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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to keep saying it - unionising has been a bad stratagy that loses. That has been true pretty much forever. Trying to muscle and threaten the organisation in the world most willing to give you money is wildly silly. Red Hat doing layoffs doesn't change that.

Software Engineers have been massive winners of the hyper-capitalist faster-than-regulation world of software. The salaries are outrageous relative to the amount of effort put in. Changing strategies because of a 5% workforce reduction would be stupid.

As a body of engineers we all stand to gain far more by breaking the anachronistic guilds in law, medicine and other trades than from unionising in software. We'd see some real progress in medicine if it was easier for people to get in and fix the rather obvious problems that plague the industry. I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades.

Locking down software companies did not work in Europe. They just ended up playing 2nd fiddle to more cut-throat approaches. It won't help. People might get an emotional kick out of it, but we'll end up paying more and getting less if people keep trying to force companies to make irrational decisions.

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Corporate shareholders are permitted to form a union of owners. It works for them.

Workers should have the same rights. That's just balance.

As far as the bad strategy comment goes, I've been working in both public and private unionized organizations since the 1980s. They seem to do quite well and I'm happy to have benefited from good salaries, benefits, company-matched savings plans, and a great pension plan that is -- contrary to all the propaganda out there -- very well managed and sound.

That being said, your comment does capture the "race to the bottom" mentality that free trade agreements have produced. I agree that if countries choose to allow capital to move freely and constrain labour at the border, the result is sub-optimal for the majority of us.

Workers are permitted to form a union. By and large, technology workers choose not to exercise that right.

Which is fine. I'm happy when they have that choice, because that's balanced. Owners have the choice to go it alone or combine too.

Pretty sure employer cartels are illegal.

I wasn't talking about cartels. A corporation is a union of owners. We've just been trained not to see it that way.

> I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades.

Every 2 decades?! I'd say it's more like every 2-3 years.

Also I'm not sure the salaries are "outrageous" except for a select few devs working at FAANGs, and those only make up a small fraction of all developers out there. The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.

If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong.

> The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.

I've talked to a lot of old people, seen plumbers and tradespeople at work and visited Asia a couple of times. Read a bit of history in my spare time. The majority may believe that but they are working from instinct rather than evidence. The evidence is they have one of the most comfortable, low risk existences in the history of humanity. Both in an absolute and relative sense, also when compared to currently living humans.

But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.

> But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.

Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry.

How would you "drive the wealth out" without eliminating demand for software, which has been on a long upward trend because it underpins so much and because increased productivity leads to demand for further productivity increases + maintenance of the existing increases?

If it's just some "unionized employees are lazy and don't actually do stuff" trope, I don't buy it.

The Hollywood model has always seemed like it could work quite well for software companies, especially startups or "release-oriented" things like games.

* wildly different success rates for different project, resulting in wildly different compensation depend on what project you're on

* generally short "try to make a big hit in just a few years" time frames

* sometimes things turn into long-lived recurring series

* incentives to push crunch time and other crazy work practices if not checked by something

Obviously it's not a perfect 1:1 match everywhere, but a lot of similarities and it's an example of creative, flexible work happening with collective bargaining and better-than-government-mandated minimum standards.

The union/non-union split could even end up looking like a split between top-tier VCs and studios and everyone else hustling trying to break in...

> Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry.

The stereotype is starving actors and artists. I don't want to copy their strategies. I want to be a capitalist in a free market; we have wine and big comfortable leather bound chairs. People who like joining unions seem to get angry with me because my approach leads to me having huge amounts of stuff.

I happen to fund my capitalist ways with a software engineers salary, which is quite high. If I get sacked once a decade or so I'm still going to crush most of Hollywood in terms of economic outcomes.

I'm serious here, as far as I can tell unionising is a bad idea. I wouldn't do that if I was trying to live a wealthy and comfortable life.

I question if you're making a good faith argument there. Your "starving artist" stereotype applies much more to non-union Hollywood than it does to union Hollywood. You can be a starving artist without needing any union. Get rid of Hollywood unions and there is 0% chance you stop having starving artists. There's only so many people and so many hours in the day, compared to how many people desperately want to create stuff to try to make it big (or just to create at all), so that attribute will never go away.

Again, software has a unique attribute of how good software creates demand for even more good software that Hollywood can never match.

There's two ways to get people to take chances:

* desperation

* a good safety net

VCs help with the latter already for founders. I think a good union could help a lot with it for would-be startup employees.

