the UAW as well is IBEW I can tell you that Trade Unions in general are much better at 'holding a standard' and truly keeping their trade-craft respectable.

However the UAW, the most worthless crap joke of a union that makes other unions look bad. Basically just protects people who show up to work drunk or drive forklifts into walls. Forces companies to do insane things to fire people who do nothing but drag down the common output of a factory.

Be careful what you wish for and who you choose to put in control a good union can be a blessing... a bad union can be a millstone around your neck that ends up just being owned and, in the case of the UAW, is just a puppet for whatever company they serve.

I will say that when with Amazon I talked to some of my peers in Germany and I was fascinated with the labor protections that were provided to staff over there vs. the USA. They have some kind of thing, like a "labor council" or something. This group had to be consulted before lots of things could be done. In this case I think that it kept the Amazon buildings across the pond much happier than the ones in the USA. (Obviously this is simply my opinion)

I am on the fence, I was raised in a blue collar union family- even went to a little UAW brainwashing camp as a kid (Black Lake anyone?). My family members in IBEW have shown me that there are some very dedicated unions that do very good things and keep a trade from turning into a free market shitshow where everything becomes lowest bidder. If a union exists to truly protect staff AS WELL AS uphold high standards I think it will survive. When its just US V. Them...gimme` free crap, you are asking to be burned to the ground by competition.

That's the thing with Germany, they have a management-labour relations regime that is collaborative rather than combative... Management has accepted that they can improve their productivity if they work with their labour unions rather than against them. Employees get treated better and management gets good productivity out of their workers. Everyone wins. I wonder what it would take to introduce this model to North American companies without state coercion...

> Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs?

If you were fired today you could walk into a new job by end of week, if you were any good. At least that's what Hackernews keeps telling me.

Everyone on HN is a Top Performer who is consonantly held back by the mediocrity that surrounds them.

Also, the hiring process is broken. Also, older workers have a hard time finding work. Also, I have work 60 hour weeks. Also, I have to be on call all the time even though they said it would only be one weekend a month. Also, it turns out the options I was given were worthless. Also, open floor plans are detrimental to my health.

Techworkers have absolutely 0 issues that could be solved by any organizing!

Make your case. Why do we desperately need to organize?

> I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.

There are dozens and dozens of threads on this site about the cancerous software engineering interview techniques in widespread use in the industry. Despite having 15 years of experience and a lot of accomplishments under my belt, I still had a bad streak a few years back where I had to interview 30 times before getting an offer.

So I have to say it's a fallacy to make this kind of claim.

You think a union is going to fix the interview process?

Why couldn't it be a potential tool towards addressing this problem? Will the status quo of angry blog articles posted to HN and Blind do any better?

Unions tend to put up more barriers to entry, not remove them.

This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.

Ah, the good old "those corporate boomers elsewhere are uncreative and therefore we'll beat them easily" trope. It's certainly possible, but I have doubts that the generation of scrum teams and open-space offices will solve unions. Innovation is hard no matter who is doing it, and most of the "innovation" seen in the valley is just applying existing solved problems to economies of scale, made possible by advancements in the supply chain (such as the SaaS paradigm).

Tech is an industry that believes it can disrupt everything from hotels and taxis to space travel to food and nutrition to the very concept of money. Not to mention the speculative life sciences companies, those who presume to be in the business of disrupting death itself.

I just find it amazing that a community so wrapped up in its own hubris always seems throws up its hands when the subject of labor relations comes up, insisting that no further improvement is possible. (Also of amusement is that KS, a crowdfunding startup, is ostensibly is about disrupting how goods are created and sold). So perhaps the industry is selective about what it believes tech is capable of inventing?

Also, a tech union wouldn’t be an advocate of open offices or the overuse of scrum, if the HN commentariat is representative of industry workers.

Unions increase wages by reducing the effective supply of labor for the company, which increases the price of that labor.

https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/...

It's the same principle which professional organizations use to keep compensation high for doctors and lawyers: set a limit on the number of entrants.

Restricting entry is a fundamental feature of unions: it protects those who are already in industry at the expense of potential new employees who might otherwise come in and undercut wages.

That said if you want to standardize the admissions process, a professional organization is a tried and true way to accomplish this: doctors and lawyers take a standardized test, become accredited, and can take on any job without being grilled for their technical skills.

Perhaps, but all of this talk about forcing licensing and certification to restrict engineering labor supply seems to fly in the face of the actual unionization efforts in the OP- the workplace improvements are mostly about addressing HR-related complaints and building a better environment, not pay raises:

https://kickstarterunited.org/#faqs

The first and only point related to pay is "equal pay for equal work", which is more about gender pay gaps than anything:

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

There's plenty of issues in the tech industry that a union or some other professional association or guild (or even the IEEE, with teeth) could address that have nothing to do with giving developers higher wages.

> This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.

Throughout human history, unions are one of the few ways that ordinary citizens can actually stand up against concentrated power (democracy, revolutions are some other ways). Rather than trying to invent something new, maybe study the past a bit more.

Ah, but we're talking about the tech industry, this disruption-obsessed startup culture. As I always say,

> I'm firmly convinced that tech workers will come around to unionizing once they accidentally reinvent it under a different name

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17881029

My point was more that the "if you don't like your job, you can easily leave" isn't as much of an option for people as many think. If you can manage to get through the interview cancer, you still run the risk of your next job being equally as bad, or worse than before.

I don't think unions are going to be much use here, however, and they may even make things worse. Raising the industry-average cost of an employee means fewer jobs in the industry, meaning even more difficulty for an employee to "just get a job elsewhere if you don't like it".

Well, for one thing, the good times won't last forever. Now's the time to prepare for the bad—it's much harder to organize when you're weak.

For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.

And then, software development and related jobs are not all at FAANG, or even close to that. Many of those working in software aren't negotiating, individually, from a position even a little better than a "normal" office worker. Probably most, in fact. There's a whole world of software developers out there beyond SV, Seattle, and New York—the average state of a worker in our industry, even just in the US, is probably much closer to the norm outside those places than in them.

It's also a proven avenue for putting a stop to all sorts of abuses that exist due to the uneven power of workers and employers, not just direct compensation. Lots of non-California workers in tech are under badly disadvantageous employment agreements, but without working collectively, either through unions or government, against them, they're so common that resisting them carries high individual risk and a low chance of benefiting anyone else who's in an even worse position to resist them. That flexibility to work or create our own businesses you bring up? Yeah, that could be assured for non-California, non-public-figure-rockstar developers, too, through union negotiations.

> For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.

At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO.

HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers.

Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.

My point is just that, despite high comp at some companies, rejecting a candidate is still considered a very "cheap" move from employers' perspective (so: their labor negotiating position is still strong, despite high comp)—I explicitly wasn't trying to get into the correctness of that sort of policy or the environment that creates it, beyond its probably not being viable if tech companies' negotiating positions were meaningfully weaker than a normal employer.

From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity.

It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar.

If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.)

Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.

Most of the people that work there probably aren't software engineers.

Some things other than salary to consider: open-space offices, unpaid overtime, increase in managerial oversight (pointless standups etc.), erosion of work time/free time boundary, onerous non-compete/intellectual property clauses in employment contracts. Everybody is constantly bitching about those things but despite the claimed shortage of software engineers they seem to only get worse with time. I don't claim that unions are the solution but these problems don't seem to magically resolve themselves either.

You say "increase in managerial oversight", but then mention standups. That's about the least onerous oversight possible. I understand not liking standups, but... that's not at the level of excessive management oversight. Excessive management oversight is a whole different level. (And yes, I know, standups can be part of that whole different level. That's the one you specifically mentioned, though. If that's the excessive management that most grates on you, you don't have excessive management.)

So, do you agree that managerial oversight is increasing or not? Of course standups can be helpful and unobtrusive, but they also often degrade into shamefests with the sole purpose of forcing everybody to conjure up reasons why they are not done yet.

And of course I agree that they are not the most annoying thing possible. Let's wait a few more years until something like DingTalk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678571) becomes popular in Western companies.

Managerial oversight is increasing as a general trend? I have no data one way or the other.

Standups increase managerial oversight compared to not having them? True... as far as it goes. The thing is, management is going to make decisions based on something. Having them make decisions with no data leads to bad outcomes, so they've got to get the data somehow. If you've got a way for them to get the data that's less intrusive to workers' time than standups, I'd like to hear what it is. (Seriously. I've got standups now, and if you've got a better way, I'm not above copying it.)

As others say, one reason is that busts happen. I was reading the union contract for one of the local government unions (like you do…) the other day, and noticed they had a lot of provisions related to lay-offs. How much severance people get, how it's calculated, how it's decided who gets laid off, etc. This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.

The other thing is that not everyone experiences the supposed benefits of these careers. I talk to a lot of people who are exploited in the tech industry with long hours and salaries that aren't really that high for the high CoL we deal with. Talk to bootcamp graduates about their job experiences some time. PoC and women also report rampant discrimination—lower salaries for the same work, sexism, organizations providing cover and golden parachutes for harassers.

Finally, think of all the issues that we gripe about here on HN:

- Open office plans

- Horrible and overly-demanding hiring processes

- Lack of transparency or consistency around promotion processes and salaries

Fixing these types of issues are bread and butter for unions.

>This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.

Not if you're a top performer who switches jobs to find new interesting things. If you look into the details of the "who gets laid off", it's very frequently just all of the newest members of each department.

By your own logic, if you frequently switch jobs to find new interesting things, don't the odds of you ending up on a layoff list go up?

