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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure going from "we can terminate your employment without cause" to "okay these are the reasons we will terminate your employment" is a HUGE stress relief for people.

Unions, even when they're not doing much, bring in stability.

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Turning the decision to fire someone into a hyper-formalized procedure mostly seems to result in environments where terrible people never get fired, like the DMV.

1. The DMV is actually an amazing quality of service. Ive lived in a couple of states. California was just on another whole level of bad. Anyway, DMV is actually really efficiently done.

2. What part of firing people do you think is going to fix the bureaucracy?

One bad person can ruin a team and cause good people to leave. See California where it can take 5 years to fire a bad teacher and 100000s of dollars.

Same for me in New Mexico two weeks ago. I had an appointment and had a new license and license plates within 25 minutes. It was an excellent experience.

There was a guy next to me who hadn’t read about the required paperwork and tried to argue. His experience probably wasn’t great but that was his own fault.

The DMV is an outdated example.

I remember decades ago standing in line literally for 3 hours to finally get to talk to the person at the desk only to be told I had the wrong form. Then back to the end of the line.

I honestly can't think of anything that has improved as much in my lifetime as the DMV.

Only if the organisation is thoroughly incompetent, and in that case it's already a terrible place to work. Of course it's possible to put too much bureaucracy around firing people, but the correct amount is not zero.

From my casual observation it’s rare that terrible or incompetent people get fired but politically not well connected people.

Not really. I haven’t been “stressed” about losing my job in decades. I keep my skillset up, my resume in sync with the market, my network strong, and have a go to hell fund.

The only time it has ever taken me longer than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “offer” is for my current job. That was only because I wasn’t really looking and was focused on this one job where the interview process took a month to schedule.

Good for you? Not everyone lives where jobs are plentiful. There are a lot of reasons a perfectly competent person may struggle to find a new job if they lose their current one. There are plenty of reasons a person may not be able to float for even a month between getting fired and getting a new job. It's nice that it's easy for you, but that doesn't mean everyone else is just lazy or incompetent because it's not easy for them.

We are talking specifically about tech workers. My company’s headquarters is on the opposite coast. Remote work is a thing.

Theres a lot more reasons that can lead to job loss other than technical competence.

Being in a union gives you a slice of ownership in the company you're working in. It allows you to have support if you're getting bullied. It also creates a wonderful dynamic with your coworkers.

But yeah, framing this as a technical problem is missing the point entirely.

I realize that. My financial livelihood is not dependent on my current job. It’s dependent on my ability to get another job.

It is purely about you taking control of your own career and not wait for the union or government to protect you.

The demand for software developers is not new. It’s been there since I started working in 1996.

Taking control of your own career could mean supporting a union.

This is what you're saying: Do you use any type of insurance? If so why are you waiting for these companies to compensate you? Just take control of your own life and don't use them.

Unions are a system of mass negotiation. The same systems that make our economy work.

How well have the union shops fared in the economy?

Our economy works based on supply and demand and individuals making the best choices for themselves. Again I get back to Amazon (where I work). They weren’t forced to completely redo their compensation packages across corporate because of a union. They were forced to do so because SDEs were quitting like crazy.

They've worked pretty well in the fact that we owe unions the fact that were working only forty hours a week.

SDEs quitting like crazy would've had a much stronger impact if it was an organized strike and AWS literally went down.

Salaries employees often work more than forty hours a week. But why do you want to take away an individuals agency to decide what’s in their own best interests?

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