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> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.

Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.

>There will be false positives, but the rate is low

What do you base this on?

My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.

Wouldn't that be a false negative?

A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity.

I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.

You're right. Edited the comment accordingly. Both false positives and false negatives exist.

I think it's pretty silly to suggest that that the failure of public schools is just due to teacher unions.

I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is:

a. incompetent administration

b. failure to desegregate our schools.

> failure to desegregate our schools

Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.

> how does desegregation help poorer performing school

1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds.

2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs.

3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor.

It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students.

I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.

> I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain.

It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district.

If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids.

We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood?

I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all.

Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.

> here's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back.

Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback? If you look at recordings from Boston parents during the busing protests, they're quite clear about what their issue is ("n*****s").

> If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school

This sounds intuitive when you hear it for the first time. And I did alude to it in my previous comment. But I don't think we should overstate the effect. From 21st century data, at a macroscale, enrollment does not really drop when you integrate, even when that integration involves sending kids to schools that are not the closest neighborhood one.

Cambridge, MA has implemented a '21st-century busing' controlled choice approach and saw no decline in enrollment. [0] Parts of Brooklyn recently did the same and saw no change in the enrollment of white students. [1]

It's hard to say exactly why this is the case - perhaps racial animus has declined, perhaps there is a growing awareness that attending a racially diverse school is not actually harmful for educational outcomes, perhaps white flight in the 80s and 90s wasn't caused by busing in the first place, perhaps the benefits to remaining in cities are increasing, etc.

Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.

I don't buy that de facto segregation is an inevitable result of freedom of mobility. The evidence strongly suggests that it is related to policy choices and that it can be changed. Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?

[0]: tcf.org/content/report/cambridge-public-schools/ [1]: https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/11/14/21121770/a-push-to-integ...

Sorry for waiting over a week to respond, but I wanted to address your example about Boston.

>Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback?

Not wanting to send your kid to a bad school in a bad neighborhood? Let's be specific here - these were parents in South Boston worried about sending their kids to Roxbury. (Yes, ironic given Southie was also a bad neighborhood.) Sure, plenty of them were racist as hell on top of that.

To the larger point - were these privileged kids living in Southie? No - they were also poor and working class, just like the kids in Roxbury. So where are these privileged kids living? In the suburbs. Which didn't have busing into inner city schools. And where affordable housing means paying half a million dollars for a condo instead of a million dollars. And there's very few POC who can afford living there. Are these families racist? Maybe not overtly, but they certainly aren't challenged to living along side POCs.

> Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.

So it failed in the 90s instead of the 80's. Roxbury and South Boston still have bad schools (although both are less crime-ridden than the 70's)

Interesting enough, Cambridge and Brooklyn have grown in affluence starting in the 90s, which more affluent families moving in. Lo and behold, the schools improve across the board as the city can bus kids and resources around to poorer preforming schools.

> "It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students."

I could not disagree more, not with our current approach to inner city schools. Desegregation through busing among bad neighborhoods didn't improve bad schools. Affluent families moving into those neighborhoods did.

> Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?

Given the current trends, I'm not seeing the interest in making these poorer communities less poor. It would be bold to see an attempt to bus kids from affluent communities into the city, but that is very unlikely to happen.

While not addressing the problem directly, school desegregation efforts usually also spread socioeconomic classes more evenly. Poorly performing schools almost always have poorer students, and bringing in more well off parents allows for things like fundraisers and increased parental involvement in things like PTAs and band/football/etc. organizations. Despite the "Karen" meme, more involved parents can also lead to problems (bad teachers, broken facilities) being addressed that would otherwise go unacknowledged.

Sorry, just look at which school systems are still closed to this day regardless of the science. NYC union leadership rebuked the CDC when their guidelines did not meet NYC union rules.

Where as much of the rest of the country has had children in schools just fine for months.

You can damn well place a lot of blame on the unions because they are not there for the welfare of students and no action they have taken shows otherwise. If anything they guarantee the least needed teachers will ever end up in schools desperate to have them. They will go after any alternative means of education which includes home teaching, something they have effectively now forced on many minority families in our largest cities.

