I'm so happy for folks who have unions and have gained benefits. I know that in the Software Engineering space we think we're all ninja elite 100x rockstar developers and we don't want to get benefits.
The reason to have a union is that no matter how much money you make, the owners of the business have more money and power. Collective bargaining is a counterweight to the power of ownership.
And it's not just about money, it's about working conditions. For example, labor unions could fight back against back-to-the-office demands, whereas without a union, employees are forced to individually consent or lose their job.
A programmers union is too dangerous in this world, especially in these times
However. Governments, and perhaps Unions, are by definition (correct me if i'm wrong?) an entity that is by the people and for the people. Some for-profit company or individual has no ethical obligation to treat workers correctly, fairly, etc. So if we remove unions and government, what power do individual people have?
To that idea then, people need a gov/union to have a voice - but govs and unions also need to be built with an extreme attention to oversight. Which we usually fail to implement correctly. Nevertheless it's the only tool we have - to give individuals power by distributing agreement. So to me the question isn't for or against gov/union, but rather how we can build them to scale and last. Especially in the face of pressure to corrupt.
Happy to hear opinions on where this is wrong, though.
I never heard of this definition for unions! Unions definitely aren't for or by "the people", that would mean everyone. Unions are - by definition - a group of arbitrarily defined "workers" lined up to fight the "management", another somewhat arbitrary group. They are inherently exclusionary and divisive.
Unless you're a communist, in which case you think managers, company founders, shopkeepers, farmers etc aren't really people.
> a group of arbitrarily defined "workers" lined up to fight the "management", another somewhat arbitrary group. They are inherently exclusionary and divisive.
So is _any_ group but "all". "For the people" doesn't literally mean "all people". Government would also not be "for the people" by your definition, given that we have no (real) global government.
If we get together and form a union, ie our joint effort towards a common goal, have we not formed an entity for the people (us), by the people (us)?
Your argument seems odd. "But it's not for everyone" is.. well, yea - nothing is. Literally. What can you say that is "everyone"?
Weird statement. No one is trying to stop you from programming. They are talking about credentials to be employed professionally.
The weird statement is yours when you say they don't stop me from programming. They do!
For example, seniority requirements and enforced degree or qualification requirements don't sound like something I would want, nor would the many other software engineers like myself who didn't go through the "proper" path of getting a CS degree.
This is exactly the problem I am talking about. This is a barrier to entry. Instead of being allowed to just apply for a job, and accepting it, you have to "do you time" in a low paid apprenticeship, due to contract requirements that are setup or lobbied for by these unions or guilds.
This puts up a barrier to entry to new people wanting to join, because union members want to reduce competition.
I am not just talking about degree requirements. Instead, I am talking about any barrier to entry. Unions have a very real and logical reason to put up barriers to entry. It reduces the supply of labor and increases prices for existing members, at the expense of people trying to break into the industry.
You say barriers to entry, I say putting in the time to ensure you're someone I want to work with in the future.
Ok fine. You are free to say that you want barriers to entry and want to prevent people from getting jobs, by making them do all this other stuff.
But other people like me do not want that. We do not want to be forced by a union to do all these things, and instead want to be able to negotiate on our own to get a job.
Unions should not get in this way of this.
And there are a whole lot of other people, just like me, who would never have been able to get into the industry if we were forced to jump through all these hoops and we will not support organizations that pull up the ladder behind us.
> You say barriers to entry, I say putting in the time to ensure you're someone I want to work with in the future.
Its funny how you are almost directly contradicting your previous statements here.
Previously, you tried to argue that degree requirements, or other barriers to entry are not a thing. And now you are giving reason why you actually support those requirements?
Do you not see the direct contradiction that you made in like 2 posts?
Instead of that, you should have started off by saying "Yes I want there to be requirements, enforced by a union. I want you to be required to get a degree or do an apprenticeship, or a number of other things/ insert random thing X".
But you didn't do that. Instead, you disagreed with my factual claim that there are requirements, which you have immediately now backed off from without admitting that your original statement was wrong.
A union is, in fact, a related second party. It is comprised of employees of that employer. You seem to be under a grave misunderstanding of what a union is. I recommend learning about what they are and put the koolaid down.
We might even get real engineer licensing programs and become an accountable part of society...!
By defined you mean requires as per the contract or even the law.
