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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone brings up the "I want to be paid for my skill, not my seniority," I'd just like to point out:

If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

And a few other things I think are worth saying...

A union is a legal framework for the employees (who have no ownership stake in the business, despite putting their time and energy into the business day after day) to recast some of the power imbalance in their favor; since many of us here are employees, and not owners, we should be looking out for our interests.

Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.

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> nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades

It doesn't sound like you have any actual first-hand experience with unions. I'll admit unions played a significant role in improving the workplace for everyone, and we should all be thankful for their contributions 50+ years ago. But they are now primarily self-serving organizations that exist for the benefit of the union itself.

Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager), let me give you some examples of the types of things unions now fight for:

* a dishwasher cannot wash pots and a potwasher cannot wash dishes

* only an electrician can change the batteries in a TV remote or change a lightbulb

* when it's busy your manager(s) cannot help you

* re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees

The better an employee is the less they benefit from a union. It results in good employees not getting paid as well as they could be and bad employees sticking around because it's difficult (or impossible) to fire them.

We could certainly benefit from the types of professional association lawyers[1] and doctors[2] have, but those are quite different than unions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed.

Frankly, you don't seem to know what a union actually does. Let's take your last example:

* re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees

If a person in the company physically assaulted another person then how could they be rehired? Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought? Were they allowed back into the building, ignoring the restraining order that was obtained?

Ohh...what you mean is that the business didn't bother with any of those legal niceties and thought they could accuse someone of assault and fire them, without involving the law. Yeah, you don't get to do that. And most people would be glad of that if some manager decided to fire them due to a personal grudge and gave the reason as assault, with no evidence at all.

you say "with no evidence at all" and yet you ignore 3 of the 4 examples and construct a strawman to dismiss the other. why don't you just ask for some backup for the examples rather than fabricating narratives.

unions do get out of line, here's another example:

http://www.legal-island.com/union-seeks-redress-for-lower-pa...

He presented no evidence at all for any of his examples. If you want backup, you ask for it.

I have no idea why you think your link is showing "unions getting out of hand". It shows people being hired at a certain pay for certain hours and then having this retroactively changed. Why would you think this is even remotely acceptable?

the union is claiming for payment for the time involved in cashing non existent cheques.

> Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed.

My first bullet is part of the union contract for stewards in NYC hotels. The second and third are part of the union contract for Boston hotels. The first part of my fourth bullet happened at a colleague's hotel who [twice] caught an employee stealing, the second part of that bullet happened at the last hotel I worked at (and perhaps "physically assaulted" was a bit strong - for accuracy purposes you can reword it to "throwing an object heavy enough to hurt someone had their aim been better").

> Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought?

Unless you have the encounter video-taped it's not worth bringing criminal charges against someone for stealing $100 or throwing a walkie-talkie. Especially since it benefits the hotel to let the union "convince" them to re-hire the person because that cost the union in future negotiating capital (i.e. at the next contract's negotiation the union will be reminded how "forgiving" the hotel had been).

I'm going to take your word for it that you have screwed up unions and that those are the only kind likely in the USA. It's no doubt a political thing.

I'm calling bullshit. Post a source for your examples. Also, the ABA and the AMA agree unions for lawyers and doctors. They have a government sanctioned monopoly on top level legal and medical talent. You can't even train lawyers and doctors without the approval of those organizations. The only reason those unions get a pass on the standard union rhetoric is because they are powerful while collar unions. Nobody with any credibility is saying the AMA residency matching is a detriment to the rights of workers, for example.

> Post a source for your examples

My "source" was in the sentence prefacing my bullets: Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager)... In response to another comment I went into a little more detail on each bullet[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249449

s/union/management/g

And your post is still true. So I think its time to do away with management roles too.

"you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that"

False. People who worked there before you decided the rules. Once you have an entrenched senior workforce the probability that they will vote themselves less power or money is remarkably low. It's basically the same problem as NIMBYism.

