Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing
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According to who?
My wife is a nurse, in a union, and the stuff she tells me about some of her cohorts getting away with then leveraging the union to avoid being reprimanded/ let go is insane.
Additionally there is no incentive to improve, your salary is based on seniority and nothing else. It is literally on a chart, predetermined.
I don't want that for software engineering.
I acknowledge the importance of unions in our history, being labor to where it is today. However I do not want unions for the software engineering field
I am not anti union (wouldn’t want to be part of one, but don’t ideologically oppose them), but this seems to be a consistent failure point for them, in the same way that Scrum often ends up generating hairball codebases.
As opposed to life in a non-union shop, where it’s a workers paradise and everyone shows up ecstatic to hit the code mines first thing on Monday.
There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't.
I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of <so and so> try a day on the line of <so and so> and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour."
No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others where NOT anyone can. These are by the way not purely academic skills, they are some where the differences are physical, though these days there is fewer and fewer of those as humanity got super good at making tools.
Basically I'm saying there are jobs where maybe the CEO wouldn't be able to figure it out on day 1, but with standard training, they would be able to do the job. And with EXPERIENCE they would be able to get better and better.
These are the jobs where salaries should be set by a union, and where your salaries rise directly correlated with experience.
Now let's get to the classist and controversial part. I don't believe software engineering is like that. Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace.
I've been in the industry for 15 years since I graduated with my undergrad, and I've been junior, and I've been senior, and I've seen new grads come in and grow, and thrive, and become promoted to senior. And I've seen juniors come in, and struggle, and tread water, and be managed out. For the exact same job.
I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars.
I am 100% against unions for software development.
Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist.
Pay/promo by seniority isn't some innate property of unions, it's a response to a lack of pay increases by management. If management keeps union members happy with their pay, the members have no reason to vote in leadership that asks for pay by seniority and have a lot of reasons to avoid it.
Yes, just look at Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
> I am 100% against unions for software development
I'm not sure what you think the first has to do with the second. Outside of public sector unions (where the actual limiting factor is civil service law more often than union preferences), union arrangements for non-blue-collar jobs often support exactly what you describe. I mean, you don't seen any cap to the capacity for differential and sometimes meteoric progression in film/tv acting despite the dominance of SAG-AFTRA, an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, in that space, do you?
Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice and I'm not here to give career advice, especially not to an industry as a whole.
If you don't mind, could you elaborate on what parts of your statement are explicitly classist in your estimation? I genuinely don't understand your point.
Which jobs would you suggest every person could eventually excel at equally because of the tools that have been invented? What about those jobs is so universally accomplishable that all humans are made truly equal less experience?
I agree that businesses should have the ability to promote based on seniority or skill! Limiting that wouldn't be efficient!
Do all unions preclude that flexibility by the very concept of their existence? I could imagine that in some cases it could be possible to create an agreement that serves all parties as best as possible.
>Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace.
Sorry. I genuinely do not understand this statement.
It's a statistical fact that not every person can develop the same skillset and inhabit the same role at the same time, yes. I'm not really clear about what that has to do with anything, considering that most large and valuable projects require multiple people with multiple skillsets to realize their potential.
Sorry, I'm a bit baffled by this. Could you elaborate a bit on your "classist" idea for software development a little further as far as how the entire profession should not take part in unionizing "100%" which I take to mean across all businesses and projects?
There is a more egalitarian school of thought is that people are people, and if given the same opportunities, advantages, educational, financial, etc, the distinction between them is much MUCH MUCH smaller than what our current wealth gap in society seems to suggest.
And that if we DID achieve such a society, then unions would be a net good because otherwise all work becomes essentially commodotized, and without the protection of Unions "high skilled" workers will not be paid well anymore.
That being said, when I was a kid I didn't have a skateboard. I had an old DOS box to play on. Then Windows 95, then 98, ME/2000, XP etc. I'm fully aware of how good I am at what I do, but I genuinely have no objective/provable reason to believe that I'm of a "class" of person that's good with computer touching. I'd assume that I would need a machine that displays alternate realities in order to establish what "class" of person I should be assigned to, objectively.
The idea of "classism" inherently (to most) relies heavily on stratification. There are (for a made-up example) The Indispensable, The Useful and The Expendable. In your definition of classism as applied to software engineering, are people born into these classes? If not, what process creates objective classification? How is it standardized and applied?