Yeah, no. We do not want to be forced into your requirements.
And we will fight and sabotage all of these efforts, because we know what it is that you are advocating for, and we will not pull up the ladder behind us.
Fortunately, the anti union side is winning in the tech industry, and those who want enforced barriers to entry are losing so much that none of this is even a real conversation in the industry right now.
> We might even get real engineer licensing programs
So literal legal requirements. Yes this is what us anti union people want to prevent.
This is why you will never has us on board. Because when your mask comes off, and people are actually honest about what they want implemented, it becomes clear that it was always exactly the stuff that we were trying to prevent.
Already trying to lock out the young, energetic, and ambitious using seniority systems? At least you're honest about it.
If you're young and you're considering supporting unionization for developers, keep in mind that people like the parent poster are your future seniors. They're marketing unionization to you to secure their own jobs (which developers who are at least average shouldn't even need to worry about) and then maybe yours as a secondary consideration.
[EDIT] I came across an example of the layoff selection process for SPEEA, a union of aerospace engineers, from https://m.kuow.org/stories/boeing-layoffs
"At SPEEA, the process is different. Engineers are assigned a ranking by their managers based on their perception of their ability.
One is the top rank, 3 is the lowest: new workers are a 3. When there are layoffs, 3s go first. An engineer must work 20 years before they are at least partially shielded from the ranking system. At 20 years, an engineer ranked a 3 gets bumped to a 2. As cuts get deeper they push into the higher ranks."
Can't say I'm too enthused about long-termers getting partially shielded from ranking since some of them are likely to be deadwood.
The same also makes it more expensive for you to switch jobs (you lose your seniority), which reduces your negotiating leverage.
I don't have a CS degree either, and I'm not sure why you think labor unions would impose them? Degree requirements come from the company, not from the employees.
Labor organizations lobby for qualifications because it helps people who have them of course.
Additional requirements lower the supply of labor, and therefore increase wages for people who have those qualifications.
An example of a similar union where this is done is in the screen actors guild. They don't just let anyone in. Instead, they require you to do a certain amount of work before you are allowed to join.
The catch-22 of course, is that the union screen actors guild contracts prevent all but a minimal amount of non-union jobs on a certain production, therefore putting up barriers to entry for new people wanting to join the industry.
You need to be in the actors guild to be able to work in the industry, and you can't get into the actors guild unless you've already worked as an actor! Catch 22.
It all makes perfect sense for the goal of a union to be to decrease the labor supply, thereby helping the existing members.
I'm sure other people can come up with similar examples.
Because unions have often in the past imposed various credentialling requirements, followed by quotas on the credentials given, as a way to push up wages.
For example the UK health system is wrecked by this. Medical unions insist on very low numbers of school places, too low to meet demand, so the government is forced to rely on immigration to fill the gaps. The unions love this because they're all overtly left wing organizations and want mass migration, also they see immigrants as free Labour voters. But being unable to actually train sufficient doctors is a bad place for the country to be in.
The other thing that people probably worry about are protecting the net negative members on the team. Those that make more work for the team, derail meetings, block things from being submitted, etc. Nobody wants to hear "well our contract doesn't allow us to fire them".
Like all engineering, there isn't a solution with no downsides.
I think unions deserve serious consideration. Our working conditions are not perfect (know any software engineers with wrist problems, back problems, or sleep apnea?). Our benefits are not perfect (love being forced to take a mandatory vacation every year paid out of my personal vacation balance). And, we have pretty much zero sway among the government. (Do you think that if attorneys were paid in illiquid shares that every time you received them, you'd have to send a hand-signed letter to the IRS?) There is certainly something to be gained; software prints money, and the people that make it deserve their fair share.
Even on HN, commenters are shocked by the FAANG salaries, but you know lots of people are making way more money. Someone just paid $7M for the two story house behind my apartment. I'm guessing they're not a couple of software engineers. Why is that? Is it because we self-sabotage? Is there not that much money in software after all?
Someone should look into all of this, but as long as we see ourselves as individuals and not a group, we will be easy to ignore.
(Uh oh, now I sound like a communist.)
Are these not things you would expect to be able to negotiate on your own? Who are you working for that would rather lose you as an employee than provide you with an ergonomic keyboard?
