Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte | Hacker News Reader

Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

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148 pointsughitsaaron357 comments

Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power.

Now compare that to tech where the 80/20 rule is patently obvious to anyone in the field. The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much. 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power, wants employers to find better and better ways to pay proportional to value-add, not to increase the floor salary, or working conditions across the board.

Unions have a lot of different forms. SAG-AFTRA is in a field with extreme striation for instance. There's still plenty of individual negotiation.

>The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers

Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.

The economics of labour suggest unions are most valuable where there's a monopsony buyer of labour. Big Tech might fit that bill, especially when we know they colluded to depress salaries.

The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.

With a few notable outliers...

99.999% of the time I agree with you.

Sure, just the integrity of the plane after landing vary sometimes.

Yeah the best developer uses the same compiler of the worst, guess the difference is not what you do at the end, but how you manage the trip, and how you write code before

>The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst

Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?

Plenty more, but the economic impact to the airline is the same from any individual pilot.

Not really. The worst pilot only lands once, and never again.

Now what qualifies as landing?

Collect a large number of pilots, divide them into two pools based upon their performance (low and high). Which pool do you think will incur more expenses to the airline? Keep in mind that some of those costs range from reducing consumer confidence (poor landings or damaged cargo), to planes requiring more maintenance (increased costs of maintenance, planes taken out of service more often), to planes being put out of commission (regardless of whether everyone walks away or not).

A lot of people seem to be measuring value in landings per day, widgets per minute, lines of code per week without acknowledging that the quality of work does have an impact.

There's only acceptable piloting and not. There's no pilot that makes the airline 10x more per flight.

The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. At the other end you have cargo pilots and regional flights that carry a brand of major airline but are operated by a different company.

Look at salary differences.

https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary

>The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military.

Curious about this. I'd have thought going the civilian route of flight school should put one on equal footing on this regard? Or are you saying that just statistically more long-tenured pilots are retired military?

In general, these are due to union rules. The union decides what the compensation is, and it's largely by seniority. The airline makes no more money from retired military pilots than they do from any other pilot.

If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.

>If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.

Have you worked on an assembly line? I have.

You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.

So there’s a cap on the maximum value (always doing it on time), and a cap on the minimum value (never doing it).

The above poster takes the position that the ratio between the maximum value, and minimum employable value is less than 10.

I think the distinction is the relationship between the median performer and the 90th percentile performer. The two are very different employees for software development but not on an assembly line. As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer and the 10th percentile performer on an assembly line, but that's not the comparison the parent comment introduced.

>As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer

But I didn't say that, and I don't agree.

I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle.

There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.

Generally you design your cycle times so that the median performer never is late. Remember if each median performer has 1 delay per hour, on a line with 100 workers that mean each cycle there is a delay somewhere and so the line always moves slower than expected. How much slack to add is a complex question, but you have to assume there will be delays. The 10th percentile cannot be allowed to delay the line, so you have to deal with it (training, fire them, give them faster tools, or switch to a station they can do in time come to mind, there may be more)

This is a completely different argument though and irrelevant to the comment chain you replied to. Everyone involved may even agree with you - why did you frame it as an argument against the claim that there is less capacity for 10x performers?

> You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.

This makes his point though. There is no capacity to be 10x more productive.

With all due respect, why are you both talking about yourselves as if you were machines? If your job is so mechanical it can be automated, you're screwed. If it's not, but your boss wants to downsize it bc "savings", a union would help you.

Unions add the same kind of value whether you're writing a Hollywood screenplay or assembling a Tesla because you have the same relationship to capital either way.

The same divide/conquer tactic was done 100 years ago when owners of mines in Pennsylvania pitted white and black miners against each other.

The actual distinction doesn't matter to the owners provided it divides labor. Anything that makes you feel special and separates you from people in the same boat as you is fair game - whether that's the intellectual needs of your job or just plain old racism.

Do I have the same relationship to capital? A miner’s relationship to capital seems pretty plausibly adversarial to me: capital buys a bunch of tools and shafts and scaffolding, asks miners to use them to pull coal out of the ground, then pays the miners a fraction of what the coal sells for. My relationship with capital is that rich investors send money to my company’s bank account and they forward it directly to my bank account.

Rich investors send money to your companies bank account. Upper management then pays as little as they can get away with. You might have “shares” in your company that gain value in an “exit” event, but have you looked at how those payout structures are arranged? Mostly the investors and “founders” are paid out first with great returns. What little is left gets divided up amongst the rest.

There is value in an investor paying for the shafts and scaffolding. The investor also takes the risk that coal prices will fall (eventually the miner is laid off, but the investor takes a lot of the risk)

Mines also had investors and they also paid wage bills before the company was profitable. Did you think that they did not?

That depends on the assembly line. The assembly the car line works like that: you get 45 seconds (or whatever time) to put your part one, then the car moves to the next station.

However I know of assembly lines where things spend several hours at each station. The people (often as many as 10 people per station) all work together for that time putting different parts on. If you can do the job faster than the time in station you can take an extra break to do what you want. Such lines are generally planned so that if you work as expected you get a 20 minute break when the lines move, most teams work faster and get a 30 minute break, almost never does some team get less than the 20 minute break planned.

The car model assembly line is the most efficient, but it has high costs. When you make a lot of something it is well worth those costs, but if you are only expecting to sell 100 "things" per year it isn't worth setting up the line.

This idea crops up so frequently that Ive started calling it the "Apparently Tom Cruise Works in a Factory" fallacy.

Is Tom Cruise represented by a union?

Yes. He's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He stopped shooting MI:8 in solidarity with the union.

The film industry is highly unionized. At some point in his career, he absolutely was - possibly multiple.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of fields where the output of your best and worst employees don't differ dramatically. Worst is generally some passable minimum not someone who refuses to do the job entirely. For plenty of assembly line jobs, your worst employee has similar productivity to your best employee because there is no ability to make the assembly line faster for the more productive person.

In code on the other hand, your best employee can straight up do things your worst employee can't. The differences are much larger. There is a reason people hire Principal Software Engineers, but most IC roles in other fields don't have the same range of seniorities.

I've been doing software professionally for about thirty years now, and what's interesting to me is that the conversations I had with my grandfather about factory work involved all of the same dynamics. Prototyping new solutions versus consistent reproduction of known solutions? People who only understand their own tasks versus those who have a holistic understanding of the components, the process, and the final product? Troubleshooting unexpected failure states in complex systems and fixing mission-critical problems that can make or break the business, versus checking out when The System Breaks? Conflicts between book-smart college grads and grizzled vets who know how things "really work" under the hood?

Those are the stories he told me about working in a factory, and frankly the lessons I learned from him were just as valuable as any "fifteen lessons for software architects" books our industry has produced. Sure — software is unique! So is food, so is metal, so is film, so is concrete…

People don't deserve unions because they're 10x workers. People deserve unions because they're workers.

I think a working model of a technology union would have to work closely to professional sports unions or acting unions that support wide disparities in pay. I think historical tech opposition to unions is people not wanting the idea of a standardized wage and extremely high job security (which acts as a downward force on wages). Many people look for something like the Netflix model where you're expected to move on if you're not producing lots of value, but you get compensated more for it. The thing about having 10x engineers being possible is that everyone thinks they are above 1x and deserve above average pay.

> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.

I've worked at FedEx as a package handler before. That is absolutely not the case there. The absolutely best employees might be 3x more productive than someone who's mediocre with 2 weeks of experience. When the job is picking up boxes off of a conveyor belt and putting them in trucks, your walking speed is one of the key limiters. And no one can walk 10x faster than someone else. Not for a 6-8 hr shift.

Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees.

>Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees.

Obviously we're all just throwing around numbers to make a point, this isn't hard data.

But I assure you there are zero jobs where there is no difference between the best and worst employees. Zero.

3x seems like a lot in a business that lives or dies on thin margins.

Specifically in the software development field, a good engineer increases the productivity of all other engineers in a way that allows engineers to increase the productivity of each other in a compounding way.

A “10x” engineer is worth a compounding amount more than their peers.

I don’t think that holds for every field.

Jorge Luis Borges colleagues at the National Library forced him to go slower because he could catalogue books in a fraction of the time they needed.

So yeah, if you're an absolute genius, you don't need a union. Everybody else does. Your common people colleagues do.

Yeah, that’s the trade off with many collectivist ideas.

They optimize for equality, which necessarily hurts the highest performers (in one way or another) and benefits the lower ones (in many ways)

Like anything, it’s a trade off

You would depress the wages of 10x engineers with unions. Look at teacher unions for an example.

Actors and athletes don't seem to have that problem despite having unions.

> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.

Or presumably anything else (because you said "any field"). But why?

It seems like the less skill or expertise something takes the less ability there is to deviate from the average. In which case unions, if most useful for low-skilled labor like OP described, are most useful for industries that tend to outsource their labor to other countries. And thus reduces the need for unions. Seems consistent with the decline of unions in the US.

Jobs aren't all technical skills. You can be the best coder in the world but if you're a colossal asshole you're not going to get put in charge of other people. If you show up to work drunk or high, you're definitely not going to advance.

Never said it was. We're talking about productivity. Being such an asshole that your performance is crippled is baked into that.

Big tech might, but unlike steelworking or auto manufacturing, the barrier for entry for tech is very low, and so big tech aren't the only employers out there. They're not even the only employers paying high wages (you can get good salaries at startups as well)

> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.

This is a big misconception. The difference is whether 10x talent is more valuable than 1x talent. You could be the worlds best fish gutter, but if you can't gut 10x more fish than the next guy, then your salary is capped and you're wasting your talent. In software, you can be 10x more productive than the next guy.

It's a decent take.

But taking a view on markets outside of the US and SV/bigtech in particular, those 10x devs aren't usually getting the 2-3x as much, and taking a view of industry in total, profits are runaway but wages are flat and falling, especially when considering inflation.

Capital is winning. Perhaps unions are required. But I'm not a union member and likely never will be.

>Capital is winning.

When hasn't it won in the western world?

> When hasn't it won in the western world?

In the US, post-WW2 until Reagan got elected.

They still won just not as much as now.

I agree, us non-capitalists took more of the cake back then.

Unions in tech won't recreate the 1950s. The reason capital always wins is because it can be moved around more easily than specialized workers can change their skill set. If you extract more of the pie in one area then capital (and thus growth) will just move to a different areas. Could be different industries or companies in different countries. They still win while your occupation and growth in earnings stagnates.

Whenever unions are strong.

(Was that a rhetorical question?)

Is that true? I am only a dataset of one, but while my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up. We can say that employers should reward employees who stay, but in an industry where getting your next job is trivial (in my experience anyway), I just say sucks to be those companies when I take my institutional knowledge with me. Also it's been my experience that remote work has put real pressure on local companies to pay higher than they did before the pandemic.

I work in the Atlanta Metro, so it's not like it's a place you think of when you think tech.

> my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.

> > my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

> There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.

I've been doing this for over 10 years. When is the plateau coming? Even lateral moves for me bump my paid up to whatever market is at the moment. Maybe that's just a 5K bump if i left in a hurry, but it's not like I lost money to inflation with a jump. I demoted myself during the pandemic due to family stuff and even taking a lesser title I still got a pay bump.

