Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

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> It’s open to anyone working for Alphabet (besides, if it works like a typical union, management).

This to me kind of highlights the disconnect of unions in software engineering. In many companies including Google, there are parallel IC and management tracks. There are ICs in leadership positions but just without any reports. Does that mean, e.g. an L7 staff engineer can unionize but not an L5 manager?

And then it leads to me wonder, why can't managers unionize in a typical union? Even at a big old-fashioned manufacturing company with a union, the managers are still individual people who are separate from the company itself. Presumably the reason is that they already have better conditions, they're highly paid, maybe they're already aligned with company itself because they have an ownership stake or some incentive bonus structure. All of those arguments apply to software engineers as well.

This may be a cheesy analogy, but in some ways all software engineers in tech are already effectively the middle managers. They oversee the "assembly line" that generates the revenue for the business, which just happens to be software rather than people.

From my read of the situation (based on past union experience), this is not a normal union. They do not seek exclusive bargaining power for a contract.

It seems more like an association of employees who seek to influence leadership on specific topics. There influence comes not from the threat of a strike, but rather just numbers (eg we have X% of workers, all willing to put up 1% of pay, you should really listen to us).

In that case, for an average employee making $100k-$200k a year in base salary at Google, I can't imagine paying $1-2k a year for the privilege of raising concerns without any real teeth. They can already do this anyway in retros or all-hands meetings, signing on to open letters to the executive team, etc.

Not saying that the organizers here have malicious intentions, but if you did have malicious intentions then something like this could actually be a pretty good scam... Re-purposing the word "union" for something that is not really serving that role, and collecting money from people who will ideologically sign onto it without thinking because they automatically think "unions == good". Basically making money off of the current shift to the left in US politics.

I gather you have not been to a Google all hands in a while?

IMO, part of the issue here is they made open communication part of the culture early on, and then cut if off, causing shock/backlash.

At least in Canada I’ve seen two different unions at the same place. One Union for managers and one union for the other non-manager employees. I don’t think there is anything stopping managers from forming their own different union.

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