> And, we have pretty much zero sway among the government. (Do you think that if attorneys were paid in illiquid shares that every time you received them, you'd have to send a hand-signed letter to the IRS?)
This is the most significant thing that unions actually do, but it seems weird to bring them in for the things they're "supposed to do" (negotiating with employers), when you don't really want that (they protect bad team members), because what you really want is something else.
And in that role a union doesn't really fit here, because you have interests shared with people who wouldn't be in it. Even if you have the same legislative goals as every other software developer, what sense does it make to unionize your own tiny startup or small business, or some entity which is already majority-owned by the employees?
Maybe what software developers need is not a union, but a PAC?
that's the thing, software workers are used to just walking away, because their skills are versatile and demand is high. A national level athlete can also simply retire on a few year's funds (or hell, sell themselves as an influencer. You don't think a youtube channel alone of LeBron wouldn't generate a 6k income from weekly "advice"?), but they tend to have a competitive drive to stay in the game, literally. You don't grind your entire childhood's physique away because you're gambling on the chance you retire at 30 (even if that is the most likely thing to happen due to injuries).
To be frank, the vibe I get from the internet seems to be that a lot of SWE's are indeed minmaxing to get out of the workforce ASAP.
But walking away voluntarily is different from having to walk away because your employer gives you an ultimatum. Especially when you're facing a market that has been hit by mass layoffs by many tech companies, and especially if you're looking specifically for a WFH job when many companies are demanding return to the office, precisely reason you'd be walking away in the first place.
Is there a real difference between walking away due to an ultimatum and walking away due to the prospect of better pay or work conditions? Especially in the case where you started pre-pandemic and technically WFH was never indefinitely promised?
Either way, you are voluntarily choosing to seek a better job with better work conditions. The only difference is that you may not be able to be as covert in the ultimatum situation.
> to seek a better job with better work conditions
> The only difference is that you may not be able to be as covert in the ultimatum situation.
The words you use here are interesting: "the prospect", "to seek".
The only difference is that you may not be able to find a better job with better work conditions if you're operating under the gun of unemployment and in a significantly worse job market.
When you leave voluntarily, it's because you've already found a new job. You're operating from a position of strength and proactivity, not weakness and reactivity.
> technically WFH was never indefinitely promised
It some cases it was indefinitely promised, and then employers broke the promise.
Sure you might not even get a raise with a union, but perhaps those same benefits of remote work when needed, unlimited vacation, and an hour lunch can be extended to every worker at the company.
The most expensive workers teaming up with the least expensive to give them more power is a good thing, I think.
Instead talk about sports unions, like the NFL Player Association, and that usually gets them re-evaluating all they've been previously understanding about unions.
(Frankly, I can't think of any unions of engineering professions aside from the SPEEA in the US and I couldn't find any in a casual Google search. Anyone know of any? And if there aren't any, well, people might want to think really hard about why.)
The Conservative's demonization of unions for the last several decades seems to have worked quite well.
Software engineers are the most coddled bunch out there. Our benefits are so far beyond the pale it’s embarrassing.
In the less complex jobs, they struggle to get things like paternity leave and time off. We have those. We should be looking at those ridiculous things we think we don't deserve and organizing to get them. We could be a leading example for the industries that come behind us.
Paid time off is common in softwareland. Let's make it mandatory "you must take 4 weeks off minimum a year". We know "unlimited time off" is a guilt-tripping farce.
If 1 software dev can add billions of dollars of value to a company, we should be getting these ridiculous things. These things that seem like coddling us. Maybe even a formula for "if i added x% profit, I deserve y% of that"
I think hollywood is ahead of us on compensation formulas imo.
More seriously, we need to make sure the entire team is getting the goodies. Even your fairy-tale 1000x developers depend on good ops/infrastructure, support and QA and clever management; if they can only hire on McStaff warm bodies, they're massively hobbling those "ridiculously compensated" devs.
Alternately, treat minimum time off like accountants. One cannot cook the books alone indefinitely if there's a week you're not there and somebody else has to do your job. Similarly, only having one guy that can fix specific issues that nobody else can touch means your sprawling Fortune 500 has a bus factor of 1 - which even executives can see is not smart business.
Oh well, they deal with that when they layoff people to get 2% lower expenses for earning's call. Why should I care about a bus factor if the company doesn't?