1) I work in software because it offers the most money for the least work.

2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union.

I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer.

> There's two ways to get people to take chances

That seems to discount the reality that Silicon Valley startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world right now. No safety nets. Not much desperation. A relatively high number of workers becoming millionaires.

Making it harder to run a business by empowering employees to just shut things down when times get tough is unlikely to help get businesspeople to take more risk.

> 2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union.

Funny, the superstars themselves certainly do not agree with that sentiment in general; and indeed, the industry was infamous for exploiting superstars prior to unionization.

Software superstars far outperform Hollywood superstars. That isn't close either. Some of the richest people in the world are people who succeeded in software. The wealthiest people in the world for the last 5 years have been ex-computer technicians.

The difference is instead of wasting their time with union politics to try and make their lifestyle work they were busy trying to figure out how to make money. The answer was a resounding "not unions".

That's not the difference. You're being willfully obtuse. Less imagined "time-wasting union politics" [whatever you think that means for SAG] doesn't change the TAM for an Oprah or a Brad Pitt to let them be a Jeff Bezos.

You latched onto the stupidest of all possible ways to interpret my post and compare the two fields because you don't want to engage with the actual things Hollywood unions do or how they actually work.

The people in a wealthier industry have more money than people in a poor industry. You just picked an answer that shows that.

Unions will make the software industry less wealthy. Eventually that will flow down to wages.

I'm not being obtuse, I'm being effective at getting wealthy. An approach I encourage for everyone else in the software industry I might add. You're holding up an example that is worse at making money than I am and saying people should copy it. No! People should copy the industry that is effective at minting millionaires. People should be copying the freedom of software rather than software copying the industries that unionised and stayed poor.

This is an even more obtuse point than your last attempt.

Go open a non-unionized laundromat and see if you make more money than Hollywood. That's all that matters apparently, right? Or maybe a sweatshop - seems like another great "free market" place to work!

You're a political tool making statements of faith instead of objective evaluations.

But you have once again picked an industry composed of people who are not wealthy and said we should copy them to make money. There is a reason when we think "unions" the industrys that come to mind are, in the main, full of workers who don't have much job security or income.

Unions are wealth-destructive. If you destroy the wealth in an industry, it cannot afford to pay high wages. If the industry has no wealth to destroy sure, unionise. You were already going to get paid nothing and you'd still get paid nothing. That'll lock down any hope of changing practices to improve things. I don't want to work in an industry that has unions; I want to be in an industry that is full of economic zest. The reason why software engineers do so well is because they are in one of the freest markets going. The wealthiest software engineers happen to be in the freest markets too. There is a bold and obvious correlation between freedom, high wages and wealthy employees.

Reducing the freedom of software companies will not help me live comfortably. Won't help most of the rest of us either. If people don't have useful work to do at a company, they should go and find a different company to work at. That is the fastest and also most effective way to maximise wages for everyone.

> Or maybe a sweatshop - seems like another great "free market" place to work!

I mean, people mocked the Chinese for this back in the 80s, now they are wealthier than the English. So, yeah. Turned out that was the path to prosperity. India kept trying socialism and ended up decade(s) behind.

If I were in China, I would advocate sweatshops and I would also have been vindicated as they pulled themselves up from poverty to success by working hard and building stuff with poor labour practices.

All the Asians started poor and just worked hard. They didn't strike, they didn't unionise their auto manufacturers and force jobs overseas. They allowed sweatshops to run. They made the biggest improvements to their lifestyle in a generation in all of human history. If they had allowed more freedom to their population they would have gone further too. Chinese wages have risen so much thanks to allowing those sweatshops that now it isn't profitable to run a Chinese sweatshop any more.

EDIT typing a bit quickly. "Wealthier" was wrong - I meant higher energy per capita. See https://ourworldindata.org/energy . The wealth will catch up to the energy though, China is on a wildly great ride. We should, ironically, be copying some of the economic practices of these nominal communists.

But we already have the actual, real-world, non-hypothetical example of Hollywood pre- and post-unionization, and the latter is more effective at creating millionaires (to use your own arbitrary metric) than the former. So why are you insistent on comparing it to an entirely different industry?

As respectfully as possible: what on earth are you even arguing at this point? You claimed that Hollywood superstars "don't need unions" -- I pointed out that the superstars seem to feel they do, and that prior to unionization they were oft exploited. What does their compensation relative to a handful of tech entrepreneurs have to do with that?

