Oh, but my employer is different and a union would only make business more complicated and less likely to give me raises and promotions! I’m a rising star, you know.
- A literal supermajority of software developers
- A literal supermajority of software developers
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 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.
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.
_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.
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.
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.
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.