I'm still of the opinion that enough money exists, but I just haven't ever experienced that my salary has gone down with a job jump I've experienced meager annual raises and skipped bonuses, but I've never not been reset to market rate however many thousands of dollars that is. I think my record for a salary jump was 40K? I stayed at a jump I liked for like 5 years. Even still, I never felt my lifestyle decrease in those 5 years. I was always paid enough and I remember once there was a 12% raise in there to help that we were too far behind market rates.

I sort of guessed you were earlier in your career. The plateau broadly is around $250k in TC, with engineers having to move into management (e.g. change jobs) to earn much more. (Yes, there are some companies where this is not true. But most tech workers do not work at pure tech firms and so this is more aligned with their reality.)

Let's approximate a non-plateau career ladder this way:

- 20s: $150k

- 30s: $250k (+ ~65%)

- 40s: $410k (+ ~65%)

- 50s: $670k (+ $65%)

Does this look roughly like the compensation path for median engineers (people who spend most of their time writing code) at your company? If there are not a lot of people there in their 50s, it is likely that they are not paying median engineers with 25+ years of experience $670k. (This hints at the other plateau, which is that very experienced engineers are often pushed out of the field entirely. Would not want to be a 50+ engineer looking for work.)

To me those numbers look insanely high. Like even the 250k that you're using as a baseline for the plateau, that's around double what is expect for that experience.

I'm about 25 years into my career, and I can definitely say there is a plateau. Yes, my first job switch resulted in almost a whopping 50% increase. Wow! Second job switch was about +25%. Third was +10%. Fast forward a decade, my last two job changes were pretty much even. Maybe 0.1%+ if that. You will get to that point if you don't go into the executive leadership suite.

> Capital is winning.

and a reactionary union isn't really the way to fix "capital winning". Because the idea that capital "wins" is flawed imho. It's not that capital is winning, it's that capital is the part of the equation which has bargaining power.

The reason for that is hard to say, but i am guessing that most workers are not really unique or special enough to warrant having them the same bargaining power as capital. After all, capital is required to establish the job in the first place.

Forcing a union, to prevent capital from "winning" merely makes capital less effective at providing their function - investment and growth of the economy. This makes capital leave.

Capital will always have information asymmetry.

There’s also the fact that the worst case scenario for a capitalist is that they become an employee. The worst case for an employee is they end up homeless.

A “capitalist” can also become homeless. Small business owners have to secure loans with personal assets and bad bets / legal liabilities are abound.

Established business shareholders probably do not have this problem.

If they fail at being an employee, yes.

> low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years

Routinely on this site, there are job postings for "senior" engineering roles for that do not require even 5 years of experience. (By contrast, the recent headlines about UPS drivers making $170k are for drivers with 5+ years of tenure.) There are frequent discussions in this space about whether engineers need college or other pre-employment education. And many/most "tech" workers are not programmers; they contribute to tech companies in other ways. By and large, our industry as a whole does not place a huge value on long experience. I'm not sure how different tech really is.

> When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power.

How much power did the individual employees at Meta, Google, etc. have when they were being laid off en masse recently?

> By contrast, the recent headlines about UPS drivers making $170k are for drivers with 5+ years of tenure.

They do not make 170k, that was a puff piece from UPS. That number was total compensation + monetary value of all benefits. Which not the way most people/postings talk about compensation.

> Which not the way most people/postings talk about compensation.

This is a tech site. People in tech routinely include the value of e.g. RSUs in compensation numbers. Point taken, but a) it's not too far afield from how tech comp is discussed and b) even if you back out the non-cash components, the drivers still make a lot of money. (Possibly more even than the median US software developer.)

I agree that things like RSUs are generally included, but the 50k of benefits does not include RSUs. The closest this they talk about is the pension plan, which they quote as 23k.

Looks like UPS quotes above 95k avg, and 42$/hr avg after 4 years. I have no idea how that compares to average tech salary, but I agree that it is good money.

That last thing worth mentioning, also from UPS' site is that almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years. That's a long time.

[0]: https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer/real-...

> 50k of benefits

First cut at this would be $23k of pension, plus health insurance. (Average policy for a family of 4 is running around $25k; UPS may have a better plan than average.) It's fair for them to include these because comparable employers do not include either. (Though it make the compare to tech workers less direct.)

> almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years

There's a documented correlation between good benefits, low turnover, and higher profits.

> It's fair for them to include these because comparable employers do not include either.

It is fair, but not under the phrase "UPS workers make". That phrasing usually only refers to (pre- or post-tax) salary.

> There's a documented correlation between good benefits, low turnover, and higher profits.

I would believe it. All I meant to say is that the 95k average salary will be skewed by having half their full time employees being there for >15 years.

I think you and I agree for the most part, I am pushing to keep a clearer distinction between take home pay and total compensation.

> I am pushing to keep a clearer distinction between take home pay and total compensation.

I agree, but even this is squishy. For example; pension benefits eventually are taken home by the employee.

It includes health insurance premiums and stuff paid by the employer. No one uses that for TC.

> health insurance premiums and stuff paid by the employer.

As indicated above, most blue-collar jobs don't carry similar benefits. Totally fair to include in the TC number. It's also a higher percentage of notional wages for the specific type of job. Health insurance premiums for a family of 4 are averaging approximately $10/hr; it would be silly not to include that in a comp discussion where employees might be looking at other jobs that pay $15/hr.

Again, even backing out the compensation you don't want to call "compensation," these are still very good jobs.

A union would protect everyone. And nobody is saying that a senior engineer should get paid the same as a junior.

You live under the impression that better workers will earn more.

In practice the skill that earns higher salary is to pretend to be very competent by using jargon and parroting stuff.

Even the terrible developers that are a drain on the company and hence compensation? No thanks

Do terrible NBA players get to keep their jobs? The pithy response is to point at like, James Harden, but on the whole professional basketball is very meritocratic and yet they have a union.

Pro sports in general. Netflix said they run their company like a pro sports team, why not include that players have a union?

> Do terrible NBA players get to keep their jobs?

Sports is different because there’s only a certain number of spots on the field. This changes the dynamics and keeps the crab mentality at bay. The same is not true for most workplaces.

How so? The limited number of spots seems like it would enhance negative behavior, not curb it.

> Even the terrible developers that are a drain on the company and hence compensation? No thanks

Nobody forced them to hire them?

> "In practice the skill that earns higher salary is to pretend to be very competent by using jargon and parroting stuff."

Remember that people who believe things like this would be in the same union as you, be paid just as well as you thanks to union contracts, and expect you to strike on their behalf. Do you really want to be in solidarity with people like this?

So? Everybody else would be too.

Did you also renounced your citizenship because there was someone you didn't like in your same country?

Were you unaware that there is a writers strike on right now?

> Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

Actors in the US are in SAG (currently on strike). AFAICT, there is a 'base contract' that most people get ("John Smith as Taxi Driver", "Jane Doe as Waitress #2"), but folks can negotiate above and beyond that ("Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt").

So there's a floor, but no ceiling.

Why would a 10x engineer object to improved working conditions for all? Some general hatred for coworkers?

Yes. Thinking of yourself as a 10x engineer, you run the risk of seeing everyone else as 0.1x engineers, mere inconvenient ants that you're forced to tolerate. You can see a bit of that in this thread.

I didn't say they would object, just that they aren't incentivized to care about it. It doesn't help the 10xer's bottom line, and the conditions at the "bottom" of tech are some of the best of any profession.

They actually are, unless the 10x engineer thinks good customer service agents, customer deployment engineers, assistants, etc. somehow are not worth having. Usually, the product is way more than just some software engineering piece.

Because Union agreements can bind pay to non meritocratic ways such as time spent in the role or when a higher position opens up. Those top players will rise to the top easier in an open market. It's the same with waitstaff in a tip-based system. The bottom half wants fair wages while the top 20% will leave because they know they can earn without those rules in place.

First, that means there is an open, two-sided market and, second, citation needed that that is really the case. Btw., employers can and do also pay based on non-meritocratic KPIs (but depends on your definition of that term).

I'm not a scientist nor am I trying to get into an actual debate on hackernews. I'm just spouting my opinion and feelings on the matter like conversations were done preinternet when someone could just go digging around to find a study to support their argument. Of course employers reward people for loyalty but as someone who has worked in a union environment before, I've felt stifled. I come from a family of tradesmen and unions do wonders to protect the health and future of employees but they are just as corruptible as corporations. They're just corrupt for the people they protect which happens to benefit the union workers most of the time.

I'm just not interested.

I think we're still in such a good position relative to everyone else in society that it's difficult to see the need for collective bargaining. The skills are in demand and not easily replicated. There are enough tech jobs that the solution to almost any workplace issue is to quit and work somewhere else - often for more pay.

> The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers

Lots of people will claim to be 10x engineers, few people will claim to be average engineers, even though statistically there are more of the latter. I suspect 80% of engineers think they're in the top 20%. This is bad for solidarity.

(Many of the people likely to face discrimination issues are also at risk of being discriminated against by their union, sadly; it's not an entirely simple solution. Again, poor solidarity.)

> pay proportional to value-add

As we're seeing in the Unity debacle, who gets to capture value is about power rather than simply distributing the total value-add among all those that add value. And power in this case is determined by the "BATNA" for both sides. So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power.

>I think we're still in such a good position relative to everyone else in society that it's difficult to see the need for collective bargaining.

Corps have been pushing down wages for decades. Here's some methods:

  - Offshoring
  - Automation
  - Skeleton teams
  - Long hours
  - Removal of bonuses for anyone but managers
  - Removal of signing bonuses (this was a thing in the late 90s)
  - Recruiters posing mid level people as seniors.
  - No or inadequate inflation raises
  - Coordinated layoffs (flood the market, hire back what you need at deflated prices)
  - Little or no on site skill training (this was also big in the late 90s)
  - A few large, entrenched tech companies.

The math is: total developer hours needed - total developer hours available = surplus and higher wages. When you automate your daily grind, you get more done. When you get more done, the total developer hours needed is less. Multiply this by around 2 million developers and and pushes down wages. They're boiling frogs here.

>So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power.

You may think that, but the phrase, "no one is irreplaceable," and "the graveyard is full of irreplaceable people," is still true. Go piss off your CEO, call him incompetent or something, and see how replaceable you really are. He will ditch you and make everyone else pick up the load.

This is true; I myself have had a below-inflation pay rise and some colleagues made redundant. I'm still paid more than 95% of people in my country.

What that highlights is just how bad the inequality curve really is, that the 0.1% right on one edge have exceptional power to make decisions which make the rest worse off.

What this means is that any tech union is going to have to extend a bit of solidarity out to lower paid and ""lower skilled"" people against whom we have traditionally been snobbish, in order to be successful. See the Hollywood millionares out donating to the rest of their picket lines, for example.

You can't just look "up" the curve at your salary getting ever higher. You have to look "down" as well, without contempt.

> "anyone is replaceable," is still true

Was it Napoleon who said "the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men"? Also true.

>I'm still paid more than 95% of people in my country.

