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Comment by syspec | Hacker News Reader

> A year ago, 80 Google contractors employed by HCL America in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with US Steelworkers—a historic victory for white collar tech workers in the U.S.

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

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Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence against collective bargaining? What do you see as the downside? “Gee, sure we have a say in our benefits and my salary is way higher, but there’s this one coworker who doesn’t pull their weight.”

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.

This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but...

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.

>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.

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.

> Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist.

Yes, just look at Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

> 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

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?

I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative!

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?

The classist aspect of my own opinion is the implication that there are inherently classes of people: Those that can be good at software engineering and those that can't.

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.

I readily agree that there are often skill gaps in many professions or endeavors. I am an absolutely terrible when it comes to skateboarding and ice skating, and they're also not big aspirations of mine. I've opted to pursue other things that I enjoy, like problem solving, system administration and cost analysis!

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?

> What do you see as the downside?

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.

The vast majority of engineers are not making anywhere near what you are making. The fact that you know a lot of other very well-paid engineers does not actually disprove that.

Exactly. So a unionized tech company would be a company that attracts people who don't have the skills to earn lots of money. I doubt such a company would thrive among competitors with top level programmers

The assumption here is that pay consistently corresponds to skill in the tech industry. An alternative factor that comes to mind is geography.

You're completely right, but with that geography comes a larger pool of very talented people to compete with.

I think it more or less evens it out

The original poster asked me what the downside were, and I just told you.

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.

"If I joined a more powerful group, I'd vote myself a pay cut, so more powerful groups are bad"

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.

Last I checked doctors, who aren't unionized in the US and are more essential than nurses, are doing just fine.

Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?

They're not outliers, they're counterexamples and fairly strong ones at that. Police unions and teachers unions, on the other hand, are both great examples of how unions can be a detriment to society.

Makes me think about Milton Friedman's talk about airline pilots and the American Medical Association, rebranded as a union, and his question of

    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?

https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478

Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power.

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

>...because there's barely anybody who could take their job

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.

Personally, I really do think medical licenses are too restrictive. I think a lot of very talented people who could have made great doctors end up pursuing other careers, because they weren't willing to commit to a pre-med undergrad + 4 years med school + residency while they were 18, which the typical age that people have to make that decision.

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.

Doctors have the AMA, which provides accreditation and artificially limits supply. This provides some of the value that unionization provides, although it technically isn't.

Doctors are not any more essential than nurses like the piston isn't any more essential than the crankshaft. You need the whole team, working in concert, and there is no other way about it.

With all due respect, your take is naive: just because you need a team doesn't mean some members aren't more essential than others.

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.

Unless you can afford your own doctor, I'm afraid you ate being naive. The reality of care for the lot of us that we depend on the system as a whole working, not individual professionals. If the nurses strike, hospitals shutter. By the way, as an oncology researcher, doctors are vastly overrated anyway. Their main contribution is signing documents. It is my officious goal to make them obsolete.

That's right, I don't want the same thing you want.

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".

Corporate overlords, on the other hand, are known for their impeccable and utterly fair behaviour throughout history. Not a single bad apple there! Be a good serf and good things will come to you, heed these words!

I've known plenty of software engineers that don't carry their weight. Some of the big techs make it very easy to do the bare minimum, if that's all you want to do. You don't need a union to have slackers.

I agree that unions have been an important player for worker rights and in some countries even the advent and enforcement of democracy.

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?

Apparently many US companies do, because they outsource to European companies and we do unionize across full sectors, not single companies.

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.

In my opinion there is a big difference between being forced by regulation to unionize and to be forced by your own employees to unionize.

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

I really don't get this US point of view how unions have anything to do with job performance or ability to find jobs.

I've noticed unions to have that affect as well.

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.

Would you accept a similar anecdotal argument against solely management-controlled labor that cited examples of companies with bad or abusive management practices? Or would you suggest that not all corporate management teams can be judged by the worst examples?

Why are unions specifically a bad idea for software engineering?

It sounds like your wife doesn't like the collective she's a part of. Welcome to collective bargaining. You don't get to pick and choose who is allowed to vote in your local elections, and you don't get to pick and choose which of your coworkers are entitled to representation. If there are bad people in your employee collective, that is mostly a rebuke of the employer for hiring bad people. Or are you arguing that unions somehow turn good people into bad ones? Is a person's only incentive for improvement in life getting an extra $1k/yr? Personal satisfaction and desire for growth don't exist, people don't care about their customers?

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 you have unions, the bad apples cannot be removed from the bunch.

So how did the bad employees get hired at your workplace and stay there before it unionized? Did the company hire 100% good apples before unionization and then suddenly change its mind and start hiring bad ones? Are you really going to assert that firing people is impossible in a union workplace? We both know that's not true.

You can have an apple that does shitty work and pay them 70% what you pay good apples, and everyone's still reasonably happy.

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.

Give them bonuses perhaps?

It's damn near impossible, and they can get unfired.

Also I do not work at a unionized employer, my wife does as a nurse at Stanford hospital.

All right John Galt, that's cool.

Even if we pretend that was so, at least you have a bunch. A bunch that can argue for decent healthcare, for reasonable family leave and vacation, for any benefit you care to find important. Otherwise you’re just some schmo talking to your direct manager who has been put in that role as a firewall between you and getting a bigger slice of the pie.

Developed countries have reasonable healthcare, parental leave and vacation minimums provided by the magic of a functional government. If your country doesn't maybe focus on fixing that for everyone. Don't need unions for that.

Virtually every European country has a higher unionization rate than the US, especially in the private sector. (Government employees are a huge portion of US union membership.) Unions provide a political countervailing force against business interests that helps ensure the existence of those reasonable, "magical" government policies. In some countries, unions are even involved in administrating those policies (such as in multi-payer health care systems with union-managed health plans).

Reasonable healthcare, parental leave and vacation minimums were not acquired in the countries that have them by "the magic of a functional government" but by people organising in big enough groups to matter and bargaining with the government and employers.

~20% of workers in Europe are unionized. ~30% for Canada, ~10% for US. Canada's labour laws are very similar to US, only slightly better. It's not better than or even close to being as good as Europe.

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.

See: police unions, teacher unions, etc.

This happens regardless of unionisation.

Yes they can, it just needs proper process and evidence and not "at will" dismissal.

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?

I too, form my entire world view on anecdotal evidence.

The challenge with unions is that the same/very similar anecdote keeps on coming up.

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.

The concerns people have with unions are not particularly amenable to statistical analysis. However at some point a sufficiently large collection of anecdotes does become data. Pretending people can hear stories of union-related BS so many times or for so many years and not take that into account is silly.

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