- A literal supermajority of software developers
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Even if you didn’t personally think it’d be useful for you, that should make you reconsider?
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
So workers are prosecuted for withholding labor in negotiations with management, these are moderately union-hostile laws. I'm told Henry Clay Frick was somewhat disinclined in his opinion of unions as well.
_American_ software developers. Many in Europe don't fall for this way of thinking.
I'm not even kidding, this is almost verbatim the attitude of plenty of (white, male, able-bodied tho at times mildly autistic) developers I've talked to throughout my career and at meetups and conferences, though few would be bold enough to spell it out this explicitly. Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability. If anything, developers working at smaller tech companies or in technical roles at non-technical companies were worse because they'd often see unions as only relevant for jobs that were "beneath them".
Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
> Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur if you have any idea of how the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence treated unions. Just look at modern China if you need a refresher on what authoritrian states think about workers unionizing.
Also unions are not communism and neither did any of those countries ever experience "communism". The USSR never claimed to have "achieved communism", in fact the expression "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") was coined by these governments to denounce critics who demanded steps towards communism as "utopian" idealists. China today even has a full roadmap towards communism with different labeled steps to justify why it hasn't achieved communism yet and needs to be authoritarian for just a little while longer because the state will wither away eventually really soon trust me bro.
> If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
Not with that attitude they won't. Do you think we got legally mandated 40 hour work weeks, paid sick leave and mandatory rest periods out of the goodness of the hearts of business owners?
Many in Europe leave for the US because EU salaries are ridiculously lower.
This is just a survey but it's in line with my perception, salaries on avg are 2-3 times lower in rich EU countries than in the US (after taxes).
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/demographics/
I'll take higher taxes, healthcare through general taxation and relatively strong job security over a fixed dollar amount any day. Everyone is different though.
That combined doesn't even remotely cost that gap of 60k per year (plus strictly speaking this is not true since many employers would provide IT people with insurance).
> I'll take higher taxes,
It's not higher taxes. It's much lower salaries + much higher taxes combined. 60k a year in savings will provide you far more security and bargaining power than any strictest EU trade code would (and this is IMO one of the reasons for higher salaries in the US).
Specifically on insurance: how much is that worth if it’s bound to your employer? What if you get laid off and don’t find a job in time, then get sick? What if your father is laid off at 55, nobody wants to hire him anymore due to his age and he develops cancer? I can tell you what happens in Germany: nothing. Both of you go to the MD and get treated as appropriate.
You’ll never get me to trade all of this for a bit more money that I need to spend on health care, ridiculous tips, and overpriced apartments anyway.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.
I also have nationally strong’ish labor laws.
Because they’ve given me reason to believe they will? But mostly because the law makes it really hard to let go of employees when your company is doing well enough to keep them.
The battle is never over. In the US labor unions reached a zenith and have been undercut and dismantled as a multi-decade project.
The incentives are clear. Our systems drives ever onward toward slavery, the only remedy is pushing back through the generations.
I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.
Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.
I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.
If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
I live in NY, and I can tell you that unions are very much a “thing,” hereabouts.
The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.
That's their fiat. They're supposed to be like that.
I'm really hoping that unions are learning a bit of humility from the last few years. We'll see.
Japan (and Germany, I hear), has unions that are stakeholders (and, often board members) of corporations. They seem to work quite well, and are very powerful.
This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mandatory tariff for everyone, just that there is an organisation in your workplace that you can turn to, which will have your interests in mind, without you having to be a member. They can protect you from overreaching managers, baseless accusations, or unwarranted layoffs. And of course, they usually negotiate on behalf of the entire staff, especially on HR topics.
While this isn’t always working perfectly, it’s still a big achievement in terms of equality and worker rights.
It’s unfortunate, I think, that the US has such an awful history in terms of unions. There are far more nuances than discussions on HN make it seem, and virtually nobody looses if employees have strong protections against their employers.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.
Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.
> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs
VCs are not generally seen as victims!
> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix
And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.
I never said they were.
If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?
Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.
You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.
> I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.
And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.
> In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.
That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.
This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.
> The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.
What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.
> in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...
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At my dad job their leaders of unions are literally paid as "leaders" xd No conflict of interest and the fact they always get so well with CEO and never with workers is not suspicious.