Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshalizee | Hacker News Reader

I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers.

Of course, it wouldn't be 1:1 mapping, but a collective tech union-like open institution would go far in leveraging against hostile employers.

CEOs get golden parachutes on signing. It's time tech workers start demanding what their exit package looks like in case of layoffs/reductions against their will. I know a lot of this is wishful thinking, but in the face of an increasingly bleak economic landscape, we may need something like this sooner than later.

View on HN

Like quite a lot of guilds and unions, the actor's guild started out by defending workers rights against a restrictive system (in that case, the Hollywood studio system) but has evolved into a gatekeeping and rent-seeking organization that primarily enriches its senior members and hurts everyone else.

We really, really don't want that in tech. Tech is one of the few segments of the economy where skill trumps credentials and connections for people entering the field. As a result, tech benefits from a lot of talent that would be ignored by more traditional methods of filtering candidates.

And what would tech workers gain? Unions don't stop layoffs -- look at the past few decades in the auto industry for proof. Unions would also negotiate standard pay packages that might be attractive to low performers, but would hold high performers back. Plus, severance packages are already legally mandated for layoffs in the places where the majority of tech workers live.

but has evolved into a gatekeeping and rent-seeking organization that primarily enriches its senior members and hurts everyone else.

This is not simply false, this is the typical FUD spread by people who have no idea how guilds or unions actually work.

SAG does not prohibit non-union actors in SAG-covered productions. In fact, appearing in a SAG-covered production is how one qualifies for membership into SAG.

SAG sets minimum thresholds for pay, benefits, and rights. Actors are free to negotiate better packages if they have the leverage for it. Most don't, which is why the actor-waiter meme is a thing for people hoping to get cast into a SAG-covered role. As someone who has appeared as a background actor in a SAG-covered production: SAG minimums are significantly higher than non-SAG pay, at every level.

> This is not simply false, this is the typical FUD spread by people who have no idea how guilds or unions actually work.

I have been a member of several unions and I know what I'm talking about.

You can disagree if you want, but I am speaking from real life experience.

I am speaking from a position of legal expertise about how Hollywood unions function.

I have been part of the legal counsel to several Hollywood guilds/unions, and have participated in the production of multiple Hollywood and non-Hollywood productions. Like you, I was also a member of a non-Hollywood union (while I was in the public sector), though that experience is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

What you see from the legal perspective vs the actual on-the-ground wheeling, dealing, favor-trading, social circle maintaining, networking actions to even get onto a union production as a non-union worker can be quite a big spread.

The intended legal requirement can be very different from the way it’s practiced on the ground.

My own attempts to break-in + friends’ experiences shows a clear pattern: the guilds gatekeep, almost arbitrarily, and creates environments primed for abuse.

Perhaps the legal, corporate side of the guilds should realign with the reality on the ground and change this. That is, if this is an undesirable state of affairs.

You actually have it backwards. Unionized productions aren't limited to unionized crew; in fact working on unionized productions is how you qualify to become a union member. OTOH, union members are generally prohibited from working on non-union productions. IOW, it's the opposite of gate-keeping.

It sounds like you and your friends tried to get hired as crew onto jobs for which you have no experience, because if you guys did have the experience you would already be union members and you would be swamped with work or offers. (The thresholds are pretty low. I'm one production away from being a member of several unions and I'm trying very hard to avoid that since it would limit my ability to work on non-union productions).

Most jobs don't hire people without experience without someone vouching for them. Why would you think that Hollywood would be different? They don't know you from Adam and from their point of view there are millions of other people just like you that are willing to put in the time and effort to start at the bottom instead of trying to skip a few rungs.

If you want to work in film, start at the bottom (i.e., meaning as an assistant or an extra) or work non-unionized productions (generally, low-budget or student films).

If you haven’t been a member of SAG, you don’t know what you are talking about.

I’ve been a member of SAG (as a child, but still!) and the WGA (as an adult). The systems are imperfect. They are also significantly better than productions with no guild affiliation.

Sounds like you don't know any other reality.

Skill trumping credentials and connections has not been my experience in a 35 year career.

The gatekeeping by recruiters and HR departments is extreme - until I got my CS degree a couple of years ago I could not get interviews anywhere, despite the fact I'd never been sacked from a job and was always one of the best coders in my teams with the broadest range of experience.