I'm very strongly pro-union, but this is an indisputable fact. If labor is to make a comeback in the 21st century, this is an important lesson that needs to be learned.

Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving?

Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.

In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.

There are unions in the nordic countries. They generally work quite well and don't hurt those countries competitiveness - those nations are quite competitive.

I believe Germany is also highly unionized.

So maybe we should learn from them ?

And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.

no. hard working europeans leave europe to escape the system where they have little hope of bettering themselves in the european system. lots of them showed up in china working as part of outsource or manufacturing firms. talked to several myself.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen... describes the tension of having a company with German-style union-values operate in the US.

I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.

Right now the above post looks about -2 despite being absolutely correct.

Downvoting informed people is the worst way to express disagreement. It contributes nothing, and makes your side look bad.

It deserves the downvotes because it ignores reality.

Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary.

Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it.

The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.

Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.

It's the same problem businesses have everywhere, except the good ones know how to weed it out. Same rule applies to unions.

Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.

In a blog entry by Micheal O. Church [1], he argues that in the companies that most need unionization, the downsides like wage normalization and seniority rules are already in place, and adding unionization to the mix almost can't make things worse.

He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking.

We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2]

[1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-...

[2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible.

Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.

But the status quo is awful for most of us.

No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?

He's the 1% and the "awful for most of us" is for the 99%.

Just because he's rich doesn't mean he can't sympathise with or understand the plight of the middle class, just like most people understand and sympathize with the plight of the poor.

Unless I'm reading the post wrong, he's saying it's "awful for us". That would include him, someone in the 1%.

My point is, the "plight of programmers" comes nowhere close to "awful" when you actually look at what some workers have to put up with.

As others have mentioned, I wasn't complaining on behalf of my own situation, which is exceptional.

Practices like "stack ranking" hurt all of us when they result in good people being fired or reprimanded, though.

If you want to see how a professional guild works as a union, see The Animation Guild.[1] TAG represents the animators at several major studios - Warner, Disney, Sony, Pixar, etc. Their contracts set minimum wages, but not maximums. Most importantly, they have serious overtime provisions - 1.5x after 8 hours a day or 40 hours in a week, 2x after 6 consecutive days of work or 14 hours in 1 day. Hollywood has "crunches", but they're rare, because of that. (This is also why film scheduling is a serious discipline while game production scheduling is not.)

[1] https://animationguild.org/ [2] https://animationguild.org/about-the-guild/organizing/

This reminds me how senior pilots will vote against raises for junior pilots so the senior pilots can preserve or increase their pay[1]

[1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable.

Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries.

As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.

"The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well.

The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.

If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced. Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored?

I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)

Except the reality is that we are not getting paid "so well". Given the scarcity and value of our skills, we're getting screwed.

We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.

I agree with you, but I don't for a second think unions will change that.

Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there.

This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity.

Unions commoditize workers.

http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html

> Unions commoditize workers.

Can't upvote this enough.

And corporations try to commoditise labour even more aggressively.

Your point is...?

My point is that if you're a worker who doesn't want to be commoditized, you have to fend for yourself. The company won't protect you from it, but neither will unions. Basically, if you see yourself as part of any group, whether it's "all the employees of company X" or "all the members of union Y", you're asking to be commoditized.

The reality is that the vast majority of software developers does not stand out enough to get any benefit from fending for themselves.

It's funny to see this idea repeated throughout this thread that we're all special snowflakes that can negotiate better deals on our own.

Even more funny if you look back at the many threads about negotiating salary and see the huge number of people on HN that never even negotiate initial offers but just accepts what they're handed.

My own experience is that some of us can negotiate outstanding deals, but from managing teams for the last 20 years and being part of salary negotiations and ranking developers for most of that, in almost every company I've worked, I've seen seen software staff get lumped together in big buckets of (from the company's perception) entirely interchangeable developers and set raises across whole blocks, with the only salary differences generally being banded by narrowly by position other than for a tiny (5%-10%) portion of top performances.

Odds are you are a commodity to your employer in terms of salary and performance.

