Yeah, so much of Google's culture is already about slowing down work so that it takes 10 (5 eng ICs + lead, analyst, manager, PM and PgM) to do the work that 2 engineers would do with identical quality in any other company, and the old-timers are the absolute worst in terms of keeping that status quo in place. I can't recall seeing a single team there that was properly sized and wouldn't function better with half the team and an eighth of the process.

There's a good argument to be made that a big chunk of the value of an engineer to Google is strategic, simply that they are locked up and aren't working at FB, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. I was never at a high enough level to have a view into the data that would confirm that, but it certainly felt like even if you weren't particularly productive in the environment everyone up the ladder was perfectly happy to let you malinger on the payroll forever, as long as you weren't so bad that you did damage to someone's pristine art project of a codebase. So maybe inability to fire isn't really such an issue - even now, seeing anyone fired at Google, let alone an old timer, is extraordinarily rare.

One day you will be the old timer that the young are trying to eat.

On the other hand, it may potentially "kickstart innovation". The driven engineers will be more likely to flee to smaller companies where they can work their magic.

> This will demoralize engineers to work smarter & harder.

This is, of course, why Germany is famously an engineering wasteland with no notable impact on the global economy.

In reality, it all comes down to contracts: union employees can have performance incentives just like everyone else. The primary difference is that they’re above board and consistent because they come from a legal agreement rather than private negotiations between individuals and companies.

Germany's concept of unions are far better than the American model that just ends up controlled by mafia families (they still are in NY) or union administration that pad their salaries because the way unions are structured and protected by the NRLB basically encourages hostile centralization.

>This is, of course, why Germany is famously an engineering wasteland with no notable impact on the global economy.

I suppose you're only referring to _software engineering_?

Because in traditional engineering Germany is a powerhouse, with countless market leaders in their individual niches, plus the ubiquitous car and machinery industries.

I was being sarcastic — Germany's union system is an existence proof that the claims made about unions in the U.S., to the extent that they're even true here, are artifacts of a bad system rather than inherent to the concept.

Do you have any sources that support that from the countries that have unions for software development. Because that is something I would be very interested in reading.