What makes you think you aren't worth much, much more? What would happen to your company if all the tech people went on vacation for a month? CEO's don't think, "We make more than 95% of businesses in our industry, I guess we can relax now." We have to act like the CEO of our careers. Also, most tech workers in the US aren't in the top 5% of earners. Unless you are in a high position at a large company, you're probably top 15-25%. Might wanna check.

>Was it Napoleon who said "the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men"? Also true.

I remember Jobs saying it, but he was known for adopting other people's sayings.

>You can't just look "up" the curve at your salary getting ever higher. You have to look "down" as well, without contempt.

Yes, tech people's elitism isn't a beneficial trait. It's good when selling yourself, but once that's done, we should drop it.

FWIW, a tech union, if done right, would probably be the strongest union in history. Think Dune and Ix.

> most tech workers aren't in the top 5% of earners

No, I really did check https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... before posting that stat.

(I guess this is where Americans start discovering how badly paid the UK as a whole is)

>I guess this is where Americans start discovering how badly paid the UK as a whole is

Holy moly. In the US you have to earn just over $240K USD/yr to break the top 5%. At least you don't go bankrupt when it's time for elder care.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/how-much-money-you-have-to-e....

In addition to the writers’ and actors’ unions, many professional athletes are also unionized, where there is also a great deal of variance in pay and skill between the best and the worst athletes.

Both actors and athletes face a different dynamic, due to the fact that there’s a limited number of spots on the field / the set. This keeps crab mentality at bay to some extent. The same is not true for most workplaces.

> Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power.

No, this is a common misunderstanding. Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes.

The point of labor unions is that no matter how much power you may think an individual worker has, it's always relatively small and vastly surpassed by the power and money of the business ownership.

> Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes.

Except tennis, where players are basically independent contractors—and not coïncidentally they have the lowest average earnings of any major sport:

* https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/9/12/23870760/tennis-wages-s...

I would not expect a union for tennis players. Why would they even have an employer? They play by themselves, for themselves. I have never heard of a tennis player “owner”, other than obviously the tennis player themself.

And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players.

> They play by themselves, for themselves.

The same can be said of actors, and yet they have a union/guild.

> And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players.

Few can name most of the benchwarmers in the NBA/NFL/etc, and yet they have a minimum salary: NHL is $775K, NFL is $800K.

Carlos Alcaraz is the top player and made US$ 10M (gross, not net) in 2022: he would be the 147th top-paid athlete in the NBA, 202nd in the NFL, 126th in the MLB.

> The same can be said of actors, and yet they have a union/guild.

Good point. I guess the big difference is that selling the tennis game itself simply does not bring in the revenues that acting and the NFL does.

Top tennis players earn from brand endorsements, not from simply playing the game.

Sports are not typical businesses. You can’t just start a team and hire union workers. Current owner management need to vote on expansion (this is a simplification) it’s an artificial situation.

Unions exist in other fields. They work best when quality is uniform and expertise counts for little. That doesn't mean they do not work when quality is not uniform and expertise matters, just that they don't work nearly as well.

UFC, NASCAR, golf, tennis, WWE don't have unions.

> Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes.

Terrible example though because professional sports leagues are monopolies.

We're not sports players or actors. How about listing unions that contain actual engineers in the US and explaining how successful or not they are at serving their members? There's SPEEA and...?

Companies do commoditize software development by for example pushing technologies that cater to the least experienced common denominator.

Bondage and discipline languages are a good example of this. It's typically the main rationale for their advocation, although stated perhaps a bit differently.

It follows quite obviously from the profit motive that companies want to minimize salaries, labour bargaining power and dependence on individuals. These, especially the latter, apply to the "10x" as well.

Skilled trades have unions.

> Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

I will do my best to take this as the result of decades of anti-union sentiment across the USA; in places like Sweden this is not "common knowledge" as it seems to be stated here.

The best counter-examples I can think of, within the US even is: the screen actors guild (which is a union) and the writers guild. Both of which cannot (and definitely do not) represent uniform quality and lack of talent or special skill.

This nuance is missing from most discussions about unions in tech; People have a high-level idea that unions have increased wages and improved working conditions in other industries and they’ve made a crude extrapolation that a tech union would therefore give them them more money and fewer working hours. All with no downsides or strings attached!

A more accurate mental model is to understand a union as trading some (or most) of your individual negotiating leverage and advancement opportunity out for a collective negotiating structure through the union. You have less opportunity to negotiate and advance on your own, but you would, in theory, get various protections in return.

This does not mean wages go up! In fact, companies are now incentivized to withhold as much compensation as they can get away with so they have room to negotiate in the next round of union talks. You also have to be prepared to strike to force those negotiations, which means giving up your compensation for that period.

Job hopping is huge in the software industry. It’s well known that job hopping is an easy way to get a pay increase when you’re in bad conditions. I would be surprised if software engineers as a whole would accept long strikes and strict compensation structures when they realize they can actually earn more by jumping out of a hypothetical union job where they’re not getting paid due to strikes and the recruiters come calling with job offers that are conveniently for 5-10% more than their union’s demands anyway.

Many tech workers already effectively have made the salary compromises required by collective bargaining. That’s what salary bands are. Those who think they’re worth more than that become contractors, while the FTEs mistakenly think they’re getting paid the same as everybody else and sleep well at night imagining they have more job security than the contractors do. Creating actual unions won’t change much. The suckers will still self-select into getting paid less, and will be very happy to do so.

At least here in (highly unionized) Finland unions set only the floor on the wages and other working conditions, and especially in white collar jobs practically everyone is paid above the floor.

Some, mostly public sector, contracts have union negotiated "wage tables" suggesting pay based on position and individual performance, but similar exist in almost all large organizations. And the unions don't care if someone is paid more than this, and at the moment they wouldn't even know, because individual pay isn't public information.

Even if it were true that there are fields where quality is uniform and it were true that unions worked better for these fields, that doesn't mean that unions are bad for other fields.

With a union backing them up individuals can more easily:

- Get better at salary negotiation and interviews through having union training - Share how much they earn with other workers, even distributing statistics, reinforcing salary negotiation power and the ability for workers to ensure that businesses doesn't engage in illegal wage fixing - Have union back up when HR are being a pest to protect the company - Ensure that fair severance is distributed when an individual is let go - Negotiate on-call scheduling as a group - Negotiate all other parts of their contract, for example removing pesky no competes - Engage in lobbying

Individuals, even ones with great competence within their field of expertise, have a lot less information regarding the game they're playing with other companies. Unions can help with that.

Note: You can still be in a union without having your workplace be 'unionized' or having a collective agreement with the union. You can still engage in salary negotiations individually, and you may still skip out on being in the workplace's union.

And those 20% won't even be compensated 2-3x higher under a union: likely just in lockstep with their years of service. A union might figure out a couple of tiers within the payscale for specialized or managerial work, but I expect those to be gamed as well by shrewd but mediocre people.

Following up on what you say, the main reason for unions is to help labor extract more of the wealth they create. While I'm sure there are lots of people here who think devs should make more of it, they live pretty comfortably. It'd be like saying doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work. There might be some marginal benefits to it, no doubt, but they don't as a class seem any more interested in it than devs do.

> doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work

.. have you actually checked how much power the AMA has, even though they're not technically a "union"?

This year UK doctors went on strike against their monopsony employer because they were getting below-inflation pay rises: https://www.bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/junior-doctor-campaigns...

Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

Actors are unionized.

> The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much.

If you want to see what happens in a collective bargaining system you can come to Sweden. Here the best engineers make about 1.25x what the worst make. Also, everybody makes a lot less than in the US.

> 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power…

In a free market those 20% have 80% of the negotiating power, true. But in a union they only have 20% of the votes. So what will happen? See above.

It makes sense to negotiate as a block when management has more power than you. Now more than ever, tech companies have more cash, more lobbying and more power. They use this to play games with employees, like attrition through a return to office program so that they can skirt around the WARN Act wrt layoff requirements.

>Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

Absolutely not.

I'm a software engineer in a research & development department (with a headcount of ~200 in an organisation of about 20k). Roles here are very varied, from people with multi-decade experience and very deep specialist technical knowledge to recent graduates, in domains that range from RF engineering to ethnography to project management.

Our union is indispensable, both within our department and across the whole organisation.

Unions work best when you have 3 qualities of the job: a feeling that you cannot be better than someone else (that is quality/expertise don't count past a short training period); a uniform wage scale (that is no way to say one person is better than another); and enough skill that you can't be easily replaced.

Note that the above is how they work best. Unions do work in situations lacking some of the above, but because of that lack there is incentive for someone to leave the union and so they have troubles they must address somehow.

The above mostly lifted from https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit...

Uh, did you miss that Hollywood is on strike? That Marvel's 3D artists are unionizing? I wouldn't call those "low skilled" jobs, or one where "quality is uniform".

edit: Artistic endeavors where people are passionate about the work to the point where they can be exploited are an excellent place for unions. Within computing the obvious comparative is the gaming industry. The "EA Spouse" scandal in the '00s demonstrated how much people were willing to destroy themselves to get into the gaming industry, and how an employer could abuse that passion.

The NBA Players Association would like a word.

Unions don’t exist so that people you consider unskilled will get raises. Unions exist so that people who sell their labor can cooperate to influence the conditions they work in.

If you consider nothing more important than your own individual compensation, and have absolute faith in your own irreplaceable genius, it’s easy to make a case against unions — sort of like “there is no prisoner’s dilemma, why would I ever cooperate?”

This thread is full of idiots who think they're geniuses.

We seem to have based our ideas of on the excesses of the 1970's.

The idea of a tech union could simply be establishing the very basics. The expectations of the folks I know in the industry include more than 40 hour weeks, significant unpaid overtime during "crunch" periods. Managers promising the world to clients without even consulting the devs. Illegitimate H1-B hiring, and unspoken threats to H1-B workers when they are voluntold to do extra, unpaid work.

Again, I understand the hesitancy, but a tech union could be much more akin to the Screen Actors Guild, where the vast majority of the negotiation is about how the lowest-ranking get a fair shake, while the superstars barely notice the union. The benefits to the superstars, however, are obvious. When you have major players on record of egregious crimes of illegal non-competes a decade ago, which probably cost the superstars literally millions of dollars each over their careers, I would hope they would want to be on board too.

Unions can suck. They don't have to suck. I would think a bunch of habitually online, highly-skeptical, analytic, and systemic-focused folks like us could actively make them not suck.

> Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

SAG-AFTRA (the big acting union) blows that argument out of the water. The disparity in compensation between the SAG extras and the big name stars can be several orders of magnitude. Their union works great, as it's mostly about dictating labor-favorable working conditions and contract terms.

There are all sorts of things that the vast majority of software developers could get behind that we often don't see eye-to-eye with management about. Flexible working hours, having blocks of interruption-free time, on-call sucks, etc.

Unions protect against the power imbalance between the capitalist class (in the classical definition -- those who control the capital) and the labor class (again, in the classical definition -- those who sell work for wage). The skill disparities you describe exist in literally every field; software is not special in this regard.

Could you possibly be more elitist?

The old-fashioned way to level this accusation is to say that the union is "Procrustean", named after the mythical Greek King who would chop people's limbs off or stretch them on a rack so as to fit the exact dimensions of his bed.