And further, how does a group of software engineers, that doesn't include you, choosing to unionize hurt your prospects or experience?
The downside is being forced into a collective bargain agreement, if I wanted to work at whatever company was a union shop.
I would much rather negotiate for my own contract. Which is something that I currently do, right now, regarding my tech job employment contract.
It has worked out pretty work for me. I've received significant pay raises, that I do not think I would get if I were forced into collective bargain agreements.
> As opposed to life in a non-union shop
I work in a "non-union" shop, in tech, and I make significantly more money than any other example of a "union shop" tech job that I have ever been able to find in the industry.
Feel free to let me know about any "union shop" programmer jobs, that will pay me more than the 300k plus that I make right now. Maybe I'll even consider it.
> A seat at the table to bargain with your betters?
I already do bargain with my employers. And it has resulted in me getting a lot of money for my efforts.
Let me know when those union jobs can get me more than 300k, for someone with ~10 years experience, lol.
And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't even been optimizing as much as I could for salary. If I really was doing that, I could probably go work in finance/quant, and get another 50% raise (Yes, really... I have peers and friends, that have gotten to that)
I don't think any "union shop" tech jobs that exist in the world, right now, match up with that.
I am not even trying to brag, or anything here. The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.
I think it more or less evens it out
It is a very real downside, to me, and many other highly paid software engineers, that forcing us into collective bargaining agreements would result in us making significantly less money.
So thats the downside. It is very clear, and obvious. We would make less money.
So, given that we would make significantly less money, you can expect us to fight and sabotage efforts to force us into collective bargain agreements.
Good luck, you'll need it. Because right now, the anti-union side, in tech, is winning, and unions are not popular at all.
I'm not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. Unions don't mean you have to vote yourselves a pay limit anymore than Democracy voting in a minimum wage means everyone in the country must earn the minimum wage. Unions don't mean that poor workers cannot be 'punished' with unemployment anymore than Democracy means criminals cannot be punished. A union is employees pooling forces for the benefit of employees, what else even makes sense? How can you on the one hand say your current coworkers are so awful that you don't want to co-negotiate with them, and the reason you don't want to do that is because then you'd have to work with them? If they are awful and not being fired right now, anti-unioning isn't getting them fired, is it?
> The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.
Dan Luu estimates on his blog that one piece of work he did saved his employer millions, yet he got no extra money for it. How do you know that 300k is as much as you could possibly get if all of you 1% exceptional people worked together? What makes you think that a union of top tier tech workers would get the same results as a union from a steel works? Why do so many people from the "United" States, living under the benefit of a massive combined armed-forces strong-arming the planet, think that combining forces is a dumb idea for dumb people which can't work ... when the people who get paid most (CEOs, board members) act together against lower level employees to keep that being the case?
That's getting into Michael O'Church territory, but you're talking about your salary when you could be inverting the structure of the company putting tech people right on top, or something.
Who are the strongest unions in the United States. Which unions in the United States are strongest in the sense of having been most successful in raising the wage rates, the earnings of their members?If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize.
Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either
That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others.
>If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency...
These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we need doctors, so those who succeed deserve higher pay. Virtually anyone can be a Fry Cook or a Walmart Greeter.
Uncomfortable fact: society needs doctors and engineers (software or otherwise) many times more than we need fast food workers.
I also think the medical field suffers because the only people who become doctors were people who have been on the track for becoming a doctor their whole life. An engineering firm might have artists and philosophers and tradesmen who are passionate about engineering and self-taught, bringing very unique perspectives to various problems. These same people have enough talent, motivation and humility that they probably would make great doctors too.
And I know for a fact that doctors would benefit from e.g. a systems engineering or fluid dynamics background to better understand the medicines they're prescribing and be more equipped to prescribe the right one in the right doses, or maybe a math/statistics background to understand unintuitive numerical data such as "X diagnostic test is 99% accurate.... [fine print] because it reports 100% of cases as negative and only 1% of cases are ever positive".
My imagination can only go so far with examples, and I know there are very good reasons for the tight restrictions, but I strongly believe the restrictions are too tight.
You can, in theory, have an Oncologist handle your cancer without a nurse; you can't have it the other way around. That makes the former more essential.
The point here being that if you want the union experience, you should create/join an union and try to negotiate collectively along other like-minded individuals. But please let me exercise my freedom of negotiating directly with an employer by myself.
