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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t know which business school teaches people to say “ah can you smell that fresh mountain air” while they have their hands wrapped tightly around your neck …

It’s all of them and the higher you get into management the more apparent it is. They sell a system of meritocracy where those who work the hardest get the rewards. Then you get into management and working side by side with people whose first job out of college was as a VP, who explain to you how they are forcing the newly hired manager to fire someone at random to “make sure they have a backbone”

Software engineers have been tricked into thinking they are part of the in club because they are paid well enough to have the lifestyle that the middle class had between ww2 and the 80s, but we are being systematically stripped of the value we bring.

If this wasn’t true then we wouldn’t be able to point towards recent events like jobs setting up a hiring cartel to depress our wages

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> Software engineers have been tricked into thinking they are part of the in club because they are paid well enough to have the lifestyle that the middle class had between ww2 and the 80s

This, and additionally we've been tricked into feeling guilty about it as well.

And still too busy smelling our own farts to unionize.

Well, question is which part of the world you live in, of course. But I don't need to unionize. If I am not satisfied in my job I can switch. Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay, better benefits and sometimes a better job (sometimes it was equaly shitty as the prevous one but for better money). This does not happen for unionized workers.

Maybe in the future we will have to unionize. Definitely not now and not in Europe. And this is not a matter of pay, e.g. airline pilots are paid more than programmers here yet they are heavily unionized.

Would this not be the best time to form a union, though? If we start to hit tough times when programmers are treated like shit and the job market is tight, then your colleagues will be less inclined to rock the boat and management will be actively trying to crack down on any attempts to organize. Basically when you need a union it could be too late.

Right now management will be off-guard, not expecting any unionisation push and will be a little bit unprepared as to how to counter it (that is, if they even try). Employees will likely feel comfortable openly discussing unions knowing that they probably won't feel any reprisals (and if they do, well the job market is still pretty good for the moment). The tough part would be convincing someone on $1x0,000/year that they might benefit from a union.

Software engineers: "No, it's going to be different for us!"

Education still doesn't prevent us from falling in particular traps.

Yep. Hell I'm guilty of the same thing. I'm saying "we" should unionise and it's a good thing to do - while not unionising myself. My defence (excuse!) is that I'm a foreigner, my local language skills suck to the point that I'd struggle to understand local employment law so I'd be a pretty awful person to spearhead this :)

The retaliation penalty is tiny. You’re not really the target demographic for the whole union thing.

Spend your money/energy on lobbying.

I also don’t need to unionize but I’m pro-union. I think software should have a guild like the actors guild, that enforced minimum standards. when Kickstarter ran its unionizing campaign it turns out one of their demands was no productivity tracking software! I would love to know as a member of such a hypothetical guild I have collective clout to ensure I’ll never have to deal with a bullshit metric tracker again.

> when Kickstarter ran its unionizing campaign it turns out one of their demands was no productivity tracking software!

This is naive. Any ticket tracking system can be used to track productivity. And if you don’t have a ticket tracking system to organize work, that’s a miserable environment to work in.

But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this. I like this minimum. I don’t need a union to perfectly solve the problem of micromanagement but I can happily pay portions of my salary towards minimum standards of workplace environment.

Yeah 100% as a union you'd have a bit more power to negotiate a range of things with your employer, and many of them are pretty minor and even cheap. Thinking back to some previous jobs I had, the things that hurt us weren't salary related, but things like:

- as you said, productivity tracking through arbitrary means (in our case it was an arbitrary "story points completed per developer per month" measurement used to rank us)

- expectations around overtime (it was common to be asked to work evenings and weekends, you were remunerated at 1.5x or 2x but expected to do so if asked and singled out if you didn't)

- developers being frozen out of the requirements process (senior devs were begging to be allowed to spend time with the analysts, but prevented from doing so by someone in the management hierarchy, I think someone in charge of analysts)

- work-from-home (this was pre-covid, but there was an expectation that you'd be in the office unless you had an extremely good reason to and it was begrudgingly permitted)

Fighting for improvements in these areas individually is near-futile, but when you've organized yourselves management have to decide whether some very minor things are really worth pissing their entire, expensive-to-hire development team for.

If it used ticket-points instead of LoC, would that be OK? If it used “a fault-free oracle who told you a perfect measure of value created”, would that be OK?

I’m trying to figure out if you’re opposed to terrible approximations of productivity or to making performance distinctions among engineers.

