It might be time for software engineers to unionize | Hacker News Reader

It might be time for software engineers to unionize

michaelochurch.wordpress.com

36 pointspdeuchler7 comments

Amen. Even as someone who is starting his own company, I fully support the idea of unions. Not just for our benefit; just as civil engineers have responsibilities that are wider than just their employers, we have ethical obligations to society that can transcend what our employers ask us to do. Software should make the world a better place, not worse, and it's our responsibility to make sure that we stand up in protest when we are asked to do things that aren't ethical.

I don't understand the attraction of a union. And I did read the article. All of my personal interactions with unions have been negative. Literally all. That doesn't mean that they don't provide benefits, I just personally don't see them.

It's one thing to know that the game is rigged in someone else's favor. It's another to watch the HN admins bury a post on unionization straight to page 6 mere seconds after it reached the front page (I saw the upvote count, so I'm 80% sure it didn't happen organically). Really brings it home.

Yes, pretty weird. Although, I am not sure if it is intentional. The submission before the OP(on the sixth page) is having vote count 9 and of 2113 days back. May be some ranking algorithm glitch.

Almost certainly not a glitch. As you saw, this post is buried among posts that are significantly older AND have lower votes. In the screenshots of the admin interface I recall seeing a "bury" option and wondering what it was for. Now I know :-)

EDIT: or not. I found the old post, I must have misremembered the bit about having a "slide off the front page" option:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972217

No HN admin touched this post. It was flagged by users.

That seems to happen to all michaelochurch.wordpress.com posts. I suspect that it has nothing to do with the union topic. Since July 2012 (my "Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs") HN has been down-modding posts on my blog, even submitted by other users. (In other news, I also can't submit new links to HN. I could use sock-puppets and proxies to evade that, but I don't care about HN enough to do so.) Consequently, submissions of links to my blog will always fall to the bottom.

I am (unintentionally, having never signed up for the role) Paul Graham's Anti-Christ. My comments fall to the bottom even when they have 20+ upvotes, and if I access HN while logged in, it takes 5+ seconds (as opposed to ~200ms when not logged in). I also get the "submitting too fast" message after 3-4 posts in a day.

Oddly enough, 7 years ago, I was a major fan of Paul Graham and what he had to say. I considered applying to Y Combinator. I loved On Lisp when I first read it (2007). I did find him to be a little bit closed-minded in his rejection of static typing (when I asked him what he thought about ML and Haskell); however, he wasn't any moreso than most programmers.

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