Why? I would argue rhat the consumer might get harmed (higher prices) or the business (higher wage costs) but the employee? How?
Overall, this encourages everyone to act in the bare minimum fashion and the business will suffer when pitted against a motivated workforce at a competitor. Unless the business has a very big moat, it will collapse under the union bloat.
Even Amazon FC workers, and SV employees who had their wages suppressed by illegal collusion, it seems.
The only people it makes sense for are those with other reasons to go (culture, family, etc).
That is the, as some would say, the "blackpill" that is toughest to swallow. Developers in the West need to realize their relatively high salaries are on borrowed time. It all will come to an equilibrium, but that doesn't mean we can't still fight for our collective rights to keep as much money in the country as possible.
I've been hearing this for 30 years, and went through all buzzwords: outsourcing (India), off-shoring (China) and whatever catchy name they gave Russia/Ukraine..
The world never ended, the pay never went down, and the jobs didn't disappear. The doomsayers will be right one day.. but not today :-)
It wouldn't take a lot for the domestic software developers to passively sabotage such software via collective action of failure to maintain it and letting the first unexpected heavy dependency crashing bring the whole system down. Even if a lot of company ops are outsourced, having all your site reliability engineers walk off the job sets the company up for any small fire to quickly become a large one.
A union can organize through collective action a walkout of software maintainers. Few organizations (big or small) run automatically indefinitely without the hundreds to thousands of changes per day such teams make. The three examples you've provided (GitHub, Slack, Teams) often grow per-enterprise integrations to make them work the right way for a given company, and when those integrations crash, who will be available to restore or correct them?
Through simple inaction, a site reliability team can "cause" a company's infrastructure to spin itself apart by simply refraining from stopping it from spinning itself apart.
We need unions and capital controls based on the counterparty's labor and environmental standards.
Agreed. The significance of the capital risk loss on most investors actual livelihoods and future investments is very often over dramatized. The risk is purely capital and at a certain point, capital accumulates capital.
Once you reach a certain level of capital accumulation that your needs and even wants are met, the rest by stable low risk and nearly fully secure investments, anything beyond that can be easily risked in incredibly high risk investments (or higher risk investments) in hopes for big payoffs. Rinse, repeat, and you might become stupidly successful or might just dither around being fully financially independent.
When people talk about investor risk, they often think about Bob or Pam down the street pulling out their life savings to take a risk and put their all in the business they're going to start up. This isn't how most investors look, most investors aren't taking much of any personal risk other than the risk of not improving their standard of living beyond an already very good standard of living. This type of risk to me is overly rewarded in our financial system. If Bob or Pam fail, they're screwed. If a typical investor fails, they wait until they snowball some more capital and try again.
Getting paid in equity doesn't make you “the investor class”, aka the capitalist class, aka the haut bourgeoisie.
Having the overwhelming share of your support coming from capital returns rather than pay for labor does that, but equity as a component of labor compensation doesn’t, alone, do that, or even move you out of the working (primarily dependent on labor income) class into the middle (split dependency on labor and capital with neither dominating) class.
Lebron James and Tom Brady are union members.
The large majority refused and preferred to stay in EU. Admittedly, my sample size is around 15, but still meaningful.
Apparently people are not liking my comment and it's getting a lot of downvotes.
> If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large.
The increase in salary can be massive, often 2x or above. Even including the increased cost of housing in large cities and health insurance.
Still, the increase in wealth hits a point of diminishing returns. Most people I know claim they have a better quality of life in EU overall.
I do agree that Europe does a good job of guaranteeing decent working conditions for the bottom half of the labor market, and it's totally reasonable to prefer a society where those benefits are widely available to everyone. But from an individual comp/benefits perspective for a skilled engineer there really isn't a comparison -- the US wins hands down.
Legally that is true. However practically only a very few tech companies don't exceed that standard. (the exceptions are mostly startups, which if things work out will make the people taking the risk worth far more in the long run - I don't think the risks are worth it but enough people have made millions on those deals to call it completely stupid)
That said, overtime is only expected in a few corners of the industry anyway, game development and pre-growth-stage startups being two of them. It's pretty easy to avoid those sectors if you want to maintain a 40-hour schedule. I've never been expected to put in overtime in my career, either in or out of FAANG.