As someone posted previously, would you consider the possibility it's not the software developers that are leading the push to unionize? Perhaps there are people occupying roles in the company that don't pay as well or roles that aren't considered as valuable. Could it be that they feel they should be compensated on par with their software developer counterparts?

edited for grammar

I don't understand it at all.

I'm kind of in the same boat, though I actually kind of lean toward some kind of organizing. Those I know who are members of a national union complain about the union spending most of its money on things unrelated to the employment of its members.

But at the same time professional organizations like the AMA and ADA seem to benefit their members (unfortunately sometimes at the expense of the public).

I think the questions to ask are what's the bigger picture? What is the framing used in the current discussion to limit our view of that bigger picture? Who is doing the framing?

I don't have answers there, but it definitely seems like there's some important hidden variable that is omitted from the framing of either side of this debate.

"The only downside I can think of is ageism"

"Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide"

Seems like you came up with another downside in pretty short order. I believe you can come up with even more if you peruse the comments here.

Why do you assume software developers are leading the push to unionize? All we know is that Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize. The majority of Kickstarter employees don't write software. My cynical take is the non-dev employees feel they're not getting what they deserve in the form of let's say salary. Perhaps they would like compensation closer to or on par with the software developers at their company.

I've already mentioned this twice in other comments here, so I feel like I'm overdoing it, but I'm sincerely interested in your (and others') opinions:

About six years back it came out that the big tech companies were conspiring against their own employees:

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

Sometimes it's not all about money. People in the bay area may not understand that most people working at Kickstarter truly believe in the company's mission. The money is not great and we've been willing to accept that to feel like we're making a positive change in the world. Unfortunately upper management has used this (as well as Kickstarter's reputation) as a bargaining chip to treat employees poorly.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

> we can go anywhere and get a job

that's exactly like the current one.

>Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people.

And compared to Africa everyone in the US is overpaid. Janitors are welcome to try and raise their wages too. I will not lower mine on their behalf.

“A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of.”

Yeah, when you are in the top 5%. I’m not sure you realize just how shit most tech jobs are. Not everyone gets $300k a year in stock. Most people get nothing.

You don’t want it because you are in the top decile. That’s the same reason that everyone who is in the top decile of anything doesn’t want change. This is for the 90%, not for you. You shouldn’t empathize. You should oppose this because it will ultimately hurt you.

Perhaps I’m jaded by my experience working for employers that support change and transparency, but I, for one, would immediately pack up and leave if any part of my firm’s white collar workforce unionized. I have zero interest in participating in collective bargaining. I work hard to stand out, and I capitalize on that influence to negotiate raises and promote change on my own.

While I’m sure there are situations that merit such a decision, might I suggest that unionizing < finding another employer that meets your needs. The inability or lack of desire to do so indicates to me either fear of change or aversion to risk, both of which are unwarranted from anyone who is continually working to improve themself.

Absolutely pathetic for both sides. If you don't like your white collar tech job, go somewhere else. It's not factory work where you're paid way less to do the same thing wherever you go. You make yourselves and your company look weak in doing this.

This is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

I on the other hand think that the comment as yours is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the extreme.

Thankfully, New York is not a right-to-work state.

So you are fine with the majority forcing the minority to support something they don't want to support? Never going to get behind that notion myself.

The short name for that notion is "democracy".

Tyranny of the majority is considered a pitfall of democracy, or consider how to enforce "the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority"

Until law mandates that all labor unionize - and as closed shops, at that - the rights of the minority are hardly impaired when any one shop does so. Open shops exist, as do shops with no union of any sort, and employees need not remain employees at all, of anyone, if they no longer so choose; they are free to start their own businesses, of whatever sort best suits them. Those who decline to join a union, even at a newly closed shop, are constrained only in that they no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand - and the "right to work", so called, does not extend so far as to establish, regarding any given company with a union or without one, a right to work there.

The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest.

One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.

"forcing" != "we voted on something"

I'd imagine the 37 people who voted nay didn't even want to take a vote on the matter.

If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.

Depends. Did you, your friend and I willingly joined a group of "wallet carriers"?

Are we all affected by wallet-carrying management?

Do our choices in wallet-carrying communally affect this wallet-carrying enterprise?

Is corporate wallet-carrying management trying to convince us to carry wallets for longer than the usual 8 hours or wallet-carrying?

This is literally how democracies work.

And yet you rarely hear about businesses being described as a democracy, except for many coops.

Most democracies include, at the very least, a bunch of hand-wringing about oppression of minorities, though.

It would be unusual in the extreme for a modern western democracy that was 75% christian to force the 25% minority to convert.

Being in a union that protects your rights as a worker is more like insurance (which the majority indeed mandates the minority to get) than religion.

That comparison only holds up if you assume all unions are politically neutral. And I would be shocked if you could find any union that was politically neutral on anything.

It's not insurance. It actively changes how you can be compensated and takes very hands-on interference with the operations of the company (in US unions at least).

As opposed to insurance, which has a huge influence on who you can go to and what your options are if you get sick, to the point that your choice of insurance may end up becoming a turning point in your life? I don't think I ever heard of someone's life turning on joining the wrong union.

So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.

True, but most democracies also have some kind of founding document that sets out broad limits on the scope of the democratic or representative powers of government.

There are some glaring problems with federal law behind unions.

1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to.

2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work".

A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.

No one is forcing them to work a job they don't want to. They're free to work literally anywhere else that will hire them.

Its the same state that brought Stop and Frisk laws to the main stream. New York government isn't known for caring about minority views

Why thankfully? Don't workers' rights mean they ought to make their own choices about joining a union or not?

Comments like the above fascinate me. The emotional appeal of "choice" seems to have no end. You can employ it to fight unions, health care, public schools anything you want. Similarly if you can successfully attach "right" (as in "a right") to your rhetoric you can draw out pride, anger, indignation, all sorts of powerful emotions.

I recently learned that Frank Luntz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz) is one of the masters of this and came up with "Death Tax", using "choice" to fight universal healthcare, and "climate change" to soften the more frightening "global warming."

We seem to be highly susceptible to emotional language triggers that just bypass our rational minds.

Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me. Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it.

Like, OK, I'm losing some "freedom" of choice from a certain point of view, but damned if that wouldn't feel one hell of a lot more free.

> Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me.

As you said, _to you_.

> Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it.

Well, this is a whole other can of worms, but here goes nothing. As a brief aside, possibly the only system more complicated than American medicine is the American tax code; both are horribly byzantine and have entire industries dedicated to wrangling the bureaucracy. Government involvement is what led to both being so messy. That aside, I oppose single-payer medicine for reasons out side of "which one costs more". I don't trust the government, and think it ought to stick to keeping the peace and enforcing property rights and contracts. There are a few other important things that can be done at the state and local level, and most things ought to be left up to the individual. I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens. Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?

> As you said, _to you_.

Yeah, I like policies that benefit me over ones that don't, typically.

> Government involvement is what led to both being so messy.

Well considering one of the two things that "both" signifies is the tax code... well, yes? More to the substance, that such systems under other states are, in both cases, significantly less messy leads me to believe "it's messy" does not follow simply from "government was involved", such that I would believe "get government out" is a necessary step in fixing either (again, one's the tax code, so...)

> I don't trust other people to run my life, be they union bureaucrats or federal ones, or even my fellow citizens.

Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.

> Leaving aside my concerns about the growth of federal government, why do you want everyone to use your government system instead of just offering it as an option? What business of yours is it if others choose to stay private?

I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system. Any system I'm aware of from any other OECD state would be anywhere from somewhat to way better, from that perspective. Given those are proven in the real world I'd say just pick one of those. I'm pretty sure a few (e.g. Switzerland) do retain private insurance. All (AFAIK) employ price controls, strict pro-citizen rules about how insurance companies have to operate, and something like a "public option" so as long as those elements are present it's probably fine. Anything else is likely to be experimental or otherwise unproven so I'd rather avoid it, given a wealth of demonstrably-fine systems to choose among.

I do think we should "get government out of the tax code" to a serious extent in that it shouldn't be in the business of taxing income, payroll, capital gains, etc. Calculate expenses / adult population and send each adult a bill for that number. This would be about $15k/adult as of last year which will sting, but will quickly make people realize how much the free stuff they've been taking from others costs.

> Corporations on the same list, surely? Unless you're lumping those in with the government, which makes sense.

Yes, there is a deplorable amount of crony capitalism and regulatory recapture. Part of the reason why we need to starve the federal government: it will always be abused by the most powerful. I do, however, trust a market with a thousand participants motivated by profit more than a government that has changing motives every few years, or depending on what the media prints.

> I don't really care what the new system looks like as long as I don't have to waste any more time or money enjoying the "benefits" of my "freedom" of "choice" under our current system.

Okay, pay a medical concierge firm to handle the paperwork for you. I don't care what you do or how you do it so long as you don't tell me what to do and don't make me pay for your choices.

With respect to my not-trusting-gov't point, here's why: https://news.sky.com/story/nhs-staff-can-refuse-to-treat-rac...

The NHS just changed rules to allow refusal of "non-emergency" care to people who meet one of their non-PC criteria. This after people saying that it's a "human right".

The other side of this is "Oh good, now I can get my health outcomes managed by the same people and with the same level of customer service/personal touch as my Department of Motor Vehicles and will have literally no alternative but to take it." Arguing the worst case of either system and representing it as the most common case is rarely productive.

My description's the typical case for the US system, in my experience, not a worst-case, and I've not seen evidence that my experience is unusual—quite the opposite. At least we haven't been bankrupted by it yet, so there's that, but only because our family's pretty healthy.

