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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

isn't this the same with tech jobs though?

you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates

it's only more intense because the cost/risk ratio is magnitudes higher

We don't earn better pay and benefits because we are special, brilliant people. We are given these benefits because there is a perpetual labor shortage of people who have enough tech experience to do their employers' bidding and nobody will show up if they don't doll these out. In other words, we are a fluke, and we'll lose these benefits once they figure out how to commoditize software development.

Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union (as well as a warehouse workers union), if not now, a few more years down the line when salaries go down as a result of saturation.

yes and i don't disagree with that

yet, have you seen how many bootcamps and hype there is about tech industry?

anyone wants to be in, anyone wants the perks

the companies will do anything to trivialise our job and race wages to the bottom, so they could justify spending less money on "human resources"

Well, yes. As an engineer, you are a very expensive resource, probably working in a department that's considered a cost center.

"Rightsizing" those is great for the bonus.

> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union

Wrong approach.

Push for real engineering certifications instead. Keeps the free market (no promotions based on seniority) but weeds out the "6 month bootcamp fullstack engineer" disaster from your codebase.

That's going to be tough to get backing for, and should be. With no meaningful labor coordination, the only way that happens is for a few unaccountable people get together and dream up their idea of what that certification looks like, then do a lot of politics to stick everyone else with it.

Sure, maybe you open-source the initial development, but you can't open-source the politics because nobody can have a sensible conversation with a million people working at at least partial cross purposes, and so when you're doing the politics you make a lot of compromises that nobody gets a say in.

Best case you fail, worst case you succeed and everyone is stuck with the result, which inevitably favors employers because why do they even participate if they don't get something at least a little more like a buyer's market out of it?

So nobody with any experience, maybe even nobody with any common sense, participates in whatever process you have from the design side, because all that does is waste time lending legitimacy to something that's guaranteed to be a bad deal for labor. You haven't even sold me on it!

Of course, if you have buy-in and trust from a sizable and valuable labor base first, all this changes. But that means a tangible history of success as part of the leadership of a union, and you've already ruled that out. What you're proposing would be more like a guild, which is actually a model that can work when the people who run it also monopolize the local industry and can exclude anyone who doesn't meet their standards - including preventing other business owners from defecting and hiring skilled upstarts who the guild won't accept for inevitable and again political reasons. Management in this industry isn't that coordinated either, and can't be without being a lot more oligopolistic than it already is.

Maybe in a few decades. Right now I don't see it.

A union could choose to not seek promotions-based-on-seniority as part of its negotiated contracts, if its membership actually wanted that.

> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union (

Yeah, let's do it when we get there

I look at things like Dynamics 365 and other no-code/low-code "solutions" and I fear that we're just about at that point.

People have been trying to get low or no code solutions to work for a very long time now. The problem is that they a) they tend to be limited in the scope of the problems they’re appropriate for, and b) if you try to solve really complicated issues with them, you usually run into the same difficulty problems that you do with regular coding.

As we've been finding out with our org's migration to Dynamics from our homebrewed organizational software. (The auditing features in Dynamics are particularly limited.) Still, as time goes on these platforms keep improving on the complicated issues and the edge cases that tend to work better with bespoke software. Slowly but surely they are killing us off.

But conventional programming languages are consistently getting better too, and the needs and desires for what people want their programs to do keep getting more expansive. That’s why programmers still make so much money, why demand is so high.

It’s still possible for it to go the way you say, but so far there’s no evidence of that.

I disagree we arent special. Not that we've been selected by the divine, but dont we sit down for long periods of time trying to model reality, speak multiple languages (sounds silly to a native english speaker but most of us non native had to first learn english just to make sense of programming languages constructs), do less drug, complain less, are more flexible to change, are willing to take ownership of creative work.

I mean this exists in factories and I ve seen it... but in the floor manager, not the dudes mindlessly putting small boxes into big boxes. I d love to put them in front of a computer and let them try but they dont seem to want to, or have the discipline to spend years learning english in the first place :s

And whatever the original reason, it's probably fair to say it's parental supervision, societal discrimination or whatever, but saying it's just experience is wrong imo. To even want to acquire this experience, is something I cant even explain, I just always wanted to and shaped my life around computers, and believe maybe naively that even with a difficult starting condition, I d have ended up coding eventually all things equal.

And it's okay to suspect capital owners will try to comoditize it but it's going to transform them into people able to talk to machines or transform us into capital owners - I dont think you can design algorithms to do what you want without willing to dig into them and for that you may always need special people ? We never comoditized electricians, and this is not a trade you can simply replace anyone with anyone, so...

>tech workers union

Yeah, let's cartelize a real free market.

> you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates

That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves.

Truth is there are people out there that are trying really hard to commoditize software engineering, with bootcamps and whatnot. And honestly, I'm not impressed one bit. Best way to build the best software (it's a winner take all market remember?) is simply to bite the bullet and go get the best talent out there. The 10x rule is well and alive.

what would be your suggestion then? become a 10x developer?

i think we should stop competing and just self-employ ourselves

> That's one way of running a tech company

at least as far as TFA is concerned, it's not really about "a tech company", but a shipping/receiving/warehouse facility.

This is a gross simplification and really trivializes the struggle of people not privileged enough to work in our industry.

I actually disagree. If you're going to look down at "those people" making the company run, then yeah, us techies are just as easily trawled through and filtered via intense programming interviews. What's the turnover time for SWEs at Amazon anyway?

I think it captures the main point that Amazon hiring procedures for 99.9% of people are based on optimizing their bottom line. If they want something specific, they'll acquire it/copy the idea. Backend optimizations/tooling stuff I don't know. Maybe they're recruiting those people based on their research credentials.

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