I work because I want to make money. My argument broadly is that we should adopt policies that maximise compensation for people who work to make money. Specifically, we should resist unions in the software industry because they are likely to have a net-negative impact on compensation. I expect my job would end up in Vietnam eventually, for example, and in the short term expect that wages would stagnate compared to an alternative strategy that doesn't involve unions.

Hollywood's practices have expressly failed to maximise the amount of money they earn - at all levels they earn less than people who went in to non-union fields. It does not follow that we need to copy their practices. Indeed, this is superficial evidence that their labour practices are failing. What law of gods or man exists to say that actors should be paid less than a Red Hat software engineer? They get paid badly because of how their industry is designed, unions and all.

Now I am happy to be on the record saying that the unions aren't the biggest problem that actors face - mainly their problem is that entertainment is a low value add industry and a lot of people are willing to starve if it gets them on a big screen. But the core problem is that small companies in the entertainment world can't make a good profit and can't afford to pay their employees much. The unions ain't helping with that problem, the unions are exacerbating it. I've avoided the whole industry because it looked like a hotbed of people who were going to stay poor and I don't want the industry that I'm in to start copying their failed ideas at how to align management and labour to make money.

> Hollywood's practices have expressly failed to maximise the amount of money they earn - at all levels they earn less than people who went in to non-union fields. It does not follow that we need to copy their practices. Indeed, this is superficial evidence that their labour practices are failing. What law of gods or man exists to say that actors should be paid less than a Red Hat software engineer? They get paid badly because of how their industry is designed, unions and all.

You keep conveniently ignoring the simple fact that actors were worse off prior to unionization. No amount of rambling is going to change that; unionization improved their wages. I will not be responding further because it's increasingly obvious that you are not willing to actually entertain fact-based apples-to-apples comparisons and, frankly, you seem unable to differentiate your beliefs from facts.

I dunno, how much of a change do you think it caused? How much does the typical actor make? I going out on a limb assuming it isn't better than the average wage. These aren't people who are savvy with monetary decisions. They're the sort of people who try to unionise to make more money and then end up living off breadcrumbs and thin soup based on the people I know from showbiz. When it comes to high wages they've done pretty much everything else wrong before joining a union, and then they unionise to continue that trend. I want to optimise my financial outcomes; a good start is copying success stories (which, again, mainly involve being flexible and responding quickly to changing circumstances) rather than trying to learn from famously-struggling actors.

The evidence here is that the job you do (software vs. actor) has a bigger influence on your pay than union-vs-non-union. The unions are allowing actors to stay in jobs where companies believe they are adding no value. We're better off in the world of software with our systems that promote people quickly moving to jobs where people think we are adding high value.

We'd literally all be better off if the free market were left to reign, kick them out and have the actors out to move into jobs where they are making a valued contribution. That is what happens in the software industry and all the software engineers I've met are making bank. Maybe some would have to move industries to something more useful than acting - seems likely, seems miserable and seems like they'd end up looking back and saying things like "yeah it sucked but I ended up making a lot more money and retiring comfortable because I learned a trade".

Are you a Marxist?

> I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer.

There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. I never asserted that everyone in Hollywood is better off than the average engineer at any particular company, or whatever dumb strawman you want to come up with.

You dismiss the role of unions for the highly-compensated in Hollywood but ... do you have no curiosity about why they exist? Why the superstars aren't constantly trying to tear down the union? Can you imagine no world where the superstars were worse off if they had been the victim of more predatory behavior early in their career before they were superstars?

---

I'm not fully sure I even agree that SV startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world. SV startup culture in particular is VERY well-capitalized companies, greatly lowering the risk for founders.

You will see a lot of people in that world complain about it being hard to hire - they don't want to compete with bigtech salaries. The salary/equity difference between founders and employees means the latter group is often shouldering as much or more risk, without as many chances to take money off the table. So, typically, you get inexperienced kids who don't need great health plans or benefits and will work for less money. Easy to see ways a union could be mutually beneficial there - no need for every startup to have to worry about company-provided health and benefits, for instance.

Management being worried about a strike seems perfectly fine - employees are in exactly that position regarding being laid off constantly in most of the US (at-will employment). So employees know not to fuck around, generally. Maybe it could be a better thing if managers similarly had to respect their employees a bit more - maybe it would prevent a lot of the "let's hire a bunch of new people during a pandemic just in case this weird blip turns out to be a permanent change, however unlikely that seems otherwise!" idiocy that started a bunch of this at FAANG companies, if "we can just lay them off easily if needed" isn't as easy as all that.