    For THERSITES & Co., for the weakly and small,
    Who in free competition must go to the wall,
    The plan of PROCRUSTES has obvious charms:
    "Cut 'em down to our standard, chop legs, shorten arms!
    Bring us all to one level in power and pay,
    By the rule of a legalised Eight Hours Day!"

Volkswagen workers are unionized. Their expertise counts for a lot.

Unions work best in industries that have captive audience, that's why public sector, and public-sector-adjacent (e.g. infrastructure construction) unions are the ones that stick around more; no matter how bad they are, the taxpayers can't choose to shop around. Stuff either becomes more expensive (infrastructure), or worse with consumers holding the bag (public schools; consumers do shop around, but it doesn't matter much to the unions because taxpayers still pay).

Or ports are a good non-public example, it's hard to "disrupt" a port. To the extent that industry is competitive, unions would basically destroy their companies... Big 3 automakers are a great example.

I don't know whether we deserve a union or not. I do know that I emphatically do not want or need one. I make the amount of money I need. I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work. Under no circumstances do I want to be forced to pay dues into a union that is unlikely to represent me in the company or politically.

Since I have no need or desire there is no reason for me to consider the question.

> I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work

Definitely something that is in no danger of changing at any point in the future! What a relief for all of us!

We already have ample evidence that tech giants colluded to depress the salaries of their workers. I can understand being wary of unions but to suggest they’d provide absolutely nothing feels like a failure of imagination.

It will change if it becomes harder for companies to hire and fire people, or become less competitive.

Software engineer is not the only job I've every had. I've been the janitor sweeping floors, I've been the guy on the assembly line. I've literally supported my family by working day labor with no certainty of continued employment. I have always been able to find a place and prove myself worthy of the pay without sacrificing my health, or family time. I've quit jobs when I no longer felt like it was the right place for me.

I don't think it's anyone's responsibility but mine to ensure that I can provide for my family. I have all the self-dignity I need to stand up for myself and my family. I have built the support structures I need to survive rocky periods. None of what I've done is out of reach for anyone else. So yes, I think a certain amount of self-responsibility and self-reliance is good for you. I don't buy into the idea the most important dynamic is relative power between employees who may or may not share my values and an employer.

Instead I buy into the idea that self-respect, self-reliance and community support structur is far more important and I would rather focus on that than trying to balance the power dynamic at a particular workplace.

> None of what I've done is out of reach for anyone else.

"Disabled workers do not exist"

You could argue for disability protections instead of unions if that's your true position. Arguing for a .01% case to make a 100% rule is disingenuous.

> community support structure

...what do you think a union is?

I feel as though you're imagining the Big Bad Union that big companies love to describe. A union can be in whatever form you wish it to be. If software engineers wish to band together to form a union solely to improve their health insurance then they could just do that.

I don't get to pick unions. I get to pick my community support structures. Who I marry, which church,friend group,local community group I join? Those are all voluntary. Unions are not voluntary so they can't really be a community support group in the sense I mean.

Of course you do, you can choose to not take a job with an attached union you don't like. As you said, there are plenty of opportunities out there!

You are correct! But we are discussing why I personally would vote against one at an employer. It would take an otherwise reasonable and enjoyable employer and turn them into a place I no longer want to work.

>I don't get to pick unions.

>Unions are not voluntary

Not all of my colleagues are in a union, and some of those that are are in a different union to me (albeit a minority of them). It works.

It doesn't work like that in USA, union laws are different in different countries.

Some major cities have multiple overlapping electricians unions. I've been on job sites where different unions are working on top of each-other.

> None of what I've done is out of reach for anyone else.

Yes it is.

It's important to look for the privileges you were born into that allowed you to get to where you are now. Because not everyone starts at the same starting line. It's great that you have such a strong work ethic and are so self reliant but life comes at you fast, and sometimes you need some outside help. Illness, accidents, family emergencies, wildfires/tornadoes/hurricanes/earthquakes/etc; those things happen and you need help, whether its from the government or from your employer or your church or church-equivalent.

It's great that you've got such a good relationship with your employer. But there are others that don't have that same relationship, and are being exploited and are being treated unfairly by their employer. Thanks to the US' H1-B system, they may not have the luxury of quitting under those circumstances like you do.

Not everyone has access to the same community support structure as you do. It's great that you have one! But for those that don't, their workplace can be a lifeline.

Look at the bigger picture. If your boss was assaulting a co-worker with his fists, what would you do? Yell at your co-worker and tell them to have more self-respect? Why, when it's financial or cultural instead shouldn't you stand up for them as well?

   If your boss was assaulting a co-worker with his fists, what would you do?

I would stand in his way with my own fists.

You say I have privilege which I suppose I do. I have it because I worked on myself to get them and stood up for myself when I needed to. I have no college degree. I grew up poor. I think perhaps one of the greatest injustices you can do to someone is tell them they are stuck with no recourse and have no leverage they can exercise. I think that's a lie that imprisons people in circumstances they don't need to be stuck in.

>Look at the bigger picture. If your boss was assaulting a co-worker with his fists, what would you do? Yell at your co-worker and tell them to have more self-respect? Why, when it's financial or cultural instead shouldn't you stand up for them as well?

> I would stand in his way with my own fists.

Ok, but that’s what unionizing is. Standing up to your employer to stop rampant abuse to you and your fellow coworkers.

> Definitely something that is in no danger of changing at any point in the future!

Then how about we cross that bridge when we get there rather than trying to optimize today’s situation for potential problems that might happen in the future?

> We already have ample evidence that tech giants colluded to depress the salaries of their workers.

And we already have evidence that the problem didn’t require a union to solve.

> We already have ample evidence that tech giants colluded to depress the salaries of their workers.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

The irony here is that the tech companies are willing to organize into a kind of union in order to promote their interests, but the tech workers aren't.

> organize into a kind of union

That's one way to describe an illegal conspiracy

Yes. On the other hand, there are plenty of legal business groups: trade associations, chamber of commerce, etc.

Also, labour unions are ammoral: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-labor-unions-are-evil

Can't think of a stronger argument for organizing than the fact that white supremacists hate it when it happens. It's good to do things that antagonize and infuriate white supremacists.

That name sounds familiar: it’s the guy who writes white-supremacist articles for neo-nazi sites:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...

why, yes, go defenestrate yourself too.

I'm not hungry therefore nobody is hungry.

Which tech workers are hungry exactly?

The ones outside of your metropolitan area. There are tech workers around the world, not just in Silicon Valley, and they are subject to all sorts of economic conditions.

But you already enjoy many benefits already brought about by unions that you did not pay dues for, like weekends off, ending child labor, 40 hr work week, 8 hr work day, benefits around health care, unemployment and more.

I also enjoy miners union that influences politics in my country in ways I don't like.

Unions have also perpetuated racism, sexism, xenophobia, organized crime, government corruption, etc. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops. America abandoned unions for a reason.

America abandoned unions for a reason.

It's been a concerted effort of corporate capitalists: buying & influencing media outlets, lobbying, offshoring, etc.

There are many unions in the US. My partner is a member of a union and has much better healthcare and, overall, a better benefit package than I do. They work at the state university.

So? Unions also bought and influenced media outlets. They also lobbied. It's not like unions just sat there while management poisoned the country's mind against unions.

Unions were not able to make a compelling case. They had every chance to do so, starting with them being the default option in many industries.

America abandoned unions for a reason. It may have taken a concerted effort by corporate capitalists to get there, but that's not why. "Why" is because more and more people felt that the unions were not a net positive for them.

It can be the case that people didn't feel that unions were a net positive from the 1960s~2000s and now, starting from somewhere in the late 2010s, have begun reconsidering whether unions are net positive. All that needs to change is conditions altering which make unions seem to be a net positive.

Sure. It can even be the case that unions were a net positive before 1960, too. It can even be the case that the gains achieved by the unions are what made conditions less terrible from ~1960 to ~2000, and that the absence of the unions is what allowed conditions to get worse after 2000. (I don't think that's the whole story, but it's a defensible reading of events...)

> have also perpetuated racism, sexism, xenophobia, organized crime, government corruption,

The same is true for political parties, religious organizations, and all sorts of other organizations that are made of people, including privately owned companies. Which of these concepts would you like to abandon, and what do you propose should be their replacement?

What you say is an argument for balancing power, not for concentrating it.

Unions are forced participation. I am not forced to participate in political parties or religious organizations. In theory a Union could be purely voluntary in which case cool. I'll opt out. But then the Union loses most of it's leverage so it in practice if a Union gets introduced it's no longer voluntary it's forced for anyone who works at that company. The only choice for someone who doesn't want to contribute to the union is to leave the company.

Government is also forced participation but I accept it as necessary part of a functioning society. I don't see Software Engineering Unions as a necessary part of a functioning society though.

That's not what we were talking about, but alright.

Not sure how it works in the US, but from what I read you can't be forced to join a union there. But I think I get what you mean: once you work in a given place, there's usually not much choice which union you can join (or which will represent you in any case), and your only option is to change employer, location or career.

I understand that point of view, but I don't think it's a good argument. Employers also organize and wield their influence in ways that you seem to resent in unions. Don't like it? You have the same choices as above. (I don't think people should be forced into unions; I just think your argument is not anti-union, or at least cannot be fairly applied to single them out.)

The difference seems to be that the employer pays you and treats you well enough that you think you won't benefit from a union. Good for you! Hope it stays that way.

>once you work in a given place, there's usually not much choice which union you can join (or which will represent you in any case), and your only option is to change employer, location or career.

Unions are generally democratic, too, so there's also the option of voting for different union reps (or volunteering to be a rep) in order to change the union's policy or how the union works.

> Unions are forced participation.

They quite literally are not, at least not in the US; half the states have right-to-work laws that prohibit this explicitly, and there are likely some protections even in the states that don't have a blanket protection.

What makes you feel that a union wouldn’t represent your interests? Do you really believe that corporations will continue paying us well any longer than they absolutely have to? As soon as an ai or low code split comes along that can replace junior and mid level engineers, those jobs will get harder and harder to find. The rest of us will have to shoulder the responsibility of “cleaning” after those solutions and the additional work of not having a “pipeline” to continue growing better software engineers.

It wouldn't represent my interest because an older programmer who puts in a few hours of work a week would be paid more than me.

You have very very heavy lifting to do if you're trying to prove a productivity improvement leads to a worse outcome.

Farming automation and the green revolution didn't make us all unemployed - it meant 90% of us could do something else instead of farming.

We used the productivity to just invent new forms of work that weren't possible and aren't possible in a lower productivity economy.

Outcome for whom, though? We can use fancy words like "Pareto" or we can argue that it doesn't matter if a productivity improvement gives a billionaire more toys if everyone else is experiencing smaller houses and a worse public environment.

> Outcome for whom, though?

Everyone who is not a slave, serf, or subsistence farmer

One thing we're not experiencing is smaller houses. Compare now to the 1950s or the 1920s or the 1890s. Productivity improvements have not led to smaller houses. Empirically proven.