As long as we’re sharing anecdotes and interpreting them as typical case outcomes: We’ve had two births, an uncomplicated broken arm, a complicated broken arm, another moderately complex issue that was many visits over a length of time, and countless pediatrics and adult GP visits and a few ER visits over the last decade with BCBS.

I’d say that 95% of all visits go off with zero interactions beyond paying our part of the bill and waiting for paperwork to cycle around. The 5% cases are about half billing questions and half “just confirm that subscriber XYZ visited doctor D on date Q (so that we [as BCBS] know we’re not being scammed by the doc)”.

We are nowhere near “tens of hours...every time [we] use medical care”. I doubt we’re even 10 hours per year on billing issues.

We've ended up with many bills, multiple EOB documents, et c., trickling in over a span of many months, coming from a bunch of different sources, each time we've had someone in the actual hospital (not just a doctor's visit), including three births. We've managed to miss some trivial bill and end up with it in collections because there's just so much damn paperwork and usually a few of them are in some state of error or dispute for some time. Seems to be normal. You in Kaiser or something? I understand that's smoother than... basically everything else, since it's all run by one entity (ahem).

Nope. Blue Cross Blue Shield. We have a high-deductible plan (just so we can qualify to use an HSA as an additional retirement account). In theory, that means we should have more billing hassles than with a typical HMO or PPO. I feel like they mostly get it right; we do have to be patient to let the billing and insurance people have a few rounds of figuring crap out, but I'm not involved other than opening the mail until it settles down to "OK, now pay this amount."

Comments like the above fascinate me. They dehumanize someone else by implying they are just spreading propaganda while never directly addressing the point they were raising.

I'm not making an emotional appeal, I'm making a logical one. Choice means I get to pick what I want to do and choose what's best for me.

For instance, many unions give money to the Republican party, the Democratic party, or both. I'm not interested in funding either. Janus only covered public-sector unions, so I'd still be stuck paying for political speech in which I don't believe.

As a second example, unions typically set the wage for a particular job with both a floor and a ceiling. This means that most employees get closer to the average wage for said job. That's great if you're a lower or average performer, but not if you typically make more. I do, and don't want my earning potential capped by the limits of my co-workers.

Third and following up on my prior point, unions often make it harder to advance. I've been quickly promoted in most places I've worked, but that probably wouldn't happen in a union job. They're all about seniority, and I don't believe some boomer who has worked the same job for twenty years should be promoted ahead of a less-senior person with greater merit.

Fourth, I don't want to be bound by the decisions of others. Unions often have the power to punish members who cross the picket line. If I'm happy with my job and others aren't, I shouldn't be stuck on strike.

There you are, four logical reasons I don't want to join a union. I don't have an issue with them existing, just people being forced to join them. You can't hardly call them "workers' rights" but then say everyone's forced to exercise those "rights". You didn't give any argument of your own, though, nor did you answer my question, you just said "that's emotional reasoning."

P.S. I've read Mr. Luntz' book, "Words that Work". I don't agree with him, but he's good at what he does, and it's worth reading. How you present things is just as important as what you present.

60 million people are forcing 63 million people to support (pay taxes to) a government they don’t agree with. This is just how governance works.

You led me to find a map of US anti-union "right-to-work" states on wikipedia[1]. I previously figured pretty much all of the US is under RTW legislation, but it seems like, outside of the folks in Texas, almost the entire tech industry is in non-RTW states.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_...

Looks like a nice list of places where I'm willing to live and where I'm not. If my co-workers want to unionize, more power to them, but I'm not going to give the union a single cent. Even if they are officially responsible for representing me to my employer, that wasn't my choice and they don't represent my interests.

Why does it work that way in the U.S.? In my country everyone can freely join a union, all union employees can go on strike if the union allows it, and they’re not allowed to prevent others from working. At no point to my knowledge do all workers in a company have to decide to unionize. Why the collective decision?

This is the problem with the conversation around unions. The way they operate traditionally in the US seems to be very different than how they operate in Europe, and many of the negative externalities from how they operate in the US are just pissed away as anecdotal rather than a possible threat to their success.

If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US.

Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.

How do unions operate in organizations where voluntary turnover is relatively high? A small % of people in tech stay at one company for more than a couple of years. I guess there's nothing about a union that stops you from voluntarily quitting for something else in that case, other than paying whatever fee you pay for the time you do stay?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that question; but, I believe the fees are usually prorated and split between each pay period. Also a lot of job switches are because that's the best way to get a decent raise, and frankly I haven't seen great benefits outside of the really big tech commpanies. Perhaps collective bargaining would disincentivize some of that turnover.

The model you are asking about is similar to SAG-AFTRA. This how actors work. This is the preferred model. Kickstarter employees should have used this as an opportunity to push for something like that.

The reason SAG started was because production companies made an agreement amongst themselves not to bid competitively for talent. (Remember that just ocurred in tech...)

Will they publish the union agreement? Wow... we will go from job/salary comparison sites to sites comparing transparent union agreements.... That is a step up!

I see a beautiful symphony here. The fact that this is discussed is to me a sign that enough people are feeling pressured and stressed, and sharing how the current systems don't work for them.

Through sharing we can reveal our hopes and frustrations.

Dialogue is step 1. It's a brave, difficult first step.

Bravo Hackernews community.

What ever pains people have, I'd like to ask them to try and see it as temporary growing pains. That maybe those who disagree with this development can see that others are sharing their unmet needs, as a request to help get help in getting those needs met. Exploring new strategies.

I believe we will make it through and come out stronger.

good luck to them. I was part of a union and joined the negotiations board. come bargaining time, I was probably the most stressed I have ever been at a company ever. you learn just how little the company actually cares about you and everyone else.

Well, now we have a natural experiment on the effect of unionization on a tech company. I look forward to monitoring the results over the next few months and years.

Folks should really read this article to get more context on Kickstarter's history with unionization, it is truly bananas and not what you think:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...

- The first thing that jumped out at me was that the primary spark of conflict was NOT compensation or working conditions.

- The main conflict was around a Kickstarter project "Always Punch Nazis", a project that gathered a few laughs among Kickstarter's largely liberal staff + management. When they faced right-wing political pressure to de-platform this project, since it technically violates their "do not incite violence" ToS, it triggered a ideological schism within the company.

- Unionization seems to be largely about placing this kind of decision in the hands of the employees. This is somewhat consistent with Kickstarter's history of activism.

- However, it's pretty uncharted territory here: Unionization that is not primarily motivated by distribution of wealth, but for the political soul of the company.

This is exactly it. After scrolling through so many of the comments it's crazy to see the actual reason for unionising so far down the list.

Somewhat tangential but perhaps of interest to anyone here curious about unions — the documentary American Factory [0] chronicles Fuyao Glass' creation of a factory in the US, and the subsequent attempts (and ultimate failure) of those workers to unionize.

[0]: https://www.netflix.com/title/81090071

It was interesting to see the lengths management went through to prevent a union from forming. The show ends with management getting excited about their now robotic arms. Robots don't unionize and complain about healthcare.

Is it normal for unionization votes to have this kind of opposition? 56.6% doesn't seem like an overwhelming majority, so I'm curious to see how it plays out for all of the employees there.

It would be interesting as well to know how/if the vote was drastically different based on role - it sounds like this was a company-wide vote, which would necessarily include many more roles than just software engineers.

I never understood why employees in America need to vote to join a union. In Australia employees can join/leave unions at will.

Professional guilds for maintaining industry-wide standards of competence and unions for corporate bargaining power.

Still waiting on the first one.

I wonder if they’ll be able to do anything about outsourcing jobs?

If they gain some advantage by being in a union but practically lose out due to outsourcing, what good would it be?

Do they have any options to protect against that scenario?

I recall a few years ago one of unis in SF outsourced many of their IT ops overseas. That is a progressive city also ships off jobs.

Is there any way to attenuate that?

I don’t see this playing out well for Kickstarter in the long-term.

Anyone else think the phrasing in the title is a bit weird? Were there other people voting in this election who were not Kickstarter employees? How can a group which makes up 100% of the electorate not "win" an election? The outcome reflects the majority opinion, by definition.

Only 46 employees voted for the union, 37 against.

That's kinda my point. A significant percentage of employees were against unionization, so it seems rather odd to treat "Kickerstarter Employees" as a monolithic group who "won" the election. It'd be like announcing the results of a political election with the headline: "U.S. Voters Win Historic Presidential Election."

It seems odd to imply that the mainstream media is the gold standard on accurate reporting of national political news.

It isn’t a win for those people that voted against it. I worked blue collar union jobs throughout my 20s in private and public sector. That experience has made me critical of unions. I will never vote to unionize and I will always buck unionization.

When employees vote against joining a union, that's generally called a victory for the company's management, so the phrasing contrasts against that. It's definitely loaded language, but it's common enough I can't get too worked up about it.

It doesn't say they won, as opposed to losing. It says they won a union, as opposed to winning a... lack of union.

> a historic win for unionization efforts at tech companies.

Kickstarter is a small company which isn't representative at all for other tech companies, so I doubt this will mean much for efforts at other companies. For example, a majority of their staff at every level are women (a quick glance at their linkedin shows that this is likely true for engineering roles as well) but that doesn't say anything about gender equality of the tech industry as a whole. It is very easy to make wins like this at small companies just by having random (or sometimes not so random) perturbations.

https://qz.com/923957/kickstarter-is-teaching-the-tech-world...