Precisely.

At every company I've ever worked at or gotten an offer from, salary was effectively non-negotiable, because HR set the rules of The Band and the Rules were the Rules, which the hiring managers simply had to abide by. Occasionally I've been able to extract a hiring bonus or something relatively minor like that, but the insistence with which they stick to the salary is mind-boggling.

It got really absurd at my last job, where I was co-lead on the most profitable team in the company and a "10x" developer: I got an offer for much more money elsewhere, so I regretfully (I really liked that job) sent in my resignation. They asked me why, I told them it was honestly too much money to pass up. My "people" manager, project manager, and a senior manager fought hard to get me a counteroffer. They escalated all the way to the VP of HR, a direct report of the CEO. The final response was "no, he can't have that, that would be out of band, and he can't move out of the band yet because his degree + years of experience doesn't equal x." This materially affected the company. One of our clients in particular was a little paranoid and I had developed a great working relationship with them - when I left, they effectively put in a stop work for months until they were satisfied my replacements understood the system as well as I did. (Which I don't believe was necessary; they were not as good, but they were and are good enough, but the guy was really paranoid. Perhaps understandably, since bugs would have directly led to financial mishaps.)

But in general the band system saves companies money, so they stick with it.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions - things are obviously different in startups, for example, where HR might not even exist, and plenty of companies don't give HR so much power.

Software workers are already treated as commodities, so even if one were to accept that last statement as fact it wouldn't actually have much relevance. Being a commodity worker with higher minimum compensation and even marginally better working environments is better than the status quo.

>Unions commoditize workers.

>http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html

That link is just terrible. It makes no intelligent argument and presents no evidence of anything. It's drivel. If you think there's an intelligent argument in there, please let me know.

Meanwhile, here's a reason that corporations in corrupt states actively try to stop unions, and it's not because they think that worker wages are too low.

I rather prefer Smith on these matters to Hazlitt, whose own conflicts of interest with FEE are well known.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

... and on for a bit (as Smith is wont to do).

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes Of the Wealth Of Nations

Chapter VIII. Of the Wages Of Labour

The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

If you are the only guy who knows X business process, congratulations! You've got yourself a comfortable trap and not much leverage for a higher pay raise or transfer because you're needed at X forever.

Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out.

But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole.

Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.

> The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs

This is an extremely dangerous myth.

Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple.

Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.

But that could never happen to us, right?

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

And apparently every programmer sees himself as a cunning negotiator, and irreplaceable genius 1000x-er.

We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.

Exactly. Which becomes downright comical when you read any of the HN threads on negotiating salary, and see the stream of people who take what they are offered or are pleased with negotiating 5% more.

I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off.

But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.

I can weigh in on this bit about high-skill workers holding the cards, because they can supposedly just create a bidding war every time they want to make more money. It's not really true. After 30, jobs under 2 years start to look bad on your CV, and you start getting into senior positions that are rarer. You can't always overcome those issues just because you're a great programmer. If you're 40 and have had 4 jobs in the past 6 years, many companies won't even look at you.

We seem to think that, if it will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to leave, we're in charge. Not really. Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces. No one is indispensable.

"Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces."

Yeah this happens all the time.

It is always weird to me when you have people who are staunchly libertarian/free-market who seem to assume companies and consumers are perfectly rational actors (which is the only way a lot of the theory they are so fond has a chance of working without outside regulation). I just want to shake them and ask them if they are even paying attention to... anything.

One of the key things to recognize when considering rationality and reasonable behavior is that not everyone is reasonable.

Not only are some people often unreasonable, but nobody is always reasonable.

Every single one of us has flaws that can be exploited (on purpose or just by coincidence) to cause us to act unreasonably in some situations... even when we're fully aware of this fact and actively trying to correct for it.

Being reasonable even just most of the time is difficult work given all of the essentially hardwired flaws we are working against.