The main problem of unions is when they want to force everybody else to play by their rules, often disproportionally benefitting union leaders and the "old guard".
While I'm happy to not hate any of my current coworkers (for once!) almost every team I've been on has had some bad apples. Unions have nothing to do with that, and I'd still rather my workplace be unionized if it meant the more vulnerable members of the team were protected even if my least-favorite colleagues could exploit it for their own benefit. I've seen too many people mistreated by employers to think that unions can't be helpful.
When I have to pay the 70% apple the same amount as the 100% apples, and can't really fire that apple, that's the not fair to the 100% apples.
Also I do not work at a unionized employer, my wife does as a nurse at Stanford hospital.
This difference is coming from different culture and priorities. Lack of unions isn't why you don't have universal healthcare in the US and other such things. It's because the country's general culture and ideology works against both unions and social welfare.
You don't need unions to organize and demand things of the government. If people don't want to vote for social policies, unions won't make them want different things.
What about when you have bad apples in the executive team and individual employees can't remove them from the bunch? Isn't it weird and incongruous that shareholders who don't work for the company can collectively vote on and influence the makeup of the company leadership, but employees who work there cannot collectively do that? Is it supposed to be all employees working for the good of the whole, or not?
While it's undeniable that they have a role, historically, they all ultimately seem to make their parent industries incompetent and completely out of touch with the market until the point that they eventually to go belly up and are sold off (not sure about the causation here).
American Automakers, Indian PSUs and the state machinery, stand out in particular in my memory.
However, unions really make sense when workers are a "commodity" and easily replaceable to the point that they are ground down into poverty. Steel workers and drivers would be a good example of such jobs.
In software engineering, you have plenty of options to change jobs and go to a better company. The market demand for software engineers is massive and you are definitely not in a job where you have to suffer through bad management.
A company in tech that unionized can only mean one thing
1/ The management is really crap
2/ The workers are so unskilled they can't find jobs elsewhere
Would you outsource work to such a company?
Everyone from the cleaning personal to upper management gets part of the deal.
Plus apparently some haven't yet grasped that in many economies across the world, Software Engineers are indeed replacement cogs, they just cost little more per month than other cogs.
The management can't be blamed for the regulation and the employees clearly didn't decide to unionize because they don't believe in their own chances of finding employment elsewhere.
If the forcing function is external then there's no reason to assume the company's performance will be subpar from a buyer POV
Why are unions specifically a bad idea for software engineering?
These people aren’t Google employees nor are they software engineers. They work for HCL, which seems like a discount tech contracting firm.
Read the article, lol.
There are definitely environments where unions are needed and have made working conditions better but unionizing in tech where most jobs are cushy is a mistake that only puts money in the hands of union bureaucrats that don’t do anything except complicate everyone’s lives.
> While they are not employed directly by Google, many of them work as analysts on Google Shopping.
I highly doubt these were workers with great working conditions and benefits.
This is less true than it used to be; the Valley has been feeling more progressive and less libertarian for a while. I'm not sure if it's because the field is growing up, so it attracts fewer disrupt-the-world types, shifting generational values, shifting cultural values, more influence from SF and the tech scene moved north, the pendulum swinging back as people see the consequences of tech, or something else.
That said, as long as it's a competitive job market in tech, I agree that seeing a union isn't likely because there isn't a clear benefit.
If you look at a lot of the chatter that leads towards discussions of unionization in workplaces these days, it's really mundane stuff and not Politics or Socialism. People talking about blatantly abusive employer behavior, wage theft, poor safety/hygiene, bad benefits, etc - an employer can easily mitigate a lot of this stuff and have happy workers who won't have much reason to unionize, and I think part of the reason unions are so rare in tech to this day is that many tech employees are satisfied. If a tech workplace unionizes I think that's an obvious sign that the employees were unhappy enough to go through all the trouble of doing it, it's not something they'd do on a whim.
Even if Poland unions aren't fully there (no idea), I bet they are more effective and in use than on US.
Google will be surprised.
Probably not.
If you look at the way most Americans argue against unions they always argue against something about how they are implemented here. Then someone points out that unions don’t have to have the referenced property as if that was a gotcha. But here there are big unions and for some reason they always try to grow. For instance, why did they join US Steel instead of consulting with them to start their own union?
So actually that doesn't surprises me.