The fact that Kickstarter is unusual for a tech company does not make the fact that it was able to unionize any less historic. Keep in mind that it is far from the first tech company (small or not) to attempt to unionize.

For those who are curious this union drive was really started by extreme incompetence from upper management. The former CEO hired ineffective status-seekers (including the current CEO) into many positions of power which created a super toxic environment. Accountability for internal problems has been extremely low. The "Always Punch Nazis" controversy was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

People in the bay area may not understand that most people working at Kickstarter truly believe in the company's mission. The money is not great and we've been willing to accept that to feel like we're making a positive change in the world. Unfortunately upper management has used this (as well as Kickstarter's reputation) as a bargaining chip to treat employees poorly.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

> extreme incompetence from upper management.

I don’t think that any unionisation has ever came about due to the management being competent and treating their workers well.

But didn't the same management also decided to make the company a PBC instead of becoming billionaires by going public? That always felt to me like a signal that the management believed the mission too.

Kickstarter prints money, so I don't think they'll be hurt too much by this.

I think that Kickstarter as a company could exist in its current form with little change for a long time. I wonder how the culture works around there.

From my work at a major consulting company the way to fix this is to rebuild the offices over ~150miles away (the exact miles is NY law). Rehire all the positions and then let go of the employees in NY.

I'm not going to express my opinion on unions because to be honest I don't know where I stand, but it's certainly interesting that the most talked about tech companies seem to be investing heavily in diversity and we hear from boards getting behind the idea that bringing different ideas to the table is positive, but when the new diverse crowd chooses to unionize this is taken as a bad surprise. Insert a surprised pikachu picture here, I guess.

I want to know if their union contract does anything from preventing parent co from shipping jobs to places with less regulation and cheaper labor...

That will kill your company way, way faster than any union will.

How? In my country for example there is a surge of US companies setting shop here just to hire local devs, and a lot more hiring remote, when their products have presence only in the US. Each year the number keep increasing.

India, Eastern Europe and other places have English speaking devs. Good ones may not be dirt cheap but they may perhaps be cheaper in the eyes of management in the face of unionized devs...

Clarify, please. Shipping the jobs will kill the company, or the union contract preventing it will?

Now that there's union recognition, they will finally negotiate a contract. Sometimes, this process can take a very long time. This step hasn't begun yet.

Hospital doctors are unionized. Professors are unionized. Plumbers are unionized Dirt movers are unionized Police are unionized Figherfighters are unionized Public employees are unionized Teachers are unionized Actors are unionized the NBA is unionized the NFL is unionized the MLB is unionized the NHL is unionized And yet, software engineers should not be ?

It being a common practice isn't relevant to whether it is best for this industry and its workers. I'm not saying I disagree, but your reasoning just doesn't support your argument

What makes software engineering different?

Many of us make more money writing software today than we could working one of those unionized jobs while having less credentialing (or not being in the top 1% like the sports players). Nothing on that list looks enviable to me.

You should actually look into those union careees and see how much they make. You’d be surprised.

There's no question that limiting the supply of labor in a job market increases its price. I just don't think it's worth the price. For unions there's an extra layer of overhead and union dues. For professional societies (like the AMA) there's an extra layer of credentialing and suspiciously low innovation.

But that's my assessment and I'm probably abnormal in my situation. I'm happy to be wrong though. If more companies form unions and these companies pay better, reward good performance more fairly, have less intrinsic bias, etc, then I'll be the first to jump ship.

I think you didnt fully understand the parent poster. The point is that in this thread many people are questioning the case for unions in software engineering and the parent comment responds to that. He just gave examples that unions protect all kind of workers, software work included, to make a point in case.

So it's you who seem to be without arguments.

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft had something akin to a union at least a decade ago. Any Microsofters here?

I was there a decade ago, nothing of the kind was transpiring within my earshot. I also have plenty of friends there and never heard anything like this.

I can't help but think that unions are very similar to code smells, it's when the management of the company isn't able to maintain cooperation and trust with their employees. I would never work for a company with a union

What's up with the satanic jacket in the picture?

https://teespring.com/shop/satanic-no-masters?pid=2&cid=2397

I guess they didn't think they could win their vote when there were ~110 employees but they did when there were 86.

I guess things were so tense between the two camps that many people moved on.

They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.

If that was true it should have happened years ago, no?

There wouldn't be any programmers in the Bay Area—or, for that matter, the US—if price were the only relevant factor in hiring developers.

That's what Detroit thought.

Sorry, so you're saying that Detroit's auto industry went away because they unionized? The thing they did many decades before that?

SV has the same kind of attitude towards competition Detroit had in 20th century.

I agree with you, but that has zero bearing on whether unionizing is a good idea. If anything it makes it more urgent.

I hope then you're passing on pay increases and benefit improvements to stay competitive. If not, then you're applying different logic to single employee competitiveness then to group bargaining without any factual basis.

This is a perfect description of a race to the bottom.

And this is what open and free markets will allow for.

Which is exactly why governments regulate “open and free” markets.

>They'd be wise to learn from history

Seems like they did learn from history. Unions are they only thing that have proven consistently, across the world, to protect wages, rights, and give workers a say in their workplaces.

Those same people working for the same cheaper wages have existed for a long time before kickstarter got a union. Running with your logic, it's a wonder anyone is employed in this country at all.

I think that on the contrary, History has proven over the past few decades that wide outsourcing doesn't work. Companies tried it in the 90's and it was a disaster. This is why software devs in the US can command a salary of $100k+

Rockwell Collins, which became United Technologies, which became Raytheon, who was responsible for the 737 MAX's MCAS software and outsourced it to a low wage country, agrees.

> They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.

Then why didn't all start ups outsource all their IT jobs to India for instance already? They are considerably cheaper than US software engineers.

I mean what stopped all these IT businesses to do that yesterday? I know more instances of businesses that tried to outsource their IT overseas only to go back on that decision, than successful IT outsourcing stories.

You would be wise to learn from history: many software companies have tried this and many of those companies no longer exist as a result.

How many are there? Kickstater looks like something quite a small team can do and I always imagined a union to mean thousands of employees.

The most fascinating thing to me about tech worker unionization is that it is less about working conditions and more about input on moral decisions made by company management.

At Kickstarter the moral divide started with the Punch a Nazi incident. You see this at other technology companies as well, as employees agonize over free speech, what to censor, whether or not to work for China, whether or not to deploy surveillance tech, etc.

This is a new era for union organizers. Ideology has become a "workplace condition" that people are organizing to change. It is an interesting concept.

I am not for it or against it, I need to think about it more.

agree, this is by far the most interesting part of all this. it’s not about “my working conditions” but about whether or not my employer “agrees with my views.”

I think this is partly because people understand the power and influence their organizations have in the world.

When many migrant restaurant workers are working 80 hour weeks or don’t keep their tips, it makes it easier to see the radical privilege of tech workers, and their unawareness.

I think it is also generational. We now have in the workplace a few generations of workers who grew up being told their opinions mattered and that speaking up is a virtue. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing.

Us old-timers were taught the opposite, your opinions don't matter much, no one will listen to you until you prove yourself, etc.

So I think the generational shift has something to do with it.

I also think labor organizers are exuberant because they finally have a way to build a wedge between highly-paid employees who were formerly resistant to unionizing and their management.

Does this union cover a global workforce?

What are the cons of unionizing? All of the benefits always seem "too good to be true" to be.

In a non right-to-work state like NY, it means you have to pay dues to a union that negotiates on your behalf. It can very well end up negotiating for things you don't want, or are even actively against. For instance, a teacher may be in favor of merit-based promotion and compensation while they are obligated to pay dues to a union that pushes for seniority based pay.

I'm all for it. Congrats to them!

Sounds like Kickstarter will sell their assets and close soon.

I'm trying to understand what the employees hope to get out of this. The only substantial issue mentioned in the article is a dispute over whether "Always Punch Nazis" should be allowed on the site.

Does anyone have insight into what's motivating the Kickstarter employees here?

Kickstarter employees vote to be unemployed.

So Kickstarter will be hiring more contractors then?

Where's my Coolest Cooler?

“ I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

-Eugene Debs

Nobody at kickstarter is living a wretched existence.

That is some of the reason they can unionize. Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.

What's much more interesting is the labor status of the people who work on the Kickstarted projects.

> Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.

Not really. It may be short-term better for the workers, but not likely long term as they are effectively constraining the growth of the business relative to what it would be if the union did not exist.

Depends.

The whole entertainment industry is unionized in L.A.

I know an actor from Las Vegas who moved to L.A. and got a role in a TV commercial and was surprised to see somebody else standing in front of the cameras and was surprised to find that every actor has a "stand-in" who is there so they can set up the equipment, then the real actor is fresh when he does his scene.

These costs add up, but there are many specialists who are highly productive. For instance, setting up and tearing down sets is a special form of carpentry which the average carpenter would take a change of mindset.

Union labor helps maintain a productive and talented workforce that gives L.A. a comparative advantage. Being at times the the documentarian who travels light and feels it is extravagant to have a sidekick that sets up lights it heavyweight but it maintains a world-beating quality standard.

And if they want to negotiate collectively to change how the organization treats them, it's absolutely their right to do so. Unionization is also specifically enshrined in law.

I hope they pursue a path toward codetermination: getting workers a seat on the board. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that plays out in a US-based tech company; I believe it'd be for the good, but we'll know for sure if we can see it play out.

Edit: Oh, and not having a say in how your organization is run is a wretched existence. Time to raise our standards, if we don't see that.

That's why they have the leverage to organize and help reset the precedent for labor representation at a point in time when that representation is at a historic low.