I lucked out many years ago on getting an interesting job but that job went through a series of acquisitions and after a while I kept trying to get out but couldn't get interviewed anywhere.

Then I finally get a degree and get a job made with a contact while doing that and all of a sudden a few years later I can at least get to the first round of interviews.

Software development is in no way a meritocracy, and companies see us as interchangeable components with very little intrinsic value as SV workers are finding out in droves.

Software developers are essentially the blue collar workers of the 21st century. We are the modern fitters and turners. Highly skilled in some cases, but not valued.

I would not call a degree requirement extreme gatekeeping.

When your hire can prove your algorithm runs in O(1) amortized time but has trouble setting up ssh and always commits to master, and you turn down a candidate who got stumped on rederiving Bellman-Ford but maintains several projects, I'd say that's gatekeeping

dajtxx claimed 'extreme' gatekeeping while describing some employers having either a degree requirement or higher standards for employees without degrees. In the US, to the extent that this is 'extreme' it's in the 'less gatekeeping' direction.

(I agree that there's some gatekeeping, and I'd rather see the industry pay less attention to degrees.)

I humbly disagree with some aspects of your comment. I think software engineers are highly paid, almost the lowest paid devs in the country are decently paid. Companies are just looking for a simple filter and a degree is an easy one. With my degree I actually did learn theory and did learn to program in several languages and did learn how to work in groups. But that's not universally true of course. And there's plenty of self-taught people. I have known a few people who got started without a degree as engineers doing software and it was really hard until they had an extensive resume. After they have a resume it doesn't matter. I just see it as a lazy, easy filter. The reason I don't see us as fitters and turners is because there's so much demand for our resources and you can become wealthy. My wife has a master's degree in library science and this isn't open to her. She's national board certified and I probably started out at more than she'll ever make.

I got into tech without a CS degree and I know a lot of other people who have.

If you had trouble getting your foot in the door, it's probably because of something else.

> Software development is in no way a meritocracy, and companies see us as interchangeable components with very little intrinsic value as SV workers are finding out in droves.

That's just not true. Interchangeable cogs in a machine don't get paid several hundred thousand dollars a year. If you want to see what being interchangeable really looks like, work in the food service industry.

I've been a developer full time for 35 years, since I was 16 years old. I've led teams, I've been a systems architect, I've never been fired. I can program in Java, C/C++, Python, COBOL, asm of various flavours. I've written crypto software, ERP systems, remote sensing systems, BI systems, dev tools.

I have never got paid close to several hundred thousand dollars a year, and I have always had trouble getting through the HR degree filter until the last couple of years when I finally got my CS degree.

You could be right, the problem is me. I don't have enough contacts due to 15 years of fully remote work and spending too much time at my previous job, and I don't want to flog myself any more because I'm in my 50s.

But I am certain my career has suffered greatly by not having that piece of paper 'proving' to HR I know what I'm doing. And yes, I am bitter about it ;)

> I always thought having a "guild" like Hollywood does or something similar would be a great boon to empower tech workers.

Maybe. But remember that the Hollywood guild system also acts as gatekeepers keeping people out of the system.

Would AI be allies or scabs?

Why not both? GANN vs LLM, an eternal cat and mouse game even more pointless than cryptocurrency mining

Software development has arguably more gatekeeping even without any guild. Got a CS degree from a university that isn't R1 and didn't score a summer internship? Need a visa sponsor? I don't envy how painful your early career will be. Luck out with the Stanford admission and a summer internship? You are playing on easy mode.

It depends on what part of the industry you're working in. If you're looking at FAANG-style companies, that's absolutely true. But there's much more to the industry than that.

I got my FANG job with a degree from a 50-ish rank school. I think their acceptance rate was 70% so it’s not exactly Ivy League levels of gatekeeping.

Some of my coworkers went to even lower ranked schools or altogether don’t have degrees (though I admit it’s uncommon).

When I was at a FANG I had at least three bootcamp grads for close coworkers, and many with degrees from schools you've never heard of.

Some of the best engineers I've ever worked don't even have a bachelor's degree. These autodidacts will suffer greatly if the wrong kind of "software guild" gains control over licensing tech employees.