> Farming automation and the green revolution didn't make us all unemployed - it meant 90% of us could do something else instead of farming.

There was actually a lot of fear that there would be mass starvation and competition for food because food production could not match population increase. It was an existential threat, much like how we look at global warming. And that fear today? Gone, and most people never even knew it existed.

“Technology will free us from a life of drudgery!” has been the promise for what, over a hundred years now? We all sit around at our leisure while robots prepare our dinner.

What actually happened in agriculture is that technology enabled massive conglomerates to dominate the industry. I see few guarantees that technological progress is going to free me up to do something else that enriches my life.

“ The spoils of technology went straight to the top while workers switched to new jobs that pay horribly.”

I have a hard time believing you believe that most people switched to a worse paying job. Did peoples material quality of life improve or not?

Technology has already freed me from a life of drudgery.

One has to consider the impact on dynamism. It may not matter to many but it would be something management would have to consider before entering into new areas for development.

I think unionization would impact expansion and research areas —the big bets where now if something doesn’t work the company either reorganizes the team or lets go of a team. With a union companies would operate more conservatively.

That would perhaps provide stable jobs for current job holders but limit growth for prospective job holders.

Union's do much more than just negotiate things with your employer. They lobby elected representatives. They donate money to political groups or candidates for office.

I have more dimensions to me than just what I do for a job. The collective aggregate desires of all my coworkers is likely to diverge from me in areas that I care deeply about. I don't need a situation where I am "forced" to support those things with my money and labor. I already have to do it with my taxes in some occasions. I don't need another one.

Do you use the "forced" framing when your money and labor is used to fund your employer lobbying against your interests? Or is it just natural and right that your effort is subservient to the desires of your boss because they are more important than you?

I think it depends. If the union is voluntary its not forced. But often membership isn’t voluntary. The relationship between you and your employer, however is. Many people choose not to work for defense companies for example.

> What makes you feel that a union wouldn’t represent your interests?

They definitionally don't. Unions represent the union's interests. It is the design intent of unions to represent an amalgamation of their members. That's already not the same as my interests, but the union organization itself is also an incentivized actor.

These distinction are far from a subtlety.

My interests might overlap with the union's interest, but that's highly situational.

> I make the amount of money I need.

It's not just about money. Working conditions are equally important.

Consider when companies demand that everyone RTO after promising permanent WFH. Consider when companies rescind offer letters after you've already quit your old job. Consider mass layoffs and severance.

I think about how so many engineers need to take a long, unpaid break from work after leaving their jobs, because they've been burned out by their former employer.

How do unions help with those?

- Do unions enforce remote work?

- Do unions enforce an offer letter to turn into actual employment for someone who isn't even a member yet (they haven't signed anything)?

- Do unions make people have a better handle on their mental health and do companies with unions have lower rates of burnout in their workforces?

Unions are democratic organizations. If those things are important to you, you can speak up at a union meeting

People voted not to have a union, so apparently democracy doesn't get you what you want, at least in your case.

In most states in the US you are not required to join the union if your workplace votes for it

But you can't form a union if they vote against it, which is why you are here arguing with people. So we here we have clear proof that even if you spend years arguing it doesn't necessarily lead to the democratic results you want. Individual bargaining however seems to work very well, lots of people get what they want that way much faster and easier than any democratic process. And that is why people vote to not have unions.

The moment developers have a cause they can agree on, they will start to vote for unions. And no it isn't too late at that point, rather it is too early to vote for a union unless you have a cause you collectively care about.

> even if you spend years arguing it doesn't necessarily lead to the democratic results you want

Yes, this is how democracy works in general. You don't get everything (or necessarily anything) you want

Personally the only thing that would really make me quit is if they tried to make me go hybrid or back to the office in any way. My workplace is small (10 engineers) and so unionizing based on that could be pretty easy, but it would be easier for me to quit and find a new job that does do remote

You don't have to join but you usually still have to pay the dues. So you both have no vote on how that money get's spent but are also forced to give it to them anyway.

You don't have to join but you usually still have to pay the dues.

You are misinformed on the law. Free riders can't be compelled to pay dues.

> Free riders can't be compelled to pay dues.

California, Washington and New York are forced union states, most developers don't work in right to work states.

For better or worse, closed shop (where a company hires only union members) was outlawed in the US by the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947.

That law has a loophole: Force the worker to pay the union even if they don't join it. So unless you live in a right to work state that law doesn't mean much.

> Unions are democratic organizations

In my experience, democratic organizations are complete garbage. Every experience I've had with local government/HOAs has been a disappointing at best.

I get that some democratic organizations are necessary. But adding more voluntarily seems to be at best a necessary evil, not something to list as a positive.

> Every experience I've had with local government/HOAs has been a disappointing at best.

As far as I'm aware, most HOAs were imposed from above by the home builder rather than coming into existence via grassroots organization of the home owners.

Yeah actually a union can help with all of those things.

That's why police are unionized, as well as most team sport elite athletes (players unions). And they like the power it gives them, which is why you never hear them talk badly about it.

While I personally think Police are necessary in a well functioning society, I will argue that Police unions are a large contributing factor behind the poor reputation Police have gotten lately. They have blocked much needed reforms, protected bad eggs, and are an argument for how a Union can force it's participants to support things they find morally repugnant.

I didn't ask If, I asked How, and I'd be surprised if you can find any examples.

You don't think unions negotiate work terms such as wages, working hours, conditions, etc.?

What are some of the reasons you think a labor union would form in the first place?

Have you ever heard of mandatory break requirements in certain industries? Think those ideas came from business owners?

"The National Labor Union was founded on August 20, 1866, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first attempt to create a national labor group in the United States and one of their first actions was the first national call for Congress to mandate an 8-hour work day."

https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/august...

You're responding to a post that gave you examples.

The mechanics are work contracts with a grievance process, if you're curious.

Yes, those are all things that your union can help negotiate on behalf of you and all your peers.

A union will make it more difficult to be hired. You can see how difficult it is to get a job a western Europe due to "working conditions" requirements.

Great but for those of us who have better than adequate working conditions and enough money, please explain why we "deserve a union".

Reading through this interview and thread, I notice how often this debate comes down to a sense of agency. You write about programmers being "burned out by their employer". But I would say that people experience burnout when they fail to set boundaries. Working to the point where your mental health suffers is your fault: it's your responsbility to establish healthy boundaries or, failing at that, quit.

> Working to the point where your mental health suffers is your fault: it's your responsbility to establish healthy boundaries or, failing at that, quit.

It's interesting that the manager and/or employer has no apparent agency here.

Sure they do. But their agency doesn't eliminate yours. You can't control what your employer does. You can control what you do. So the correct thing is to exercise your own agency in response to theirs.

> You can't control what your employer does.

That's precisely the point of unions, though. Individually, you have no control over your employer, but via collective bargaining you do.

So once the collective agrees they want something they will form a union to bargain collectively. But so far developers don't agree about anything so they don't, because the collective feels that they get enough from their individual contracts.

A union is like insurance in a situation like this. By the time you need it, it's too late. You needed it to keep things from degrading to that point.

> By the time you need it, it's too late.

Why? Unions work the best when they are formed around a cause everyone cares about, that is how we got workers right in the first case, there is nothing that says you need to form a union when things are good.

Because at the time you want to form a union due to things being bad, your employer already has the workers in a position of fear and control, and they have reasonably free reign to do whatever they want and toe the line of illegality when it comes to intimidating workers who are discussing unionization.

Talk to a union organizer about this. They'll help you understand how this type of monopsony looks to a worker when they're trying to organize.

What mechanism is there to impact unethical work laid across your back? You walk away so someone in more of a desperate situation will do the work instead?

There's no mechanism that ensures that no one does things you consider unethical. What an idea!

If my superior asks me to violate stated company policy and my only play is to quit, what do you think is the ultimate outcome?

Why on earth would you want to continue working for someone who would ask you to do that? The union won't make that person any better. Union or no union you are better off going somewhere else.

I think this idea that everyone can "just move" is heinous.

> Consider when companies demand that everyone RTO after promising permanent WFH. Consider when companies rescind offer letters after you've already quit your old job. Consider mass layoffs and severance.

Should these not just be regular labor law requirements?

They aren't though. A lot of regular labor law requirements (hours, benefits, safety requirements, etc.) are in place today because of labor unions.

Perhaps, but favorable labor legislation often depends on a robust organized labor movement, especially in the United States (where no labor party is present).

Right now if I don't like the working conditions I leave for a place that has better conditions. I've never had to take a long unpaid break because I don't stick around long enough to burn out. I've done exactly this multiple times. I think most people could do this. I don't know why more of them don't. If they did working conditions would be across the board better.

I don't think burnout is caused by companies most of the time. It's caused by the employee not taking care of themself. Will a manager abuse someones willingness to not leverage the power they have? Sure. Some managers are awful. They'll continue to be awful when the Union is in place. Just in a different way. You'll still be miserable under that manager. The solution is to make a plan to leave and start executing on it. The moment you make the plan you'll feel better.

> I've never had to take a long unpaid break

The reader is expecting you to say, "because I only work for employeers with good working conditions", but...

> because I don't stick around long enough to burn out.

Well, ok, but how old are you, and do you believe that this strategy of musical chairs will continue to work for the rest of your life? It's a marathon, not a sprint.

> If they did working conditions would be across the board better.

Why do you think so? How exactly is that going to happen? What's the incentive to improve working conditions when employees just leave quickly, on purpose? Again, you didn't even claim that your new jobs have good working conditions.

It's not musical chairs. My average tenure is somewhere around 5 years. I've worked at companies for 7+ years without burning out or getting close to it. So yeah, I think it's a sustainable pace for quite a while. I'm also not a spring chicken anymore. I have 5 adult children.

    Why do you think so? How exactly is that going to happen? What's the 
    incentive to improve working conditions when employees just leave quickly, 
    on purpose? Again, you didn't even claim that your new jobs have good 
    working conditions.

Most of my jobs have had great working conditions. The few jobs that were short tenure were the ones that didn't. The incentive is that high turnover is harmful. Successful companies should look to keep people around for longer than a year. If they want to keep me for 5 or more then they'll have to provide an environment that I'll be willing to stick around for. There are companies that have done that and we have both benefited as a result. If enough people realize that they are valuable employees and treat their employer relationship that way I believe it can change the landscape.

If you think it's hopeless and you aren't a valuable employee in the companies eye then that turns into a self fulfilling prophecy.

American scale and polarization make it impossible to have moderate conversations around social tools like unions.

A union doesn't need to be a mediocrity enforcing, all-encompassing beaurocracy.

Programmers don't need a union to ensure fair pay or minimum hours. Our concerns are different, and a limited union can help.

Eg:

1. Programmers need to be given 6 months heads up before big change in employment situation. (RTO, city change, etc).

2. On call hours on weekends need to be compensated as overtime.

3. Unused vacation must be compensated as overtime by year end. This also means that unlimited vacation policies should come with miminum compensable vacation days.

4. Standard minimum maternity & paternity leave policies. Also, additional compensation if layoff occurs after notice of mat/pat leave or soon after mat/pat leave.