Do they have to live a wretched existence? Exactly how wretched does it have to be to allow them the ability to organize.

Or perhaps they are justified to want a better share of the value created at kickstarter by their labor.

The quote at the top of the comment chain is about living a wretched existence. Don't get me wrong, it's totally fine to form a union on the principle of "we're doing okay but we want more stuff", businesspeople are allowed to try and get richer with no higher principle in mind. But it's dishonest to pretend that it inherits some kind of inherent moral weight from the traditional labor movement.

It's dishonest to pretend companies aren't perfectly happy to make their employees live a wretched existence as long as profits are brought in.. and that is a fundamental issue of the labor movement.

Tech workers are better off, but still treated poorly by management:

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

The thing that gets me about Apple specifically is that they did this while sitting on huge cash reserves and being one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world, yet they still fucked over their own people to make more.

I used to think that, as a 733t programmer, I had no use for unions, but then this happened and showed that there's no particular reason to trust tech company management at all, at all. They'll screw you to make a buck and get a slap on the wrist if anything if they're caught.

Interview with Google and they will send you lovely little videos with folks sliding down banisters and such to show you how wonderful it is to work there. It won't mention the "wage-fixing cartel" that limits your job opportunities and take-home pay.

It's pretty sick when you think about it. I don't know it unions are the answer, it's complicated after all, but absolutely these folks are not your friends, and you should coe in with as much leverage as you can get if you want to work for "the man".

I'm sure this phrase inspired many, but it's talking about an extreme. What if the disadvantaged are not having a "wretched existence"? Is immense inequality ok then? That's the big question.

Your definition of "wretched existence" might be very different from the folks seeking union representation.

That's my point. It's not a useful concept when explaining the situation.

> one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful

Assuming all of the risk is useful. I understand the point, but it's undercut by that woefully inaccurate jab.

Workers assume risk taking on an opportunity cost with their employers, and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.

But the point is this part: "for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars" is irrelevant. Who has done this besides criminals?

It all depends on your definition of "useful", but anyone who's made that much money legally has probably put in a bunch of work (or put in work to educate themselves to be able to make good decisions), or assumed a lot of risk in an investment.

There's definitely something to be said for reducing income inequality, but we don't have to assume the ultra-rich have "done absolutely nothing that is useful" in order to be pro-workers rights. Capitalism is designed to produce ultra-rich individuals.

We also should not lionize wealth. There are many people who inherit a lot of money, have a family that has a business network, that have really contributed nothing but are massively wealthy.

There are massively wealthy individuals who have collected value in one area, and use that wealth to negatively influence many other areas. We really should not give money that much of an advantage.

> We really should not give money that much of an advantage.

What do you suggest as an alternative?

In general, tilt the system away from favoring money concentrations.

Favor small business formation (and worker coop formation) with higher SBA loan funding. Put required worker representation on corporate boards (like Germany) of larger corporations. Do actual antimonopoly enforcement. Tax large corps more. Create more public ownership of housing and infrastructure.. it's all pretty mundane well trodden and reasonable practice for good governance.

Exotic stuff would be government backed individual loan lines for citizens. The limit could be expanded on repayments but zero consequence if never repaid. The idea would be to open a window for entrepreneurship when right now, wages have basically squeezed out the possibility of most people starting any sort of business from savings. If you can make things grow, you get a larger limit. Basically decentralize loans.

>and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.

No they don't. Not even in the wall-street bailouts did shareholders get money from the government.

Banks were bailed out by quantitative easing to the tune of $4+T, so at the very least, one can draw a direct line from that government bailout from banks to bank stock shareholders.

Just to review: QE bought risky Mortgage backed securities off of banks and finance companies completely absolving them of carrying the negative effects of their bad investments...

> Assuming all of the risk is useful.

I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.

I think you may be misunderstanding - "risk" here is a financial thing, not a personal risk of being tossed on the street. If someone is worth $10 billion and will lose $2 billion if their company fails, that's still a lot of risk being covered, even though it won't really change their life to only have $8 billion.

Doesn't that mean that all the employees taken on a much greater personal risk? Personal risk seems to have higher stakes than financial risk - so it's unclear why financial risk is so prized. When you lose $2 billion because your company fails, workers are thrown out onto the streets. What makes the $2 billion risk more valuable than peoples' livelihoods?

I'd rather be a multi-billionaire who loses $2 billion than a mid-level worker who loses their job (and for a proper comparison you'd have to aggregate all the trouble caused by all the job losses the closing of the company has caused), especially in a country with a smaller social safety net. That alone tells me enough about the value of this "risk" supposedly so greatly undertaken by the owners to entitle them to perpetual gains on it.

Financial risk isn't prized in some moral sense. It's just an instrumentally valuable service. If a factory costs $100m to build, someone has to put $100m at risk to build it; no matter how much the workers self-organize they won't be able to build the factory if they don't have the $100m.

It is prized in the sense of providing justification for huge salaries, which is the point of discussion here. Just as you couldn't build a factory without $100M, you couldn't operate it without workers - and sometimes, because they self-organize. In a capitalist economy, one needs capital and labour. Capital without labour is unproductive, and labour without capital is (usually) the same.

Each and every employee takes a risk by being employed at a company. At the moment, it seems they are only compensated for their labour. Why is the owner of the company compensated for risk, possibly in addition to being compensated for labour, but the employees aren't?

>It is prized in the sense of providing justification for huge salaries

No it's not. Investors don't take salaries. Many stocks don't even pay a dividend (e.g. most tech stocks).

Switch "salaries" for "compensation", then. If the idea is that risk-taking is inherently useful and therefore deserving of constant income, it must be shown why that risk is compensated in some cases (investors, CEOs) but not in others (employees).

The argument was as follows:

* People who do nothing useful gain high compensation (Debs).

* Acutally, the high compensation is due to taking on "all the risk"

* But employees also take on a large amount of personal risk which is not compensated.

* Ah, but the kind of risk being discussed isn't personal risk, it's financial risk.

* But this means that when constructing an argument for high compensation, financial risk is prized and personal risk is not. Why?

The fact that investors don't take salaries is irrelevant to the discussion. The justification for their profit is still "financial risk" without regard for "personal risk".

Stock appreciation isn't really "compensation". When Bezos for example gets billions of dollars richer, that's an artificial number from multiplying a NASDAQ price by his holdings - there's no actual flow of billions of dollars which could be redirected to employee salaries. The only way for employees to get a piece of the pie would be to give them stock. And most large companies do try to give their employees stock; even Walmart part-timers have an ESPP.

"The consequences of $X failing will have no impact" is quite literally the definition of risk-free.

Losing $2 billion is not 'no impact'. That's money that could have been pumped into the economy somewhere else and could have done much better for both the investor and society. The investor might get some extra tries, but going from 5 attempts down to 4 is still a big loss.

Probably because a lot of that risk was taken before the success and you're looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who succeeded).

So if the risk was taken before, why does that entitle the risktaker to seek constant gains on it? If I wrote a program essential for the success of the company, before the success of a company, would it entitle me to a perpetual percentage of the company's profits? The benefits of that program, by current standards, belong to the company perpetually. Why does the risk, taken on behalf of the company, only belong to the person in charge?

By looking at employees, you're also looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who were able to gain employment). The person who took the initial risk (say, a founder) may often leave the company or sell it. Who in the company has then assumed all of the risk? The person who bought the company?

Even then, we're not living in a just world. What's admirable, or a social justification, for taking a risk in a business that operates in immoral ways, or illegal ways? I'm not saying this applies to Kickstarter, but it certainly applies to a great many other companies.

And when GP said "assuming all the risk", I can't think how that's possibly true. Workers in all professions assume some level of risk every day - either to their safety, career prospects, or continued employment.

Elon Musk invested all of his funds. Let's be honest, tons of people believed Tesla and SpaceX was going to fail.

https://venturebeat.com/2010/05/27/elon-musk-personal-financ...

According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less. Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.

Personal—not Tesla—burn-rate of $200,000 a month, and he still owned property.

Putting aside that if "I may get slightly less rich but still never have to do anything, whatsoever, that I don't want to, ever, and neither will the next two generations of my family" is the risk please fucking sign me up for taking that "consequence of failure", I don't even need the chance at up-side.

If the world gets to the point where it really thinks their work is useless, I hope _they_ go on strike.

These workers are setting an example for the entire industry. Tech employees deserve job security, strong wages and benefits, and a voice in their companies.

The same ol'shite that is ruining most of the workplaces nowadays. Wtf you want? A job right? You've got it now do it properly and earn your money the right way..

Condolences

more shares for everyone! immediate monthly vesting, no 1-year cliffs, refreshers 6 months in woooo! I hear some companies are already like this, but then you have other companies with like only 5% vesting on the first year and no refreshers.

Kickstarter has had no intention of going public and doesn't issue shares like that to employees at all.

Opinions aside, you have to see the writing is on the wall.

Which is? People crave Socialism?

However you feel about unions (and I personally have many reservations), if tech workers unionize, management will have nobody to blame but themselves. They've had decades to listen to us, and they've responded with open offices, JIRA (or the equivalent) ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, whiteboard coding interviews and zero training. We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

You can always start your own company if you are unhappy about other companies' conduct.

Yes you can be part of a union and create your own loan out company.

https://www.wrapbook.com/how-to-set-up-a-loan-out-company/

For example.

> We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

Relative to other wage workers yes, but nowhere close to the ratios between wage and housing last seen 30 years ago. There are opportunities to negotiate for that sort of compensation again.

As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do.