Highly skilled workers lose out too. If you bring in several million dollars in value and you are working for a large company is your pay proportional to the amount of value you bring in? This is a common reason people leave in the tech sector, you have a major breakthrough or a wildly successful project and you get a pat on the back for it while the shareholders take the lion's share. Ever tried to negotiate a raise and find you are getting less than 10% of what you bring in in revenue?

Thats a myth. IT employees get paid in bands just like any other worker. The difference is that you hit the ceiling sooner than a similar gigs.

If you're in the Bay Area or Wall St tribal units, the numbers are higher, but they are higher for a reason... Your expenses or costs are way higher.

Everyone is replaceable. If you are the keeper of the keys of some magical system, you'll be replaced with the system when you become a liability, unless your employer is a moron.

"unless your employer is a moron..."

I'd like to point out that having a moron for an employer, and in fact, a passle of morons in management is not a far fetched scenario.... I'd go so far as to say it's somewhat regular.

Don't believe me? Just ask the average employee:)

Oh no doubt. But as an employee, proceed with caution. Being the keeper of the keys for the magical complicated system can work out for years... until it doesn't.

Then you'll find yourself as the guy with 10 years of managing a OpenVMS legacy system in 2015!

If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues.

Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers.

This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...

If they do their job, they negotiate the minimum wage and benefits. Nothing prevents you from getting more than that if you're skilled, but it does in fact prevent the new guy from being screwed over if done properly.

You say that now, just you wait until supply of programmers catch up.

Yep. It has always amazed me how my peers can assume that their pay should be proportionate to their value in one breath while ranting about unions in the next.

I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).

The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.

When the supply of programmers catch up, the weak go to slaughter. 2 people digging a hole for $5 an hour are more effective than 1 person digging for $10 an hour, almost completely irrelevant to digging ability. 2 dummies don't make 1 smartie in programming. Unions exist in fields where replaceability is high. That happens much less in educated professions. The main other reason they exist is for professions with a high risk of injuries. Carpal tunnels only takes so many programmers every year.

Ok, so how do you explain the situation for chemists? The variation in their productivity due to competence is at least comparable to that of programmers if not more -- yet their pay is uniformly low and the job security is uniformly poor. The only escape route is having the flair (!=competence) required to go into administration or attract investors (which is basically the same thing). OTOH if you assume that supply/demand is king, it all makes sense.

To assume that your competence will save you, you need both to assume that your evaluation of your own skills is correct and that others will confidently agree. Both of those propositions sound shaky. I've met a lot of overconfident programmers and I've met a lot of disinterested HR people.

I don't know anything about chemists. However, I struggle to believe an industry with a career path starting freshman year has more variance in ability than a technical field pulling poli-sci majors off the curb to fill seats.

Supply/demand of a chair takes a distance second to the value of the product of that chair. Medicine/law/finance are all oversupplied with high salaries. Try showing up to a teaching position interview and convincing them to pay you more because of econ 101.

> secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).

I think this is the hard part: what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.

It gets particularly hairy when technological change has an impact on value. This is happening faster and faster.

Consider the classical example of Wapping dispute [0] where old hot-metal methods of printing, which unions sought to protect, were replaced by electronic publishing tools and printing machines. Today, it would look quite funny if papers still had to employ Linotype professionals to be able to print things in newspapers. The more acute concern is whether publishers print anything at all on paper, or if everything is in the net. If the unions could decide, of course you couldn't publish in the net, because it is destructive to jobs in the printing industry.

At some time, the commercial "value" of Linotype operators was very high. Now it is only historical; as a commercial operation, the machines have gone to obscurity. Who should have decided the value of those workers? I think the only one who really can decide is the one who owns and runs the operation. The unions mostly have an incentive to preserve the status quo - while happily accepting a change in other businesses, if it benefits them. No doubt that the modern-day Linotype operator would see it fit that he uses his union pay to buy an iPhone.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute

> what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.

On the contrary, it's economics 101. I have a feeling our disagreement is due to definitions so let me be more specific about my intended meanings.