I’m opposed to bullshit metrics to measure performance, lol. I don’t see how you can interpret my statement otherwise I’m good faith. I’m merely pointing out that at the very least the Kickstarter union was able to limit the degree of that particular bullshit.

There are people who are opposed only to the use of bullshit metrics and others who are opposed to all forms of metrics in performance appraisals.

Some of it comes down to having a seat at the table in deciding what metrics can and should be used. Obviously there needs to be some way to evaluate developers (whether it's subjective or objective), but particularly when they're negotiating collectively, it's reasonable for developers to have some say in this. Their interests are also aligned in making sure that the ranking reflects skill rather than something arbitrary.

> But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this

A middle manager is not allowed to use git?

This and maybe not getting corralled into working ticket after ticket and sprint after sprint...endlessly.

I have had numerous jobs in IT, and software development is by far the worst. Ticket grinding bullshit.

The sad part is that developers think this is how software development is so they can't even demand better. Clueless.

Lots of developers apparently WANT to do this though, when they belittle all the "soft skills and politics" that they feel are inferior to writing code. The irony is when the machines take over they'll start with executing the carefully defined instructions on all these tickets, while the last humans around will be the ones defining the requirements and hasing out the intent.

>But I don't need to unionize. If I am not satisfied in my job I can switch. [...] This does not happen for unionized workers.

I can't work out what "this" is that does not happen to unionised workers? Unionised workers can switch jobs to get more pay too.

If the union has a structure with the company that rewards seniority then job hoppers are punished.

I think there are different definitions of what a union even is. German here and I was really quite surprised to understand that unions in the US are apparently per company. I believe in most of the EU, unions are per business sector - so while unions are in a sense stakeholders of the companies (if the company goes bust, it can't provide jobs), it usually doesn't have a specific interest in keeping employees in a particular company.

American unions have 'shops', which often correspond to companies. But sure America has national unions. Most of them are.

I've always heard "shop" used in relation to a particular business being union or non union in terms of who they hire (i.e. "they're a union shop" means they'll only hire IATSE or something like that and no non-union people), and "locals" being the actual union you belong to, but that's from the theatre world which might be a bit different.

Ah, that makes sense, then I might have misunderstood.

So does that mean, when the headlines say "Amazon workers (from a particular warehouse) vote to unionize", it's really about bringing that warehouse under the umbrella of an existing union?

Oftentimes, yes. They could form their own union but it's common to join an existing union.

Having universal or near universal union membership for a certain profession is limited to certain jobs, things like warehouse workers or retail employees aren't anywhere near that.

Geniunely asking. As I live in a part of world where we stay in longterm jobs.

Is it not stressful when switching jobs? - from paperwork, interviews, new colleagues, friendships, on-boarding, new place politics - especially for brain.

You get used to it. After a while if you become good at interviewing and going through the motions you are probably more secure than someone who has "job security", no matter how hard it is to fire someone a company can still go bankrupt.

If I got fired tomorrow it would result in a vacation, probably followed by a raise. When you get to that place it isn't scary at all.

I'm guessing you are American and under 35 because there's a whole generation of you that considers an 13-year tech bull run with massive stock appreciation as normal, and the hardest problem is passing leetcode interviews. It's a very different story looking for a job in a real downturn like 2000 or 2008.

If you keep looking for the same job as you get older, yes. I'm well above your age guess and starting a new job soon, but it's definitely not the same role or expectations as 20 years ago. I've found that if you work to differentiate yourself as an individual the substitution cost is very high, so you can find work even in the most challenging environments. I think this would be a much harder strategy in a heavily unionized environment.

Something to consider is pension lock. Your pension is tied to a specific employer, and leaving means losing everything. I hear this all the time from school teachers, but it also happened to my mom: Budget cuts were coming and while she had enough seniority to stay employed, she didn’t have enough juice for choice of location. She was going to have to accept a job that required an additional hour of commute that she couldn’t do for health reasons. So she had to leave 2 years shy of a pension. She got nothing, and she also doesn’t qualify for Social Security.

Thankfully we don't tend to get those scam pension traps in tech, instead we get 401k's which are your own money.

It is extremely stressful some of the times even. But it's the reality we live in. People don't change. Companies change extremely rarely. If you are smart enough to reverse-engineer software systems -- a necessary skill during onboarding -- then you are smart enough to see nobody will change things to a more positive environment, and hence you should leave.

