I'm a member of a union in Norway. They have zero to do with my day-to-day. Which is nice. I bargain pay on my own etc., same does everyone else. Don't even think my employer knows I'm a member.

However, the union has pushed for better regulations. When I started my career 5 years ago for instance, I had to sign a non-compete. Almost every offer had one, as an individual I couldn't do much. The union however helped pass legislation so those general non-competes are illegal, and can only be used for very specific purposes. When I got offers, they would also look over the contracts, tell me what I should be expected to be paid etc, giving me more knowledge and backing as a rookie (vs big cos). The yearly salary statistics is detailed and useful for me every year.

The union also collectively bargains for other stuff. For instance my mortgage rate is far lower through their offer than anything else I've found. The member fee (~400 yearly?) pays it self many times over just from this.

So I think this works great. Everyone on here always paints unions as these monoliths, but they don't have to be. I am still valued as a singular, but for the big stuff we're numerous.

This sounds more like a "professional organization". I wonder if this would be a good thing for software engineers, where it's not a union for a specific company but just a lobbying organization to push for legislation that is beneficial for software engineers and maybe a legal arm available to members to sue for violations of those laws.

Yeah, it may be that the union word is too tainted.

A union doesn't have to be a monopoly keeping everyone else out ("you have to hire our licensed workers") or something that is in the way of doing your job ("you're not allowed to crawl under your desk and plug in ethernet"). Which are the examples I often see here.

Most Googlers aren't exactly passing around union cards, but a bunch are collaborating and organizing on pushing the company to do what they believe the company should do. It's kinda union-like, but software engineers aren't fighting for higher wages and workplace safety as much as trying to push ethical behavior.

Google has essentially a monopoly on search and is part of a duopoly on mobile phones, so they have the money to treat their employees LAVISHLY compared to others.

Perhaps Maslow's hierarchy of human needs is right, and the employees are treated well enough their able to care about other groups and the ethical implications of their work? Seems like a good thing to me.

A Kickstarter style union where employees say "we aren't allowing this on the platform, and we will have this even though we normally would not allow it", would allow for an amazing level of evidence to pile up of biases. That would be a nightmare scenario for Google.

Google would vastly prefer the former than organizing for ending forced arbitration (which worked and is what prompted Google's anti-union crackdown/illegal firings), a formal council for engineers to voice complaints/elect representatives, and higher wages/profit sharing.

I'd join one if it meant I had more bargaining power and therefore more pay.

Just because I'm being paid outrageously high, doesn't mean I shouldn't also be getting paid more.

In addition to pay, a union would also give employees some practical muscle if, say, the company decided to deal with sexual harassment by paying the perpetrator a giant sum of money to go away instead of following up and seeing the situation through to some justice.

Damn straight, or more autonomy over your work environment, less crunch time, freedom to choose wfh outside pandemic conditions? I've literally never worked anywhere that couldn't be improved in one dimension or another, which is kind of what unionization is about for workers.

Pay might be high, but it has not kept up with the increases in cost of living and inflation over the last 20 years, especially in big cities like SF or NYC.

Also, Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with one another to keep tech worker compensation below its market value[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

They make a lot of sense, “employees have more control if they act together”, so I imagine they’re rightly scared of them catching on.

Why would a group of employees want to have any collective say in what their company does or how it treats them?

> unions often diminish individual accomplishments and liberties in favor of what begins as collective interest

Is that why NFL players have no individuality and are basically just substitutes of each other? I doubt anyone even knows any individual football player's name, since the union has so diminished their individual accomplishments.

Who even knows the names of movie stars anymore? They just go by their SAG-AFTRA member IDs since the union has made them all practically interchangeable.

They are pretty interchangeable, but I have to say I am a bit partial to actor 958309 from SAG-AFTRA 5757, his performance in Inception was pretty great.

I heard 958309 got a flogging for that performance because it violated union bylaws that forbid one member from making other members look like slackers. That'll show him for being a prima donna and giving it his all!

> often

Ah, that one must be the exception that proves the rule - i always forget about that.

The first obstacle to general software engineering unionization is getting software engineers convinced that their problems stem from shitty management, and not incompetent peers.

Which problems? Being paid well? Having a fun and interesting job? Have you ever worked a union job, did the union make shitty management suddenly disappear? Shitty management is often just swallowed up by the union itself. And I don't think I have incompetent peers, I think my peers are perfectly competent precisely BECAUSE the profession is not unionized. The fastest way to a pool of incompetent peers is by assuring the continued employment of incompetent people under the umbrella of collective protection.

I believe you just made my point for me.

You said that I believe my problems come from incompetent peers, and not shitty management.