The science is not clear-cut. Many "minority families in our largest cities" have been polled and support continued distance learning while the pandemic is ongoing. In the urban district that I grew up in, I know this to be the case, I am not sure about in NYC.

I think it is funny that outsiders on an anti-union crusade will continue dismiss what students & parents who actually go to schools like these say many of the problems are.

e: And I'm not saying unions are entirely unproblematic. I had a few (2 or so) teachers who were protected. But they are so far from the root cause of the dysfunction in our urban schools. Informal segregation is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.

This gives me new perspective. I wish we had more discussion like this.

If all media could list facts and stats, and lay out all kinds of reasons and assumptions. Unfortunately, both left and right media are doing the opposite. For instance, some right labels NYC teacher's union as a woke entity. The teacher union said that reopening school was racist. And Twitter, oh, the almighty righteous Twitter, simply bans the accounts who are opposing CDC's guidelines. It's just so hard to see influential medias and platforms to engage nuanced discussion.

Okay, here are some of the stats I'm relying on to say that desegregation is needed and good:

* Randomly assigned poor & black students to socioeconomically diverse and non-diverse schools, found rich-poor achievement gap was halved in math (https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2010/10/1600543...)

* Systemic benefits in national tests for students in socioeconomically diverse schools, regardless of family background (https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica... along with a whole laundry list of other evidence).

* Evidence that minority parents in my school district favor distance learning while the pandemic continues. I couldn't find the original stat because the thread was deleted, but here is a similar poll showing the same thing (https://www.the74million.org/article/as-more-dcps-schools-op...)

Thanks. I was not challenging your comment. Instead, I was trying to compliment yours, as it gives a new perspective on why teacher's union didn't want schools to open. Otherwise, I had this impression that the union used racism to hide their true motives.

And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise.

>unlimited PTO

This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.

> This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.

Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine.

Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited".

But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)?

The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO"

is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO.

But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*

What's interesting about that Workforce article is that the tone is completely different from the sources it cites. The "2 days less per year" article by Namely that they cite is about how to effectively implement an unlimited PTO policy that doesn't have that side-effect. In the Fast Company article they cite, they found this:

> In a survey we conducted just before we hit the one-year mark, our employees ranked unlimited vacation third-highest among the benefits we offer, just behind health insurance and a 401(k). It beat out vision insurance, dental insurance, and even professional development, all of which ranked highly in their own rights.

Their Unlimited PTO policy didn't move the needle at all on how much vacation people took, but it had a huge impact on how people felt about it. In short, they appreciated being treated like adults.

How the author of that Workforce article got from the two sources they cite to the extremely negative article they wrote is beyond me.

> "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.

Then work for a company with fixed PTO. There are plenty of these; the vast majority, actually. Why are you so hell-bent on denying that choice to people who wish otherwise? Even worse, you're telling these people that they are wrong and that unlimited PTO cannot possibly be a good fit for them. How can you expect people not to disagree when they have first-hand experience of the contrary?

You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either.

>In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.

Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally.

>And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop.

Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure

Are you a poet?

In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

And research in logs and events can either be quick or very slow, depending on what you're looking for.

And it's also easy to slop out slow bad code, and make it someone else's problem (dev side of things).

That's a story about overzealous productivity metrics coupled with a non-thinking management class. It's hardly an argument for or against being able to identify bad performers.

I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.

but does your manager? or does s/he actually only see the pizza guy delivering the pizza?

"My manager doesn't recognize my hard work" is a totally different statement than "performance is subjective".

Good point. But the managers make most of the decisions, and they usually can't recognize performance. So if you have a 10x developer who is admired by all coworkers but disrespected by management, they probably won't get raise (unless they change the job).

...does that happen?

The situation you're describing is going to be far more about the specific personalities and power dynamics than anything related to accurate performance estimation.

