It doesn’t make sense to unionize when you are powerful and you can use “merit” to raise your power and compensation.

As the economy downturns, more and more software devs on the low end will be pushed to the point where unionization makes sense. They were never really powerful or well paid, but had hope of rising to a higher class. It’s that aspiration that lead to people discounting the ida of unionization.

It makes sense to unionize when you're powerful because that's when you actually have the leverage to put things in place in preparation for the inevitable downturn. Waiting until you need the union is too late.

Grasshopper and the ants!

Part of unionization is standardization of skillsets. Any journeyman plumber should be able to replace any other journeyman plumber, there's an apprentice program and years of training associated with becoming a journeyman. How's that going to work in IT we have massively diverse skill sets and I don't see anyway we could standardize because technology is moving too fast. We might be able to have a general apprentice program where you qualify for certain programming languages/jobs and can get qualified for other languages/jobs by taking additional training, similar to how a pilot gets qualified for different air craft. That said I don't know how everyone if going to feel about getting paid the same wage as the person next to them, tech is a pretty independent group with huge egos. I do think certain ops jobs could be unionized, helpdesk, networking and the like those are defined skills that can be taught repeatedly.

No the thing that has changed is the attacks. The upvotes I'm getting on that post indicates support. Maybe two or three years ago I'd have negative karma.

The reaction I got from previous pithy comments on unionization in past years vs. the reaction I got today from a pithy comment about unionization is absolutely night and day. The volume and pace of upvotes was eye popping and the comments have actually been discussing the merits of unionization and the realities of big tech as a labor force instead of incoherent screeching about the benevolence of FAANG

It’s frustrating because the logic never changed, only the environment has. Some people called it years ago:

LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...

My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.

If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298

I do think that a tech union should probably be structured more like a guild than a typical union.

Imagine how terrible it would be to be on a team with subpar engineers with some kind of tenure / union protection so they cannot be fired.

I think this is a big reason tech workers are opposed to the idea.

1. People in unions are fired all the time with cause. 2. Terrible engineers exist with tenure/some other reason that they are not fired. Tech is not unionized right now and there are plenty of horror stories...

On the other hand, I’ve seen great teams who were continuously stymied and stonewalled by incompetent leadership who failed to address the concerns of engineering, who refused to be transparent, who made boneheaded decisions without a check in power.

Tech, particularly Silicon Valley tech startups, have always had rather lofty ideals and conjured visions of employee empowerment, which management then fail to deliver upon. One could imagine a tech union or guild that goes beyond the function of old-style industrial unions but actually serves as a means of protection for a company’s workforce to challenge management decisions if a majority disagree, in terms of strategy. Every engineer has felt like Dilbert working under a pointy-headed boss at some point.

Why do you need a formal Union for that? Europe is full of voluntary workers guilds that provide employee input to leadership. I'm very open to this model in the US. It is less adversarial and does not require employees to be locked into Union rules. As I mentioned above, every employee in the US already has job protections if they strike individually or as a group for improved worker conditions. I think this middle path provides all the upside and none of the downside

I don't think a formal union is necessarily required. However, American business culture has such an antagonistic relationship between management and labor that it is likely such guilds' input would be automatically discarded by many companies' management. Compound that in tech the spirit of worker solidarity or even collaboration is often dismissed, you don't even see engineering "guilds" forming at tech companies.

I think a true middle path would be German-style co-determination, where there is active engagement and cooperation between workers and management as equals, moderated by the government.

https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/business/co-determinatio...

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/indust...

I mean which do you prefer. Being on a team with terrible engineers, or getting layed off. Take your pick.

It's not really a binary choice either. With unions it just increases the probability of you being on a team of terrible engineers while lowering the probability of you getting layed off.

So the real question is which probability metric is more important to you and other engineers?

One of this scenarios would leave me without job, another one would push me to quit my job. Outcome is the same, but bad team is likely to cause a lot of frustration first.

No, one scenario is slightly better because it gives you the choice to quit. In the other scenario there is no choice.

Times constantly change you won't always be in a situation where you have the finances to just quit just because you're frustrated with a job.

As a high paid SWE we often forget that A job is more then doing something you "like" to do, it is a means of survival. When times change, when hard times come or when some life changing event happens, being allowed to survive is a good thing.

Imagine how terrible it would be to be on a team with a guy who thinks that employers treat all people with due process always.

Union people get fired all the time.

What firms can't usually do to them is fire them without actually demonstrating cause.

I don't have to imagine that I work in it every day, I think it's pretty standard to have a few A students a bunch of C students and a few F students. The problem with the union is the F students don't get fired and if they do they just move them to another open slot assuming they have seniority. On the plus side you're not going to get replaced at 45 by some low-end college grad because they'll work for half the price, is job security worth carrying a little extra load?