I hate it with all my heart but if I have to, I'll do it 50 times more. I am never allowing myself be held hostage.

> I am never allowing myself be held hostage.

So, you navigate this quagmire begrudgingly, yet don't favour unionisation?

Unionization does not magically change poorly managed companies into well managed ones.

Of course it doesn't happen by magic, it takes dedication and hard work.

No, but unionization gives you a seat at the table to negotiate the rules of the game with upper management. Collectively you stand a better chance than individually to improve the working conditions.

> unionization gives you a seat at the table to negotiate the rules of the game with upper management

Hmm, but is this really the case?

I know it's how it's sold, but does it actually work like that?

Unionization can be hijacked by employers, history knows of such occurrences. Plus Amazon and Google have been caught up (in the recent times nonetheless) of hiring paid saboteurs to impede people from unionizing.

My job is not to do underground mafia wars. If the employers want to fight dirty I'll just move to someplace else. Eventually they'll be stuck with the people who are OK with being slaves -- but won't be creative or efficient.

I wish them luck. They are hurting themselves, not me or the other worthy programmers.

Unpopular opinion: unionization is like democracy: people think it works but in reality there are a lot of shady deals under the table and the system hasn't worked as it is supposed to, for a long long time.

Inquiry: does this apply to other well-paying unions, such as the actors guild and professional sport players? I’m genuinely asking, because as far as I know they are still in existence and regularly ensure better working conditions for their membership without limiting their mobility.

My wife had a client that went on to play in the walking dead. In order for my wife to be able to continue to do her client’s hair, she had to join the actor’s guild and be “licensed” by them and pay dues. So, I’d say they (at least the actors guild) def can reduce your mobility, even say which hair stylists you are and aren’t allowed to use.

Well, in order to do her hair for the role. She obviously could style her hair for events in her private life, right? A wedding or whatever?

It seems a stretch to say the union interfered with her 'mobility', any more than you can't do plumbing on a public building without having a license etc.

They have hairstylist on site for the role, as well as wigs. But even in her private life, she had to use guild sanctioned hair stylists.

I'd need a citation for that. Seems impossible to enforce, and a gross violation of privacy.

Contracts are amazing… and terrifying. Feel free to send them an email and ask.

Wait so like, your wife got up to do someone’s hair every single day because the person couldn’t brush their own hair according to their union??

We're talking like a normal every 6-weekish haircut. Nothing crazy.

I am not saying effective unions don't exist.

I am saying that when enough money are in danger [of having to be spent by big companies] that unionization gets under attack with very questionable and shady techniques.

I wasn't aware that I have to remind HN of the recent articles, published right on this forum, of evidence that Amazon sabotaged unionization efforts by hiring people who deliberately derail discourse and pump outrage. But alas, apparently people believe only what they want to believe.

It wouldn’t change anything about the job description. Even unionizing doesn’t mean that developers suddenly get more say in how uselessly their time is spent.

> Even unionizing doesn’t mean that developers suddenly get more say in how uselessly their time is spent.

I mean...yes, at the macro level, that's part of the point of unionizing.

The reality in which we live is one crafted by people, and if you don't have a seat at the table crafting the rules, then you are the one being taken for a ride.

Generally yes and that's the reason I've been reluctant to switch jobs for small gains. I stayed with my previous employer for 6 years (plus 2 calendar months because here you have to file in a letter of resignation 2 months in advance, that's by the law).

But software development can be stressful on its own: you have endless pointless meetings which serve no purpose but you have to attend them, you have mandatory corporate team-building shite which you must attend or you lose the "software engineer SENIOR" job title and you have to show leadership skills to HR people and your managers during pointless "funny" "games" during the team-buildings, you can't be involved in illegal activities (e.g. rage-type murder of your manager is a major no-no which can ruin your career for good). You also have to learn new things constantly in your free time because your employer is reluctant to pay for courses. The list goes on. My previous job was applied research and especially the university professors who did the actual research treated us like a piece of shite. I can't even count the number of times I heard something like "you can't understand anything because you have only Master's".

The stress-level of switching to a new job is generally comparable to normal activities. You need to grow some thick skin.

>Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay, better benefits and sometimes a better job (sometimes it was equaly shitty as the prevous one but for better money). This does not happen for unionized workers.

As a counter-example to this specific point, the Screen Actors Guild does a tremendous amount of work to raise the pay and conditions of the median earning actors, without preventing the highest performing members from negotiating compensation in line with their ability to contribute to the success of a project. We can have our cake (collective negotiation) and eat it too (million dollar+/yr IC roles).