5. All meetings from noon-1pm should have compensated food.

6. Any meetings after 11pm (of contracted timezone) should be compensated as overtime.

7. If an employee has to live more than a 1 hour rush-hour commute from work AND a company cannot find nearer housing for them at some standard rental amount, then the commute should be fully paid for.

None of these are unreasonable and all will benefit everyone. You can have students get union membership in undergrad. Universities can enforce entry permissions to career fairs on union compliance.

Now, absolute power corrupts absolutely. As vital as unions are, limiting their powers to valid areas is just as vital. That portion I still don't have figured out.

Those are law in many countries, you do not need unions for that, you need a social democracy.

It's unclear to me how social democracy could be achieved without a labor movement.

1. I got cut from my company during the holidays in 2016. I had a job less than a month later and was double paid for some days while the severance overlap with the new job.

2. This one is interesting to me, but also might be mildly insulting to a laborer fighting for it because they actually get tired at the end of a day's work. On call is stressful, but it's first world stressful. Furthermore, you can usually do something about it to make sure that the app gets more stable over time.

3. Again this would be interesting, but I feel no loss. The company gives me an opportunity to use the vacation days, and if I am cut from the company mid-year I am paid for the vacation days I didn't use for that year. Although at my current company This is all theoretical anyway because I am given unlimited vacation days. I know unlimited vacation days are bad and come with their own caveats, but hey, if you don't want unlimited vacation days to become the norm, Don't legislate around vacation days.

4. I'm actually pretty comfortable with this one for maternity, but men really don't need much paternity. Most of the five weeks paternity leave I was given I just screwed around and home. I need 3 days, tops.

5. Our work is flexible enough nature that we can just eat at 1:00 most of the time.

6. If your company is having you do meetings at 11:00 p.m. you can just switch companies.

7. The commute is fully paid for. You knew what you were signing up for when you started the job and they fully pay for it in your salary.

A lot of these justifications sound like, " if you make enough money, you can't complain".

Also,Yes, some people, some of the time don't need these protections. Switch it to an early in career person in a terrible economy and things become quite different.

> mildly insulting to a laborer fighting for it because they actually get tired at the end of a day's work

I dont understand this one

> men really don't need much paternity

The first year of children is a sleepless affair. It is difficult for a mother to do the heavy lifting by herself. Additionally, if the woman wants to go back to work in a few months, then that's a good time for the man to take paternity leave and step up.

It’s absolutely incredible to me how much animosity unions have in the US and how self defeating the typical programmers attitude is (maybe this is just selection bias for HN?) — and I say this as someone who’s definitely not a laborer. But if I was one, I would hope I wouldn’t vote against my own class interests like it appears developers often do.

Luckily, even speaking openly against my own interests here is zero risk, I feel Americans are too far gone in their position against unions for it to ever be an issue for me personally.

Its a mix of crabs in a pot and 'f u I got mine' syndrome. I've largely given up trying to convince HN readers that tech work in the future will be the modern equivalent of bricklaying and will need its own protection for workers. Workers enjoy a high demand now and think that will always be the case but blacksmiths and telegraph operators thought so too.

And the best time to set such a union up is while we're in a strong position. Why wait until we're competing with AI?

Exactly. Crabs in the pot. "How dare you suggest lifting everyone up. Only I should be lifted up!" A lot of HN thinks they are Captains Of Industry who would somehow make less money in a union. The rest point to the least-pleasant union they can think of and declare "They are all necessarily like that one."

Unions have not helped their cause over here. They have regularly enforced paying bad people more than good people because the only measure they allow is years on the job. They regularly prevent people who want to move into management from doing so (not to be confused with people who don't want to!) be not allowing anything learned to count for your management role. They regularly discourage learning something more. They regularly yell that doing better work just helps your employer and will not help you.

Unions don't have to be that way, but all the examples I have of unions are places I would not want to work. Thus why would I want a union in my job?

Here’s how I think about it —

There’s a value X that’s the absolute minimum you would work for, any less and you quit today.

There’s a value Y that’s the absolute maximum I would pay you, any penny more and I fire you immediately.

Y - X is up for grabs, and there are zero moral proscriptions I would give to any allocation of this between employee and employer. Each and every aspect of the employee-employer relationship is advantaged already in favor of the employer (resource disparity, implicit solidarity from company structure, regulations). Unions tend to reduce my share of Y-X. If I was a laborer, I’d prefer a union.

E: I’ve seen unions that are counter examples to each of your complaints so not really interesting to me to think too much about your own personal experience with unions.

I've seen counter examples of the unions as well. However overall what I've seen has left me with a bad taste.

> They have regularly enforced paying bad people more than good people because the only measure they allow is years on the job.

This is blatant propaganda. Stop repeating it, it's just false. There are plenty of unions where compensation has nothing to do with seniority, just look at SAG-AFTRA: Daniel Radcliffe was making a lot more than actor playing Mr. Dursely, despite the the latter having more acting experience than the former's experience living.

All you do by perpetuating lies about unions is making management more powerful. It doesn't benefit you at all. Yet here you are, going to bat for them.

It is not false. It is not true for all unions, but it is true for some.

Management is NOT your enemy. This is probably the worst lie unions keep repeating. The best solutions are win-win. Yes management has different interests, but that doesn't make them an enemy.

Fundamentally, why do we work? We work for money. The employees want to make as much money as possible, the employer wants to make as much as possible. Management, representing capital, can make more money by paying their employees less. Therein lies the fundamental, unsolvable conflict between labor and management.

There are win win solutions to that conflict which makes it solvable.

By the company as a whole making more money, everyone can make more money. But no matter how much more money the company makes, capital and by extension management can make more money by paying the employees less.

Why is that incredible? I left a top level comment on why I hate unions [1], they create the worst set of incentives possible - they are exclusionary, anti-meritocratic, bureaucratic, anti-innovation... if I was to make a purely morality-based choice, without considering selfish consequences, I'd sooner join something less evil like a drug cartel.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37511944

With the recent vfx unionization at marvel and the QA unionization at ZeniMax, I hope we see more efforts to organize tech workers.

What about a union that spans companies something akin to the directors guild of america, whom almost all Hollywood creatives are apart of? I think it's purpose is very similar to how software engineers work on practice.

Labor law makes it difficult to achieve, sadly. The NLRA only provides for bargaining units within one employer. Unless you can get an industry wide coalition to voluntarily recognize your union, it is not happening.

Therefor, labor law needs to change, no?

It's hard to envision such a drastic (and labor friendly) change passing in a climate where the much milder PRO Act couldn't get passed when an allegedly labor friendly party and leader controlled both houses and the presidency.

The path to winning such changes - whether through changing the law with the political process or simply forcing employers to bargain with industry wide strikes - requires much more powerful labor movement. The path to that is simply to build whatever power is possible. Right now the labor movement just trying to get organizing and union membership on the upswing, and I think that's the necessary step from where we are today.

Laborers need a union because their work is not differentiated. Anyone can dig a ditch. Most people can put grocery carts away. With a little training, most people can even drive a bus. Because of this, market forces drive businesses to treat them inhumanely and pay them so little money that they can't support a family on it.

On the other hand, engineers are highly differentiated. I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm probably one of the most highly paid engineers in my company.

I can assure you, the market is not something that I'm afraid of. Engineers do not need a union. If they get good at their jobs, they are highly differentiated.

I'd go further and say that unions would be detrimental. I remember my sister working at a grocery store and having to pay union dues cut and it would cut into her paycheck. A necessary evil perhaps for that field, but in ours would be overhead and cost that didn't need to be there. It would probably just make me poorer.

Ditch diggers may need a union, but if the ditch is dug with a manual shovel they won't get one because as soon as they organize the boss will fire them and hire someone else. A ditch digger who operates a backhoe needs a union and can get one because you can't hire just anyone to operate a backhoe (I can operate one, but I'll spend the first several days randomly pulling levers until what I want happens does - don't put me close to something important for the first week as I'll destroy it moving the wrong way - after a month I'd be good, but that is a month of paying me while not getting your ditches dug)

Grocery workers rarely have a union, and when they do they rarely go on strike because the workers don't really have enough skills to not be replaced. It only works at all because every clerk going on strike at once is hard to replace.

Many of the top replies are about "I'm a top programmer, why would I need a union? change my mind"

And, you don't. Not right now. When you're just "a common worker" you do. Because your bosses have convinced you everybody has to be a top programmer or they can die in a ditch even when it's impossible. It's called Stackhanovism.

> After the 2016 presidential election, the tech industry saw a surge of activism when workers began to recognize the work they had produced could potentially be abused to harm people.

This is one more reason to be skeptical of tech unions. Often, they aren't interested in securing higher pay and better conditions; they're about politics.

"Politics" is when people fight for more human rights for others, but when companies try to destroy others' lives or livelihoods, that's _not_ politics, right?

Has no one heard of the CWA? They were huge back when I live in California.

Granted that was quite a long time ago and when telco's were a major power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...

CWA is a big part of the tech unionization effort today: https://code-cwa.org/

I was once a card carrying member of the CWA, communication workers union, I was an apprentice studying telecoms and systems engineer. They helped me out during my dumb teenager gets caught drunk driving days. Instead of getting the boot, I got counselling for my drinking issues and sent on driver training courses. If I didn’t have the union behind me who knows…

I would argue that in the US it will not work. An only acceptable model might be co-determination where workers have direct representation on the board. You can look across the board for barely functioning unions in the US, they are in some cases nearly adversarial with the people they are representing.

We must remember that any structure will require money to function, and I don't think paying a bunch of people who don't do what I do to "represent me" is for me. As people who are certainly making above average wages, we are now juicy targets for make-work organizers and griftlords who want to tell us how we should run our businesses and lives and to cut them in. The purpose of labor is scale, and in software we don't have the same overheads.

As for our industry, we are not very uniform in what we do and so it will be hard to define. This is very different to say, trades, or services that are well defined. Of course we want to think we are special so maybe it isn't true and I'm wrong. My guess is if you talked to five senior software engineers (to be explicit: someone who has been working for 10y) in software you'd have five different novels of war stories.

We are by far one of the highest paid and most coddled workers of all time. There is no kombucha on tap at the job site where you're laying bricks. (Marshalltown forever!)

Don't give me lines about "solidarity with workers" when you're the same people ordering doordash/instacart/grubhub. Those models ship money from your neighborhood and area directly into ultracapitalist hands.

No one strip mined you into a six figure job. I have belonged to several unions, most of which could not do anything for me contractually and yet I still paid a large amount of my then tiny checks because I was "part of the system". Not part enough to benefit. Maybe it's sour grapes on my part!

We must swim with the tides, and maybe the industry will change.

I see no reason or benefit to unionizing tech workers.

The Physicians have a cartel, Pharmacists have a cartel, why can't we create our own cartel?

The only way this would work, is if we entrench ourselves into US politics and spend hundreds of millions of dollars of bribery/lobbying money.

Sure its definitely going to be bad for the rest of US citizens, but if the medical field is going to extort us, why can't we join in?

100% agree.

I think it is because we can't get out act together to create a professional organization to gatekeeps credentialing, so that we can "police our own". Hence, the whole tech interview drama, because there is no uniform metric of quality, because anyone can call himself an "engineer".

