I have been working in the tech industry for 5+ years now (not too long, I know). I have yet to see a company that commonly identifies low performers and successfully terminates their employment for performance reasons only.

In fact, the three times I have seen companies terminate employment after somebody was put on a PIP it was directly related to other mental health issues the employee was going through at the time. Anecdotal m, obviously, but this complaint about unions smells bogus to me, since a common complaint about the tech industry is about blood sucking low performers that stick around long past they’re due.

As for measuring performance I again fail to see any company that does an adequate job of this with heuristics that aren’t at least partially, and usually fully, based on tenure.

In short, what makes you think we’re good at these things now, such that unionizing would make them worse.

I have seen people fired for incompetence. In fact, I appreciate companies where that happens at least every now and then. I've left jobs where incompetence wasn't corrected in some way.

Though generally what happens is employees get basically cost-of-living raises indefinitely. Over a decade or two, the company ends up with a half-price employee, compared to market rates.

Also we don't have to be good at evaluating employees to get worse at it. Giving raises on certification and seniority will make engineers chase promotions and titles instead of solving problems and finding managers that appreciate the work.

> Giving raises on certification...

As far as I can tell everything you're describing is the primary way that people are currently promoted and how compensation is decided. The real unicorns aren't companies with billion dollar valuations, but companies where you can just focus on solving problems and have your manager recognize that with compensation and promotion.

Just like unicorns... they don't exist.

I still feel like my question stands. Are we actually so good at these things now that unionizing would actually harm us? Or is this claim that unions will make it harder actually just hand-waving and ignoring the fact that we're already terrible at this kind of evaluation only we (workers) have no recourse against a feelingless corporate structure that exists to min-max productivity and compensation for the benefit of shareholder value?

That, sir, is just FUD. The dangerous type.

Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.

If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to adapt, and not the other way around.

> But be ready to prove it.

How do you prove that an employee took two weeks to find a bug that should have taken one day to find?

How do you prove that writing a domain-specific language was a bad decision compared to defining a complex XML schema?

How do you prove that an engineer is bad at explaining technical concepts?

General consensus amongst the developers that work directly with the person being investigated. It's pretty easy. Head butting with poor managers and broken company structures with ZERO recourse is the problem. The strawman you're putting up is not.

>How do you prove [...]

Email archives of PIP goals and the like. But that doesn't even matter. All you really have to do is prove you didn't fire them because they asked for OT pay they were owed.

You could use the exactly these arguments for union and against. But in modern justice systems you are innocent until proven guilty, simply so anyone cannot just scream witch and have someone burned.

Getting laid off isn't getting buried, though. Getting a crappy raise isn't going to jail.

I do think employees need organization and culture to negotiate better in the short term and manage health and career in the long term. But I don't see evidence that either the employer or the union leadership have the right incentives to meet those needs.

I agree, but the consequence of getting fired for a employee is worse than the consequence for a employer not being able to fire someone. Also a company is more often a organization of several people which can be used to leverage a firing (or what you call it). A union only seeks to counter this by giving each employee a more level playingfield. Without unions and worker laws it is basically a third world country where anyone is at risk of being fired for reasons they dont understand or was never informed of and never given a chance to improve. The importance is in the power balance. It could even be argued that unions are just as important for distributing power and wealth in a society as a democracy. The scandinavian model is by some attributed to the power of the worker unions. Of course anyone working in management and business osners will always oppose unions. But it makes no sense that workers themselves opposes it. Skilled workers will still get work and get better compensated for it.

Properly done 121's and APR's

Which side are you on?

Discussing both sides of an idea is acceptable. Picking a side is not a requirement.

I don't think the grandparent's point is an issue of sides. It's more of a problem of gathering a useful heuristic of an engineer's performance. Given a variety of every day engineering tasks, how can you know exactly the difficultly of a person's work short of having done it yourself? I believe that experience is the answer in some cases, but others it is not. As another poster stated, it could also be done by working with the engineer through it all.

That's basically my take. A lot of evaluation is properly subjective and qualitative. Both bosses staring at deadlines and union negotiators clamoring for paper trails and predefined metrics are going to be bad for the industry and therefore workers, at least in the long run.

Of course it's just FUD. Millions of dollars are spent every year to stop people from organizing and to break up existing unions. Finally someone is trying to help tech workers organize, expect more of this.

Yup, only terminations I saw in gamedev were very much with-cause scenarios(employee threatening physical violence).

Unions are like lawyers members get representation irrespective of guilt or innocence.

Yes a Union cant stop some one being fired if they are guilty of Gross misconduct but they can make sure people don't get fired for say accusing a manger for unwanted touching or to make wahy for the CEO's nephew.

For example I bet James Danmore had no advice before his internal hearings that lead to his firing.

Filmmaking, especially in Hollywood, has a long tradition of strong unions. As all your statements are invalid in terms of Hollywood, I don't see why they should be valid for the game industry.

I think the way film making unions are organized is something to look into but my impression is that the problem space is more familiar when you look at what industrial worker unions deal with. That is: careers under a single employer instead of gigs where you go from employer to employer and have to basically get re-hired.

Hmm, but why shouldn't games work like a Hollywood-style gig economy, since the need for labor varies depending on a game's lifecycle?

