This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but...

There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't.

I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of <so and so> try a day on the line of <so and so> and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour."

No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others where NOT anyone can. These are by the way not purely academic skills, they are some where the differences are physical, though these days there is fewer and fewer of those as humanity got super good at making tools.

Basically I'm saying there are jobs where maybe the CEO wouldn't be able to figure it out on day 1, but with standard training, they would be able to do the job. And with EXPERIENCE they would be able to get better and better.

These are the jobs where salaries should be set by a union, and where your salaries rise directly correlated with experience.

Now let's get to the classist and controversial part. I don't believe software engineering is like that. Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace.

I've been in the industry for 15 years since I graduated with my undergrad, and I've been junior, and I've been senior, and I've seen new grads come in and grow, and thrive, and become promoted to senior. And I've seen juniors come in, and struggle, and tread water, and be managed out. For the exact same job.

I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars.

I am 100% against unions for software development.

> I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars.

> I am 100% against unions for software development

I'm not sure what you think the first has to do with the second. Outside of public sector unions (where the actual limiting factor is civil service law more often than union preferences), union arrangements for non-blue-collar jobs often support exactly what you describe. I mean, you don't seen any cap to the capacity for differential and sometimes meteoric progression in film/tv acting despite the dominance of SAG-AFTRA, an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, in that space, do you?

I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative!

Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice and I'm not here to give career advice, especially not to an industry as a whole.

If you don't mind, could you elaborate on what parts of your statement are explicitly classist in your estimation? I genuinely don't understand your point.

Which jobs would you suggest every person could eventually excel at equally because of the tools that have been invented? What about those jobs is so universally accomplishable that all humans are made truly equal less experience?

I agree that businesses should have the ability to promote based on seniority or skill! Limiting that wouldn't be efficient!

Do all unions preclude that flexibility by the very concept of their existence? I could imagine that in some cases it could be possible to create an agreement that serves all parties as best as possible.

>Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace.

Sorry. I genuinely do not understand this statement.

It's a statistical fact that not every person can develop the same skillset and inhabit the same role at the same time, yes. I'm not really clear about what that has to do with anything, considering that most large and valuable projects require multiple people with multiple skillsets to realize their potential.

Sorry, I'm a bit baffled by this. Could you elaborate a bit on your "classist" idea for software development a little further as far as how the entire profession should not take part in unionizing "100%" which I take to mean across all businesses and projects?

The classist aspect of my own opinion is the implication that there are inherently classes of people: Those that can be good at software engineering and those that can't.

There is a more egalitarian school of thought is that people are people, and if given the same opportunities, advantages, educational, financial, etc, the distinction between them is much MUCH MUCH smaller than what our current wealth gap in society seems to suggest.

And that if we DID achieve such a society, then unions would be a net good because otherwise all work becomes essentially commodotized, and without the protection of Unions "high skilled" workers will not be paid well anymore.

I readily agree that there are often skill gaps in many professions or endeavors. I am an absolutely terrible when it comes to skateboarding and ice skating, and they're also not big aspirations of mine. I've opted to pursue other things that I enjoy, like problem solving, system administration and cost analysis!

That being said, when I was a kid I didn't have a skateboard. I had an old DOS box to play on. Then Windows 95, then 98, ME/2000, XP etc. I'm fully aware of how good I am at what I do, but I genuinely have no objective/provable reason to believe that I'm of a "class" of person that's good with computer touching. I'd assume that I would need a machine that displays alternate realities in order to establish what "class" of person I should be assigned to, objectively.

The idea of "classism" inherently (to most) relies heavily on stratification. There are (for a made-up example) The Indispensable, The Useful and The Expendable. In your definition of classism as applied to software engineering, are people born into these classes? If not, what process creates objective classification? How is it standardized and applied?

And further, how does a group of software engineers, that doesn't include you, choosing to unionize hurt your prospects or experience?

>I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars.

Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist.

Pay/promo by seniority isn't some innate property of unions, it's a response to a lack of pay increases by management. If management keeps union members happy with their pay, the members have no reason to vote in leadership that asks for pay by seniority and have a lot of reasons to avoid it.

> Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist.

Yes, just look at Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Last I checked doctors, who aren't unionized in the US and are more essential than nurses, are doing just fine.

Doctors have the AMA, which provides accreditation and artificially limits supply. This provides some of the value that unionization provides, although it technically isn't.

Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power.

If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize.

Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either

>...because there's barely anybody who could take their job

That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others.

>If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency...

These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we need doctors, so those who succeed deserve higher pay. Virtually anyone can be a Fry Cook or a Walmart Greeter.

Uncomfortable fact: society needs doctors and engineers (software or otherwise) many times more than we need fast food workers.

Personally, I really do think medical licenses are too restrictive. I think a lot of very talented people who could have made great doctors end up pursuing other careers, because they weren't willing to commit to a pre-med undergrad + 4 years med school + residency while they were 18, which the typical age that people have to make that decision.

I also think the medical field suffers because the only people who become doctors were people who have been on the track for becoming a doctor their whole life. An engineering firm might have artists and philosophers and tradesmen who are passionate about engineering and self-taught, bringing very unique perspectives to various problems. These same people have enough talent, motivation and humility that they probably would make great doctors too.