I have repeatedly seen companies treat their contractors with lot of disrespect, such as repeatedly sending their salaries too late, or extending the contracts for the next year at the very last moment (in one case the papers to sign were delivered literally on December 31st in the afternoon). Some of those contractors were the best developers in the company. The company employees who did the paperwork simply didn't care.

In the most absurd case, the best developer got a contract offer from another company with deadline to sign at the end of November. He wanted to stay at the current company, and the managers were telling him they wanted him... but he was unable to get the contract extension on paper. So at the end of November, he was like "okay, screw it, I wanted to stay here, but I am taking the other contract, to avoid the possibility that I would miss that other offer and this company would not extend my current contract here". So he signed that other contract (starting from January), and when towards the end of December this company finally offered him a contract extension, he was like "sorry guys, but I already signed a contract with someone else". He left, and the managers were all surprised "but we told him we wanted him, why couldn't he wait?" During the following year, a chain reaction started, when his closest coworkers left too, then more people left, most of them reasoning like "I was already considering a change of job, but I stayed here mostly because of good friends at workplace, now that the friends are no longer here, I might leave too". The company lost most of their developers... because there were not willing/able to extend their best developer's contract two months before expiration instead of the usual one month.

Another example, this was an internal employee, there was a super talented guy, freshly out of university, but incredibly experienced in some technologies. Also super helpful, whenever someone in the company had a technical problem, they usually asked him for help, and he always helped. The whole company changed their technological stack based on his recommendations. Then, one day, another company approached him and offered double of his current salary. He wanted to stay, so he went to management, described the situation, and asked them for 50% increase (which would still be only 3/4 of what the other company offered him). The managers refused; as I later learned, their conclusion was that "a person this young does not deserve such high salary". So the guy left.

Maybe this is "specific personalities", but those personalities seem quite frequent.

It's not a matter of identifying the obviously worst performers. It is about insulating the majority of middling workers from the whims of their bosses so they can't be fired at a moment's notice for a vaguely defined idea of "poor performance".

This kind of obtuse comment is part of why pro-union people have such a hard time convincing any anti-union people.

People have had bad experiences with unions protecting shitty employees far beyond what companies usually do, and the response amounts to, "NUH UHHH".

If that's what people have actually experienced, telling them "actually what you saw with your eyes isn't reality" is not effective messaging.

The comment you responded to gave a response to multiple points, it's far from "nuh uh." Your characterization is inaccurate.

I'm specifically talking about dismissing concerns about how bad employees are protected or how promotions are handled.

> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either.

Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed.

"No, you didn't actually see that."

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.

Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.

On the flip side, I've been a student in a school with a teacher's union (NYS public middle school) and a school without (South Carolina public high school) and there was an absolute world of difference between the two. My NYS teachers were almost universally better, whereas in South Carolina good teachers seemed to be the exception. My good SC teachers made 20k/year less than my worst NYS teachers, iirc

If by NYS, you mean Westchester (as is not unlikely given HN), I don't think this is a fair comparison.

There are a lot of confounding factors here. New York state has higher median income, lower violent crime, etc than South Carolina. It is more than possible that the unionization of NYS education is a result of its better education system rather than its cause.

And even worse, schools can't be shut down. It's okay for companies to have unions. In the worse case, the company closes doors, so ultimately the union needs to work with the company one way or another. In government entities, unions are tumors as they don't need to worry about their employers going down.

You make it sound like everything is subjective and there are no bad or good workers. And since we can't accurately, objectively measure performance, let's just pick metric we can measure even though it has no correlation with performance.

Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.

    They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.

    And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.

This is only for people who just apply to "jobs" and accept whatever money is given. You're entirely in control of negotiating terms and it's easily possible to negotiate wildly different employment terms than your coworkers at medium to large companies.

Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination.

I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that.

You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.

> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.

This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.

> wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable

We can use seniority, but why not get creative and rank employees by height, moustache density, or digits of pi memorized?

> not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that

You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment?

Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.

> In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure.

Then either you and all your coworkers so far have been amazing, or you're the bad one. Either way consider yourself lucky!