Comparing yourself to other trades is not relevant. Wage growth in one not-so-rare trade will benefit many more trades and people.

Most of us would not be where we are today if we limited our aspirations to what other people do.

As if companies determine the price for housing. With Sillicon Valley wages, you could easily afford housing within 5 years somewhere else. It is not companies' fault that housing prices have gone up - it is politics preventing building of available housing. It is also an example that shows that no matter how much you pay the employees, housing prices will simply adapt if more housing is not being built.

The companies are at least partly culpable for choosing to aggregate themselves in these insanely high CoL areas, contributing to the rent jumps, and failing to engage in the proper corporate social responsibility of working with their ambient communities to alleviate these living situations for both their employees and their neighbors.

Well the people living there can vote, can't they? I don't see how it is corporate responsibility. Corporations can't vote.

Yes, the corporations are contributing to rent jumps, but that was part of the point: by paying higher salaries, as is being demanded by the pro union crowd here, they also increase the rents. So they can't simply pay enough so that "people can buy a house within 5 years", because housing prices rise along with salaries.

The union crowd isn't unilaterally asking for higher salaries. Hell, the Kickstarter employees in the OP aren't even focused specifically on compensation. There are issues at stake such as toxic environments, anti-age/race/gender discrimination, open offices, etc.

Even on matters of comp it needn't simply be "give raises to all the engineers", as pro-tech unionization efforts tend to also support non-technical workers such as the custodial and cafeteria staff, who would be in higher need of pay raises. The pay for engineers is usually more directed towards addressing unpaid overtime, which is more of a work-life balance/anti-death march measure more than a monetary one anyway.

Corporations can't vote, but they do have free speech when it comes to political expression, and tech companies already do plenty of lobbying. Perhaps they could have spent some fraction of those efforts on influencing the housing shortages in the places they set up camp in. Being a good, responsible neighbor should be part of CSR.

We are in a thread about the claim that "As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do."

That is what I was referring to.

I think companies are already trying to alleviate the housing issues. But their influence is not as high as you think. Google buses were attacked by locals, for example - they would have enable Google employees to live farther away, alleviating pressure on prices in the immediate neighborhood.

Corporate buses are helpful to their workforce (and at this point normalized to the extent that such backlash is far less common) but are also just a bandaid that can lead to extreme commutes [0]. Ultimately, the faults of development in the Bay Area, Seattle, and other high-growth/high-CoL areas are mainly on local governments and residents, but large employers share part of the responsibility because their presence is what drives up the desirability of a region in the first place, as well as prices.

Yes, you can't ask Google to solve everything themselves (even if their PR likes to paint them as being in the business of doing that), but they could at least explore more policies like opening larger offices in regions with more housing, embracing more remote work, working more closely with local communities, etc. You'd think megacorps with the resources and supposed strategic foresight that FAANGM possess would be more proactive about addressing an issue that impacts their workforce. Is it no wonder then that their workers will seek desperate measures like unionizing?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362271

If they would open offices elsewhere, they would drive prices up there, too. In fact here in Berlin they cancelled their plans after protests by the locals.

Then perhaps they should take remote work more seriously.

You assume it is as effective as onsite work, just like that? If that was the case, why haven't remote work companies trounced on site work companies en masse?

We're not debating the efficacy of the practice, but whether or not it can help prevent rising costs of living caused by tech agglomeration. Certainly "taking remote work more seriously" would include investing in pilot programs, experiments, and innovating processes/technologies to make it better and better. And it's something that large megacorps could work with, if they cared about rising CoL.

> I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

I'm guessing you've never worked a job in the retail, warehouse or food service industries :)

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.

I hope we can look back on this day as the first in a series of victories in which tech workers rest back control from their workplaces from their executives that have driven them off course. From sex abuse scandals to wage fixing to collaboration with authoritarian regimes, it’s clear that many of these companies have become unmoored from the vision, talent, and ideals of the labor makes that makes them possible.

nearly half of them voted against it? americans are so amazingly propagandized against anything vaguely construed as 'socialism' it's honestly impressive

there goes the neighborhood

Hipster Local 153

We hereby declare the following as Scabbing:

- drinking starbucks coffee - wearing new clothes that’s not patagonia - owning a car. renting ok. - eating animal products that aren’t wrapped in expensive paper and rope packaging - discussing any views that aren’t first endorsed by a jezebel staff writer or hollywood star.

This is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

Just because you work in tech doesn't mean you can't get exploited. And just "go somewhere else" isn't possible for everyone.

And why would it not be?

If I don't like my job, I get another one. It's easier to do this as a software engineer than almost anything else.

Countless reasons why.

Low job supply in your area and inability to move due to family and other responsibilities tying you down or too busy taking care of your kids to have time to interview and study leetcode or too little time spent on a gig getting you labeled as a job hopper or as a problematic employee by other companies if you don't have enough experience backing you up.

I feel you have no idea how complex people's lives can be.

Then that was the employees fault. They took the risk of moving to the middle of nowhere, (which for Kickstarter happens to be New York?), and are getting paid a bit less than industry average because of it. Is that a call to unionize? Absolutely not.

It seems like this would be solved by you not going to work for Kickstarter.

Maybe people other than you have problems you cannot see or understand.

1) I agree, me and everyone else. This problem will be solved not through a union, but nobody except the bottom of the barrel wanting to work for Kickstarter. Then they will either bump their pay to get good workers back, or fail. Simple economics.

2) I also agree, but that doesn't mean these workers should unionize.

These are bold assertions with no evidence. We do understand that you don't think these people are entitled to a union, nor are they entitled to live where they want and have the respect they think they deserve. Yet you have not said why. It would seem that Kickstarter employees, the ones with the most information here, do disagree with you though.

If they live in New York, and they have to unionize rather than just find a better job, something tells me they deserve below average industry pay.

Of course the employees would disagree, that doesn't mean anything about what they deserve to be paid.

There is no point in having a conversation if you are going to continue to assert points without any evidence or arguments to back them up. We understand that you look down on this unionization and don't believe that these workers should have the rights that they think they should. You made your point.

Good day.

Being easy to do does not mean that it should be expected or usual to do - and even then, if it wasn't easy to do for just a single person in the company, they now have another layer of protection against that. Not every employee lives in the same personal circumstance.

Their headquarters is in New York, not some island in the middle of nowhere.

Ignoring that point, if the employees really are working from somewhere there are NO other tech jobs, then that would be their fault. They took the risk in moving / raising a family in that area relying on a single company to pay them the salaries they want.

The price is slightly below average industry pay. Is that a call to unionize? Nope.

>if the employees really are working from somewhere there are NO other tech jobs, then that would be their fault.

I can't see how it is their fault. Not everyone can afford to live in particular places. You talk about risk, but risk is in fact what is prized - the CEO benefits because they took the risk in starting the company. The CEO is compensated for that risk. Why aren't the employees compensated for their own risk?

>The price is slightly below average industry pay. Is that a call to unionize? Nope.

It can be. Unionization isn't only about salary, it's about maintaining that level of salary, and other benefits. There are many reasons to unionize, which apply to every worker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357492

The owner of the company puts as much effort as possible into increasing the duration and intensity of work for a lower wage, providing they maintain the value desired. The worker, likewise, puts as much effort as possible into reducing the duration and intensity of work, and bargaining for a higher wage. Unions make this push and pull more symmetrical.

>If I don't like my job, I get another one.

Looks like someone doesn't own a home or have a family.

Or if you do, perhaps you have adequate savings where that's maybe not a big deal. Or maybe your spouse makes good money also to support for a while. But most people are not lucky enough to be in that situation.

I do not, so it's possible i'm misunderstanding something.

If I live in New York, as Kickstarter is located, what is so difficult about changing jobs if I have a family? Same thing with other tech hubs, you don't need to physically move homes in order to change jobs. What is so hard about it?

Even if you have to move, my family moved 10 or so times in a few years when I was in grade school for new jobs, never seemed to be a huge issue.

Please follow the HN guidelines when posting here. Lashing out like this not only damages the commons, it discredits what you're saying, so it's neither in your interest as a community member nor as an individual.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand. I apologize. You may want to remove my comment on the other thread then (exactly the same), although interestingly it is upvoted there.

Test

So what happens now? Do the 37 nay voters need to join the union or be fired?

What exactly does it give the workers, better ways of dealing with management?

Leverage.

Without a union, you can ask management for stuff, but they can just say no. Your only recourse then is to quit, which wouldn't change anything when it's just one person.

With a union, a work stoppage is a possibility. Suddenly management have a reason to come to the negotiation table and make concessions.

First of all "asking for stuff" implies a negotiation between two parties. A negotiation implies that either party can walk away from a deal. You're implying management shouldn't be able to say no. Management is not necessarily out to get employees and excessive compensation or regulation around hiring and firing leads to either insolvency or stagnation. It's a balancing act.

A union can be just as exploitative as a company can. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

The software industry has been regulated by demand over the last few decades. Demand is still extremely high for software devs. Managers know that employees can make moves because unemployment in our sector is something like 2%. I've worked in many industries in my life and I've never been chased down or marketed to move jobs as much as I have in software development.

And the company can walk away too, they just don't get to take the workers with them.

A corporation is not entitled to anyone's labor.

Neither is a union entitled to my labor. I would purposely avoid unions to maintain my agency as an individual and to work at more agile and flexible institutions.

The union isn't benefiting from your labor, this makes no sense.

Of course it is, union dues are literally a percentage of your salary.

That's absolutely not equivalent. labor != money

If the union benefited from your LABOR then there would be no incentive for unions to strike.

