Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

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I've thought about this a bit and have decided the main barrier to realizing a software development worker co-op is getting together the sufficient startup capital. A handful of regular tech workers probably lack the liquid capital to self-fund a company. And good luck convincing a VC to invest in a worker coop. The easiest business to build like this would be a software consultancy since it doesn't actually require a product (you could structure it almost like a law firm).

I agree unionization is a very good idea for software engineers and the industry should have tried to do it decades ago. I think it hasn't happened because of the overall weakness of US organized labor and prevailing ideological biases among software engineers which go against our own interests. If unions work well for other highly compensated professionals like athletes there's no reason they can't work for us.

The H1B visa is one reason. Unions function by constraining the supply of labor. If companies can simply import labor, you can’t constrain supply. Bonus points if you can underpay the immigrants.

H1B should be much more heavily scrutinized. And for those who are granted visas, their compensation needs to be exceptional, so that it doesn’t compete with American workers.

It’ll never happen, but I’d vote for any politician campaigning on requiring, across the board, that H-1Bs be in the top 10% of industry comp for the role.

have you seen H1B numbers lately? H1B constraints supply as crazy. 80K slots for 800K+ applications.

and besides, over-restricting import of labour will just result in offshoring dev teams to India. just look at major USA tech names

It doesn’t matter how many applications there are. What matters is those 80k slots which aren’t enforcing prevailing wage, and consequently push salaries down.

Something like a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) could be one way to go. DAOs are tricky however: very difficult to implement an effective governance structure in code. But I reckon it's possible to use some DAO concepts and develop a co-op type model. There are sources of funding available for 'community interest' type business ventures.

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