I think if we fix that problem, we'll get most of the benefits of unionization downstream.

This is more or less what's happened in my country, which is a popular outsourcing destination.

Contractors enjoy lower taxes and any attempt at ending these privileges failed, because otherwise the brain-drain that's going on would be much worse.

I found it an interesting omission that the author completely failed to discuss H1B. There will be no tech union for the same reasons there is are no corporate unions for white collar labor. A significant amount of the core population are capitalists who are angling for middle management and executive roles, and/or founder roles, and the companies source competent intellectual labor internationally. There is often no reason the demand cannot go offshore, and value of offshore talent doesn't just come from labor arbitrage anymore.

I don't read that title the same way other people read that title

In my country we had mandated unions for tech workers in various states. I paid the compulsory annual fee plus an additional fee that I didn't understand and can't properly explain what it was for.

Not once in 23 years in IT have they done anything for me. Not a single time. Every time we pushed for raises and someone contacted the union, nothing came back. When the company was not updating our salaries against inflation (that's a thing here), the union made a deal in our behalf so the increase would be bellow inflation. Multiple times.

I'd like to see unions working but they are a joke.

EDIT: Just remembered that we constantly had issues with overtime and they didn't care either.

From what you described it sounds very, very similar to my experience with unions in Brazil. The ones for IT specifically, they all suck and that system is definitely not how unions should work... For some reason I always felt those IT unions in Brazil were not actually run by any worker but by cadres from the employers.

On the other hand, unions here in Sweden are definitely worth being part of, they have your back as an employee, and have helped many people I know personally.

>I always felt those IT unions in Brazil were not actually run by any worker but by cadres from the employers.

That's a yellow union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_union

These are, for some reason, popular in Denmark.

I might be misinformed here, but aren't unions part of the board for LLCs in Sweden? Or is it in Germany? (which, I mean, if you want limited liability, it's a good idea to have real oversight).

As far as I know that applies to Germany, don't remember similar legislation existing in Sweden.

Sounds like a bad union and in many places unions are badly run. Did people keep voting for the same ineffective union reps?

I don't think about what a union can do for me personally, rather what it can do for the collective and hope that benefits me directly. I'm in a union and they have forced yearly mandatory base rate raises for all and the negotiation to be just after the company announces their yearly profit. My salary keeps going up without me doing anything and occasionally I have a performance review to increase the salary beyond the mandatory minimum rise.

Fundamentally unions require either a good relationship and respect from the company; or be willing to enforce that respect via direct action. In order for that to happen the country has to have decent employment laws.

Which country?

I know. Why would someone create a throwaway account and then not mention the key bits of information??

Brazil

Do you get to vote for union reps? If they aren't doing the job can't you just vote them out?

I have no idea. Maybe? Either we can't or nobody bothers to notify workers that they are happening.

I guess the trouble is that we don't have any self-admitted exploited workers. Everyone is a temporarily embarrassed Founder/CTO.

With thanks to Steinback - https://hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com/post/23486952183/com...

At least in the US, the average software developer does eventually become a millionaire, working a pretty cushy job. If that is "exploitation" then most people would be like to be exploited like that.

The average software developer makes $110k/yr, and there's a clear differentiation between having a million dollars (or millions) in your 20s and 30s compared to retiring with $2-3 million in a 401k that you need to live off of for four decades.

$2-3 million in a 401k by retirement age is still 30-40x the median amount. [0]

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/retirement/average-401k-balance-by-...

I just keep thinking about the fact that literally everyone in my family makes less than that. To say that a developer _only_ makes 110K is high level privilege in many places including tech hubs. 110K is more than a whole household makes in my metro area. The average dev out earns dual income family.

This is why I spend a lot of think wondering what could a union even do for me? I work in comfort. If I work long hours that's my decision because I can always get another high paying less stressful job. Over my career I've taken very high paying jobs with high stress for the money and also chill lower paying jobs. Every job I've ever had I've outearned my both my working parents.

> This is why I spend a lot of think wondering what could a union even do for me?

I mean the same thing it does for Tom Cruise.

You're really thinking about this the wrong way. Companies all the time join trade groups and pay membership fees to coordinate their efforts. Are you going to argue that companies are making a fiscally irresponsible decision?

A union is strictly the same thing as a trade group except its membership is labor and not management.

Tom Cruise is in an industry where he can be shut out at any given moment and there's only like 5 employers.

How does that match tech? FAANG pays outrageously compared to regular dev jobs, but regular devs jobs are still pay absurdly high for a job that has a lot of comfort. This is nothing like average actor.

So for me, average dev, what is a union doing for me? What can a union offer me that I don't currently get? I make far more than median income in my area. It has never taken me long to get another job even when I burned a bridge. I can't be "black balled". My benefits are stellar and every company I have interacted with has stellar benefits. Merely being at a company with developer bestows better benefits for all white collar workers in my experience.

What can a union offer me when unions in the US are prone to valuing seniority over all (I say this as someone with 10+ yoe) and prone to being sympathetic to companies over time and tending towards modest progress instead of allowing supply and demand pressure to be fully felt.

Software development is not at the stage where it has been whole consolidated and companies are insulated from market pressure. If you work for an airline what real threat is your quitting? You can only do so so many times. This is not the case for developers. Unions however would bring forth a kind of calcified standardization that will resist radical change. That's why I'm against it. If unions existed when I first started my career, I would have seen the rise of unlimited PTO that allows me EU level vacations. I never dreamed when I started that I'd take 5 or six weeks off a year and that would be fine. I could tell my interviewers I'd be doing that and that would be fine. Because as it stands companies need devs and I have power.

People are upset about layoffs but barring Twitter which was an illegal shitshow, was anyone really harmed by it? Layoffs are rare in our field (ignoring game development which does actually need a union for inhuman work conditions and general instability). Easy money ended and so they layoffs happen. Should financial professionals be so up in arms about what happened to them in 2008 because it was the same kind of shitshow looking at my circle.

I remain unconvinced at this moment that unions will help and in fact feel they will hurt our industry which hasn't settled into a bad state and unions could settle us at a point less than we could otherwise get.

> Tom Cruise is in an industry where he can be shut out at any given moment and there's only like 5 employers.

[Citation Needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_production_compan...

Look, you're really just a worse paid Tom Cruise. I'm sorry you can't see this.

Hot take. It’s also untrue. Software developers overall are not millionaires.

I am discounting non-liquid assets like the main residence.

Why are you discounting real wealth? I am a millionaire. If I spent my millions on buying a modest house in Palo Alto, does that mean I am no longer a millionaire? Have I lost all my wealth just by purchasing a home?

For the purposes of discussing security, counting the price of the residence is not very useful, assuming the discussion participants agree it is an “average” residence that meets minimum expected quality of life standards.

For the purposes of discussing quality of life, if the person values living in the place they are which is higher priced than most others, then the price of the residence could be useful.

I see no reason to include price of house if I were to sell it in my picture of my financial security because I have no desire to live elsewhere (or if I wanted to live somewhere more expensive).

> I am discounting non-liquid assets like the main residence.

That's pretty unusual. Do you consider someone with $1.5M but no house considerably better off than someone with $500k and a $1M house?

Everybody becomes a millionaire if they don't eat and don't pay rent.

Are you done repeating this false statement?

I don't think this is average, common maybe.

Yes, software engineers are paid very well as a class.

Google made $21b in income in Q2 of this year. That's more than $100,000 per employee. $400,000 in profit per employee per year. I'd sure like to get paid another 400 grand annually.

Exploitation can also happen in ways other than pay. 24/7 oncall is unfortunately common in our industry, including oncall that is unpaid.

Why is 24/7 oncall exploitation? It is hardly unpaid when you are payed > $500,000 a year. Also you should know this upfront when accepting employment.

Oncall can show up after the fact.

You take a job paying $X. Two years later, people decide that 24/7 oncall is necessary and suddenly now you are required to perform this 24/7 oncall. Your pay is not adjusted. You have no say in this new job requirement. This oncall is unpaid (your compensation hasn't changed).

>500,000 compensation is also highly unusual, even at very well paying companies.

Give me a break with focusing on the "eventually one becomes a millionaire" bit.

How much are our bosses, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc. making? in Steinbeck's lifetime, CEOs made "only" 42x of what the average worker made. Today, we're up to 120x. I recognize that we have it better than people working in a cannery, but this is exploitation all the same. We're getting paid just enough to not revolt, but nowhere near what we're worth.

Until recently, tech had a large number of jobs and a shortage of competent workers - these workers don't need unions pretty much by definition.

What kind of workers need a unions, esp. US-style unions? 3 types (I could give a ton examples for each, but I'd only give one in the interest of brevity):

1) Incompetent workers. If I wanted to chill at the expense of my coworkers or taxpayers, unions would be awesome for me. E.g. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo... , many more examples, also e.g. police unions.

2) Exclusionary workers. If there are too many workers for the number of jobs, it'd be cool if I could exclude all those pesky other workers, to the fullest extent that it's socially acceptable. While my favorite example is union racism during the Great Migration, as an immigrant I'd like to give honorable mention to Cesar Chavez running literal patrols to physically intimidate undocumented immigrants: https://www.ambitiouscollective.com/blogs/news/history-cesar...

For me as a tech worker, it would be pretty nice to prevent outsourcing and extra immigration - selfish and evil, yes, but pretty nice, go unions!

3) Unnecessary workers. If my job was unneeded, it would still be nice to keep it and have someone else (consumers, taxpayers) pay me. Lots of examples, e.g. https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-... " the number of workers assigned in the tunnel in New York is significantly more than other parts of the country and as much as 4 times more than tunnel workers assigned to comparable projects in Europe"

3a) Honorable mention, since this is HN after all - workers unnecessary due to innovation. If unions had power 200 years ago, we'd still be driving horse buggies - https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/11/california-bill-to-ban-dri...

You could sit down to design messed up, pernicious, evil incentives all day, and you couldn't come up with anything close to what unions already are.

Some say "well, most historians agree that during one period of history, unions achieved great things and improved lives on the net!" to which my response is "so did nuking civilians; and?"

I know European Union work quite differently than in the US.

My experience with unions in the US like the teachers unions where conditions are still poor, pay is poor, and everything based on seniority rather than skill, you’re stuck with whatever the union negotiates regardless if you’re in the union or not …. I want nothing to do with that.

Public unions are a completely different beast than private unions.

Is there a good example I should know about?

All police unions

The problem with a police union is that management (i.e. Captains + & Commissioners) are part of the union.

It'd be like if Gary Bettman ran the NHLPA.

All the entertainment unions (IATSE, WGA, SAG, DGA, and I think even some athlete unions, etc), do not base their pay off of seniority and also don’t cap their pay. So higher skilled players can absolutely still negotiate terms and pay when accepting a job. The workers in these unions just have access to more protections.

FYI, if you look at teachers $/hr, its pretty extraordinary.

What people forget is that teachers are part time workers, with full time pay.

Average teacher salary in the US is 58k, which is liveable if you get a summer job, but that also means half the country is worse. Montana (where I live) has an average of 30k, which is essentially destitute, especially with rising housing costs around here.