I said that not only do I not believe my problems come from incompetent peers, but that I don't actually have any problems. And to the extent that I've worked under shitty management, I've had sufficient leverage to alter my situation accordingly. When I feel as though software engineers are systemically incapable of possessing the degree of leverage so as to alter their situations to a more optimal one, within reason, then I would be willing to consider bringing forth the myriad of problems that come with collectivization in order to attempt to access additional leverage. The landscape at the present could not be described as I have.

So no, I haven't proved any of your points. Nothing that you said applies to what I said.

I think you misread the question you are replying to.

The question is sarcastic.

Yes, thank you for getting it.

Screen Actors Guild member Tom Cruise would like to chat with you about negotiating based on leverage, since you seem to have some misconceptions about what a collective bargaining agreement does what to the workplace.

Thing is Google will eventually get to the stage that the PR of not having a union exceed any downsides of having one.

As for software engineers (apart from SQL ones who would of read your UNION JOIN as a whole different sentence), most grown up in a work environment that has seen the need for Unions moot as tech companies shifted in perks/remunerations that exceeded what many a Union could of dreamed of achieving. That alone seen the driver for Unions moot in many eye's, combined with a lack of tech focused Unions and the shift from lifer work mentality to few years being classed a long time at a company. Times changed and moved faster than many Unions.

However, many tech companies grown to the stage that they ain't all software engineers and the size/scale of them has seen them grow to the stage that some level of check like a Union wouldn't go amiss and opinions about unions as a whole been slowly improving in the past few years after decades of disdain. Thing is, what type of Union and is the need for a larger more tech orientated Union or lots of smaller ones? That's the crux.

Though when I started in tech, the worry about competition bugging the water cooler was the edge-case worry, today it's the company itself that has become that worry and less of an edge-case as well. So clearly the use of Unions does have some safety in voice for employee's.

If Google workers organized/became a union shop, compensation would probably be unbelievably high.* They are the source of most of the profits and Google is very profitable.

*assuming the union only represented SWEs and not PMs/etc.

"Why would serfs want to have say over their activities anyway?"

It really struct me one day at work, as myself and all of my coworkers watched in horror as "leadership" made decisions after decision that we all felt not only made our lives worse, but were fundamentally bad decisions for the health of the company, how powerful the ideological tools are that keep us from questioning who has a say in the future of a company.

One of the key reasons there weren't more peasant revolutions was a combination of violence to suppress this, and, more importantly, ideological tools to keep peasants in line. That we still read our kids stories about how great princesses and kings are is evidence of how strong this feudal propaganda is.

Especially at software companies, the hardworking engineers are why the company can exist at all. How many times have engineers deeply cared about things such as quality of the code base, giving back to open source communities, or even things like ethical treatment of coworkers and users?

But we have been trained to treat CEOs and "leadership" like divinely ordained kings. Sure the VCs and Founders have laid out the capital to run the company, but capital alone does not make the company.

Have you never worked at a company where software engineers are forced by management to make very bad technical choices? Have you never been in a room where everyone working on the project sees clearly it will be a disaster but has absolutely zero say in the decisions around it? Have you never seen your company do questionably illegal or unethical things, where everyone working on the project wishes that they could stop things, but no individual wants to handle the risk of being a whistle-blower and having their career destroyed?

Imagine a startup or large tech company where collectively the engineers had a voice on par with the c-suite. Where they could say "I know that we have quarterly goals to meet, but we refused to ship new product until we have our infra in a least a semi-stable state. This will allow us to ship faster in the future and it's important for the company"

or

"We strongly believe that while this current feature does generate slightly more revenue, it is intentionally deceptive to users and ultimately harmful to them and our product, so we would like to see it changed or removed"

or

"X,Y and Z Open source products have saved us tremendous amount of capital, to continue to keep these ecosystems we depend on healthy, we demand that N hours a month be actively devoted to giving back to these projects"

or

"I know you are unhappy with employee 123, primarily because they have openly questioned the decisions of management. However they have no records of outright insubordination and are considered a valuable member of the technical team, so we will fight your request to fire them."

Labor having a voice is about far more than just salaries and benefits like it is for factory workers. And if you think the solution is just that engineering management needs to better represent their teams, then you likely haven't worked in management.

My guess is they are not worried now but they know a strong union may cause problems for them in the future. If there's any kind of trouble in the future, a union will be harder to control.

Today or in a purely hypothetical situation in the future when the management does something that pisses off a majority of employees?

I'm not sure it's even a hypothetical future situation. I don't know if a majority of Googlers were against it, but the way Google handled Andy Rubin wasn't exactly a popular move internally.

Probably a tiny but vocal minority who use internal tools to amplify their message, becoming a nuisance to their colleagues. From the outside, it reads similarly to the recent struggles inside Coinbase. But this being google, the company’s response is more “corporate”.

I would love to join a union!