Not really, if the guild founders include self-taught coders then they will make provisions for their fellows.

SAG doesn't require a degree in screen acting. It's a little convoluted but they basically operate mainly on proof of work. That sort of system would probably give self taught engineers who spent their years from 18-22 doing actual work a huge leg up compared to those who were in school during that time doing no work on any projects for any company.

Those people have a huge leg up right now in large swaths of the industry anyway.

The issue with the "proof of work" standard is it sets up a difficult conundrum. You need to work to join the guild, and you need to be a guild member to get most work.

You can get hired for guild work as a non guild member, usually you join the guild after though.

And that is the main gatekeeping mechanism that keeps so many talented young writers, actors, cinematographers, etc. out of the game or working for pennies on the dollar as assistants.

It’s great when you’re in but if you don’t have the connections to get in you can find yourself on the outs for years.

If a SWE guild can find a way to eliminate the nepotism and create a meritocratic way to get into a guild…

Sure, it's obviously possible. If it weren't there would never be new actors on the scene.

But the number of times I've heard directors and such tell stories about how they wrote a line for a non-speaking part as a favor to the actor in the role, solely to allow them to get their SAG card, is disturbing.

It's indicative of a high degree of gatekeeping.

The sag rules have changed in recent years to be a lot simpler.

>It's a little convoluted but they basically operate mainly on proof of work.

It's mainly leveraging cartel power rather than proof of work. Even if you have a lot of experience acting in non-union productions, you're still ineligible from joining SAG. To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing for SAG because the number of aspiring actors far exceeds demand, so SAG increase wages without causing the most of negative effects with cartels, but I don't think this is the same for tech.

You don't think school has any value? There's a reason we have higher education - Work-based learning is somewhat prone to leaving significant gaps in a person's knowledge.

Not to say working has no value, but neither does schooling have no value.

It has approximately zero value for doing the job of software development vs. equivalent time spent with actual work experience. It has value otherwise, but I'm really not concerned about that when hiring my future coworkers. There are other ways to acquire the skills you learn in college. This credentialist bias of yours is exactly what I'm arguing against. Guilds tend to promote this mindset, when they're not too busy promoting nepotism.

School is a good tool to gain a comprehensive education. It is not the only tool to gain a comprehensive education, and it is not effective for everybody.

Strong disagreement!

Software is the high paying industry with the least gatekeeping I'm aware of.

I never got around to finish my degree. Neither did Bill Gates. I've worked with highschool dropouts and Harvard graduates. And by and large, nobody cares!

Did you also have generational wealth and networking like Bill Gates?

Not in the slightest :)

I don’t think the production guild system works in tech. In Hollywood, guilds and unions are necessary and work, in part because most people in the guild are independent contractors. Each production is its own thing. And that assignment could last a day, a few weeks, a few months, or years (depending on your contract/position), but it’s not an ongoing concern.

Whereas in tech, that isn’t the case for the majority of the employees at large companies. Yes, you have consultants and contractors, hit the vast majority of people at Google or Microsoft or Facebook are full-time employees, not hired on a project by project basis.

And that changes both the incentive structure and the organizing power. There are other unions that could be better parallels to trying to organize tech — but I don’t think the Hollywood guild system is the one to try to copy. You’d need to have specific unions covering each company (even if many companies were still affiliated with the same umbrella union) and carve outs and contracts for each company or even subgroup of workers inside a company. You couldn’t just do a blanket SAG-AFTRA style guild for everyone at every company when most of the employees are not on contract but full-time. It just wouldn’t work.

I've been thinking about how IT union would look like, because IMO the reason it still hasn't materialized is that it needs to be dramatically different from the unions every other industry has. For one, I think it should be remote only, highly automated and the main offer would be to create a platform to discuss problems that arise, collectively make a choice and then enforce it through the hands of union members, if people sabotage the process they get kicked away. Have a way to prove that you are indeed a current member, things like that.

But a guild minus the dues, bureaucracy, political infighting, barriers to entry, and corruption.

The biggest barrier to unionizing in tech is immigration. A union is able to collectively bargain by restricting labor supply. If outside workers are able to work the same job, the biggest weapon a union has is taken away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com