Massive crunch culture where Tim checks the lot for cars late at night and on weekends and complains when there are not enough cars there.
A tech workers' union means not only the mandatory imposition of dues (don't need any more little cuts out of my paycheck), fixed hiring qualifications that are pretty likely to evolve into full-blown licensing (i.e., the end of the self-taught professional), removal of the right to independently negotiate, and affirmative action, but also a large, opaque body that engages primarily in political activities like lobbying and negotiations with very little oversight or transparency.
The benefits of a union are protection from predatory employment policies. That may be necessary in some fields, but in programming, it isn't. Most devs I know can have a new job within a few weeks if they don't like their employers' policies, and most employers I know appreciate the difficulty in sourcing good software talent so they don't want to do much to piss them off.
Here's some more links about him, if the one above doesn't make the point clearly enough:
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rick_Berman
- http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/2006-07-31-lo...
- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-rick-berman-aka-dr-evil/
- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/politics/18berman.html?...
You know, just FYI.
The former is an aspect of personal freedom, the latter is evidence of market failure and possible exploitation.
On the bright (?) side, the bonuses are epic (hee hee).
Given the well documented case where certain California based tech companies used their combined leverage to hold wages down (through the non-poaching pact) I would say that your view of the leverage of employees over employers is overly optimistic. (i.e. http://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/03/anti-poaching-lawsuit-41...)
If employers gang up against non-unionized employees I would say it is obvious who has the short end of the stick.
There are areas in tech where your statement may hold true, and superstar performers usually hold more cards at the negotiation table than employers do but for the general software engineering populace it's not as clear cut as that.
There are other ways of reducing turnover, such as finding whatever would convince your key employees to leave and offering it to them to stay before they get that offer from a competitor.
It's certainly true that blanket no-poach agreements can help an employer reduce turnover without making the employees lives any better, but that's part of the reason they artificially restrict wages and are unfair.
My understanding is that the no-poach agreements forbade only unsolicited pursual of employed individuals. Dissatisfied employees were still free to seek employment at the other competitors. All these agreements did was keep others from fomenting discontent by dangling carrots in front of potential employees (which would've been unlikely to be fulfilled). It was a voluntary arrangement entered into by the industry's recruiters. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78818102/TechCrunch-High-Tech-Empl...
> The documents also demonstrate that Defendants did not extend an offer to an employee of another Defendant without prior approval from the candidate's current employer, regardless of whether the candidate applied without being solicited first.
It's also obvious from now public emails that many of the employers knew that these agreements were probably illegal, with Google explicitly saying internally that they didn't want to create a paper trail that they could be sued over, and Palm flat out telling Jobs that his suggestion was probably illegal.
Michael Capps is Epic president, and he ended admitting he joined IGDA board in first place to stop IGDA from forcing studio hands in fighting crunch, when Capps joined, IGDA most high profile work was to try to fix the crunch culture, Epic felt threatened, and pulled that stunt (send Capps to join IGDA and undermine the efforts against crunch)
(Thank god I got out of that industry)