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Comment by woodrowbarlow | Hacker News Reader

i would love to have a software engineer's union, not so much to get better working conditions but to be able to say stuff like "i can't implement that unethical feature, it's against union rules and i'd lose my membership".

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To be fair; you don't need a union... you can just say no. Context; I told them they couldn't ship this exact feature as designed. (It worked until I left.)

yes, true sometimes (not always). but if more people have access to a way to confidently say "no" (with protection behind them), then i think saying "no" would happen more often, by people who might've otherwise complied.

Without the protection of a union, "just saying no" is a good way to get fired

Why not just ask for context and approval of the legal team? That would generate enough trail so some shady requirements get dropped almost immediately; having your superior explicitly sign off in writing a feature you deemed unethical and/or potentially illegal is a great way of actually removing them from the pipeline. You can even frame it as "a good guy" just alerting him/her that there may be a fallback, so make sure it has all necessary elements. Compliance decisions are often above a developers paygrade, and one should squarely document the culprit on any shady decision - and boy, this is very easy in big organizations where no single decision-maker wants to be accountable.

You could join the Order of the Engineer and refuse to do things that would not be compatible with your understanding of the Obligation of an Engineer [1]. Of course, that doesn't stop your employer from asking someone else to do it and asking you to find other employment.

There's a few other orders or societies or what have you that you could join. Personally, I don't drive a train or even wear a stripey hat, so I haven't considered joining an organization for Engineers.

[1] https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...

Start one. Unions are worker owned. You could also join the IWW.

are there examples of unions that have started around a focus on the ethics of the services they provide? unions traditionally start locally, around issues for which the locality is a hotspot, which is why they usually focus on pay and working conditions. it's also easier to get a large group to agree on a set of improvements to working conditions vs a set of ethical boundaries.

actually, it looks like this is happening inside Google right now. DeepMind workers are unionizing, and most of their demands revolve around ethical boundaries and the right to refuse to contribute based on ethical grounds.

Unions in the US are nerfed, by law.

Collective bargaining is nerfed. Other structures remain viable and legal.

Naw unions are nerfed.

ex. Secondary (Sympathy) Strikes are illegal [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action#United_State...

Exactly. Nerfed. Unions without collective bargaining is more like a social club.

unless your union involves being the law, then they can do literally anything.

Are you not allowed to leave the US?

I'd wonder how you'd get into that arrangement to begin with when the entire job is based on unethical tracking

You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.

The collective leverage of a union gives you significantly more power to do something like this.

Only if the union is against the unethical request. In some cases the union may be for it, which makes it even harder to push back.

Fellow software engineers aren't incentivized to destroy their company's reputation in the same way that boards of directors have proven to be time and time again.

> You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.

If you push back against unethical feature requests:

No union: you get fired

Union: you still get fired

maybe, but the union could provide a lot of services to someone who loses their job this way (like income insurance and legal services) and could leverage collective power over companies that demonstrate a pattern of behavior.

This is something that has just never sat well with me. How exactly will the union provide this insurance? That insurance isn't free, so paid for by member dues? How many members are required to be able to afford the payout for just one member? How about the other services unions are touted as being able to provide? They all come from the same dues? I know that unions will put money into investment funds to attempt to grow the coffers, but that just means the money isn't liquid.

Unions are always touted as a panacea, but logically, it doesn't compute for me. They feel more like ponzi schemes than anything else.

that's definitely a big question and i don't pretend to have enough expertise to answer fully; however, i will point to the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan which is (per Wikipedia[1]) "one of the world's largest institutional investors [...] over $266 billion in net assets, with a one-year total-fund net return of 9.4%, and a 7.4% 10-year total-fund net return". the union runs their own investment fund; it's an extension of collective power into the financial realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Teachers%27_Pension_Pl...

That is only a pension plan. It provides no insurance to teachers who are still employed.

it's an example of how a union can use collective financial power to fund the services they offer to their members. a software engineer's union could prioritize income insurance over retirement.

> That insurance isn't free, so paid for by member dues?

Yes, obviously. That's how every insurance works.

Yes, obviously. A question not asked as assumed a natural part of the thinking process is how many members does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? Just because other unions exists does not mean that the one that techBro Norma Rae starts is going to remain viable. How many claims can be paid out before the insurance no longer pays out? Lots of conversation left after your trite yes obviously unhelpful comment

> This is something that has just never sat well with me. How exactly will the union provide this insurance? That insurance isn't free, so paid for by member dues?

That is how all unions were born.

Providing insurance was one reason for the emergence and popularity of friendly societies, fraternal organizations, and trade unions in the 19th century. But out of that emerged the modern insurance industry, so you can now just buy those products directly. Unemployment insurance may be an exception, but that's because employer-mandated unemployment insurance is now so ubiquitous.

The modern "welfare state" also emerged out of those earlier grassroots movements. Now we take it for granted. One downside is that the state has largely displaced the incentive for those private societies.

And for the conspiratorial minded: that displacement was in part a deliberate attempt to limit the power of collective action and employees generally. In the early 20th century, jury awards for horrendous workplace accidents were often large and starting to threaten the bottom line. Employer-mandated workers' compensation insurance was promoted by companies as a way to limit their liability. This is why you typically cannot sue your employer for most workplace accidents if you're covered by workers' compensation. The same legislation that mandates workers' compensation insurance shields employers from liability for workplace accidents. Especially in the case of grievous injury or permanent disability, an employee likely would have gotten much greater compensation in a civil suit than what they'll get in workers' compensation. (OTOH, considering all workplace injuries and compensation together, maybe the bargain was worth it overall. Employee societies may never have achieved the degree of coverage the legal mandate did, and maybe those societies would never have been able to provide more compensation on average than employees get now.)

That's great insight. Thanks for contributing.

Simple idea: look how other unions work, and in other countries as well. The wheel has already been invented.

You can say that about a lot of things. The car was already invented, but so many new car companies struggle. Just because a thing exists does not mean someone else can come along to immediately become successful with thing.

The question as I took it was "I can't imagine how this can work". Interpreting it as anything else is defeatism and I won't entertain that.

It's not defeatism. It's doing the research to avoid unnecessary failure from over ambitiousness getting in the way of doing something the right way. This isn't a Show HN situation where you go and get some VC funding and yolo your way through it. This is something that if it's not done right it could have a greater blast radius than some VC funded startup shutting down with a "What we've learned" blog post.

Makes sense, but I haven't seen in the comments the signs of research having been done. Or maybe you were hoping that I am doing the research for you, while you brainstorm how it can't work? I am an union member, albeit not in the US, and for me it looks fine. Sample size of 1, but a sample which says it does work. Take this information as you wish.

Still a better outcome than tossing your ethics overboard.

Why bother to join a union, pay dues, potentially have your career limited, and have another layer to deal with?

Just leave or be fired without the song and dance.

Because you’re a person who cares about your fellow citizens and realize that collectively bargaining helps to lift all boats, not just yours

How would your career be limited?

union strong, bro.

I didn't get fired.

Maybe don't apply to Meta in the first place? With their track record it's pretty obvious that you'll be part of building something morally dubious.

Take a lead, let me sign up :)

And this is why we don't have one. Someone else is expected to do the hard part.

same

That’s what licensing is for, not unions.

i don't believe that software development should require a license. imagine having to get board-licensed to download gcc; therein lies the death of free software and owning your devices.

> therein lies the death of free software and owning your devices

(That’s what these people want)

A union could absolutely get involved in something like this.

Honestly - shouldn't one assume that train already departed when they decided to work for company that is basically data mining operation with no ethics?

> not so much to get better working conditions but

... why not both?

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