There is a minimum price at which you are willing to not switch vocations and there is a maximum price at which you can be profitably employed. The latter is what I was calling value, as in "value to the company." Relative bargaining power determines where on that spectrum your salary will be. It's arguable that the final price is "value" but that's not the meaning I intended. What should happen is a question for the philosophers. What does happen is up to us.

The Wapping dispute is an example of a union failing to recognize that the value (same definition I was using above) of their employees had fallen below their asking price. Sure, it happens -- I have no doubt that unions increase friction, which is bad and hurts the economy. But underpaying workers "because you can" is also bad, also introduces friction (increased need for loans, decreased ability of workers to bootstrap), and also hurts the economy. So I don't buy the argument that one is better or worse. As far as I'm concerned it's a zero-sum power struggle, philosophically and morally speaking. I'd rather be on the winning side and I don't begrudge others for wanting to be on the winning side.

> maximum price at which you can be profitably employed.

I think such a figure is extremely difficult to calculate in many if not most jobs.

> just you wait until supply of programmers catch up

Been hearing this for decades and the only things happening are:

1. The multiplier effect of programmers keeps going up.

2. Programming work is growing faster than the supply of programmers.

I don't plan on seeing these trends reverse during my lifetime. It's not a zero-sum game.

Is there evidence of this?

In Europe all I have seen is wages going down over the last 10 - 15 years. Admittedly I only started taking notice during the dot com boom, but I get the impression they were better before that.

The other thing I notice is that I personally manage a database that would have taken three of four people ten years ago. We have loads more frameworks and libraries that make the task manageable. I use Django, whereas ten years ago, the stuff done by Django would likely be done with in house libraries, so needed more people. Also I think many of the problems are "solved", we have ideas about how to do things that were not as clear when the internet was staring out.

A small subset of the population even has the potential to program and that's probably not going to change. If a lot more people are encouraged to try it out then a small amount more of the people who had an aptitude for it but didn't realize it will enter the workforce. The leftover majority will still not be able to. No dramatic increase in programmers is going to happen.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/

http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...

10x developer is a myth, but a fun one that makes you feel warm and fuzzy if you believe it.

You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

Unfortunately, right now, that bottom is below our what our fair market-rate earnings would be.

> You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

I've never heard of a unionized industry that worked this way. Unions negotiate pay for every worker that belongs to the union. The only way to negotiate for higher pay is to quit your unionized job and take another non-unionized job.

Depends on the union. Some allow for negotiation, some have a scale which you can work with.

Bonuses and supplementary pay are usually not determined by unions and are up to you to negotiate in this situation.

Evidently this is highly industry-dependent. My experience is in the US auto industry, where all union workers' pay and benefits are fixed by what the union negotiates with the company. (At least, they were when I worked in that industry.)

I don't know much about how most unions work, but at least TV & movie actors and writers, classical musicians, and professional athletes have unions that work as task_queue describes. It's hard for me to imagine a programmer's union that didn't work this way getting off the ground.

Here's an example: The Screen Actor's Guild.

Matt Damon is a SAG member but he does not get paid scale. Scale is a minimum wage set by the union but if you're a big enough star, you negotiate your own wages.

Pretty much all the unions in industries where there are recognized hyper-elite workers work this way (SAG s mentioned in a sibling comment, most of the major professional sports players unions, etc.)

Most other unions don't work that way.

It's not a myth, some developers really do suck that much.

This is exactly what I am thinking. Its not that I believe I am amazing, I just see so much incompetence around me.

10x developer is very rare, but I have worked with guys like that - though of course, this depends on tasks. If task is well defined and bounded by a given tool set and rigid rulesets, etc, 10x cannot really be achieved. On the other hand, if there is just a vision of achieving goal X, and the median developer doesn't even know what tools to start with, an outstanding developer is much more than 10x productive than median.

However, in regular development jobs, I have also seen 0.1x developers, and worse. Even guys who definitely do damage if they are given access to the tools. The variation is huge.

