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Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. I'm worth more than the average employee at my company, so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer.

On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.

A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.

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This feels a little contrived. I work for an organisation with trade union representation and yes there is an agreed pay structure in place. This doesn't prevent management identifying particularly critical people and those people being rewarded/incentivised outside the norms of the pay scales (I am one of these people). Sometimes specific cases are discussed in the management/union meetings but not often and even then it's just a matter of management saying "Yeah that guy is the world's greatest widget engineer if he leaves we're screwed so we created a new job to keep him here".

It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.

> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine

Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways. It's _possible_ for you to be worse off in a union, but rare.

> but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.

This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.

Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.

> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.

You do know that your employment depends on the success of the business, right?

The relationship with an employee is no more adversarial than your relationship with the local grocery store when you buy a bag of potatoes.

Yeah, except that switching grocery stores is practically zero cost, so any store that does silly shenanigans gets spanked almost immediately.

Also, grocery stores are about a million billion gazillion times more transparent about trading with you relative to trading with other shoppers.

The trading with a grocery store is heavily regulated as well. They have requirements for storage and handling, their scales have to be calibrated, and there can be very strict fines for things like screwing around with sale prices.

Switching jobs has a very low cost now as well. It’s not 2009 anymore.

Switching jobs is not "very low cost" at all. It's a huge pain in the ass, even if you don't count interview prep.

The behaviour, motivation, and goals of individuals (including your boss and CEO) working for a business very rarely has anything to do with the goals of the business itself. There is a lot of pretend going on, but that is mostly just surface BS. Why do you think CEO’s spend billions buying back shares instead of using that money to invest in new products and other innovations that will make the business more successful long term? Could it perhaps be (gasp! horror!) that they care more about personal enrichment than making the business successful long term?

> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways

I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.

Cost centers: anything that improves your experience as an employee.

It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.

Hollywood actors are part of a large union (SAG-AFTRA), but individual actors still get compensated orders of magnitude more than the average.

What particular aspect of having a union would make that substantially more difficult in tech?

The completely different industry structure. The film and theater industries work on time limited projects with a defined beginning, end and deliverable and most teams break up at the end of each project. Under those circumstances all a union can do to protect members is dualise, making lives better for insiders and harder for outsiders by restricting entry.

Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.

> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer.

Say, I am not.

> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer

I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?

> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.

Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).

> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?

No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)

I think a lot of devs are led to believe they're the World's Greatest Widget Engineer but what they've really fallen for is the "Hank Hill Special Deal" lol.

Thats ok - they are one in a million anyway. We are talking about people in general, not exceptional diamonds (they clearly can take care of themselves).

> better at your job than you are

What you mean is «better at negotiating than you are».

Work skill an negotiation skills don’t always coincide (in my experience they almost never do).

Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.

Because being an effective individual contributor and being an effective manager require different skills? Because the goal of a software company is at least nominally to produce software, and paying people who are good at producing software to produce software is how you produce software?

Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)

First level managers still write code where I'm from. In the Peopleware system, you'd give an expert like that direct reports to act as assistants.

That makes you management buddy, so saddle up and don't forget your helmet.

If you can become an enemy of the union simply by being good at your individual-contributor job, maybe that's why unions haven't really taken off in software engineering.

I'd venture a guess that the variance in quality between a set of "professional" electricians and another set of "professional" developers is different by an order of magnitude.

Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.

I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."

Not-so-subtle threats of violence. Another reason not to like labor unions.

People should really stop with the hyperbole. It makes people not take you seriously and ruins the message, even if valid.

Completely agree. Generally, when hyperbole is used, the underlying argument is week or poor, and the writer is trying to argue from emotion.

Sadly, it often works.

As a person not necessarily opposed to labor unions, I'm curious as to how the previous post was hyperbolic? Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal, so let's not act like union folks are all saints.

Somewhat relevant: https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/denver-fir...

>Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal

What do you base this on? Movies?

Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.

Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:

https://www.al.com/news/2021/07/striking-miners-wife-hit-by-...

Here's a few more people running into picketers in Alabama. Apparently these are strikebreakers:

https://www.wbrc.com/2021/06/08/video-shows-trucks-hitting-w...

Here's another:

https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/crime/police-in...

And another:

https://abc7news.com/uc-union-strike-university-of-californi...

There's plenty more.

Sure, that's all bad stuff, I agree.

But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.

I see what you are saying. Yes, violence begets violence, certainly. I would also argue that while not defending the morality, the violence against scabs are done by rogue individuals while violence against picketers are coordinated by using companies known for strikebreaking. The company typically yields a much stronger threat of violence than any individual union individual can, and has more sympathy of the "law."

The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

I'm in Montana these days and just finished a book by Michael Punke about the Butte Mining Disaster. It does a fairly good job of pointing out how basically we're all assholes when you get down to it.

This guy sticks out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood

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