> There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect.

But the argument today is literally that we should be homogenising the practices of the market which pays employees well with the practices of the market that is famous for forcing women to sleep with people for opportunities.

I refuse to back down on this point - that is a terrible strategy and we should not do that. We should be doing the opposite of what Hollywood does in this instance. The evidence is overwhelming. I would not choose to work in Hollywood if I wanted to make money and be paid well. None of us would, I suspect, since this is a tech forum.

I would rather be working for Red Hat, even with this round of layoffs.

"I happen to fund my capitalist ways with a software engineers salary, which is quite high. If I get sacked once a decade or so..."

You are not a capitalist. Capitalists, by definition, do not get sacked.

You can like capitalism, but words mean things.

> If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong.

Sacked?! If you think the only time people switch jobs in the tech industry is when they get sacked, with all due respect, you know nothing about the tech industry, and your views and understanding about most corporate jobs today is most likely very, very outdated.

If you're already voluntarily switching jobs every 2-3 years, then nobody should care that Red Hat is forcing its employees to switch jobs every ... when was the last time they had a layoff, I dunno... years. It is barely an inconvenience.

when you switch jobs voluntarily, then you can do the job hunting on the side and you can reject offers that are not obviously better than your current job.

when you get laid off then you may have to take the first offer that comes along, even if it pays worse because (at least in the US) many can't afford to be out of a job for long. in germany you have to take any offer that pays at least 80% of your current salary if you don't want to loose unemployment benefits.

getting laid off is a massive difference compared to switching jobs voluntarily.

Or maybe the entire structure has been upturned.

My story: laid off 3/20 because of the pandemic. Had a nice gig with a nonprofit that saw their revenue crater because of lockdowns. Followed by a year of contract work, followed by a year working for an established firm owned by private equity. PE went slash and burn in 2/22, went to a startup in March only to have their Series C fail to close, another startup in June with funding, who did a 30% layoff in December because they needed to conserve capital-their funding plans for 2023 fell apart. I had more jobs in the last 3 years than I’ve had in the previous 25.

So with all due respect- f** off.

Please don't break the site guidelines, no matter how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.

Your comment would be just fine without that last bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> unionising has been a bad stratagy (sic) that loses. That has been true pretty much forever.

If lowering hours, raising pay, better working conditions are a losing strategy.

> Trying to muscle and threaten the organisation in the world most willing to give you money is wildly silly.

Glad these organizations never muscle and threaten.

I think you have the direction of money mixed up. The workers create the wealth, and the heirs who own IBM stock parasitically expropriate dividend profits from those workers surplus time. The money flows from the workers creating wealth to the aristocratic expropriating parasites.

There are two parties here - the workers creating all the newly created wealth with their labor, and the heirs who parasitically expropriate profits from their surplus labor. We know you're not on the side of those of us doing the work, so it's clear which class you're representing.

Unionizing is a bad strategy that loses when governments captured by the elites who own the capital help those same elites squash the power of unions. When governments get out of the way (marginally better) or work to actively balance the power structure (much better) it's not such a losing strategy: workers' lives improve, and companies generally end up doing better.

> I'm going to keep saying it - unionising has been a bad stratagy that loses.

Perhaps rather than repeating yourself, you should consider defining what you mean by losing and backing up your claim with data.

> We'd see some real progress in medicine if it was easier for people to get in and fix the rather obvious problems that plague the industry. I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades.

But would that be good for doctors' paychecks? This pivot midway through from "unions are bad for the people in the unions" to "unions and similar mechanisms are protecting the people in them at other people's expense" doesn't seem fully consistent. It's consistent from your point of view - "give me what I think is best in the situation regardless" - but that "I just want what's best for me" is exactly why collective action is so often appealing. A view of the field as "the salaries are outrageous relative to the amount of effort put in" sounds like a management POV, not an engineer POV, and similarly focusing solely on the "effort" to frame software engineers poorly instead of "the value created by the work for the organization" which paints the engineers as more critical to the business.

Well they'd see job growth far in excess of the 5% that is causing this fuss. There is a shortage of medical care and a lot of good people who want to go in and make life better for others. Warms the heart to see their efforts, even if legislation is causing a lot of the work to go to waste.

I expect the average wage of doctors are paid would rise, employment would certainly rise, and if we look at the real outcomes the doctors would have a better quality of life (as would we all) because medical care would be better. So I think they'd probably see nominal pay rises, but even if you want to be pessimistic and assume they were nominally paid less, their quality of life would probably improve.