The difference is that a lot of roles in film are individual. You can hire a director, a writer, a scenarist, a bunch of actors etc. separately and they will do their job just fine. And for the tasks, which require high-skill teamwork, movies contract a company, which employs the team full-time (e.g. VFX, stunts).

There are very few individual roles in games. Even leadership roles are highly dependant on their teams (just look at what happened to Visceral if you want an example). And there is a lot of interdisciplinary interaction too, so even if there were separate game programming, game design and game art houses, there is no guarantee their could work with each other in a productive manner. At best you can separate QA and some art teams, which already happens all the time.

that's true. I think something really unique in game dev is that parts of the team can fluctuate while another part has a larger commitment across several projects.

EDIT: I'll also add, although obvious to some but worth mentioning, that an effective game-dev union needs to help both those people equally.

I think its important to point out that there are a wide range of union constitutions & contracts - not all film jobs are gigs; there are contracts that cover workers who work for a single employer, like a tv studio, film projectionists, or arena stagehands (all IATSE)

That's only if you are speaking of protection without procedure to allow the employee to improve or checking to see if there is a medical reason (including mental health issues). Otherwise, no. This simply isn't true. You can still let employees go because they aren't actually doing their job, just like you can still let employees go for bad attendance, among other things. Unsurprisingly, the call center I worked at had high turnover (both employees quitting and getting fired) before and after it became unionized. But it does make it harder for employers to use these excuses willy-nilly.

"Could be killed by a union".. yes, or they could be killed by corporate policy or management that lets rules slide for employees they like.

Your example of teachers unions is a bad one, as they often get villified. Yet, we know there are multiple reasons for a so-called "underperforming" teacher, multiple solutions that help, and the fact that one has to be able to replace the teacher if you let them go, all complicating the issue.

"Pay may be solely based on tenture, not skill" Note your use of "may be". Tenure-only pay is often used for jobs that you can't measure the skill of one person against another: Factory jobs, for example. These often still have a pay range, giving more for folks with education than those without, for example. What changes is generally transparency: Skill measures and the evaluation of those skills needs to be communicated to employees in ways they can meet and/or improve them. In addition, these same issues happen outside of unions as well.

Unions are reactionary organizations. They tend to create and enforce rules around how things work now. Unions don't like it if new technology lets two workers do the work of forty.

All organizations are reactionary and necessarily settle on the state of the world at the current moment. This is an extremely bizarre line of logic you are using.

There is always version lock in at some point, and NO workers like change if it's going to cause them to lose their livelihood. This has nothing to do with unions.

Why do you care more about protecting artificial constructs like companies at the expense of power given to people building the products?

I honestly don't care about companies. But I don't care about union bosses either. Unions do just as poor a job as employers in preparing workers for tectonic shifts in employment patterns.

For example, when the ACA passed, unions were more concerned with their constituency and their carve outs than with decoupling employment from healthcare. Same story for all the business interests.

A company is comprised of many parts — including its employees. Calling it an artificial construct may be legally and semantically valid, but it’s also dismissive to the reality that any company is more than just the ink on its articles of incorporation (or whatever).

The argument is much more nuanced than you’ve proposed.

I don't think it is about technology. In general, unions don't like people to get fired (without proper compensation). If new tech does more work for the company but no one gets fired I see no reason why unions would have anything against it.

However, the whole firing topic is really only filling up a fraction of unions' time. Unions' main tasks are overwatching safety regulations, crunch times, etc... so that the actual time spent at/for the company is better quality whise. This leads to happier, healthier programmers which should be in their employer's interest as well, see e.g. negative press and lack of battle proven personel at telltale.

Ok. We have automated the build process. We don’t need you anymore. Thanks for your service, here’s two weeks’ severance.

A union would go nuts in that scenario. Which then supports the theory that unions would oppose technology that improved efficiency since they would care more about the protecting the production input than they care about optimizing the production output.

Yeah because that's really shitty. If you actually cared about that person you wouldn't throw them out, you'd train and place them elsewhere within your company because they are good employees that contribute positively to your culture.

Unions are just as responsible for being myopic and irresponsible. Shouldn't the teamsters be leading the way in retraining truck drivers given the coming automated truck apocalypse?

There are plenty of trainings offered by unions. However of course, each union offers the courses it has expertise in. Asking a trucker's union to offer courses in Javascript is not feasible.

This article is one of many discussing the dawn of truck automation in very much detail: https://teamster.org/news/2018/01/teamsters-union-perspectiv...

As you can see unions are in fact discussing this very broadly without jumping to easy conclusions.

Automation by ML is a complex topic on all levels. We are just at the beginning of what will be very interesting times regarding policing automation, ML, and AI.

Its up to the union to determine rules like seniority. My union has no seniority - if you suck, you don't get hired. if you break a major job rule, you'll get fired.

Union bonus is, that when your a-hole boss has a grudge and fires you for a bogus reason, you can dispute it, and possibly get your job back too.

Our contracts also spell out specific job titles and positions, and pay rates accordingly - a guy who only sweeps gets $x, where as a special effects technician gets nearly 3 times that amount.

Those are risks to both employers and employees. The idea is that employees accept measures employers want ( layoffs, performance evaluations) in return for security (full time contract that gives unemployment benefits, medical etc).