Other notable examples; State bar associations (lawyers) and the American Medical Association (doctors).

All the Hollywood & TV & Stage unions do that.

Also professional sports unions.

The Bar Associations and the AMA are not quite unions though they certainly advocate and lobby strongly on behalf of their professions.

For the Bar there may be confusion because of the names of licensing agencies. In California, the state agency is the State Bar of California, but that has nothing to do with various bar associations.

> Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay

The last 15 years have also been a relentless boom market, longer than most.

It won't always be that way!

The best time to prep for bad times is when the going is still good.

> And this is not a matter of pay, e.g. airline pilots are paid more than programmers here yet they are heavily unionized.

[Citation needed]

here you go:

* https://centreforaviation.com/news/pilot-union-accepts-emplo...

* https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/klm-clears-path-to-bai...

VNV is the pilots union of KLM, the Dutch national airline. IIRC they were the very last of the unions to sign up to the 'commitment clause' the Dutch gov required as part of their bail-out during Covid. Not a union without teeth.

If you include quality of life at work, exposure to radiation, not being able to sleep in your own bed and have dinner with your family everyday, and slogging through years of lower paid piloting to have a low probability chance of making it to the higher paying flights, programmers handily beat pilots in the pay to quality of life ratio.

I wasn’t clear. Pilots absolutely have strong unions (which is partly responsible for their levels of pay).

I was contesting that pilots are paid more than developers. If you have data that supports that, please share. It seems like an absurd claim.

Well, depends on the country you live in.

My country: https://www.platy.cz/platy/doprava-spedice-logistika/pilot https://www.platy.cz/platy/informacni-technologie/programato...

Average is CZK per calendar month gross (which is some 25-30% higher than net).

Pilots 38k - 132k Programmers 36k - 86k

as employees. If you work as a freelancer programmer (i.e. you have your own trade license) you can easily earn twice as much but if you count-in all the employee benefits granted by the Work law it's usually not worth it if you already have a family (which I have, therefore I switched from freelancing to being an employee).

And of course, Ryanair/EasyJet pilots are not counted in the statistics. The same goes to students - programmers which kludge together a Wordpress site and "sell" it.

Those numbers roughly match what pilots make in USA[0], but 86,000 CZK per month is about 20% (or less) of what an entry-level programmer would make in the USA. The lower bound of 36,000 CZK per month would be only just above USA federal minimum wage.

I think part of the push-back against programmer unions from American programmers is that there's such a wide range of skills, and at the moment the market allocates compensation more-or-less according to capability. In many important ways, a programmer earning $500,000 per year at Google is in a different industry than a programmer earning $50,000 per year at General Motors.

[0] $52,000 per year according to https://www.indeed.com/career/pilot/salaries

Gosh... can't imagine paying for my pilot training (even in the USA it's usually half of what's here) and be paid $52k.

It's pretty disingenuous to equate a RyanAir pilot with a student, which speaks to the misleading nature of comparing these statistics straight up; go look at what it takes in terms of training, experience and seniority to get to one of those higher paid pilot jobs. Now compare it to software development. 36k is less than minimum wage in Canada ( < $2K CAD / month); junior developers are easily making 3x that in their first role.

> It's pretty disingenuous to equate a RyanAir pilot with a student

Ironically, as Ryanair pays pilots significantly more than the range in the GP's comments (at below the low-end and high-end), including them would support their argument.

The only way to make the claim that pilots earn more than developers stick is to ignore all but the high-end of pilot salaries at major airlines and include all developers. A fairer comparison would either be to include all pilots (including the low end piston engine pilots at skydiving DZs and other utility roles) or to only include the top-earning professional developers (maybe MAGMA).

If this happens to be about France, then I can second this. $116K AirFrance vs €39K software engineer.

https://fr.glassdoor.be/Salaries/airfrance-pilot-salary-SRCH...

https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Software_Engineer_%...

That seems like an example of selection bias. Does the average software developer in France earn €39k? Does the average pilot earn $116k?

The answer is obviously not - do you have any salary data?

Did you look at the links? They both claim their numbers are averages.

I’m not saying they are perfect sources, but they do align with anecdotal datapoints.

Neither are reputable sources, I'm afraid.

> I’m not saying they are perfect sources, but they do align with anecdotal datapoints.