The basic strategy of unions is to not work sometimes and pick fights with employers. That isn't making anyone better off in the real world.

Orrrr you have more doctors and some of the "obvious problems that plague the industry" get way worse because now the power shifts even more to non-practicing administrators who push less face time with patients, more paperwork, etc, as they try to maximize a certain particular definition of "efficiency" over everything else...

I'd need a lot more details on how you'd expect more competition for medical jobs to result in rising salaries to buy the claim.

Present state: Dave tries to practice medicine. Doctors guild shuts him down. He earns nothing.

Alternate state: Dave practices medicine. He gets good at it. He earns a very high salary.

The union argument isn't about whether workers can cooperate - they can already do that. Free speech and all that. It is about whether employees can prevent others (often called "scabs" in Australia, not sure about the US term) from working. Guilds are similar.

I wasn't asking if Dave's salary went down. I was asking if the existing doctors' did.

Expecting unions to be good for the whole world is stupid. Nobody expects a company to act in the whole world's interest rather than its own. The union is just a tool to level the playing field, to get some control back over "Dave will practice medicine for half what we're paying you, without complaining, so fuck off"

If they are relying on being good at what they do? Probably not.

If they are relying on the fact that they are in a guild? Probably. Good thing too. They should be making money by being competent.

That is why we should be resisting unions. We're paying money for nothing when we interact with unionised industries, and in software we'd be protecting weak engineers at the expense of people who are good at their job.

If everyone unionises, that just means everyone is worse off. If you want to protect economic dead weight then we just end up with a basic prisoners dilemma scenario where the optimum outcome is everyone cooperates and bans unions.

So you agree, then, that the union/guild is good for its members?

Well, there are people in unions who can't succeed without it. But if the software industry starts to unionise:

- The highest paid software engineers will be worse off.

- The quality of software will be lower.

- I expect the average software engineer to be worse off.

You're chasing a local optimum that is substantially worse than where the software industry currently is. The answer to Red Hat laying off 5% of their workforce isn't to lock in permanent barriers to entering the software industry.

I'm part of the software industry. Unions will make me worse off.

Do you have evidence for those statements, or are you just generally in the habit of stating your beliefs as fact?

I've shot down every source you've cited. If we're just going to argue about what should be done next, I'm happy to go with opinions and thought experiments. If you want to do something different, do something different.

Here is a link for you to rebut any one-study approach though, because I'm sure someone in the peanut gallery is thinking of doing that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-...

By happy coincidence, the evidence in that article is a similar field to unionisation.

In my experience, unions drive out people that are capable of getting employment elsewhere, and give tenure to people that are OK with infinite bullshit and with extorting their employers.

If you are in the latter category, go for it. Unionize. I’ll happily join a startup and get an extra 7 figures in my exit because your teams repeatedly tripped over their own dicks while actively preventing management from defending your market share.

This isn’t true in all industries, but tech workers are exceptionally mobile, and the technology landscape constantly shifts, which undermines incumbent players. Together, those two factors make it true for us.

Also, I should point out that I have been aggressively spoiled by current and former employers.

Historically, those organizations have to treat us well or attrition would kill them. The current downturn is relatively minor, and doesn’t seem to have made any fundamental changes to these trade offs.

Companies generally exist to make money. Law and medicine are fields I personally do not want optimized for profits. I believe a better approach to be making governments more efficient and more aligned with the interests of their constituents (e.g., rewards for meeting targets that indicate a benefit to society - improving gdp, reducing health care spend, reducing criminal recidivism, whatever).

laugh in 5 week vacation minimum thanks the the unions fighting for worker rights in the past in Europe

It’s a bit of a balance, more aggressive approaches work well when there is high growth. But are more painful when things are bad.

Unions often slow down change, in bad times this means more job security and protections. In good times they might act slower.

Yeah, I think I'm happy with outsized rewards for outsized contributions.

You guys feel free to spend time worrying about how to split the pie equitably, I'll be over here making more pie (and demanding a share).

Unless you’re bill joy or an owner with a chunk that must be noticed “demand a share” often equals “exits the business”. Why would they have to pay attention to somebody when they’re probably leaving in 2-3 years or can be replaced anywhere in the world? Gotta have leverage to threaten.

Dear sir, are you suggesting that something that worked well for certain things at certain times may not automatically apply to all 21st century industries in the year 2023?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0

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