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So many of you are also convinced you are expert negotiators and 200x programmers who surely deserve, and can get, get more for your work than the average programmer, so unions would surely result in less money for you.

Or at least I sure do see that sentiment in most discussions of unions on HN.

I don't think HN represents the average tech worker so that may well be true.

At the very least HN represents the tech worker either genuinely interested or personally invested in their job if not being entirely focused as a place for the top performers to share projects and information in the first place. Since by definition half of people can get more than the average if you apply either the above filters to define the average HN user then most people here probably would be right - they could get significantly more than their average peer.

> Since by definition half of people can get more than the average

Median, not average. Salaries are nothing like a normal distribution.

As the saying goes, Jeff Bezos walks into a bar and on average everyone in the bar is a billionaire.

Average doesn't always refer to arithmetic mean but yes in this case particularly median.

For the kinds of devs you are referring to, the kind that post on HN, I am skeptical that a union could materially improve the year-over-year wage increases they already see. At best their compensation trajectory wouldn’t change and unionization often causes wage compression in other industries (read: it would reduce their compensation). If you are one of those highly paid devs, everything about the calculus of unionization is unlikely to produce a positive expected return. Software is manifestly not in a race to the bottom; there are persistently more jobs than devs that can fill them if you are sufficiently skilled.

In Europe, businesses encourage labor solidarity among software devs because it suppresses wages in a global environment where software wages are rising rapidly. Exceptional devs are shamed for believing their worth is so far above their peers, even if it is true. I don’t believe most wage gains in software in Europe would be happening if US tech companies weren’t in Europe pushing the wages upward.

Unions focus on the compensation of the median ability worker. The issue in the software is that ability has something like a barbell distribution; workers at different ends of that barbell live in different worlds and are not interchangeable. The “median dev” barely exists as a useful abstraction.

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

Unions will come with professional licensing and tests to be a software programmer. I would hate this since now it’s very easy to get into the industry with several alternate modes of training. It would also create friction with hiring developers from overseas and really hamstring America’s ability to get good software out quickly. I also think we make a good living so I don’t see what exactly would improve. The only thing I can think of is unpaid overtime for salaried workers.

Licensing and testing is not an inevitable consequence of unionisation. Those are more closely associated with professional associations or guilds, which don't tend to represent the same kinds of workers as unions.

Your sarcastically expressed sentiment is correct. Unions play a zero-sum game. They change the way the pie is split between consumers, investors, and workers, in favor of the workers. Among the workers, they act in favor of the incumbents to the detriment of the newcomers. So the folks who are posting on HN will benefit from union power. Young people and especially women and minorities will lose.

Theory 1: HN commentators are irrational and could make more money.

Theory 2: HN commentators correctly identify that a union would make them less money.

The age old clash of collectivists and individualists. I personally think strong union activity is more likely to move tech clusters for America to China than it is to make software engineers more money. Software engineers already seem to be making a lot of money, it is unclear that asking for more will work, even if done loudly.

> Software engineers already seem to be making a lot of money, it is unclear that asking for more will work, even if done loudly.

Software engineers at Amazon, Apple, Uber and others could show solidarity to non-tech colleagues, just like in Hollywood, the Directors Guild barely has any reason to initiate strike action, but doesn't cross the picket line, but instead often supports "lowlier" unions.

That said - money isn't the only thing unions can negotiate: all that industry-wide malfeasance folk like to complain about on HN, e.g. around privacy and advertising: unions could negotiate rules around those.

Another one is a rule about not being managed by someone who can't code.

But in general the solidarity problem is huge. If you look at Europe where we get strikes now and again, there's always a fault line between the group that wants some change and their friends. The third party always has this problem of "do we want to piss off people that we personally are ok with at the moment?". It's understandable too, everyday people don't want to be bothered by some specific issue that causes a general strike.

> ... e.g. around privacy and advertising: unions could negotiate rules around those...

That is a political minefield, because it implies fairly directly that software engineers should try to leverage their technical knowledge to enforce their social values.

1. Risk of migrating the tech clusters to exotic foreign lands.

2. Some fairly substantial minorities in the tech industry do not support the political morals and values of the majority, and will be truly unhappy about that sort of faux-union.

Right now software engineers are leveraging their technical knowledge to enforce [their bosses'] social values.

But the situation is not comparable to gig workers, devs are much more privileged because they (think they) are in short supply. Devs may genuinely have no need for unions but the rest of the economy is increasingly exposed

> I went biking early in the morning a few times this week and came across a bunch of Uber drivers sleeping in their cars with jackets over their heads.

Out of curiosity, what city is this?

NYC, biking from Brooklyn to LIC.

Or, it's because in the US (because I assume you talk predominately about the US), there are institutions, laws, culture etc which has been pushing the US society in that direction (and/or being less able to handle the continuous change happening everywhere). I'm not sure why tech is the only thing to blame here?

Even software engineers are labor man. If it isn't livable for regular people, what the fuck is the point?

Sorry had to tend to something and didn't get to write more in my original comment but my point is exactly what you're saying. As software engineers we have a lot more leverage at Amazon than the warehouse workers, than the driver's at Uber, than the delivery drivers at seamless and instacart, at Netflix and Amazon than the IATSE workers. Uber engineers walking off for a day could do more for the gig workers than all of the strikes that they attempted in different cities.

You have to convince software engineers they are labor instead of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Some do end up wealthy. Most won’t (so says the data [1] [2]).

