I don't think teachers, cops, sanitation workers, or iron workers can realistically do their jobs at home
I would never want their jobs over mine.
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
FWIW those were recently completely outlawed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are unenforceable.
That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
Also some of Harris's donors are pushing her to get rid of Lina Khan. Even if she wins, the rule might not stay around
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-noncompete-ru...
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
You can replace code monkeys, but you can’t replace people who can use code to solve real business problems on time and under budget.
or else, at this point there would be no domestic jobs period
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
I’ve done quite a bit of negotiation in my career and ended up with many perks and pay bumps that weren’t schedule or written down.
What I’m describing is my actual real life experience.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
Whats next? You're going to be telling me Patrick Mahomes is in a union too!
This is not how management sees software devs.
Devs are fungible resources that can be allocated where the urgency/importance is and regardless of individual attributes.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
> Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
> Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
> Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I think I have a few colleagues to notify.