I do believe that top developers are 10x as productive as the median. I don't see this as an indication that top developers are particularly good, though; rather, it's a commentary on how awful the median developer is.

>>However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...

I wonder what's point in having a fast super car and complaining you are stuck in traffic often.

If you are good by a factor of 10, it hardly makes sense for you to ever work with a group of people.

Unions exist to increase the bargaining strength of the labor supply when it is very weak. The bargaining strength of developers is rather strong, and good developers can demonstrate their ability.

Good developers would not want a union, as it would likely drag down their compensation while forcing them to work with hiring mistakes.

Those who tilt at these giants mean well, but they will unhelpfully collide with windmills.

But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc.

I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.

I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance.

Private-sector unions have been hugely helpful in the US. This article touches on it in an interesting way: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...

> the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions

He also brought up the United Auto Workers, which is not.

Yes, but only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.

> only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.

I don't understand. His complaint is basically that public sector unions and private sector unions have the same problems.

>Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits

>I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.

The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe, and are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise, rather than the rates during its current fall.

"are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise"

European taxation takes far more from low income people than taxes in the US. The US gets the highest proportion of it's take revenues from the top 10% in the OECD.

> The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe

Not at all. The average U.K. universal pension is about $9,000 per year. The average U.K. teacher pension payment is only $15,000 per year. The average Chicago teacher pension payment is $42,000 per year.

Moreover, average teacher pay in places like Chicago is far higher than in places like Germany or the U.K. http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf (D.3). A Chicago police officer with 2.5 years on the force makes $65,000. A U.K. officer with double the experience makes only $46,000 per year: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12678661.

You are cherrypicking facts by comparing the pay of a large, expensive, city to an entire country. Either do country to country or equivalent cities. While an officer in the UK might only makes 46K I'm fairly certain an officer in central London makes quite a bit more.

Chicago is 16% more expensive than the U.S. average, while consumer prices in the U.K. are about 10% higher than the U.S. So it's really a wash. Comparing country to country would be pointless, because most U.S. teachers are not unionized. The point is to demonstrate the impact of a particularly dysfunctional teachers' union. San Francisco or New York would be other examples, but the cost of living there is vastly above the U.S. average.

As for London--average police pay is 45,500 pounds ($67,000): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084505/Generous-pay.... So a Chicago police officer with just 2.5 years of service earns about as much as the average London cop does in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The average Chicago police pension is $57,000: http://www.weareonechicago.org/documents/waoc_fact_sheet.pdf. The average U.K. police pension is $23,000: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/305105/Police-pensions-bill....

I'm not familiar with US unions generally or the ones you bring p, but if they get unreasonable concessions then their situation may be a type of survivor bias. The only unions that are left are the very tough ones?

In countries where labour is generally covered by collective bargaining frameworks and enjoys public support, there's a lot of consensus seeking about the unionization ground rules between job market players (labour unions, employer unions, legislature).

I'd like to make a subtle but critical adjustment to your statement:

"A union is a legal framework for the employees which has the ability to recast the power balance and can do it in their favour, if it so chooses."

Unions are definitely capable of doing this thing, and some do it. They do not necessarily do this thing, and some do not. The common failure mode is that an entrenched union is run by a group of people who act very much like company management, profit immensely from this arrangement, and remain in power by employing forms of the pirate ship loot splitting strategy.

(The pirate ship captain must propose a split of the loot, which the crew votes on. If they vote in favour, the loot split goes ahead, and if not then the captain is thrown overboard. The correct solution is to divide the loot equally between 51% of the crew including the captain, and allocate none to the rest.)

The worst unions are definitely not a framework for laziness, but they do tend to be bad for businesses as their primary function is to suck money out of the company and give it to union leaders. The best unions make everybody better off, including the employers. Some companies have internalised the functions of the best unions, because they realised that this makes everybody better off, so don't have any real need for unions. Some companies have internalised the functions of the worst unions and are engaged in an asset-stripping operation.

