> but I have no bargaining power as an individual

What about "stop putting me on call without compensation or I will leave the company"

> What about "stop putting me on call without compensation or I will leave the company"

Says the dude without kids and a mortgage who can afford a couple of months without a salary :)

Why does that matter? If you don't like your current job, start looking around until you have a new offer in hand. That new offer in hand is now your leverage ("bargaining power") if you really like your current company. Otherwise if they "call your bluff" you still have a job.

Living life by ultimatum is pretty lame.

End of the day, requiring such a high friction approach to addressing basic issues sets up incentives to take no action.

Lame living by someone else's ultimatum also. If you had a union you'd have to go on strike for shit you don't necessarily care about and you would have to wait for somebody to age out to get off of pager duty. It's outsourcing responsibility of your life to someone else.

In the timeless words of Bob Dylan, "gotta serve somebody"

Yeah, try that outside a 100 km radius from SV.

I did it and it worked well. All I really had to do was respond to the LinkedIn recruiter spam and take some vacation days for interviews.

This isn't 2010. Unless, you're some legendary-tier coder (and I have my doubts these actually exist or are useful in a corporate environment), the company will most likely call your bluff. There are loads of coders willing to take the job.

What are you talking about? I'm a totally average programmer, hell, maybe below average for my age and experience level, and I literally walked on a job that wanted to make me do uncompensated on-call at the end of 2019 for one that compensates me to be on call.

It doesn't have to be a bluff, programmers are still in high demand.

And I'm not even in Silicon Valley, and I have no degree. C'mon!

Don't make it a bluff then. Have an offer in hand before bargaining. If the company values you (and not every company treats its programmers like cogs) they will work with you. Otherwise if they refuse you still have a job.

> Don't make it a bluff then. Have an offer in hand before bargaining. If the company values you (and not every company treats its programmers like cogs) they will work with you. Otherwise if they refuse you still have a job.

So what you are describing is a situation in which there is zero long-term pressure for the company to improve or change their practices, because there is a never-ending source of people to replace the ones leaving, and as long as they're fine with the churn (spoiler: they are), they'll just chalk it up to the system working as intended.

I am not a fan of people that only apply for a job so they can use it as a bargaining chip at their work. Such a waste of energy for me

You don't have to be "legendary" to have that kind of leverage.

If the software has any level of complexity, an org does not want to incur the cost of training a newly hired engineer and waiting 3-6 months while they get up to speed.

It's a bluff only if you don't mean it. If you are willing to fight for what's fair according to yourself, then it is one of the expected results.

Are you sure the job market is softer now than in 2010?

in collective bargaining you ALSO have no bargaining power as an individual.

That means you can't go to your bosses and say "I think I'm worth this much (more) money".

You also can't leave your job to get paid that much, because seniority at your new company means you will start at lower pay than you currently have.

Sure you can. Usually there’s a combo of rank+time. I know, I’ve done it.

Collective bargaining is usually around work rules and core issues. No non-VP+ individual has the ability to effectively bargain re health insurance.

All companies have pay scales. Even massive unionized bureaucracies like the Federal government have the ability to compensate critical employees or critical skills. (Although your definition of critical may not align with the entity)

I've been in three different unions before I landed in this career. Salary increases were fixed by time and position. Position was always based on seniority. No exceptions. You could try to transfer locations within the same company to try and get better roles (which is how most people got promotions, aside from waiting for people to die).

If you changed companies though you started at the bottom, guaranteed, because if you get moved ahead of people in the new company it creates an utter shitstorm. Management at the new job basically has to hate their employees and themselves to do such a thing.

This is the point that seems so often missed. I was union before I joined tech, and unions are poison to somebody who wants to represent themselves. They completely remove the option. It often forces people into either management or just learn to be happy inside the system.

It bothers me the ignorance of people who immediately think that having a union means "I'm going to get what I want."

No. You're going to get what the union wants.

People complain endlessly about HOAs and their behavior. Being in a union is the same shit!

By the way, in my professional adult life, there has never been a situation where there was something reasonable that I wanted in my employment contract and didn't get it. Just ask! I wonder how many people out there want unions and are also the kinds of people who don't ask for things they need.

And if you want to use unions to get you things that are _unreasonable_ that's bad for everyone.

Are you in a salaried role with pager duty? Are your responsibilities different from what was advertised? It sounds like you’re okay with pager duty—have you tried asking for an increase in comp? You can probably fix your current plight without invoking a union...

Careful, you may end up on those same rotas all the more when the union rep takes himself off and let's Frank off because they're drinking buddies...

Having been in unions before, I can confirm that this is exactly what happens.

At least Frank is fucked if their relationship ever sours though. Fucking Frank. Everyone wants to see that guy get injured.

with a union, at best, you'll submit a ticket to your rep. Like most tickets, it will likely never see the light of day.

btw, would you be prepared to strike if negotiations don't go well? That's the only tool a union has to keep the other side at the bargaining table. heh I doubt you can charge PTO to a strike so i wouldn't expect a paycheck.