If you get seriously sick, you're much more likely to get effective and timely treatment with the gold-plated health insurance plans provided by US tech employers than the options I'm familiar with in Europe.*
I'll 100% grant that the US healthcare system is really messed up, and if you're not in a highly-compensated field you're probably better off in most European systems. I'm socially liberal and would much rather the US system were more equitable, even if that means my own personal experience gets a bit worse. But that doesn't change the fact that if you're an in-demand engineer your personal interactions with the US system will be great.
* To be fair, I've only lived in London and Barcelona, so there may be other parts of Europe with better healthcare systems. But at least compared to those two cities, I've had much better experiences with my employer-provided health coverage in the US than in the public UK or private Spanish healthcare systems I've used.
In my specific case though I was bootstrapping my own startup, which had no funding, revenue, or employees. (I survived by living off my wife's PhD stipend at the time.)
In the US you wouldn't have had any health insurance at all?
Have you compared health insurance at a FAANG in the US with NHS + Bupa in the UK?
I looked into this precisely because I was interested in moving to Europe for a while and found it would be very difficult for me to afford for my wife and I to both live in Europe and travel Europe on my salary alone (and the odds of her finding work in Europe seemed slim).
And now with Obamacare exchanges, low incomes folks can qualify for substantial premium subsidies. Deductibles and out of pocket limits can still be significant, but one could consider it catastrophic coverage.
Basically the general balkanized-bureaucratic chaos that affects all US healthcare is not ameliorated by medicaid being the single payer. Something simplified and streamlined like the UK NHS sounds much better.
I have lots of friends in the UK including some who work for the NHS and none of them characterize it as “streamlined” or “simplified”. “Bottomless money put” has come up a few times. I’m sharing this out of amusement more than anything; I fully support single payer and I suspect even the UK’s NHS is better than America’s system in general.
Of course. I wasn't thinking properly.
And you can't compare professions where you get paid for fame with professions where you get paid for performance. It is really hard to prevent famous people from making loads of cash, but it is very easy to prevent high performers from getting a higher salary than their peers as both companies and unions would prefer that.
A lot of software does often have a credits splash screen somewhere, if it's open source you can probably see contributions on GitHub, etc. Game designers are fairly well known even if all the coders aren't.
You can buy John Carmack products.
SAG is in no way the norm when it comes to US Labor employment unions.
Not necessarily. It just institutionalises office politics. If you’re in a customer-facing role, the skills that make you successful at lobbying customers and lobbying your union might be identical.
Why wouldn't organized labor in software build their unions the same way?
In other words, it's just another interested party that gets inserted as a middle man between you and your employer. If you weren't lacking in leverage, which most engineers are not, you're unlikely to find the upside.
I’ve never worked in an Amazon Warehouse but I don’t think there’s any room to negotiate any of that - no matter how good you are, you’re still a replaceable cog to Amazon.
Unions work when people are all equal in output. Assembly lines are only as fast the line, it doesn't matter how much faster you can put that bolt in the hole than the next guy: it just means you have more time to wait for the next widget to come before you can put the bolt in the hole, so you can't be worth more than the guy who barely gets done in time (and the guy who is a little slower needs to be fired)
However even roles where the skill set is filled by more people a good worker, that shows up on time, has few absences, performs the job with limited errors, and has higher productivity then other members will be valued more by the company, and (in a non-union setting) often be giving more wage increased, promotions etc
In a union setting however none of that matters, everyone is on the exact same contract, and the pay is often determined by tenure not performance.
Obviously this is a doubled edged sword.
As long as you hit whatever metrics the agreement says you're gonna be tracked by you'll say employed and get your scheduled raises. People can be real jerks to everyone around them and cause all sorts of problems while still doing whatever their on-paper job duties are.
The guy who wants to work his butt off make everyone happy and pivot that built up goodwill into a quick promotion or internal transfer to a different role is usually SOL in those kinds of workplaces.