Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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With 25 years experience, the other thing is environments vary a lot, even within a single company. Things can be dysfunctional for lots of reasons, sometimes due to individual incompetence at various points in the hierarchy, or just systemic/cultural issues that no one has the vision or influence to identify and fix. When you're young and inexperienced, but technically brilliant, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees of what's really going on on the human side of things of any large group effort.

One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.

This leads to a more fundamental observation.

That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.

As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.

> That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.

> As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.

No, your "observation" has a fundamental flaw: There's no general "net positive for most workplaces," because different groups have different interests.

Unionization is a "net negative" for certain groups (managers, owners) and a "net positive" for others (employees, if done right). That's why there are sustained agitation campaigns against it.

It should also be pointed out that it's not just the money aspect. Managing people is difficult, managing people in a stressful situation is really difficult, add a dysfunctional culture (especially if that culture is "imposed" from above) is a pain in the proverbial. Which means managing in these situations is hard work.

Add on top of that that a largish number of managers just plain suck at their job, so being in a union can be useful to push back against either lazy or incompetent managers.

Because there are far more people who leave their manager than leave their job.

We (especially those with an entrepreneurial bent like so many of us frequenting this site in particular) have so effectively been sold the illusion that class no longer exists that most have us have genuinely become blind to the idea that a company's interests (i.e. the interests of owners, shareholders, the board, investors, whatever - maximizing profits or ROI) and a worker's interests (e.g. a sustainable, stable and reliable income with potential for career advancement providing access to better pay/perks) usually run directly opposite to each other. Class conflict is inherent to the employer-employee or owner-worker dynamic. You can merely afford the luxury of pretending it doesn't exist when it's in their interest (i.e. doing so aligns with their goals, usually in the short-term) to "pamper" you - and that era may be drawing to a close within our lifetimes.

Every single worker is ultimately disposable. If you think your employer is disposable to you, that's not because you're special but because so far you've been extremely lucky. It is far easier for a company to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace the company they work for - we just tend to see the "inability to find a new job" as a personal failure (i.e. bad performance at the job of "finding a job") whereas we take the existence of job vacancies for granted as a normal part of the market and maybe even a positive indicator for "growth" (which we define as desirable even if it's artificial or unsustainable).

This seems like a tautology, of course there can not be a general rule for all workplaces.

By definition with sufficiently seperate interests, then anything (or nothing) goes.

We generally don't let markets choose rights

Yeah we do…? political power can also be traded in markets, subject to market forces, etc.

Maybe not 100% of the time in 100% of societies, but certainly more than zero in every society I’ve ever heard of.

Tell me you've never read history without...etc

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