There are many such policies in a union, ask anybody who is a member of one and nobody is happy with all the policies of the union. Not to mention people who want to start a career and cannot even join the union (hello SAG) and cannot get a job because they are not in the union.
because even with "unlimited time off" it is a herculean task to get a long vacation approved. And without those plans, accrued time off is lucky to hit 2 weeks a year. So I have to not be sick or have emergencies for 2 years straight to get what is normal in the EU?
It's easier to force mandatory vacation than go through all that. US as a whole has horrible days off policies and I'd happily take some mandatory vacation. You are even free to use it to research stuff if you really want to get ahead or whatever.
> I'd choose some place where I could cash out time off over the one where I can accumulate multiple months of time off over the one where I have to use-it-or-lose-it.
Where are you where you can accumulate "months of time off"? Every plan I've had had max accruals of anywhere from 14-28 days. You literally hit a point where you have to use it, and this is after multiple years of accrual, not a single year.
>And without those plans, accrued time off is lucky to hit 2 weeks a year.
I never had less than 20 days (4 weeks) PTO, not counting holidays and Christmas lockdown and since I did not bother to negotiate any special PTO, I believe thousands upon thousands of my coworkers had the same luck.
>So I have to not be sick or have emergencies for 2 years straight to get what is normal in the EU?
I believe if you took a SWE job for what the normal in EU you could have also negotiated 10 weeks of PTO on top of that.
>It's easier to force mandatory vacation than go through all that.
It might be easier that that, whatever that is, but it's not desirable for me.
>Where are you where you can accumulate "months of time off"?
In the last TNC where I worked, I cashed out over two months of PTO (it capped over 40 days, 380 hours or some strange number like that) when I resigned.
>Every plan I've had had max accruals of anywhere from 14-28 days
So? If PTO is so important to you just make it a condition of your employment, it's just money for the employer, take more PTO, take less other comp. It's as same as if it had been made mandatory except people who are not interested in long vacations can have cash instead.
I guess it's simply a problem of my industry if that's the case (you can probably guess it at this point). Or you found some extraordinary workforce, perhaps ones not based in the US.
>If PTO is so important to you just make it a condition of your employment,
I'd love for a $400k salary to be a condition too, but life is full of compromises. I simply haven't seen such deals in my industry, except for ones not based in the US, of course. I still have growth/networking plans for long term goals, so I'd rather not leave my industry just yet.
however, my industry also has horrible work conditions in general, so even if I do have a long term exit plan, I'd love for others to not go through my cruddy benefits. So I'm still all for a union.
>I'd love for a $400k salary to be a condition too, but life is full of compromises. I simply haven't seen such deals in my industry,
I am not sure what your industry is, but in this particular thread the discussion is about programmers, and why they need a union to force mandatory 4 weeks off on everyone. If your industry is so bad that you cannot even trade PTO for your cash compensation then you might be better with unions, I don't know what industry that is and, obviously, I am not employed there.
You're saying your work doesn't have PTO accrual: There's another thing we should lobby for.
How many times has productivity doubled since the industrial revolution? I would love the tech world to stand still for a time so we can demand these things that seem ridiculous, because we've been succumbed to wage slavery. Even that sounds odd: Software wage slavery - puh-lease, right? Except few things have expanded the economy of several nations in the world like software, like tech. We should be much more demanding.
</harp>
To get people on-board union organizers would need to come up with some real benefits that people would want from unions, not with what organizers themselves want.
>There's another thing we should lobby for.
Your mandatory 4 weeks off is mutually exclusive with PTO accrual, you do understand that?
I do not see how mandatory 4 weeks off (paid) are mutually exclusive with PTO accrual. In my own corner, I've been elected to a board to represent other employees. Something we're lobbying for is a certain minimum of mandatory paid leave - as well as circumstances where being overworked would accrue additional time. Am I mixing up terms?
Something we're trying to cut down on is 7 days a week, 14-hour days. We've attacked this from a cost point of view if we can't get leadership to understand the humanitarian need. We're now putting it in policy that working lengthy hours will accrue paid (admin) leave. So the supervisor ultimately hurts themselves authorizing so much overtime. They will have to settle the books, and lose that person for their minimum and accrued time.
Mandatory 4 weeks: you have to take 4 weeks off each year. You cannot spend your PTO as you wish.
