Is hackernews on the side of QA people?
What’s the general feeling? I can’t see their working conditions being genuinely terrible or unsafe, or the pay being that unfair. Perhaps they’re being driven too hard?
What’s the general feeling? I can’t see their working conditions being genuinely terrible or unsafe, or the pay being that unfair. Perhaps they’re being driven too hard?
I'm on the side of those unionizing. Work conditions don't need to be unsafe for folks to unionize, and I'm fairly confident in saying that the vast majority of folks everywhere (in tech anyway) are paid an unfairly low amount for the value they generate.
If I have an employee that generates 100M a year, but I have boundless applicants that can perform that same task then the unfortunate reality is that person is not that valuable.
Just because a union isn’t “needed”, doesn’t mean it can’t be helpful.
The 100M a year here is generally rapidly competed away in this situation.
Value generation should be +/- the only metric for salary(besides whether or not you negatively affect the rest of team because of your behavior)
Rightfully so too -- none of the programming jobs I've had have made me believe that crunch time is actually necessary. But, management has to plan not to have crunch time rather than rely on it regularly.
Under a union, the gaming industry will have to give a lot more time to work on tasks that have a specific deadline that can't be moved (like tie-ins with external events that won't get delayed, such as the super bowl for example).
What's "fair" got to do with it? If they can get more, they should. Companies don't stop at "fair". CEOs don't stop at "fair".
Is this in general or in this specific case of defending their decision to unionize?
In general, I feel that QA should be paid as much as devs, when they are good. I've worked with a couple of "holy shit, how did you find that?" level of exceptional, and I felt they deserved more than I was paid and actively argued as much with our manager. Those people made me better, they made the products better, which ultimately made the company better. Keeping these people around make other QA people better. Instead, they get hired away because nobody pays them their worth, and you're left with a much less capable QA team.
I know it's got a particularly bad reputation in SV but software developers are long overdue a strong union.
Can I ask what you are basing this assumption on?
They sell a position to a qualified candidate. Keyword is sell. They're not going to tell you what frustrations other staff have, or if they treat their workers like shit, or if they make unreasonable demands that aren't in the job description, or if scope-creep on a project 4 months down the line will require me to start putting in overtime I didn't agree to, etc.
If you know of an accurate way to determine what the day-to-day working conditions are for any arbitrary position in any company over an extended period of employment (including how work conditions will change with things like leadership changes, mergers, departmental transfers, special projects, etc.), shoot me an email because I will invest in whatever magic it is.
The general consensus seems to be that good QA is highly valuable. As for if their pay were unfair, would they not leave for a better pay/safer working conditions?
My personal take is that people in the software industry don’t understand what terrible working conditions are. Running out of odwalla or having non-organic fruit in the micro kitchen is not terrible.
Isn't that the equivalent of other jobs in other industries where no qualification is required?
That is such a trash comment. Good QA/test/validation engineers are worth their weight in gold! It is a absolute crime we don't pay the profession more.