So you say, but that's definitely not true for me (who lives in the States and Ireland). In fact, it's an absurd claim to me.

It’s absurd in most countries I’m sure. The OP said

> airline pilots are paid more than programmers here

(emphasis mine)

I just gave one geographical example where I believe that to be true. I don’t think it is true everywhere, nor do I think OP meant that.

It seems clear he means in Europe from his preceding sentence, where I think it is absurd ( including in France).

With “is absurd”, do you mean that the statement isn’t true, or that you think that pilot’s should not be earning more than software engineers?

It’s not true.

i don’t think you understand what unions are for

also, for every engineer, there is one who will claim to be able to do the job cheaper. that is why we need unions. that, and to get rid of leetcode. people already went to college and that should be enough.

>> that, on to get rid of leetcode. people already went to college and that should be enough.

I don't like or do LC interviews, but even if (a big IF) college prepared you for programming, a LOT of professionals don't study development or even attend college. How would they get into the industry? Take 2 years off later in life and attend college?

if you did not go through college but picked up programming that’s cool. this should not put requirements like ridiculous leetcode interviews onto those that did go through college.

any good college will require significant programming work, so by the time you graduate 4 years later you not only have CS theory subjects down but are able to write software and can pick up any language in a few days.

What would be your expectation for an union? I was union member as a developer when I lived a Nordic country (union for engineers and other academic technical professions). Main benefit I saw would've been legal help if I got into trouble with an employer. Otherwise the working conditions were anyway in such a good shape that I wasn't really sure what I should want out of it.

Software development is one of a fairly short list of fields where people regularly epouse the virtues of unsustainably long work weeks, and openly state that employees not meeting those requirements will not be successful. I wouldn't describe the working conditions of software development as great in many companies, a lot of snacks doesn't make up for 80 hour work weeks. I could definitely see a guild type arrangement setting minimum standards for hours and working conditions, just like they do in other well-compensated fields.

> Otherwise the working conditions were anyway in such a good shape

Would the stability and general level of working conditions have anything to do with the fact that most are unionized, and have been over a long time so they can do their job responsibly, perchance?

Yes, the working conditions are earned by previous generations through their hard work for unionization and employee rights and is not something that can be taken for granted.

Maybe the parent wants the union to fight for the same conditions as Europeans now have? I wouldn't know. My experience from a Nordic union certainly wouldn't be a good take of what an union membership in Brazil, US or Japan would be like.

You don't think that, perhaps, the working conditions were so good because of the strong culture of unionizing in Nordic countries?

That's a fact for sure, and I was a member partly because of recognizing it's good keep that balance of power in employer-employee relations.

agreed

If you think thatthe lifestyle of a software developer with a few years of professional experience is only as good as the middle class between the late 40's and 80's you're either vastly revising history or weren't there. And before you trot out home ownership remember that all those tiny post-war bungalows housed families bigger than yours and were not located in the handful of big centers were housing is so expensive.

Most software developers do not work for faangs. 2xxk or above salaries are beyond imagining for most

very true

> Software engineers have been tricked...

I think of this when managers come up with different requirements during the project. If the requirements seem to make the product better, I'm all for it. I like to work this way and they pat me on the head for being "agile". But I always end up kicking myself when they ask why the project is taking longer. I fall for it almost every time because I like to tinker.

One of these days when I’m feeling salty I’m going to make a wiki page called “why is it taking so long” and list every feature that drew out the schedule. Hopefully it’ll be seen as helpful, but probably not.

> setting up a hiring cartel to depress our wages

I missed this, any details?

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/60000-tech-workers...

"former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and top executives from [Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm] had reached "no-poaching" pacts prohibiting each other from trying to lure away each other's top workers with offers of higher-paying jobs."

These were the ones for whom DoJ had enough "smoking gun" proof, but Jobs and Schmidt had a lot of friends elsewhere (Larry Ellison...), so the cartel was likely much bigger.

IIRC, Apple and Google (Steve Jobs and whoever from Google, Larry Paige probably) did it circa 2008. Douchebaggerymaximus.

Yeah, the ad-run Internet allowed ideas to be capitalized easier, and it also made memetic - not even novelty - value dominate over everything. That resulted in manager-sales role capture entirety of credits. That had been great for some temporarily embarrassed millionaires, I guess, but it sucks for the rest.

I received a settlement from the case because I worked at Intuit, also a party to the cartel.

Google apple suppress wages.

> whose first job out of college was as a VP

What? How?

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