In my case I don't have accrual, my PTO balance is reset every 1st of January, if I have any days left, they are "gone". I get the same balance of Jan 1st if I had 30 days of PTO on Dec 31st and if I had 0 days. It's not ideal but still is better than mandatory time off as I still have a choice to let the PTO "burn".
As far as me being an outlier I think you just get industry experience from reddit and have not worked much. Wherever I worked managers sent emails with dozens of names on the cc: regarding PTO balance reaching cap, there were always giant threads whenever HR posted about PTO cash out or cap change polices etc. If people starved for PTO that would not have been happening.
Think about how much additional profit highly skilled engineers could capture from company owners if we negotiated as team against the organized team that company owners pay for.
Negotiating as an individual against a full time team seems nuts.
Why leave so much profit on the table? For what good reason?
They sit around deciding each other's compensation and giving each other golden parachutes.
It has been very effective in creating disunity among workers -- which most managers definitely are.
The owners of the business, e.g., the stockholders, are capital.
There is some overlap, because employees can be compensated in stock, especially CEOs. The crucial difference is that when an employee is fired, they stop making a salary from the company, and they stop having any power in the company, whereas stockholders cannot be fired, and they continue making money from the company and having voting rights no matter what.
It is true that the interests of the CEO and the interests of the owners do not necessarily align. This is exactly why CEO compensation is often in stock: the theory is that if CEOs are compensated in stock, then their interests will align more closely with the interests of the stockholders.
Still, CEOs can be fired at any time, so they need to look out for themselves, and CEOs do have a kind of union, because they often sit together on the boards of directors of companies, and of course the boards of directors decide on CEO compensation (a massive conflict of interest). This is why CEOs often get massive golden parachutes: it's CEOs protecting other CEOs.
Even including the CEO, though, current employees typically own only a very small % of a corporation's total stock, which is exactly why they can be fired.
The rest of the population may own some stock, but it's a pittance relative to the capitalist class. We're not running the show.
Regarding Bill Gates, he acquired his wealth by exploiting workers, not to mention everyone else, engaging in illegal monopolistic practices. Moreover, he's even wealthier now than he was before retiring from Microsoft and claiming to want to give most of his wealth away. And he's 67 years old, time's a wastin'. The problem is that wealth begets wealth. Gates doesn't even have to work to continue to accumulate wealth, so much so that he can't seem to give away money faster than he makes it.
That's the essential difference: having to work for your money vs. having your money (and also everyone else) work for you.
The guys actually physically building the tooling you designed to build a product are definitely unionized, and have been for a very long time.
You’re welcome to go work at a software union shop, like Boeing.
Writing low quality software that kills people, great job security even if you are at fault for peanut pay. I’ll take my non union job any day.
What does my boss’s paycheck have to do with my argument? How does your comment convince me i’m not way better off than you and other union NPCs?
Comparing safety by deaths/injuries per distance travelled between different modes of transport does not make sense to me.
To prove the point imagine some hypothetical mode of travel that can take us to the nearest star - alpha centauri. Now imagine that 50% of people that travel via this mode of transport die, thats obviously not a risk anybody would be willing to take right? But if you use the same statistics as we use for aircraft safety it looks amazing, better than anything else by far.
Am I saying that aircraft are unsafe? Not at all - they're still very safe relative to other modes of transport, but the statistics that we commonly calculate to compare them seem totally meaningless to me. Comparing deaths per distance travelled only makes any sense when comparing modes of travel that actually go similar distances.
I also acknowledge that this is somewhat of a regional nitpick - it makes a lot more sense to compare aircraft with e.g. cars in the United States because taking an aircraft vs taking a car to travel between different states is actually a choice that many people are making. Whereas I live in a small country where there's very little overlap between aircraft trips and car trips.
> Writing low quality software that kills people, great job security even if you are at fault for peanut pay. I’ll take my non union job any day.
Boeing primarily manufactures and designs airplanes. The odds of dying while being a passenger on an airplane is about 1 in 200,000. Compare that to being a cyclist, which is 1 in 3,500. Or a pedestrian which is 1 in 485.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/how-safe-is-flying-heres...
Putting your stupendously bad comparison aside, I'd say most software devs/programmers don't really need to unionise, aside from video game devs. 80+ hour work weeks, constant burn out, consistently underpaid compared to most other devs who just program boring line of business apps; they just get treated very poorly.