We are talking about them as an exploited working class, wild to me.
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.
I wonder if unionization could help us do a better job of collectively saying "no" to awful product demands.
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.
Some software is critical. Safety critical, or running critical financial processes, handling medical info, and so on. That software does have technical standards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
110K sounds great, now divide by 80 hour weeks. Now it is nominally 50K.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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".
?? Maybe your code shouldn't be running anything critical.
Yeah, nothing exploited there.
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.
You mean their landlord becomes a millionaire doing absolutely no job whatsoever?
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.
That is some grade a BS.
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.
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.