For a position where we expect people to have a 4 year degree, it’s pretty ridiculous. No one who goes into teaching pays off their student debt before they’re 40, and many don’t ever expect to do it in their lifetime without leaving for a different career.

Hard pass. I can do better without a union than with one, and I refuse to subsidise those who can't.

In this system, who would you subsidize?

Likely the terrible/slacking developers

The goal isnt to strike or anything, its to raise money, lobby the government, and give ourselves some sort of regulatory capture.

Look at the medical cartels for the playbook.

Make it illegal to outsource work, make the barrier to entry high, etc...

Sure its terrible for the nation, but everyone else is doing it. We don't want to be last.

It's a lot like insurance - you might be fine right now, and you may be fine for your whole life, but what if you aren't? There are so many scenarios where you can fall out of favor and where collective bargaining is the only lever you have to pull against a large company. The chances are relatively small for an individual, but with the # of people involved, it happens a lot (we see HN post about workplace retaliation and employment litigation all the time).

And then, of course, there's the argument that those that truly need the unions could be your kids, your relatives, people you care about.

I don't think you need to be so concerned about subsidizing others; we all already benefit from that. This stance of being so protective of your labor should be reserved for employers and the Capital class, not weaponized against fellow workers to throw them under the bus.

So what you really want to do is subsidize _managers_ who can't?

Tech workers are usually so buried, heads hunched over the keyboard, focused on the latest project, that they aren't even aware they are being used. They straiten their back one day, look around, and realize they've been working for 20 years and getting nowhere. They got good enough raises, but forgot inflation, and it was really nothing.

In what country? Software engineers have some incredible pay for pretty low effort in the last 15years. Even before that it was a pretty decent living for most of the time pretty non-unique software.

We are talking about them as an exploited working class, wild to me.

IMHO our profession's adherence to ethics and technical standards is shockingly low compared to others. If a civil engineer was asked to build a bridge that will probably be unsafe, I think they and their colleagues would have the power to refuse (right?). If a software engineer is asked to ship a feature that's probably insecure then... IDK, gotta get it to prod, move fast and break things, right?

I wonder if unionization could help us do a better job of collectively saying "no" to awful product demands.

Your civil engineer would also end up in jail or bared from working in the area if they made a mistake and has pretty strict criteria for becoming a civil engineer.

This sounds like more of an argument for a software safety commission than for a union.

A whole lot of software just supports a business, and a non-critical business at that. If my buggy software takes down, say, pets.com, well, first, the world won't end because pets.com is down for 8 hours, and second, pets.com wasn't going to succeed even if my software was perfect. That kind of software isn't like building a bridge; it's more like building a birdhouse. Nobody's going to die if it collapses. (OK, a bird might.)

Some software is critical. Safety critical, or running critical financial processes, handling medical info, and so on. That software does have technical standards.

Sure, but if pets.com has a database breach and leaks PII, that could be used to help break into someone's email or bank.

I think a more apt analogy would be a pothole. It's probably OK, until it grows deep enough that someone hits it hard and veers into the sidewalk or the opposite lane.

The real pets.com (petsmart) stores credit card data. As do many other “non-critical” sites.

Yeah great point. It’s like why does my doctor have to wash their hands before operating on me but my CPA doesn’t have to wash their hands before doing my taxes?

Cute analogy dude, but it's startling that you think that the negative impact of software engineers is as contained as a CPA typing on their keyboard with dirty hands.

Equifax leaked PII for over one third of the entire US. The stress and financial loss of identity theft can take years off of people's lives.

That's just the big example, but there are countless other smaller examples of bad security and other bugs harming people in tangible ways.

Healthcare is pretty reliant on software, that's an area that strikes me as being susceptible to something like this. Banks and their associated (i.e. Equifax) are also in a position where this kind of feedback from developers could make a difference.

Given that they are typically salaried, I wonder what the hour adjusted pay is? The median for a dev in the US is $110k, and many of those jobs fall in higher than average cost of living areas.

It's possible that people in the industry want better working conditions or more equal/open pay systems, not just more money. Better hiring practices could be nice too.

The problem with looking at hourly pay is that I don't feel it applies well to the software industry. I can easily say there are some weeks where I have little to nothing to do and there are other weeks where I'm working a full day every day of the week.

There are also hourly jobs where you get paid for slow times of doing almost nothing. You would want to track hours worked (including hours that you did almost nothing but were still required to be at work or logged on) per year with pay per year.

The issue is that everyone wants something different and no one ever agrees.

The median software developer job is not in a high-cost area. $110k is less than what the median software developer is paid in e.g. Omaha, Nebraska, where the median house price is $275k.

In the US, software developers are highly compensated by local standards almost regardless of where they live. That was not always the case decades ago but it is today.

Any numbers to back you up? (Other than your one cherry picked city)

If you look at the top 10 states for software jobs, you will see that they fall in the higher end of the distribution for cost of living.

Even looking at your cheery picked example, we see the salary and cost of living track roughly - median dev salary is about $95k based on multiple sources and COL is about 7% lower than the national average.

Yes, devs do tend to fall on the higher side of a local median than others. Hence my point about unions not being just for more money.

Not if you divide by the hours.

110K sounds great, now divide by 80 hour weeks. Now it is nominally 50K.

It would be nice to work for a successful company, see that company earn record quarterly profits and then not have to worry about being laid off. Pay is important but, arguably, job security even more so.

Even in countries like India programmers make salaries in the multiples of the average (checking around on Payscale I see the average is around ₹60k, while programmers make on average ₹460k).

Sometimes programmers can have it rough, but that’s entirely their decision to stay. As a programmer you have unparalleled movement; the post-lockdown WFH standard and ability to code from basically any device show that readily. Combine that flexibility with high pay and long term career prospects and it shows that anyone begging for a union doesn’t understand what real working class struggles are.

Our employees are saving a lot of money from WFH, and they are not giving that to salaries.

You're saying that only the least paid profession should have a union and no other profession should have one? I don't think that makes sense. More than one union can exist at once.

Your reading comprehension is lacking. I’m saying programmers get paid well and have large opportunities, and that unions don’t serve a purpose. Care to enlighten me how programmers are some abused work force and need unions?

My reading comprehension is fine. You wrote an incorrect statement and I corrected you.

> Care to enlighten me how programmers are some abused work force and need unions?

Everybody who works for someone else does, not just programmers. And the expectation of working nights, do open source work to even be considered are all abuses that are happening.

I did not make an incorrect statement. I pointed out reality. Whether you accept reality or not is the question.

> Everybody who works for someone else does, not just programmers.

Speaking of incorrect statements.

> And the expectation of working nights, do open source work to even be considered are all abuses that are happening.

Those are not abuses. Working nights is part of the job, just like doctors and engineers. Don’t like it? Find a job at somewhere that doesn’t work nights. And contributing to open source is proof of your capabilities as a programmer in a real world environment. If you cannot do open source, you do not deserve to be hired.

These are at most minor inconveniences, and not something a union would even help you with.

> Speaking of incorrect statements.

Correctness and being liked by you aren't the same concept.

Also "reality" as you called it, is just your own political opinion.

A union would help with getting fairly compensated for working nights, instead of "see you at 8.30am tomorrow".

Software engineers, like most workers, are exploited. Do you think that companies pay us well out of the goodness of their hearts? As soon as they can find a way to replace us or pay us less, they will. Currently they have to pay us well and give good benefits, otherwise we will move along to somewhere that will. The more likely scenario, is that they will start replacing the "non 10x" developers with AI soon. This may allow the 10x to demand a salary bump, but it also means that they will be cleaning up after AI and shouldering all of the extra work so it probably will be a net loss for most.

Sounds great to me. That’s how the market works. If a cheaper means of production exists, the industry should utilize it. While I think unlikely right now for it to vanish, it should definitely not be propped up.

Agreed, however, in practice I’ve found that companies replacing humans with AI is usually a disaster, and the only reason they get away with it is because they have some sort of near-monopoly. When’s the last time you got an automated customer support menu on a phone and thought “wow, I’m sure happy they figured out a cheaper means of production here”

> We are talking about them as an exploited working class

1. Workers don't need to be exploited to want better for themselves. There's nothing wrong with this.

2. There are a lot of tech jobs that have essentially become always-on, with no commensurate bump in pay. Think of the number of engineering positions that now require an on-call rotation, adding perhaps another effective day or more to one's working time. Pay has broadly not increased to account for this.

Very few tech workers get incredible pay – most people do not work for a FAANG, and far from all of the ones who do are getting paid lavishly, especially after you account for hours & cost of living (note the downward pressure against wages for anyone not in SF). Not bad pay by any means but people still have to go to work every day and are living in upper middle class but not upper class houses, etc.

This is especially true relative to the business revenues generated. A union helps workers get more of the value they’re creating and also helps avoid things like companies using layoffs as a tactic to keep employees from negotiating aggressively.

It also helps with less visible things like age discrimination – very few people are going to retire by 45 no matter what they tell themselves at 25 – and non-cash benefits like parental leave or not being discriminated against for politics or not fitting in with some group. I’ve heard a lot of bad things about unions, and seen some firsthand (the Teamsters are self-destructive), but everywhere I’ve worked the union was a net win for workers and literally every one of the times someone publicly blamed the union for poor performing workers it was an attempt to shift blame from management failures.

80 hour weeks, 24x7 support, called all weekend, every weekend, over holidays and vacations, for year over year.????

Yeah, nothing exploited there.

>" pretty low effort"

?? Maybe your code shouldn't be running anything critical.

The environment resembles more a circus or a zoo where the animals are trained/fed and kept in well designed (sometimes golden) cages.

Hard to expect such conditioning to generate the imagination required to reconstruct the environments.

New environments and the space for new ideas is only possible outside the circuses and the zoos.

> realize they've been working for 20 years and getting nowhere

How are you defining "getting nowhere"? At least in the US, the average software developer eventually becomes a millionaire working a pretty cushy job with good benefits. Most people in unions wish they could be exploited like software engineers.

Any bar set so high in defining worker exploitation that a software engineer can't clear the hurdle is not a constructive definition. If everyone is "exploited" then no one is.

> the average software developer eventually becomes a millionaire working a pretty cushy job

You mean their landlord becomes a millionaire doing absolutely no job whatsoever?

Do you have a source for the claim of the average software engineer becomes a millionaire? As a software engineer I would really like for you to be correct.

There are no definitive studies but reports I've seen suggest the typical software developer these days crosses that threshold about 20 years into their career. Something like 80% of all millionaires in the US are so due to 401k + savings, which is something software developers are exceptionally well positioned to easily take advantage of.

I know several non-software people in boring industries that managed to accumulate $1M in their retirement accounts by the age of 50 while living a non-austere lifestyle and making less money than the average software developer. It isn't that hard to do in the US. Anyone making above average wages with decent savings discipline can do it, the financial math makes that obvious.

Millionaire?

That is some grade a BS.

It is funny how many people just read a few articles about salaries at a FAANG and think Software Devs are all rolling in the money.

Or the free-market cheerleaders that actually just flat out agree that exploitation is the natural order of the universe and we should all just suck it up and do nothing.

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