Pretty sure they were just phrasing it casually…

Of course there are negotiations involved. Having workers be organized provides a better ability to ask for (and negotiate) things by banding together. As well as protections. Without, sticking your neck out—alone or in a small non-unionized group—can be a major risk.

High demand does not mean workers are not exploited (hi amazon), and employees organizing can provide protections and benefits for all staff, some of which may not be in the same “high demand” group.

A negotiation is also done in good faith with both parties willing to listen and discuss options. An individual almost never has the advantage when negotiating with a company.

For 99% of employees out their quitting isn't the threat you make it seem to be. As easy you make it sound to get a new job, its that easy for them to replace you. Then that new employee gets to deal with the same shit you left over. It never gets fixed.

Leaving and going somewhere new doesn't solve anything. for most people job hunting is just looking at piles of shit and finding which one stinks less.

Insurance at my current job is not great. I can't go to my boss and say I want better health insurance he would laugh me out of his office, but even if he could, why would he not just give me the better insurance from the start? If a Union went to management and said we demand better health care that carries weight. That would get something done.

Yes they do, when you are in a high demand industry with low supply of skilled workers, you are in the driver's seat of a negotiation. You have options. You're the one being bid on by multiple employers. You absolutely have the leverage there. This is similar to the real estate market, by the way. There are so-called "buyers markets" and "seller markets" where one trend or another is dominant at any given time depending on if there are more buyers than sellers or more sellers than buyers.

It's not easy to replace tech employees at all. Even if there was an abundant supply of expert software engineers (there's not), it takes many months to ramp up on a new code base to optimal productivity and to learn the organization and domain requirements of a software product. That will never change.

An average tech company will spend tens of thousands of dollars to fill a position, not even counting initial salary and bonuses.

Leaving for somewhere better often does solve quite a bit. On my last job move my pay increased by 50%. If I had stayed at my previous company I'd be skating by with 4% raises.

On the whole the aggregate effect of employees moving around in a dynamic market creates the cush benefits and pay we see in this industry.

The reason they wouldn't give you specifically better insurance is because they have to negotiate a plan for everyone in the company. What is that costing them on paper? I don't know how many employees your company has or what their margins are or any details really, but it can be as much as $700-$1000 a month per employee for health insurance. If you've got 100 employees that's $100K a year.

No boss should "laugh you out of the office" for requesting that. But really, its an HR and Corporate leadership issue so you should take your grievances to those with the power to make the change and not your boss (unless you work directly for the CEO).

Kickstarter is essentially a microcap stock fraud platform with a slick UI, so this is a good fit.

What's the benefit of being in a union for highly specialized tech workers that are very in demand?

Maximizing the value of the demand.

Same sort of benefits as, say, union electricians receive, who are also specialized workers who are very in demand in certain markets.

Or, for that matter, doctors, who are frequently members of professional organizations that are unions in all but name.

The same things as any other union? Improved working conditions (e.g. hours), protecting employees from abuses, and maintaining fair pay & benefits.

Unions as only a working class institution is mostly a US historic artifact. Other countries have unions in highly specialized and in-demand industries too.

What were the specific concerns of the Kickstarter employees though? Were they being worked extra hours or being abused by management? Or not getting proper market wages? This is quite a heavy hammer to a set of problems, so I'm curious how bad it really was.

Were they firing people arbitrarily making it a positive thing that the company will now have to jump through hoops to reprimand or get rid of the worst non-productive workers? Or the countless other limitations now imposed on the company from making decisions which benefit the existence of the company itself (and the fact they can even hire/pay for these workers)?

Will it make Kickstarter super cautious about hiring new people with their new extensive protections lowering the amount of people who would benefit from the success of various companies who have unions (and the taxation of these which benefits the wider community)? Turning them into mini-exclusive clubs of workers, while everyone else works p/t or on contract to avoid f/t hires?

There's a list on their website: https://kickstarterunited.org/

How are extremely in-demand tech workers not "maintaining fair pay & benefits"? Surely if they were not being paid "fairly" (not sure what that means anyways, if not market price) they could just leave, as there are plenty of tech jobs in NYC where Kickstarter is based.

You're misquoting. I was explaining a union's purpose, I didn't claim tech workers were underpaid. Plus "fairness" could also refer to inter-employee compensation at the same company (e.g. men and women).

Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.

Re: enforcing fairness, that argument is still asinine, if women were underpaid relative to men at the same company surely they could find many other companies willing to pay them a fair wage (and hopefully they would sue their former employer as well)

It might behoove you to read a bit more about the well-documented nature of employment discrimination in the tech industry. Women are systematically underpaid and denied raises and promotions compared to men, which tends to make their cases weaker when going to a new company as well.

It might behoove you to not make baseless assumptions about other people's knowledge.

If the question about why women just don't go work at another company when they're given unequal pay was legitimate, then I think it's fair to assume there was a knowledge gap. If it was a bad faith question, of course, there's not much I can do about that!

Unless you're wrong about the mechanics of the pay gap, which you are.

There is still a pay gap after you adjust for pregnancy, which I'm pretty sure is what you're thinking of.

It's harder to account for things like the price of benefits and measuring the amount of time spent on things like oncall.

As a concrete example, when Google analyzed their wages they actually noticed that they were underpaying men.

It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk.

Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.

Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less.

Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.

> It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk.

> Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.

You are misinterpreting my comment. It had been well documented that in job searches women prioritize benefits at a higher rate than men. So women might on average be getting $10,000 less in salary but also ~$10,000 less in benefits. This is not about utilitzation of the same benefits. This is about differences in men's and women's job preferences that result in unequal salary but equal overall compensation.

> Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less

Equal pay for equal work can also be violated by giving workers equal pay while allocating unequal work.

> Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.

Google's analysis is conducted over all of their employees, for one. By comparison people typing their salaries into spreadsheets is 1) subject to people falsifying or misremembering their compensation, and 2) has a selection bias towards people who feel they are not compensated fairly. Furthermore, Google has the data to know the stock prices at the time equity packages are awarded, which affects compensation results (e.g. someone who started right before a rise in stock gets more money than someone after even though their original equity packages had the same dollar value).

Google does not generally engage in negotiation of benefits on being hired, so this would be a strange reason for women to make less than men in the same role at the company.

I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.

Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.

Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:

https://www.nber.org/digest/feb07/w12321.html

https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2018/05/new-research-pr...

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/19/health/women-work-harder-...

Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.

> Google does not generally engage in negotiation of benefits on being hired, so this would be a strange reason for women to make less than men in the same role at the company.

Yet again, you continue to misinterpret the role of benefits that I explained in my comments. Women's prioritization of benefits over compensation does not mean they are receiving different benefits than men at the same company. It means they apply to different companies than men. Pointing out that Google does not negotiate benefits is not a valid line of criticism.

> I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.

You assume that this is the company refusing to allocate more work to women. Typically, this is the opposite: the company is more than happy to give women 24 hour oncalls but a lower rate of women are willing to do so than men.

> Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.

The onus is on you to provide proof of your allegations that Google is not being honest in its pay analysis. What proof do you have that they are lying? Like I said, employee compiled spreadsheets are rife with selection bias, and there's no guarantee that employees are even telling the truth. Why would we believe the latter over studies compiled by people who actually have the real salary data?

> Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:

This is not what the research you linked claims. There is a promotion gap, in the same way that there is a wage gap: the average woman is less likely to be promoted than the average man. The existence of a gap is not the same as the existence of discrimination. Much like the wage gap, when normalizing for role and experience the disparity mostly disappears:

> The additional controls slightly reduce the gender difference in promotion rates but, controlling for all variables, including worker performance ratings, men's promotion rates were still 2.2 percentage points higher than women's.

And furthermore, your own study says that there is no wage gap once these factors are accounted for:

> However, in marked contrast, the authors find that after controlling for measured characteristics, promotions and expected promotions continued to yield comparable wage increases for both men and women. And, there were essentially no gender differences in overall wage growth at the establishment, with or without promotion

So this difference in promotion drops to 2% when accounting for differences in role and experience, and there is no wage difference with or without promotion between men and women. I'm not sure how you think this study supports your point.

Not to mention, there's plenty of evidence of discrimination against men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/

> Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.

I have. Many do note instances where they believed there were discriminated against on the basis of their sex. Most of them also detailed explicitly discriminatory policies aimed at allocating more opportunity to men. I'm more than happy to give you the details if you so desire. They want to be treated equal to men, not have the red carpet rolled out for them because they're "diverse". Since you're seeing many people disagreeing with your claims around these supposedly uncontroversial facts, it would be prudent to rethink whether your assertions really are as universal and uncontroversial as you claim.

I bet a union would have been able to more quickly sniff out the Apple/Google wage fixing that was happening a few years back.

The top earning actors and athletes in the country all have strong union representation, but for some reason it's software engineers who think "nah we are too well paid".

Professional athletes in the US need unions because the leagues are granted a legal monopoly. AFAIK most European soccer professionals (where there is more options and competition between leagues) do not have player unions / Collective Bargaining Agreements.

You mean like the PFA [1] who are the oldest professional sportsmans union in the world?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Footballers'_Asso...

Interesting - as I said I'm not too familiar with the EPL/other euro leagues. When I had tried to google Football unions I did find that PFA wiki, but couldn't tell if they actually are involved in collective bargaining with the leagues. As far as I could tell, no such agreement existed?

> for some reason it's software engineers

Well, at the risk of getting all tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, I can’t help but wonder if the people posting these “you guys are too well paid to have any other concerns” types are really practicing software developers and not “startup founders”.