And I know for a fact that doctors would benefit from e.g. a systems engineering or fluid dynamics background to better understand the medicines they're prescribing and be more equipped to prescribe the right one in the right doses, or maybe a math/statistics background to understand unintuitive numerical data such as "X diagnostic test is 99% accurate.... [fine print] because it reports 100% of cases as negative and only 1% of cases are ever positive".

My imagination can only go so far with examples, and I know there are very good reasons for the tight restrictions, but I strongly believe the restrictions are too tight.

Doctors are not any more essential than nurses like the piston isn't any more essential than the crankshaft. You need the whole team, working in concert, and there is no other way about it.

With all due respect, your take is naive: just because you need a team doesn't mean some members aren't more essential than others.

You can, in theory, have an Oncologist handle your cancer without a nurse; you can't have it the other way around. That makes the former more essential.

Unless you can afford your own doctor, I'm afraid you ate being naive. The reality of care for the lot of us that we depend on the system as a whole working, not individual professionals. If the nurses strike, hospitals shutter. By the way, as an oncology researcher, doctors are vastly overrated anyway. Their main contribution is signing documents. It is my officious goal to make them obsolete.

Makes me think about Milton Friedman's talk about airline pilots and the American Medical Association, rebranded as a union, and his question of

    Who are the strongest unions in the United States. Which unions in the United States are strongest in the sense of having been most successful in raising the wage rates, the earnings of their members?

https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478

Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?

They're not outliers, they're counterexamples and fairly strong ones at that. Police unions and teachers unions, on the other hand, are both great examples of how unions can be a detriment to society.

That's right, I don't want the same thing you want.

The point here being that if you want the union experience, you should create/join an union and try to negotiate collectively along other like-minded individuals. But please let me exercise my freedom of negotiating directly with an employer by myself.

The main problem of unions is when they want to force everybody else to play by their rules, often disproportionally benefitting union leaders and the "old guard".

> What do you see as the downside?

The downside is being forced into a collective bargain agreement, if I wanted to work at whatever company was a union shop.

I would much rather negotiate for my own contract. Which is something that I currently do, right now, regarding my tech job employment contract.

It has worked out pretty work for me. I've received significant pay raises, that I do not think I would get if I were forced into collective bargain agreements.

> As opposed to life in a non-union shop

I work in a "non-union" shop, in tech, and I make significantly more money than any other example of a "union shop" tech job that I have ever been able to find in the industry.

Feel free to let me know about any "union shop" programmer jobs, that will pay me more than the 300k plus that I make right now. Maybe I'll even consider it.

> A seat at the table to bargain with your betters?

I already do bargain with my employers. And it has resulted in me getting a lot of money for my efforts.

Let me know when those union jobs can get me more than 300k, for someone with ~10 years experience, lol.

And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't even been optimizing as much as I could for salary. If I really was doing that, I could probably go work in finance/quant, and get another 50% raise (Yes, really... I have peers and friends, that have gotten to that)

I don't think any "union shop" tech jobs that exist in the world, right now, match up with that.

I am not even trying to brag, or anything here. The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.

"If I joined a more powerful group, I'd vote myself a pay cut, so more powerful groups are bad"

I'm not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. Unions don't mean you have to vote yourselves a pay limit anymore than Democracy voting in a minimum wage means everyone in the country must earn the minimum wage. Unions don't mean that poor workers cannot be 'punished' with unemployment anymore than Democracy means criminals cannot be punished. A union is employees pooling forces for the benefit of employees, what else even makes sense? How can you on the one hand say your current coworkers are so awful that you don't want to co-negotiate with them, and the reason you don't want to do that is because then you'd have to work with them? If they are awful and not being fired right now, anti-unioning isn't getting them fired, is it?

> The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.

Dan Luu estimates on his blog that one piece of work he did saved his employer millions, yet he got no extra money for it. How do you know that 300k is as much as you could possibly get if all of you 1% exceptional people worked together? What makes you think that a union of top tier tech workers would get the same results as a union from a steel works? Why do so many people from the "United" States, living under the benefit of a massive combined armed-forces strong-arming the planet, think that combining forces is a dumb idea for dumb people which can't work ... when the people who get paid most (CEOs, board members) act together against lower level employees to keep that being the case?

That's getting into Michael O'Church territory, but you're talking about your salary when you could be inverting the structure of the company putting tech people right on top, or something.

The vast majority of engineers are not making anywhere near what you are making. The fact that you know a lot of other very well-paid engineers does not actually disprove that.

Exactly. So a unionized tech company would be a company that attracts people who don't have the skills to earn lots of money. I doubt such a company would thrive among competitors with top level programmers

The assumption here is that pay consistently corresponds to skill in the tech industry. An alternative factor that comes to mind is geography.

You're completely right, but with that geography comes a larger pool of very talented people to compete with.

I think it more or less evens it out

The original poster asked me what the downside were, and I just told you.

It is a very real downside, to me, and many other highly paid software engineers, that forcing us into collective bargaining agreements would result in us making significantly less money.

So thats the downside. It is very clear, and obvious. We would make less money.

So, given that we would make significantly less money, you can expect us to fight and sabotage efforts to force us into collective bargain agreements.

Good luck, you'll need it. Because right now, the anti-union side, in tech, is winning, and unions are not popular at all.