There is a tendency for older unions to be worse than newer ones. Setting up a union will almost certainly be good for the people who set it up. Joining an established union may or may not be good for you; if you're thinking about joining a union then research this union carefully and figure out if they're going to be good for you. Keep in mind that bad unions tend to be extremely political and will be surrounded by propaganda - look for clear evidence of outcomes.

If you're thinking about unionising in your workplace, please think carefully about this problem and how you're going to make sure that your union is one of the good ones. If you're thinking about running a company, please think carefully about how to be one of the companies that already does the work of the good unions.

A union will remove any ability for you to stand out. You will be paid the same as the worst or best worker, on the basis of some kind of seniority/job description parameters worked out by the union leadership and the company management. It may get you a little more than you get now, but it also removes any reward for excellence. You will be unable to negotiate a raise or promotion directly with your managers.

If you're unhappy with your compensation, move to someplace where you get a better deal. You are worth whatever you agree to work for. If you want a union, fine. I don't suggest that you shouldn't have one. But it will limit your upside, a lot. Even if it offers some minimal protection on the downside.

This matches my experience, unfortunately.

I worked in an industry with notoriously low pay, and I felt that the union removed my ability to negotiate my pay.

Meanwhile, my workplace was paying for (and I was stuck dealing with) union-protected incompetence.

To bring a counterpoint, it does not match mine (but I do not live in the USA).

My salary is actually higher that the minimum (established by collective agreement) for my job. The union just negotiates the lower bound.

If your company values you more than that, they can always pay you more. Or promote you. Nothing stops them to do so.

I guess this depends on local legislation. It is possible that in some places the law/collective agreement says that you cannot pay more.

Nothing stops them to do so.

Except the fact that at any given moment, the company only has $X to pay you from, and the union makes it so that they have some amount less: $X - n.

For some reason, this logic never seems to apply upper management salaries - irrespective of competence or achievement.

Here's the reality - the C-suite is already informally unionised. There's no explicit union structure, but there's a very cosy network of personal relationships, social signals, and ethical assumptions which relies on rhetoric like "We should pay talent what it's worth" to make sure that executive-level comp only shrinks in exceptional and rare cases.

Unionisation may not be the most perfect balance to that, but it's much better than any alternative which amounts to "Eh, let's just do nothing."

This is because upper management has an imbalance of power, agreed.

But it seems to me that unionisation ultimately gives management additional power - when the management can re-direct employees to the bureaucracy of the union structure - where the union has negotiated protection for their own upper management - rather than manage with them as individuals with individual circumstances.

But they don't already manage them as individuals as individual circumstances. They manage them as interchangeable pieces who have weakly singular leverage.

Hollywood actors, writers and directors all have unions. Professional baseball and football players have unions.

You really think any of those people feel like they don't have the opportunity to stand out? Or that their financial upside is too limited?

Don't generalize about what a union can be based on what unions for one particular type of workers are. When a group of workers' labor is easily replaceable, of course their union is going to focus on things like uniform pay -- that way the workers won't get trapped into a downward spiral by demands that they undercut each others' wages or lose their jobs. But unions for workers who aren't easily replaceable will have different priorities.

No you don't. Your union bargains away your value and your only option is to not vote yes to the contract only to have them tell you its the best you can get and the majority votes for it. Most of the time your representatives don't want to rock the vote and work to protect themselves more than you. Your just a worker to them, they see themselves on the same level with the people they negotiate with, not you.

Your hyperbole doesn't provide any real reason to form a union other than you don't like where you work. Honestly go somewhere else. Really. You won't be happy after a union gets there and likely you will be paying dues equivalent to an hour or more a month to be a member.

anecdotal part comesnext Having been a member of a union shop before and having quite a few family in the Midwest I would switch employers or careers before creating or joining one. I cannot for the life of me equate professional and union in the same sentence.

Still anecdata but I've worked in three locals and have NEVER felt like my job steward or the union leadership aren't working to protect me. If they were, they wouldn't get re-elected. Of course, I work in an industry where the unions are strong and members actually vote.