Advocating for better working conditions. For example (not saying that these are specific to Kickstarter, I don't know that culture, but they do occur elsewhere in tech):

1) Better IP restrictions. Working on open source, side projects, etc.

2) Better treatment around oncall.

3) Limiting hours (no expectations of 60+ hour weeks)

4) Transparency in hiring, promotion, and review processes

5) Transparency in company performance and benefits decisions

6) Better benefits, particularly things like parental leave, vacation, and health care

7) A greater slice of the value that workers provide

8) Representation at the board level, or at least a democratically elected representative to the C-level

9) A representative during disagreements with the company (e.g. making it harder to be singled out/fired just because)

There are probably a bunch more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head.

Many other specialized high demand workforces with intense disparities in skill and compensation between coworkers have done well with unions. Professional athletes, screenwriters, and actors are obvious reference points.

You should ask members of the AMA or the SAG or The Bar.

I think most Americans mostly have experience with blue collar unions, often ones that represent relatively unskilled labour. Consider though that even in the US, there are plenty of unions (or things which are effectively unions) which represent highly differentiated and skilled professions.

Notably, directors, actors, and writers in American film and television are unionised. That does not mean that everyone is paid the same, nor that there is any concept as "seniority" (very rare in unions that represent highly skilled workers), nor that it is assumed that everyone has the same level of skill.

While the AMA and ABA are not conventionally considered unions, they do effectively control entry into and regulation of their respective professions. (Medicine and Law).

If brain surgeons benefit from being in a union, javascript developers probably do as well.

AMA and ABA are protectionist and "America-first", though. The tech unionization movement is full of people who favor open borders and the like

> The tech unionization movement is full of people who favor open borders and the like

In my experience, tech unionists fall into one of two camps:

* The progressive camp, which is largely what you describe. Likes open border, diversity hiring and the like.

* The protectionist camp. Wants to limit immigration, require CS degrees, and clamp down on H1B hires.

The former seems to care more about influencing the politics of the company. The latter is more the traditional union stance, which is to increase the price of labor by restricting the supply.

Tech is probably more like the film industry than law though, isn't it?

Focused on global markets rather than focused on capturing as much as possible from the lucrative American market.

Just off the top of my head: transparency in promotions and evaluations, greater pay equity, and just cause protections against arbitrary discipline and termination

You can actually stop your company from doing shady or unethical things. This can mean holding a person in power accountable to sexual harassment, preventing your company from selling user data to a shady third party, demanding better working conditions for contractors at your company (think apple and foxconn).

There's many benefits but one big one that would apply to tech workers is benefits/working conditions guaranteed by a contract where you have a union negotiating those benefits on your behalf.

For example, the vast majority of employers reserve the right to change benefits at any time, and they liberally do in a minor downturn. I've worked at places where an email was sent saying "as of tomorrow we will no longer match your 401(k)." That's it, one executive decided something, you just have to deal with it or quit. Another example is an email saying "this is the new PTO acquiral schedule." I lost a whole week of PTO that day, no apologies, just a "this is how it's going to be." If you're working under a union contract where the benefits are spelled out in the contract, they have to wait until the contract term runs out and then renegotiate another contract to change the benefits.

Some tech companies are known to demand unpaid overtime without prior warning. A union contract may have a provision where you must be paid for overtime or overtime can't be mandatory, etc.

Another example might be that allegations of misconduct must have a transparent investigation before adverse action is taken and the employee is entitled to be represented by the union during the investigation.

If you've only worked in a bull market environment with a massive amount of free flowing VC money you might not appreciate those sorts of things. I've worked outside SV during the Great Recession, during that time jobs dried up and benefits were dropped like a bad date. I was laid off and had to relocate to get a new job. I'm not saying that a union would have prevented that, I'm just illustrating that jobs might not be so plentiful at some point in the future.

Another thing is when a significant portion of a workforce is unionized then there is a tendency to improve the working conditions of non-union shops because they have to compete with unioned shops for employees.

Professional athletes are some of the the most highly specialized, highly paid, and highly demanded employees and the vast majority of them at the highest level are unionized.

> very in demand

Who, exactly, is highly in demand? There was a post on here last week from somebody who had gone on, I think, 40+ in-person interviews and hadn’t gotten a single offer. It’s well established that experience actually works against you in this profession; you can end up being too old long before you hit retirement age. Influential hiring authority Aline Lerner argues that people with Master’s degrees should be rejected in favor of those with just Bachelor’s degrees; education can work against you, too. There’s an unprecedented market for 30-year-old developers with specific education and experience; if you’re anybody else, you would have been better off getting a business degree. To paraphrase Bane, “Do you feel in demand”?

Ask highly paid actors why they are in a union.

Assuming this is true, now is the time to form a union. Not when they are no longer in high demand.

There's a lot of hubris in the tech field that high salaries and a plethora of available jobs is the norm and will forever be that way.

I anticipate a lot of "Why Tech Needs A Union" posts on HN during the next recession or when the current crop of 25-35 year olds reach their late 40's and all of a sudden have trouble finding stable work.

It didn't happen in the US but back during the 2009 global financial crisis Nokia let about 15000 employees go. Many of those were employed in Germany (I am not one of those though) and I heard they were pretty well protected by their union and up for a generous allowance when their time came to leave the company. If it were not for the union, the company would have let them go empty handed.

What an awful decision by those employees. They’re in for a rude awakening.

Is there a list of demands and laws anywhere they want to impose?

There is only this: https://kickstarterunited.org/

Not a word about the standards of performance or expectations from employees who would want to be part of union. A short list of some fairly handwavy statements and a one-page website "join-join-join".

Also what kind of positions do people who pushed this occupied? How many engineers have signed this?

Are they actually technical workers or ex political studies majors, who lucked out to get a job at Kickstarter and not Starbucks.

Literally taken from your link.

> Is there a list of demands and laws anywhere they want to impose?

"02) What are the workplace improvements Kickstarter United is seeking?"

> Not a word about the standards of performance or expectations from employees who would want to be part of union.

"Kickstarter United will be made up of all employees in the bargaining unit."

> "Kickstarter United will be made up of all employees in the bargaining unit."

So no standards of training etc. for the workers? Just you know, show up for the work, punch in and punch out?

Also there is no specific requirement in the list. The only one that is not a blanket statement and has actually some case in it is "when disciplinary action is taken"

the rest is just a list of what KS is already doing and has been doing better than many companies.

Yeah this discussion appears to have been hijacked by thinly veiled anti-union astroturfing. I would be highly skeptical of all posts in this thread. Many of the posts literally using the exact phrases commonly repeated by anti-union propagandists.

This makes me wonder if Silicon Valley is starting to see the writing on the wall and pay for disinformation campaigns in places where engineers regularly read and post. I know that there are people who share similar views to Peter Thiel within the software engineering community, but they are not the majority as you see in this thread. This is pretty shameful that this is what the Internet has become, a new medium to misinform the public. I wouldn't expect any productive conversation here.

Or maybe some people just have different opinions than you do? Unions are a charged topic for lots of people.

gasp You mean that all comments should be pro-union or neutral, otherwise we're being anti-union?

My goodness, I guess you should go find the steward and file a grievance.

I am pro European style unions where membership is optional, but anti American style unions where you have to leave your job if you don't like the union.

(I live in Europe)

I would not be surprised if there is some low level effort amongst some of the larger companies in silicon valley.... especially after the whole issue of not bidding up talent or stealing talent from each other...

Yeah all of the language here feels very contrived.

Wow this really sad, provided Kickstarter is one of the nicest places to work at and their public benefit corporation was not empty words.

These people ruined a really nice NYC company for everyone around. Anyone running their company who thought of making the workplace a bit different will expect the kind of crowd from this photo to show up and implode it.

One thing is if the conditions were bad, there was insane overtime, the pay was low etc etc., but no, none of that applies to the people on the photo.

This is why we cannot have nice things.

Why do you hate people making Kickstarter what it is? The people actually doing the work want a union, how is that ruining the company?

The whole thing started as political stunt sort of due to the neo-nazis' outcry over some anti-fascist project. It was a mess (of course not sympathizing with Breitbart at all for the record).

And now they just added a whole new overhead of dealing with their initiative. Look at that one-pager of extremely poorly formulated demands. Obviously the company will have to spend resources sorting this out, through lawyers, through hiring MORE managers to deal with these managers. KS is NOT a bad place to work at by large margin it's a GOOD place to work at.

I am hearing already around here in NYC that no I don't want to go work there next to these folks, I am a developer not a polit-sci wannabe etc.

The spectacular outcome would be if KS fails to raise more funds because of this which is quite a possibility.

What exactly is "ruined" about Kickstarter when the employees unionize?

I'm just annoyed because there are so many people out there working in supermarkets treat like dirt, yet 'software engineers' who are paid huge amounts still want to unionise? Where exactly is the struggle here?

I am not anti-unionist by a country mile, but I can't sympathise with this group.

You can only unionise if you struggle?

I view unions as something that's only essential in the worst case scenario. If you truly need one then I fully support that, but they come with a huge cost to innovation. It's important to not forget the trade off.

Hate to break it to you, but "unions are ok but only under specific circumstances I describe" is anti-union.

They're always 'OK' (I'm not saying they're immoral) but they do come with a cost (to innovation, to efficiency) that should not be ignored.

Can you elaborate how Kickstarter is now ruined? As a creator and backer, this makes Kickstarter better for me. The organization as a whole is maddeningly unresponsive to me, but the workers who voted for, and organized, the union have been my strongest advocates.

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