Edit: In my experience, older folks are easier to sell on the idea because they’ve seen how the sausage is made and have had enough time to have possibility convert to reality. Younger folks are still…more optimistic than the data suggests is realistic.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

[2] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

When you pass by the homeless (along nearly every freeway) it's hard not to feel very privileged. Even though not wealthy, still much, much better off than many.

> temporarily embarrassed millionaires

At Amazon and Uber? The problem is that they aren't not millionaires; they're mkaing 250k-650k/yr. At those companies, even in extremely high CoL, you can pay the landlord his due and be a millionaire in 5-10 years.

What percentage of all SWEs do you think those folks are? I acknowledge the outliers in my original comment but also put forth that they are a minority when considering the entire industry footprint. Software engineering is larger than just FAANGM.

Agreed, probably sub-1%, but you mentioned them specifically :)

> You have to convince software engineers they are labor instead of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

At least in the US, they aren’t temporarily embarrassed, they actually are millionaires in many cases. Software engineering today may have one the highest expected ROIs of any occupation in history.

Doctors?

You can't begin work as a doctor until you're in your thirties. Usually with a ton of debt.

I’ve watched these walk offs at Google and Facebook. They’re not impactful. The company loses a day of productivity (maybe) but everyone still gets paid. Half the time the owners are like “yeah ! We’re with you about how the things we totally did are unacceptable”.

Now if they walked off the job for a year, then things might change because it could cost their bottom line meaningfully. Maybe. But. And this is a big but. The companies are sitting on tens of billions of dollars in the bank and have private police forces on campus. I’m pretty sure they’ll pay extra for any strike breakers to come in if it came to that to avoid setting the bad precedent (from their perspective) that labor is an equal party to meaningful negotiations. The police force will try to ensure the safety of the strike breakers. The company will also go on a PR offensive to magnify any small misstep to overwhelm the bigger story.

My perception is that there's always been a white collar/blue collar split that has hindered things.

My dad was involved in trying to unionize engineers at GE, a long time ago. There was a vote, but it didn't quite make it. It wasn't until like a quarter century after he died that I realized he might not have retired early by choice.

I have zero details on it, all I know is that it was pre-Jack Welch, and probably the majority of the engineers felt that they were too good for a union.

I am a member of a union that has a long and convoluted history, but I think the origin was basically about how office workers didn't want to belong to the same union as everyone else.

People said this was folly, that it was splitting the power of the employees to our detriment.

I used to belong to a union and while helpful for blue collar work, the benefits go away pretty quickly when you can negotiate as an individual, have high mobility and strong demand for skills.

When I was in union you negotiated as a group. You bring up the bottom and pull down the top. Seniority determines most of your compensation, not performance.

> when you can negotiate as an individual

When can you negotiate as an individual?

Is the scenario you have in mind when there is an actual bidding war, when you go into a negotiation of salary with an actual offer from another firm, and neither one is offended enough to eliminate you from consideration?

How often does that happen to you and how often do you think it happens in general?

I negotiate every job offer. I also negotiate compensation by getting outside offers and benchmarking my internal pay to that.

No bidding war required. And nobody is offended. And it happens pretty often for white collar work in high demand industries.

In tech, this happens quite often. People like patio11 will explicitly say that you should always negotiate as it has net positive ROI [0] [1].

Just wondering, do you not negotiate? If so, you might be losing out on many multiples of your current compensation.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

[1] https://github.com/vlvagerviwager/salary-negotiation-tech

You can always negotiate, can't you? I except if the job is on a collective bargaining agreement, sure, but your average Dev job is negotiable, no?

You don't actually need another job on hand to negotiate terms. It's also up to you what you want to haggle over, money or holiday, on call duties, etc.

I think the key is agency. If you have it, you can negotiate. If you're always in a terrible negotiating position like certain blue collar workers, it makes sense to be in a union.

Mind you, I'm not sure if would be bad for white collar workers to unionize. Doctors for instance are white collar and have unions.

>You can always negotiate, can't you?

You can always try. If you have always made market rate, then have you ever really negotiated anything? To benefit from negotiation skills, you would have to be making way below market and then somehow convince someone to pay you what others are making. And do it without flat out lying.

Most of the pay gap between the top and bottom performers isn't much to do with direct negotiation, it's the cumulative effect of star performers being in high demand and therefore getting faster promotions, more and better offers, etc. If they get screwed on a promotion they can get another ten offers and pick the best one. Iterate over twenty years and you have a gigantic gap in comp between the top and bottom within the same industry.

> but because they're distributed it's hard for them to organize.

How's that? In 1991, maybe. In 2021? If a movement like BLM can form today, if in the 1960s Dr. King could organize, then a seemingly simpler union organizing effort can't be excused due to distribution.

To the extent that the problem is one of distribution at all, surely that's a pretty minor problem.

The problem with tech is its highly monopolistic nature . Every tech sub-sector experiences a short period of chaotic growth and then The One gets chosen to dominate with the praises of the rest of the gang. The lack of competition in the tech sector is astounding on a global scale.

Can you name one of these sectors? Cloud for instance has cutthroat competition. CRM software as well. Mobile phones also have pretty fierce competition.

Social networking/blogging whatever else fb does, mobile OS, desktop OS , web search, credit cards, online advertising, online videos, web mail, ... Maybe cloud hasn't found the clear winner yet

I agree - but I think you're grandizing engineers way too much. I highly doubt "a couple" or DevOps engineers at Uber not showing up to work would do anything at all. Maybe if the entire DevOps team striked.

> since tech ate the economy software engineers are one of the only groups with any worker power

Except in the App Store, where developers are essentially powerless.