I'm really believing we need a professional association or guild. With merit-based professional rankings.

I think a big contributor to the problem of programmers being underpaid is that there's no distinction between the clinic assistant and the brain surgeon. We're all just "programmers" or at best "software engineers". If there were an official distinction, then it might be easier to demand higher salaries for the higher skilled positions.

I am not entirely without sympathy for the idea of a union modeled after those in e.g. Hollywood; I can see reasonable arguments on both sides.

But the guild that controls the medical profession has turned out to be a disaster of such epic proportions that I am stunned any sane person would consider it anything other than a grim cautionary tale. Any other setup would be better than that. (Beware of the temptation to let the high status of medicine influence one's opinion of the institutions by which it is run.)

If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

This is theoretically true for a lot of things such as pay by seniority but it isn't true for everything. In the bad old days some people used union requirements as a way of keeping minorities out of certain industries. Laws were passed to fix this, but those same laws sometimes mean that if your coworker is incompetent then even if management and most union members want them gone then the union is still obligated to fight to let your coworker keep their job.

It can be hard to talk about unions in general when unions in the US and Sweden and Japan end up working so differently.

I agree that many of the slogan laced perspectives are shallow. Unionisation and the whole complex that comes with it is not narrow. A lot of effort and thought has gone into it. A lot of smart people.

But it's also true that unions themselves have causes problems, often at a very macro level. Unions can have their own interests, independent of the interests of their members.

I don't know where I stand. I think there is a real problem in negotiation position of employees and employers. An employer negotiates often, their stakes are lower and they can optimize. I think we would be seeing improved "labour conditions" like working hours, holidays and other points if the negotiation process was efficient, but we are not. Generally, the less restricted the market, the longer the conventional hours, the fewer the number of days off and the lower the job security. I think it's probably inefficient.

I don't think unions have offered a perfect solution. Often it's not even good enough or better than nothing. I think we need to keep looking.

The left needs new ideas.

"Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.."

This sounds great in theory, but here is what I've seen in practice:

1) Very difficult to fire someone which almost always leads to a court case. Poor employees should be able to be terminated, for the benefit of everyone, not shuffled around the company wasting money and resources.

2) Unions becoming as powerful or more powerful than many large companies which leads to the same type of corruption. Most Union leaders get millions in bonuses every year, yet we don't see anyone protesting on Wallstreet.

3) Guaranteed raises for unionized employees, even if it means the company will go out of business or can't compete any longer in the market place.

4) Inflated wages. A worker doing a job that requires little education or skill can do should not be paid > $100,000/year. In the 90s, I knew mechanics making $150,000/year working 3 day work-weeks. The unions forced the companies to have 2 people working the job of 1 person.

5) You can't get raises based only on merit. If you want a raise, many other people need to get raises in your department or it just won't happen.

My previous company went to a trade show in Vegas and we rented a booth. We were required to pay $500 for a union guy to unfold a table and another couple thousand to essentially plug in a computer. Why would I want more of this inefficiency?

More examples:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-bloc...

Ever wonder why the UFC isn't in New York? The Culinary union. When people choose not to be in a union, many unions decide to use under-handed tactics to force a company to support them.

It's just one group looking to have power over another. They generally aren't looking out for your best interest, only to use your status as an employee to have leverage and power over a company.

This is a forum for startups. Do you actually think it would be easy to start a company if you had to go through miles of red tape and essentially a court case to let a poor employee go? It would change the entire startup scene for the worst.

The glut, waste, and inefficiency is why I despise unions. You can tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've seen it too many times in the last 20 years to believe you.

>If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

Only if someone before me hadn't decided them first. And even if I decide them, what about the people who come after me? They're forever beholden to the context that I created the rules under.

Rules and leadership get renegotiated periodically, just like a company's board of directors and shareholder ballot initiatives are voted on periodically. A rule set is not a permanent structure.

Except that it is. How likely are the current rules going to be completely revised? It would probably takes countless years for anything to change.

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